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JADT Vol8 n3 Fall1996 Richardson Anthony Neff Gillian Nunns McConachie
JADT Vol8 n3 Fall1996 Richardson Anthony Neff Gillian Nunns McConachie
90.
40 NEFF
.emerging on the British rock scene.
25
Cavale's opponent, Slim, becomes
Hoss, a more mature and self-reflective representative of values emerging
from the American West, values that Shepard viewed as particularly
American. No longer symbolically associated with the characteristics of
the Native American Coyote, Hoss is an American cowboy from head to
toe, facing an enemy who is connected historically and in popular culture
with forces seeking to undermine the lives of pioneers and frontiersmen
who were forging their identity in the New World.
Shepard's exposure to Crow and to Hughes' accounts of its genesis
may have had the effect of making The Tooth of Crime a tantalizing
reimagining of the American Revolution and the cowboys-and-Indians
tale. Further, Shepard's awareness of Hughes' Crow could have
sensitized him to the horse and crow as animals whose behavior could
help to shape dramatic and thematic elements in his play. The Hoss and
Crow "style match[es]"
26
may be interpreted as integral features of a
battle between totemic animals whose basic characteristics transcend
national and historic boundaries.
The crow is "the most intelligent of birds, the most widely distributed
(being common on every continent), and the most omnivorous," a
"carrion eater" that "kills a little himself," but is mainly "dependent on
the killing of others." That "least musical of songbirds," "black all over,
solitary, almost indestructible," produces songs that can only be
described as "harsh and grating."
27
The crow's songs may not be sweet,
but, as Bernd Heinrich explains, the creature that serves as the model for
Shepard's Crow is "an imposing bird" that "has a greater variety of calls
than perhaps any other animal in the world except human beings." Just
as crows and ravens are characterized as "the ne plus ultra of
25
1n "Rip It Up," Shepard's persona writes that " Rock and Roll is definitely a
motherfucker and will always be Rock and Roll made movies theatre books painting
and art go out the window none of it stands a chance," and refers to "the constant
frustration of the other artists to keep up" with a protean art form that is " more
revolutionary than revolution" (Hawk Moon, 55). Leonard Wilcox, in " Modernism
vs. Postmodernism: Shepard's The Tooth of Crime and the Discourses of Popular
Culture," Modern Drama 30 (1987): 560-73, offers an insightful and valid reading of
clashes between modernity and postmodernity in Tooth. Any new discussion of the
Hoss/Crow conflict, including this essay, must acknowledge a deep indebtedness to
Wilcox's analyses because they offer what seems to be the best explanation for the
cultural dynamics underlying Shepard's rock 'n' roll tragedy.
26
Sam Shepard, The Tooth of Crime, in Seven Plays (New York: Bantam Books,
1984), 230. All subsequent quotations from The Tooth of Crime will be cited in
parentheses in the text.
27
Sagar, 105.
Horse vs. Crow
41
up-and-coming birds," belonging to the "most species-rich and rapidly
evolving line of birds,"
28
Shepard's Crow is the hottest new thing on a
very competitive rock scene; he is wily, hardy, and sure to spawn entirely
new variants of himself that will be closely associated with innovations
in popular music.
Shepard, whose family had horses at their ranch at Duarte and whose
interest in horse husbandry, horsemanship, and rodeo has not escaped
notice/
9
may have made the opponent of the crow a horse instead of a
coyote not only because the horse is so intimately associated with the
cowboy in American culture, but also because the horse, having
disappeared from the New World sometime after 9000 B.C. and having
been reintroduced during Cortez's conquest of Mexico (1520-30 A.D.),
was dispersed among the Native American tribes of the Great Plains only
very recently in history. Since the conquistadors did not allow Native
Americans to own horses and since there were no "feral and Indian
horses west. of the Mississippi before the 1680s,"
30
the horse had
acquired almost no totemic value for those relatively ancient cultures
whose myths and rituals were concerned with their chief food source, the
buffalo.
31
There is even a fascinating possibility that Shepard, interested in
exploring the fullest symbolic potential in the crow/horse dichotomy,
may have based not only the relations between Hoss and his entourage,
but also the general setting, atmosphere, and plot structure of The Tooth
of Crime, on the behavior of wild horses. Arthur Vernon, in his classic
study of the history, myths, and legends of the horse, provides an acces-
sible and popular account of equine ethology that makes use of the work
of Ernest Menault, a nineteenth-century French naturalist who studied
communication between wild horses. According to Vernon, the Great
Plains were transversed by "vast, swarming hordes of thousands and
thousands" of feral horses. "In spite of the huge size of these equine
armies, there was no internal disorder during the great, stamping marches
across the plains. They were not "tumultuous mobs," but rather "organ-
ized legions, almost tyranically ruled by the chief leader," who would
28
Heinrich, 19-21.
29
VerMeulen, 80, 86. Shepard's knowledge of rodeo is used to very good effect
in "Voices from the Dead," a monologue written for The Open Theatre in 1969
(Hawk Moon, 88-89).
30
Robert West Howard, The Horse in America (Chicago: Follett, 1965), 8, 28.
31
Cottie Bueland, North American Indian Mythology (New York: Tudor, 1965),
81.
42 NEFF
send out as scouts "a small company of horses, spread out at intervals,"
that "preceded the whole army to find out the lay of the land and detect
the presence of any considerable enemy."
32
The surrealistic setting of
Tooth, with its grids, territories, reconnaissance missions, and raids, bears
a close resemblance to struggles for self-preservation between and among
such large migratory groups of wild horses. Smaller groups of feral horses
comprising the equine armies, like the astrologers, disc jockeys, pushers,
groupies, and drivers in Tooth, " choose their own leaders and travel in
a herd .. . . The leader is invariably a stallion and is invariably obeyed to
the finest detail by his following." According to Menault, the lead
stallion communicates with the rest of the herd by using five very
different neighs conveying happiness, desire, anger, fear, and sorrow.
The leader is usually the sole mature male in his group, and he makes
decisions concerning whether to fight, ignore, or flee from potential
threats. The "highly organized world of wild horses" is "not without
unavoidable internal friction," with the leader called upon to defend his
position "whenever another stallion dispute[s] his rights of priority." In
a passage describing an inevitable conflict within the herd of horses that
closely parallels Hoss' s dilemma in Tooth, Vernon writes that
the chief ruled by might, kept his station by might and eventually
lost it by loss of might. When a chief leader grew old, he was
challenged by some younger stallion who was in a condition to
defeat him. Most chief leaders fought to the end, and died, at
least, as chief.
33
"
Sometimes, however, a successful usurper does not "bother" to kill the
lead stallion that he has vanquished. Then the conquered animal, "his
ruling days over," makes his way "out into the prair.ie alone to die"-a
situation that resembles the defeat and ultimate suicide of Hoss in
Shepard's drama.
34
Of course, delving into possible influences on The Tooth of Crime
exerted by the complex mythological, historical, and anthropological
underpinnings of Crow remains only an intriguing exercise in speculation
unless specific parallels between Hughes' collection of poems and
32
Arthur Vernon, The History and Romance of the Horse (New York: Dover,
1946), 127-34.
Horse vs. Crow 43
Shepard's play can be analyzed. The best place to begin such an
endeavor is with Shepard's analysis of his Crow:
The character of Crow in Tooth of Crime came from a yearning
toward violence. A totally lethal human with no way or reason
for tracing how he got that way. He just appeared. He spit
words that became his weapons. He doesn't "mean" anything.
He's simply following his most savage instincts. He speaks in an
unheard-of tongue. He needed a victim, so I gave him one. He
devoured him just like he was supposed to.
35
Shepard's Crow, like Hughes', just inexplicably appears in the world. In
Hughes' "Conjuring in Heaven" (44), Crow drops out of the sky onto the
ground, "cataleptic," a "nothing, ... put inside nothing/Nothing ...
added to it," with ,,nothing more [that] could be done with it." There is
,,prolonged applause in Heaven', accompanying such an arrival, but a
careful reader of other songs in Crow realizes that it is almost certainly
not the judea/Christian God who is doing the' applauding.
It seems that in the Crow mythos there has occurred a basic split
within the Godhead that is in some ways analogous to that proclaimed
by the Gnostics in their heretical revisions of Jewish and Christian
doctrine and by William Blake in his creation of an ironic "Bible of
Hell.,
36
In "Crow's Theology, (30), the reader learns that "Crow
realized there were two Gods-/One of them much bigger than the
other, " a divinity with "all the weapons" who not only ,spoke Crow,,
but who also made that word flesh by allowing Crow to live as ,His
revelation,, as the nightmare alternative to the Biblical God's creation.
In "A Horrible Religious Error" (37), the serpent makes jehovah
,grimace,, and man and woman abjectly bow to it, but Crow, having
been engendered by the Other God, only peers at that "sphynx of the
final fact,, grabs it "by the slackskin nape,, beats it up, and devours it.
In "Crow's First Lesson, (16), the Biblical God, displaying more of his
New Testament aspects, attempts to teach Crow to say "love," but all that
Crow can do, try as he might, is gape, convulse, and retch, bringing all
sorts of killers, including humans, into existence. In "Crow's Nerve
35
"Language, Visualization and the Inner library," 217.
36
See Hans jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the
Beginnings of Christianity, second edition revised (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), for
a basic survey of Gnosticism, and j. G. Davies, The Theology of William Blake (1948;
rpt. New York: Archon Books, 1966), 82-94, for a useful discussion of Blake's
heterodox views on the judeo-Christian concept of God.
44 NEFF
Fails" (38), Crow is described as never able to "fly from his feathers,"
pinions that have "homed on him" and have turned black because of the
"living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood." Crow, ''trying to
remember his crimes," discovers "his every feather the fossil of a
murder."
Three powerful poems in Crow may have helped Shepard conceive
of the word-wars engaged in by Hoss and Crow. In Hughes' alternative
myth of the Fall, which is most clearly related in "A Disaster" (28), the
word was once supreme, "killing men," "bulldozing/Whole cities to
rubble," "poisoning seas," and "burning whole lands/To dusty char."
Leaving all people "digested inside" itself, the word next "tried its great
lips/On the earth's bulge, like a giant lamprey," attempting to drain all
life from the world. The word could not devour nature, however, and,
"its effort weakened" because "it could digest nothing but people," the
word shrank down to almost nothing, "its era ... over." The effects of
the mythic fall of signification and of humankind's decreasing hold, literal
and semantic, on nature are made clear in two poems presenting vivid
and disturbing images of titanic, yet ultimately failed, word-battles. In
"Crow Goes Hunting" (45), that ultimate predator tries to capture a hare,
imagining "some words for the job, a lovely pack-/Clear-eyed,
resounding, well-trained, with strong teeth." Just as it is about to be
confined within Crow's signification, the hare changes into various
shapes, and even though Crow changes his words into "bombs" to blow
up "a concrete bunker," a "shotgun" to decimate "a flock of starlings,"
and "a reservoir" to contain "a cloudburst," Crow can never really
encompass "the bounding hare," and he gazes after that animal,
"speechless with admiration." In "The Battle of Osfrontalis" (29), it is
Crow himself who remains uncannily impervious to words, to "the glottal
bomb," the overwhelming "light aspirates," the "guerrilla labials," and
the "consonantal masses" that attack, bombard, surround, infiltrate, and
overwhelm him, only to retreat "into the skull of a dead jester/Taking the
whole world with them," leaving Crow to yawn in boredom.
Shepard has stated that his idea for Crow's "victim" originated "with
hearing a certain sound which is coming from the voice of this character,
Hoss. And also this sort of black figure appearing on stage with this
throne, and the whole kind of world that he was involved in, came from
this voice."
37
Such an epiphany may have been inspired by a reading of
Hughes' "The Black Beast" (23), in which the persona asks, over and
over, "Where is the Black Beast?" and is answered by various details
about the life of the Crow, one of which is particularly relevant to Tooth:
37
Chubb, eta/., in American Dreams, 200.
Horse vs. Crow 45
"Crow sat in its chair, telling loud lies against the Black Beast." In
Shepard's play, the stage is bare "except for an evil-looking black chair
with silver studs and a very high back, something like an Egyptian
Pharoah's throne but simple." Hoss comes on stage dressed "in black
rocker gear with silver studs and black kid gloves," (203, Italics in the
original). In Hughes' poem, Crow hides in the Black Beast's bed "to
ambush it" and in Tooth, Crow usurps Hoss's chair (227) and ambushes
that stallion/cowboy by creating a completely false picture of Hoss's
life-filled with cowardice, masturbation, and homosexual sex-in the
first round of their verbal bout (235-37): A ferocious, and ultimately
hopeless, battle between a hero and a fearsome, protean bird-like foe in
"Crow's Account of St. George" (26-27) may have further preserved in
Shepard's imagination an image of a chair as a feature in an apocalyptic
struggle. The hero of that extremely violent song confronts "a bird-head,/ -
Bald, lizard-eyed, the size of a football, on two staggering bird-legs" that
"gapes at him all the seams and pleats of its throat,/ Clutching at the
carpet with horny feet." The hero picks up a chair and "smashes the
egg-shell object to a blood-rag/A lumping sprawl" that he "tramples" to
a "bubbling mess." The foe changes into different shapes (a "shark-face
.. . screaming in the doorway," a giant hairy crab- monster), and the hero
attacks with the chair and then with "a ceremonial japanese decapitator."
He finds, however, that he has somehow destroyed himself by attaining
what seemed to be a victory because in reality he has slaughtered those
most dear to him-his wife and children.
Hoss's equine name and the unremitting fears he expresses to Becky
Lou about an inner weakness making him "go too soft" (218) could have
been shaped by a reading of Hughes' "A Bedtime Story" (59-60), whose
hero is "a person/Almost a person," with an "intermittent" body, and
hands that turn into "funny hooves just at the crucial moment." Such a
person gazes into the eyes of "the most beautiful girls" who lie with
"their faces on his pillow staring him out," but "somehow his eyes" are
"in the wrong way round." Like the owl in Hughes' "Owl's Song" (46)
that sings "how everything had nothing more to lose" in a world peopled
by Crow, Hoss declares that he is "just a man" (225) in a confusing new
kind of world where he feels "outa' control. ... pulled and pushed
around from one image to another," where "nothin' takes a solid form,"
where "nothin' [is] sure and final" (243). In Hughes' "Crowego" (50),
Crow is described as gazing "into the quag of the past/Like a gypsy into
the crystal of the future/Like a leopard into a fat land," and that particular
characterization may have formed the basis for Hoss's fascination with
and ultimate repulsion at Crow, the "Gypsy" who has marked him for
destruction (214). just as Hughes' Crow, the acolyte of the violent Other
God, is a frightening new force within the judea/Christian world,
46 NEFF
Shepard's Crow is a product of "a whole underground movement going
on" in the rock 'n' roll scene, where the "next genius is gonna be a
Gypsy Killer" who lives "outside the game" because "genius is some-
thing outside the game" (207). Even though Hoss is " a complete beast
of nature" who has been "sharpened ... down to perfection" (207), he
operates according to the strict code of behavior that has governed what
he has conceived of as a violent but strangely moral way of life in a vastly
competitive universe. Becky Lou insists that the rise of the Gypsies calls
for just a "temporary suspension" of the code, but Hoss knows better.
He is sure that he is living in "the last days of honor" when "the code's
going down the tubes." The coming of Crow makes Hoss' s "killer heart"
falter, compelling Hoss to decide whether he wishes to go on in a world
governed by no code-a daunting prospect because, as Hoss exclaims,
"Without a code it's just crime. No art involved. No technique, finesse.
No sense of mastery. The touch is gone" (215-1 7).
The-peculiar dynamics of the Hoss/Crow fight may be grasped more
completely by understanding Shepard's feelings about British and
American varieties of rock 'n' roll. In "Who Would've Thought,"
Shepard's persona exclaims, "Who would've thought the English would
cop our music"
38
-a reference to the British Invasion in the early 1960's,
in which rock groups from Great Britain, having nurtured themselves on
American blues, rock, soul, and folk, came back across the Atlantic, in
what might be interpreted as belated revenge for the American Revolu-
tion, and embarrassed a nation that had forsaken its musical roots as it
sacrificed pure rock 'n' roll on the altar of popular music.
39
The British
rockers had become so adept at their craft that, by the late 1960's and
early 1970's, the rock scene in Britain was felt by some to be eclipsing its
American counterpart, which led to the ironic situation of aspiring
American rockers, like Shepard, who had been raised in the cradle of that
musical form, traveling to Britain in their efforts to become rock stars. At
first, Hoss seems to feel that Craw's mimicry of his style is a compliment
(228-29), but Hoss complains more loudly when Craw's imitation
threatens to displace almost completely the original -that inspired it
(232-33). Hoss can be said to have been bitten by the Mallarmean "tooth
of crime" because even though he, like Shepard and all the other
American rockers forced to accede superiority to the British, may have
38
Hawk Moon, 39.
39
See Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages: The Rolling
Stone History of Rock & Roll (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 209-89, for a useful
discussion of the American rock 'n' roll scene in the early 1960's and the effect of the
British Invasion on rock music.
Horse vs. Crow 47
real , vital links to rock's past, such apparent advantages are rendered
meaningless when marauding thieves can usurp the image and style of
the art while discarding the rich cultural matrix that produced it.
40
Crow, then, is the ultimate criminal according to Hoss's (and
apparently Shepard's) definition. Hoss proclaims that "there ain't no
heart to a Gypsy. just bone" (221 ), and that such a new kind of rock 'n'
roller is "nothin' but flash. No Heart" (237). Crow nonchalantly admits
the truth of such appraisals, summing up his modus operandi in a
disturbing refrain to his song: "But I believe in my mask-The man I
made up is me" (232-33). Hoss gets very angry when Crow, perverting
the particularly American styles of the cowboy and the Chicago gangster,
lies about the past in the first round of their fight. After yelling to the ref
that Crow, who should have been playing "honest pool," was "pickin'
at a past that ain't even there" (237), Hoss tries to overwhelm Crow's
skillfully sardonic demystification of any delving into "past roots" or the
"retrograde," by going back into the African-American ancestry of rock
'n' roll. Such a maneuver seems to force Crow back against the ropes,
but the ref interrupts the round, saying that "somethin's outta whack"
with such a strategy. Hoss goes into the third round, vowing to remain
an "original" and "stand solid." Crow, however, immediately detects
the uselessness of such a posture, and taunts Hoss by telling him to "get
the image in line" and develop a "fantasy rhyme" in order to come into
the present. The ref ultimately stops that final round, declaring a T.K.O.
for Crow. Hoss, letting loose "a blood-curdling animal scream" (Italics
in the original), shoots the ref to death (232-41 ).
Early in Tooth, Becky Lou tells Hoss that "it's back down to survival"
(217) with the advent of the Gypsies, but Hoss only gradually realizes the
consequences of living in a world where, as Crow says, "the image is my
survival kit" (249). Hoss's murder of the ref, then, can be seen as a
defiant gesture against a time and place where the rules have changed,
where style is everything and words can establish no lasting hold on
experience. Being defeated in the match means that Hoss must turn for
lessons in survival to Crow, the ultimate Hoss-thief who, without even
caring, has somehow stolen him from himself, all for the sake of
establishing an appearance that will be remorselessly cast aside when the
40
A close analogy to such cultural theft may be found in Walter Benjamin, "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, " in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 217-51. Benjamin sees
much the same kind of larceny as that perpetrated by Shepard's Crow being
perpetrated by mechanical means of reproducing art forms that formerly lived only
through the intimate contact between performers and the audience. In other words,
mechanical means of reproducing art tend to rob art of that ineffable "aura"
engendered by a personal communal experiencing of that art.
48 NEFF
need arises, as it most surely will, throughout the myriad reinventions of
what passes for the self in the rock culture. To survive, Hoss must
become like Crow, learning to develop eyes that look right through
people, seeing "no pictures just pure focus." Hoss is told to "re-program
the tapes" in order to empty his mind until it becomes like "a clean
screen," allowing "no doubt" and "no fear" to disrupt the quest for
self-preservation (241-47).
Shepard's association of Crow with the notion of pure, soulless
survival could have resulted from reading early reviews of Crow, which
emphasized that creature's ability to thrive in an extremely violent,
protean world. A. Alvarez states that Crow's "one unequivocal attribute
is survival. jaunty and insatiable, disgusted and not a little disgusting, he
bobs up again from each disaster . ... Like hope, he is unkillable. But he
is unkillable precisely because he is without hope."
41
Alan Brownjohn
explains that Crow is mainly about "survival achieved by confronting the
terrible and the meaningless, and exacting from it [sic] a kind of ironical
stamina, and appetite for existence."
42
Derwent May, commenting on
Hughes' creation of a "landscape" of "phantasmagoric extremes of
human chaos and suffering," notes that it is Crow's "totally insensitive
preoccupation with survival" that allows him to make his way across
such a world.
43
Tony Harrison observes Crow's "modes of minimum
survival" and argues that "his scarcely triumphant tenacity [is] what he
has to crow about" because he has "achieved a better adaptation to the
Universe than either God or Man."
44
Hoss's suicide can be read as his (and Shepard's) comment on the
prospect of surviving in the worlds of Crow and Tooth . Cowboy Mouth
concludes with the Lobster Man, having been challenged by Slim's
music, metamorphosing into a black-clad rock messiah, and escaping
alive from his round of Russian roulette (162-65). Perhaps in part
because of his reaction against Hughes' Crow, Shepard can not allow
Hoss to opt for mere survival. In Hughes' truncated poetic cycle, suicide
by a gunshot to the head, which is evoked through imagery in "A Kill"
(12), "Crow's Account of the Battle" (21-22), and "Dawn's Rose" (48),
seems to be a preferred mode of protest against, and departure from, the
horrifying world of the Other God and His Crow. Indeed, Hoss's heroic
41
A. Alvarez', "Black Bird," The Observer, 11 October 1970, 33.
42
Aian Brownjohn, "On Survival," New Statesman, 16 October 1970, 491.
43
Derwent May, "Bird Words," The Listener, 29 October 1970, 603.
44
Tony Harrison, "Crow Magnan," London Magazine, 10 Uanuary, 1971 ): 86.
Horse vs. Crow 49
refusal to become like Crow, his courageous stance of taking his life in
his hands by bringing about his own death (249), may have been
suggested by the powerful image of the "humane-killed skull of a horse"
in "Crow Improvises" (53-54).
Hoss's death begins the moment he even considers seriously the
alternative of surviving on the rock scene by becoming as big a
style-monster as his final adversary. Ironically, Crow, who has never paid
attention to any potential meaning in his words, sings that "it's time to
squeeze the trigger" when "there ain't no Gods or saviors who'll give
you flesh and blood" (232), and Hoss, the American cowboy/rocker, the
man whose anachronistic faith in someone being able to maintain his
"own image" as a "one and only" and "an original man" (241), does
exactly what Crow sings about, going "out in the old style" (249) in a
world where the past has never been lived and history is good only for
providing the external trappings of any subsequent changes in style.
Becky Lou's odd pantomime of a failed sex act during Hoss's decline
(246) may constitute a bleakly ironic undermining of the Hindu
Asvamedha, or Horse Sacrifice. In the Hindu ritual, the queen of the
kingdom, in order to ensure future fertility for the king and his realm,
mimes sexual intercourse with a stallion that has been ritually
sacrificed.
45
In Tooth, however, the sex act is not consummated, which
may symbol ize the basic sterility of Crow and the ultimate emptiness of
his triumph.
The "tooth" of rock 'n' roll"crime" makes Hoss pay a terrible price,
and yet Shepard allows him (and us) a dignity that, for all their inexplica-
ble power, lies beyond his and Hughes' Crows, each of whom will be,
forever, in the words of "Crow's Playmates" (49), "his own leftover, the
spat-out scrag," something that "his brain could make nothing of,"
leaving everything else in his world
1
even "the least, least-living object
extant/ .. . Lone I ier than ever."
45
See David M. Knipe, Hinduism: Experiments in the Sacred (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 39, and Wendy Doniger O'Fiaherty, "Horses," in The
Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 6:463-68,
for discussions of the Horse Sacrifice, and see the Satapatha Brahmama, second edi-
tion, tr. julius Eggeling (1900; rpt. Delhi : Motilal Banarsidass, 1966), 5:274-440, for
a thorough description of those complex ri tes.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Fall 1996)
Tracers: This is our Parade
A First Look at an Understudied Vietnam Drama
CINDA GILLILAN
1
Drama, more than any other literary genre, needs a resonance in history.
-Walter Benjamin
August 1986, Tucson, Arizona. Hot, humid, the park crowded with
men, women, and children, all there for 'Nam Jam, an annual celebration
-of service and survival. I wandered through the gathering, listening to a
distant voice occasionally breaking free of the music, laughter, and
conversation.
Where's the firing com in' from? Anybody know what the fuck' s
goin' on? Who's doin' the shooting? What direction we
supposed to be goin' in? Movement in the tre.eline! Form up!
2
In a clearing, a man stood alone, the sun making him sweat. He read
from a thin black book.
I'm gonna get a medic. You'll be okay, Dinky Dau. Wbo's
shootin'? Fuck, somebody's still shootin'. Where's my rifle?
Fuckin' M-16! Gotta keep it together. Be cool, Scooter, be cool.
Gotta keep your sanity, man. Christ, what happened to my
mind? (1 00)
The cadence of his delivery reminded me of a televangalist, preaching
from his "good book." I stepped forward to listen.
1
The author would like to thank John Difusco for his time and efforts in support
of this paper. Also Richard Chaves, Mitch Hale, Lupe Vargus, Esther Reese, and Jody
Norman. And a special thank you to Dr. Robert Schulzinger for reading an earl ier
version of this essay.
2
Difusco, John, eta/., Tracers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 100. All
subsequent citations appear in the text and are to this edi tion of the pl ay.
Tracers 51
Oh no! Oh, Christ! Bleedin' all over the place! Pressure points?
Oh, fuck it! Press some dirt down on top of 'em. That oughta
stop 'em. Stop bleedin', you motherfucker! Stop! Fuckin' stop!
Keep it together, keep it together. Don't want to go into shock.
Most guys die of shock- that's what they taught us. Gotta keep
it together .. . (1 01)
A crowd gathered, their gazes fixed on the preacher. A man standing
next to me in old fatigues trembled, tears rol ling down his face as the
preacher read: "I don't wanna die. I don't wanna die here . .. " (102).
The preacher's arms shot above his head, the book waving. Some of
the men took a step forward, some a step back.
Medic! Medic! Medic! Please, God, I need a medic! Please,
God, don't let 'em die. Don't let everyone die here. Talkin' to
God. I need a medic! I hate you, God! You hear me?! I hate
you! You motherfucker! (1 02)
The preacher dropped to the ground, hugging his knees to his chest,
rocking, moaning: "Mama ... mama .. . . " No one moved. It was
surreal. Was he crazy? Was he still reading? Was he an actor?
The preacher levered up, swinging himself around to sit cross-legged
on the grass. He opened the book and continued to read, first in a
whisper, then his voice gaining strength and volume.
Someone told me you're a vet. Someone told me you had a gun.
You ki lled people. You were only nineteen? You volunteered?
You're bullshitting me. You're one of the lucky ones who made
it back. I'm sorry. I suppose you don't want to talk about it?
Yeah, we saw that on TV. How was the heat? How was the
rain? How were the women? How were the drugs? How was
Bob Hope? How does it feel to kill someone? You were a
pawn. You were a hero. You were stupid, you should have
gone to Canada. You were there? You were there? You were
there? You were there? You were there? You were there? (1 04)
The preacher closed his book, the sermon over. The spectators moved
away and he retreated to the shade of a tree. I ventured forward, asking
him what he was reading from. "Tracers," he told me. "It's the truth."
My introduction to Tracers, a play written by Vietnam veterans about
their experiences, can only be described as emotional, and emotion is the
heart of this play. Often listed. among the standout dramas dealing with
52 GILLILAN
Vietnam, Tracers remains to be analyzed in depth. This essay begins that
process through an examination of the evolving structure of Tracers and
the critical reception the play received.
3
This is a necessary first step
before the play can be explored in a broader context of representations
of Vietnam and the accompanying evolution of our national ideology
embodied in images of the war and its warriors. I find that Tracers
preserves an overall veracity absent in other Vietnam plays and films, and
it is the nature and source of this authenticity that motivate my interest in
and analysis of the play.
jane Tompkins, a historian, states: "all accounts of events are
determined through and through by the observer's frame of reference ...
there really are no facts except as they are embedded in some particular
way of seeing the world." Thus historians (and playwrights) cannot
escape the limitations of their subjective position in history, and their
products are extensions of the circumstances from which they spring.
4
An inevitable dialogue exists between the present and the past, but
elements of historical authenticity exist. The historian wants "first and
foremost to let the past be the past, strange before it is familiar, particular
before it is universal."
5
Tracers maintains a distinct connection with the
war experiences of the veteran authors, while at fhe same time develop-
ing within a cultural setting that has shaped and reshaped the war and its
veterans over the past two decades. The veracity of Tracers is the text's
greatest strength, and its contribution is to our understanding of the war
and the men who fought it.
Since so little work has been done on this play, I begin here with a
description of the drama,
6
then examine the history of the play, with an
emphasis on the changes made to the structure of the text between 1980
3
Theatre companies large and small, as well as many colleges, have produced
Tracers since its original publication in 1983. (The exact number of college
productions is unknown at this time, but it is high enough-that Difusco could not
make a guess at the number.) DiFusco directed all of the productions discussed in this
essay with the exception of the Chicago Steppenwolf Theater Company, the Ar izona
State University, and the Denver Theater on Broadway productions.
4
jane Tompkins, " 'Indians' : Textual ism, Morality, and the Problem of History,"
Critical Inquiry 13 (Autumn 1986): 101-119.
5
Natalie Zeman Davis, '"Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead': film and
the challenge of authenticity," Historical journal of Film, Radio, and Television 8
(1988) : 280-294.
6
The description presented here is based on the Hi II & Wang 1986 text and my
observations as an audience member at the 1994 Los Angel es production.
Tracers 53
and 1994. Next, I examine the critical responses to the play from both
journalists and scholars, offering an alternative understanding of the play
as an "experience" in response to the academic critique of Tracers as a
"story." I conclude with suggestions for future work on the play.
Performed on an almost empty stage (the only props absolutely
necessary are six M-16's), Tracers is propelled by the dialogue, actions,
and emotions of its six major characters as they experience bootcamp, the
war, coming home, and the present time. As John DiFusco, the play's
creator and director, describes it, Tracers is "visual, emotional, poetic,
often comical."
7
What Tracers is not is a linear narrative. The play lacks
a central protagonist, shifts locations and times in a non-linear fashion,
and has multiple, contradictory endings.
Tracers opens with the "Prologue," a list of questions and comments
the veterans heard when they returned from the war:
Someone told me you're a vet! Someone told me you had a gun.
You killed people? You were only nineteen? You volunteered?
You're bullshitting me. Oh, you're one of the lucky ones who
made it back. I'm sorry. I suppose you don't want to talk about
it. Yeah, we saw that on TV. How was the heat? How was the
rain? How were the women? How was Bob Hope? How does
it feel to kill somebody? You were a pawn. You were a hero.
You were stupid, you should have gone to Canada. You were
there? You were there? You were there? You were there? You
were there? You were there? (6-7)
The "Prologue" lacks a specific time referent, making it immediate to the
performance of the play. The characters speak in the moment. This
scene and others like it in Tracers create a present-mindedness, recapitu-
lating past experiences using the ongoing, current memories of the
veteran actors. This results in an immediate connection between the
characters and the audience. But this is a connection in reverse. The
characters speak to the audience, and in doing so, recreate each viewer
as a veteran: "You were there." Thus before the play really begins, the
audience is constructed as participants in the drama. They cannot watch
the story as spectators; they must experience it along with the other
characters.
7
John DiFusco, "Synopsis," Tracers: A Reunion Celebration, 1994. The
playbook for the 1994 Bar Triangle Entertainment production, Schoenberg Hall,
University of California, Los Angeles.
54 GILLILAN
Act One begins with "Home From the War-The First Tracers," a
series of monologues set at the end of the war. The veterans' immediate
reactions to their experiences in-country are revealed, making it clear that
some of the men dealt with their service better than others. Next is the
"Saigon List
11
-words and phrases which evoke the Vietnam experience.
For example:
La dai, motherfucker! Mas skosh! Deedee mau! I kinda fuckin'
doubt it. There it is, G.l. I can't feel my legs. Sorry 'bout that
shit. Dog tags. He's dead. Wasted. KIA. Head wound.
Stomach wound. A fuckin' suckin' chest wound. Medevac.
Dustoff. Clear to fire in any direction ... . (1 0)
Jeffrey Fenn (1992), in his discussion of the Vietnam' dramas, including
Tracers, states that the "Saigon List":
. .. no doubt means much to those who have had to fill sand-
bags and crouch behind them, and who have personal memories
of particular places. The images must remain unintelligible to
the uninitiated, however, and the scene would seem to appeal.
primarily to an audience of veterans rather than a regular theater
audience.
8
However, this is not the case. The audience has already been made
participants. Individuals might not understand each word or phrase, but
before their tour of duty is over, they will. The scene ends with an
explanation: " You're all going to Vietnam; if you don't pay attention,
you're gonna die" (11 ).
The "Saigon List" returns the narrative from the immediate post-war
setting of the "The First Tracers" back to the timeless position of the
"Prologue." It reminds the audience that it is along for the ride to come.
Both the and the "Saigon List" suture the Vietnam experience
across time, merging the "then" and the "now." The result is the
creation of a shared space in which audience and actors can interact.
This also gives audiences their first glimpse into the experiences they and
the actors/characters are about to share. However, it is only an glimpse,
since the images evoked in the "Prologue" and the "Saigon List" are
contextual ized over the course of the play.
8
Jeffrey W. Fenn, Levitating the Pentagon: Evolutions i n the American Theater
of the Vietnam War Era (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 27.
Tracers 55
Tracers moves next to "Day One," a scene encapsulating the boot
camp experience and providing clues to each character's personality and
motivations. The range of character types-patriotic volunteer/draftee,
scholar/blue collar, etc.-offers a range of identification for audiences.
"Day One" is followed by "Day One Epilogue," a moving monologue
for drill instructor Sergeant Williams that foreshadows one of the play's
endings: "Before they are twenty-one, nearly half of them will be killed
or wounded ... eighty percent are targets" (24-25).
From the relative safety of boot camp Tracers moves to "Sense of
judgment," another monologue, this time by one of the soldiers, Baby
San, who tries to reconcile himself to his first kill.
9
Temporally, this
monologue takes place after the next scene, "Initiation," the patrol during
which Baby San is forced to kill. This juxtaposition of time, experience,
and emotion collapses them all into a dynamic "now" that stretches from
boot camp to the present, making all the play's experiences immediate
and powerful. This juxtaposition also mirrors the way DiFusco and the
other actor/veterans experienced time and events. Difusco describes the
phenomenon of recalling events from his service in Vietnam, but being
unable to remember when during his tour of duty they occurred.
10
Thus
the fluidity of time and place in the play echos the lived experiences of
the men writing it.
"Initiation" traces the characters through daily life in Vietnam and
out on patrol, where they end up in a firefight. The scene is set during
the war, but includes Dinky Dau's first monologue, which he narrates
from the subjective position of the present. The temporal placement of
his monologue is cued by his opening line, "I remember the sky was
overcast ... " (37). and by the use of the past tense throughout. At the
end of the monologue, the action returns to the bush, but Dinky Dau
continues to reflect from the present: "Everyone was into it. I was eager.
I was angry!" (38). At the end of "Initiation" past and present converge,
shifting from one to the other in the dialogue, creating the extended
"now" and embracing events in Vietnam and in the present. This
conflation strengthens the play's emotional immediacy, bridging the
experiences of the veterans who were there and the audience which is
taken there.
9
According to DiFusco, most of the character names were simply the actors'
nicknames while in Vietnam-Baby San, Dinky Dau, Scooter, and a b u ~ "Professor"
was a modification of the actor's nickname "Senator." And "Little John" was both
a nod to the mythos of Robin Hood and a personal conceit for the play's creator, John
DiFusco. "Doc" is the only figure named after an actual casualty of the war.
10
John DiFusco, telephone conversation with author, 7 September 1995.
56 GILLILAN
"Fourth of July" picks up the in-country chronology, tracking Dinky
Dau as he responds to his kill earlier that day. And, like "Initiation," this
scene includes a monologue by Dinky Dau that slips from Vietnam, " ...
keep your fuckin' paws off my pound cake," to the present, "I couldn't
sleep that night ... " (31 ). However, instead of the scene ending in a
blend of past and present as "Initiation" does, "Fourth of july" returns to
Vietnam after the monologue with Baby San and Dinky Dau proceeding
to get high on heroin while Little john watches and drinks.
Act One ends with "Touchdown," Habu's monologue set during
the war. However, the monologue is delivered during a mimed patrol,
a surreal reminder that Habu's words could also be memory. By keeping
the language of "Touchdown" in-country, the play creates a sense of time
passing there and strands the audience in Vietnam over the short
intermission.
Act Two opens in Vietnam and remains there through the next
several scenes, including "Fun and Games," a conversation between
Dinky Dau and Baby San, who speak at but not to each other. Baby San
worries over the possibility that he impregnated a local girl, while Dinky-
Dau laments over his girlfriend back home and his present boredom.
"In the Rear with the Beer and the Gear," pttle John's monologue on
a trip to a local massage parlor, follows. A not so subtle commentary on
the language of these soldiers-"Went out on a fuckin' ambush one
fuckin' night. Stayed out in the fuckin' boonies for ten fuckin' days ... "
(41)-the monologue both adds humor and desensitizes the audience to
the profanity that was common speech. Through the repeated use of
"fuck" throughout the speech, the word loses its shock value and at the
same time reminds the audience of the frustration and dehumanization
behind that loss. This scene is temporally ambiguous in the same way as
the "Prologue" and the "Saigon List" and could be occurring in-country,
just after the war, or in the present. Set between two in-country scenes,
this monologue reminds the audience that they are present in the past
with the characters.
Next, "Cheryl's Letter" returns us firmly to Vietnam.
11
The scene
begins with Dinky Dau reading a "Dear John" letter aloud and ends with
Dinky, Scooter, and Baby San heading off to get laid in Saigon.
"Friends," the next scene, is a conversation between Baby San and
Professor and is also set in-country. This scene establishes Professor's
loner attitude, " I just don't like to get too close to people" (44), that is
later explained in "Professor and Doc."
11
1 n some versions of the play, another scene titled "Got Your Ass" occurs
between "In the Rear with the Beer and the Gear" and "Cheryl ' s letter." I will
discuss it in more detail later in the essay.
Tracers 57
"Blanket Party", another Vietnam scene, follows. The specter of drill
instructor Williams reminds the audience that "Eighty percent are targets"
(45) while Baby San, Little John, Professor, and Dinky Dau carry out the
grisly task of collecting the remains of dead American soldiers. The men
talk about their R&R to take their minds off the task, but that proves
impossible. When Little John becomes obsessed with piecing two of the
bodies back together a fight breaks out between him and Dinky Dau.
Professor ends the scene with: "Can we please just get this over with?!"
(47).
"Parallel Vietnam Ambiguities," Professor's monologue, follows, set
in Vietnam, but foreshadowing later events in his "1984 Tracers"
monologue. "Professor and Doc," another in-country scene, follows.
Suffering with a rat bite, Professor goes to see the medic (Doc), who starts
him on rabies injections and talks with him about Pirandello. The scene
ends with Professor's second monologue, set again in the present: "Well,
I went back to see Doc for the thirteen days and the thirteen rabies shots
... " (53). He explains that Doc had committed suicide. At the end
Professor states: "But, as hard as I tried, I could not shed one tear for my
friend who had just killed himself. I guess the machine just refused to
shut itself off" (84).
The next scene, "The Machine," is a flashback to boot camp, and in
it Professor explains what the machine is, and what function it serves:
"The machine was a defense mechanism I dreamed up in boot camp.
When things got tough, I would just turn my mind off and become a
machine" (85). These two scenes re-establ ish the past/present conflation,
reminding the audience that "then'' and "now" are inseparable, before
the play moves into its double ending.
"Fuckin' A, We Like it Here" returns the characters and audience to
Vietnam for Habu's short-timer's party. The excitement over Habu's
apprdaching departure is overshadowed by Scooter's revelation that he
"can't leave, I just extended six months" (56). This scene is foll owed by
''1984 Tracers," a series of monologues where the characters speak to the
audience from the present, whenever that may be. Each of the characters
survived Vietnam, some better than others. Professor returns to Bangkok
in 1984 to hear: "The war is over. It's time to go home" from a young
Thai girl. Little John learns that he is dying and his children are disfigured
due to his exposure to Agent Orange. Habu left the military only to
return and become a lifer. Dinky Dau, in a wheelchair, celebrates his six-
month long relationship with Mary, a Vietnamese woman. And Scooter,
released from prison, travels to see the Wall. He recounts a dream in
which all the boys from his high school graduating class are dead, but
they come to life: " We've all come home-together" (59) .
58 GILLILAN
This reflection on the past disappears in the fervor of "Ambush."
And, as the play describes, "We are jolted back to 'Nam" (59) for another
patrol. Remaining fi.rmly in the time frame of the war, this scene, parts
of which I quoted at the very beginning of the paper, ends with all the
characters dead or dying, a sharp contrast to the preceding monologues.
Having just seen that the characters-and therefore the audience-have
survived, "Ambush" reminds spectators of the fickleness of war and both
the audience and the characters are forced to die. This strands both
characters and audience in a particular limbo. They are neither dead in
the past nor alive in the present, and they are both dead and alive. This
juxtaposition of realities, dead and alive, elevates the characters beyond
their individual personalities to representatives of all the men who served,
those who lived and "the 59,000 who missed the Freedom Bird," to
whom the play is dedicated. The veterans and the audience have died
and yet survived, the experience permanently marking them.
"The Resurrection," also called "The Ghost Dance," follows
"Ambush." This wordless "ritualistic choreography to raise the dead and
pay tribute to the 59,000 who were killed in Vietnam" (64) is a collage
of potent martial imagery: the Wall, the hand salute, the 21-gun salute,
and Tai Chi . Of all the moments in Tracers, this is the most visually
oriented, and description can only do the scene partial justice. As
DiFusco describes it: "It's deep, but it's not words . .. we're doing some
kind of communication there."
12
Lighting, sound, actor movement, and
the resulting ambience is "magical," as I overheard one observer at the
1994 Los Angeles ,performance describe it:
"The Ghost Dance" touches you deep inside. It's magical. I
think that emotional effect occurs because the moment occurs
without words. The language it speaks is something more than
words. It speaks an emotional truth that words cannot embody.
The scene occurs in a timeless, dream-like space that is both real and
imaginary, representing both what might have been and what was. Like
the young men resurrected in Scooter's dream, so too the "dead"
characters from "Ambush" are resurrected. The scene ends with each
character positioned before the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall.
In the 1994 production, the blocking of the characters at the Wall echoed
their positions at the very start of the play in "Home From the War-The
12
John DiFusco, Richard Chaves, and Mitch Hale, interview with the author.
Video recording. Los Angeles, CA, 12 September 1994.
Tracers 59
First Tracers," bringing the audience closer to where they began their
journey through the Vietnam experience.
The play is carried full circle by the "Epilogue," and Tracers ends
with a return to the same questions posed in the beginning of the play in
the "Prologue." However, unlike the beginning, "Epilogue" can only be
described as celebratory, the characters dancing and speaking accompa-
nied by a pounding drumbeat.
13
The two and a half hour spiral of shared
experience provides the audience the answers to these questions, "You
were only nineteen? . . . How were the drugs? . . . How does it feel to kill
somebody? .. . You were there?" (1 04), because, as Richard Chaves
(Dinky Dau) states, "We've showed you how it feels."
14
And, "for those
two and a half hours it was real."
15
An idea that creator John DiFusco carried around for more than a
decade while working as an actor, director, and writer, Tracers originated .
out of the collaborative work of a group of Vietnam veteran actors
16
and
one writer, Sheldon Lettich. It developed from a one-act play in 1980
into a complex two-act play by 1985, made up of the scenes and
monologues described above.
17
As DiFusco explains in an interview: "I
was obsessed with the thought that every war has its chroniclers. Every
war but this one [Vietnam]. No one wants to talk about it-so the veteran
13
For the 1994 Los Angeles performance, ex-Door's drummer John Dinsmore
created and performed the final percussion arrangement.
14
John DiFusco, Richard Chaves, and Mitch Hale, interview by author. Video
recording. Los Angeles, CA, 12 September 1994.
15
Michael Cruff, "Tracers is a successful war drama," Arizona State Press, 9
February 1990, 15.
DiFusco believes that "Resurrection"/"The Ghost Dance" and "Epilogue" are
the hardest scenes for any cast to "get right" with regard to the ritual and celebratory
nature of both scenes. As a result, he has traditionally begun each rehearsal with
these scenes and employs them as a collective "warm up" before each day's work
starts. In this way he is able to ensure that the actors are well prepared for the scenes
by the time of the performance. Uohn DiFusco, telephone conversation with the
author, 10 February 1996.)
16
Vincent Caristi (Baby San), Richard Chaves (Dinky Dau), John DiFusco (Doc),
Eric E. Emerson (Habu), Rick Gallavan (Scooter), Merlin Marston (Little John), and
Harry Stephens (Professor).
17
The chronology here is based on the Hill & Wang Tracers (1986), the playbill
for the Bar Triangle Entertainment, September 1994, University of California at Los
Angeles production of Tracers, and interviews with Mr. John DiFusco, the play's
creator/author.
60 GILLILAN
is walking around with all this suppressed information .. . . "
18
Elsewhere
DiFusco speculates: "I guess the motivation for the piece is the fact that
you were there, and it's probably the most important thing that ever
happened to you in your life, and if you're an artist you' ve got to deal
with it."
19
DiFusco concludes: "We were just boys saying the truth."
20
Based on the actors' personal experiences-if not always literally
true-Tracers provides snapshots from the lives of Vietnam veterans as
they journey through the psychological minefields of war and its
aftermath.
21
While working in theatre, DiFusco met Vincent Caristi, later Baby
San, and received encouragement to pursue the Tracers project.
DiFusco's twelve-year experience with experimental theater and
improvisational techniques using groups of actors inclined him to think
that Tracers might be developed that way,
22
provided he found a group
of actors who had Vietnam war experiences.
23
Not being acquainted
with any other veteran colleagues but Caristi, DiFusco ran an ad in
Drama-Logue-a theatre trade paper-in March of 1980.
24
Approximately thirty-five actors responded to the ad, and after an
initial audition, DiFusco called back about half of the men. Without a
script, the auditions consisted of a monologue about the actor's Vietnam
experience, a few improvisations, and discussions about the war.
DiFusco ultimately singled out six men in their late-20s to mid-30s who
18
Kathleen Hendrix, "A Personal Play, and Purgative, About Vietnam," The Los
Angeles Times, 21 November 1980, 5:3.
19
Leslie Bennetts, "The Vietnam War as Theater and an Act of Exorcism," The
New York Times, 27 January 1985, 2:4.
20
John DiFusco, Richard Chaves, and Mitch Hale, interview with the author.
Video recording. Los Angeles, CA, 12 September 1994.
21
Bennetts, 4, 19.
22
Hendrix, 3, 18.
23
0tis L. Guernsey jr, ed., The Bums Mantle Theater Yearbook: Best Plays of
1984/85 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1985), 165-177.
24
The ad read: "Casting Notices/Non-Equity Actors who are Vietnam veterans are
needed to participate in a workshop leading to an original production. No fee. Mail
your pictures and resume to John Difusco ... . " Hendri x (1980): 3.
Tracers 61
had served as enlisted men in Vietnam from 1967 to 1972 in the Army,
Marines, and Air Force. Most had volunteered, a few had been drafted.
25
In April 1980, DiFusco organized the group and began holding
workshops in the cafeteria of the Veterans' Hospital in Brentwood,
California.
26
Arranged through the efforts of VA official Shad Meshad, the
site was free. The collaborative process took six months, the first three
conducted in complete privacy while the actors learned to trust and open
up with each other. During the last three months, the actors worked on
scenes to the accompaniment of VA patient life. DiFusco recalls one man
who paced the hospital halls calling cadence. Richard Chaves (Dinky
Dau) recalled other veterans who sat watching the performers, occasion-
ally shouting at them: "What the hell are you doin' that shit for! Shut the
f- up!"27
Meeting five nights a week, for no pay, they talked about what had
happened to them in Vietnam and how it had affected their lives. The
actors often found themselves describing painful personal memories only
to find them part of the script the next day-nightmares ready to be
enacted. As Merlin Marston (Little John) told one reporter: "It forced you
to relive experiences you'd forgotten. After rehearsal, I'd go home and
cry. Sometimes I wasn't even sure what I was crying about, but the next
day I sure felt good about it."
28
Due to the personal nature of the play's
material, the actors made a promise to each other not to disclose who
had which experience, believing this would allow them to express their
feelings and still protect their privacy and professionalism as actors.
29
A frequent participant in the workshops, writer Sheldon Lettich
transcribed the improvisations, and DiFusco then edited the developing
play. On july 4, 1980 a work-in-progress performance was given at the
intimate 45-seat Odyssey Theater on the west side of Los Angeles.
Receiving an encouraging response from an invited audience made up of
DiFusco's theatre peers and friends came as a surprise. DiFusco assumed
that the audience would be uninterested since they were generally liberal
25
Hendrix, 18.
26
The workshops employed a variety of theatrical techniques including personal
improvisation, rap sessions, psychodrama, physical work, trust and ensemble work.
27
John DiFusco, Richard Chaves, and Mitch Hale, interview with author. Video
recording. Los Angeles, 12 September 1994.
28
Hendrix, 18.
29
/bid.
62 GILLILAN
well-to-dos and therefore not as affected by the war. When they
responded enthusiastically, workshops resumed with renewed vigor.
30
In October 1980, DiFusco completed the overall structure of the one-
act version of Tracers, including scene order, music and sound design,
choreography, and final editing. The play opened on October 17, again
at the Odyssey, to sparse attendance.
31
Groups of Vietnam veterans
brought in by Shad Meshad constituted many of the audiences during the
first month. DiFusco resorted to calling friends to fill seats, but was told:
"Oh, John, no one wants to hear about Vietnam."
32
By November, positive reviews and word of mouth helped the play
gain momentum and its own unique following of theatre people and
Vietnam veterans and their families. The veterans often came in groups
and responded well to the production, calling it therapeutic. "One thing
this show has done for us," actor Harry Stephens (Professor) stated, "We
came back. There was no hoopla. No confetti. This is our parade."
33
Running nine months to mostly sold out houses, the production quickly
became a critical success and was nominated for its first award within
three months,
34
going on to receive the Drama-Logue Critics' Award for
direction, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics' Circle Award for best
ensemble performance.
After it closed at the Odyssey, Tracers was produced in 1981 by The
Bear Republic Theater in Santa Cruz, California.
35
Running for a week
with sold out houses, the production provided the cast with their first
encounter with "bush vets"-veterans who lived in the woods near Santa
Cruz-who came down out of the mountains to see the play.
36
Appear-
30
John DiFusco, telephone interview .with author, 7 September 1995.
31
Produced by Lupe Vargus and Ron Sossi. Directed by John DiFusco.
32
John DiFusco, Richard Chaves, and Mitch Hale, personal interview with
author. Video recording. Los Angeles, CA, 12 September 1994.
33
Hendrix, 19.
34
John DiFusco, telephone interview with author, 7 September 1995.
35
The Bear Republic Theater was the premiere experimental theatre in Santa Cruz
at the time and was loosely associated with the University of California at Santa Cruz
Theater Department. Many theatre actors, writers, and directors from Los Angeles
migrated to Santa Cruz to work in the theatre, which was originally a large redwood
barn. (John DiFusco, telephone conversation with the author, 10 February 1996.)
36
john DiFusco, telephone conversation with the author, 10 February 1996.
Tracers - 63
ing next in January 1983, Tracers was produced by the Steppenwolf
Theater Company of Chicago. Gary Sinise directed the production,
which received the 1984 Joseph Jefferson Award for best ensemble
performance.
37
In January 1985, Tracers made its New York debut at the Public
Theater. This production was presented by Joseph Papp, produced by
Thomas Bird and the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theater Company
(VETCo), and directed by DiFusco. DiFusco credits Thomas Bird and
VETCo for bringing Tracers to New York and ensuring its popularity. In
1979, Bird founded the company with a $25,000 grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts.
38
VETCo was an acting company composed of
Vietnam veterans and dedicated to presenting the human side of the war.
Established in response to a major call to action agai nst the silence and
isolation confronting Vietnam veterans in the late 1970s, it was less
concerned with any overt political debate over whether the war was right
or wrong than with the insistence that a particular experience be
recognized as something historically significant.
39
The play featured two members of the original Los Angeles Odyssey
cast, Vincent Caristi (Baby San) and Richard Chaves (Dinky Dau).
DiFusco and David Berry, known for his own Vietnam play G.R. Point,
edited and restructured the play for the New York performance, resulting
in the two-act narrative described earl ier.
40
Several significant changes
were made in the play as it moved from one to two acts.
37
DiFusco flew to Chicago for the last two weeks of rehearsals. He worked with
Sinise, polishing the changes to the play.
38
Fred Bernstein, ''Vet-Turned-VIP Tom Bird is Struck on New York' s 'Mayflower
Madam'," People Weekly 23 (17 June 1985): 95-102.
39
Christopher Edwards, Spectator review in the London Theater Record 5 (1985):
769.
40
DiFusco wanted to restructure and rewrite Tracers. David Berry was a well
known playwright with a successful Vietnam play, C.R. Point, which was performed
in Los Angeles where Sally Kirkland saw it. She had also seen the Odyssey
production of Tracers. A friend of Tom Bird, Kirkland suggested that Berry and
DiFusco work together on Tracers. Since DiFusco knew Berry and respected his work
he agreed, and changes were made right up to the last night before the performance.
(John Difusco, telephone interview with author, 7 September 1995.)
64 GILLILAN
First was the permanent inclusion of a minority character. Habu
became African-American.
41
This change was one that DiFusco had
wanted to make all along. A review of the 1980 Odyssey production
included the following observation:
The group seems unanimous in their regret that there is not a
black in the play ... . Blacks were very much a part of the
Vietnam experience, and, it is apparent, of these men's particular
experiences.
42
Second, the imagery of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, or "the
Wall" as it is more commonly known, was added, becoming the
backdrop for "The Resurrection"/"The Ghost Dance". This went hand
in hand with the inclusion of the "1984 Tracers" to give the characters
contemporary lives, which DiFusco felt made the play more effective.
43
At the same time, the "Epilogue" was moved to the end of the play so it
did not conclude on "a downer."
44
A third change involved the removal of the "Got Your Ass" scene at
the request of Joseph Papp and Thomas Bird. DiFusco wanted to keep
the scene, but was over-ridden by the producers who wanted to cut the
overall length of the play.
45
Not included in the opening description, this
scene fell between "In the Rear with the Beer and the Gear" and
"Cheryl's Letter" and consisted of a conversation between Little John and
Baby San as they played cards. The R.C. Dispatch, the official newsletter
for fans of Richard Chaves (Dinky Dau) describes the scene: "Although
the characters of Little John and Baby San never truly come right out with
it, the implication is that both have engaged in homosexuality with an
Army colonel." The Dispatch goes on to state that the scene "was
considered too strong for the more sensitive members of the audience
during prior performances of the play" and was cut. Whether for length
41
According to Difusco, this shift first occurred in the Chicago production and
was a condition of Sinise being allowed to produce the play. By the September 1994
production, Tracers included two African-Americans (Habu-and Little John), and one
Latino (Dinky Dau).
42
Hendrix, 19.
43
janice Arkatov, "Viet War Vets Return to Front in 'Tracers'," The Los Angeles
Times, 11 November 1985, 5:5.
44
John Difusco, telephone interview with author, 7 September 1995.
45
/bid.
Tracers 65
or content reasons, the scene was removed for the New York production
and was not returned until September 1994. The Dispatch stated that it
was returned at that time "for the express reason that homosexuality was
a matter-of-fact in Vietnam . . .. "
46
With complete control over the 1994
production, DiFusco replaced the missing scene to restore the historical
wholeness of the play for future generations of viewers who wi II see the
videotaped version.
47
Critically acclaimed, the New York run played to capacity houses for
six months. The critic for Newsweek sums up the accolades:
Tracers is something special. ... Nothing bland about this
devastating evocation of the individual, personal apocalypses
that were Vietnam. Tracers is a land mine of a play that blows
complacency to shreds. Tracers meets reality with a force and
dignity that creates honor out of horror.
46
DiFusco received the 1985 Drama Desk Award for sound and music
design, and Chaves the Theater World Award for outstanding new talent.
In August 1985, the play moved to the Royal Court Theater in London,
England, as part of the New York Shakespeare Festival exchange
program.
49
Returning from London, the play opened again in Los
Angeles, this time at the larger Cornet Theater, running there from
November 1985 through February 1986.
50
Presented next at the Annenberg Center on the University of
Pennsylvania campus 12-16 February 1986, the play then toured
Australia (Sydney and Melbourne) during the remainder of February and
April of that year. In spring 1987, Susan Dietz produced a New England
46
Denise Stoltenberg, "Tracers: A Review of the Play," The R.C. Dispatch 2 (5)
1994, 3.
47
john DiFusco, telephone interview with author, 7 September 1995.
48
jack Kroll, " Vietnam of the Spirit," Newsweek, 4 February 1985, 51 .
49
Co-produced by joseph Papp and Tom Bird, directed by John DiFusco. Tracers
competed with and was picked out of six or so possible plays to be included in the
exchange program. Oohn DiFusco, telephone interview with author, 7 September
1995.)
50
The popularity of the play helped three of the actors land televisi on spots.
DiFusco appeared on The Greatest American Hero, Caristi on Magnum P.t. ; and
Chaves in a made-for-TV movie, Fire on the Mountain. All three played veterans or
military characters.
66 GILLILAN
tour for Tracers, including stops in Connecticut, New Hampshire, New
jersey, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont. In the fall of
1987, Rubin Sierra produced the play at the Group Theater in Seattle,
Washington.
51
For the Seattle performance (the first with a non-veteran cast) Tracers
underwent another structural change, "The Resurrection"/"The Ghost
Dance" being modified, though not for the first time. "The Ghost
Dance" underwent several incarnations, beginning with Harry Stephens'
audition, where he performed a mime of a person unable to escape an
invisible box. The work-in-progress rendition of Tracers at the Odyssey
used that visual metaphor. However, Difusco wanted the actors to
participate in learning something physical while in the workshops. Eric
Emerson (Habu) taught them some Tai Chi. In the 1980 Odyssey run,
"The Resurrection"/"The Ghost Dance" was a combination of Stephens'
mime and the Tai Chi. The scene involved Baby San falling dead and the
others paying tribute, each in his qwn way. As Difusco describes it:
It's a resurrection, a raising of the dead. And we show the Wall
to show you that if this hadn't happened, there would be 59,000
other forty-year olds walking around this world, maybe doing
something good for the world. It's mostly about resurrection and
recognition.
52
The choreography changed again in Seattle with the addition of the
"Universal Greeting," a series of hand gestures, each with a specific
meaning.
53
Difusco had used the "Universal Greeting" in an earlier
production of Hair, which he also directed, and decided to include it in
Tracers as bridge between the actors on stage and the audience. Richard
Chaves (Dinky Dau) explains that "'The Ghost Dance's gestures are like:
connect. It's inviting the audience in."
54
Olympia Dukakis produced the play next at the New jersey Whole
Theater in Montclair for the 1987/1988 theatre season. When it closed
in Montclair, Tracers moved to The George Street Playhouse in New
Brunswick, New Jersey. On 7 February 1990, Tracers opened for four .
51
Difusco directed this production as well as playing the Dinky Dau role.
52
John DiFusco, Richard Chaves, and Mitch Hale, interview with author. Video
recording. Los Angeles, CA, 12 September 1994.
53
/bid.
54
/bid.
Tracers 67
performances between Wednesday and Saturday, at the Arizona State
University in Phoenix. The production was directed by Wanda
McHatton as part of the requirements for her Masters of Arts degree.
McHatton used an all student cast. Reviews of the production share one
thing in common. Despite the fact that the production was directed by
a young woman and performed almost exclusively by actors too young
to remember the war, reviewers still found the play to be "verytrue to
life."
55
In March 1990, the "hand grenade of a show"
56
was produced at the
California State University at Northridge with an all student cast as part
of the Los Angeles Olympic Festival. DiFusco directed his first teenage
cast, but the result was still"a show featuring some remarkably convinc-
ing grunts."
57
Peter Sellers, who produced the festival and had seen
Tracers in New York, spoke to DiFusco at the time about a possible
Kennedy Center production of the play-artistic differences suspended
the discussion.
58
Also in March 1990, the Denver Theater on Broadway produced
Tracers under the direction of Steven T angedal. Described by a Denver
critic as the "best thing ever done at Theater on Broadway,"
59
the
production garnered nominations for five Denver Drama Critics Circle
Awards: best play,_ best ensemble performance, best direction, best
lighting, and best sound.
60
The production won best ensemble perfor-
mance and was re-staged at Theater on Broadway a second time in
August 1994, also under the direction of Tangedal.
61
In September 1994, a Tracers reunion celebration resulted in two
benefit performances at the University of California, Los Angeles,
55
Francine Stahl, "War lives on in Tracers," State Review, 7 February 1990, 15.
56
Ray loynd, "Explosive Tracers Reopens Postwar Wounds," The Los Angeles
Times, 17 March 1990, F: 1.
57
/bid.
58
john Difusco, telephone interview with author, 7 September 1995.
59
Aian Stern, "Tracers tells unique war story," The Denver Post, 13 April 1990,
F: 1.
60
Sandra Dillard-Rosen, "Tracers tops theater nominations," The Denver Post,
21 August 1990, E:1.
61
Sandra Dillard-Rosen, "Vietnam drama worth repeating," The Denver Post,
12 March 1 994, E: 1 .
68 GILLILAN
Schoenberg Hall Theater. The production reunited four of the surviving
cast members from the original Los Angeles production: Richard Chaves
(Dinky Dau), John DiFusco (Doc), Rick Gal Iavan (Scooter), and Harry
Stephens (Professor).
62
The two performances, rehearsals, and several
planned takes were filmed, and a video version of the play is in post-
production.63
Upon release of the video, the evolution of Tracers will come to an
end, the play joining the myriad of other film and video representations
of Vietnam. However, because of Tracers' long development, this final
product has far more to offer than might be expected. DiFusco states:
We meet kids, kids that come to our rehearsals, or come to our
show and they think they're coming to see some kind of Steven
Segal thing. I like those movies. They're okay, they're action,
they're escapism, but they're not the truth about war. I think we
represent that truth and I' m really glad we finally were able to
put it on video.
64
It is ironic and appropriate that a fixed version of Tracers wi l l emerge at
the same time as the Hollywood popularity of the Vietnam veteran begins
to decline, but more on this later. I turn now to a description of the
critical reception of the play.
The Otis Guernsey's Best Plays of 1984/85 synopsis states that the
play developed from an improvisational process to a "frozen'' script
form,
65
but this description is far from the truth, as an examination of the
play's chronology makes clear. Under almost constant production since
1980, Tracers has undergone significant structural changes over time.
This evolution sets Tracers apart from other Vietnam dramas and films.
Tracers is "a personal play, not a political one. The actors incorporated
62
Two of the original cast members have passed away, Vincent Caristi and Merlin
Marston.
63
For this production a final change was made to the play's structure. Prior to
1994, songs from the 1960s and 1980s were used throughout the performance as
transitions between scenes. In this production the songs were replaced by an
instrumental and sound effects score.
64
John DiFusco, Richard Chaves, and Mitch Hale, interview with author. Video
recording. Los Angeles, CA, 12 September 1994.
65
Guernsey, 165.
Tracers 69
the play into their ongoing dealings with the war."
66
Or, as DiFusco
describes it: "Tracers is structured emotionally. It's not a story type
play."67
The 1985 New York and London productions of Tracers garnered the
bulk of the critical response, and three themes emerge in the reviews,
which describe Tracers as something more than other Vietnam dramas.
First, reviewers comment on the play's origins in the collaborative work
of a group of Vietnam veterans, or authorship by committee. This is
directly related to the second theme, the authenticity of the production,
a result of the actors' lived experiences as veterans. These two character-
istics of the play work together to heighten its emotional impact, creating
an almost documentary feel to the production, or "oral history for the
stage" as Guardian reviewer Nicholas dejongh described it.
68
Finally,
and more common in the academi.c criticism, is the non-linear structure
a_nd the ambiguous endings found in Tracers. I will address each of these
in turn.
The majority of work done on Vietnam dramas centers on the work
of David Rabe and other particular playwrights and their war plays, the
majority of which were written and staged from the late 1960s to the
mid-1970s.
69
lhese authors are regarded as "artists" with unique
perspectives on the war. In his book, Levitating the Pentagon, Jeffrey
Fenn complains that Tracers lacks a guiding consciousness and intensity,
individual perspective, and thematic unity.
70
He finds fault with the fact
that there is no central voice, no authority or auteur representing his
singular experience of the war.
However, this lack of an obvious central voice opens the Tracers text.
Written out of the memories and experienc:es of eight individuals, Tracers
explores the multiple voices of the veteran community, rather than a
i ndividual vision. Tracers is a series of intertwined stories speaking to
66
Hendrix, 3, 18.
67
john DiFusco, telephone interview with author, 7 September 1995.
68
Nicholas dejongh, Guardian review in the London Theater Record 5 (1985):
766.
69
For example: H. Wesley Balk's The Dramatization of 365 Days; Tom Cole's
Medal of Honor Rag; Amlin Grey's How I Got That Story; Arthur Kopit's Indians;
Emily Mann's Still Life; Terrence McNally's Botticelli; David Rabe's The Basic
Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers; Megan Terry' s Viet
Rock; Michael Weller's Moonchildren, etc.
7
Fenn, 29.
70 GILLILAN
many viewers/readers.
71
DiFusco states that he hopes Tracers wil l reach
several audiences:
. . . for veterans, I hope this can be a purging experience . .. . For
the uninitiated, I hope it' s informative. I hope they understand
some things about the war they didn't understand before, and I
hope they understand some things about veterans.
72
Tracers is a play drawn out of the veteran actors' hearts, minds, and
memories.
73
As the critic for The Nation describes it: "The play was
written and performed by Vietnam veterans. This fact makes all the
difference. The result is that, watching Tracers, you feel closer to the war
than anything else is likely to make you feel."
74
This is an example of the
second theme of the critical response, the play's authenticity.
For the critics, the ultimate value of Tracers resides in its ability to
"tell us exactly like it was,"
75
to take images overly familiar within the
mass media and infuse them with new legitimacy and emotion/
6
Edith
Oliver, reviewer for The New Yorker magazine, maintains that:
"However familiar sounding the material, this play is different. The
difference lies in the clarity with which it portrays confusion and
frustration."
77
This clarity, confusion, and frustration are all part of
Tracers' authenticity, its ability to dramatize the real events experienced
or witnessed by the actors themselves. This aspect even turned up in an
action-adventure fiction novel, Koko, where one of the characters is
described as having attended the New York production of Tracers:
71
1 would also argue that DiFusco's direction has provided Tracers with a
constant guiding consciousness. However, this is not necessarily apparent in an
examination of a singl e production and is outside the scope of this essay.
72
Bennetts, 19.
73
Bennetts, 4.
74
Paul Berman, "Theater," The Nation 240, 1985, 31 6-317.
75
Jim Hiley, Listener review in the London Theater Record 5, 16 (1985): 768.
76
Michael Feingold, " Tongues of War, " The Village Voice, 29 january 1985,
V:83.
77
Edith Oliver, " The Theater: Off Broadway," The New Yorker 60, 4 February
1985, 92.
Tracers 71
Tracers put you very close to Vietnam, and virtually every minute
of it called up pictures and echoes of his time there. He found
himself crying and laughi ng, undone by uncontrollable feelings.
78
A veteran who loaned the Phoenix production several film projectors
only asked for tickets in return. The director explained that the man gave
the tickets to his family so that they "could see what it [Vietnam] was
like," but he was unable to attend because the play brought back too
many memories.
79
Told from a multiple perspective, Tracers is able to maintain a
firsthand authenticity even when performed by actors too young to
remember the war, as was the case with the performances in Phoenix,
Northridge, and Denver in 1990.
80
This level of authenticity transforms
the drama into dramatized documentary or oral history,
81
the actors not
just acting, but re-enacting real experiences, giving an extra-theatrical
dimension to the performance.
82
The result is the characters' ability to
speak for the entire Vietnam generation and their bonds of " common
experience."
83
Or, as one reviewer summarizes: " If you don't know
anyone who fought in Vietnam, go see Tracers . .. you'll get to know six
who did."
84
Another criti c writes:
Subjects never go stale if freshly seen, heard, smelled, and felt.
All the expected scenes are here, but again and again something
particularized, pungent, and palpable to the imagination clinches
78
Peter Straub, Koko (New York: New American Library, 1988), 243.
79
Keira Wright, "Tracers: It's Vietnam conflict all over again," The Phoenix
Gazette, 3 February 1990.
80
Stern, 1.
8 1
Christopher Edwards, Spectator revi ew in the London Theater Record 5, 16
(1 985): 769.
82
deJongh, 766.
83
Ci ive Barnes, The New York Post revi ew in the New York Theater Critics'
Reviews 46, 4 (18 March 1995): 353.
84
Cruff, 15.
72 GILLILAN
them with the unexpected ... . A play that is more of a docu-
mentary, but that comes off as a play nonetheless.
85
However, there is a price to be paid for authenticity-in this case, a
straightforward linear narrative. Because Tracers tells many stories it
lacks a central protagonist, shifts locations and times in a non-linear
fashion, and includes multiple, contradictory endings. Toby Silverman
Zinman, in her article on the dramas of the Vietnam War, argues that
America's Vietnam plays, Tracers included, lack meaning and aesthetic
form.
86
For Zinman Tracers' fluctuations in time and setting is problem-
atic. However, she saves her harshest criticism for the end of the play:
... as the play approaches the paltry resolution provided by this
chronology, the stage action returns to Vietnam. Thus, the
structure mirrors the minds of the characters; these tracers are
more inescapable than their wheelchair. Additionally, there is
the implication that, just as tracers signify the approaching end
of a clip of ammunition and the need to reload, so the play's title
reflects the interminable firefight, the renewal of the war.
87
Zinman mistakes the function of Tracers' non-linear narrative, which
sets out not to tell a story, but to allow the audience to experience
Vietnam along with the veterans. This experience is complex, ambigu-
ous, and, in the end, incomplete. It is rooted in emotion. As veterans,
the actors' ability to draw the audience into the war occurs through an
artistic tapping of "primal" reality that does not conform to a linear
trajectory. The result is summed up by a reviewer for The New York
Times, who writes:
58.
When a nation's horror tale is told by its actual witnesses-and
told with an abundance of theatricality, a minimum of self-
pity-it can still bring an audience to grief. Many of the play's
85
John Simon, "Good Violence, Bad Sex," New York 18, 5, 4 February 1985, 56,
86
Toby Silverman Zinman, " Search and Destroy: The Drama of the Vietnam
War," Theater }ourna/42 (1) (March 1990): 6.
87
Zinman, 8.
Tracers 73
segments are straightforward oral histories ... . The concerns are
more primal than polemical.
88
These experiences do not constitute a renewal of the war, as Zinman
argues, but rather an experience and understanding of it. "Tracers not
only reports to tell us what it was like, but lets us feel what it was like."
89
Thus, far from destroying its own structure/
0
this spiral brings the
audience back to the beginning so the questions posed there (i.e. "How
does it feel to kill somebody?") can finally be answered by veteran and
non-veteran alike.
David DeRose, in his article on Vietnam dramas, also attacks Tracers,
stating that the play's narrative voice, juxtaposed with moments of high
emotional intensity, enables the veteran artists to communicate their war
experiences via their eventual grasp of their significance and conse-
quences. The actors are, in essence, "doing our thinking for us" DeRose
claims.
91
I would suggest that rather than interpreting the war for us
through subjective manipulation, Tracers allows each member of the
audience to share the experience and understand it in their own
subjective, individual terms. By necessity the experience remains
incomplete because Tracers itself is incomplete in any one particular
production. Zinman's "inconclusive conclusions"
92
reflect not shoddy
writing but the veterans' -and the culture's-journey-in-progress.
88
Frank Rich, "Stage: Tracers, Drama of Vietnam Veterans," The New York
Times, 22 January 1985,3:1.
This is not to say that Tracers cannot be read as a political critique of the war in
Vietnam. As producer Thomas Bird states, "The appeal of the play is that it says, 'We
are who we are because of Vietnam. You can accept us or not"' (Bernstein, 96).
This is a condemnation of the war at one level as DiFusco observes: "When the
truth is told about war, it cannot help but be a statement for peace." Oohn DiFusco,
"Director's Notes" in Tracers: A Reunion Celebration, 1994. The playbook for the
1994 Bar Triangle Entertainment production, Schoenberg Hall, University of
California, Los Angeles.)
89
Lawrence Christon, "Vietnam Nightmare in Tracers," The Los Angeles Times,
19 November 1985, Vl:1 .
90
Zinman, 10.
91
David j. DeRose, "A Dual Perspective: First-Person Narrative in Vietnam Film
and Drama," America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on the Literature and Film of the
Vietnam War, Owen W. Gilman and Lorrie Smith eds. (New York: Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1990), 109-119.
92
Zinman, 10.
74 GILLILAN
Through the fragmentation and juxtaposition of experiences, Tracers
points out the ambiguities and the contradictions of the overall experi-
ence of Vietnam, both then and now. Jeffrey Fenn, in his article on the
dramatic responses to Vietnam, describes three types of rites in plays
about the war: rites of separation, rites of experience, and rites of
reintegration. According to Fenn, Vietnam plays typically document the
progression of an individual through his induction into the army, his
experience overseas, and his attempts at reintegration into the society
from which he has been alienated as a consequence of his military
training and experiences. Typical of all of these plays, Fenn states, is the
failure of culture to support the process, resulting in the ultimate failure
of the rite. "Novitiates are left in an existential void, isolated and
alienated, separated by their experiences from the old order, but never
fully integrated into the new."
93
Fenn sees Tracers as also failing in these
terms.
However, Tracers, as of the 1985 performances, takes place in three
time periods: the present, just after the war, and during the war. This
allows for a dramatization of every phase of the combat infantryman's
life, from patrols and helicopter assaults to nightmares, flashbacks, and
verbal abuse by civilians, as well as a visit to the Vietnam Memorial.
94
Tracers integrates the rites of separation, experience, and reintegration,
not falling cleanly into any one particular category. This integrative
approach realistically portrays the range of experiences and responses
among the veteran authors. Tracers' ambiguous ending, with some of the
characters remaining alienated and separated and others achieving
integration, also mirrors the experiences of actual veterans within society.
The themes described above-authorship by committee, the play's
authenticity, and the non-linear narrative structure-work together to
make Tracers an experience rather than a story, an experience that unites
veterans and non-veterans, an experience that teaches, heals, and
remembers. As the critic for The Village Voice sums up:
Tracers is an attempt to bridge the gap between those who
served in Vietnam and those who didn't, an impossible task, but
93
jeffrey W. Fenn, "Vietnam: The Dramatic Response," Tell Me Lies About
Vietnam: Cultural Battles for the Meaning of the War, Alf Louvre and Jeffrey Walsh
eds. (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1988), 202.
94
Edward K. Eckert and William). Searl e, "Creative literature of the Vietnam
War: A Selective.Bibliography," Choice Oanuary 1987): 725-735.
Tracers 75
necessary if the two groups are going to have any hope of
sharing one nation and one history.
95
Tracers makes the turn from art to communication because:
In this case art itself is only a convention, presented as such
w ithout apology, for communicating something else, a burden
that lies between this particular set of artists and the rest of us,
containing some incomprehensible thing, waiting to be lifted up
by time, by history, by political change-a task that art, for all its
expressive usefulness, can' t finally accomplish.
96
Tracers taps the incomprehensible thing that is combat, and Don
Ringnolda describes the result in his article on Vietnam dramas as:
"taking the bloody glamour out of war."
97
Tracers is personal as well as
cultural "truth," and, as DiFusco describes:
Tracers is a surrealistic portrayal of the Vietnam war and its
veterans. The structure is emot ional rather than plot-orientated.
A series of stories intertwined .... It is meant to work on the
audience's heart and mind, in that order . ... It is a tribute to the
dead and a celebration of survival. Mostly, it stands on truth and
spirit.
98
DiFusco describes Tracers as emerging from a time of national silence
about the war and its veterans:
When we first did it, it was in a time of .. . silence. It was in a
time when nobody wanted to talk about it [the war] . The hawks
wanted to forget it because they considered it a failure, and the
95
Feingold, 83, 86.
97
Don Ringnolda, " Doing It Wrong Is Getting h Right, " Fourteen Landing Zones:
Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, Philip K. jason, ed. (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 1991), 72.
98
john DiF usco, "Synopsis," Tracers: A Reunion Celebration, 1994. The
playbook for the 1994 Bar Triangle Entertainment production, Schoenberg Hall,
University of California, Los Angeles.
76 GILLILAN
doves wanted to forget it because they considered it a disgrace.
And we [the veterans] were left in between .. ..
99
At the same time as Tracers made its debut, Jan Scruggs began working
to get the Vietnam Veterans Memorial built, and a hunger strike occurred
among the veterans at the V.A. Hospital in Brentwood. The silence was
cracked, and as DiFusco states, the veterans started coming out and
saying: ' " Wait a minute, you know. We deserve something here.' And
artistically we became a part of that."
100
When Tracers became a hit in
Los Angeles and later New York, DiFusco speculates that the play let
Hollywood know that it was finally okay to talk about the war again. The
silence was over.
101
As I stated earlier, the video version will be released as attention to
Vietnam and the veterans declines. CNN, as part of its coverage of the
20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, ran a segment on the films of the
Vietnam war, the commentator stating that the latest efforts coming out
of Hollywood were box office duds, and that the cycle of popularity ~
once again swinging away from the war and its veterans.
Tracers participates in the same processes Fenn attributes to
individual Vietnam dramas-the processes of separation, experience, and
reintegration. Begun in the silence of 1980, the play evolved within the
cultural context that elevated Vietnam and the veterans who fought the
war to near mythic status over the next decade. This cultural transforma-
tion is present in Tracers when the evolution of the play is taken into
account. Now, as the video version nears. completion, both the play and
our culture have apparently reached a stage of reintegration, the exact
nature of which remains to be seen. In any case the play will : "bring you
closer to the truth about one of this nation's most tragic episodes."
102
99
john DiFusco, Richard Chaves, and Mitch Hale, interview with author. Video
recording. Los Angeles, CA, 12 September 1994.
100/bid.
101/bid.
102
Kyle Lawson, "ASU actors hit target in Vi etnam drama Tracers," The Phoenix
Gazette, 9 February 1990.
Tracers 77
Future work on Tracers needs to address several issues. First, the
play's structural changes need to be analyzed in the context in which
they were enacted, both socio-culturally and personally within the lives
of the actors and writers. In particular, Tracers is not just a Vietnam
drama. The play also is able to evoke the decade of the 1960s for many
m e m ~ r s of the audience, whether they were veterans or anti-war
protestors.
103
How that historical aspect plays into Tracers' veracity needs
to be addressed.
Second, an examination of the relationship between the non-linear
narrative structure and the emotional qualities of the play needs to be
undertaken. Third, the extent to which DiFusco provided a guiding or
"auteur" influence on the play should. be examined. And lastly, Tracers
needs to be compared and contrasted to other Vietnam dramas, as well
as to other cultural representations of Vietnam-films, television series,
novels, and poetry. It is my hope that with the release of the video
version of Tracers, scholars will begin to look more closely at this rich
text.
I give the last word to the producer of Tracers: "All of those involved
with the production had one thing in common, their sincere passion and
commitment to the message that Tracers-brings. Honor, remembrance,
and respect in tribute, united in the demand for peace."
104
And to John
DiFusco, who articulates what might be Tracers' most lasting legacy:
I think Tracers is almost more important now because of how
America and the rest of the world is inundated with violence.
Young people don't realize that violence lives with you, haunts
you for the rest of your life. In that sense, I think it's more timely
now.
105
Tracers is determined through and through by its authors' frames of
reference, multiple and contradictory. From these particular ways of
seeing the world, DiFusco and the other actor/writers recreated the
experience of the war and gave audiences an understanding of the
warriors who fought it. Tracers has a particular resonance with history,
103
john Difusco, telephone conversation with the author, 10 February 1996.
104
"Producers Notes," Tracers: A Reunion Celebration, 1994. The playbook for
the 1994 Bar Triangle Entertainment production, Schoenberg Hall, University of
California, Los Angeles.
105
John Difusco, Richard Chaves, and Mitch Hale, interview with author. Video
recording. Los Angeles, CA, 12 September 1994.
78 GILLILAN
an authenticity or veracity of experience that was recognized by the
critics, even when they had other objections to the play. The nature and
essence of this veracity remains to be fully explored. As Dittmar and
Michaud state in their to From Hanoi to Hollywood,
representations of Vietnam are about power: the power to make war and
destroy lives; the power to make images; the power to challenge myths
and prevailing ideologies.
106
Tracers is a reassessment of personal as well
as national history and ideology. And, I believe, it has much to teach us
about the legacy of war and violence, and the meaning of "Vietnam."
106
Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, "American's Vietnam War Films: Marching
toward Denial," From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 1-15.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Fall 1996)
Reflections in the Mirror:
Public Arts Funding in the United States
STEPHEN NUNNS
It was one of those nights in New York. After standing around the
lobby of La MaMa for about an hour hoping for a ticket to a sold-out
production, my friend and I were turned away by a box office attendant.
Something of a mix between Blanche DuBois and the Marquis de Sade,
he leered at us through the box office window and said, "Ah told ya, ya
might not git in." We weren't about to give up so easily-we wanted our
experimental theatre and we wanted it now-and twenty minutes later
we found ourselves in another line snaking around the outside of
Performance Space 122 on First Avenue, waiting for tickets to Ron
Athey's 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life.
Although he hadn't appeared in New York City in almost a year and
a half, Athey was a celebrity of the moment, mostly because of a
Minneapolis Walker Art Center performance on March 5, 1994. The
actual production-which involved human "scarification" and
mutilation-came and went with little fuss. But it did generate a formal
complaint to Minnesota State health officials from audience member Jim
Berensen, which in turn brought the show to the attention of the
Minneapolis Star Tribune. The paper published two articles on the show
approximately a month later.
1
While there is little doubt that the Star
Tribune's coverage was both hyperbolic and misinformed (the longest
critique of the performance in the March 29th paper was by staff writer
Mary Abbe, who admitted in the article that she had never attended the
show), its effects were immediate and predictable. Within a month, art
debunkers like jesse Helms were denouncing the performance, and
liberal periodicals like The Village Voice and trade publications like
Theatre Communications Group's American Theatre were supporting the
work. The latter publications set Athey up as the right's new whipping
boy, suggesting he'd replaced the "NEA Four" (performance artists Karen
Finley, john Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, whose grants were
vetoed by NEA Chairperson John Frohnmayer in June 1990), Andres
1
Minneapolis Star Tribune, 24 and 29 March, 1994.
80
NUNNS
Serrano (whose 1987 work Piss Christ raised the ire of a variety of
Christian groups), and the late Robert Mapplethorpe (whose posthumous
1989 collection of photographs, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect
Moment, . became the standard-bearer for controversial NEA art) . Now
Athey was to become the latest excuse to eliminate the National
Endowment for the Arts. The implication of these articles-the most
extreme being a piece in the Voice in which the writer, Guy Trebay, went
on a shopping trip with Athey who was buying hypodermic needles for
the show
2
-was that Ron A t h e y ~ work was simply not that big a deal.
I went into the performance as a supporter. I had been spending the
last few months defending Athey to people who questioned the artistic
legitimacy of this material, since I was used to over-reaction from people
like Helms and the American Family Association's Reverend Donald
Wildman. I was also worried about the "slippery slope" of arts funding.
Like the question of free speech, I felt there was no such thing as a little
bit of censorship; obviously, there couldn't be a government rule book
about what was and what wasn't acceptable art. It was all or nothing.
All the same, I hadn't seen Athey's work. In order to be a true defender,
I had to see the material for myself.
There had been rumors of people fainting at the Minneapolis
performance, of live human mutilation, and of HIV-positive blood being
dripped on the audience. Unsubstantiated rumors, naturally, by those
involved in the politics of fear. However, my friend and I were taken
aback when audience members were asked to sign the following
statement:
RELEASE AND WAIVER OF ALL CLAIMS
I understand that in tonight's performance of 4 SCENES IN A
HARSH LIFE by Ron Athey blood will be drawn and prints from
it will be exhibited as part of the performance. By entering the
performance, I agree not to hold liable Ron Athey, Performance
Space 122 or its staff or Board of Directors, 122 Community
Center Inc or its staff or Board of Directors, or any other persons
connected with tonight's performance for any injuries, property
damage or incidents of any kind that may occur in connection
with .the performance. Further I understand and agree that I am
releasing the above mentioned parties from any and all claims of
any kind for loss, damages or costs incurred, now or in the
future, from any injuries, property damage or incidents of any
2
Guy Trebay, "Ron Athey's Slice of life," Village Voice, 1 November 1994, 38:
Public Arts Funding 81
kind that may occur in connection with the performance.
3
Sobering stuff, but we signed and went in.
Interestingly, none of the preliminary reports prepared me for Athey's
work. As we entered the theatre, a tableau vivant was set up on stage.
Athey, wearing something that looked like a monk's frock, stood center
stage. A woman, clothed only in a loincloth, her skin glistening with
either sweat or some kind ~ oil, stood beside him, her arms lashed
together and tied to the ceiling. A number of long, porcupine-like pins
stuck out of her back (a reference, perhaps, to Early Italian Renaissance
paintings depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian). A smoke machine
was on, so it w ~ s difficult to see, but it looked as if her back was
bleeding. She seemed to be trembling. Athey, who grew up in a strict
fundamentalist household, told an autobiographical story of his child-
hood preoccupation with saints and the first time he ever cut anyone with
a knife (it was his younger sister). He then went on to the "anointment
part of the ceremony" where assistants pulled people up from the
audience and anointed them on the head with the oil/body fluids from
the woman's back.
Two audience members left after this scene.
The next scene was entitled "Working Class Hell" and included the
now-famous cutting of patterns into a cast-member's skin, sopping up the
blood with paper towels, and pinning up the bloody towels on a
clothesline that spun out over the audience's head. Perhaps we were all
prepared for it, but unlike Minneapolis where "the audience reportedly
scrambled to get out from under the blood," in New York the audience
watched quietly, one might even say patiently. Nobody fainted.
Another person left after this scene.
There were three more scenes in one of which Athey, in a state of
extreme anxiety, inserted hypodermic needles into his arm and head,
which caused quite a bit of bleeding. Finally, there was a scene in which
Athey-again in the role of minister-"married" three women in his cast,
and played drums along with the rest of the cast while the women
danced unti I balls attached to their bodies ripped their skin, once again
causing quite a bit of bleeding. At the end of the performance, neither
my friend nor I applauded ("That didn't seem like the right thing to do,"
she said). As we got up to leave the theatre, I noticed that there was a
goodly amount of body fluid (blood and sweat) left on the floor of the
3
1nsert from program for 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life at Performance Space 122, 27-
30 October, 1994.
82 NUNNS
stage. A couple of stage hands with plastic gloves were left with the
unpleasant duty of cleaning the mess up.
Walking around in a daze later that evening, something that Athey
had said during the "marriage ceremony" stuck in my head. He said " I
dismiss-! refuse to acknowledge-a white, racist, middle-class, homo-
phobic culture," the implication being that these people on stage were
creating their own culture.
Of course, this is a bit disingenuous. First, simply " stealing" another
culture' s rituals-in this case, riffing on African tribal ceremonies-and
calling them your own is neither "original " nor endearing (I suspect a lot
of African-Americans would agree). More importantly, for Athey to
suggest that neither he nor his material is acknowledging a middle-class
bourgeois culture is patently ridiculous. Clearly, Athey and his work exist
because of this culture. He is a reaction against the culture-a counter-
culture; he is responding to it, rather than "recreating" it in a vacuum.
Whether or not one believes that Athey is talented, he is certainly
fulfilling one of the duties of the artist. As Representative Pat Williams
said in the House's re-authorization hearing on the National Endowment
for the Arts last year:
When we want to know how we look in the morning, we look
in the mirror. If we want to know what America looks l ike, I
suppose we are going to have to get America to look in the
mirror ... I maintain that artists possess the mirror.
4
Often, the reflection in that mirror is a troubling one.
Nevertheless, are we particularly surprised when these challenges to
the status quo are in turn challenged by the bourgeoisie in the form of a
reluctance to part with tax dollars? When I posed the question to my
friend that night, she replied, "Well, then, are you saying that no more
federal money should go to any performance art?" "Ah," !thought, "the
slippery slope again."
The argument seemed hyperbolic. It's all or nothing. There' s no
such thing as a little censorship. If funds are withheld from Ron Athey,
everyone's at risk. And therefore there will be no more funding for any
arts. After spending an hour watching something I felt was rather
exploitative and sensationalistic (not to mention amateurishly written and
performed), that logic seemed flawed.
4
House of Representatives, Subcommi ttee on Labor-Management Relations,
Committee on Education and Labor. Hearing on the National Endowment for the Arts
(Washington, D.C. : Government Printing Offi ce, 1994), 1.
Public Arts Funding 83
***
Ironically, only a year later, after a huge Republican victory in the
1 04th Congress and a Contract with America to be reckoned with, the all-
or-nothing argument assumed the weight of prophesy. In November of
last year, the NEA ended its Individual Artists Program-basically the only
program through which someone like Athey would be able to get federal
funds. Content restrictions (a long-time litmus test for arts advocates and
civil libertarians alike) prohibiting the Endowment from "promoting,
disseminating, sponsoring, or producing materials or performances that
depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual or excretory
activities or organs," or "denigrate the objects or beliefs or the adherents
of a particular religion,''
5
have been accepted by the NEA as a kind of
dance with the devil. After all, the beleaguered Endowment itself is
bracing for major cuts (32 percent in 1996 from 1995, 40 percent in each
of the following two years, according to the recent Senate bill) and worse
(planned total elimination in 1998).
6
Even arts-oriented publications seem resigned. An editorial in last
February's American Theatre stated that the NEA could yery well be
abolished outright or "allow[ed] to falter through benign neglect."
7
This
year, FYI, a newsletter published by the New York Foundation for the
Arts, featured a pragmatic article by visual artist Steven Durland entitled
"Post-Apocalyptic? Or Just Post-NEA?," which began:
Okay, I'm just going to assume the NEA is dead and gone.
Sentiment grows annually in Congress to kill it so let's just go
ahead and project its death as a logical conclusion.
8
It's silly to suggest that Athey was singularly responsible for this
although Robert Byrd, ex-chairman of the Senate Appropriations
Committee, which recommended the five percent cut in the Endowment
for the 1995 fiscal year (which was eventually reduced to two percent),
expressed dismay about Athey's Minneapolis performance. That Athey
did briefly become the new hot spot for the NEA is ironic, mostly because
the amount of money he received was either ridiculously small ($150 at
5
Barbara Janowitz, "Senate Restores Some Arts Funds," American Theatre,
October 1995, 108.
7
Peter Zesler, "Setting the Terms," American Theatre, February 1995, 5.
8
Steven Durland, "Post-Apocalypse? Or Just Post-NEA?," FYI, Winter 1995, 1.
84
NUNNS
the Walker) or non-existent (P.S. 122 went to great lengths making it clear
that no federal funds were used for its production) . By election time
Athey was already irrelevant, however, rarely mentioned in most articles
about the NEA. Tha't his notoriety lasted for such a brief period can't be
attributed to the minuscule amount of money involved. If that was the
case, the NEA with its piddling $167 million budget would also never be
an issue. However, the fact is NEA detractors have made dollars the
issue, deciding against a critique that focused on morality in favor of
good, old-fashioned fiscal responsibility. Art was no longer the point.
Federal money-or lack thereof-was.
***
The artistic community's reaction to the attacks by the right have
been similar to the left's defense of liberal causes-disorganized and
apologetic. Rather than simply reaffirm values and beliefs that may be
momentarily unpopular, artists and their supporters have attempted to
out-Republican the Republicans. NEA Chair jane Alexander is no
exception. Since her appointment in 1993, Ms. Alexander has spent a
lion's share of her time traveling throughout the United States, attending
sewing bees, school plays, and Native-American Folk Festivals, trying
rather disingenuously to suggest that this is where federal tax dollars are
going. Not surprisingly, this approach has failed. After all, folk arts
existed without federal subsidies for several hundred years (they have, of
course, metamorphosed over time, but that's what folk arts are supposed
to do), and no one can deny that a huge amount of funding goes to large
urban areas.
9
Interestingly enough, this kind of defense has actually turned the
tables. Whereas now the left takes a relatively unsophisticated view of
art, suggesting that, as Martha Bayles put it in an op-ed piece for The New
York Times, art should be "as bland and benign as a cup of chamomile
tea,'
110
the right sees art for what it always has been: a dangerous and
subversive critique of the status quo. This holds true for even the most
innocuous of artists, say, Norman Rockwell. What most people fail to
see is that Rockwell's anecdotal scenes of small-town life didn't simply
reflect his world (he was, after all, born in New York City). They were
actually a challenge-a challenge asking whether this simple and naive
world of boys in watering holes; fat, jolly cops wandering down friendly
9
See Representative Williams' opening remarks, Hearing on the National
Endowment for the Arts, 1994, 3.
10
Martha Bayles, "The Philistine Consensus," The New York Times, 30 January
1995, A:19.
Public Arts Funding 85
streets; and brave soldiers returning physically and emotionally intact
from the war could actually exist during and after the destitution of the
Great Depression, and the death and destruction of World War II.
When Jesse Helms attacks a Robert Mapplethorpe or an Andres
Serrano, he knows what he's talking about. These artists explore aspects
of our culture (homosexuality and sacrilege) that some of us have acted
upon and that all of us have certainly thought about. That's precisely
what makes Helms uncomfortable. Although I'm not a big fan of Ron
Athey, I can appreciate his specific, important, and disturbing presenta-
tion of the American experience. As he wrote in his program notes:
It' s too easy to write off "autobiographical work," and avoid
looking at the issues: scenarios born from grieving AIDS deaths
including my/our own HIV infection, collapse of the "American
Dream," hate crimes endured for being queer, a national history
of drug abuse.
11
Like it or not, Mapplethorpe, Serrano, and Athey are indeed artists. They
are celebrants of individualism and free-thought, and as such they are all
inherently American. They are also extremely dangerous. And danger,
not chamomile tea, is what art should be about.
***
This is the core of the problem. There is an inherent problem with
spending public funds on something that, by definition, flies in the face
of that public's moral and ethical standards. Newt Gingrich criticizes the
NEA for being "self-selected elites using tax money to pay off their
friends,"
12
the implication being that the Federal government shouldn't
throw its money away on such trivia. Gingrich is only half right, and
once again, his colleague Senator Helms fills in the rest of the picture.
"I say again, Mr. President," he thundered during the debate in the
Senate over Piss Christ in 1989, "[Andres Serrano] is not an artist. He is
a jerk."
13
Helms knows better than to suggest that this art business is
frivolous; he's far more worried that these "jerks" will end up as the pied
11
Ron Athey, " Ron Athey on 4 Scenes in New York," published in the program
for 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life at Performance Space 122, 27-30 October, 1994.
12
Newt Gingrich, quoted in Bayles, "The Philistine Consensus."
13
jesse Helms, "Debate in Senate over the NEA, May 18, 1989," quoted in
Culture Wars; Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, ed. by Richard
Bolton (New York: New Press, 1992), 30.
86 NUNNS
pipers for the masses, leading them down the immoral road to national
ruin. In this post-Cold War world where there are no ideological foes
except those in the mirror, this is the true issue at hand. Federal subsidies
for artists create in-house social critics, and at a time when this country
is feeling sensitive and confused about its national identity, it's not
surprising that these commentators have become the enemy.
All of this implies that the debate about public funding for the arts is
new. Indeed, the controversy about the NEA really did not begin until
1989 with the Serrano case (the same year, it's worth pointing out, that
the Berlin Wall came tumbling down). Until then, things were quiet at
the NEA. While there were a couple of minor scraps with politicians
(Erica jong's thanks to the agency in Fear of Flying's acknowledgements
being one of the more notable), the Endowment had gotten off relatively
lightly since its founding in September 1965. Nevertheless, this wasn't
the first fracas between the arts and government in this country.
***
In 1936, the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project
had been in existence for only a year. The mother of all welfare
programs, the WPA not only over-saw the construction of thousands of
buildings and more than half a million miles of public roads, but
included a number of other programs designed specifically to assist artists
through the economic devastation of the Depression. These included the
Federal Arts Project, the Federal Writers Project, and the Federal Theatre
Project.
The Theatre Project had a number of successes in New York (Orson
Welles' African-American version of Macbeth, for example) and, perhaps
more importantly, in the heartland as well. Although Charlton Heston's
recent suggestion that "before the NEA, theatre was confined to a twenty-
block radius in New York City"
14
may have proved that his heart was in
the right place (and a peculiar one at that, considering the actor's past
endorsement of such right-wing playpens as the National Rifle Associa-
tion), the fact is that the WPA's Theatre Project had created a regional
theatre phenomenon over thirty years before the Endowment. Indeed,
theatre has been part of the American cultural landscape ever since the
advent of the railroad systerJl, which carried New York touring compa-
nies to the rest of the country. By the end of the nineteenth century,
there were over five thousand theatres throughout the nation, up from
14
See Frank Rich, "Saviors of the Right (Conservative Arts Patrons Ready to
Defend the National Endowment for the Arts)," The New York Times, 19 January
1995, A:19.
Public Arts Funding 87
forty at the time of the 1848 Gold Rush.
15
All the same, the WPA's
Theatre Project did mark the beginning of a true "regional voice" for
local artists, which in turn led to controversy. As Walter Pel I wrote in the
magazine New Theatre in 1937:
Throughout the United States, WPA h;3.s succeeded in making a
new audience theatre-conscious ... a critical taste based on a
consciousness of the social function of the theatre has been
quick in developing. This evolution has been reflected in the
character of the plays presented . . . .
In Mt. Angel, Oregon, in one of the greatest flax centers of the
world, the Federal Theatre of Portland created a flax pageant
which pictured the exploitation of the workers in graphic terms.
In Birmingham, Alabama, Altars of Steel has been collectively
written out of the local experiences of steel workers.
16
Not surprisingly, the prospect of making political "workers' theatre"
(read, Communist) with federal monies raised the hackles of many
politicians. Events came to a head on January 23, 1936, when Elmer
Rice, Regional Director of the Theatre Project for New York (and a well-
known playwright), resigned over a controversy involving the Theatre
Proj ect's first "edition" of The Living Newspaper, a piece titled Ethiopia.
The play, which dramatized the events leading up to Mussolini's invasion
the year before and the League of Nations' inability to react, raised the ire
of the Roosevelt administration which at the time was officially neutral
regarding European politics. As the play readied for production at the
beginning of 1936, Jacob Baker, Assistant Administrator of the WPA,
ordered a number of drastic script changes (Baker had also called off an
earlier Federal Theatre Project in Chicago because of its uncompl imen-
tary depiction of the local Democratic administration). When Rice
refused to make the changes, Baker issued the following statement:
When difficulties have arisen in the past ... you have proposed
either to resign or to take the difficulties to the press. Now that
a problem has arisen in connection with a dramatization that
may affect our international relations, you renew your proposal
of resignation to [WPA Administrator Harry] Hopkins. This time
15
Stephen Langley, Theatre Management and Production in America (New York:
Drama Book Publishers, 1990), 120-121.
16
Walter Pel!, "Which Way the Federal Theatre?," New Theatre, April 1937, 7-8.
88 NUNNS
I accept it, effective upon receipt of the letter.
17
Rice was not about to take this lying down. As a final duty, he
arranged for an open rehearsal of the play at the Biltmore Theatre the
next day at noon-minus sets and costumes-for members of the press.
At the performance, he handed out a letter which said in part:
The implied charge that a carefully documented factual presenta-
tion of public events could conceivably affect our international
relations is absurd ... Mr. Baker is merely trying to raise a
smoke-screen to conceal the real issue. That issue is clearly free
speech ....
. . . The issue of free speech and the preservation of the bi II of
rights seem to me of greater moment today than they have ever
been in the history of America. I cannot conscientiously remain
in the service of a government which plays the shabby game of
partisan politics at the expense of freedom and the principals of
democracy.
18
The following day, Brooks Atkinson reviewed the play for the New
York Times. While acknowledging that the play "is no masterpiece," he
found the production "sobering and impressive." More importantly, he
recognized the complexity of the issue, particularly regarding free speech .
. . . any one can understand the government's unwillingness to
sponsor out of public funds a play that would certainly be
misinterpreted in Italy. The international situation is danger-
ously sensitive; officially we are neutral ... it would be miscon-
strued in Italy as evidence of American animosity, subsidized by
the government, and it would provide another irritant in
diplomacy.
But the theatre is reduced to innocuous commonplaces when it
has to conform to diplomatic manners. This episode ... shows
how futile it is to expect the theatre to be anything but a
sideshow under government supervision . ..
17
Jacob Baker in a l etter to Elmer Ri ce, quoted in " The WPA Theaters and
Censorship," by John Howard Lawson, New Theatre, February 1936, 3.
18
Eimer Rice, "A Statement by Elmer Rice," New Theatre, February 1936, 2.
Public Arts Funding 89
. .. What we all know now is that a free theatre cannot be a
government enterprise.
19
***
Like all artists since who have found themselves in a similar situation,
Rice invoked his First Amendment rights. Indeed, one could interpret the
quickness with which artists and NEA supporters quote the Constitution
as an indication that they are well-acquainted with the document.
Unfortunately, that's not the case.
A close reading points out the flaws. The initial problem is obvious:
while the First Amendment is very specific in its support of freedom of
speech, many politicians with anti-funding tendencies have been equally
specific in their criticism. Artists, they claim, are always free to do and
say what they want, but at their own-or at private-expense. Certainly
there is nothing in the Constitution regarding subsidized speech.
However, as Stanley Brubaker points out in an article published in
The Public Interest, "In Praise of Censorship," the document is con-
cerned with people's rights, not virtues. According to the Fifth Amend-
ment, no one may be "deprived of life, liberty, and property." Censor-
ship, regardlessof where the money's coming from, is verboten since, as
Brubaker puts it, it "meddles with mens' souls."
20
So, perhaps Rice was
correct. In the case of Ethiopia, there was a clear case of censorship on
the WPA's, and therefore the government's, part. Or was there? Almost
since its inception, the Supreme Court has made it perfectly clear that the
government could limit free speech. As Archibald Cox puts it, the First
Amendment protects "expressions separable from conduct harmful to
other individuals and the community,"
21
and restrictions on such conduct
do not constitute "censorship." Since the country was on the brink of the
Second World War, a piece like Ethiopia, with its obvious anti-fascist
slant (even Rice and the authors with all their "factual presentation" talk
couldn't disagree with that), could be considered the theatrical equivalent
to shouting "Fire!" in a crowded movie house. Only in this case, the
19
Brooks Atkinson, "Ethiopia, the First Issue of The Living Newspaper, Which the
Federal Theatre Cannot Publish," The New York Times, 25 January 1936 (n.p.).
20
Stanley C. Brubaker, "In Praise of Censorship," The Public Interest, no. 114,
Winter 1994, 50.
21
Archibald Cox, quoted in "There' s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a
Good Thing, Too," by Stanley Fish in Debating P.C., ed. by Paul Berman (New York:
Laurel Trade Paperback, 1992), 235.
90 NUNNS
movie house was the whole industrialized world.
Of course, it's worth noting that the definition of what conduct is
"harmful" has always been up for debate. Oliver Wendell Holmes shed
light on the issue in the 1919 decision Schenck v. United States, when
he wrote that "the question in every case is whether the words are used
in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and
present danger ... It is a question of proximity and degree."
22
It's also
worth mentioning that in the specific case of Ethiopia, history proved
Rice right.
The other constitutional issue which rarely comes up-but which
Brubaker also notes in his article-is in Article One, Section Eight, which
lists the limited powers of a federal government. There, according once
again to Brubaker, it states that the Congress will have the power "to
promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts ... " He defines
"useful arts" as "agriculture, medicine, commerce, and engineering. Not
the fine, soul improving arts-like music, poetry, painting, drama and
literature. No censorship, but no funding."
23
Brubaker's argument is persuasive-what else could a "useful art"
be?-until one takes the trouble to actually check the source. Indeed,
with a subtle editing job, he has changed the meaning of the terms. The
text of the Constitution reads "Congress shall have the power ... To
promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Brubaker's addition of
"the" implies that "the useful arts" is a specific term-quite appropriate
for his conservative agenda-when in fact the founding fathers used a far
more ambiguous term.
So much for "no funding." Upon reading this, an artist might think
that the creators of the Constitution have given her a green light for
government subsidies. But this proves not to be the case. "To promote
the Progress of Science and useful Arts," it says, "by securing for limited
Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective
Writings and Discoveries."
24
The Article is the justification behind the
creation of a Copyright Office and perhaps the Library of Congress-two
government agencies that are important to creators of all kinds-but it
certainly has nothing to do with government funding.
Running to the Constitution is a futile exercise for both sides. While
House Majority Speaker Dick Armey may have a point when he says
22
0iiver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Essential Holmes, ed. by Richard A. Posner
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 315.
23
Brubaker, 51.
24
Constitution, art. I, sec. 8.
Public Arts Funding 91
"there is no constitutional authority for this agency to exist,"
25
it's also
true that intellectuals, the poor, farmers, or, for that matter, middle-class
homeowners who write their mortgage interest off their income taxes also
have no constitutional right to government support. All of these groups
enjoy one form of welfare or another, and none of these benefits are
constitutionally protected. In fact, if this 208-year-old piece of paper was
our only guide to what the federal government could or couldn't spend
money on, our government would only fund the Treasury, the Armed
Forces, the Post Office, and, chances are, the Internal Revenue Service.
Perhaps this is what the new federalism is about, but it seems a
simplistic and naive take. The founding fathers may have been firm
believers in a free market but, as the very term "amendments" makes
clear, this was never viewed as a stagnant document. One would hope
we had learned something from the two hundred years that have passed
since the creation of the Constitution, years that have included two
depressions (one world-wide) and countless recessions. From a
pragmatic stance, federal regulations-which subsidize many segments
of society-are not only important for altruistic reasons. They're
necessary.
But how does a country decide what it will fund? The basic concept
of a federal government presupposes that there is some greater purpose
at work, some common good. The new federalism espoused by
contemporary Republicans, with its emphasis on decentralized power,
seems more intent on decimating the union than preserving it. (It's hard
to miss the irony that members of the party of Lincoln are the architects
of such a plan.) Obviously, nobody is interested in treading on state or
for that matter individual rights, but a strong federal government, one that
attempts to shape a vision and direction for the country, is what
federalism is all about. Without it, there is little reason to have a United
States of America at all.
Shaping a vision requires encouraging all aspects of culture, through
as many means as possible. Certainly European countries have realized
this for many years (Goethe's theatre was being federally subsidized in
_Weimar while the delegates in Philadelphia composed the Constitution).
But the United States is fundamentally different from other countries (and
democracies), not only because of its healthy disrespect for officially
sanctioned intellectualism but, more importantly, because its basic
conceptual structure is loaded with contradictions. Though it may seem
there is little reason for a federalist state if there is no overall concept of
25
Dick Armey, quoted in "Is the NEA's Number Up?" by Barbara Janowitz,
American Theatre, February 1995.
92 NUNNS
the common good, the United States was in fact created without such a
concept in mind. Isaiah Berlin argued- in his famous 1958 speech at
Oxford that there were two liberties: positive and negative. He said:
Pluralism, with the measure of "negative" liberty that it entails,
seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of
those who seek in the. great, disciplined, authoritarian structures
the ideal of "positive" self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the
whole of mankind. It is truer, because it does, at least, recognize
the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensu-
rable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another. To assume that
all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter
of inspection to determine the highest, seems to falsify our
knowledge that men are free agents, to represent moral decision
as an operation which a slide-rule, in principle, could perform.
26
No republic's charter or constitution exemplifies the concept of
negative liberty more than this country's Constitution and Bill of Rights.
These documents form a skeletal mechanism for a society. In a true
capitalist, laissez-faire spirit, the goals, the needs, and the values of the
society are left to the free market.
This poses problems. Basing rules for society on the concept that
there are no rules is pretzel logic. And whether this works for the good
of a society has proved questionable. The fact of the matter is that true
"negative liberty" has never existed in the U.S. for good reason: a free
market inevitably benefits the haves more than the have-nots. Federally-
controlled, "positive liberty" programs (including school lunches,
middle-class tax breaks, Medicare, and the NEA) are simply attempts at
the democratization of our society. Nevertheless, it's important to factor
in Berlin's concept when considering the direction we're going, since the
alternative, as we have seen, can open the door to fascism and total itari-
anism.
This conceptual struggle is at the heart of the debate over subsidies
for art and culture. The "simple" act of defining this country's
culture-and subsidizing it-is at odds with its constitutional structure.
In fact, both the WPA's arts projects and the NEA went to great lengths
not to be definitions of our culture: the WPA was simply a work-fare
program and the NEA, with its structure of artists' panels making grant
decisions, serves as an award of recognition by one's peers rather than by
26
1saiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," published in The Democracy Reader,
ed. by Diane Ravitch and Abigail Thernstrom (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 92.
Public Arts Funding 93
the society at large. The idea-to avoid "government-sanctioned" art-is
a commendable one. But it may be the Endowment's very
lack of authority as an official cultural voice that will prove to be its
undoing. Certainly, it has been the central argument of Pat Buchanan,
who considers it "the upholstered playpen of the arts and crafts au xi I iary
of the Eastern liberal establishment."
27
Ultimately, the NEA's problems are only a reflection of the nation's
cultural identity crisis. The Endowment, like Public Television and the
National Endowment for the Humanities, is simply an easier target than
other examples of government social construction. This is partly because
it is something that has never gone over very
well in a populist country, but more importantly it's because our insecure
society, struggling desperately for a unifying, monolithic definition of
itself, is hardly going to open its collective arms to embrace its in-house
critics. There is something ironic about a government that pays to have
its basic intellectual, moral and ethical values questioned. Still, it seems
obvious that such critiques are essential and ultimately serve a democ-
racy. (After all, the tradition goes back as far as the Ancient Greeks. The
apocryphal legend says that when a Syracusan tyrant asked Plato to
describe the Athenian constitution, Plato sent him the satirical plays of
Aristophane_s-complete with their biting satire of Ancient Greek
society-as documentation of Athens' liberty.)
28
Our European cohorts have less trouble with keeping full-time critics
on staff. Perhaps this is because their societies were never as
fundamentally populist as this one, and in most cases there is a basic (and
sometimes problematic) acceptance that social construction takes
precedence over individual rights. _ But maybe it's something else.
Perhaps a society simply needs time to mature before it can take the step
of questioning itself and its beliefs. Berlin ended his essay "Two
Concepts of Liberty" by quoting Joseph Schumpeter: "To realise the
relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly,
is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian."
29
Contemporary
philosopher Richard Rorty, in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,
27
Patrick Buchanan in a speech February 20, 1993, published in The World
Almanac and Book of Facts (Microsoft Bookshelf, 1993 Edition) (Microsoft Corp., c.
1987-1993).
28
"The Comic View," an introduction to Eight Great Comedies, ed. by Sylvan
Barnet, Morton Berman and William Burto (New York: New American Library,
1958), 13.
I
29
Berlin, 93.
94 NUNNS
describes such a person as an "ironist." These ironists are the intellectual
cornerstones of a liberal society, which he claims:
. .. has no purpose except to make life easier for poets and
revolutionaries while seeing to it that they make life harder for
others only by words, and not by deeds. It is a society whose
hero is the strong poet and the revolutionary because it recog-
nizes that it is what it is, has the morality it has, speaks the
language it does, not because it approximates the will of God or
the nature of man but because certain poets and revolutionaries
of the past spoke as they did.
30
It might take an extremely mature and confident society to I ive up to
these ironic expectations, and mature and confident are not exactly apt
descriptions of the United States at the end of the twentieth century. It
may simply be a matter of time-perhaps it takes longer than two
hundred and nineteen years. Or maybe it will never happen. This
society may never be able to I ive up to the expectations it has set for
itself.
In the meantime, the government seems determined to eviscerate the
National Endowment for the Arts, either through "privitization" or
indifference. And in a few years (it took less than twenty last time), after
this society has struggled a little more to define itself, some other subsidy
program will probably come around to take its place. For as much as
folks like Ron Athey, with their condemnations of our "racist, middle-
class, homophobic culture" may annoy us, we eventually find we miss
the mirrors they hold up.
30
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 60-61.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Fa/11996)
Parlor Combat
1
BRUCE MCCONACHIE
When I was invited to speak about the work of American theatre
scholars, it was suggested that I draw on my teaching as the basis for
some o(my comments. As many of you know, I have been involved in
the American Studies program for some time at William and Mary as well
as in the theatre department. So I thought it might be useful to ask a kind
of question that I have occasionally posed to my American Studies
students: Is there anything particularly "American" about American
scholarship in theatre history and criticism?
I hoped that by asking this question, I might be able to shed some
light on the divisions that are wracking most professional organizations
in our field. These controversies over our relations with American
professional theatre, the epistemological foundations of our knowledge,
and the future of theatre studies in the academy, to name just a few of our
prominent differences, continue to divide us. Our divisions are exacer-
bated, of course, by continuing bad news about the job market and
funding cuts. Sometimes conflicts can be productive, but not if they
remain at the level of namecalling and sloganeering. While I don't
expect that my comments will heal our divisions, I do hope they will give
us some perspective on our current dilemma.
Of course it would be fatuous for any American Studies scholar to
claim that the attributes she or he perceives in a particular phenomenon
are "uniquely" American. Nonetheless, there are characteristics-modes
of action, historical conflicts, and psycho-social concerns-that have
recurred in the cultures of the United States more frequently than in other
national cultures. To answer what might be "characteristically"
American about our current controversies, I turned to a book by an
Englishman, Rupert Wilkinson, entitled The Pursuit of American
Character.
2
Wilkinson examines various interpretations of what he terms
1
This article was originally presented as a "State of the Profession" address at the
American Society for Theatre Research in the fall of 1995. I have altered it slightly for
pub I ication here.
2
(New York: Harper and Row), 1988.
96 McCoNACHIE
the "American social character" that have appeared in print from the
1940s through the mid '80s. His aim is to tease out the commonalities
among these scholarly conclusions, especially those that cluster around
the tensions between individualism and community. Underlying these
interpretations, Wilkinson discerns several common fears that scholars
have emphasized as giving shape and direction to the lives of U.S.
citizens throughout much of their history. Of these, three fears are
particularly relevant to our professional controversies as theatre scholars:
The fear of being owned (including fears of dependence and of being
controlled and shaped by others); the fear of falling away (from past
virtue and promise); and the fear of falling apart (a fear of anarchy and
aimlessness).
My own take on Wilkinson is that his typical American fears provide
a suggestive starting point for an analysis of white American middle-class
life for the past hundred and fifty years, but have generally less to do with
the cultures of most 18th century Ameri<::ans or of black, hispanic, and
native dwellers in this land. Of course this shortcoming is largely
irrelevant if we wish to use Wilkinson to examine ourselves; like it or not,
the culture of theatre studies in the American academy remains predomi-
nately white and middle-class.
As Wilkinson recognizes, the fear of being owned is deeply
embedded in American historical experience. To counter this fear, some
Americans fought against British tyranny during the Revolution, against
slavery in the Civil War, against "the bosses" during industrial strikes,
and against sexism and racism throughout the modern era. As academ-
ics, our fear of being owned keeps us assertive about the few rights that
remain to us as faculty members and protective of our intellectual
property. One assumption animating this fear is that we already exercise
quite a-bit of control over our lives; we believe we have a lot of freedom
to lose. In this regard, we are quite unlike most Polish academics, for
example, whose historical experience has led them to believe that others
above them in the governmental hierarchy will continue to control their
professional lives, even now, after the fall of Communism.
Our fear of being owned often inflects and sometimes shapes our
scholarly disagreements, especially when they involve battles over
paradigms of knowledge. Like many other American academics, we
seem to have had a particularly difficult time adjusting to the fact that
how we construct our investigations and epistemologies both enables and
constrains what we can know. Some of us touting the benefits of
Lacanian theory or new historicism-and I include myself among the
latter group-have been too glib about the new insights opened up by
these perspectives; we have not wanted to recognize the limits set on our
independence by these forms of knowledge. Post-colonial scholars like
Parlor Combat 97
Homi Bhabha who have noted the limitation of Eurocentrism in these
paradigms have been right to complain.
3
On the other hand, traditional thinkers still wedded to empiricism
also assume the possibility of more scholarly independence than exists
in fact when they accuse their adversaries of being prisoners to an "ism."
No doubt, we've all heard the following overstatement in conversation
and occasionally read versions of it in print: "Of course I knew what her
(or his) conclusions were going to be because he's (or she's) a "
-and then you can fi II in the blank with the "ist" of your choice:
Marxist, feminist, deconstructivist, etc. All stereotyping contains enough
truth to be recognizable, and this slur is no exception. Given certain
definitions, modes of investigation, and narrative structures-all the
tropes and trappings of any "ism"-certain kinds of conclusions are more
likely than others. But I believe that this is a problem with all knowledge,
including empiricism, though many empiricists would deny it. American
scholars have a difficult time giving up on the idea of objective knowl-
edge because we want to believe-that the Truth (with a capitai"T"), like
the Individual, cannot be owned. In fact, our independence has always
been compromised; our paradigms, our constructions of knowledge, own
us as much as we own them. While it might be pleasant to recall what
the world looked like before the path of knowledge took its famous
"linguistic turn," we can't go home again.
This brings me to Wilkinson's second fear, the fear of falling away.
Politicians and pundits play on this fear quite a bit these days. Ameri-
cans, we are told, are in moral decline; we have lost the will tQ work
hard and to take responsibility for our own actions. "Will you tell me
how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication,
extravagance, v i e ~ and folly?" demanded john Adams in 1819.
4
Apparently, we've been falling away from a more pristine past for quite
a while. It began soon after 1630, when John Winthrop proclaimed the
Puritan settlement in the New World "a city on a hill" for the world to
emulate; if you start at utopia, history inevitably runs downhill. The
American fear of being owned proclaims our independence. The fear of
falling away decries excessive freedom and celebrates the vision of an
ordered community in the past.
As historians, we're right to be skeptical of rigid moralists and
nostalgic hand-wringers who evoke an image of a past golden age to
denigrate the present period of plastic and cyberspace. But visions of
3
See, for example, Bhabba's essays in The Location of Culture (London:
Routledge, 1994).
4
Quoted in Wilkinson, 80.
98 McCoNACHJE
historic wholeness are a part of our collective imagination and continue
to ghost our present actions. These ghosts whisper in our ears at
academic conferences, urging us to live up to past promises. Some of
them say, "Remember when knowledge was a fortress, built up carefully
from stones of evidence dragged into place by obedient Ph.D. students?
We can still complete the castle." Others command, "The American
theatre is in grave danger and the academy must save it! We've got to cut
out this theoretical foolishness and get back to the days when our
programs served the needs of the professional theatre." My own
particular ghost sounds like a political agitator from the sixties. He
(inevitably the voice is male) wheedles, "Hey man, remember when
theatre students and academics stood against the Establishment. Theatre
scholars unite! We can save the world." I have no doubt that these
ghosts and others like them will continue to haunt our gatherings.
Although we can' t banish them, our knowledge of their existence and
persuasiveness can keep them from dominating our conversations.
Regarding Wilkinson's final fear, there's substantial evidence that
Americans are frequently obsessed by a concern that their lives and
institutions are falling apart. Many other cultures tend to be more
tolerant of divorce, or civil strife, or individual isolation than that of the
American middle class. like the other fears, the fear of anarchy and
aimlessness is rooted in historical memory; coherent communities helped
to sustain life on the frontier and Americans fought a civil war over the
issue of national unity. As theatre academics, ~ l O S t of us live in depart-
ments that are fragmented by two distinctive, sometimes conflicting, but
equally important objectives: the goal of creating significant new
knowledge and the aim of educating students to produce exciting new
art. Lacking the kind of coherence in our programs that most of our
European counterparts in universities and conservatories take for granted,
it's no wonder that we're often fearful of our professional lives falling
apart.
The drive for unity, however, can stultify the flow'of new ideas and
the invention of new institutional structures to house them. In this
regard, I have been troubled by some of the more extreme attacks from
within theatre departments on the ideas and institutions of performance
studies. While I would agree with its critics that some of the theory and
much of the institutional base for this new interdiscipline remain weak,
I do believe that theatre historians and critics have much to learn from
scholars of performance studies and they from us. What strikes me about
our current disagreements, however, is the extent to which they reflect
American concerns about holding things together.
I have time for only one example. In the September 1995 issue of
Theatre Topics (5:2), Richard Hornby, in an article entitled "The Death
Parlor Combat 99
of Literature and History," attacked what he perceived as a "growing
tendency" toward the teaching of performance studies in theatre
departments. Hornby writes:
Performance theory today, when it deals with the theatre at all . . .
consists of semiotic analysis of theatrical presentation, sociological
analysis of the audience, anthropological analysis of exotic non-
western performance, or inflated discussion of avant-garde perfor-
mance here in the West. The results may be of interest to the
sociologist or anthropologist, but not to the American theatre
professional, nor to the American theatregoer (144).
There is much one might say about this passage. I shall restrict my
remarks to Hornby's assumption-a supposition that pervades his
article-that all scholarly writing on the theatre should be accessible and
interesting to theatre professionals. Frankly, I find this a startling and
chilling assumption. If taken to its logical conclusion, we ought never to
organize academic conferences or publish most of our articles because
so few theatre professionals will attend or read them. From Wilkinson's
point of view, Hornby's article is circle-the-wagons talk. Fearing that
theatre departments are losing coherence and direction, he calls for us to
restrict our community, banish dissenters, and repel exotic invaders. This
.logic may have had appeal on the Oregon Trail, but are we really so
fearful about our survival that we are willing to harness our intellectual
ambitions to the equally worthy, but very different task of educating
theatre professionals and theatregoers? Hornby's trail would lead theatre
departments to the Donner Pass.
Personally, I would welcome professionals and theatregoers into our
conferences and I'm glad that Hornby's recent book, The End of Acting,
implicitly invites them to join in our deliberations.
5
But they should
realize that our conversations concerning the advancement of knowledge
do not necessarily speak directly to their needs as creative artists. If we
are to work toward the purpose of encouraging cutting-edge scholarship,
our primary, though certainly not our exclusive audience must be other
scholars. And like scholars in all other fields, we must occasionally use
language that is difficult for the non-specialist to understand.
This brings me, finally, to the title of my talk, "Parlor Combat." Its
seemingly enigmatic subject will be apparent in the following famous
passage from Kenneth Burke's Philosophy of Literary Form, one of those
golden oldies from the '50s:
5
The End of Acting: A Radical View (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1992).
100
MCCONACHIE
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive,
others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated
discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you
exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun
long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified
to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a
while unti I you decide that you have caught the tenor of the
argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer
him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against
you, to either the embarrassment or gratificat ion of your opponent,
depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the
discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart.
And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
6
Burke's domestic setting is rhetorically designed, in part, to al lay the
kinds of fears that Everyscholar, including Wi lkinson's American variants,
regularly experiences. In Burke's allegory, we are part ly shaped by past
history and present discourse, but not wholly owned by them; we can
still put in our " oar" to steer the discussion in ways we deem important.
Notice that there is no foundation for Burke's parlor conversation; there
is no ideal origin to return to, no utopian past to fall away from. Scholars
pick up the discussion, as they must, in media res. Final ly, Burke
counters the fear of falling apart by strategically placing his images of
academic combat in a parlor. There are attacks, defenses, allegiances,
and alliances in Burke's story, but there is no blood. The battles among
scholars are contained by the rules of parlor rhetori c, in which persua-
sion, not conquest, gains temporary victory. While no final agreement
among the combatants will ever occur, the form of rhetoric itself imposes
a kind of coherence to the ongoing dancing of attitudes, to adopt another
Burkean phrase.
I'd like to conclude with a brief report about a parlor battle that's
been going on for over a century on the subject of blackface minstrelsy.
The discussion first heated up in 1849 when Frederick Douglass accused
antebellum minstrels of racism. Later, Whitman, Twain, and even W.E.B.
Dubois countered that minstrelsy drew on the traditions of black folk
culture. Bridging the academy and popular culture, Carl Wittke and
Constance Rourke substantiated the folk culture position through
historical argumentation. Ralph Ellison led the revisionist charge in 1958
6
The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Act ion (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of Californi a Press, 1973), 110-1 1. I am indebted to Frank
Lentricchia's discussion of this passage from Burke in his Crit i cism and Social Change
(Chicago: Univ. of Chi cago Press, 1983), 159-63.
Parlor Combat 101
and Robert Toll came to his defense in '74, both using much the same
evidence as before to argue the effects of racist stereotyping. Drawing on
neo-Marxist and structuralist assumptions, historians Alexander Saxton
and David Roediger reinforced this revisionism by examining the social
construction of whiteness within minstrelsy's primary audience, the
American working class.
The disagreements over mi.nstrelsy continue today, with Eric Lott
using post-structuralist and Lacanian approaches to redraw the battlelines
of the previous debate. Lott makes a case for the ambivalence of
minstrelsy with regard to its construction of race and class, an ambiva-
lence crucial to its historical effects.
7
Many of us have dipped our
11
0ar"
into this discussion, taking sides with Lott or others, through monographs,
book reviews, conference panels, and e-mai I conversations. And
rhetoricians beyond the academy continue to enter the parlor. Last fall
in Colonial Williamsburg the politics of racial representation, including
the legacy of minstrelsy, was the subject of heated debate when actors
presented a 18th century slave auction in its colonial milieu. As in
Burke's allegory, the rhetorical conflicts continue and show no signs of
abating.
So what are the implications of this model discussion for our
scholarly disagreements? There are several, but I wi-ll finish by focusing
on only two. The first is that the best parlor battles invariably cross the
boundaries of disciplines and paradigms and usually leap the wall
separating the academic from the mundane. Thus, we cannot hope to
contain and limit scholarly conversations on any topic worthy of debate.
Despite the obvious importance of minstrelsy in theatre history and
performance studies, our academic organizations will not be at the center
of this discussion. Indeed, the modernist notion of center and margin is
no longer applicable to scholarly conversations, if it ever was. Because
Burke's parlor contains no center stage, we must continue to learn the
language and rhetorical moves of other disciplines if we wish to be
players in significant scholarly debates.
Make no mistake: theatre and performance scholars have not
generally been in the front lines of ongoing rhetorical battles, even those
that affect us directly. How many of us have been asked to write an op-
ed piece about the attacks on the NEA or the NEH? With "performance"
emerging as a crucial category for understanding history, psychology, and
culture, however, our interests are now a focus for several o t ~ r
disciplines. Thus Burke's larger point-the importance of persuasion in
7
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
102 McCoNACHIE
continuing to shape the network of conversations-is potentially
empowering for us all. Will we accept the challenge? Will our scholar-
ship become a place where we can more fully engage such ongoing,
interdisciplinary discussions as the relation between role playing and
identity, staging and political power, performance and multiculturalism?
To do so requires that we approach such parlor battles with knowledge-
able hope, not historical fears. We have, of course, already made some
mqdest interventions in these ongoing conflicts. But if we retreat from
this challenge, our scholarly fate will be decided rhetorically by others.
Since these are the stakes, returning to the provincialism of the past is not
really an option.
So I say to all of you, strap on your arguments and let the battles
continue! But remember: Be polite and keep your voices down-we're
in a parlor.
CONTRIBUTORS
BRIAN RICHARDSON is an Assistant Professor in the English
Department of the University of Maryland. He has published a
number of articles on dramatic theory and criticism in journals
such as Comparative Drama, Poetics Today, Modern Drama,
Philological Quarterly, and Essays in Literature. His book Unlikely
Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative, will appear
in 1997.
SUSAN ANTHONY is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre History and
Criticism at the University of Maryland, College Park.
D.S. NEFF is an Associate Professor of English at the University of
Alabama in Huntsville. He has published articles on nineteenth-
century British literature, modern drama, contemporary literature,
Anglo-Irish literature, and modern literary theory in Literature and
Medicine, Research Studies, Eire-Ireland, Modern Fiction Studies,
Victorian Poetry, Victorian Newsletter, journal of English and
Germanic Philology, and The Yale journal of Criticism.
CINDA GILLILAN is a doctoral student in Media Studies in the
School of journalism and Mass Communication at the University
of Colorado, Boulder. Her areas of interest include the repre-
sentation of the Vietnam war and its veterans and of Native
Americans, as well as television 'zine fans/fandom.
STEPHEN NUNNS is an M.F.A. candidate in Dramaturgy at
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
BRUCE McCONACHIE is a Professor of American Studies at the
College of William and Mary, the author of several books and
numerous articles, and a member of the Editorial Board of the
journal of American Drama and Theatre.
103
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