THE jOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 8, Number 2 Spring 1996
Editor: Vera Mowry Roberts
Co-Editor: Jane Bowers
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(ENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDY IN THEATRE ARTS
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Stephen Archer
Ruby Cohn
Bruce A. McConach ie
Margaret Wi I kerson
Don B. Wilmeth
Brenda Murphy
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THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 8, Number 2 Spring 1996
Contents
ARNOLD SUNDGAARD, The Group Remembered 1
jULIAN MATES, Experiments on the American Musical
Stage in the Twenties 12
GENE A . PLUNKA, Buddhism on the Contemporary
American Stage: jean-Claude van ltallie's
The Tibetan Book of the Dead 26
DOROTHY H. jACOBS, Mamet's Inland Sea 41
ALVIN GOLDFARB, The Holocaust on the Air:
The Radio Plays of the Writers' War Board 48
DOWNING CLESS, Ecology vs. Economy in
Robert Schenkkan's The Kentucky Cycle 59
CONTRIBUTORS 73
journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Spring 1996)
The Group Remembered
ARNOLD SUNDGAARD
In the summer of 1939 the Group Theatre was coming apart at the
seams. After eight years of struggle and achievement the Group Theatre
was going down in flames. Just short of a decade after it had changed the
face of the American theatre forever, the Group Theatre was going up in
smoke. Much of this has been eloquently recorded by Harold Clurman
in his book, The Fervent Years, but there are a few stray scraps of the
Group's his tory that ought to be gathered up before the winds of time
blow them away.
I was a guest, and an inadvertent eavesdropper, with the Group that
tumultuous but magnificent summer. Like many a guest who finds
himself in a household that is breaking up after years of a seemingly rich
and rewarding relationship, I watched the dissolution of this remarkable
theatrical family with shocked and disbelieving eyes. A sense of tragic
loss and nostalgic compassion clung to me for months after that day in
September (when war broke out in Europe) and we all went our separate
ways.
In June of that year I had received a letter from Harold Clurman
inviting me, along with several other young playwrights and actors, to
join the company at its summer retreat at the Winwood School near Lake
Grove, Long Island. It was to be a time of reflection, a time in which the
company would assess and reconsider its artistic goals while evaluating
its performance techniques and philosophical foundations. For the
Group that meant its continuing exploration of acting methods, if not the
controversial Method itself, work on the body from fencing to modern
dance, and even a brief embrace of classical ballet as an exposure to
elegance and grace, qualities Harold felt the actors lacked.
All this was peripheral, however, to the paramount purpose of the
summer and that was to start rehearsals of a new play by Clifford Odets
for the coming season on Broadway. It had been the success of the
earlier Odets plays that had made the luxury of summers like this one
possible. His Colden Boy, particularly, had been a commercial hit, and
for the first time in the eight years of its existence the Group felt
2 SUNDGAARD
financially secure. They looked forward to the delivery of his next play,
The Silent Partner, on which he had been struggling for more than four
years. It was to be a giant leap forward in his already spectacular career,
a complete break from the Jewish family milieu in which he had shown
such crack I ing bri II iance.
I was one of six young playwrights who, it was hoped, would
eventually be added to the circle of young actors and directors around
whom the Group would grow and expand. We had been selected by
Molly Day Thatcher, the Group's playreader and wife of Elia Kazan, who
would serve as our nurturing house mother and mentor for the course of
the summer. She provided each of us with an empty faculty office in
which we could set up our typewriters and work at whatever pace and
on whatever subjects we chose. We were free to attend all classes, sit in
on all rehearsals and attend the company's animated and contentious war
sessions.
It was a heady challenge for all of us and we felt more than a I ittle
awed to find ourselves having breakfast next to Lee J. Cobb, Morris
Carnovsky, Stella Adler (usually in a low-cut peignoir), Frances Farmer
(with the supple legs of an antelope), Ruth Nelson, Sandy Meisner, Philip
Loeb, Bobby Lewis, Leif Erickson, Roman Bohnen, and the rest of the
sterling company.
Among the younger actors were Karl Malden, Martin Ritt, John
Kennedy (known professionally as Arthur), Norman Lloyd, Kurt Conway,
Alfred Ryder, Olive Deering, and Harry Bratsburg who, in his later
Hollywood career became the deep-voiced Harry Morgan of M*A*S*H.
On the first evening we assembled in one of the lecture halls of the
school where Harold was to lead a discussion of the Group's plans for
the coming season and the reorganization of the Group under a new
leadership. I learned for the first time that Lee Strasberg who, with Cheryl
Crawford and Harold, had founded the Group, was no longer a part of
that triumvirate. As the evening wore on I was able to grasp a few of the
reasons why.
The frankness and bitterness with which Lee was attacked by those
who had once revered him set my skin to tingling. It was said that he
was dictatorial, arrogant, misguided, didactic and wrong-headed. It was
also conceded that he was brilliant, inspired, and a bold pioneer in the
discovery of the actor's innermost needs. But as a human being he was
impossible. Worst of all he was misapplying the acting concepts of
Stanislavsky to their particular problems as indigenous American actors.
Stella Adler had met Stanislavsky in Paris not long before this, and the
Russian master had confirmed her convictions that the Method according
to Strasberg was not the method of the Moscow Art Theatre. Now the
Group was turning to Harold to set a new direction.
The Group Remembered 3
Harold responded in a style of inflamed oratory unlike any I had ever
encountered before. Nor, I might add, any I have heard since. His voice
rose in wild swooping crescendos. His eyes dilated and his fleshy jaws
quivered and, like a chameleon's, changed color from ashen pale to
cyanotic purple. In his steamy exuberance I lost track of entire sentences
in the fear he'd drop dead of apoplexy or a heart attack before our very
eyes. But suddenly, as though from a reverse infusion of adrenal in, his
voice would stop its violent churning and slow to the gentle simmering
sound of a steam locomotive pausing at a rural railroad station.
With time I learned that when Harold spoke in this way he was not
really angry at all. The seeming frenzy was rather a reflection of an
intense intellectual passion. Timidity of expression is not part of the
character of a great tragic hero, whether it be Lear raging in a storm or
Oedipus blinding his eyes in expiation for his unintended sins. Harold
seemed to see himself as just such a character on a wild and blustery
stage.
After almost six hours of rancorous haranguing there was a lull in the
discussion when Luther Adler rose to his feet and shouted, "Okay,
Fuhrer, Fuhrer!"
It was agreed. Harold would be their leader. Lee Strasberg would
no longer be a member of the theatre-he who had been instrumental in
its founding, who had directed its first success, and who had created the
core idea around which its actors had found a revolutionary approach to
acting. The breach with the past was complete. Harold now found
himself in the position of Moses with a band of half-trusting yet skeptical
children trying to find their way out of (or was it into) the wilderness of
Broadway.
Shortly after that the meeting broke up and we returned to our
various rooms in the school's dormitories. The room I occupied with
Alexander Greendale, a fellow playwright, was across the hall from that
of Leif Erickson and Frances Farmer who had met and married a year or
two before. They had for a pet an English bulldog named Karl Marx who
was waiting impatiently for their return. He greeted them with joyous
howls and seemed to be asking what had kept them away so long. They
took him for a walk on the darkened school grounds, and when they
returned almost an hour later Alex and I could hear Leif and Frances in
some kind of heated debate. I assumed they were trying, like everyone
else, to extrapolate from the evening's turbulent forensics the effect
Harold's leadership would have on their place in the Group's future.
I was to learn later that their discussion had concerned itself with
another matter entirely. It was a known fact to all in the Group that
Clifford, married but separated from Luise Rainer, had found himself
attracted to Frances during the run ofCo/den Boy, and Frances had been
4 SUNDGAARD
no less attracted to him. Until now their marriages, like burning oil
wells, had kept them at a distance from each other. But the gap was
rapidly closrng and would narrow disastrously before the summer was
over.
One night a week or two later I was awakened at two in the morning
by the sound of someone pounding on the door across the hall. !listened
with suspended breath. The sound was not that of fists but of some kind
of metal. I dared not look out for fear of i ntruding on something so
private. The noise went on for a full five minutes. Then there was a lul l
and the door was opened. Leif-1 knew it was he-was finally admitted
by Frances to the quiet of the opposite room.
The following afternoon I met Leif in the hallway as I was entering
my room. He looked rather sheepish and said something to the effect
that he was sorry if he had awakened us in the middle of the night. His
eyes, usually clear and youthfully innocent, looked abysmally sad to me.
" I was a little drunk," he said, and he held out a gold watch in his
hand. The face was broken and the hands were bent.
"Frances didn't want to let me in," he explained, "and I tried to
break down the door with this. It was a birthday present from her. I was
using it as a symbol, a kind of metaphor for our love."
He smiled rather proudly at his use of the imagery, an awareness
picked up in a Group discussion, probably. And then summoning up the
recollection of his rage, as though preparing for a sense-memory exercise,
he smashed the watch one more time against the door.
He looked at me as though he expected to be applauded for his
performance. When I gave him a stunned look of dismay at seeing so
fine a watch abused, he took it as a sign of approval and made a quick
but dramatic exit through the door. It left me wondering when and how
this little passion play would find its final curtain.
Although Molly Day Thatcher had made it clear that her six budding
playwrights were under no obligation to deliver a finished play during the
course of the summer, each of us felt in the privacy of our hearts that it
would be pleasant to surprise the company with something that might
follow the new play by Odets. There was no thought that he could be
superseded (we held him in awe as the primal source of the Group's
strength), but there was always the tantalizing hope that something of
ours would find a place in the Group's repertory.
The year before I had written the Living Newspaper, Spirochete, for
the Federal Theatre in Chicago. It was a documentary of sorts that traced
the medical history of syphilis and had led to legislation requiring pre-
marital blood tests in at least two states-Illinois and Pennsylvania. It had
provoked wide discussion at the time and its theatrical form had
apparently attracted Molly to the so-called Epic theatre it represented. In
The Group Remembered 5
addition, I had written a lyrical play called Everywhere 1 Roam that made
use of folk songs and country dances while exploring the pioneer
expansion and exploitation of the American West. It had a brief but not
unnoticed run on Broadway.
Now in the privacy of my cell I was struggling to find a shape for a
play called The Early Traveler dealing with an alleged slave rebellion in
the heart of New York City in the year 1741. A number of slaves were
burned at the stake in a ghastly miscarriage of justice. Its form was
comparatively realistic and quite unlike the other two plays I had written,
but because of its concern with a social issue I thought it might have an
appeal for the Group.
I had only a faint idea of what the other members of our small cadre
of writers were up to, and while we spent considerable time together we
discreetly asked few questions about each other's work. I know that
Ettore Rella . wrote plays in which the characters spoke in tumbling
iambics, and he was attempting to evoke the dark side of life in the dying
mining town of Telluride, Colorado, where he came from.
Ettore once read me a passage from his play in which a grizzled old
denizen of the town mourns the death of a mountain stream from raw
sewage and mining waste. It was intended as a symbol of life itself in that
bleak community. Today Telluride is a fashionable ski resort and host to
a film festival, but in those Depression years the world, and even the
earth, looked dark to Ettore. Once I pointed to a glorious sunset seen
through a break in the trees from where we were sitting. Ettore looked
at it indifferently and said he could see no beauty in nature unless there
were some sign of man's hand on it-like a suspension bridge or a radio
tower. Yet paradoxically he deplored the polluting of creeks by industry
and urban sprawl in his own home town. The hands of Karl Marx had
many nimble fingers in those days, and they gently massaged our necks
in different ways.
They did not touch the neck of Alex Greendale, however, with
whom I shared that room. Alex had been a star water polo player for the
Illinois Athletic Club in Chicago, and the virility called for in that sport
splashed into his plays. One scene remains vividly in my memory. A
character in a demonstration of inspired machismo reaches into a parlor
stove and snatches up a white-hot burning coal. He holds it aloft in the
palm of his hand and sears his flesh as proof of his fi erce masculinity. It
is all I remember of Alex's play, but it is enough.
Meanwhile the play on which Odets had been working for so many
years, The Silent Partner, was ready for a reading before the entire Group
company. Odets was, for me at the time, an intimidating presence. His
eyes, behind thick horn-rimmed glasses, seemed fi xed with enigmatic
intensity on a distant horizon. He drove a huge black Cadillac. He had
6 SUNDGAARD
a male secretary named Herman who carried a notebook and brought
him things. He was married to Luise Rainer, one of the brighter gamins
of Hollywood, to whom he once said (someone told me), "Luise, your
instincts stink!" He sent off ripples of self-confidence that lapped on the
shores of arrogance. But almost single-handedly he had catapulted the
Group to one of the loftier plateaus in the high Sierras of Broadway.
An odd myth surrounding him still intrigues me. It was said (and I
heard it from several sources) that he had an uncanny sense of smell.
Odors that escaped the nostrils of most ordinary mortals were captured
by him with ease and could cause acute pain as well as ecstasy. I
attributed it to a skill developed in sense-memory exercises practiced in
his fledgling years as an actor. I have since looked at his photographs
and there is something about his nostrils that suggests a deer sniffing the
air for hidden predators.
As Molly's apprentice playwrights, we had very little contact with
Odets. Once when Alex, Ettore and I were piling into an old battered
Ford on our way to the beach, he offered us the use of the Cadillac.
"Here, take it," he said, offering Alex the keys.
We were already in the Ford and ready to go. Alex hesitated and
then said, "Thank you, maybe some other time." As we drove away I
could see that Odets was visibly hurt by our rejection. It was intended,
I was sure, as a gesture of comradeship. I felt a sharp pang of guilt for the
rest of the day.
A few days later I met him as I was taking Karl Marx, the English
bulldog, for a walk. Both Frances and Leif had been neglecting him
lately. Clifford stopped to address, not me but the dog. He bent down
to touch Karl Marx's thick ruffled neck.
"I don't think this animal likes me," he said. "When Frances came
to see me the other day he lay on his belly and growled all the time she
was there."
As I remember it, Bobby Lewis read The Silent Partner solo-all the
parts and all the stage directions. He was a master at suggesting subtle
differences of character while filling in the dynamics of the action. There
were forty-three characters in the play, which, like Waiting for Lefty, dealt
with a group of workers on strike. Odets was returning to a setting
similar in nature to his first great triumph of 1935. Was this to be a
regression in his development, or the giant step forward we had been led
to believe?
As the reading progressed I sensed an air of growing disenchantment
spreading through the hushed audience of his peers crowded into that
room. In one scene I still remember a sense of embarrassment I could
not quell. In the scene big cans of milk (the ten gallon cans of the time)
are smuggled through to the starving workers and their children. The
The Group Remembered 7
women fall to their knees and embrace the milk cans as they would a
beloved child. At that moment the hated thugs rush in, rip off the lids,
and spill the milk to the ground.
As a scene in a Russian film it might have proved effective, but to the
cluster of urbane Group actresses who would be playing the scene it
seemed daunting to say the least. The blatant villainy and melodramatic
denouement were hardly what they had expected. The work was like a
huge block of granite on which Odets had been chiseling for years and
that evenog 5t crumbled so many
A few days later Harold announced that he and Clifford had agreed
to postpone all production plans for the time being. I dared not
contemplate the agony and pain that went into that decision. I had no
way of knowing its effect on Clifford, but he remained in his room on
campus and attended some of the evening hallelujah sessions led by
Harold. Once he spoke of his original love for the Group, that it was this
love that had sustained him when filled with doubt and loss of faith. The
Group would always be his home and n;s maddening though they
might be.
He and Harold seemed to see in their relationship a parallel to the
one enjoyed by Anton Chekhov and Stanislavsky. One evening Clifford
chided Harold by saying, "I will say one thing about Stanislavsky, when
he came to see Chekhov he brought Chekhov cigars. He didn't steal
cigars like some people I know."
Harold was quick to reply. "Ah, yes," he said, "but then Chekhov
didn't drive a Cadillac either."
Not many days later Harold woke to find a shiny new Chevy
convertible in the before the cottage he frequently shared with
Stetla Ad[er. On tne steerrng wneer was a note that read, "For Harold
with love, Clifford."
It remained on the driveway for most of the summer. Neither Harold
nor Stella drove a car. However, it had a good radio and Stella could be
seen in the front seat every morning at eight twisting the dials for the grim
news now coming out of Europe. The rising clouds of war were growing
darker with each new day and the German m i I itary menace was deeply
troubling to us all.
The day it was announced that Russia had signed a non-aggression
pact with Germany a wave of disbelief and consternation spread like a
heavy fog through the compound. Tears, anger, and cries of
disillusionment were followed by wild and conflicting speculati on.
Russia had been a shining beacon for many and the extinguishing of that
light was a plunge into darkness none had ever expected. When war
broke out in Europe less than ten days later, everyone knew the world
would never be the same again.
8
SUNDGAARD
At breakfast a few days later I happened to be sitting across the table
from Stella Adler when she looked around the room and said to no one
in particular, "Of course we all know the best people are in Europe."
And then as an astonishing non sequitur she smiled sweetly at me
and said, "Of course I don't mean you, darling."
That I should be equated with the "best people in Europe" in Stella's
eyes came as a surprise to me. I'm not sure she even heard what she was
say1ng.
Stella defied easy description. She was stunning, and possibly
beautiful, but there was so much theatrical artifice in her style and
manner it was difficult to tell what was real and what was performance.
Her skin was smooth as a bleached peach, but the never-absent make-up
was just a shade too gaudy. She had managed to create a pentimento in
which a duchess was superimposed over a Park Avenue madam. She
gave the impression that she considered most members of the company
somewhat beneath her, both in talent and breeding.
Harold seemed to share this feeling somewhat. Once when Maria
Ley, Irwin Piscator's wife, was teaching a class in ballet he was amused
to see his actors floundering in frustrating pirouettes across the gymna-
sium floor. He stood to one side flourishing one of Clifford's huge Cuban
cigars and remarked, "It'll do 'em good working with her. She's a lady."
But Stella was an aristocrat, too. Her high intelligence and her
sensitivity to the actor's craft and the playwright's text made her one of
the supreme teachers of performing art in our time.
Harold loved her with the hopeless, helpless swooning of a school-
boy. Elia Kazan called my attention to the fact that Harold was one of
the few people he knew who could not shave himself without leaving a
thicket of nicks and scrapes on his face and chin. Often at breakfast I
noticed it-the tell-tale dabs of Styptic pencil intended to staunch the flow
of blood. Cadge (Kazan) said it was solely the result of Stella's disquiet-
ing effect on his equilibrium.
After the collapse of The Silent Partner, the Group had hoped to take
up the slack with a new play by Irwin Shaw. They had had a warm
relationship with him in the past and looked forward to the new work he
had promised them. One evening at dusk Kermit Bloomgarden, the
Group's company manager, drove out from the city with a recently
delivered script. He did not stop on the driveway but drove across the
lawn and stopped under an apple tree where Harold and a group of
actors were sitting. As he stepped out of the car he handed the script to
a noticeably anxious Harold. In a low voice I heard Harold ask, "How
is it?"
"You read it," Kermit said.
The Group Remembered 9
The noncommittal way in which he spoke told the whole story. Like
The Silent Partner the Irwin Shaw play proved to be a sad disappointment
and was reluctantly rejected by Harold.
How was the summer to be salvaged? With a show of thinly
disguised bravado Harold announced the fall season would open with a
production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters in a new acting version
prepared by Clifford Odets. This came as a surprise to us. Odets as the
adaptor of someone else's work when his own enormous gifts had so
recently been at their height somehow seemed an artistic surrender. And
yet why not? He had been compared, after all, to the Russian playwright
in his mastery of subtext and indirection.
A few days later rehearsals began. Harold was to direct, but it was
announced that Stella would be his co-director because of her affinity for
European drama. The arrangement seemed to suggest that Harold was
unsure of himself in dealing with a classic. It seemed to do little to
inspire confidence in the company who were often disturbed by the
chaotic nature of the couple's relationship.
The cast was announced. Stella would not only be co-directi ng but
also would be playing Masha, with Phoebe Brand and Frances Farmer as
the other two Moscow-longing sisters. The rest of the cast came from the
Group's core of established actors-Morris Carnovsky, Luther Adler, and
others. None of the younger actors who had been asked to join the
company for the summer were offered parts. And those of us in Molly' s
stable of playwrights had come to realize we would not be filling the void
left by Odets and Irwin Shaw.
With great hesitation I had decided to turn my own play over to
Molly. She read it in a day. I have no recollection of what she said
except that she would pass it along Harold. A few days later he asked
to see me. I went to his office with a burden of anxiety clinging to me
like a leaden blanket used to shield one from the lethal effects of an x-ray.
Harold was kind. He said he was sure The Early Traveler would find
a production somewhere, but it was precisely the kind of political play
the Group no longer wanted as a reflection of its work. The compelling
reason for inviting me to join the company, he added, was the belief that
I would write something in the lyrical style of Everywhere I Roam,
something that would challenge them in new and experimental direc-
tions. The Odets and the Shaw plays had been requested for the same
reason. The world of social realism was changing before our very eyes.
He urged me not to feel dismayed; the Group would be happy to
read anything else I cared to submit in the future. He invited me to
attend the rehearsals of The Three Sisters.
I am able to recall the first day of those rehearsals because it
confirmed the feeling of fragility one felt about Harold's relationship to
10
SUNDGAARD
Stella. In his evening talks earlier in the summer he spoke with such fiery
conviction that the element of doubt seemed absent from every ringing
syllable. But in his opening remarks to the cast that day, a crisp and
lovely morning, he seemed as ill-at-ease as a high school orator in his first
debate. He kept looking in Stella's direction as if to make sure his words
were meeting with her approval. Perhaps this was his tacit acceptance
of the fact that she was his co-director, but the effect seemed more like
that of a man submitting to an act of emasculation. My attention soon
strayed. I kept looking away at the leaves turning crimson on the scrub
oaks outside the classroom window.
By now the summer retreat was over. Rehearsals were halted while
the company straggled back to the city. I had no place to go and decided
to stay on for a few days in one of the empty dormitories. Leif Erickson
said he would give me.his bicycle if I would take care of Karl Marx until
the following Sunday. At that time Bill Kellam, the Group's stage
carpenter, would come by to pick up the dog and take him to his home
in New Jersey. Leif had promised him to Bill who wanted the dog as a
companion.
In a day or two the campus was empty except for me, Ruth Nelson
and a friend of hers who had decided to stay on for a few days as well.
One afternoon whi le exploring the countryside on Leif's bicycle I came
upon a beautiful country road near St. James, about ten miles away. To
my surprise it was called Three Sisters Road. The road was flat for half
a mile and then it plunged so precipitously downward that I had to jam
on the brakes to keep from spilling into a ditch.
When I returned I said to Ruth, "I came across a road today that I
hope is not prophetic." And I made a gesture in the air to describe how
Three Sisters Road made its abrupt plunge to the bottom of a steep hill.
Ruth clapped her hands across her mouth as her eyes seemed to be
saying, "Oh no, no, no, don' t tell me!"
She had been cast as Natasha, the grasping wife of Andreyev played
by Luther Adler. When I saw the look of anguish in her eyes, I wished I
hadn't mentioned it. In the theatre, who knows where a new superstition
may be lurking?
As it turned out my encounter with Three Sisters Road did prove to
be an ill omen. Rehearsals in the city did not go well and the production
was canceled within the month. I never fully learned the reasons for the
cancellation except that Stella had withdrawn from the cast and had
resigned from the Group. I also learned that Clifford Odets had returned
to Luise Rainer and Frances Farmer, that lovely creature, was committing
acts of desperation in her vast despair. She did not even have her Karl
Marx to console her. Leif had given him away.
The Group Remembered
11
Bill Kellam called that Sunday with his wife and daughter to take Karl
Marx to their home in New Jersey. I had grown very fond of the beast by
this time and it pained me to see him go. I wished I had not agreed to
Leif's offer.
"We'll have to change his name," Bill Kellam's wife said. "I don't
think we can let anybody know his name is Karl Marx."
"Just call him Karl," I suggested. "He'll answer to that."
When they tried to get him into the car, Karl refused to budge. He
dug his front paws into the ground and resisted all efforts to move him.
Bill and I finally lifted him into the back seat where he reluctantly settled
down. He looked at me with great sad eyes as if to ask how I could have
participated in such an act of betrayal.
I could not bear to look any longer. I hurried into my empty room
and fell upon the bed and wept.
Little more than a year later, the Group Theatre closed its doors
forever.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Spring 1996)
Experiments on the American Musical Stage
in the Twenties
JULIAN MATES
Marc Connelly once wrote, "The New York Theatre never saw
palmier days than in the 1920s. Seldom could one find any of the city's
more than one hundred theatres tenantless."
1
And Stanley Green points
out that at no time did the number of musical shows drop below thirty-
seven per season.
2
With so much going on it would be unusual not to
find a number of experiments in our musical theatre. Before looking at
the surprising number of these new ideas, it may prove useful to glance
briefly at the slow development of our musical theatre, before the 1920s
brought an explosion of ideas and ushered in a new era on the American
stage.
The musical had been a large part of America's repertory from the
first companies to arrive here in the eighteenth century. The Beggar's
Opera not only introduced ballad opera to American audiences but was
itself produced all over the colonies in every year in the eighteenth
century by the first troupes to arrive. Soon after pasticcios and comic
operas were imported, we began to create our own. The same was true
for pantomimes and melodramas, with their extensive use of music to set
the mood, underscore and accompany specific actions, and provide a
substitute for dialogue.
3
Even the acting of melodrama was closer to
1
Marc Connelly, "Once Upon the Palmy 1920s, The Dramatists Guild Was
Born," The Dramatists Guild Quarterly (Spring 1976), 8.
2
Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy (Da Capo Press reprint of 4th ed.,
San Diego: A.S. Barnes & Co., Inc., 1980), 131.
3
Anne Dhu Shapiro points out that the ways music was used in melodrama
"were transferred yery directly into music for the early silent film," thus providing a
continuum with our early musical theatre. Anne Dhu Shapiro, "Action Music in
American Pantomime and Melodrama, 1730-1913," American Music, Vol. 2 No.4,
(Winter 1984), 66.
The American Musical Stage 13
dance than to traditional stage movement.
4
Dance, whether on a slack
wire or in pantomimes, became an important part of our repertory.
The nineteenth century displayed all these forms created by
Americans in addition to imports from England, France, and Germany.
Our major contribution was, of course, the minstrel show. At first, the
form utilized well -known songs, as the ballad opera had; soon, however,
American composers-Stephen Foster and Dan Emmett, for exam-
ple-wrote original music for minstrel shows, and by the end of the
century, Black minstrels and Black composers had found an outlet for
their abilities Oames Bland comes to mind, with his "0 Dem Golden
51 ippers" and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny") .
Extravaganzas, with elaborate scenery, little dialogue, and lots of
music, were popular as soon as technological development permitted
lighting and stage effects-from Cherry and Fair Star to The Black Crook.
The Mose plays (Mose was a Bowery fireman) added music and songs to
stories about characters with whom the audience could easily identify
and carried the comic opera past the 1840s. "Farce-comedies" tied
variety acts together strung on a very thin clothesline ("a day in the
country," for example). The form began with Nathan Salsbury's The
Brook in 1875 and l s t ~ d many years, eventually surfacing again with the
intimate revue. Fritz, Our German Cousin led to a series of "Fritz" plays
well into the 1880s, and all provided spots for performers to interpolate
songs.
The Harrigan and Hart Mulligan Guard plays made a leap toward the
twentieth century with musicals depicting l ife in and around Corlear's
Hook in Manhattan. It is worth noting that Harrigan and Hart's
background was in the minstrel show and their Mulligan plays were a
strong influence on George M. Cohan. Cohan's brash musicals with their
super-patriotism (" Can you write without the flag?" he was asked; "I can
write without anything but a pencil, " he replied) and realistic language
were one strong element in this country and operetta was the other (the
latter usually taking place in a never-never land, with unreal people and
situations and music closer to opera than to popular song). The Princess
Theatre shows (1915-1919) began the process of integrating book and
music.
In dance, the major revolution came with Isadora Duncan, but when
she died she left no school , no legacy of modern dance. The twenti es
would complete the revolution and in addition bring modern dance into
the popular musical theatre.
4
See Alan S. Downer, " Players and Painted Stage, Nineteenth Century Acting,"
PMLA, Vol. 61 , No. 2, Uune 1946).
14 MATES
Vaudeville, burlesque and revues flourished before the twenties, but
their very popularity allowed them to experiment with song and dance
during the twenties. In fact, new forms constantly appeared and new
experiments were tried, but, as Margaret Knapp writes, in some of our
musical stage forms "such as burlesque and comic opera, the book was
an important aspect of the production, while in forms such as extrava-
ganza and minstrel shows, the book was secondary to music, dance,
comedy and spectacle." And the twenties, particularly, included comic
opera, operetta, burlesque (both in its original meaning and in its later
guise), extravaganza, and the revue. "By permitting these numerous
forms"-she omits opera, dance, and vaudeville-"to flourish side by
side, the musical theatre of this era literally offered something for
everyone."
5
In fact, audiences were willing to accept experiments in part because
of the long tradition of musical theatre mentioned earlier, going back to
the eighteenth century. The ballad opera, the pasticcio, and the comic
opera dominated the repertory and the musical theatre became our
longest-standing tradition.
6
Americans were not only used to musical
theatre but were willing to go along with experiments.
If, for example, the twenties saw an extraordinary concern with
commercialism and business, the musical stage was quick to reflect this.
Ron Engle and Tice l. Miller's The American Stage notes the appearance
of benevolent men at the top of business in Letty Pepper (1922) which
clearly demonstrates that success in business and love are designed to
journey hand in hand.
7
Helen of Troy, NY (1923) was concerned with
advertising and big business in a musical comedy. The musical Clinging
Vine (1922) dealt with gender conflict in business. Plays heavy with
music-Processional, for example-attacked the entire capitalist system.
It was largely in the twenties that women found careers in the theatre
other than acting. Anne Caldwell enjoyed success as a playwright and
librettist, Rida Johnson Young wrote nearly thirty plays and musicals, and
Fanny Todd Mitchell wrote twenty-six plays and musicals, many in the
twenties and many starring Jeannette McDonald and Archibald Leach
5
Margaret M. Knapp, "Integration of Elements as a Viable Standard for Judging
Musical Theatre," in Henry F. Salerno, ed., Focus on Popular Theatre in America,
Bowling Green, Ohio: journal of Popular Culture, 114.
6
See Oscar G. Sonneck, Early Opera in America, (New York, London, Boston:
Library of Congress, 1915), and Julian Mates, The American Musical Stage Before
7800 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962).
7
Ron Engle and Tice l. Miller, eds., The American Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 175-189.
The American Musical Stage 15
(who would later change his name to Cary Grant). Mitchell's A Wonder-
ful Night in 1929 utilized what may have been the first revolving stage
in America. One of the most successful musical collaborations was that
of Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnell; she wrote the book and
lyrics for, among other works, Blossom Time in 1921 and The Student
Prince in 1924. And Dorothy Fields began her illustrious career by
writing the lyrics for Blackbirds of 1928, the longest running all-Black
review in Broadway history.
8
Women helped the dance world throw off its stodgy image. "The
earliest date usually set for the modern dance is the beginning of the
twentieth century, when [Isadora) Duncan with her natural movement
and Denishawn with its exoticism broke with the forms of conventional
ballet."
9
Duncan danced for the last time in the United States in 1923,
but her autobiography of 1927 gave a key to what was happening: "Why
should our children bend the knee in that fastidious and servile dance,
the Minuet, or twirl in the mazes of false sentimentality of the Waltz?
Rather let them come forth with great strides, leaps and bounds ... to
dance the language of our Pioneers .... "
10
Others insist that the origin of modern dance does not go any further
back than the expressionism of Martha Graham that emerged in the
twenties.
11
Her work helped to provide a popular audience for dance.
She had been teaching and studying at Denishawn when, in 1923, john
Murray Anderson saw her and engaged her for an edition of the
Greenwich Village Follies. Graham's continued search, her experiments,
her programs of 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929 displayed what one
biographer called "a new form and style in dancing" in such dances as
Desir (1926) and Adolescence (1929).
12
Whether one credits Duncan or
8
See Felicia Hardison Londre, "Money without glory: turn-of-the-century
America's women playwrights," Chapter 9 in Engle and Miller. Also see William A.
Everett, " Barbara Frietchie and My Maryland: The Civil War Comes to Operetta," The
Passing Show, Newsletter of the Shubert Archive, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2-8; and, in the
same issue, Priscilla Cunningham's, "Fanny Todd Mitchell," 8-17.
9
Sel ma jean Cohan, Next Week, Swan Lake (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan
University Press, 1982), 128. The Denishawn company and school, formed by Ruth
St. Denis and Ted Shawn in 1915, pioneered the use of primitive and ethnic dance,
often with religious themes, as sources for serious theatre.
10
1sadora Duncan, My Life (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 343.
11
See Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham (New .York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce,
1941), 141 , 142.
12
George Bei swanger, "Martha Graham: A Perspective," in Morgan, 142.
16
MATES
Graham with originating modern dance, one of its most fascinating
aspects was its appeal to popular audiences as it made its way into revues
and, later, musical comedy.
Still another experiment influenced both audience and production,
and that came with the resurgence of Black theatre, especially with Sissie
and Blake's Shuffle Along, in 1921 . There had been many "greats" in
Black theatre before the 1920s. Bob Cole and Billy Johnson's A Trip to
Coontown (1898) was the first musical written, directed and performed
by Black artists. George Walker and Bert Williams had starred in several
Broadway shows by 1910 and had enjoyed phenomenal success with In
Dahomey in 1903. Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson had written songs for
Broadway musicals. Ernest Hogan had set up a touring company for
Black musicals. Allen Woll, in his Black Musical Theatre, points out
how difficult it is to establish a historical continuity for Black theatre,
"since the creation, evolution, and shape of the Black musical has
changed so abruptly and so often since the turn of the century."
13
These early examples of Black musical theatre notwithstanding, it is
still true that the major breakthrough for Black theatre came with Shuffle
Along in 1921. Not only was the cast assured of future starring roles but
the show made the Black musical legitimate; managers and producers
realized that audiences would pay to see a Black show, and "Black
musicals became a Broadway staple."
14
langston Hughes felt the show
launched the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that spread to books,
sculpture, music and dancing.
Eubie Blake wrote the music and Noble Sissie the lyrics for Shuffle
Along. Flournoy Miller and Aubrey lyles, collaborators since their
student days at Fisk University, wrote the book and also starred in the
show.
15
The plot is skimpy but allows plenty of room for the performers
to use vaudeville sketches they knew. The minstrel show's influence was
displayed in dialect, slapstick, and what Robert Toll calls the "empty-
headed, convoluted use of words."
16
The jazzy score ("love Will Find
A Way" and "I'm Just Wild About Harry" were two of many hits in the
13
AIIen Woll, Black Musical Theatre (Baton Rouge: louisiana State University
Press, 1989), xiii.
14
/bid., 60.
15
Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1971), 288. .
16
Robert C. Toll, On With the Show (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976),
134.
The American Musical Stage 17
show) and the dances, steps that had been featured in the Black vaude-
ville circuit-time-steps, buck and wing, soft shoe and others-made the
deepest impression. Toll writes: "With its foot-tapping music, its wacky
comedy, and its dazzling dances, the show literally burst with explosive
energy. Shuffle Along revitalized musical comedy in the twenties ... . "
17
Shuffle Along made other innovations. Not only did the show find
a Black audience, but the rigid barriers of segregated seating in the
theatre also broke down. Blacks were no longer restricted to balcony
seats. With each succeeding Black show on Broadway during the
twenties, segregated seating for Blacks became less common. The stars
and replacements of Shuffle Along-Florence Mills, josephine Baker, and
Paul Robeson among others-helped form a talent pool for the many
Black shows to follow. Woll says that Shuffle Along legitimized Black
musical theatre on Broadway. In three years, New Yorkers saw nine
musicals written by and starring Black performers. Black composers
wrote the songs for three shows with white casts. "Shuffle Along was a
milestone in the development of the Black musical, and it became the
model by which all Black musicals were judged until well into the
1930s."
18
If Shuffle Along was the most important Black theatrical enterprise in
the 1920s, it was the music and dance that gave the production its
power.
19
Most of the routines showed a direct descent from the minstrel
show and vaudeville. Robert Toll points out that most popular dances of
the period emerged from Black theatre-dances like the Charleston,
truckin', the shimmy, the black bottom, and the Lindy hop-dances "that
symbolize the twenties."
20
They were all featured in the Black musicals
following in the success of Shuffle Along. Lewis Erenberg points out that
"the source of dances like the Charleston and the black bottom lay in
Black culture, and they found wide introduction in New York after the
popularity of Shuffle Along."
21
Gradually, the book tended to disappear in Black shows, and the
revue format took over (revues, thanks to Ziegfeld and others, were the
17
/bid., 136.
'
6
Woll, 75.
'
9
Huggins, 288.
2
0"foll, On With the Show, 133; also see Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out, New
York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture 1890-1930 (Westport, CN:
Greenwood Press, 1981), 151 .
21
Erenberg, 250.
18 MATES
rage on Broadway). The revue capitalized on the most popular elements
of the Black musical show and blurred the line between nightclub and
theatre. Tryout performances were also less expensive for revues, and the
focus was on the talent. After Shuffle Along's conquest, a large number
of Black revues had success on BroadwayY Shuffle Along had provided
fresh entertainment for the audience and an outlet for Black talent
unknown before the 1920s.
The theatre of the twenties provided other groups with a means of
achieving success, of escaping the slums. It is worth taking a brief glance
at burlesque and vaudeville. Charles Hamm, in Music in the New
World, points out that "songs were an essential element in vaudeville"
as indeed they were in burlesqueY Ballad singers offering popular songs
of the day, singers in blackface, dialect singers, juvenile singers, character
singers-all were featured. They reflected the audience even as they
appealed to it, and again we see that experiments in the twenties are
important to the history of American musical theatre.
Burlesque had long waged a battle between "clean" and "di rty"
shows (the clean derived from the original meaning of a travesty or satire,
and the dirty derived from the earnest desire to display as much female
flesh as possible). By the twenties the "dirty" had won out, and the
shows had achieved a kind of sameness that threatened to kill the form.
William Green points out that the Minskys in the early twenties instituted
a variety of innovations in the basic format; they "threw out the
traditional three-part structure which had rigidly compartmentalized
where in the production the comedy, musical and specialty acts could
come."
24
The Minskys included a musical director on the permanent
staff. They installed a runway so the dancers could be in closer proximity
to the audience. Yes, the comedy acts were essential , but the added
stress on music and dance had audiences flocking to Minsky burlesque.
A further experiment included placing "serious dramatic sketches in the
midst of the cooch dancing and rowdy comedy."
25
In the mid-1920s the
striptease came into being and this was the last stage, and possibly the
22
Woll, 95.
23
Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.,
1983), 258.
24
William Green, "The Audiences of the American Burlesque Show of the
Minsky Era (CA. 1920- 1940)," Das Theater und sein Publikum, 1977, 229.
25
/bid., 232.
The American Musical Stage 19
cause, of burlesque's demise.
26
But for a few years in the twenties, not
only was burlesque popular with a wide range of audiences, but it also
served as a training ground for singers, dancers, and comedians who
went on to the revue and to musical comedy.
Vaudeville also frequently served as a training ground, though more
often it was an end in itself. It was able to attract a heterogeneous
audience with an incredible variety of performers and material, "from
trained animals to opera singers, from sexual impersonators to ballet
dancers, from ethnic humor to production numbers."
27
It drew material
from and gave material to musical comedy, burlesque, drama, the
minstrel show, and the circus. Lewis Erenberg suggests that in the 191 Os
and 1920s, most of the stars were of recent immigrant origins, especially
the dancers and singers.
28
john Dimeglio writes that vaudevillians were
America in microcosm. He finds that vaudeville refused to experiment
with successful acts, but that until success was achieved vaudeville
allowed performers to experiment freely.
29
Vaudeville probably reached
its peak in the twenties, but thereafter its life was brief: Radio and movies
signaled its demise in the thirties.
A large part of the experimenting in the twenties on the musical stage
was in the revue. True, Ziegfeld had started the vogue in 1907, but it was
in the twenties that revues were created constantly and that experiments
were tried whose effects are still felt today. Robert Baral says that over
one hundred revues opened in New York in the twenties and thirties.
30
The Ziegfeld Follies featured several of the revue's most glorious editions,
and one could attend George White's Scandals, the Earl Carroll Vanities,
Artists and Models (the Shubert entries), the Greenwich Village Follies,
the Grand Street Follies, the Music Box Revues (Irving Berlin's shows),
the Carrick Gaieties (here is where Rodgers and Hart joined forces), the
Blackbird Revues, the Ed Wynn Revues, the Passing Shows (another
Shubert entry), and on and on. George M. Cohan created revues in 1916
26
Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness, Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel
Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 243.
27
Toll, On With the Show, 276.
28
Erenberg, 187.
29
John E. Dimeglio, Vaudeville, U.S.A. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green
University Popular Press, 1973), 2.
30
Robert Baral, Revue (New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1962), 14.
20
MATES
and 1918 with much satire and with no book, and these had a strong
effect on what went into revues of the twenties.
When the big, elaborate shows began to go out of style, a smaller,
intimate revue began to take its place. Where vaudeville was a series of
individual acts, the musical revue was "planned, designed, scored and
directed with an eye for a unified final product."
31
The 49ers (1922)
introduced the American experimental intimate revue while the English
contributed Charlot's Revue (1924). Audiences quickly accepted the new
form (note especially The Little 5hows).
32
Both the large and intimate
revues have continued their careers on the American musical stage,
though perhaps with not so lush a quality as in the twenties.
Among the positive developments resulting from the twenties
experiments with the revue form, one must include the opportunity for
young composers to try their wings on the musical stage-Rodgers and
Hart, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields,
for example-without having to compose a complete score for a full-
length musical. Established composers, too, found a place in the revue;
the Ziegfeld Follies of 7921 featured music by jerome Kern, Rudolf Friml
and Victor Herbert.
33
One of the more interesting experiments took place
in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1922 with the ballet of Oscar Wilde's
The Nightingale and the Rose. These ballet ballads became a regular part
of the series.
34
Years later, when Agnes DeMille and jerome Robbins and
others worked on popular Broadway musicals, their audiences had been
thoroughly prepared. The "personality revue," a vehicle for a single star
(though surrounded with singers and dancers in minor roles), was
launched in the twenties with Elsie janis leading the way followed soon
after by Ed Wynn's Carnival .
John Murray Anderson points out that many technical innovations
were introduced during the twenties, including drapes and draw curtains
31
Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2nd ed., 1992), 574-575.
32
Thomas S. Hischak, Stage It With Music (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press,
1993), 212.
33
Baral, 268.
34
Gerald Bordman, American Musical Revue (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), 59.
The American Musical Stage 21
of exquisite materials and design, the moving platform, and, especially,
projected scenery, allowing for faster pacing.
35
The Carrick Gaieties spoofed operetta; the Grand Street Follies
twitted Broadway. The fact is, revues of all kinds flourished in the
twenties and all sorts of experiments were attempted. Especially
noteworthy was George Gershwin's jazz opera, Blue Monday Blues,
inserted into the 1922 edition of George White's Scandals. The real
attraction of this series was the jazz-age tone established by the dancing
and the music. The Music Box Revues proved that audiences of the
revue were no less interested in spectacle than in song. The revue of the
twenties " emerged as the superstructure of Broadway musicals," and it
is to the musical we must look for still more experiments and
innovations.
36
Gerald Bordman found that "an almost incredible array of brilliant,
adventuresome young composers" plus "a few brilliant, adventuresome
young lyricists" accounted for much of the era's-and the twen-
ties' -greatness.37 Even though operetta's days were numbered (to a large
extent the form died in the thirties), some of the best American operettas
were written in the twenties (for example, The Vagabond King, The
Desert Song, The Student Prince, The New Moon) and their experiments
affected the musicals to come. Rudolf Friml's Rose-Marie (1924) tried the
Canadian Rockies as a setting, experimented with murder as an important
part of the story, and made a serious attempt to integrate music and plot.
In fact, the program refused to identify individual songs.
38
The musical comedy, however, was where most experiments took
place. Almost everyone who writes about the Ameri can musical has a
candidate for exciting experimentation in the twenties. john Lahr, for
example, is partial to George and Ira Gershwin's Lady, Be Good! (1924).
"Gershwin shortened the musical line, added blue notes, and brought the
musical up to speed with the Metropolis." He quotes Gershwin as saying
" we are living in an age of staccato, not legato."
39
Experiments and
innovations included a thematic danced opening, songs that helped to
35
Cited in Bordman, American Musical Revue, 60-61.
36
Baral, 10.
37
Gerald Bordman, American Musical Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1982), 128.
38
Stanl ey Green, The World of Musical Comedy, 36.
39
john Lahr, " City Slickers," The New Yorker (22 and 29 August 1994), 110-112.
22 MATES
tell the story, and two pianos in the orchestra. The city's feverish pace is
first dramatized here, says Lahr, and the myth of modern urban life begins
to take shape. Bordman says the date when jazz became an established
and even welcome musical idiom was 1 December 1924-the date when
Lady, Be Good! opened.
40
Another book finds "one of the first and most
potent symbols of the Jazz Age-the Charleston-came in the 1923-24
season in the Black musical Runnin' Wi/d"-it bridged the gap between
exhibition and public dancing- "and announced that jazz was indis-
pensable for truly chic and up-to-date Broadway entertainments."
41
With Morrie Ryskind and George S. Kaufman writing the book, and
the Gershwins writing music and lyrics, Strike Up the Band (1927)
experimented with politics as theme with a cynical point of view,
satirizing militarism and big business. The experiment proved successful
enough that others in the genre followed, notably Irving Berlin's Face the
Music and As Thousands Cheer. And of course, Of Thee I Sing, a direct
outgrowth of experiments in the twenties, was the first musical to win a
Pulitzer Prize.
The Cinderella theme, claims Bordman, so dominated Broadway that
for three seasons, from 1921-1924, of the one hundred and twenty
musicals that showed up on Broadway, fully half the operettas and
revues and twenty-one of the fifty-eight musicals centered on a Cinderella
figure.
42
Musically, these shows gave their audiences songs, with dancing
an important, though mostly irrelevant, element (precision dancing in
particular was tried and accepted). What Cinderella shows did was
provide a venue for American composers and lyricists to come to the
fore. Stanley Green said, "If ever a period of musical comedy belonged
to its composers and lyricists it was the decade between 1920 and
1930."
43
Vincent Youmans was one of the most popular composers of the
period with some of the biggest hits on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks
to a large assortment of touring companies. If his shows had few
innovations, they served to combine many of the experiments of others,
including the quickening of pace and the new stress on urban back-
40
Bordman, American Musical Comedy, 121.
41
Armond Fields and l. Marc Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway, Lew Fields
and the Roots of American Popular Theater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
439.
42
Bordman, American Musical Comedy, 107.
43
Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy, 101.
The American Musical Stage 23
ground {witness No, No, Nanette) . In Rainbow (1928), Youmans
experimented with realistic situations {a novelty) and three-dimensional
characters. Music was somewhat relevant to the plot. Here, at least,
Youmans's experiments advanced the cause of musical comedy.
Rodgers and Hart's The Girl Friend kept the spirit of the Princess
Theatre's shows alive, and their Peggy Ann (1926) used a dream as the
entire story.
44
They had three shows on Broadway in 1928, though only
Chee-Chee attempted to experiment, with all songs sticking close to the
story line and pushing the plot forward.
Buddy De Sylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson took up-to-date
topics with current language phrases and made hits of them in such
shows as Good News! (1927) and three others before the end of the
decade. The topical musical comedy "became one of the standard types
of the late 1920s, and as time went on it tended to become the ruling
type.''4s
Some strange productions probably should be mentioned, though
whether they were spectacles or pageants or extravaganzas is hard to
say. Such shows as Aphrodite {1919-1920), with Henri Fevrier and
Anself Goetzl's music, Michel Fokine's choreography, and Leon Bakst's
costumes, seem to represent some strange musical stage experi-
ments-Aphrodite's climax, for example, was set to the music of
Moussorgsky and the bacchanalian ballet was danced on a floor of rose
leaves.
46
Mecca (1920) had music by Percy Fletcher, with Fokine and
Bakst again designing the choreography and costumes, respectively.
Several other musical shows experimented with staging and lighting, and
though the shows have disappeared, the technology {drapery, lighting,
elevators) was passed on and remains an important part of today's
musicals.
Probably the most important experiments came near the end of the
twenties when jerome Kern's Show Boat (1927) set new standards for the
American musical.
47
The plot was unusually serious for the musical stage
of the twenties, involving among other things desertion and miscegena-
tion. The opening with Black wharf hands instead of chorus girls was
44
/bid., 117.
45
Cecil Smith, Musical Comedy in America (New York: Theatre Arts Books,
1950), 151 .
46
/bid., 136.
47
Robert C. Toll, The Entertainment Machine, American Show Business in the
Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 134.
24
MATES
another risky experiment. The songs expressed the feelings of the
characters and were not dropped into the show willy-nilly. Part of the
experimentation involved a "blending of the most antagonistic elements
of musicals comedy and operetta."
48
Even the use of a serious novel (by
Edna Ferber) was startling in the twenties, as was a story that stretched far
over time and place. Where interpolations were standard fare in
musicals, here they helped to set time and place-in short, they were
relevant. The use of the leitmotiv throughout was innovative in a
musical. Arthur Jackson claims that Show Boat was a new departure in
the world of musicals, "a blend of music, lyrics and libretto that would
serve as a guidepost for the future and an object lesson for all aspiring
show writers."
49
And Miles Kreuger, in an entire book on Show Boat,
says that for Kern and Hammerstein "this was to be a tightly written
musical play with devotion to character development, with songs that
grew meaningfully out of the plot, with spectacle and dance only when
spectacle and dance seemed appropriate to the story."
50
Ethan Mordden writes about the forcing of the issue of social
integration through the musical. 5
1
And Robert Toll notes:
[L]ike America itself, musical comedy was a blend. From
extravaganzas it got lavish costumes and production numbers;
from burlesque it took satire and chorus girls; . . . from operettas
it drew beautiful melodies and glamor; and from vaudeville it
borrowed popular dance, music, comedy, and stars, along with
a breakneck performance speed. But the full integration of these
diverse elements . . . took decades of experimentation on the
nation's stages.
52
There is no question that as a result of the experiments of the
twenties, America's musical stage changed-not necessarily because it
48
Ethan Mordden, " Show Boat Crosses Over, " The New Yorker (3 july 1989), 79.
49
Arthur Jackson, The Best Musicals from Show Boat to A Chorus Line (New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1977), 32.
50
Miles Kreuger, Show Boat, The Story of a Classic American Musical (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 26.
51
Ethan Mordden, Broadway Babies, the People Who Made the Broadway
Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 33.
52
Toll , The Entertainment Machine, 132.
The American Musical Stage 25
evolved from earlier forms but because these forms coexisted on the New
York stage "and productions that were conveniently labeled musical
comedies actually covered a that included comic opera,
operetta, burlesque, musical farce, satire, and extravaganza."
53
Add the
different kinds of revue and grand opera, and the musical stage offered
something for everyone. The credit for drawing a heterogeneous
audience and for passing on new traditions to the American musical stage
largely goes to the wonderful range of experiments of the 1920s.
53
Knapp, 115.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Spring 1996)
Buddhism on the Contemporary American Stage:
Jean-Claude van ltallie's The Tibetan Book of the Dead
GENE A. PLUNKA
When Open Theater members toured Europe in summer 1968
performing The Serpent, Jean-Claude van ltallie left the group to go to
Scotland to visit his friend, Tania Leontov, who had become a Buddhist.
Van ltallie had been interested in Buddhism after having read D.T.
Suzuki's The Supreme Doctrine years earlier. During his visit with
Leontov, van ltallie met her teacher and master, the Tibetan lama,
Chogyam Trungpa, a graduate of Oxford University who had established
a Tibetan monastery in Scotland. A few years later, Chogyam Trungpa
moved to the United States and founded a Buddhist center in Vermont.
After becoming a student of Chogyam Trungpa in Vermont, van ltallie
embarked on a trip to India in 1971, carrying with him a letter for the
Dalai Lama from Chogyam Trungpa. Van ltallie left India before he
could meet with the Dalai Lama, who had deferred the appointment for
one week; the most noteworthy relic of the trip was To India, a journal
that van ltallie kept about the two-month excursion. After returning to the
United States, van ltallie became a practicing Buddhist under the
guidance of Chogyam Trungpa. From 17 to 23 February 1973, van ltallie
directed the Mudra Theatre Workshop in Boulder, Colorado, which
allowed directors and actors from experimental theatre groups, as well as
playwrights and dancers, to study with Chogyam Trungpa and forty of his
students. Van ltallie organized the conference, the first working
exchange of Western experimental theatre techniques and Buddhist
psychology. A year later, the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist college, was
founded at Boulder. Van ltallie has frequently taught there since 1974.
Since the early 1970s, van ltallie has incorporated Buddhist philosophy
into several of his plays. Certainly, van ltallie's The Tibetan Book of the
Dead best exemplifies the influence of Buddhist concepts and beliefs on
many Western artists' work.
Van ltallie has frequently included Buddhist thought in his plays.
Several of his dramas that examine the effects of materialism and
conspicuous consumption derive from the Buddhist concept of spiritu-
The Tibetan Book of the Dead 27
ally cleansing the soul. However, The Tibetan Book of the Dead clearly
goes beyond a nominal understanding of the tenets of Buddhism and
instead delves into a more rigorous foregrounding of Buddhist ideology.
In an interview that I conducted with him in December 1992, van ltallie
emphasized that he avoids using Sanskrit or Tibetan language in his plays
but instead tries to include vocabulary accessible to the audience. In that
interview, van ltallie discussed the role of Buddhism in his theatre: "I
hope that I never preach, Buddhism or anything else, in my plays. The
theatre doesn't work as a pulpit."
1
By the time van ltallie had completed The King of the United States
in spring 1972, the Tibetan Buddhism of Chogyam Trungpa was slowly
inculcating him with a sense of spirituality. For example, part of
Chogyam Trungpa's conversation with van ltallie in summer 1968
inspired the Call Girl's speech about a spiritual leader she seeks in India
that van ltallie inserted into The King of the United States.
2
Van ltallie
converted to Buddhism shortly after his trip to India in 1971, so The King
of the United States reflects the first vestiges of his linking national
politics with the spiritual vitality, or lack thereof, in individual conscious-
ness. Van ltallie's thesis in the play is that we elect the political leaders
we deserve-inevitably, those politicians who reflect the dearth of
spirituality in the individuals who voted them into office.
Van ltallie's Bag Lady (1979), a study of the effects of consumerism on
modern society as well as an engaging psychological portrait of individ-
ual exile, has roots in Buddhist philosophy. Not only has Clara's
supposed insanity created a self-imposed exile for her, but also her
madness seems to distinguish the bag lady as one who has tremendous
wisdom about how people interact in modern society. Individuals who
are deemed insane may frequently have a unique understanding of
humanity beyond what one might expect. Clara's name suggests
"clarity" or clear vision. Van ltallie views her as a seer or prophetess.
Less than a year after the play's run in New York, van ltallie admitted,
" . .. I saw her partially" as a kind of Zen monk. Her message was, 'Travel
1
Gene A. Plunka, "Interview With Jean-Claude van ltallie," in The Playwright's
Art: Conversations With Contemporary American Dramatists, ed. Jackson R. Bryer
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 253-54.
2
Van ltallie made this comment in an extensive autobiographical report published
in 1985. See "Jean-Claude van ltallie," in Contemporary Authors Autobiography
Series, vol. 2, ed. Adele Sarkissian (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1985), 416.
28 PLUNKA
light, you're not going to be around for very long. Travel light. ' "
3
In an
earlier interview with the Daily Princetonian, van ltallie stated, " The bag
lady is an observer, she's in a kind of Zen position there on the curb, and
she watches all the people pass by, and she sees the end of the city."
4
At
t imes, Clara epitomizes the Buddhist sense of calm and stil lness amidst
a society gone amok. Clara's solitary existence and concomitant sense
of alienation and exile provide her with a Zen-like serenity that offers her
the ability to see clearly. Clara seems able to predict intuitively who will
succumb to cancer or heart attacks. As a seer, she also envisions the
destruction of modern society, which she predicts will soon be reduced
to an apocalyptic wasteland.
Van ltallie's 1988 play, Struck Dumb, is essentially a Zen experience,
much like Bag Lady, in which the protagonist, an aphasic, is an observer
of I ife around him and therefore stands outside society, like Clara, an
omniscient seer, watching with a different perspective as the world passes
by. Struck Dumb invites us into the mind of Adnan, a singer by
profession, nearly fifty years old, who lives in Venice, California. We
spend a day with Adnan as he wakes up in his small apartment, discusses
his Lebanese heritage, takes us through his morning routine, explains his
interest in music, walks on the beach, practices words, reads a letter from
an aphasic friend, strolls the Santa Monica mall , and finally muses about
the sunset. Adnan, the seer, views himself as " a phi losopher" ; he even
claims to have befriended jean-Paul Sartre, another phi losopher. Van
ltallie implies that Struck Dumb is similar to the Zen experience of Bag
Lady: "It is the perceptions of someone who lives on the margins of
society-who is, by society's terms, in some ways a little bit off. But that
'off' leaves a gap for some very clear perceptions which reflect on society
itself."
5
As a type of Zen philosopher, Adnan perceives life di fferently from
most of us. He admits, "I am a philosopher, but I have no answers./You
must I ive without answers./! want to know things clearly/The questions
3
Jean-Ciaude van ltallie, interview with MG (full name unknown), 28 August
1980, Department of Special Collections & Archives, Kent State University Librar ies,
20.
4
Craig Mellow, " Van ltallie: Broadening the Frontiers of Theater," Dai l y
Pri ncetonian, 7 April 1980, 7.
5
Barry Daniels, " Listening for the Word, " Ameri can Theatre 5, nos. 4-5
Uuly/August 1988), 47-48.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead 29
must be clear./ But I must live without answers."
6
His vision is often
epistemological: "Every every/day, waking:/1 wonder, what is this
room?/What is this day?!VVhat planet?/Light?/Lights?/Sky?/Only one sun?"
(11) Like Clara, the bag lady, Ad nan predicts an apocalypse that he views
from his own inner turmoil: " Cataclysm . . . /It's crisis in universe, stars,
planets ... /Crisis causing changing, of course./So what is changing?/
Changing, it's 'evolving' " (12). Adnan, the seer, concludes, "Earth
ending-it's going to happen when?" (18)
Van ltallie's first full-length examination of Buddhist thought on stage
was Naropa, completed in draft form during summer 1977. His source
material for the play consisted of Tibetan texts translated by Herbert V.
Guenther.
7
The Buddhist KagyU lineage examined in these texts is
referred to as an oral-instruction heritage. The lore of this I ineage has
been passed on since the time of Tilopa, a guru who lived in India at the
end of the ninth century A.D. and the beginning of the tenth century
(A.D. 988-1 069). Taught by four gurus in India, Tilopa passed this
knowledge along in eleven yoga manuals and then through his teachings
to Naropa.
As a Buddhist abbot of Nalanda University, which van ltallie describes
as "the Harvard-Oxford of its time," Naropa was known as a prominent
spiritual teacher. He had written several texts on Buddhism and was
presumably proud of that accomplishment and of his fame. Naropa was
somewhat disenchanted with his life as a scholar and therefore turned to
a study of the occult sciences. One day, when he was studying the
Vajarayena teachings, an old witch-like crone asked him whether he
grasped the deeper significance of the texts he was reading. When
Naropa acknowledged that he understood what he was studying, the old
woman wept. She explained that her brother, Tilopa, a pandit and great
teacher, had such knowledge. Naropa, convinced of the woman's
sincerity, abandoned his position at the university and received permis-
sion from the monks to pursue his prospective master, Tilopa.
Naropa, written in epic style structured as a series of isolated
episodes or stationen, depicts Naropa's picaresque journey to find Tilopa,
6
Jean-Ciaude van ltallie and Joseph Chai kin, Struck Dumb, in Kaleidoscope 19
(Summer/Fall 1989), 14. Subsequent references to thi s work will be cited in the text.
7
For information about the biographical histories of Naropa and Tilopa, see
Helmut Hoffman, The Religions of Tibet, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (london: George
All en & Unwin, 1961 ); S.K. Ramachandra Rao, Tibetan Tantrik Tradition (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press, 1978); Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through
Spiritual Materialism (Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1973); and Giuseppe Tucci,
The Religions of Tibet, trans. Geoffrey Samuel (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1980).
30
PLUNKA
his teacher. Van ltallie understood that the spirituality of Zen koans is
intrinsically linked with a deeply manifested sense of humor. The
opposite of this spirituality is rigidity of thought derived from conditioned
behavior. Naropa, the serious pandit, lacks the ability to see clearly,
displaying virtually no sense of humor. Unlike Clara, the bag lady, who
views humanity with wry sarcasm despite the impending apocalypse,
Naropa, the university scholar, is so solemn that he fails to realize his
own spiritual identity and the beauty of the world surrounding him. In
a comment about the potential synthesis between politics and spirituality,
van ltallie once said, "You need to begin by centering yourself, slowing
down, seeing things clearly, and then allowing whatever action is
necessary to arise spontaneously."
6
Naropa has difficulty responding
spontaneously because, according to Tilopa, he is "poisoned" by his own
restrictive mode of thought. As an insolent abbot, Naropa did not
"center" himself and therefore could not see clearly, most notably
demonstrated by his inability to find Tilopa. The quest for Tilopa thus
becomes a search for the key to unlock the secrets of one's own soul. As
was true in van ltallie's earlier play, A Fable, the Beast lies within
ourselves.
Unfortunately, Naropa has not premiered on the New York stage
because van I tall ie has never been comfortable with how the play worked
in rehearsals. In a 7 June 1993 letter that he wrote to me, van ltallie
noted, "It [Naropa] was directed at a workshop at Yale School of Drama
by Lee Breuer in a manner I loathed." Naropa was next scheduled to
premiere with Bag Lady in 1979 at the Theater for the New City during
its prospective run from 21 November to 23 December in New York
City; however, at the last moment, Naropa was withdrawn because van
I tall ie thought the production was flawed. In 1982, Naropa was in
rehearsals at the LaMama Experimental Theatre Club; Steve Gorn had
already composed the music. Unfortunately, van ltallie agreed with Ellen
Stewart in finding the production "woefully inadequate" and canceled
it.
9
One must understand that the LaMama performances were staged
without puppets, which are an integral part of the play. Obviously the
continuity was altered, thus causing difficulties. The fact that van ltallie
withdrew Naropa twice before it was to be given public_ performances
invites intriguing queries about the efficacy of the play's form. In Naropa,
the episodes often degenerate into brief images that are at times loosely
structured as in a dream. Whereas a random juxtaposition of images
8
" Theater as Practice: An Interview With Jean-Claude van ltall ie, " New Visions,
Spring 1993, 10.
9
Jean-Ciaude van ltallie, letter to author, 7 June 1993.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead 31
works in surrealist theatre, such a form was less effective in Naropa, in
which the audience must make sense out of the collective episodes in
order to unravel the parable, i.e., Naropa's quest for identity. In short,
several of the images in Naropa need to be fleshed out a bit more to
solidify its epic structure and deter any notion that the play is loosely
fashioned like surrealist theatre. Naropa's inappropriate form thus
precludes it from being a multicultural vehicle for effectively representing
Buddhist thought on the contemporary American stage.
Yoshi Oida, one of director Peter Brook's actors, asked van ltallie to
assist him in creating a dramatization of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
In Paris, van ltallie saw Oida's adaptation of the Tibetan text and decided
to write his own version. After van ltallie revised the play for nearly a
year, going through eight rewrites and translating the text into French (his
native language) and back into English, The Tibetan Book of the Dead or
How Not to Do It Again was completed in draft form in December 1982.
The play is an adaptation of the Bardo Thodol, a sacred text of the
Mahayana School of Buddhism, first translated by Oxford University
scholar W.F. Evans-Wentz as The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead premiered at the LaMama Experimental
Theatre Club Annex on 14 January 1983. The play was produced by
El len Stewart and directed by Assurbanipal Babilla. The lively Tibetan
music was composed by Steve Gorn, who played some of it himself, ably
assisted by Geoff Gordon, Yokio Tsuji, and Dan Erkkila. Together they
created sounds from Oriental musical instruments, including the Sona (a
Tibetan oboe), the Sheng (a Chinese mouth organ), a fan drum, and
assorted bells, pipes, and reeds. Jun Maeda, a Japanese set designer who
had worked at LaMama for ten years, created a huge set that featured a
two-story-high skull made of white sheets stretched over saplings.
Passages that appeared to be orifices of the skull functioned as entrances
and exits for the performers to move about on various stage levels;
moreover, the saplings enabled the actors to climb around the set
acrobatically. The skillful lighting design was effectively coordinated by
Blu (sic) who devised five auras (red, blue, green, grey, and yellow) to
correspond with the energy levels surrounding the dead person. The
play's international ensemble consisted of eight performers from different
countries, providing the performance with a multicultural distinction that
suggested universality and recalled the Open Theater's collaborative
efforts on The Serpent.
As is true of most off-off Broadway productions that do not aim for
commercial success, The Tibetan Book of the Dead was not heavily
reviewed by the New York press. However, the notices the play did
receive were favorable. In a 1993 interview that I conducted with him,
van ltallie fondly recalled: "That play was a wonderful success with the
32
PLUNKA
audiences. People who came to see it often came back several times to
see it because they were so moved. That play is a success story in every
sense except the commercial. It moved even some reviewers to great
paens."
10
Mel Gussow's review in the New York Times praised van
ltallie's "ecumenical spiritual fervor," the "physically adept'' cast,
Gabriel Berry's "vivid costuming," and the music, "scored for a potpourri
of exotic instruments that are plucked, thumbed, stroked, shaken and
tooted."
11
Comparing The Tibetan Book of the Dead to the ensemble
pieces created by the Open Theater, most notably Terminal, Michael
Feingold of the Village Voice described the play as "simple and cogent,
dignified without pretension," framed within a fluid production high-
1 ighted by masterly set design and sty I ish dance and acrobatics.
12
Rosette
Lamont's review, which summed up much of the critical sentiment about
the play, referred to van ltallie's drama as "a beautiful and deeply moving
spectacle. . . . The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a magnificent text, and
van ltallie has created a powerful dramatic version of this classic work.
LaMama invites us to a solemn and ecstatic celebration of death and
life."
13
The only dissenting opinion was written by Lionel Mitchell of the
New York Amsterdam News, who enjoyed the performance but, as a
student who once received instruction from an old Mongolian lama, was
adamant that "one cannot reduce these teachings to a Western drama
concept without the audience being initiate into the culture behind it."
14
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an examination of the choices one
has when death occurs, a subject that obviously fascinated van ltallie.
During a 27 December 1992 interview, I asked van ltallie what terrifies
him. He responded, "Oh, Lord. At different moments, different things.
Death. Old age."
15
In 1980, shortly before The Tibetan Book of the
Dead was conceived, van ltallie and Wendy Gimbel visited the
10
Jean-Ciaude van ltallie, interview with author, tape recording, 26 june 1993,
Rowe, Massachusetts.
11
Mel Gus sow, "Theater: Tibetan Book of the Dead," New York Times, 1 9
january 1983, C24.
12
Michael Feingold, "And So Tibet," Village Voice, 25 January 1983.
13
Rosette Lamont, "The Book of the Dead: A Meditation on Mortality," Other
Stages 5, no. 9 (13-26 January 1983), 5.
14
Lionel Mitchell, "Lightweights Do 'Heavy' Tibetan Book of Dead," New York
Amsterdam News, 22 January 1983.
15
Piunka, "Interview With Jean-Claude van ltallie," 252.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead 33
Vileabamba Valley in the Andes Mountains of Equador to discover the
secrets of longevity in a region of the world where the elderly continue
to be active when they are well over one hundred years old.
16
Moreover,
in her article on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was printed as
pub I icity material for the drama and was part of various theatre
programmes advertising the play's run at LaMama, Rosette Lamont
included this statement by van ltallie: "The most tragic experience of my
life was the death of my mother. She died very young, before she was
fifty. We were very close." Lamont tied van ltallie's play to the death of
his mother by stating, " Van ltallie's enactment is an exorcism of a
profound sorrow, a meditation on mortality, and the soul's progress."
17
However, The Tibetan Book of the Dead is not a lugubrious event;
instead, it is a rejuvenation of the soul to its divinity lost at birth. As such,
the focus is on spiritual rebirth rather than on death. Van ltallie summa-
rized the tone of the play: "The production was full of light and joy, a
celebration really, not at all what the name of the play might imply."
18
Buddhists believe that life and death are continuous processes.
Indeed, many Buddhist lamas insist that they have experienced frequent
deaths and rebirths. Some Buddhists admit that every person alive has
returned from death, although seldom will those individuals who are not
spiritually oriented recall previous deaths. Death is a time of reflection
in which the meaning of life is accentuated. The Bardo Thodol, or The
Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a guide for the Bardo existence, which is the
intermediate period of forty-nine days from one's death to rebirth.
19
Bardo is a Tibetan word that means "gap," the transition between death
and spiritual rebirth. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is read by a spiritual
master to a dying person or even to one who has recently passed away
16
See Jean-Claude van ltallie and Wendy Gimbel, "Discovering the Real Fountain
of Youth ... in South America," Vogue, February 1981, 196, 201-204.
17
Lamont, 4.
181
'Jean-Ciaude van ltallie," in Contemporary Authors, 421 .
19
For a more thorough appreciation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, see W.Y.
Evans-Wentz, ed. and trans., The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 3rd ed. (london: Oxford
University Press, 1957); Francesca Fremantle and Chogyam Trungpa, ed. and trans.,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo
(Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1975); and Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of
Living and Dying, ed. Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey (New York: HarperCollins,
1992). Also pertinent is C.J. Jung's " Psychologi cal Commentary," Lama Anagarika
Govinda' s " Introductory Foreword," and Sir John Woodroffe' s "Forward" to the
Evans-Wentz translation, as well as Chogyam Trungpa's "Commentary" included in
the Fremantl e-Trungpa edition.
34 PLUNKA
and is now in the Bardo state. The Tibetan Book of the Dead thus
stresses to the dead person the vital significance of the soul. However,
the original purpose of this sacred text was as a guide for the living who
are seeking spiritual enlightenment and a concomitant understanding of
the full meaning of their existence as human beings. Sogyal Rinpoche
explains, "The word 'bardo' is commonly used to denote the
ate state between death and rebirth, but in reality bardos are occurring
continuously throughout both life and death, and are junctures when the
possibility of liberation, or enlightenment, is heightened."
20
This sense of liberation or enlightenment for the living is part of van
ltallie's purpose in staging The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Van ltallie
views the play as a celebration of life. During spring 1993, van ltallie
stated, "Theater at its best is a spiritual practice. And also when it's very
funny, it's a spiritual practice."
21
In yet another interview that he gave in
1993, van ltallie acknowledged, "In the blessed sixties Ram Dass
summed up the goal of spiritual practice as being here now .... Is the
landscape, whenever we glimpse it, of being here now piercingly,
poignantly, beyond words funny? Seems to be. No?"
22
In that article,
van ltallie also discussed the concept of the koan as a joke, "its purpose
to blow mind."
23
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a manifestation of
theatre as spiritual practice. The text teaches us the importance of "being
here now" as it celebrates the beauty of life. In short, The Tibetan Book
of the Dead is a humorous, yet revelatory, guide to leading a more
rewarding existence. Van ltallie explained why The Tibetan Book of the
Dead is the personification of spiritual theatre: "The book is trying to
bring consciousness, light, into the process of our projecting our illusions
onto the world. It speaks with the voice of a friend, often with humor,
and its intent is compassionate."
24
The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains no acts or scenes, and van
ltallie does not designate an intermission. Obviously, van ltallie realized
that it would be pedantic to dramatize each of the days of the
Bardo. Instead, van ltallie devised a unique structure of seventeen
20
Rinpoche, 11.
211
'Theatre as Practice: An Interview With van ltallie," 10.
22
Jean-Ciaude van ltallie, "On Laughter," American Drama 3, no.l (1993): 89.
23
/bid., 88.
24
Jean-Ciaude van ltallie, "Additional Notes, " in The Tibetan Book of the Dead
or How Not to Do it Again (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1983), 51.
Subsequent references to this work will be cited in the text.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead 35
interludes, each with its own title, to represent the most salient stages of
the Bardo. The structure is fluid and organic, with one interlude moving
gracefully into the next as if the play were orchestrated as a sustained
rhythm. The dialogue reminds one of several of the dramas written by
T.S. Eliot in which verse is used to create a ceremonial effect.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is structured as an aesthetic piece of
performance art. In van I tall ie's entire canon, The Tibetan Book of the
Dead is the most aesthetically appealing play he has written and loses its
raison d'etre when an improperly coordinated production fails to capture
its full beauty. The actors must mesh carefully in an ensemble for the
play to work as intended. Van ltallie reveals, "The success of the play
depends on a long rehearsal process including group improvisation (not
verbal) to find expression for and become familiar with the primal
energies and the emotional realms" (44). In this sense, The Tibetan Book
of the Dead is similar to The Serpent, which was the pinnacle of effective
collaborative theatre. Music is an important part of the play's aesthetics.
Each interlude has its own designated music, often setting the mood for
the individual segments. Music also creates a unifying rhythm for the
play, much in the manner that Antonin Artaud suggested. In addition,
music provides a means of codifying the various energy levels and
emotipnal states surrounding the dead person during the Bardo. Van
ltallie specifies the use of "Tibetan ritual instruments, Asian gongs and
drums, bamboo flutes from India and Japan and a variety of shakers,
chimes and bells" (44) .
The set design is also an important factor in maintaining the aesthetic
appeal of the play. The stage consists of a floor mandala that must be
painted with designated colors to mark four cardinal points. The stage
design represents a huge white skull perhaps two stories high, with the
mouth on the ground floor. Rosette Lamont says, "The voyage, however,
is to take place within the human mind, and thus the stage space is
enclosed by a circular structure suggestive of rice paper and reeds which
represents a human skull with its two eye sockets."
25
The mouth and eye
sockets should be designed as if they are sucking the audience in, and the
skull ideally should be created in such a way as to beckon the audience
into the stage action. The lighting also must be intricately coordinated to
achieve the proper aesthetic appeal. Colored lighting effects must be
meshed with the appropriate music to accentuate each individual energy
level surrounding the dead person. Furthermore, the blinking of various
colored bulbs requires intricate timing to coincide with specific intervals
that van ltallie has carefully designated in the text. Costumes also
enhance the aesthetic appeal of this rite of passage. Performers wear the
25
Lamont, 4.
36
PLUNKA
patterned, layered clothing of Tibet, in earthlike colors-deep reds,
ochres, yellows, and maroons. Van ltal l ie suggests using natural
materials "with no careful uniformity but rather with an eye to a changing
harmony of patterns and colors" (45) .
As the play begins, the actors and musicians loosen up in preparation
for the performance. An informal, relaxed atmosphere intimates that the
audience is welcome during the rites of mourning. In the production
note to the pl ay, van ltallie defined the proper atmosphere in which to
stage The Tibetan Book of the Dead: "The audience should not be
patronized by an attitude of pretending to know, nor preached at, nor
bored w ith pseudo-religiosity. The actors should think of the audience
as friends" (44). The atmosphere suggests a celebration, a renewal of life.
An actor addresses the audience, welcoming them: "Oh you,J\Nho have
come to this place./Sisters and brothers, friends" (9). The audience is
exhorted to mourn the dead person, who will be played by as many as
four different performers during the course of the play. The process of
dying is enacted onstage, metaphorically represented by a white scarf
covering the Dead One to indicate that the Bardo shall not be inter-
rupted.
Suddenly, from the third eye of the skull at the top of the proscenium,
a clear white light shines in the eyes of the audience for approximately
twelve seconds. An actor addresses the audience, assuring them that
death has occurred and that there is nothing to fear because no pain is
possible now that the physical body no longer exists. The clear white
light begins the stage action in which consciousness dissolves into what
Buddhists refer to as the all-encompassing space of truth. The awareness
of objects is now lost, replaced by pure consciousness for those who seek
the power to discover it. The dead person now has the opportunity to get
off the cycle of reincarnation, hence the subtitle of the play, How Not to
Do It Again. To choose to accept the clear white light means abandoning
earth I ike ego, but the reward is to become part of the universal mind. As
a celebration of life, the play suggests that at any moment of our lives, we
can abandon ego. However, at death, we have an except ionally
appropriate opportunity to do so because we must lose the body and
therefore its baggage as well, including the habits we have accumulated
over the years. Unfortunately, the choice to drop ego is not an easy one
because, unless the person has made an effort to slough off such detritus
during his or her lifetime, the decision to alter one's thinking at the time
of death will probably be terrifying. If the deceased accepts the clear
white light, the play would be terminated.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead next depicts the peaceful deities that
visit the deceased during the first week of the Bardo. These are the
benevolent aspects of the five families of energy. The Dead One now has
The Tibetan Book of the Dead 37
the opportunity to join with any one of these peaceful energies, depend-
ing upon his or her psychological makeup. As W.Y. Evans-Wentz
explains in his introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, "Rationally
considered, each person's after-death experiences, as the Bardo Thodol
teaching implies, are entirely dependent upon his or her mental
content."
26
Choices are determined solely by the deceased individual.
The peaceful energies each have their own psychic manifestations,
colors, wisdom, and negative or "angry" aspects. The ensemble
members are required to form each energy with their own bodies.
Vairocana, the first of the five peaceful energies, is a mediating figure
with four faces, simultaneously perceiving all directions in a type of
panoramic vision. His color is white; thus, he stands in the white portion
of the mandala. Vairocana is the embodiment of "all embracing
wisdom" (14) whose angry aspect manifests ignorance in various forms.
In the East, the blue quadrant of the mandala, Akshobya appears as the
winter king. Akshobya, the immovable, personifies strength and
toughness. His blue color indicates the water element that depicts his
ability to purify and suggests the blue-white of winter. Van ltallie notes,
" Akshobya is intelligence, mind, consciousness, piercing, like an icicle"
(48). His negativity reflects hatred in all its forms. Ratnasambhava, the
third peaceful energy, enters on the southern quadrant of the mandala
with his consort and court. As the sun king of the harvest,
Ratnasambhava is personified by the golden light. Ratnasambhava
typifies richness and dignity, the fertility of the earth's harvest that
corresponds to wealth. In his glory, Ratnasambhava is generous and
dignified royalty, but in negative form, he embodies pride and penurious-
ness. A bright red light in the western quadrant indicates the arrival of
Amitabha, the rosy king of compassion. His element is the glowing red
of fire and sunset, suggesting a spirit of seductive warmth and kindness.
Amitabha denotes spring and rebirth, but in the angry mode, he displays
I ust and passion. The last of the peaceful energies is the wind king,
Amogasiddhi, who emerges in strong green light on the north quadrant
of the mandala. He is the incarnation of the spirit of summer-the air of
the wind and the green of the growing grass. Amogasiddhi represents the
breath of life, the spi rit of doing and accomplishing, yet his negative
aspect manifests itself as envy. Surrounded by the five peaceful energies,
the dead person is having difficulty making a choice.
Unable to choose, the Dead One is terrorized by the five angry
energies, which are merely the peaceful energies in their angry forms.
The angry energies of Vairocana, Akshobya, Ratnasambhava, Amitabha,
26
Evans-Wentz, "Introduction," in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 34.
38
PLUNKA
and Amogasiddhi take turns threatening the deceased, who, in turn, flees.
The dead person can join with these angry energies simply by being
unafraid, although this does not occur. In short, the deceased's reaction
to the angry energies is again a reflection of one's own mind. However,
van ltallie would probably admit that in death, as in life, fear is a difficult
emotion to erase. For that reason, Mahakala appears to assist the
deceased to "recognize the darker parts of ourselves" (25) . Mahakala,
dressed in black, represents the union of the five peaceful energies. An
icon of strength and positive energy, Mahakala helps the dead person get
through this potentially difficult stage. In contrast, the Lord of Death, the
Dharma King, is the personification of the wrathful deities plaguing the
Dead One. The Lord of Death is the grim reaper watching the deceased
jump from one emotional state to the other. One of the actors consoles
the dead person: "Oh you of glorious origin, don't be afraid/Even if you
were cut into little pieces/You couldn't possibly die again/Emptiness
cannot harm emptiness" (26) .
The deceased gradually realizes death. Sarvamangalam, a blessing
similar to "Amen," is sung by the actors as the Dead One, excited over
this revelation, runs around the mandala. The deceased acknowledges
that previously he refused to recognize the peaceful or angry energies as
his own. However, now he is resigned to accept death: "But now my
eyes distinguish./My ears hear./1 can move more easily./My voice is
clear" (28).
During the next interlude, the Dead One is pursued by demons.
Images of death and destruction confront the dead person, but the
Soothsayer acknowledges, "All these are from your mind" (30). A male
and female judge jab the Dead One with white and black stones,
representing good and evil deeds, respectively. The demons reveal to the
deceased: "You have no body./You're already dead./We demons are
your own imagining" (33). The demons remind the dead person, "Your
things are of no use to you now./Let whoever has them have them./By
wanting and wanting/You become a hungry ghost" (34). The Dead One
is given choices to make about his own psychological makeup; decisions
may be made during every step of the Bardo journey.
The demons evolve into hungry ghosts that besiege the dead person.
This is the world of addiction or consumerism, a subject van ltallie has
treated in several plays, most notably Eat Cake and Bag Lady. As
consumers, these hungry ghosts with insatiable appetites want sex, food,
material objects, drink, or drugs and are never satisfied with having
enough of such things. They are dominated by greed and constantly try
to possess more and more. Chogyam Trungpa explains this state of mind:
"The joy of possessing does not bring us pleasure any more once we
already possess something, and we are constantly trying to look for more
The Tibetan Book of the Dead 39
possessions, but it turns out to be the same process all over again; so
there is a constant intense hunger which is based not on a sense of
poverty but on the realization that we already have everything yet we
cannot enjoy it."
27
An actor chides the Dead One about what appears to
the deceased to be a blissful state: "Be carefui./You could be born
here/And have to suffer life again" (35). The dead person can still make
a choice: "So far you've not recognized your own light/Do so now"
(35).
During the next segment of the play, the Dead One is faced with the
Human Realm, a world defined by bliss, laughter, and increased
celebratory activity. The Dead One is fascinated by this burst of energy
created to celebrate a wedding. The bridal couple, engaged in a
love-making dance, beckon the deceased to join the merriment. The
Singer warns, "Ride the horse of bliss and emptiness./Don't be distracted
.. . /Ride the horse of bliss and emptiness/Which is your own mind" (36).
In his notes to the play, van ltallie writes, "But unfortunately the blissful
world is temporary and, because so filled with bliss, mindless" (49) . The
Singer reminds the deceased that passion is fleeting: "For an instant you
would know the bliss/Of sperm meeting egg" (37). When one tires of
pleasure, there will be a lack of fulfillment remaining. The Dead One,
bewi Ide red, seeks solace from the Singer, who says quietly, "Father,
mother, the great storm/All are illusion" (37).
Choices for the Dead One are rapidly becoming more narrowly
defined. The dead person must decide whether to seek the spirit world
or be reborn. The Reader makes an appeal for the spiritual life: "Best is
to rest, empty" (39). However, when the deceased reacts like a child to
this advice, the Reader provides the alternative: "Or join the play of
illusion:/Become illusion's child" (39) . The Dead One therefore must
choose a body so the spirit can be reborn. There are six possible choices:
the blissful, the ambitious, the human, the animal, the hungry ghosts, or
the world of hell. Spiritual visions from each of these six realms,
positioned on different sections of the mandala, beckon the Dead One to
choose an emotional world. The Dead One decides to be reborn in the
human realm, represented by the golden light on the southern part of the
mandala. The Reader motivates the deceased: "Enter again this theater
of illusion, vale of tears./With your head held high/Call on the forces of
compassion" (42). Sarvamangalani is chanted, placing a blessing on the
Dead One's choice of rebirth in the world representing compassion. The
dead person then embraces each actor and expresses his farewells to
27
Chi:igyam Trungpa, "Commentary," in The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The
Great Liberation Through Hearing the Bardo, 7.
40 PLUNKA
them. The white scarf is discarded as the deceased now awaits,
somewhat bewildered, before beginning his rebirth and accepting a new
body. Life in the Bardo, which is now over, has brought the deceased no
rewards or punishments-merely the opportunity to make decisions
about a new life.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a compassionate guide for the dead
as well as for the living. Addressing the Dead One as "you of glorious
origin" who is "nobly born," the play functions as positive encourage-
ment. Van ltallie mentions that The Tibetan Book of the Dead treats the
deceased as a friend, one who will now share in this fundamental
universal knowledge: "It encourages us to remain 'in a state of no
thought,' wishing to help us from further suffering, and from confusion
caused by our own over-active constantly discursive thoughts"(6}.
Speaking to us with the compassion of a friend, The Tibetan Book of the
Dead reminds us that we can determine our own spiritual life only if we
will agree to abandon the rigid thinking that frequently defines our
identity for us.
As a play that aesthetically appeals to one's intellect and senses
simultaneously, The Tibetan Book of the Dead latently conveys an
important Buddhist text to the audience without being dogmatic. The
images of The Tibetan Book of the Dead are carefully crafted in distinct
stationen or interludes in which van ltallie has worked out intricate
details with regard to costuming, lighting, music, and color coordination.
This meticulous coordination of images in the play imbues the audience
with a vigorous spiritual energy. The Tibetan Book of the Dead thus
evolves into an icon of multicultural performance art targeted for an
American society that, as van ltallie has often claimed in his plays, has
lost its spirituality in the midst of egocentrism, materialism, rigidity of
thought, and conspicuous consumption.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Spring 1996)
Mamet's Inland Sea
DOROTHY H. jACOBS
Literature tells of many men who had to "go down to the sea again,"
from Ulysses and the Anglo-Saxon Wayfarer to Ishmael and Masefield's
sea-feverish seeker of "the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the
white sail's shaking." Spray, spume, mist, and whales combine with sail,
mast, and open deck to form an aesthetically powerful appeal. Not just
"the call of the running tide" provides the lure, though. An essential
element in those enchantments of the sea is distinction from the land.
More venturesome than Ithaca for Ulysses, surer than the farm or the city
for Anna Christie, the sea provides an adventure and an escape from
land. Within the confines of the ship there exists a separate life with its
own peculiar rules and rigidities of command. Even the idiosyncracies
of captains Bly and Queeg provide intriguing conflicts in distant oceans.
The predominant relationship at sea is that of man with nature as the
sailor contends with tempest or calm, with tide, temperature and giant
whale. As though with the assurance that Neptune still rules, literature
of the sea tends to perpetuate mythic qualities of a world at sea, one that
is unique and separate from life on land.
David Mamet, in three of his plays-Duck Variations, The Water
Engine, and Lakeboat-posits an inland sea that has none of the tradi-
tional charms of escape or unusual experience because that sea is
inseparable from the corruption of its shores. No sentimentalist about the
city, Mamet shows a Great Lake that stinks of the sewage and sludge that
industry dumps into the old Indian waters, Mamet extends Robert
Herrick's identification of Chicago as a "stupendous piece of blasphemy
against nature"
1
to that inland sea where ancient gods, along with species
of fish, are dead, and where, in the place of Ulysses and Ahab, captains
of commerce rule the waves.
1
Kenny J. Williams, " 'Creative Defiance': An Overview of Chicago Literature,"
in Midwestern Miscellany XIV (East Lansing, Ml: Midwestern Press, 1986), 8.
42
JACOBS
In an ecological sense these plays of Mamet's share a modern
awareness parallel to Thor Heyerdahl's observations about the density of
debris in the oceans and to Tom Lehrer's satiric injunction in his song
"Pollution" that we "wash out our mouths in industrial waste." But the
plays are not simply tracts for ecological reform; rather, they are exposes
of the expansion of American commerce so that no escape, even by sea,
is possible.
Earlier in the century another American playwright, Eugene O'Neill,
gave us a dramatic confrontation between romantic and unromantic
notions of life at sea in The Hairy Ape. In the steel prison of the fireman's
forecastle Yank scorns Paddy's evocation of tall-ship days with his gruff
and authoritative retort, "Aw hell! Nix on dat old sailing ship stuff! All
dat bull's dead, see?"
2
What O'Neill termed his "comedy of ancient and
modern life in eight scenes" divides scenes equally between the ocean
liner and New York City. But the crucial moment is the recognition
which Yank suffers in the stokehole, for his subsequent journey on land
ends in a logical acceptance of his identity as a hairy ape. Yank had
bragged of belonging in the hell of the ocean liner's engines. Neverthe-
less, a look of horror and disgust from a lady passenger upset the bravado
of "Twenty-five knots an hour, dat's me!" easily enough. O'Neill
emphasizes here, as he does in his other plays, the psychological impact
of events on character.
Just as Yank has no use for Paddy's nostalgia for "scudding south
again wid the power of the Trade Wind," Mamet has no interest in
O'Neill's sort of expressionistic exploration of the seaman's psychology.
Rather, Mamet uses mainly realistic means to indicate commercial
domination of man's environment.
Several of Mamet's plays are set, pointedly, in "a Big City on a Lake,"
in wry reference to the playwright's native Chicago. Of his two best-
known dramas, American Buffalo has internal references to Chicago, and
Glengarry Glen Ross emanates from his own experiences working in a
Chicago real estate office. More important, these plays demonstrate the
duplicity and bad faith that permeate the world of business as Mamet sees
it. Familiar as the image of Chicago is as a locus of dehumanization in
the literature of such prominent writers as Dreiser and Bellow, Mamet
extends the traditional metaphor of centralized corruption to the very lake
which shapes its tainted shore.
Mamet's first play, Duck Variations, begins with a perspective on that
lake. Two aging men, Emil and George, meet on a bench in "a Park on
2
Eugene O'Neill, The Hairy Ape, in The Plays of Eugene O'Neill Vol. 3 (New
York: Random House, 1967), 210.
Inland Sea
43
the edge of a Big City on a Lake."
3
Their position allows a clear view of
boats, water pump, and ducks. George postulates an analogy between
ducks and humans in their sufferings from worries, disease, weather,
physical and sexual maladies, and combat. George's sometimes comical,
sometimes lyrical comparison culminates in his opinion that lung cancer
in ducks is caused by the lower atmosphere being "messy with gook."
To Emil's question, "Our stratosphere?" George confidently replies that
it is "Everybody's. Because it's all the same thing" (83). What George
first categorizes as "shit" put up in the air by man he soon specifies as
dirt, automotive exhaust, and cigarette smoke, all, he says, "more a part
of our world than we would like to admit" (84).
These observations on the poisoned air lead to George and Emil's
more personal acknowledgments of their connection with nature and to
the Great Lake. At George's insistence that Nature is "our window to the
world" (85), they agree that the world they know is dirty, cruel, and self-
destructive. A despondent Emil wonders if traipsing to the Park "is more
trouble than it's worth," even though his apartment is, as he describes it,
"Joyless. Cold concrete ... Stuff. Linoleum. Imitation" (86). In close
dialogue they establish the relationship between city and sea:
GEORGE: The park is more real?
EMIL: The Park? Yes.
GEORGE: Sitting on benches.
EMIL: Yes.
GEORGE: Visiting tame animals?
EMIL: Taken from wildest captivity.
GEORGE: Watching a lake that's a sewer?
EMIL: At least it's water.
GEORGE: You wanna drink it?
EMIL: I drink it every day.
GEORGE: Yea. After it's been pured and filtered.
EMIL: A lake just the same. My Inland Sea.
GEORGE: Fulla Inland Shit.
EMIL: It's better than nothing.
Well, it's a close second (86) .
By the Tenth Variation Emil sees beyond his Inland Sea and its ducks
to oceans glutted with multiple deaths of birds:
3
David Mamet, American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and Duck
Variations. (London: Methuen, 1978), 78. Subsequent references are cited in the text
and are from this edition.
44 jACOBS
Oil slicks from here to Africa .. . . They don't allow no
smoking on ocean liners. One spark overboard and the whole
ocean goes ... . Oil bearing ducks floating up dead on the
beaches. Beaches closing. No place to swim. The surface of the
sea is solid dying wildlife .. . . Thrushes. No more the duck.
Blue-jays. Cardinals. Making the dead ocean their last home.
Floating up dead on the beaches. Their lungs a sodden pulp of
gasoline .. . . Can you imagine, being the last man alive to have
seen a blue heron? Or a wild buffalo? (88)
So intense is Emil's comprehensive view of the spoilage that George's
attempt to remind him of remaining natural gifts in bir.d, sunset, and
breeze fails. Emil concludes, "They're all dead .. . or hiding" (89) .
In the final Variation George and Emil compare themselves to
"Ancient Greeks" who used to "sit around all day looking at birds" (93) .
Deepening the analogy, George says, ,; A crumbling civilization, and
they're out in the park looking at birds." Thus, with the sometimes
comical portentousness of the Chicago contemplators, Mamet establishes,
in this first play, a theme of integrated waste from sea to shining sea. The
gloss on the Great Lake is as synthetic as that on Emil's linoleum floor.
But while Duck Variations of 1972 has a reflective, even at times a
eulogistic tone, Mamet's 1977 play, The Water Engine, is satiric in its
juxtaposition of various sleazy deals with the boosterism of the 1934
Century of Progress Exposition extolling "the concrete poetry of
Humankind" in Chicago. Singers at a radio microphone open the drama
with the state song of Illinois. Here we recognize the source of Emil's
proud boast, "My Inland Sea." The song goes, in part:
Illinois, Illinois.
Till upon thine Inland Sea
Stands Chicago, great and free,
Turning all the world to thee,
Illinois, lllinois.
4
Throughout the play occasional reminders and replays of this sort of
patriotism and belief in "the Second Hundred Years of Progress'' intersect
the main plot, which, in sum, exemplifies the "Inland Shit" of George's
report.
4
David Mamet, The Water Engine (New York: Grove, 1977), 6. Subsequent
references are cited in the text.
Inland Sea 45
The protagonist, Lang, believes in the integrity of man and nature.
His solitary chemical experiments have led to his invention of an engine
that uses distilled water as its only fuel. "Like a sailboat," Lang says,
"This engine ... draws its power from the Earth" (20-21). When Lang
tries to negotiate a legitimate business arrangement for patenting and
manufacturing his engine, he finds that his sister's predictions about
lawyers and merchants being thieves are proven true. The play, which
Mamet subtitles" An American Fable," reveals that the business offers are
actually threats; the deals, schemes for cutting Lang out; the methods,
ruthless and self-aggrandizing. Because Lang refuses to give over his
plans for the engine, he and his sister are eliminated. The news report of
the location of their deaths makes emphatic the connection between
inland criminality and the Great Lake:
The mutilated bodies of a man and a woman were discovered in
the early morning hours on a stretch of industrial frontage five
miles north of Waukegan today . ... The cause of death in both
cases appears to have been drowning, but both bodies bear signs
of quite extensive injury (67-68).
While industry keeps its hold on the shore, the Barker for the Exposition's
Hall of Science closes the play with praises for the Chicago Fair and
promises of half-price tickets good for tomorrow.
The tomorrow in Mamet's canon is the 1980 play, Lakeboat.
Whereas Duck Variations defines the Great Lake as a sewer and The
Water Engine identifies sources of effluvia, Lakeboat shows life at sea as
nothing more than an extension of the industry of Chicago, East Chicago,
Duluth, Gary, or Buffalo. The Fireman watching twin gauges in the
engine-room has an eight-hour stint as boring and mechanical as Lang's
at his punchpress in the factory. Not even a romantic name distinguishes
the vessel; originally christened joseph Czerwiecki for Czerwiecki Steel
when it was built in 1938, the ship, when sold to Harrison Steel in 1954,
was appropriately renamed . T. Harrison. Dale, the new nightman
replacing an absent sailor, describes it as a "fair-sized boat. A small
world," and, more specifically, as "a steel bulk-freight turbine steamer
registered in the Iron Ore Trade."
5
The very title of the play prepares us
for the clipped, spare dramatization of the routines on this floating freight-
train. In the play's unsentimental presentation of life at sea the primary
lore is of the absent sailor. Taking the familiar first line of an old sea-
5
0 avid Mamet, Lakeboat (New York: Grove, 1981 ), 24-25. Subsequent
references are cited in the text.
46
jACOBS
song, Scene 1 has as its title, "What do you do with a drunken sailor?"
(17) What the onboard sailors do is speculate on the possible reasons
why the sailor missed the boat. Their assumptions range from drunken-
ness and mugging to violent death, but conclude prosaically, "Skippy
said he said his aunt died, but he thinks the real reason 'cause he
overslept" (111). Thus the imaginative possibilities generated by the lost
sailor reduce to the banal the actualities of any tired workman absent
from his job.
A secondary bit of lore centers on the cook's cars, beginning with a
rumor of two Cadillac Eldorados and gradually descending to "A couple
of '56 Chevys ... a pair of used Volkswagens ... a beat-up Buick," and,
finally, "a fucking De Soto" (66-67). Both the emphasis upon cars as
symbols of economic success and upon language as representative of the
male competitive world remind us of the familiar competitions and
obscenities in the flim-flam real estate world of Mamet's Glengarry Glen
Ross where the prizes for the office contest are: for the winner, a
Cadillac; second place, a set of steak-knives; the loser, getting fired.
No dream of being bound east for Cardiff motivates Dale, the new
nightman. For Dale this is just a summer job between undergraduate
semesters. His work in the galley is no different from that in any fast-food
snack-bar. As for workload, it is described to him in familiar terms of
"straight shift" and "a half-hour for lunch" {42). As Dale encounters
other merchant mariners in various locations on the lakeboat, he
discovers attitudes that show solidarity with other discontented workers.
Joe's simple economic formula applies on land as well as on board ship:
" You get paid for doing a job. You trade the work for money, am I right?
Why is it any fucking less good than being a doctor, for example?" (1 03)
Stan claims he could "tick off" his life, not in coffee-spoons, but "in beer
caps ... every man on the ship had his own opener .. . Around his
neck" (27). Stan adds the further observation, "This boat is becoming a
bureaucracy" (40). He ranks the boat right along with drinking, life, and
women as "No good" {27). But Fred, feeling obligated to inform the new
man about "a thing or two," gives Dale authoritative information, that
the boats are of primary importance in the "Steel Industry" (51).
Conversations are almost entirely land-bound, for the topics are
prize-fighters, movies, guns, and compensation for injury on the job.
Only one scene of the twenty-eight, "The Inland Sea Around Us,"
features any contemplation of the lake. joe wonders how long a fellow
would last in the water if the boat should go down. The second mate's
assurance about reliable jackets and a fast helicopter rescue helps Joe to
recognize what the big problem would be: not drowning, but boredom.
Even in a life-threatening situation the usual work response would
prevail .
Inland Sea 47
Further evidence of the banality of their sea-trade comes from the
second mate's amazement that anyone could find anything of interest in
their work. In a late scene he says:
You know, it's surprising what people will convince themselves
is interesting. The Company, guests come on for a trip and
we're docked at Port Arthur and they're up on the boatdeck and
for an hour, an hour and a half, they're watching this stuff pour
into the holds. The woman's got a Brownie. She's taking
pictures of rock falling off a conveyor belt. Now what is so
interesting about that? If you described the situation to them, to
any normal people, they wouldn't walk across the hall to watch
it if the TV were broken. But there they are, guests of the
Company ... watching the rocks and the dust (79).
His perspective pervades the play, for no matter what the
location-engine room, galley, fantail, boat deck, or rail-the attitude
expressed is that of a hardhat worker. Even though the men have ranks
in the merchant marine, their primary function, that of toting dolomite
across the Great lake, identifies them as industrial workers. just as
sewage seeps into the Inland Sea, the commerce of Chicago determines
I ife on the lakeboat.
Kenny Williams has reminded us that "few think of urban corruption
without citing Chicago as a prime example," and that its writers
tradit ionally have proposed its significance "as a symbol for American
culture."
6
Through the metaphor of Duck Variations, the fable of The
Water Engine, and the realism of Lakeboat, David Mamet adds to the
accumulated literature on the importance of Chicago. What it has
symbolized extends, in these dramas, to the Great lake. And further
extension to national, indeed to international borders is more than a sea-
link. No escape at all from "primary importance in . .. Industry,"
Mamet' s Inland Sea is inextricably of the land.
6
Williams, 9-13.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Spring 1996)
The Holocaust on the Air:
The Radio Plays of the Writers' War Board
ALVIN GOLDFARB
In the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum there is extensive documentation of America's non-response to
the Nazi's war against the Jews. It seems clear that governmental leaders,
the press, and the publ ic knew what was occurring in Third Reich
occupied territories. Researchers, such as Arthur D. Morse, in While Six
Million Died, and DavidS. Wyman, in The Abandonment of the jews,
catalog the irrefutable information circulated to the Allied governments
regarding the liquidation of the ghettos, the Nazi death camps, and the
many other atrocities.
1
As Wyman pointedly concludes:
Authenticated information that the Nazis were systematically
exterminating European Jewry was made public in the United
States in November 1942. President Roosevelt did nothing
about the mass murder for fourteen months .. .. Strong public
pressure would have brought a much fuller government commit-
ment to rescue .. .. Analysis of the main rescue proposals put
forward at the time, but brushed aside by government officials,
yields convincing evidence that more could have been done to
rescue Jews, if a real effort had been made. The record also
reveals that the reasons repeatedly invoked by government
officials for not being able to rescue Jews could be put aside
when it came to other Europeans who needed help.
2
1
Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy
(New York: Random House, 1968), and DavidS. Wyman, The Abandonment of the
jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
2
Wyman, x-xi.
Holocaust on the Air 49
A striking piece of theatrical evidence that reflects how much was known
about the Third Reich's Final Solution as well as how the information was
mediated so as not to focus specifically on European jewry is a series of
scripts for radio distributed by the Writers' War Board between 1942 and
1944.
The Writers' War Board was an organization made up of noted
United States authors that disseminated propaganda for the war effort.
The Board was established on 9 December 1941 at the request of the
Treasury Department.
3
The Board's purposes, as outlined in its first
annual report, included serving as a liaison to such governmental and
quasi-governmental agencies as the Armed Forces, USO, and Red Cross,
which needed written materials supporting the war effort, as well as
developing original works that educated the public about the necessity
of American participation in the conflict.
Mystery novelist Rex Stout was the chair and other board members
included William L. Shirer (later the author of The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich), Pearl S. Buck, and Russel Crouse. All Board members lived
in or near New York City. There was also an advisory group of forty-four
authors who served as consultants and supplied writings. The member-
ship of the advisory panel included a "who's who" of American drama
in the 1940s: Marc Connelly, Howard Lindsay, Clifford Odets, Eugene
O'Neill, Elmer Rice, and Thornton Wilder.
The amount of material distributed by the Writers' War Board was
astounding. In its first year of existence, it "sought, suggested, and placed
more than eight thousand articles, sketches, ideas, brief items, radio
scripts, and talks" (WWB 1, 6). In the second annual report, Stout
bragged that the Writers' War Board made available to the public "two
tons of manuscripts at two percent the market price" (WWB 2, 1). The
board also published monthly reports that were distributed to twenty-five
hundred authors outside of New York City and contained information
about war related publications as well as requests for specific types of
written materials to support the war effort.
4
In addition to the main and advisory boards, subcommittees were
established to help with the writing and dissemination of this massive
3
AII of the information about the history and structure of the Writers' War Board
comes from their three annual reports distributed in December 1942, January 1944,
and January 1945. They can be found in the Research Divisi on of the New York
Public Library on 42nd Street. They are cited as WWB 1, WWB 2, and WWB 3.
4
The monthly reports issued by the Writers' War Board can be found in the
Research Division of the New York Pub I ic Library on 42nd Street.
so
GOLDFARB
amount of material, including the War Scripts of the Month Committee.
5
A detailed description of this committee's activities was included in the
first annual report of the Writers' War Board:
Sees and selects effective war scripts suitable for re-use by
schools and colleges.
Originally chose one script a month, but due to increased
demand has recently averaged two a month.
Arranged to make all scripts royalty free for local educational use
via local broadcasts.
Mimeographs and mails scripts to over two hundred and fifty
AEI3- [Association for Education by Radio] members and
others who agree to broadcast them whenever feasible. Also
makes scripts available for school assemblies and classrooms
through the Office of Civil Defense (WWB 1, 27).
Among these "scripts of the month" were seventy-seven plays for
radio and outdoor pageants, with at least five of the widely circulated
radio scripts making references to the Holocaust: Stephen Vincent
Benet's They Burned the Books (1942), Morton Wishengrad's The Battle
of the Warsaw Ghetto (1943), Max Ehrlich's Der Fuehrer (and the Great
Lie He Borrowed) (1944), Richard P. McDonagh's War Criminals and
Punishment (1944), and William K. Clarke's The Promise Versus the
Deed (1944).
6
Like the membership of the Writers' War Board, the authors of these
five dramas were well respected literary figures. Benet (1900-1943) was
a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who wrote john Brown's Body and who
died prematurely the year after writing They Burned the Books. Morton
5
1n its first annual report, the Writers' War Board lists twenty-eight
subcommittees. Throughout its more than three-year existence, there were many
committees with overlapping functions and frequent changes. For example, there was
a Radio Committee listed in 1943's annual report as well as a War Scripts of the
Month committee.
6
Since all seventy-seven scripts propagandize for the war effort, many have
tangential references to the pi ight of European Jews. I have chosen those texts that
contain extended references. In addition, for consistency of genre and style, I am
focusing only on radio plays. Another war script that has extended references to the
atrocities in Europe is Otto Harbach's Hitler Has a Vision (1943), which i s subtitled
"A Modern Miracle Play for Outdoor Production." Harbach (1873-1963) was a
renowned librettist and lyricist who worked with Rudolf Friml , Sigmund Romberg,
j erome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein. Among his most famous musicals were Desert
Song, Rose Marie, and No, No, Nanette. Given his stature, this war script also
deserves additional scholarly attention.
Holocaust on the Air 51
Wishengrad (1913-1963) wrote more than one hundred radio scripts for
the Eternal Light series, produced by the Jewish Theological Seminary
and broadcast on NBC. In the 1950s, Wishengrad wrote for television,
adapting Robert E. Sherwood's There Shall Be No Night, and authored
the Broadway play Rope Dancers, which was directed by Peter Hall.
7
Max Ehrlich (1910-1983) was a respected radio and television author,
who wrote scripts for The Shadow, The Inner Sanctum, and The Big
Story. He later authored teleplays for Studio One, Star Trek, The
Defenders, and Mr. and Mrs. North.
8
Richard P. McDonagh
(1909-1975) wrote many educational radio plays, including Assignment
U.S.A. and George Washington Carver, both of which were broadcast in
1944 and were adapted from other authors' works. McDonagh later was
manager of the Script Division for NBC radio and in the 1950s wrote
teleplays as well as served as story editor for Lux Video Theatre.
9
William K. Clarke (1911-1981) worked for CBS Radio in the network's
Division of Program Writing, was a novelist, and wrote sixty hour-long
teleplays as well as scripts for daytime dramas.
10
These authors' radio plays are intriguing contemporary dramatiza-
tions of the Holocaust because they clearly reflect the high level of public
awareness of atrocities perpetrated against Europe's jews as well as
exemplify the manner in which the media tempered the horrific
message.
11
All of these scripts, to some extent, de-Judaize the charac-
ters and circumstances in order to make the Holocaust a universal
7
NBC press release, 5 March 1957, in the Morton Wishengrad Clippings file in
the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
at Lincoln Center.
8
" Max Ehrlich: Obituary," Variety, 23 March 1983, 98.
9
Richard P. McDonagh, "Pity the Genius," New York Times, 15 February 1948,
Section 2, 11. For a partial list of McDonagh's teleplays, see: Irving Wortis, Writers
Credit List, a typescript list found in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection. Additional
titles of teleplays by McDonagh can be found in: Connie Bil lips and Arthur Pierce, Lux
Presents Hollywood: A Show-by-Show His tory of the Lux Radio Theatre and the Lux
Video Theatre, 1934-1957 Oefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 1995).
McDonagh sometimes used the pseudonym "Will La Jolla."
10
"William K. Clarke: Obituary," Variety, 29 July 1981, 94.
11
ln this article, I will be analyzing the texts of the radiodramas to focus on the
ways in which the authors represent the issues of the Holocaust and what their texts
suggest about American awareness and reception. While I will make tangential
references to production history, a fuller study of the performances and audience
reaction to these plays also needs to be undertaken.
52 GOLDFARB
catastrophe, reflecting an unwillingness to recognize and confront the
reality that the atrocities within the Third Reich were based on accepted
governmental policies of institutionalized anti-Semitism and that jews
were singled out for mass extermination.
Benet's play, They Burned the Books, which was written to com-
memorate the ninth anniversary of the Nazis' book burning and was
broadcast by NBC on 11 May 1942 as well as being aired by 210 local
radio stations,
12
does not specifically focus on the atrocities of the
Holocaust but instead recognizes the connection between intellectual
and physical violence.
13
Heinrich Heine, whose works were burned and
banned because of his Jewish birth, is the raisonneur in the script:
NAZI VOICE: New editions of the Jew, Heinrich Heine, are not
desirable . . .. Where the words of the song "Lorelei"
appear the name of the Jew Heine shall be omitted and the
author given as "Author Unknown."
HEINE: (mocking) Author well-known-since 1842. Author
unknown-since 1933 (7).
Benet argues that the burning of works by great literary figures on the
basis of either racial background or improper political thoughts creates
a universe in which the physical brutalities of the Third Reich are
possible; therefore, he portrays Heine as the spokesperson not only for
authors but also for all who are persecuted:
I speak for all humanity in chains,
Exile, jew, Christian-for the prison camps,
And those who dwell in them and bide their time- (10) .
While Benet's play does not dramatize the actual horrors in the
"prison camps," the scene detailing the burning of the books, in which
the Nazis name the writers, not their works, evokes the horrific fires for
cremation in the death camps: "Einstein-to the fire . . .
Mann-Toller-Helen Keller-to the fire" (25). Even if Benet did not
intend such a reading, as more and more information became available
about the death camps and with the radio play being rebroadcast in
12
WWB 1, 20-21.
13
Stephen Vincent Benet, They Burned the Books, War Scripts Number 3,
Writers' War Board, typescript found in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection. All quotes
in this article are taken from this version. Benet's script was also published: They
Burned the Books (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942).
Holocaust on the Air 53
1943, it is hard to imagine listening audiences not making the connec-
tion.14
Nonetheless, while Benet points to the expulsion of authors and
works because of their Judaism, he chooses to universalize the Nazi
horrors by melding together the suffering of "exiles and Christians" as
well as Jews. While historical ly correct about the varied background of
those authors whose books were burned, the play does not recogn ize the
difference between the persecution of those who were deemed intellec-
tual criminals and of Jews-authors and non-authors alike-who were
singled out for extermination.
Morton Wishengrad's The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, which was
broadcast on NBC on 3 October 1943 and was rebroadcast several
additional times, is the war script that most graphically describes the
plight of European Jewry under the Nazis.
15
The play opens with the
reciting of "EI Mole Rachamin," a Hebrew chant for the dead, clearly
signaling the fate awaiting the jews. The play dramatizes the struggles of
a fictional ghetto family, the Davidsons, from their arrival in the ghetto
through the uprising in April 1943.
Through the depiction of the universal ghetto family, the play
realistically portrays the intense overcrowding, the starvation (iII ustrated
by the mother's death and her body being abandoned in the street
without identification by her husband in order to keep her bread card for
their son), the attempt to maintain cultural life, and the eventual mass
deportations to the death camps. As the narrator tells the listening
audience: "Done with method, precise, efficient, recorded. To
Tremblinka [sic], Oswiantzem, Belzec, SoBibor [sic] , Majdany, a lethal
gas chamber, an electric cell , a poison pot, an execution field, a
cemetery" (6) . The number of those deported to their deaths from July
to mid-September 1942 is accurately delineated: "You cannot do it on
your fingers. But I will give you the sum. Listen, 275,954 fewer bread
cards in the Ghetto" (6).
As the Warsaw jews prepare for the uprising, Wishengrad's play
unflinchingly points out that they were provided with no meaningful
outside help:
14
NBC rebroadcast Benet's play on 8 May 1943. An abridged version of the
script was published at the same time in the Saturday Review of Literature 26 (8 May
1943): 3-5.
15
Morton Wishengrad, The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, War Scripts Number 43,
Writers' War Board, typescript found in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection. All quotes
in this article are taken from this version. Wishengrad's play was also published in:
Erik Barnouw, ed., Radio Drama in Action (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1945).
54 GOLDFARB
When we were starving we beseeched the civilized world for
food, and when the plague struck us, we appealed for the simple
things, soaps, medicines, tools for our physicians. But when the
black trucks came we no longer asked for rescue and for
mercy-we asked for weapons. . . . We waited for weapons that
did not come. Five hundred thousand waited and looked
abroad. Three hundred thousand waited. One hundred
thousand waited. And finally twenty five thousand waited (6-7).
The play closes with the population uniting in revolt and the Nazis
sustaining heavy losses prior to their liquidating the ghetto.
Unlike Benet's play, Wishengrad's script clearly denotes the horrors
perpetrated against the Jews. Wishengrad's representation of life in the
ghetto, the lack of Allied help, and the heroic uprising is remarkably
accurate, given the fact that the play was written less than six months
after the revolt.
16
However, even The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto
dramatizes the horrific fate of Poland's Jews in a manner meant to make
it reassuring and comforting for its listening audiences.
The names of the fictional family members in the radio drama all
have bib I ical connotations. The ghetto father is Isaac, whose ancient
namesake God demanded be sacrificed as a test of his father Abraham's
belief. The death of the biblical Isaac would have meant the destruction
of the Jewish people, but God interceded, preventing the sacrifice. In a
similar fashion, Wishengrad suggests that the deaths of Europe's Jews will
not mean the ultimate extinction of worldwide Jewry or the victory of the
Nazis.
Isaac's wife, Dvora, and his son, Samuel, are both named after
biblical warriors who led Jewish wars of liberation, again lending a sense
of heroism and historic continuity to the rebels in the ghetto and
suggesting eventual redemption from subjugation. Even the family's
surname-Davidson-implies a rebirth since the Messianic hopes of the
jewish people are traditionally tied to King David's descendent.
However, the choice of Davidson-from the literal Hebrew,
ben-David-Anglicizes and again de-Judaizes the characters, since the
surname is not one traditionally given to Eastern European jews.
Furthermore, the biblical referents all suggest greater hope for redemption
than was possible given the abandonment of the Jews. While the act of
resistance in Warsaw in 1943 was heroic, with no support from the
outside world, the revolt was futile. The Jews of Europe were doomed
16
For a brief, but highly detailed discussion of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, see:
Israel Gutman, "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising," Encyclopedia of the Holocaust Volume
4 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), 1625-1632.
Holocaust on the Air 55
without assistance from the Allies, and while Wishengrad reminds his
audiences that little aid was provided, he still implies that heroism might
overcome even insurmountable odds. This desire to reassure audiences
undercuts the harsher historical-and, in 1943, contemporary-reality of .
Jews being abandoned to die at the hands of the Nazis.
Remarkably, the three radio scripts written in 1944, only a year prior
to the end of the war, are almost devoid of any specific references to the
singular fate awaiting European Jewry, even when cataloguing Nazi
atrocities. Max Ehrlich's Der Fuehrer (and the Great Lie He Borrowed),
distributed in June as an extra monthly script, is a detailed refutation of
the virulently anti-Semit ic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which posits
a Jewish political conspiracy to control the world and was widely
circulated beginning in the late nineteenth century.
17
Ehrlich's premise
is that:
NARRATOR: Many idiots actually believed them. And because
they did ...
VOICE 1: Poland became a charnel house, reeking with the
smell of death.
VOICE 2: Blood ran in the gutters of Ludice, Rotterdam,
Belgrade, Smolensk.
VOICE 3: Sixteen million human beings were slaughtered in
Russia, by rape, by fire, by guns, and sword.
VOICE 4: Untold millions of Jews and Christians perished
against bullet-pocked walls, in gas chambers, by starvation
and pestilence (1 ).
Even though later in the script, when a scapegoat for Germany's
problems is needed and one of Hitler's high ranking officials indicates
"there are always the Jews'' (11 ), the text diminishes the specificity of the
Holocaust as a Jewish catastrophe. The radio script accurately chronicles
the history of the fraudulent document that historically was-and still
is-used to rationalize physical and written attacks against Jewish
populations throughout the world. When describing Nazi atrocities, Der
17
Max Ehrlich, Der Fuehrer (and the Great Lie He Borrowed), War Scripts
Number 57, Writers' War Board, typescript found in the Billy Rose Theatre
Collection. All quotes in this article are taken from this version. The Protocols was
first circulated in 1905 in Czarist Russia and after World War I throughout Europe and
the United States. In reality, as Ehrlich points out in his radio drama, this was a
document written to attack the imperialist tendencies of Napoleon Ill and its
anti-Semitic authors simply substituted Jews for Napoleon. Between 1920 and 1927,
Henry Ford published excerpts from the Protocols in the Dearborn Independent. Ford
later apologized for disseminating this fraudulent document.
56
GOLDFARB
Fuehrer contains only general references to deaths in Poland, millions
being slaughtered in Russia, and blood running in the streets of Europe.
Even when the Jews are mentioned, they are coupled with Christians who
died, never noting that the Nazis viewed these two populations differ-
ently, with one deemed unworthy of existence.
Richard P. McDonagh's War Criminals and Punishment was
distributed in August of 1944 and was adapted from George Creel's book
of the same name.
18
The premise of the radio drama is that the world
must remain vigilant and not allow Nazis to escape punishment as
German war criminals supposedly did after World War I. The play
presents a fictional trial of Hitler following the defeat of the Nazis. Hitler
is described as "the killer of millions" (2). Voices of victims describe the
atrocities that make the Nazis war criminals. One voice testifies that
"you herded us into freight cars" (3), while another reminds the tribunal
of the "sixty thousand of us" (3) at Babi Yar. But as in Ehrlich's play the
references to Jewish victimization are almost nonexistent; only once are
the Jews referred to specifically: "American correspondents bear witness
that German citizens, without urging or official order, killed and tortured
Jews no less enthusiastically than did the Storm Troopers" (6). The play
then goes on to praise '.'Poles, Czechs, Dutch and French [who] are
resist ing" (6).
McDonagh's script clearly de-Judaizes the Holocaust. The victims
are, for the most part, "us," not specifically Jews. The only concrete
reference to ki II ing and torturing Jews is inserted in the text solely to
propagandize against Germany and does not specify that Jewish
extermination was official Nazi Germany governmental policy, that the
German citizens' acts of violence were in accord with Reich laws, and
that atrocities were perpetrated against Jews throughout occupied Europe.
The suggestion that the Reich's behavior differed little from the Germans'
actions in World War I also diminishes the significance of the genocidal
crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. Furthermore, the one-sided presentation
of resistance in the conquered countries, which is meant to further isolate
Germany, does not honestly reflect the amount of collaboration in the
extermination of Jewish populations nor does McDonagh cite acts of
Jewish resistance and the lack of any Allied assistance.
William K. Clarke's The Promise Versus the Deed, distributed in
October 1944, is extremely graphic in detailing Nazi atrocities in order
18
Richard P. McDonagh, War Criminals and Punishment, War Scripts Number
59, Writers' War Board, typescript found in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection. All
quotes in this article are taken from this version. Also see, George Creel, War
Criminals and Punishment (New York: R.M. McBride and Company, 1944).
Holocaust on the Air 57
to force audiences to hear that the deeds of Hitler belie his promises.
19
For example, Clarke strikingly describes the mass execution by the Nazi
Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar: "They were driven out of the city to a great
gully called Babi Yar, or Women's Ravine. Men, women, and children
were led up on the edge and machine gunned . .. " (1 0) . The Nazis'
attempt to conceal the Babi Yar massacre is also vividly depicted, with
the makeshift incinerators used to burn the bodies described as being
constructed out "of iron fences of the Jewish cemetery" (1 0). In addition,
the increasing number of those massacred throughout Nazi-controlled
countries is recounted:
Before the end of 1942, more than six hundred and fifty
thousand Poles had died of torture . . . shooting : .. and
hanging .. .. In Poland two million people have been forcibly
evacuated from their homes. . . . In Yugoslavia, up to 1942,
there have been in excess of four hundred and sixty five thou-
sand executions (1 0).
Still, the irony of this radio drama's representation of the Nazis'
atrocities is that the mass deaths of jewish populations goes unmen-
tioned. The dead are Poles, Yugoslavs"or Soviets. The nationalities of
the victims are noted but the overwhelming number of jewish victims
goes unrecorded.
20
Babi Yar becomes a universal tragedy rather than
primarily a jewish one. Only the reference to the desecration of the
jewish cemetery in order to build the machinery for incineration even
hints at the Nazis' extermination policy. Clarke's European Holocaust is
one without specific jewish victims.
What then do we conclude from these radio scripts about the
awareness of Holocaust atrocities in the United States? Clearly, these
texts support the already proven hypotheses of Morse and Wyman that
significant amounts of information about the extermination of the jews
circulated in the United States but that there was no concerted effort to
help save European jewry. The plays also support the conclusion drawn
by these historians that there was a desire to disbelieve the facts and to
underestimate the Nazis' racial policy and its horrific ramifications. Even
19
Wil l iam K. Clarke, The Promise Versus the Deed, War Scripts Number 61,
Writers' War Board, typescript found in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection. All quotes
in this article are taken from this version.
20
Ciarke's representation is reminiscent of the way in which the post-World War
II Soviets and other Eastern bloc countries commemorated sites of Jewish mass death,
noting the citizenship of the victims and ignoring their Judaism.
58
GOLDFARB
in its essay "The Position of the Writers' War Board on the German
Problem," in the final annual report produced by the Board in january
1945, there are no specific references to the crimes perpetrated against
the Jews of Europe.
21
The atrocities are generalized as are the identities
of the victims.
Historians have debated over the "why" of this self-imposed
blindness to the reality of the Holocaust. Some suggest latent anti-
Semitism. As Wyman concludes: "Several factors hampered the growth
of public pressure. Among them were anti-Semitism and anti-immig-
ration attitudes, both widespread in American society in that era and both
entrenched in Congress."
22
It is unlikely that this was the case with the
Writers' War Board. Many of the other plays written for the Board
argued for racial equality in the armed forces as well as in American
society. Langston Hughes was a prominent member. However, the
authors were most certainly aware that many Americans did not share
their liberal sentiments and that possibly it was easier to muster sympathy
for the war effort by emphasizing the sufferings of generalized nationali-
ties rather than focusing on the specific atrocities perpetrated against
Jew.s.
In addition, these plays mirrored the government's frequently
reiterated official policy: that the war effort could not be sidetracked by
efforts to save European Jews and that the jews' greatest hope for rescue
was the defeat of the Germans.
23
Hence, all the radio plays make limited specific references to jewish
suffering. There is little recognition that the Jews were singled out for
extermination and that their plight was horrifically unique. For the most
part, the atrocities described in the radio plays are universalized rather
than particularized. Only Wishengrad's Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto
forces the audience to hear of the singular suffering of Europe's jews; in
the rest of the plays there is no Jewish Holocaust, only a European one.
21
WWB 3, 32-37.
22
Wyman, x.
23
For example, this policy is the primary explanat ion given for United States
inaction against the death camps in the documentation provided in the permanent
exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
. Journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Spring 1996)
Ecology vs. Economy in Robert Schenkkan's
The Kentucky Cycle
DOWNING CLESS
In The Kentucky Cycle Robert Schenkkan weaves a rich tapestry of
imagery about the age-old conflict between ecology and economy, two
words that share the same ancient Greek root meaning "home" but
which are polarized in the modern world. These two concepts of systems
originally incorporated similar principles of balance, be it between prey
and predators or productivity and profits. But, after the Renaissance and
especially during the Industrial Revolution, imbalance occurred due to
what Garrett Hardin calls "the tragedy of the commons."
1
Put simply, as
the population expanded, the community no longer shared a concern for
natural harmony, but rather nature became only a thing to be used or
conquered for economic gain, as chronicled by historian Carolyn
Merchant.
2
Today, sustaining resources and keeping the environment
unpolluted (or, in the larger sense, preserving the web of life) are in
constant conflict with material needs and economic development, as
documented by many researchers, including Vice President AI Gore.
3
So,
1
Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162 (13 December
1968), 1243-48. In this renowned article, biologist Hardin broke new ground in
ecological thinking.
2
Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1989). Merchant traces the Western history of the domination of
nature. For a contemporary view, see Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York:
Random House, 1989).
3
For a comprehensive, insightful introduction to the ecology/economy conflict,
see (then Senator) AI Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). More detailed analysis can be found in Lester R.
Brown et al., State of the World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), an annual
anthology from the Worldwatch Institute. For a briefer look, see two companion
essays: Lester C. Thurow, "On Environmentalists," Boston Globe, 15 January 1985,
38, and Donald Worster, "On Economists," Boston Globe, 22 January 1985, 40 . .
60
CLESS
ecology and economy have been in a deadly battle for hundreds of
years-a dramatic tension that fuels the broad sweep of America's history
of land grabbing and environmental despoi lment represented by
Schenkkan's localized story.
4
On the surface The Kentucky Cycle is a colossal drama of revenge
and betrayal, artfully yet somewhat obviously dominated by appropriate
images from the Bible. On a grander scale an epic of environmental,
economic, and human exploitation, it reflects United States history
through the melodramatic saga of three families and a parcel of land in
eastern Kentucky. The scope of the cycle's nine short plays, spanning two
hundred years and six generations, is bold, but what fu l ly distinguishes
the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning play is its theatricalization of the
degradation of the land due to incessantly excessive financial transactions
overrun w ith appetite, greed, and pride. A concordance of the cycle
reveals that images of land and business prevail throughout, mostly in a
complex relationship of contradiction.
5
Indeed, the word "land" recurs
more than a hundred times, and "business" and such related words as
"deal," "debt," and various synonyms for "money" appear almost as
often. In the preface to the acting edition Schenkkan says, "the 'land' is
a major, if silent, character."
6
Moreover, in all printed texts, both parts
of the cycle are preceded by an Oliver Goldsmith couplet: "Ill fares the
land, to hastening ills at prey,Mthen wealth accumulates, and men
decay."
7
The scenographic progression of land as "silent character" is
captured well_ by Schenkkan's references and descriptions in the text,
even though he intends all scenery to be "suggested rather than re-
created" (29). The land seems very alive and aware of what happens to
it because of business. In 1775-76 the "thick forest" (9) and "rich
woodland" (29) are almost untouched by economic ventures. With a
4
The cycle's plays include several incidents and details from the research of
Kentucky historian Harry M. Caudill, especially his Night Comes to the Cumberlands:
A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston: little, Brown, 1963), to which Schenkkan
expresses his debt.
5
1 am grateful to my Tufts colleague Neal Hirsig, who did the image analysis.
6
Robert Schenkkan, The Kentucky Cycle (New York: Dramatists Play Service,
1994), 9.
7
Robert Schenkkan, The Kentucky Cycle (New York: A Plume Book [Penguin],
1993), 1 and 165. Subsequent references to the plays are from this edition and are
cited parenthetically in the text.
The Kentucky Cycle 61
seeming ring of ecological consciousness Michael Rowen, a former
indentured servant recently migrated from Georgia, extols the land:
It's a beautiful country, now in nit? Look at the size of them trees.
Sure but that's the King of Oaks there. And the water in that
creek is so sweet, and so clear, b'God you could read the date
of a shilling on the bottom of it (14-15).
Yet, his infatuation with monarchic magnitude and monetary metaphor
hint at his true economic intent, which he reveals a moment later: "It's
a grand land of opportunity, it is, with plenty of scratch to be made for
those with an itch!" (15) In the first play, ironically titled Masters of the
Trade, Michael, a man of voracious drive and ruthless abandon, sets in
continuous motion an ancestral legacy of wheeling and dealing that
abuses land and people. Driven by revenge and betrayal rooted in
economic motive, the multi-generational vortex of acquisition and
degradation leaves the land ecologically decimated in the last play of
1975 with the title (again ironic) of The War on Poverty:
We have returned to the original Rowen homestead near the
stump of the Treaty Oak. The Shilling Creek is now full of silt
and garbage and abandoned cars. . . . The surrounding fields,
heavily timbered and mined and then abandoned, have also
accumulated their share of refuse over the years (31 5).
joshua Rowen, Michael's great-great-great grandson, refers to the creek
as a "pathetic sewer" (316) and the home of his ancestors as "a fuckin'
ghost town ... in a 'desert' fulla broom sedge and open graves" (326).
In the end, ecological and economic imbalance go hand in hand as a
result of business consuming, even devouring the land.
8
The transformation from a kind of eco-paradise to near eco-apoca-
lypse is effected by an assortment of imagistic oppositions about land and
business throughout the cycle of plays. Schenkkan makes these variations
even more complex by adding layers of secondary images. For instance,
representations of the ecologically related elements of water and air
(including stars, moon, or sky) are juxtaposed with images of fire, the
human-made element so connected with economic enterprise. A prime
example is sound imagery in which the rushing water of the Shilling
Creek and "forest sounds" (9) such as "birds and insects" (29) give way
8
This premise is fully analyzed by economist Paul Hawken in The Ecology of
Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
62 CLESS
to the industrial sounds of coal mining in the seventh play, Fire in the
Hole-such as an abrasive steam whistle that signals disasters (as well as
the epic-styled endings of scenes) or the terrifyingly loud sounds of a slate
fall (213) and a coal bump (242). Another poignant example from Tall
Tales is Mary Anne Rowen's childhood belief that the Treaty Oak "was
all that kept the sky off my head" (174); for her, the tree is a profound
symbol of ecological securit)i. Later, she looks back at the imbalance that
the coal companies caused her, not to mention the land: "They came a
couple of years later ... and they cut down all of the trees, includin' my
oak. I was right about it hold in' up the sky, 'cause when they chopped
it down, everythin' fell in: moon 'n stars 'n all" (206).
The opposing images of land and business commence immediately
with Michael Rowen's Biblical proclamation from Psalm 121, "I lift up
mine eyes unto these hills, whence cometh my strength" (10). On the
one hand his Judea-Christian ethos of dominion over nature leads him to
admire the pristine quality of the creek's water, the fertility of the soil,
and the spaciousness of the land-" enough room for a man to stretch out
and lose himself entirely" (15); but, on the other hand, dominion's
corollaries of conquering nature and having one's due are preponderant,
so he wants some land that he can use to the maximum and can call his
own. In the spirit of high-risk business and "an eye for an eye," he both
figuratively and literally kills all with whom he deals. With the Chero-
kees he trades pox-ridden blankets for land that they believe "no one
owns" and that, in any event, is "cursed" (23). In the second play, after
forcing the only surviving Cherokee to be his wife, Michael makes her
listen in silence to his eco-credo, more economic than ecological :
See, I learned early, blood's just the coin of the realm, and it's
important to keep strict accounts and pay your debts. That's all.
And now here, at last, I'm a man of property meself, on the kind
of land ya only dream about (35).
In The Courtship of Morning Star her response to his sermon comes later
in a Cherokee lullaby to their baby boy, as she sings, "The land shakes
with your war cry" (39) . Both opening plays feature the juxtaposition of
indigenous ecological values with the Euro-American propensity for
economically motivated conquest.
9
9
See Winona LaDuke, "Indigenous Environmental Perspectives: A North
American Primer," Akwe:kon ('All of Us') journal 9:2 (Summer 1992), 52-71, and
Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian
Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
The Kentucky Cycle 63
The saying " Possession is nine-tenths of the law" certainly holds true
for the next three plays (the remainder of Part One of the cycle), in which
the possessive construction dominates references to land (and people
too), reflecting that acquisition is an economic imperative. In the
opening scene of The Homecoming, set in 1792, Michael's son, Patrick,
proclaims, "I AIN'T LEAVIN' THIS LAND! It's mine!" (52) when his
girlfriend, Rebecca Talbert, suggests that they elope. When Michael
returns from a trip with a slave whom he intends to "breed" with himself
to get "a half-dozen men in the fields" (67), Patrick is spurred to ask for
his parcel of land, thus launching the pivotal confrontation of this play:
PATRICK: I want a share of this. It's mine ... .
MICHAEL: Don't push it, boy!
PATRICK: DOES IT COME TO ME OR DON'T IT?!
MICHAEL: I'd sooner give it to my slaves, first! (69-70)
Patrick seizes the land by ki lling his father in a fit of passion. Soon
thereafter, he murders Rebecca's father, whom he accuses of being "just
after the land" (75) when it is revealed that joe Talbert and Star are in
love; then, he abducts Rebecca to be his wife, and banishes his
mother-all under the aegis of the personal and famil ial possession of
property: "This land is my land! Rowen land!" (78)
In Ties That Bind, set during 1819, the tables turn. Patrick and his
two sons face the economic demise of their land because of defaulted
loans. The bulk of the play is a bankruptcy trial in which a mysterious
creditor ("Mr. jeremiah") coolly milks Patrick dry. When the "worth" of
the land becomes a key point of contention, Patrick rejoins the judge's
economic perspect ive with an ecological argument of his own:
JUDGE: Land is just dirt, Mr. Rowen. It's worth only what the
market is willing to pay for it. No more, no less.
PATRICK: IT AIN'T JUST DIRT! It's land. It's a live thing. It' s
got moods and tricks and secrets like me or you or any other
l iving thing (102) .
Ironically, Patrick, who has killed to acquire his original acres, now
benignly and even gently defends his land as a "web of life" rather than
just a commodity. Perhaps influenced by Kentucky farmer-poet-essayist
Wendell Berry, Schenkkan has Patrick speak of the land with Berry's
64
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sense of small-scale, local economy:
10
"This here ... this land . . . it's all
I ever knowed. All I ever wanted. I know ... know ever foot of this
place" (111 ). However, Patrick is forced to his knees to beg "Don't
throw me off my land" (112), and in feigned sympathy Jeremiah takes on
Patrick and his sons as impoverished sharecroppers. The trial ends, at
which point Jeremiah shockingly brings on the aged Star Rowen, who
had saved him after his father was murdered and his sister wife-napped
by Patrick. It's not enough for Jeremiah Talbert just to possess the land:
"And now I own you, Rowen-own all of you Rowens" (115).
Exploited and landless like the slaves that Michael, then Patrick
owned (and forfeited to Jeremiah), the Rowens are left at the end of Ties
That Bind only with evangelical son Ezekiel's fanatical vows to "get it all
back" (117) and "settle up" (118). They do just that in God's Great
Supper. In 1861 during the Civil War, Jed (Ezekiel ' s son) rides with
Richard Talbert Oeremiah's son) in order to find an opportune moment
to murder him, and when he returns he tries to convince his father that
the others need not be killed. "They walkin' on our land, ain't they?!"
responds Ezekiel (157). Repossession of the land supersedes all other
motives. The only reference to business is revenge, as when Ezekiel rants
"[God] will pay you back in your own coin!" (159) while burning the
Talbert home. At the end of Part One of the cycle, the foreboding ground
has been laid for the larger ecological disasters and industrialization of
the economy brought about by the history of coal mining-the focus of
Part Two, in which degradation of the land and its possession by
increasingly large corporations are the central images.
In the prologue and epilogue to Tall Tales, the adult Mary Anne
Rowen of 1920 Oed's daughter) looks back on what happened in 1885
to herself, her family, and the land that she loved when she fell in love
with an itinerant storyteller. At age forty-nine she can envision the beauty
of the land when she was fourteen only through the industrial metaphor
of coal mining: "Spring usta explode in these mountains like a two-
pound charge of black powder hand-tamped down a rathole" (171 ).
After describing the glories of the dogwoods and azaleas, she yields to
her teenage self who is enjoying the natural wonders of her "favoritist
spot" (175) by the familial oak when JT Wells encounters her. Through-
out this play, the ecology/economy dichotomy is manifested in the
opposing images of country/city, farming/mining, and trees/skyscrapers.
In the first scene, JT tells Mary Anne that New York City is "hundreds of
buildings, each and every one taller'n that ole granddad oak of
1
0Wendell Berry, Home Economics: Fourteen Essays (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1987), 54-75 and 137-51.
The Kentucky Cycle 65
yours. . . . Skyscrapers" (175) . In the second scene, the urbane
storyteller applies a businesslike turn of words to bilk Jed (actually a
common occurrence in 1880's Kentucky)
11
: "The people I represent will
pay you fifty cents an acre for the right to haul off all mineral and metallic
substances and combinations of the same" (192). A contented farmer,
jed naively pushes the price to a dollar, saying "you can't let your
personal feel in's get in the way of business-can you, JT?" (194). In the
last scene, spurred by Mary Anne's love for him and her defense of his
life when threatened by her boyfriend, JT reveals the economic fraud that
he pulled on jed, who is in fact "sitting on top of maybe fifteen, twenty
thousand tons of coal an acre" (202) . Then, he lays bare the ecological
lie that his company will treat the Rowen land carefully:
First, they cut down all your trees. Then they cut into the land,
deep-start huntin' those deep veins, diggin' em out in their
deep mines, dumpin' the crap they can't use in your streams,
your wells, your fields, whatever! (202)
Finally, in one of Schenkkan's most powerful images of the conflict of
ecology and economy, JT, who it turns out is working for Standard Oil,
crushes Mary Anne, saying, "When they come in here, maybe they'll cut
the heart out of that old oak you love so much ... and they'll ship it off
to New York, where somebody'll cut it into a fine banker's desk and
swivel-chair for Mr. Rockefeller himself!" (204) At this point, the non-
local, "industrial economy" (Berry's construct)
12
, with its corporate deals
and "robber barons," reigns supreme over ecology, to such an extent
that today economics starts to become a "tall tale" that excludes
environmental costs, as Gore points out.
13
Thirty-five years later, in 1920, Mary Anne concludes Tall Tales in
poignant solitude reporting that all the trees were cut, leaving only mud
in the spring, and she begins Fire in the Hole again alone, despondently
saying that the mine soon bought all the land and made her a coal
miner's wife. Ironically, the mine is owned by Richard Talbert's
grandson. Andrew Talbert Winston is a voice of taut economics, as he
pushes productivity despite dangers, controls the miners' credit lines at
the company store, and suppresses any attempts to change the mining
11
Caudill , 72-73.
12
Berry, 65.
13
Gore, 182-83.
66
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system. In saying" ... but ya just can't let your personal feel in's get in
the way of business, can ya?" (222), he echoes jed and JT's credo. But,
the ecological configuration of an unsafe working environment (e.g.,
entrapping explosions or lung disorders due to coal dust) and deadly
living conditions (e.g., tainted water causing typhoid fever) sow the seeds
for unionization. Mary Anne leads the union to victory, as described by
joshua, the only one of her five sons to survive typhoid:
And then we marched in thousands ... and the earth trembled
under my feet and the sun stood still in the sky ... and they
threw down their guns in fear and fled before us like Pharaoh's
army before the ocean! (262)
The ecological elements of earth, air (i.e., sky), and water (i.e., ocean)
prevail, at least momentarily, over the "fire in the hole" that fuels
mining's industrial economy.
14
In 1954 joshua is president of District 16 of the United Mine
Workers, and his contemporary, Andrew's son james, owns Andrew's
mining company. The business of a union contract and the company's
productivity is the overriding focus of Which Side Are You On? There are
abundant references to the contract and the "deal" being negotiated
between joshua and James, with Franklin Biggs as middle man. Franklin
is Michael and his slave's descendant, a successful liquor businessman,
who lobbies against black miners being selectively laid off. Joshua and
Franklin get James to reduce the layoffs to fifteen percent based on
seniority, but in return "The coal never stops" (281), and James is given
three weeks to solve a s.afety problem with coal dust that could cause an
explosion; also, he must donate land for a hospital (the only mention of
"land" in this play). Again, the central conflict is between economy and
ecology in the form of productivity and job security versus environmental
hazards in the mines. Now, ecology exists wholly within the parameters
of the industrial economy of mining, so the land.is seen as only coal and
ecological issues are entirely ones of pollution and dangers accompany-
14
Coal mining as depicted by Schenkkan is a paradigm of all industrial hazards
and resulting organizing by workers. See, for instance, Charles Noble, "Work: The
Most Dangerous Environment" and Cynthia Hamilton, "Environmental Consequences
of Urban Growth and Blight," in Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of
Environmental justice, ed. Richard Hofrichter (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers,
1993), 171-78 and 67-75.
The Kentucky Cycle 67
ing mining.
15
At the climax of the play, joshua's adult son, Scotty,
learning of his father's compromise on safety, goes into the mine to get
the miners to walk out, but he and twelve others are killed in a massive
explosion.
Industrial economy's precept of extraction and production at all costs
leads to nearly total devastation of ecology and local economy in The
War on Poverty. joshua, James, and Franklin are looking over the land
that, unknown to them, had once been the Rowen farm-the same place
that had been set aside for the hospital, which was not built, presumably
because the mining company got taken over by "Consolidated," a large
strip-mining corporation. As holders of the land's "assets, " the men must
decide whether to sell it to Consolidated; james says the land is "a
garbage dump" (320), yet Joshua resists the sale. He says the company
"leveled" a nearby county (323), but James counters with an economic
argument that "this new system is cheaper and a hell of a lot more
efficient" (324). When he adds "it's safer" (324), joshua is set off on a
tirade of emotional recall of his deal with james, his son's resulting death,
the demise of the community, and, finally, a regional union meeting led
by his mother (Mary Anne) and Franklin's father:
And we sat there together on this little burlap island, lookin' out
over this sea of people like the mountains in bloom in that spring
my mama usta tell me about in her dreams, and they were all
holdin' hands and swayin' back and forth, and it was all one
thing-all of us and them mountains-and I remember thinkin',
there ain't nothin' we can't do! Nothin'! (327)
Through this childhood memory joshua reconnects to the oneness of
life-the ecological system linking land and people (and all creatures) in
a web that should include economy rather than being excluded by it. He
has an embryonic vision of sustainability.
16
He combats guilt, cynicism,
15
The belief that ecology should be subsumed by economy is shared today by
those who see environmentalism as just "resource man.agement" or "wise-use." See
Emily T. Smith, "Growth vs. Environment," Business Week, (11 May 1992): 66-75.
16
"Sustainability is the nascent doctrine that economic growth and development
must take place and be maintained over time within the limits set by ecology in the
broadest sense-by the interrelations of human beings and their works, the biosphere
and the physical and chemical laws that govern it. . . . It follows that environmental
protection and economic development are complementary rather than antagonistic
processes." From William D. Ruckelshaus, "Toward a Sustainable World," Scientific
American, 261 :3 (September 1989), 167. For full elaboration, see Gore, Hawken, and
Lester R. Brown, Christopher Flavin, and Sandra Postel, "Picturing a Sustainable
68
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and despair with a newfound sense that his action "MAKES A DIFFER-
ENCE!" (330). So, when James wants to sell a 200-year-old preserved
baby he finds, Joshua demands it at gunpoint and gently buries the infant
girl, who, ironically, had been deserted and killed by her father, Michael
Rowen.
Economy's alienation from and domination over ecology during the
course of The Kentucky Cycle eventuates in a vision of eco-apocalypse,
which is the collapse of an ecosystem due to over-use of resources,
destruction of the interdependent elements, and violation of natural
"carrying capacity."
17
Ezekiel's biblical exhortation to his father, "We
got to wander in this desert here" (118) is the first glimmer of this. Eco-
apocalypse comes into focus during God's Great Supper, named for a
phrase in John's vision of Armageddon in the book of Revelation in the
Bible. The play is framed by Jed's dream of ravenous crows, rotten
apples, and himself constantly having to eat-all refracted from the title-
bearing quotation from the Bible: "Come and gather for God's great
supper, to eat the flesh of horses and their riders, the flesh of all men,
slaves and free, great and small!" (124) The fire and brimstone of biblical
Armageddon is reflected cumulatively through many indiscriminate
killings in the Civil War, the conflagration of the Talbert house, and the
culminating image:
JED: (aside) Then [Ezekiel] took Stephen Talbert, Richard's
younger brother, hitched him up like a mule, and, crackin'
a whip over his back, plowed table salt into their fields.
EZEKIEL: "That the whole land thereof is brimstone and salt,
that it is not sown nor beareth nor any grass groweth
therein!" (159)
At the dawn of coal mining in 1885, JT warns Mary Anne that her
beloved land will become "colder and deader'n that moon up there"
(203). Indeed, by 1920 the industrial economy of coal mining has
created an eco-apocalyptic environment both below and above ground,
Society," in State of the World: 1990, ed. Lester R. Brown et al. (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1990), 173-90.
17
Gore, 269; Sandra Postel, "Carrying Capacity: Earth' s Bottom Line," in State
of the World: 1994, ed. Lester R. Brown et al. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1994), 3-21; Donella H. Meadows, Dennis Meadows, andjorgen Randers, Beyond
the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future (Mills, VT:
Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1992).
The Kentucky Cycle 69
evident in the multiple mine explosions and the scenic description for
Fire in the Hole:
The set is now darker and dirtier looking, almost as if a healthy
outer layer of skin had been ripped off and some essential
"essence" had been bled out of it. There is no hint of the forest
that once stood here. The ground is barren and covered with
slate and mud (211).
Eco-apocalypse is nearly complete in 1975 at which point the land is
"bruised and battered" (315) by mining, the town is almost deserted due
to unemployment, and pollution is ubiquitous.
Eco-apocalyptic "fields of decay" have resulted from the "fields of
appetite" Jed portends in his dream, in which he is afraid to stop eating
food continuously given to him (162) . Unlimited hunger is a major sub-
theme of ecology's conflict with economy throughout the cycle of plays.
With recurring images of out-of-control appetite, Schenkkan portrays an
economy in which the natural and healthy limits of an ecological system
are eschewed in favor of unrestricted growth, such that bigger is always
better and more possession or production is always desirable; indeed,
capitalism requires growth and reinvestment, but economic analysts like
Donella H. Meadows and Paul Hawken believe that there must be limits
set by the moderation of sustainable development.
18
Michael Rowen,
expressing his insatiable appetite, says "I'm gettin' in and layin' by more
food than one man could eat in a year and instead of feel in' full, l feel
empty. I feel hungry" (35). Michael and Star's son, Patrick, has the type
of environmental sensitivity espoused today by "deep ecology" yet he
uses it to economic ends in hunting:
19
When I reach that place, when I just am, there, with the forest,
then it's like I can call the deer or somethin'. I call 'em and they
come. Like I was still waters and green pastures, 'stead of
hunger and lead (51).
18
Meadows et al., 210, and Hawken, 139.
19
"We must come to understand that life-forms do not constitute a pyramid with
our species at the apex, but rather a circle where everything is connected to
everything else." From John Seed, "Introduction: To Hear Within Ourselves the
Sound of the Earth Crying," in John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess,
Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings (Philadelphia: New
Society Publishers, 1988), 10. Also, see Brian Tokar, "Exploring the New Ecologies:
Social Ecology, Deep Ecology and the Future of Green Political Thought,"
Alternatives, 15:4 (1988), 31-43.
70
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Were it not for his appetite (and concomitant technology such as guns),
he could be at one with his ecological surroundings. Patrick's economic
motive clearly wins out over his ecological consciousness in his need to
possess his own piece of his father's land, decried by his Cherokee
mother, who bears the redemptive seeds of a kind of eco-feminism latent
in all the women of the cycle:
20
"You work from sunrise to sunset and
you can't plow all of what you have now, but you want more. More
land!" (60) Patrick's masculine need for "more" comes back to haunt
him in jeremiah's unlimited expropriation of "everything in your life that
meant anything to you" (115). The lack of limits to appetite is the
primary metaphor for the Rowen's ruthless vengeance in God's Great
Supper, which is prefaced by a Stephen Crane poem about a masculine
bestial-like creature in the desert that eats his own heart and likes it
(119).
21
In the ninety years from 1885 to 1975, the limitless appetite for coal
brings more lies and taller tales, more violence to people and land, and
many more deaths at the hands of the dangerous, often destructive
ecology of mining. It is interesting that, when Schenkkan introduces the
two characters who assert limits, Mary Anne and Scotty, both say they are
not hungry (179, 271 ). Mary Anne lives in a state of eco-despair, having
lost her family's land, the oak tree she revered, and four of her five
children to the relentless foraging for coal, even by her miner husband
who "eats coal for breakfast" (215). Finally, at the apex of organizing a
union, she rises above her despair and demands a limit to the coal
company's excessive hunger:
They can bring in a hundred ... armies and it cain't be nothin'
worse than what we've known. It won't stop unless we say it
stops, and I say it stops now. Right now. Right here. Stand up!
(261-62)
But, even the union, only thirty-four years later under the leadership of
her son, loses sight of the limits it once stood for. During a contract
negotiation, joshua compromises ecological safety for a small gain in
2
For an overview of eco-feminism, see Karen) . Warren, "The Power and the
Promise of Ecological Feminism," Environmental Ethics, 12 (Summer 1990), 125-46.
21
"The Good Man Fills His Own Stomach" is the title of the first chapter of a
sociologist's study in which " wilding" (i .e., wanton murder by a group) is a metaphor
for the excessive pursuit of money or power in the United States. Charles Derber,
Money, Murder, and the American Dream: Wilding from Wall Street to Main Street
(Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992).
The Kentucky Cycle 71
economic security, and when his son, Scotty, dissents and insists on
safety, Joshua threatens him with a tirade of power-hungry words: "You
walk outta here, you turn your back on this Union, and I swear to God,
I will cut you out of it like a boil!" (295). Ironically, in 1819, Patrick
Rowen says similar words to his son, Zach, when he leaves his family in
rejection of an economic appetite that induces his father to sell slaves
who are related.
Scotty, Zachariah, Mary Anne and the other women in The Kentucky
Cycle are the only characters who place limits on appetite and therefore
offer some hope for the next generation's redemption from the spiraling
cycle headed toward eco-apocalypse. In the last play, amid the deepest
morass of ecological and economic imbalance, there are a few positive
signs of renewal, such as Schenkkan's scenic description, "If you look
closely, you can see that the land is slowly regenerating itself. Now it is
mostly broom sedge and hard-rock, but here and there a young pine
asserts itself" (31 5).
At the close of the play, there is a strong resonance of affirmation
when Joshua Rowen rediscovers the importance of limits. In saying "IT
MAKES A DIFFERENCE" (330) as he staves off James from selling the
baby's corpse, he overcomes gui lt and denial (an even more common
state of being in what Sandra Postel calls the "decisive decade" of the
1990's
22
). Then, he strengthens the flame of hope when he buries the
child with the Rowen family watch, the emblem of the legacy of eco-
apocalypse (or what the Cherokee called a curse, in the first play).
Finally, he lets a wolf run free over the land that now shows a few signs
of spring, as the resurrected spirits of the cycle's characters watch silently.
It is a powerful moment I inking past, present, and future in a way that
cracks through America's myths of Frontier and Escape, which Schenkkan
discusses in his Afterword (336-337) . Joshua has halted the cycle and
started to put his "lands in order," in the words of T.S. Eliot quoted in a
preface to the last play (311). He has set limits that can start to rekindle
a balance between ecology and economy, represented today by
sustainabi I ityY
In an interview about The Kentucky Cycle Robert Schenkkan said,
"What I'm interested in is how much Eastern Kentucky's situation, which
22
Sandra Postel, "Denial in the Decisive Decade," State of the World: 1992, ed.
Lester R. Brown et al. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), 3-8.
23
There are systematic visions of the rebalancing of ecology and economy in the
last chapters of Gore, Hawken, Derber, and Brown et al. (1990, 1991). An additional
offshoot is offered in Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision
(San Francisco: Sierra Club Press, 1985), 52-88 and 163-79 (especially 172-73).
72 CLESS
can be viewed and has historically been viewed, as somewhat isolated,
is in fact really a paradigm for the United States as a whole."
24
In this
spirit, his epic cycle points the way toward understanding and perhaps
even healing the enormous rift between ecology and economy in
America (and much of the world).
24
Bobbie Ann Mason, "Recycling Kentucky," The New Yorker 69:36 (1
November 1993) 56.
CONTRIBUTORS
ARNOLD SUNDGAARD is best-known for his librettos and plays,
including the Living Newspaper, Spirochete, for the Federal
Theatre Project, and the Broadway plays Everywhere I Roam and
Of Love Remembered. He has also written novellas, short stories,
and scripts for radio, television, and film, and has been lecturer,
associate professor, and playwright-in-residence at various
universities.
jULIAN MATES is Professor of English at the C.W. Post Campus of
Long Island University in Brookville, Long Island, New York. He
is the author of America's Musical Stage: 200 Years of American
Musical Theatre (1985). The article in this issue of }ADT is an
expanded version of a paper given at a conference at Hofstra
University, 5 November 1994.
GENE A. PLUNKA is Professor of English at the University of
Memphis, where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary
drama. He is the author of Peter Shaffer: Roles, Rites, and Rituals
in the Theater (1988) and The Rites of Passage of jean Genet: The
Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking (1992), and is the editor of
Antonin Artaud and the Modern Theater (1994).
DOROTHY H. jACOBS is Associate Professor of English at the
University of Rhode Island in Kingston, Rhode Island, and has
published several articles on David Mamet.
ALVIN GOLDFARB is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Illinois
State University in Normal-Bloomington, Illinois.
DOWNING CLESS is Associate Professor of Drama at Tufts
University in Medford, Massachusetts, where he is a member of
the American Studies faculty and the Tufts Environmental Literacy
Institute. He has written and directed many plays and
performance pieces with ecological themes, and was recently
appointed to the Editorial Board of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies
in Literature and Environment.
73
Ph.D. Program in Theatre
at the Graduate School and University Center
of the City University of New York
Offers graduate training in Theatre Studies
Certificate program in Film Studies
Recent Seminars include
Contemporary Performance Theory and Technique
The Current New York Season Feminist Theory and Performance Melodrama
The History Play Dramaturgy Simulations Film Aesthetics
African-American Theatre of the 60s and 70s
Lesbian and Gay Theatre and Performance
Theatre History Dramatic Structure Theatre Criticism
Strindberg and Modernism American Film Comedy Kabuki
Films and Theatre of Ingmar Bergman Minstrelsy 1865-Present
Italian Theatre Latino Theatre in the U.S. Women and the Avant-Garde
Interdisciplinary Options
with distinguished Graduate Center faculty in other fields
and through a consortial arrangement with
New York University and Columbia University
Affiliated with Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts and
Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Western European Stages
Slavic and Eastern European Performance
Theatre faculty include:
Marvin Carlson, Jill Dolan, Dan Gerould, Judith Milhous
and James Hatch, Jonathan Kalb, Miriam D' Aponte, Harry Carlson, Jane Bowers
Rosette Lamont, Samuel Leiter, Gloria Waldman, Ralph Allen, Albert Bermel,
Mira Feiner, Morris Dickstein, Stephen Langley, Benito Ortolani, David Willinger
Film faculty include:
Stuart Liebman, William Boddy, George Custen, Tony Pipolo,
Leonard Quart, Joyce Rheuban, and Ella Shohat
Theatre Program
CUNY Graduate Center
33 W. 42nd St.
New York, NY 10036-8099
(212) 642-2231
tht@mina.gc.cuny .edu
The Journal of
American Drama
and Theatre
.....,, _
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The widely acclaimed journal devoted solely to drama and theatre
in the USA - past and present. Provocative, thoughtful articles by
the leading scholars of our time providing invaluable insight and
information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its
continuing contribution to world literature and the performing
arts. Edited by Vera Mowry Roberts. Published three times per
year- $12 per annum ($18.00 foreign).
Please send me the following
CAST A publication:
Journal of American Drama
and Theatre _@ $12.00 per year
(Foreign) _ @ $18.00
Total
Send order with enclosed check to:
CASTA. CUNY Graduate Center
33 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
CASTA
Cen1er tor Advanced Study In Theatre Art$
The Graduate SchOol and Universi ty Center
of The Ctty University of New York
V<:llume lwalvo. uo J
spnnq 1992
Now in its 15th year, this journal, edited by Daniel Gerould and
Alma Law, brings readers lively, authoritative accounts of drama,
theatre, and film in Russia and Eastern Europe. Includes features
on important new plays in performance, archival documents,
innovative productions, significant revivals, emerging artists, the
latest in film. Outstanding interviews and overviews. Published
three times per year - $10 per annum ($15.00 foreign).
Please send me the following
CASTA publication:
Slavic anti Eastern European
Performance _ (Q' $10.1Xl per year
(Foreign) _ (Q) $ 15.00
Total
Send order with enclosed check to:
CAST A. CUNY Graduate Center
33 West42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
I , . j: I I fq , , . ,, . , .,,,I. ,.j ' ,,
I l l 1: ' 1 ', I f -. ol bll>l 'lo l" . \ .
'"Ill , ' . . 1 1: ' .1
' ,. I ., I.
An indispensable resource in keeping abreast of the latest theatre
developments in Western Europe. Issued twice a year- Spring
and Fall - and edited by Marvin Carlson, each issue contains a
wealth of information about recent European festivals and
productions, including reviews, interviews, and reports. Also,
special issues on the theatre in individual countries. News of
forthcoming events: the latest in changes in artistic directorships,
new plays and playwrights, outstanding performances, and
directorial interpretations. - $10 per annum ($14.00 foreign).
Please send me the following CAST A publicalion:
Western European Stages
_@ $10.00 per year
(Foreign) _@ $14.00 per year
Total
Send order with enclosed check to:
CASTA, CUNY Gradua\1! Ccnh!r
33 West 42nd Street
New York. NY 10036