THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 20, Number 2 Spring 2008
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THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 20, Number 2 Spring 2008
HEATHER S. NATHANS
Introduction
BARRY B. WITHAM
CONTENTS
Eggheads and Witches: Molly Kazan Boils the Left
SEBASTIAN TRAINOR
"It Sounds Too Much Like Comrade": The PreserYation of American
Ideals in Room Service
ELIZABETH OSBORNE
A Nation in Need: Revelations and Disaster Relief in The Federal
Theatre Project
lLKA SAAL
Making it Real?: Theatre in Times of Virtual Warfare
MARLIS SCHWEITZER
Singing Her Own Song: Writing the Female Press Agent Back Into
History
ADRIENNE C. MACKl
(Re)constructing Community and Identity: Harlem Experimental
Theatre and Social Protest
CONTRIBUTORS
5
9
29
49
65
87
107
141
jOURNAL OF AMERJCAN D RAMA AND THEATRE 20, NO. 2 (SPRJNG 2008)
INTRODUCTION
It is a great pleasure to introduce this exciting collection of essays writ-
ten and edited by members of the American Theatre and Drama Society.
ATDS has enjoyed a long and productive relationship with The Journal of
American Drama and Theatre, and we are excited to see that collaboration
enter its nineteenth year.!
For this spring's issue, we asked our authors to consider histories
that have been "hidden in plain sight," whether that might mean radical
interpretations of texts that had been deliberately concealed from audi-
ences, biographies obscured by political or social agendas, or undiscov-
ered tales buried in the archives.
2
The result is a collection of articles that
explores not only a series of dynamic and engaging moments in
American theatre history, but that challenges scholars to re-think the ways
in which they frame contemporary interpretations of familiar stories.
Both Barry Witham's "Eggheads and Witches: Molly Kazan
Boils the Left" and Sebastian Trainor's '"It Sounds Too Much Like
Comrade': The Preservation of American Ideals in Room Service" invite
readers to re-examine some of the less familiar events that shaped
American theatre history around the time of the Red Scare, but they each
approach the topic from very different perspectives. Witham's essay
traces the career of Molly Day Thacher Kazan, wife of Elia Kazan, and
author of some of his boldest public statements against American com-
munism. While Molly Kazan's contributions to American dramaturgy and
to her husband's political ideology may be familiar to scholars, her own
dramatic endeavors in which she attempted to stage her own political
beliefs are likely less so. Yet as Witham's essay reveals, Kazan's play, while
not commercially successful, forms an important piece of the ongoing
dialogue about theatre and ideology in 1950s American culture. Staged in
response to Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Kazan's drama presents the
"other side" of the story in the guise of a disillusioned university profes-
sor who sees one of his most promising students, a young African
American man, come under the sway of the communist agenda. That
I Spedal thanks are due tO the members of the ATDS Publications Comminee:
Jonathan Chambers, Dorothy Chansky, William Demastes, Michelle Granshaw, Kim
Marra, and Robert Vorlicky, as well as consultants Robin Bernstein and Harley Erdman.
2 This theme was inspired by the tide of a paper given at the 2007 ATDS Pre-
Conference by Chrystyna Dail on the litde-known history of Tony Award-winning light-
ing designer, Peggy Clark.
6
NATHANS
agenda had been "hidden in plain sight," although the young man's men-
tor refused to acknowledge it. It is the professor's na1ve and benevolent
blindness that Kazan suggests may put the nation in greater jeopardy
than any openly revolutionary action.
Trainor's essay on the popular comedy Room Service argues that
the numerous revisions inflicted on Allen Boretz and John Murray's wild-
ly successful script gradually excised its original anti-capitalist sub text. For
example, the 1937 play boasted a Russian waiter who advocated revolu-
tion to a group of dissipated and down-hearted businessmen. Within one
year the play had become a Marx Brothers' farce. By 1944 it had become
a musical vehicle for Frank Sinatra called Step Live!J and in 1953 it was
revived as both a showcase for the young Jack Lemmon and a final effort
to rescue the sagging fortunes of its blacklisted author. As Trainor notes,
every successive iteration became progressively less ideologically driven,
suggesting that in this case what was "hidden in plain sight," was not a
message of communist subversion, but rather the controlling hand of the
Hollywood censor determined to coerce the play into an acceptable and
lucrative property. Room Service remains popular to this day, with a recent
2007 production in SoHo and ongoing regional productions across the
country. Yet its numerous transformations from its 1937 debut to its
1953 revival suggest that audiences and scholars should pay special atten-
tion to the changes made to even the most seemingly innocuous works.
Elizabeth Osborne and Ilka Saal's essays address theatre's
response to moments of crisis-whether in the form of a natural disas-
ter, or war and terrorism. Both authors highlight the hidden issues that
often lie concealed among the more visible or attention-getting ones. For
example, Osborne's article, "A Nation in Need: Revelations and Disaster
Relief in the Federal Theatre Proj ect," investigates the Federal Theatre
Proj ect's response to the great mid-western floods in 1937. Yet, as
Osborne notes, the floods brought to light larger problems of racial prej-
udice and segregation that the FTP not only seemed unable to address,
but that they were perhaps unwilh.ng to take on during their time in the
refugee camps. As Osborne observes, while it would be hard to blame the
FTP for failing to solve deep-seated habits of discrimination during their
brief tenure with the flood victims, she also rightly states that the com-
pany director's own records of his time with the traveling FTP units sug-
gest that the problem, if not the solution, loomed large in his mind.
Osborne's essay also underscores the way in which the archive militates
against scholars seeking to uncover these kinds of histories. The very cat-
aloging structure of the FTP records means that episodes such as the
flood unit's trips from Ohio to Tennessee remain essentially hidden in a
INTRODUCTION 7
record focused on famous names or major regional centers.
Saal's "Making it Real? Theatre in Times of Virtual Warfare"
challenges readers to re-think the ways in which familiar narrative tropes
are constructed around contemporary international crises, such as the
Persian Gulf War. Using British playwright Sarah Kanes's Blasted (1995)
and American playwright Jonathan Kalb's Gulliver's Choice (2004), Saal
offers a transatlantic comparison of responses to contemporary warfare.
Yet, as she notes, the plays themselves are never merely about war-
instead, war seems to exacerbate long-standing patterns of racism,
homophobia, and sexism that have been concealed by a veneer of civi-
lization.
Marlis Schweitzer and Adrienne Macki each explore archival
records that have often marginalized women and people of color.
Schweitzer's "Singing Her Own Song: Writing the Female Press Agent
Back into History," recuperates the female publicity agent, once a popu-
lar and powerful figure in the American theatre. As Schweitzer suggests,
the female press agent gained notoriety during the end of the nineteenth
century, and was often credited with a greater ingenuity and more emo-
tional insight than her male counterpart- two traits that made her ideal-
ly suited to dealing with a fickl e American public. Yet, according to
Schweitzer, these women often struggled to establish themselves in a pre-
dominately masculine profession, working carefully to balance their rep-
utations as hard workers with their reputations as "ladies." Some suc-
ceeded by transforming themselves into "personalities" whose notoriety
occasionally outstripped that of their clients.
Macki's "(Re)constructing Community and Identity: Harlem
Experimental Theatre and Social Protest" offers new insights into the
largely vanished world of the Harlem Experimental Theatre. She maps
the hidden "interracial networks" of the Little Theatre movement and
1920s Harlem to suggest the ways in which the HET helped to construct
both a sense of community and a sense of modern African American
identity in American theatre. As a theatre dedicated specifically to artists
and community development, the HET occupied a unique position in
early twentieth-century American theatre, one that Macki suggests has
been obscured by more explicitly political or experimental troupes.
Each of the authors in this issue brings rich insights to the ever-
evolving field of American theatre scholarship. It has been a pleasure and
a privilege to collaborate with them on this volume.
JOURNAL OF MIERJCAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 20, NO. 2 (SPRING 2008)
EGGHEADS AND WITCHES: MOLLY KAzAN BOILS THE LEFT
BARRY B. WITHAM
Molly Day Thacher Kazan died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage three
weeks after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and her funeral, like many
other events that cold winter, was obscured by a nation in mourning.
Those attending, however, had to be content with standing room only
among a roster which was the firmament of the American theatre.
Williams, Miller, Burrows, Chayevsky, Logan, Schulberg, Strasberg,
Clurman, loge, Whitehead, and Dunnock were numbered in the over 400
that stretched the capacity of St. Clement's Episcopal Church on West
Forty-sixth Street. Among the recited tributes was a poem that Molly
Kazan had written just days earlier, on Thanksgiving 1963, mourning the
dead president.
Molly was 56 and although her obituary announced her as a
"playwright," her resume is relatively thin and does not account either for
the outpouring at her funeral or the esteem in which she was held by her
peers. A few days later, Robert Anderson wrote a tribute to Molly which
was published as a letter in the New York Times and which summarizes
why so many grieved.
She was an appreciator of other people's plays and tal-
ents, and that is something very difficult for a playwright
to be. At Theatre Union, the Group Theatre, the
Theatre Guild and Actors Studio, Molly read thousands
of scripts by young playwrights and advised, encouraged
and followed up her enthusiasms with action which
opened the way for many of the playwrights of today's
theatre .... Molly read all my plays hot out of the type-
writer. It was she who carried a copy of my play, Tea and
Sympatf?y, to Gadge .... We who were constandy in her
debt as friends have suffered a great personal loss. The
theatre has also suffered a loss, not just in the plays she
might have written, but also in the plays she might have
read.
1
1
Robert Anderson, "A Playwright's Tribute to Molly Kazan," N ew York Times,
22 December 1963, X-5.
10 WITHAM
Long before American dramaturgy became popular and in an era
when "play doctoring" was the out-of-town remedy for Broadway-bound
plays and musicals, Molly Kazan insisted on the need for identifying and
nurturing promising playwrights. At the Theatre Union and with the
Group, she spoke and wrote passionately about the need to make the the-
atre relevant and political. Although she had a patrician background and
could trace her ancestors to the Mayflower, Molly was a Progressive and
an ardent New Dealer who had been trained to embrace a visionary the-
atre.2Under the tutelage of Hallie Flanagan at Vassar (who instilled in her
a sense of the urgent link between theatre and a vital national culture),
Thacher wrote a controversial anti-war play. Later, at Yale Drama School,
she met Kazan and Alan Baxter who brought her into the growing corps
of Group Theatre admirers. In spite of an often stormy relationship with
Clurman, Thacher was admired by Group members, and by the end of
the decade her vision of identifying and encouraging writers was institut-
ed at their summer retreat in Smithtown, New York. Wendy Smith
describes the scene from the summer of 1939:
Molly Thacher kept her six playwrights sequestered on
the second floor of one of the dorms, instructing them
never to answer the phone or let anyone distract them
from their work. She had great hopes for her proteges,
who included Arnold Sundgaard, author of Spirochete,
one of the Federal Theatre Project's most controversial
Living Newspapers; Jerome Weidman, whose satirical
novel of the garment industry, I Can Get it For You
Wholesale, had been a best seller in 1937; and Charles
O'Neill, a young playwright whose adaptation of a
Danish play called The Melody That Got Lost she'd been
pleading with Clurman to produce for more than a year.
Thacher knew how unwise it was for the Group to
depend so heavily on Odets; she was trying to prepare
for the company's future.3
Unfortunately, the Group was very close to the end of their productive
2 Biographical sketches frequently list Molly as the granddaughter of the
President of Yale. Acrually her grandfather, Thomas Anthony Thacher was a distin-
guished Classics professor at Yale who was married to Elizabeth Day, the daughter of uni-
versity president, Jeremiah Day.
3 Wendy Smith, Real Ufe Drama (New York: Grove, 1999), 377.
EGGHEADS AND WITCHES 11
life in that turbulent summer, and Thacher, in spite of her continued
career as writer and dramaturg, was poised to have her own achievements
eclipsed by her talented and combative husband, Elia Kazan.
When Molly Kazan is remembered today in the annals of the
professional theatre, it is not for her tireless advocacy on the part of
American playwrights, nor her lifelong commitment to expanding
America's dramatic canon. Instead it is for two events, both associated
with her husband's contested relationship with the House Committee on
Un-American Activities. The first is her authorship of Kazan's famous "A
Statement" published in the New York Times following the testimony in
which he named the names of his former Communist colleagues in the
Group Theatre. She is frequently cited as the driving moral force behind
this statement, drawing upon the outrage that she experienced when
Communist organizer V ]. Jerome and others had tried to bully Kazan
into "democratizing" the Group Theatre in 1934. Richard Schickel
recounts her famous rejoinder when Jerome had tried to meddle with the
Theatre of Action: "What the hell does Jerome know about the opera-
tion of a theatre?"4
The second is an oft-repeated and very brief encounter between
Molly and Arthur Miller when she discovered that he was going to write
a play about the witch trials in Salem, with special reference to contem-
porary events in the United States. Miller recalls it this way in his autobi-
ography:
She instantly understood what my destination meant,
and her eyes widened in sudden apprehension and pos-
sibly anger. ''You're not going to equate witches with
this!" ... Molly's instant reaction against the Salem anal-
ogy would be, as I already sensed, the strongest objec-
tions to such a play. "There are communists," it would
be repeatedly said, "but there never were any witches."S
The intersection of these two moments reveals a great deal
about Molly Kazan and her subsequent career. ''A Statement" is almost
surely her composition, and while Schickel and others consider it possi-
bly the worst mistake of Elia Kazan's career, it offers an accurate account
of how he and Molly viewed the cultural politics of the period.
Communists were evil and a threat to national security. Liberals should
4 Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 48-49.
5 Arthur Miller, Timebends (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 335, 339.
12 WITHAM
stand up and renounce them and not be duped into protecting their lies
with more lies. And those who stood up should be rewarded and not
scorned. The last line of "A Statement" does not plead for work for her
husband; it announces that he will continue to make motion pictures.
As for the conversation with Miller about Salem (often invoked
as a justification for hunting real subversives) .Miller's account suggests he
had no very high opinion of Molly Kazan or her talent. His version clear-
ly casts her in the role of pleading wife, "standing in the drizzle there, a
woman fighting for her husband's career," while also questioning her acu-
ity as dramatic critic-"She had repeatedly pressed me long before the
Salesman rehearsals began, to eliminate Uncle Ben and all the scenes in the
past as unnecessary."6
What remains untold is how Molly relentlessly carried the anti-
Communist fight forward, beyond "A Statement" and her run-in with
Miller, culminating in the 1957 Broadway production of The Egghead, her
play about Communists in America, and her response to Arthur Miller
and the "misguided left's" belief in witches. In spite of increasing ten-
sions with the philandering Elia Kazan, Molly continued to defend his
public position of good conscience and moral outrage while seeking to
establish her own playwriting credentials independent of her notorious
husband. In this article I explore how the dramaturgy of ''A Statement"
became the basis for a play about Communists in America and how the
play attempted to expose the villainy of the Party and the moral blind-
ness of American liberalism.
In order to gauge the passion of Molly's indignation, as well as
the ethical journey that she and Elia would undertake, it is instructive to
review her husband's first testimony before the infamous House
Committee on Do-American Activities on 14 January 1952. Unlike his
later testimony (1 0 April 19 52) which was almost immediately released to
the press, the transcript of the initial executive session remained secret
for fifty years and only became available in public domain in 2002.
Subsequently it was published by Brian Neve in the Historical Journal of
Film, Radio and Television.
7
While the transcript has been referenced by
both Kazan in his autobiography and Wendy Smith in her study of the
Group Theatre, reading the actual dialogue highlights how bitterly Kazan
reacted to the threat of the Communists and how aware he was of the
6 Miller, Timebends, 334.
7
Brian Neve "Elia Kazan's First Testimony to the House Committee on Un-
American Activities, Executive Session, 14 January 1952," Historical Journal of Film, Radio
and Television 25, no. 2 (June, 2005): 251 -72.
EGGHEADS AND WITCHES
high stakes in this congressional confrontation.
Kazan: I think the Communists like that are die hards,
will never change. I think they are a conspiracy. I think
that in many industries, like all the key war industries
and radio, in anything that has to do with communica-
tions, they are a menace. I think they should be exposed.
I don't think they should be in anything like that. For the
life of me, I don't see how an actor saying someone
else's lines can be subversive; but maybe that can be, too.
I think most of the people I knew, I would say all of
them, are misguided and erratic, pitiful.S
13
But at this point in time Kazan clearly recognizes the enormity and con-
sequences of naming names and stubbornly refuses to do so.
Mr. Nixon: Now were there other individuals to your
knowledge who were members of the Communist
Party, who were also members of the Group Theatre at
the time?
Mr. Kazan: I don't want to answer that question. I don't
take any refuge in anything, and I am not hiding behind
any immunity of any kind. It is a matter of personal con-
science. There were members in the theatre, in the pro-
fessional theatre generally who were concerned with it.
Mr. Nixon: Can you recall who brought you into the
Communist Party?
Mr. Kazan: Yes, I do.
Mr. Nixon: Would you name them?
Mr. Kazan: No, I wouldn't. I know the fellow. I believe
he is out of it now. Any knowledge that I have of mem-
bers of the Communist Party does not extend more
recently than 1936. I don't know anything about him
except hearsay, supposition, or anything like that. I have
assiduously stayed away from it. I detest what they did
to me. I hate their policies. And I have personal experi-
ence with it, and believe me, my feeling is based on a
good deal of personal encounter.9
8 Quoted in ibid., 67-68.
9 Quoted in ibid., 266. The interrogator here is Raphael Nixon the staff
14 WIT HAll!
Kazan's personal distaste for the party is well documented in his
autobiography and other sources, but Molly's influence cannot be under-
estimated as he made his journey towards cooperation with the commit-
tee. She had been active in the Worker's Theatre movement, writing for
New Theatre, Theatre Arts, and others. She had observed the infighting and
power struggles as cooperatives like Theatre of Action were bullied or
highjacked into presenting appropriate party dogma. She had been
Assistant Editor of New Theatre and Film in 1937 when party criticism Jed
to the magazine's demise. And she loathed the "discipline" that the party
could enforce on artists who did not toe the line. She had watched the
demands for socialist realism as the only acceptable style, viewed with
suspicion the hypocrisy of the popular front, and questioned the influ-
ence of party leaders like V J. Jerome on idealistic leftists. Like a number
of other American liberals, Molly had made a distinct pilgrimage during
the thirties and recognized the fist of the party behind the slogans and
ideology. She particularly hated the self-criticism that was forced on John
Howard Lawson after the production of Gentlewoman and despised the
way that he paraded his weaknesses in a piece in New Theatre.to She
became convinced that it was an obligation of patriotic citizens to expose
the party influence on American arts and politics.
Elia Kazan knew, of course, that naming the names of his old
colleagues could result in lost employment and blacklisting. Here he is
discussing that issue in his first meeting with the committee:
Mr. Kazan: Well, today if someone is brought down
here to an open meeting, I know you fellows aren't out
to harm anybody, but if someone is brought down here
to an open hearing the result is that they cannot work in
radio, movies and television. You don't intend to do
that, or else maybe it should be a national law that they
shouldn't, but that is the situation. If it weren't for that
employment thing, I might feel differently about it. I
feel, if I did give these names, I would harm someone.11
------
Director of Research and nor the future president who was by this date a member of the
Senate.
10 In an essay tided "Straight From the Shoulder," Lawson talked about the
obligations of a Communist writer and admitted that his work had been marred by vague-
ness, literary romanticism, Freudian escape, and obscure symbolism. See Ne1v Theatre,
November 1934, 11-12. My thanks to Lawson scholar Jonathan Chambers for this cita-
tion.
11 Quoted in Neve, "Elia Kazan's First Testimony," 271.
EGGHEADS AND WITCIIES
15
Ultimately he changed his mind, of course, for a variety of reasons that
certainly included pressure from Hollywood moguls Spyros Skouras and
Darryl Zanuck.12 But that infamous testimony was certainly buttressed
with the authority of Molly's unequivocal moral stance and her convic-
tion that silence only aided the enemy. Elia Kazan's decision to reveal the
identities of his comrades in the 1930s created the need for that famous
''A Statement," established the defiance of his subsequent
career, and became the blueprint for Molly's Broadway play, The Egghead.
"A Statement" by Ella Kazan
''A Statement" was published in the New York Times on 12 April1952 as
a paid advertisement. It is a series of short paragraphs totaling approxi-
mately 853 words. In his autobiography Kazan places himself outside of
Molly's study while she wrote it.
So she locked herself in her study and I heard the type-
writer, pages being ripped out impatiently, the carriage
slammed back to its start position, then more typing. It
wasn't easy, what she was trying to do, and she didn't
stop for food. When she came out, it was the end of the
afternoon, and she had a single page for me to read.13
Kazan read and approved it.
From the outset the statement is framed in moral and ethical
terms. It is a "stand" not an explanation or apology. "I want to make my
stand clear." And the stand is necessary because the enemy is a "danger-
ous and alien conspiracy." Therefore testifying to the dangers of this con-
spiracy becomes an "obligation" for those Americans who have "facts"
which could discredit the conspirators. The argument is framed in patri-
otic language and the repeated use of the term ' 'American" establishes
the obligation of the testifier as well as invoking the legitimacy of the
committee whose job it is to unearth and expose un-American activities.
As ''A Statement" notes, the facts which will cool the hysteria
and expose the menace are "sixteen years out of date" but still relevant
!2 Neve, Schickel, and others have all reported on the pressure that Fox
President Skouras applied to Kazan including his famous statement that Kazan "would
not haYe a future in the industry" if he did not cooperate. Neve, "Elia Kalan's First
Testimony," 256.
13 Elia Kazan, A Lift (New York: Nfred A. Knopf, 1988), 464.
16 WITHAM
to the present because they illustrate how Communists routinely oppose
and subvert democracy. Under the guise of party "discipline" the
Communists attempted to "control thought, suppress personal opinion
and habitually distorted, disregarded and violated the truth." Kazan's
experiences in the Group Theatre are characterized here as first-hand
exposure, and these facts of that experience gave him a "taste of the
police state."14 Facing the specter of that horror Kazan left the party, but
he understood how his subsequent silence about those days has furthered
the power of the conspiracy.
Liberals have been silent too long in Kazan's estimation because
they have been victims of the "specious reasoning" which teaches citi-
zens not to attack people who have unpopular opinions and to defend
civil liberties. But this strategy has backfued when "the employment of a
lot of good liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves
to become associated with or silenced by the Communists." Liberals now
must speak out because "secrecy serves the Communists."IS
Stressing again that his experiences with the Group gave him
"firsthand experience of dictatorship and thought control," Kazan
returns to a passionate defense of testifying to Communist perfidy
because in doing so you are protecting what is fundamental to
Americanism. And the roll call of rights reminds us of the patriotism that
is fueling this stand. "I am talking about free speech, a free press, the
rights of property, the rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, indi-
vidual rights." He concludes by saying that his work on stage and screen
represents his convictions, and that he expects to continue making the
same kinds of pictures and directing the same kind of plays. He clearly
expects that he will not suffer from punishment in the market place
because his testimony is not only patriotic but obligated in the fight
against evil and the police state of Communism.
In spite of Molly's passion and convictions, A Statement did not
produce its intended results. Some saw it as self-serving and others
believed that it was a rationale for naming names. It's clear that the pres-
sure from Hollywood was immense, (where Kazan had just finished his
smoldering ftlm of Streetcar') but Molly's strategy of equating Kazan's
experiences in the Group Theatre when he was in his twenties with police
states under Communism was judged excessive and overblown. Popular
opinion soon cast Kazan in the role of hypocrite who sold his friends so
1
4 Elia Kazan, "A Statement," New York Times, 12 April1952, 7.
IS Ibid.
EGGHEADS AND WITCHES 17
that he could continue to work while many others languished on the
blacklist. In Schickel's characterization: "By this one act he became the
celebrity informer-the namer of names nearly everybody could name,
the great symbolic stooge, rat fink of the era."16
I t is not my intention here to judge Kazan's behavior. Many oth-
ers have commented on that, and the pros and cons have been debated
in a variety of places and even spilled onto the stage of the Academy
Awards. Phoebe Brand and Ruth Nelson never forgave him. Others
(including historian Richard Schlesinger Jr.) believed him to be quite right
in identifying the ultimate treachery of the party and praised him when
the truth of Stalinism was fmally exposed. What interests me here is how
the dramaturg and playwright, Molly Thacher Kazan-now nearly erased
from our theatre narratives-continued to preach the horrors of the
Communist menace and how the dramaturgy of "A Statement" becomes
the basis for her long-standing ambition to create a Broadway produc-
tion.
The Eu,head by Molly Kazan
The familiar, and sometimes inflammatory, label of "egghead" circulated
widely in mid-century America and had many resonances. In popular
parlance the term "egghead" was most commonly associated with Adlai
Stevenson and other liberals often characterized as very bright but poten-
tially "soft" on real threats like international Communism. In his Pulitzer
Prize-winning Antz'-Intellectualism in Amen'can Lzje, historian Richard
Hofstadter reminds us that the word was used to express "disdain for
intellectuals" and quickly became a highly negative term associated with
pretension, superficiality, and contempt for the experience of "real
men."17 Richard Nixon's attacks on Adlai Stevenson and others popular-
ized the term, and it also invoked charges of femininity and/ or indeci-
sion. In deploying the term, Molly clearly linked it with the popular
notion of softness in the liberal community.
The Egghead opens in the comfortable living room of a New
England college professor, Hank Parson, a proto-liberal (and the title
character). Everything about the mise-en-scene speaks to the idyllic land-
scape of the American family at home. It is a "friendly, generous, incon-
16 Schickel, Elia Kazan, 272.
17
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Ufe (New York: Vintage
Books, 1962), 9.
18 WITHAM
venient old house, circa 1912" and many of its furnishings reflect "an
attachment to the Colonial past."
1
B Sally Parson, who will play a central
part in the subsequent "education" of her "egghead" husband, is busy
preparing for a party and picking up after her four-year-old son who is
building a space platform with his father's books.
The arrival of two FBI agents immediately interrupts this idyll.
They have come to interrogate Hank about one of his former star pupils
who is suspected of being a Communist and inf.t.ltrating a local factory.
These agents are surprisingly decent folks and their conversation with
Sally, while they await Hank's return, charms her.
Sally: My God! I always thought the FBI would look
sort of like spacemen.
Donahue: You got your television programs mixed.I9
Donahue, the lead agent, is a genial Irish Catholic with a family
of four boys (Michael, Patrick, Dennis, Martin Jr.) who believes that the
Communists are a threat to America, and he is committed to exposing
them as they bore into America's vital industries. His interrogation of
Hank, when the "egghead" finally arrives, quickly establishes a central
conflict in the play and crystallizes the debate between the classic
American liberals of the 1930s and their subsequent anti-Stalinist adver-
saries. It also echoes Elia Kazan before he woke up to the "party disci-
pline" of the police state.
Donahue: After his graduation, did you recommend
Mr. Hall for an instructorship at the Lionel Institute in
Virginia?
Hank: I did.
Donahue: Do you know why he left there?
Hank: Maybe he didn't get along with the Baptists.
Donahue: He's said to have expressed opinions which
cast doubt on his loyalty. Sir, have you any doubt as to
his loyalty?
Hank: What I doubt is the propriety of that question.
Donahue: . . . We're asking, have you any reason to
believe that Mr. Hall might be a Communist?
18 Molly Kazan, The Egghead (New York: Samuel French, 1958), 5.
19 Ibid., 9.
EGGHEADS AND WITCHES
Hank: No, and he's not an archconservative and if he
were-either one-I doubt it's any of your business ....
If a man is energetic and able, does that make him a
Communist?
Donahue: They move in and they work like beetles. The
pattern's familiar.zo
19
Perry Hall, who is the subject of the conversation and whose
behavior will determine the play's outcome, is a Negro, and it is this
choice on Molly's part which further complicates the issues and prob-
lematizes audience's sympathies and expectations.
Hank: Just because Perry Hall happens to be a Negro.
Donahue: Now wait a minute!
Hank: I've spent a good part of my life fighting preju-
dice. Because the color of his skin is different from ours.
Donahue: Color, race-religion, even-have got noth-
ing to do with it. You take the record, it'd favor him.
Considering the campaigns they've put on and the bait
they put out, the Party's got pretty near nowhere with
the Negro people. They really had a bust. Only we can't
go by statistics. If this man is a Communist, we ought to
know it.
Hank: He's not a Communist .... I resent this intrusion
into my house, I resent the un-American attempt to fer-
ret out and judge a man's political beliefs.zt
While Hank erupts with enormous indignation ("Put it in my
dossier that I stood on the Bill of Rights' '), Molly's choice to make Perry
a Negro resonates strongly with her eventual unmasking and indictment
of the party. Many in the American left praised the party following its
defense of the Scottsboro "boys," its support for Angelo Herndon, and
its attempts to unionize southern textile workers throughout the 1930s.
Civil Rights had become an important plank in the platform of the
American Communist Party, and they had nominated a Negro candidate
Games Ford) to run for Vice President in 1932 and 1936. The party's mis-
sion, however, was constantly at odds with the ever changing ideology of
the Soviet Comintern. As early as 1928 Stalin had declared that Negroes
20 Ibid., 13-14.
2t Ibid., 14-15.
20 WITHAM
in the Southern States were a "nation," and this designation frequently
frustrated party workers who believed that class struggle of an oppressed
minority should be central, rather than nation and race. Communists
were suspected of exploiting Negroes for their own political gains just as
they were accused of exploiting the labor movement for the same ends.
The arrival of HUAC and the subsequent Red Scare then played havoc
among American Communists of color. Paul Robeson was disgraced.
Benjamin Davis, the brilliant civil rights lawyer, was jailed. Red Channels
would even ferret out signatures to the Jackie Robinson petition to end
"Jim Crow" baseball as grounds for suspicion. By making Perry a Negro
Kazan played on the sympathies on the left while also creating the poten-
tial for a devastating critique of Communism.22
Before we meet Perry, however, and are drawn into the web of
his possible party connections, Molly has another important dramaturgi-
cal card to play. In both Kazan's testimonies and in her subsequent
Statement, a critical ploy is to expose how vicious and duplicitous actual
Communism is. Whether it is the "party discipline" of the Detroit organ-
izer or the "police srate" of the real Stalinists, the move to expose what
the Kazans perceived as the reality of Communism cannot be achieved
until that brutal face is revealed.
In the dinner party which concludes act 1 we meet Professor
Gottfried Roth, a German ex-patriot who has escaped the Nazis and who
has this very day become an official citizen of the United States. Roth, a
former Communist, lost family members to the Nazis and the
Communists and finds both groups equally barbaric. It is Professor Roth,
who has experienced totalitarianism first hand in Europe, who becomes
the device through which Molly can confront the myths of the witch-
hunt and finally articulate her rebuttal to Arthur Miller.
Roth: I was speaking of Europe also. In Europe also,
we had this search for witches.
Harvey: I'd forgotten that.
Roth: In Europe also, we forgot it. We hanged or we
burned as witches tens of thousands in England, in
Sweden, elsewhere. Not as here, twenty innocent
22 There is a rich bibliography on the relationship between Communism and
black Americans including important literary classics like Invisible Man and Native Son. A
recent critical study is James Smethurst, The Ne1v Red Negro, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), and a fascinating comparison between policies in the USA and South Africa
is George Frederickson's Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the
United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
EGGHEADS At'ID WITCHES
women and men. And this was going on for many years.
Amanda: Is this true?
Roth: I made some superficial research. We could inter-
pret the Salem story in another way. We could even take
satisfaction from it. We could be proud that in America
in one year, decency came back. In one year, the hyste-
ria was finished.
Harvey: I see why you're a stimulating teacher.
Hank: That was then. What about now?
Roth: Americans have a bad conscience about Salem.
Hank: That's to our credit.
Roth: Surely. Only the Communists, they capitalize on
this feeling.
Amanda: You mean we shouldn't have a conscience?
Roth: Oh, if you have none, they make use of that.
Hank: What do you want?
Roth: A little realism. Nobody could ride in the air on a
broom. Nobody could turn to a cat. ... There were no
witches. They did not exist. The Communists exist. And
they are crying "witch hunt" so that people are ashamed
to expose them.23
21
Hank is not convinced but Sally is troubled enough to undertake
some research on her own. A former student of Hank's, she has been
accustomed to simply parroting his beliefs but now her curiosity has been
piqued and her critical acumen is invoked.
Sally: Did you ever read the far left?
Madeline: I had a beau once who used to read it to me.
He's now on Wall Street.
Sally: They have the weirdest way of expressing them-
selves. When they change their minds about something,
then what they used to think is called a deviation. And
when they mean kids, they call them The Youth and
when they mean factory people, they call them The
Proletariat and the rest of us are Bourgeois and that's
about the worst thing you can be.
Madeline: It's practically nostalgic.
Sally: They contradict themselves all the time! They run
23 Molly Kazan, The Egghead, 32-33.
22
on about democracy and in the next breath, it's dicta-
torship. You can't be for both! How can you? They're all
mixed up!24
WITHAM
Dramaturgically, Hank's liberal beliefs-which we were invited
to admire at the outset-are now under attack. But not from just the FBI.
Roth provides the viewpoint of European realism, and Sally begins to
question the orthodoxy that has characterized much of the well inten-
tioned, but misguided, liberal ideology. All that remains is to resolve the
questions about Perry's politics and thus determine the validity of Hank's
"eggheadedness."
In the final act Perry's loyalty becomes the major dramatic ques-
tion. Hank refuses to bow to the pressure of the rumors that stain Perry
as a Communist and invites him to speak at the college. But Sally uncov-
ers some damning evidence which exposes his membership in the party
and his plans to subvert the factory which he has inflltrated. In a dramatic
moment Hank confronts his former student and finally learns the truth:
Perry: ... There has to be a discipline.
Hank: There has to be a moral standard.
Perry: Don't be a sentimental liberal. You were the one
who taught me-Action.
Hanlc I taught you respect for human beings and for
the truth! I never taught you this! Lies! Treachery!
Blackmail! Cutting people down! I never taught you to
hide and weasel and echo the dictation of a Party line or
any other line! What happened to you?25
Perry is exposed but Hank is devastated by his calumny. He offers to
resign his teaching position but in the denouement comes to realize that
his real error was in being too "soft boiled" an egghead. His liberal sen-
timents prevented him from seeing the truth and from acting on his own
prejudices and sympathies instead of using his brains. "There's nothing
wrong with having brains. I didn't use them .... From here on, we're
going to have to train ourselves to be hardboiled-not softboiled!"26
The tide of the play resonates clearly in these closing moments
24 Ibid., 39.
25 Ibid., 70-71.
26 Ibid., 78.
EGGHEADS AND WITCHES 23
and reinforces the dramaturgy that inspired both Kazan's actions in nam-
ing names and Molly's reasoning in A Statement. Conununism is evil and
it must be confronted and exposed. The danger is that "soft" liberals will
allow the Communists to continue plotting because they are not hard
enough to confront and destroy them. Hank learns that lesson in the play,
and along the way, reinforces Molly's critique of Arthur Miller and other
liberals. Earlier, after the discussion with Roth, Hank ruminates, "I've
been thinking about the analogy to the witch hunts. There's some truth
to the objection that it's inaccurate."27
The Egghead previewed in Cleveland in mid-September and the
reviews were promising. Hume Cronyn directed and, after some reluc-
tance, Karl Malden agreed to star as the soft-headed liberal. Malden
thought that he would be miscast as an intellectual college professor, but
Molly coaxed him and on opening night gave him her Phi Beta Kappa key
as a present. The cast was exceptional. Phyllis Love played Sally, Eduard
Franz was Professor Roth, and the eloquent FBI agent was Biff
McGuire. Even more memorable was the casting of the Negro student
and secret Communist; Lloyd Richards played Perry and was understud-
ied by a young James Earl Jones.
Kazan knew how important this Broadway debut was to Molly,
and he tried to be supportive without interfering with the process.
Cronyn was respected by the cast and the rehearsals went smoothly. He
liked Molly and later recalled: "In this case I admired and respected the
playwright-a very bright lady indeed-and was surrounded by people of
whom I was very fond."28 But he also thought the script was over-writ-
ten and too analytical. Like most plays he felt it was flawed but that the
problems could be worked out in rehearsal. Malden was also uneasy
because he knew Molly was a ftne critic but not always a strong dramatic
writer.
She was a great critic; she could nail other people's work
with enormous insight, but she probably had too great
a critic running in her own head the whole time she was
writing. Her writing was very much like herself. She was
a tall, thin woman with an elegant reserve about her. So
in her writing, she stopped herself short of emotion in
favor of taking a stand.29
27
Ibid., 55.
28 Hume Cronyn. A Terrible Liar (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 267.
29 Karl Malden, When Do I Start? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 255.
24 WITHAM
Elia Kazan watched a performance in Cleveland and urged
Cronyn to confront Molly with the need to make several cuts and to
sharpen the conflicts so that the audience would be kept guessing about
the outcome. He believed that the play was carefully built and much of
the writing was excellent, but he was not convinced that anybody would
doubt where it was going or how it would turn out. Later he remembered:
"Molly's work had a fault that is fatal in the theatre, one so deep in her
character that it could not be corrected. There was no moment in the
evening's entertainment where it appeared that both sides may be right;
only Molly, the author, was right."30
Cronyn convened a hasty post-performance meeting which also
included Malden and the playwright Robert Anderson, but Molly
remained unmoved. She had worked many months on the script and
wanted no more cuts prior to the New York opening. The discussion
(according to most of the participants) eventually became very heated
with Kazan entreating Molly to edit the play. "God damn it, Molly, you've
got no choice .... No one wants to hear that shit! ... Boring, Molly, bor-
ing!" raged Gadge as he tried to get her to change her mind. ''Ask Bob,
ask Hume, listen to your audience for Christ's sake."3t Molly listened but
stayed firm in her belief that the play was ready. A week later, The Egghead
opened in New York.
In a sense she was preaching to the choir. The threat of black-
listing had diminished somewhat by October 1957, but America was still
in high anti-Red mode. It had only been a year since Khrushchev's
famous speech denouncing Stalin's crimes had been printed by the Dai!J
Worker. In three months that venerable paper itself would publish its last
issue. Suspicion of anything communistic was still widespread. Joe
McCarthy had only been dead eight days when The Egghead opened, but
his harangues had been homogenized and recycled in a variety of politi-
cal campaigns including one which had discredited the egghead left and
returned the Republicans to the White House. Howard Fast and many
other patriotic Americans had resigned from the party but refused to
renounce it with the same vehemence as the Kazans. For Fast, there was
no paternal Irish FBI man protecting America's shores (as in Molly's play)
but the tyrannical J. Edgar Hoover trying to get his books removed from
the New York Public Library.32
30 Elia Kazan, A Uft, 570.
31 Elia Kazan quoted in Cronyn, A Terrible Liar, 269.
32 Howard Fast, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990), 203. Fast
relates how a librarian at the New York Public Library refused an FBI order to remove
EGGHEADS AND WITCHES 25
Robert Coleman began his review in the Dai!J Mi"or by assert-
ing a truth that, in his opinion, everybody already knew; "In The Egghead,
Molly (Mrs. Elia) Kazan, has penned a stinging indictment of
Communists. Her charges are not exactly new, for we all know that the
party card-holders are a bad lot, ruthless, devious and treacherous. They'll
sell their best friends down the river for power."33 Still he believes that "it
took courage to write this bitter and honest play" and he only wishes that
the author (whose "heart is on the side of the angels") had been able to
make her people more human and less "types."3
4
Frank.Aston writing in
the World-Telegram seems to agree with Molly that "the poached liberal is
a menace to America in the way he coddles Commies and fails to realize
that he looks prehistoric to the young and is a museum piece to infiltrat-
ing Reds."3S He goes on to say that "she deserves a fat accolade for bal-
ancing in her drama fiercely contesting forces which befuddle and befoul
America today and for demonstrating how some citizens, who should be
looked up to, are in reality a bunch of suckers."36 John McClain pro-
nounced it a "hit," praised the writing and the playing and concluded that
"The Egghead is a play that had to be written, and I think Mrs. Kazan has
written it well. There have been injustices on the side of the reactionar-
ies; but there are also the 'eggheads' who believe blindly that to be sus-
pect is to be blameless."37
But there were also dissenting voices. John Chapman found it
entirely boring, "badly scrambled and undercooked,"38 and Brooks
Atkinson in the Times found that the impassioned propaganda and thesis
arguments overwhelmed any real artistry. Perhaps the most thoughtful
discussion came from Walter Kerr who recognized the contesting points
of view and the contemporary truth among its "muddled contestants"
but still could not shake a "sense of uneasiness" about the whole enter-
and burn his books.
3
3
Robert Coleman, "Egghead Fails to Completely Satisfy," New York Daify
Mirror, 10 October 1957.
34 Ibid.
35 Frank Aston, "A Liberal May be a Menace," World-Telegram, 10 October 1957.
36 Ibid.
3
7
John McClain, "Disappointing Comedy," journal American, 10 October 1957.
38
John Chapman, "The Egghead, Badly Scrambled and Undercooked Stage
Omelet," Daify News, 10 October 1957.
26 WITHAM
prise. "Why," wondered Kerr, "are we never precisely comfortable in the
playhouse?"39 Perhaps because he recognized that the issues were more
complex and controversial than Molly's accounts of them allowed or per-
haps because he was reluctant to endorse the liberal as dangerous, Kerr
provided an answer for his own question: "I suspect it is because the
materials are not (at this odd and incomplete moment in time) wholly
subject to the distillation, the shaping into patterns, that are inevitably
demanded by the stage."40
The division in the critical opinions reflected a similar division in
the theatre community, but the critics were oddly silent on the biograph-
ical nature of the writing. Only McClain and Coleman mention Elia
Kazan by name. Richard Watts refers to a kind of "personal quality" in
the wri ting that gives it a "documentary interest," but does not mention
Molly's marriage and is not convinced by her indictment of the "innocent
liberal."4I Whether the absence of the real source of the drama is in def-
erence to the Kazans' personal troubles or whether the politics are still
too contentious to be broached is not easy to parse. What is clear is that
the play did not find an audience and closed after only twenty-one per-
formances. I suspect that The Eggheads frontal assault on liberalism, and
hence its implied support of McCarthyism, combined with the explicit
villainy attributed to the Negro character could not find favor with a pro-
gressive audience. In addition, many who might be invited to support the
non-Communist left were still smarting from the Kazan "betrayal." He
had a career, but Mady Christians, Canada Lee, Larry Parks, Lionel
Stander, and others did not.
Molly, however, did not appear to lose her support in the theatre
community. Her essential dignity, combined with the admiration she
earned from raising her four children and reading countless manuscripts,
earned her a continued and sympathetic following. For a time she was
Head of the playwriting program at the Actors Studio, and her former
students still sought her advice. She pursued her own interests, wrote two
one-acts for Off-Broadway (The Alligators and Rosemary, 1960), and was
working on An Evening of Camus for the American Place Theatre at the
time of her sudden death. Her ex-husband continued to write and speak
about her with respect, and eventually he reached a truce with Arthur
39 Walter Kerr, "The Egghead," Herald Tribune, 10 October 1957.
40 Ibid.
4
1 Richard Watts Jr., "The Case of the Innocent Liberal," N ew York Post, 10
October 1957.
EGGHEADS AND WITCHES 27
Miller which led to their collaboration on After the Fail. Meanwhile The
Crucible, with its cast of bewitched children, would go on to be one of
America's most produced plays. The Egghead was quickly forgotten,
although singled out by critic John Gassner as the only American play
that season which "made any claims of importance as realistic expose
and discourse" and he was sorry that it "failed to win a supporting audi-
ence."42
In spite of its apparent failure, The Egghead is a remarkable explo-
ration of the cultural anxiety that characterized much of Cold War
America. Its artistry is certainly flawed, but as artifact it is a vivid touch-
stone of how the battles were fought. Molly Kazan's answer to the bleed-
ing hearts who were "duped" by Communism flrst outlined in her hus-
band's famous ''A Statement" finds its fullest expression in the play, and
resonates with other documents which crystallize the tensions of the era.
From The Partisan Review to Scoundrel Time, American liberals quarreled
over the fact and fiction of Communism and the scars ran deep in the
landscape. The disputes were passionate and often bitter. Lillian Hellman
went to her grave believing that she would win her slander suit against
Mary McCarthy, and Kazan went to his still defying those who ignored
his oeuvre of progressive flims because of his stand. Molly's controversial
play not only tried to assert again her husband's integrity but also tried to
settle some old debts in the culture wars. Today, as in 1957, the title res-
onates with the persona and ideology of Adlai Stevenson and a defeated
American Left. But given the complicated personal and political drama-
turgy of The Egghead, audiences in 1957 certainly were being invited to
recall the famous Variery headline which greeted the marriage of Marilyn
Monroe to Arthur Miller-Egghead Weds Hourgiass.43
42 John Gassner, "Broadway in Review," Educational Theatre Journal 9, no. 4
(December 1957): 311. I ts only competition in Gassner's estimation was the English
import Look Back in Anger whose Amerits and limitations are significant, but which he
found, "difficult not to think of as the conclusion rather than the beginning of an era of
playwriting; as a blind alley rather than as a vision of promise and advance."
43 Variery, 29 June 1956, 1. I'm indebted to Josh Polster for reminding me of
this headline.
JOURNAL OF AMERJCAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 20, NO.2 (SPRING 2008)
"IT SOUNDS Too MUCH LIKE COlvfRADE":
THE PRESERVATION OF AMERICAN IDEALS IN ROOM SERVICE
SEBASTIAN TRAINOR
Today the names Allen Boretz and John Murray are no longer widely rec-
ognized. Seventy years ago, however, they were the celebrated co-authors
of the most successful Broadway script ever produced.
1
That script-a
farce entitled Room Service-remains a staple of the American theatre
even now.Z Yet, even while Room Service continues to be a familiar part of
the repertoire, its authors might scratch their heads over the many trans-
formations the play has made in its journey from 1930s farce to its most
recent Off-Broadway revival in 2007. They would certainly miss the
nuanced socialist subtext that was systematically scoured from the story
during its successive retellings on film.
Today's Room Service strikes audiences as a comfortable and reli-
able crowd-pleaser, a nostalgic comedy appropriate for families, perhaps a
bit creaky, but charmingly so. It seems difficult to reconcile this present
condition of the play with the vitality of its original 1937 counterpart-a
runaway Broadway success in which communist co-author Allen Boretz
deliberately embedded pro-labor, pro-Russian, and anti-government
motifs to be seen by a nation struggling through the darkest days of the
Great Depression. In this essay, I explore the play's (and its almost-for-
gotten authors') journey through the American canon. I suggest that a play
1
This claim is based on the script's final sale price to the Hollywood filin sru-
dios. The sale garnered a fair amount of attention in 1937 as "the highest price ever paid"
for the right to film a stage play ("News of the Stage: Record Film Price Brought by Room
SenJice," New York Times, 10 June 1937, 26). See also "News of the Stage: Room JenJice
Purchased by RKO Rather than Warners," New York Times, 16 June 1937, 26.
2 The most recent off-Broadway revival of Room Service finished a nine-month
r un at the SoHo Playhouse in April 2007. Summer 2005 saw a production at the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival. A few years before there had been a national rour of the show
directed by Robert Woodruff and fearuring the Flying Karamozov Brothers. More anec-
dotally, the calendar page of American Theatre seems always to list Room Service in produc-
tion somewhere in the U.S. Its popularity also exceeds U.S. borders. In the internet pub-
licity for the recent New York City run, Dorothy Ames, widow of Allen Boretz, notes:
"my husband wrote Room SenJice in the 1930s, long before I knew him . .. but I've seen
the play many times in the US, Great Britain and France .... The show is still produced
all the time; we just signed agreements with theatres in Japan and Germany, in fact''
(ww"':roomservicetheplay.com/ dorothy /html) .
30 TRAINOR
like Room Service can help scholars trace not only the ways in which politi-
cal, ideological, or social themes are sometimes hidden in plain sight for
American audiences, but also the ways in which those same themes are
deliberately excised from later adaptations, recyclings, and re-productions
until a play's original meanings become almost impossible to recover.
In 1937 Room Service began its original Broadway run of 496 per-
formances. The production had been directed by the legendary George
Abbott, and within a month of its opening, the rights to film it had sold
for an unprecedented $255,000 to Hollywood's RKO studios. In 1938 the
farce was filmed with the Marx Brothers as its new stars. Then, in 1944,
during the dosing phases of World War II, it was adapted into a movie-
musical- with the new title Step I.ivefy--featuring a young Frank Sinatra
crooning in a leading role, and future Republican U.S. Senator George
Murphy as the star.3 Each new version proved a new box office success.
Later, in 1953, Room Service was revived on the New York stage where it
gave Jack Lemmon his Broadway debut. That same year marked both the
height of the Red Scare and the blacklisting of the play's co-author, Allen
Boretz, a long-time member of the Communist Party.
All these developments concern a single play, which has so far
remained nearly invisible to scholarly attention, yet there are some things
that are well worth observing about each of these moments in its evolu-
tion.4 It is clear that Room Service enjoyed extraordinary popularity
between 1937 and 1953. During that same period, however, American
culture underwent a profound change (from the Great Depression
through World War II and into the Red Scare) that radically altered the
3 George Murphy was president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1944-1946.
He was also aggressively anti-communist and played a significant role in the movement to
ban communists from working in the motion picture industry After his term as president
of SAG he became a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the
Preservation of American Ideals, discussed later in this essay.
4
Although Room Service is among only 17 plays tO have run in New York for
500 performances during the 1930s, it goes unmentioned in the various companions and
critical introductions to twentieth-century American drama. Nor can any treatments of
the play be found in academic journals. On the other hand, there are a number of stud-
ies of the avant-garde, leftist, workers, and federal drama of the era, as well as a few books
examining the American theatre of the 1930s more broadly. Among these, passing refer-
ences to Room Service may be found in: Joseph Wood Krutch, The American Drama Since
1918 (New York: Random House, 1939); Joseph Mersand, The Amen.can Drama 19 30-1940
(New York: The Modern Chapbooks, 1941); Jordan Miller and Winifred Frazer, American
Drama Between the Wars: A Critical History (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991 ); and Mark
Fearnow, The American Stage and the Great Depression (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
"IT SOUNDS Too MUCH LIKE COMRADE" 31
ways in which the play would be seen by American audiences. Examining
the play's hidden pro-labor, pro-Russian, and anti-government themes
may offer insights into the rising tensions between the nation's dominant
capitalist ideology, and the emergent communist struggle against it.S
What makes Room Service particularly unusual in the American canon is
both its enduring popularity among a// levels of society, and its success-
ful integration of ideological agenda into a comedic situation (rather than
a didactic morality play) that allowed it to appeal to the dominant culture.
Communist Content?
Room Service's complex production history makes one wonder to what
extent audiences are consciously aware of the ideology they receive via
performance (and which they support through continued attendance at
long-running shows). It is possible that Room Service's long-term success
resulted, in part, from an audience's failure to realize that the tale por-
trayed the artful manipulation of the American capitalist system by the
agents of an emergent ideology. Scholars have asserted that Depression-
era audiences likely derived considerable "Freudian pleasure" from wit-
nessing the abuse of authority figures on stage, and that this contributed
to making farce the leading form in the commercial theatre at that cime.6
Here, the term "Freudian pleasure" indicates the fulfillment of a desire
that had not been consciously acknowledged by the audience. I would
5 Throughout this essay the terms "dominant," "emergent," and "incorpora-
tion" are used in the sense meant by the cultural materialist critic Raymond Williams, who
related the internal tensions of a society to the cultural products made by that society.
Within such cultural products (Broad,\ay comedies and Hollywood films, for example)
one set of social values dominates, though often strongly oppositional values will be pres-
ent simultaneously and will contend for meaning. Some opposing values are the "emer-
gent" values of a developing social order that has not yet achieved dominance. Williams
notes also that the cultural institutions of society (Broadway production companies and
Hollywood fUm studios, for example) are controlled by an unaccountable elite who have
an invested interest in reinforcing "dominant" ideology. They therefore police the ideo-
logical content of their products, and when they recognize emergent elements they
attempt to pacify the opposing ideology through "incorporating" it into the dominant set
of social values. This might be achieved through such methods as reinterpretation, dilu-
tion, or exclusion of aspects of the unwanted content. This model has been extremely
helpful to my thinking about Room Service, as the process of incorporation plays out quite
clearly when this play is translated to fll.m. For a more thorough explication of Williams's
theory, refer to the short essay "Dominant, Residual, and Emergent," which appears in
his Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121-126.
6 Fearnow, The American Stage, 130.
32 TRAINOR
suggest that something like this repressed desire for the abuse of author-
ity figures, but operating in a larger political/ economic sphere, was partly
responsible for Room Service's enduring popularity.
Yet, whatever Room Service's initial ideological magic may have
been, it seems to have worn off by 1953. Given the play's history of suc-
cess, it is curious that the Broadway revival of that year-in spite of
receiving some excellent reviews-failed financially. The production
closed after only 16 performances. Soon thereafter, co-author Boretz,
now unemployable due to the blacklist and "Red Channels," was forced
to leave the country to find work.
7
Many years later, after he returned to
the U.S. and toward the end of his life, he gave an interview in which he
spoke about scriptwriting and Communism.s Asked for his professional
opinion as to whether subversive messages or significant social content
could be inserted into mainstream entertainment, Boretz replied in the
affirmative; "content could be put in," he said, adding:
But I don't like to say "put in." Content could be made
an integral part of the structure of a script, if it lived up
to its dramatic purpose and was not inserted willy-nilly.
Otherwise it would stand out like a sore thumb.
Everything depended on what effect it was supposed to
have. It could be too strong, but it could also be too sub-
tle, in which case it was useless.9
Boretz's attitude here toward "content," particularly his emphasis on its
becoming a structurally integral element of the plot (and therefore very
difficult to edit out), raises a fascinating question: is it possible that this
so-called "brainless farce" of Room Service--which, according to one 1937
reviewer, actually "forbids thought"
1
0- was once a pillar of communistic
subversion standing in the mainstream of American escapist capitalist
7
Boretz went to Franco's Spain where he joined che community of Hollywood
exiles who had begun to work in che film industry in Madrid.
8 Though Boretz's communism did not attract as much media attention as did
John Howard Lawson's, Dalton Trumbo's, or Ring Lardner, Jr.'s, he was a Party member
and appears to have taken this commitment quite seriously. To assess its depth see
Boretz's interview in Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the
Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Marrin's Press, 1997), 112-127.
9 Ibid., 121.
10 See Grenville Vernon's review in che Commonweal, 11 June 1937, 188.
"IT SOUNDS T OO MuCH LIKE COMRADE" 33
entertainment?
By sketching a microhistory of the evolving representations of
Room Service from the 1930s through the 1950s, set against the backdrop
of the increasingly anti-Communist sentiment of American popular cul-
ture, I attempt to detail the decreasing subversion---or the step-by-step
ideological "incorporation"-evidenced in each successive portrayal of
the story as it moved from Broadway to Hollywood. For example, the
world of the piece acquired an easy glamour that undermined the atmos-
phere of desperation in the original setting as the scene shifted from the
near-defunct White Way Hotel of 1937 to the fashionable Crilton Towers
of 1944. Similarly, where the 1937 version featured a "pageant of
American history seen through the eyes of an ignorant Polish miner"
performed by unemployed Russian waiters, the 1944 ftlm version boast-
ed instead a burlesque of "boiled buffalo bits" performed by bubbly
Vargas girls.tt Moreover, even the potential for maintaining "content" in
the story diminished with the new production environment. On the more
red-friendly New York stage the co-authors could assert a fairly direct
control over their creation, but in Hollywood conservative studio execu-
tives and reactionary co-stars held much greater sway. By mapping these
changes and others, what is revealed is a genealogy of the gradual disap-
pearance of "red" -ness from subsequent representations of Room
Service-even though it may only have been slightly "pink" at the start.
Ironically, this disappearance---or "incorporation," in Raymond
Williams's terms-is whimsically foreshadowed in the original 1937 script
itself. In that version, in the final scene of the play, a "dignified, authori-
tative windbag of sixty-five with a Southern accent"-whom the play
establishes as U.S. Senator Blake, the true owner of the play's setting, the
White Way Hotel-enters the action.
12
The senator is delighted with the
opening night of Godspeed, the pageant of Polish miners on strike that
forms Room Service's play-within-the-play. "That's the finest play I ever did
11 The phrases here quoted can be found, respectively, on page 57 of Allen
Boretz's and John Murray's published script Room Service: A Comedy in Three Acts (New
York: Random House, 1937); and in the videorecorded dialogue of the 1944 ftlm Step
Liveb, directed by Tim Whelan, starring Frank Sinatra, George Murphy, and Gloria De
Haven, screenplay by Warren Duff and Peter Milne (RKO Home Video, 1989). The quo-
tations are taken from successive incarnations of Godspeed, the story's play within the play.
The significant contrast, of course, is between the pageant of immigrant coal miners on
strike (in the 193 7 Broadway script) and the much more puerile Godspeed of the 1944 ftlm
in which tap-dancing girls in swirnwear improvise a number called "Oh Goody" after
being promised a bowl of boiled buffalo for dinner.
12
Boretz and Murray, Room Service, 186.
34 TRAJNOR
see-it has a message," he declares.
13
But when the play's shoestring pro-
ducer, Gordon Miller, remarks that the production will "pull this hotel
out of the red" the double entendre is not lost on the senator. In fact the
comment on "red" -ness reminds the senator of a small revision he would
like made to the play:
SENATOR: By the way, Miller.
MillER [the shoestring producer]: Yes, Senator.
SENATOR: I have a suggestion to make.
:MILLER: Yes, Senator.
SENATOR: I'd like to change the name of the hero in
the play.
:MillER: You mean Konrad?
SENATOR: Yes, I don't like Konrad. It sounds too
much like comrade.
MILLER: All right, Senator, we'll call himJoe.14
In 193 7, this slight revision is enough to satisfy the Senator. "That's the
idea," crows Blake, who fails to realize that merely changing a name from
"Konrad" to "Joe" neither substantially transforms the ideology of
Godspeed, nor changes the Russian-ness of its performers. Thus, in this
instance, the final joke seems to be on the senator. But, egg-on-legislative-
face notwithstanding, one can also see in this exchange that the drama is
already aware that a predatory ideological "incorporation" lies in its
future.
The Red in the Whlte Way Hotel
The plot of Room Service presents the misadventures of Gordon Miller, a
harassed shoestring theatrical producer in New York City trying to keep
rooms and rehearsal space for himself, his staff, and 21 actors in Times
Square's near-defunct White Way Hotel where he is unable to pay his bills.
The producer must outwit an irate authoritarian hotel manager until a
"backer" can be found for his currently-in-rehearsal historical pageant of
American labor called Godspeed. As it happens, the script for Godspeed is
the fust dramatic effort of Leo Davis, a niive young playwright from
Upstate New York, unschooled in the ways of the big city. Since Miller,
13 Ibid., 188.
14 Ibid., 188-189, emphasis in original.
"IT SOUNDS Too MUCH LIKE COMRADE'' 35
Davis, and company cannot meet a backer for their wonderful play-with-
a-message unless they remain at their hotel, and since they cannot remain
at the hotel unless they pay their bill, and since they cannot pay their bill
unless they find a backer, they therefore seize and illegally occupy their
hotel rooms to await salvation. In maintaining this situation they deploy
endlessly renewed deceptions against their watchdogs-including phony
measles, bogus tapeworm, and counterfeit suicide-while the hotel man-
agement attempts to starve them out of their rooms.
Clearly, this is silly stuff-and it must have been superbly exe-
cuted in the 1937 premiere, for every major metropolitan newspaper
printed a glowing review. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, for
example, opined: "at the present moment your correspondent is too
fatigued from laughing to appraise (it] judiciously."Js But something seri-
ous can be mined from this scenario. Given the context of 1937-its
severe unemployment, perpetual labor strife, sit-down strikes, the Wagner
Act's creation of the National Labor Relations Board, and other indica-
tors of social unrest-together with co-author Boretz's (who wrote on!J
comedies) previously-quoted view of "content" in mainstream entertain-
ment, I would suggest that there are indeed some conceits in Room Service
that could be regarded as sober, subversive, or ideologically emergent.
Such a suggestion raises a number of intriguing questions: How should
audiences view the profit-mongering hotel manager who cashed-in his
humanity to advance his career? Having driven the young playwright to
suicide, he afterwards gropes for meaning in his actions, tormenting him-
self: "you struggle for money .. . what the hell good is it?"16 Similarly,
how might the 1937 audience have construed the Russian waiter (played
by a Russian actor) who-with signs of capitalism's failures evident in the
city outside-reminded them that, "in Russia money means nothing"?17
Is the audience meant to celebrate the seize-and-occupy/ sit-down strike
tactics adopted by the producers of Godspeecf?
1
B And just what exactly is
the message of Miller and Davis's great play-with-a-message?
This last question regarding the (apparently serious) pageant,
15 Brooks Atkinson, review of Room Senrice, New York Times, 20 May 1937, 16.
16 Boretz and Murray, Room Service, 85.
17 Ibid.
18 It is worth noting that when Room Senrice premiered on Broadway the 40-day
Flint, Michigan sit-down strike of the United Auto Workers-which began on 26
December 1936-was fresh in the national memory. Further, during 1937 especially, the
ideology of the sit-down strike was a constant topic of debate in the media.
36
TRAINOR
called Godspeed, which is being produced within the farcical frame of
Room Service, is the most directly connected to current events of 1937. In
the Godspeed pageant, this same Russian waiter portrays a Polish miner
condemning his son, Konrad, for labor-organizing activities: "What you
want? Why you make trouble for me? T'ousand miner wait outside for my
job. You want get me fired? Hah?"
19
The father's anger erupts because the
son, in an effort to improve his father's quality of life, had agitated for a
coal miners' strike. The audience never sees the agitation itself, but it does
hear something of the miner's life:
All my life I dig coal. Go to sleep couple hour-get
up-dig coal again, and what I got? Three children no
good-not worth two-cent piece. Tomorrow I dig coal
again. Dig again ... dig . .. dig ... dig .. . 20
Such writing recognizably derives from the socialist-realist strike plays of
earlier in the decade. Though Godspeed does evoke these (and perhaps
some of the work of the Federal Theatre Project), it has nowhere near
the force of indictments like John Wexley's Steel (1931), George Sklar's
Stevedore (1934), Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty (1935), Albert Maltz's
The Black Pit (1935), or other "calls to action" of this kind.21 However, it
is also worth noting that none of these plays ran anywhere near five hun-
dred performances, none were re-made as ftlms, and none have ever seen
a revival on the Great White Way. Given his comments above, Boretz
would likely assess Steel, Stevedore, Lefty, and The Black Pit as scripts in
which the content is "too strong" for the popular taste. Thus, for all their
force, perhaps the subversive/ emergent elements of Room S ervice-----<:.om-
paratively tame as they may have been-ultimately made a larger impact
on society as a whole, for Room Service was undoubtedly seen by a greater
number of people than all the others combined.
This argument will certainly have skeptics. Most readers, viewers,
and reviewers regard Room Service as escapist comedy that is in no way
socially-engaged. In fact, one of the original notices on the production,
19 Boretz and Murray, Room Service, 92.
20 Ibid., 93.
21 In addition to the plays mentioned here, as a historical pageant God;peed also
has some stylistic similarity to John Howard Lawson's vaudeville-influenced "jazz sym-
phony of American life" Processional (1925), which was being remounted in 1937 under
the auspices of the FfP, and which was loosely based on events surrounding a West
Virginia coal miners' strike.
"IT SOUNDS Too M UCH LIKE COMRADE'' 37
Grenville Vernon's review in the 11 June 1937 issue of the Commonweal,
argued:
&om Service is ... utterly inconsequential, divorced from
psychological truth, written to be played in a sort of
hilarious cloud cuckoo land .... Such plays are peculiar-
ly of the minute ... they not only ignore thought, they
forbid it. In a truly happy society, or even one of any
balanced stability, they could not exist, or at least their
popularity would be greatly lessened.22
Yet even in dismissing the play, the critic compares it to the work
of Aristophanes, who used ludicrous situations to comment on the polit-
ical and ideological agendas of his society. Though the play may have
appeared insignificant to Vernon and other critics of 1937, when one
considers its fate over a longer period of time, it seems quite possible that
Boretz and Murray were, like Aristophanes, engaged in a type of comedic
ideological agitation. Thus, in response to such accusations of "inconse-
quentiality," one can argue that the prevailing critical taste of the
decade-accustomed to the didactic texts of Odets et al.-was not yet
trained to recognize Room Service's more indirect sort of political engage-
ment.
What Happened to Senator Blake?
When considering the transformations that the play underwent from its
1937 debut to its 1953 failure, it helps to examine the play from several
vantage points. Simply viewing the cast lists suggests the substantial
changes made to the meaning of Boretz and Murray's script.
Though it was not the first professional production of Room
Service, the 1937 Broadway premiere offers a good starting point for
future comparisons.23 Its credits read as follows:
1937: ROOM SERVICE, a comedy in three acts by John P.
Murray and Allen Boretz. Scenery by Cirker & Robbins.
22 Grenville Vernon, review of Room Service, Commonweal, 11 June 1937, 188.
23 George Abbott produced and directed Room Service on Broadway in 1937, bur
the play had previously been "tried out" by producer Sam Harris at the McCarter Theatre
in Princeton, New Jersey. A brief New York Times commentary on the opening night of
that earlier production-16 November 1935-prornises that the production "will travel
38 TR.\INOR
Produced and Directed by George Abbott. At the Cort
Theatre. Opened Wednesday, May 19, 1937.
Russian Hotel Waiter [Sasha r n i r n o f ~ .... Alexander Asro
U. S. Senator Blake .................... Ralph Morehouse
Shoestring Producer [Gordon Miller] ......... Sam Levene
Asst. to the Producer [Faker Englund] ........ Teddy Hart
Play Director [Harry Binion] ................ Philip Loeb
Young Playwright [Leo Davis] .............. Eddie Albert
Aspiring Actress [Christine Marlowe] .... Margaret Mullen
Regional Hotel Suprvsr [Gregory Wagner]. Donald MacBride
Hotel Manager Ooseph Gribble] ........... Cliff Dunstan
Asst. to the Hotel Manager [Hilda Manney] .... Betty Field
Hotel Doctor [Dr. Glas] .................... Hans Robert
The "Backer'"s Agent [Simon Jenkins] ..... .. Philip Wood
Man from Collection Agency [Timothy Hogarth]. Jack Byrne
Bank Messenger ....................... William Mendrek
The next year, the credits for the RKO ftlm read as:
1938: ROOM SERVICE, based on the stage play by John P.
Murray and Allen Boretz. Screenplay by Morrie Ryskind.
Directed by William Seiter. Produced by Pandro S. Berman.
Released by RK:O Studios on Friday, September 30, 1938.
Russian Hotel Waiter [Sasha r n i r n o f ~ . . . . Alexander Asro
Shoestring Producer [Gordon Miller] ........... Groucho
Asst. to the Producer [Faker Englund] ......... .... Harpo
to Philadelphia for a brief sojourn before opening in New York around Dec. 1" ("&om
Service Opens: Sam Harris Presems Murray and Boretz Farce in Princeton," New York
Timer, 17 November 1935, N-7). But Philadelphia was as close as that particular produc-
tion ever got to Broadway. A review of the later (1937) production which appeared in
Newsweek continues the story: "Sam H. Harris sat through the opening night performance
of Room Service at the Cort Theatre last week and didn't even smile at lines which evoked
guffaws from the audience. He owned the property two seasons ago, tested it in
Philadelphia, and decided it wasn't funny enough for Broadway" ("George Abbott Gi\es
Broadway Another Comedy Hit," review of Room Service, Ne1vsweek, 29 May 1937, 23-24).
" IT SOUNDS Too MUCH LIKE COMRADE" 39
Play Director [Harry Binion] ..................... Chico
Young Playwright [Leo Davis] ........... Frank Albertson
Aspiring Actress [Christine Marlowe] ......... Lucille Ball
Regional Hotel Suprvsr [Gregory Wagner]. Donald MacBride
Hotel Manager Ooseph Gribble] ........... Cliff Dunstan
Asst. to the Hotel Manager [Hilda Manney] .. . . Ann Miller
Hotel Doctor [Dr. Glass] ................. Charles Halton
The "Backer"'s Agent [Simon Jenkins] ....... Philip Wood
Man from Collection Agcy [Timoth Hogarth] . Philip Loeb
Even a cursory comparison of these 1937 stage credits to those of the
1938 film reveals significant absences. Two of the characters-U.S.
Senator Blake and the Bank Messenger-have disappeared from the
story.24 Though this winnowing of the Bank Messenger seems of little
significance, the disappearance of the hotel-owning senator is a different
matter altogether. Indeed, the principal polarity of the published 1937
playscript lies between the politically ineffectual Russian Waiter, whom
the farcical plot establishes as the ultimate savior of the play's central
characters, and the all-powerful senator, whom the plot establishes as the
play's ultimate fool. The two represent opposite ends of the spectrum of
economic and political agency. By removing one character, the other's rel-
evance is undermined.
Though mockery of legitimate authority remained an important
element of the 1938 Marx Brothers' film version, thanks to some judi-
cious revision, the new script no longer deliberately made the "southern
windbag" U.S. senator the specific butt of its joke. Gone also is the mis-
sion of "pulling the hotel out of the red" (with its potential double enten-
dre). Apparently, this really did "sound too much like comrade."25
If the 1938 ftlm undermined this government official/working
immigrant polarity, the 1944 ftlm destroyed it completely. Consider the
24 Also worth noting is the fact that five supporting members of the original
Broadway cast were recruited for the ft.lm: Donald MacBride, Charles Halton, Phillip
Loeb (who was also the ftlm's associate producer), Alexander Asro, and Clifford Dunston.
Lucille Ball and Ann Miller were cast in the two female roles, but these actresses play very
minor roles in the film and are noted here only because of the significance of their later
careers.
25 According ro Patrick McGilligan, who interviewed Allen Boretz in 1983, the
playwright "always insisted" that the Marx Brothers filin "bore scant resemblance to the
play'' (McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, 113).
40 TRAJNOR
credits from 1944:
1944: STEP LIVELY, based on the stage play Room Service
by John P. Murray and Allen Boretz. Screenplay by Warren
Duff and Peter Milne. Directed by Tim Whelan. Produced
by Robert Fellows. Released by RK.O Studios on Friday, July
28, 1944.
Shoestring Producer [Gordon Miller] ..... George Murphy
Asst. to the Producer [Harry] ............... Alan Carney
Play Director [Binion] ............. ... ..... Wally Brown
Young Playwright [Glenn Russell] .......... Frank Sinatra
Aspiring Actress (Christine Marlowe] .... Gloria DeHaven
Regional Hotel Suprvsr [Gregory Wagner] . Adolphe Menjou
Hotel Manager Goseph Gribble] ........... Walter Slezak
Hotel Doctor [Dr. Glass] ...... ......... .. Grant Mitchell
The "Backer" [Miss Abbott] .......... . ..... Anne Jeffries
The "Backer"'s Agent [Simon Jenkins] ..... Eugene Pallette
Here, the Russian Waiter has also gone, making the original title of Room
Service meaningless: no waiter, ergo no room service. But without the wait-
er, the plot's subtle statement that salvation can only be achieved by
actively embracing the interests of immigrant laborers disappears as well.
In the previous versions of the story, the producer characters were quite
literally starving until saved by a meal smuggled to them by the impover-
ished but kindhearted Russian. The situation highlighted both the inabil-
ity of the capitalists to produce any product of real use to themselves
(food, for instance), and the importance of the working class in saving
society.
Moreover, in the 1944 version, the central axis of the story is no
longer even economic: Godspeeds lack of money is not the main issue any-
more. (Gone also is the Man from the We-Never-Sleep Collection
Agency who figured so prominently in the earlier incarnations of the
story). Nor is the film's axis political: there are, for instance, no disfran-
chised Russian immigrants, and no overbearing politicians with whose
values they might contrast. Rather, the script has become a monolithic
story of "beautiful young love" in which the young, morally-perfect,
singing playwright- the character formerly called Leo Davis, but now
"IT SOUNDS Too MUCH LIKE CoMRADE" 41
renamed to the more Gentile-sounding Glenn Russell (and played by
Frank Sinatra)-woos and wins the aspiring actress away from the the-
atrical producer, Gordon Miller. Lkewise, Miller, who was formerly the
story's most sympathetic character, has become an un-likeable fast-talk-
ing con man who keeps the plot moving. He is hardly as sympathetic as
in his earlier manifestations. In other words: Step Live!J is no longer a
farce in which one watches the hero, a starving theatrical producer, take
advantage of the establishment around him to subvert legitimate author-
ity, but rather it is a romance in which one watches an entirely different
hero, a young, morally-unimpeachable, all-American man, fall in love.
Incidentally, this young singer also, in the end, saves the day through a
remarkable performance in much the same way as the Russian Waiter had
done in previous iterations of the story. All in all, it is a much more tra-
ditionally patriotic narrative, in keeping with the rhetoric of World War II
entertainment.
This brief overview of the disappearances and transformations
of familiar characters in Room Service highlights the ways in which the anti-
establishment content of the original script was re-shaped-Williams
would say "incorporated"-by later generations of producers and ftlm-
makers in order to render the narrative less semiotically subversive for
American audiences at the dawning of the Red Scare. These ideological
incorporations made the values of an enduringly popular story more con-
sistent with mainstream American culture.
The Preservation of American Ideals
To analyze specific contributions and circumstances of the as-yet-
unnamed script doctors (those individuals entrusted with the task of
reforming the Room Service script just prior to its two fllmings) is beyond
the scope of the present essay. Nonetheless, one particularly germane
case deserves mention, for it was the screenwriter for the initial 1938
motion picture adaptation of Room Service, Morrie Ryskind, who, in
February 1944, became one of the founding members of the Motion
Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA).26 This
aggressively anti-Communist organization-all of whose members were
Hollywood ftlmmaking professionals-formed their group in order to
devise a means for combating what they perceived as an infiltration by
Communists (such as Allen Boretz) into the infrastructure of the
26 Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star Owr Hoi!Jwood: The Film Colony's
Long Romance with the Left (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005).
42 TRAINOR
American ftlmmaking industry.27 Soon after the MPA was created, the
organization sent a delegation to Washington, DC-a delegation of
which Ryskind was a member-to meet with representatives of the U.S.
Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAq.zs
This meeting directly resulted in the convening of HUAC's investigation
into the Communist infiltration of the Hollywood motion picture indus-
try. Moreover, Ryskind's own earlier 1938 contributions to (and erasures
from) Room Service are enlightening and sobering when their nature and
circumstances are examined closely. It should be noted also that this pre-
cipitation of HUAC onto Hollywood was a drastic measure taken by
agents of the dominant conservative/ capitalist ideology toward exclud-
ing the agents of an emergent ideology-mainly communist screenwrit-
ers, in the beginning-whose pervasive influence was proving so difficult
to incorporate, transform, or otherwise contain.
Indeed, many illuminating stories can be found in the biogra-
phies linked to the step-by-step cultural sanitization of Room Service, with
an astounding richness of recoverable detail available. One might also
reveal parallel stories of ideological sanitization in a different way by min-
ing the evidence within each successive representation. Examples include
the (already-cited) transformation of Godspeed; the increasingly infantile
play within the play; and the reincarnation of the naive young playwright
character, Leo Davis, as the sharp, well-connected, morally perfect croon-
er Glenn Russell. These changes, already explored to some extent, con-
stitute readable semiotic incorporations (dilutions, exclusions, and trans-
formations).
Similarly readable is the representational fate of the play's "shoe-
string" producer, Gordon Miller, whose reincarnations make him pro-
gressively less appealing as a role model. On Broadway, for instance, the
role was performed by Sam Levene whose "distraught agonized comic
acting" according to New York theatre critic Richard Watts, "is one of
the joys of the American theatre." Watts continues: "Harassed by an inex-
orable fate that makes life a series of unbearable problems and desperate
crises, his baffled but resigned frenzy of exasperation is wonderful to
behold."
2
9
27 On page 147 of his posthumously published autobiography, I Shot an
Elephant in My Pajamas: The Morrie Ryskind Story (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House
Publishers, 1994), Ryskind maintains that he "did nor think anyone who was subscribing
to the tenets of the Communist party should be allowed to work in positions where they
might influence the content of motion pictures."
28 Ibid., 165.
29 Quoted in Alice Griffin, "A Theatre Portrait: Sam Levene," The Theatre, May
"IT SOUNDS Too MUCH LiKE COMRADE" 43
The role of Gordon Miller had been tailored to this actor who
specialized in gritty harassed heroes. However, when the shoestring pro-
ducer first made his way into film, he was portrayed by Groucho Marx (in
his usual Groucho costume). As ftlm historian Joe Adamson expresses it:
"Gordon Miller, who sincerely cares about the fate of his production and
the people involved in it, is being played by Groucho Marx, who sincere-
ly cares about nothing at all."30
Thus, the character had transformed from a harassed hardwork-
ing everyman who triumphs in the end, into an insincere wisecracking
clown in a tailcoat whose final triumph has been edited out of the ftlm.
Later, in the 1944 musical remake, the role was played by George Murphy
whose portrayal of an obviously hypocritical and borderline criminal
character provides an even less desirable role model. Yet in Murphy's por-
trayal the character does not overthrow authority, rather he learns a moral
lesson from it. Indeed, Murphy's Miller departs significantly from the
hardworking hero who had been played by Sam Levene-a departure in
keeping with one of the unwritten commandments given to Hollywood
screenwriters at the time: "Don't glorify the working man."31
Gordon Miller did not conform well to authority, so his story-
though essential to the basic movement of the plot-was reduced,
revised, and moved into the background. Elements of the former char-
acter remained (his name and job title, for instance) but his nature was
vilified to fit the dominant patriotic ideology, thus rendering him semiot-
ically harmless. Such evolutions are hardly surprising. It seems clear that,
as a general principle, the content of slickly-produced mainstream com-
edy is policed by the agents of incorporation. Yet this same narrative of
incorporation simultaneously indicates that the original 1937 Gordon
Miller may indeed have been a subversive hero, for if he was not semiot-
ically subversive, why should the studios have bothered to change him?
The same might be asked of the Russian waiter, of Leo Davis, of
Godspeed, and even, in a different way, of Senator Blake.
Moreover, if these elements all conspired in the overall semiotic
subversion of the original Broadway run of Room Service, then it must
1961, 29. After &om Service, Sam Levine went on to originate the role of Nathan Detroit
in GtfYS and Dolls, for which he is particularly weU remembered.
30 Joe Adamson, Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo: A History of the Marx
Brothers and a Satire on the Rest of the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 345.
31 See Boretz's fascinating discussion of this topic in his interview in Tender
Comrades, 116-118.
44
TRAINOR
have shared in an ideological move that theatre scholars previously attrib-
uted only to so-called social problem plays. Further, if this condition is
true of Room Service, then a general re-examination of the ideological role
played by other "inconsequential" (but well-attended) popular comedies
might prove a rewarding endeavor. What such a project could eventually
reveal about the evolution of American social values in relation to
Broadway comedy is unknowable at present, but certainly stimulating to
imagine.32
The Return to Broadway in 1953
Regarding this relationship between popular comedy and American social
values, there remains one important episode to consider in this history of
Room Service's early career-for in April 1953, at the height of the Red
Scare, the play experienced a short-lived revival on the Broadway stage.
One review began: ''A special lunacy-the only justification for farce-is
nowhere in evidence during the tedious passage of this revival at the
Playhouse. There would seem little reason for exhuming Room Service at
this twilit, lamentable stage of our history."33 As the author continues, it
becomes clear that by "twilit, lamentable stage of our history" he means
McCarthyist red-hunting in general. This review appeared in the
Commonweal, a weekly journal of politics and culture, which was highly
critical of the junior senator from Wisconsin. Its drama critic regrets the
nervousness that the senator had inflicted on the present Broadway the-
atre, as well as the "dreary competence" of Room Service's new cast. He
had hoped to see "spirited mockery," a "grotesque inflation of personal-
ity," a "bold immersion in caricature," and an "exhilarating assertion of
self." Instead he found only: ''A McCarthyism of the emotions that
increasingly infects the climate of our theatre. At one pole, the neuras-
thenia of Camino Real, at another, the pale gentility of Room Service-
32 There is no shortage of popular comedies that might be explored. One
might, for instance, investigate the ideological transformations in Thornton Wilder's
Merchant of Yonkers (1938): a disappointment when it first appeared on stage, but an
instant hit "hen adapted into The Matchmaker (1 954), and an even bigger musical success
when it became Hello, Doi!J! (1964). Clare Boothe's mannered comedy The Women (1936)
might be read against its film version of three years later. The early stage success of The
World of Sholom Aleichem (1953)-whose company consisted almost entirely of blacklisted
performers-might be ideologically compared with its later musical reincarnation Fiddler
on the Rnof (1964). This list could easily be enumerated to include dozens of titles with
similar inter-relations.
33 Richard Hayes, review of Room Service, Commomveal, 24 April 1953, 72.
'1T SoUNDS Too M UCH LIKE COMRADE" 45
between them, what hope?"34 This particular incarnation of Room Service
may have downplayed its own agenda. Yet perhaps this is understandable,
as an ideology once readily welcomed in 1937 had become suspect by
1953.
The careers of Allen Boretz, John Murray, and their play had
diverged in 1937. After the sale of the film rights, Murray remained in
New York where he contributed material to certain Federal Theatre
Project revues, while Boretz followed Room Service to Hollywood. Yet, in
Hollywood-even though he was well-known there as the co-author of
the play-Boretz and his script did not cross paths for they had gone to
different studios. The play was purchased by RKO, while Boretz con-
tracted with M-G-M. In the spring of 1953, though, all three were reunit-
ed for Room Service's Broadway revival-an event which had been precip-
itated by Boretz's being named to HUAC as a member of the Communist
Party by fellow screenwriter Martin Berkeley.35
With Boretz evicted from Hollywood, his and Murray's lives
began to imitate their play. John Murray now became the producer,36 with
his friend and co-author on hand in the big city planning to live on the
royalties of the great production-with-a-message that would surely pull
Boretz's situation "out of the red." It is clear from reviews that some top-
ical revisions were made to the dialogue for the 1953 version,3
7
the full
cast (including Senator and Russian waiter) was reinstated,38 and the
34 Ibid.
35 Boretz was never mentioned by any HUAC witness other than Berkeley, nor
was Boretz ever the specific topic of HUAC's questioning, nor was he ever called to
appear before congress hirnsel The entirety of the testimony which transformed
Boretz's career was as follows: "was a party member, and Lester Koenig, K-o-e-n-i-g, who
is now an associate producer; Roland Kibbee, K-i-b-b-e-e, and Marguerite Roberts's hus-
band John Sanford, a writer, Morton Grant and Melvin Levy, L-e-v-y, Allen Boretz, B-o-
r-e-t-z, co-author of Room Service; Hy Kraft, K-r-a- f-t. I presume that is Hyman. I have
always known him asHy." ("Testimony of Martin Berkeley," 19 September 1951, House
Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the
Motion Picture Industry, Eighty-second Congress, 1599-1600).
36 Murray was one of a trio of producers. His partners were Bernard Hart and
Don Hershey.
3
7
See particularly Richard Watts's review in the NeJ/J York Post, 7 April 1953.
38 In fact, even the original actor, Alexander Asro, a genuine Russian, had been
reinstated in the role of the Russian waiter-in which he received excellent reviews. He
played this role in the 1937 production, as well as in the 1938 Marx Brothers fJ.!m. The
rest of the cast were newcomers.
46 TRAINOR
enthusiastic company of unknowns included future stars Jack Lemmon
and Tony Randall.39 The play even received some positive reviews: "The
original production rolled up 500 performances .. . if the revival doesn't
hang around at least twice as long, its demise will occur because the
Broadway audience has grown too blase to respond."40
Apparently the audience had grown too blase, for the revival last-
ed only 16 performances. The critics who had not seen Room Service on
stage in 1937 reviewed it favorably, but the new production was found
wanting by the older critics who remembered the brilliant mischief of
George Abbott's 1937 presentation. None wrote a truly damning review
of the revival, but many voiced disappointment. The New Yorker com-
mented that: "The revival of 'Room Service' at the Playhouse has a good
many comic virtues, but the play doesn't seem as funny now as it did six-
teen years ago, when George Abbott was in charge of the production."41
Similarly, the New York Post observed:
It used to seem to me that the moose's head was one of
the most hilarious props I ever saw on the stage, and
George Abbott, who directed the first production,
appeared to have invented a thousand comic things to
do with it. In the present revival, it is apparently brought
on for merely one dubious gag and then hangs gloomi-
ly on the wall, a melancholy symbol of the fate of Room
Service.
4
2
And, most poetically, Walter Kerr for the New York Herald Tribune
mourned:
A frenzied stagefull of determined and likeable enough
farceurs charge through the motions . . . but much too
much of the evening is spent in pushing a tired old
39 Though cast in one of the principal roles, Tony Randall left the production
before it opened. Lemmon received some nice reviews in his role as the young playwright.
He also offers some helpful observations on the re"lival. For more see Don Widener's
Lemmon: A Biograpf?y (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1975).
40 Theophilus Lewis, review of Room Service, America, 18 April1953, 116-117.
41 John McCarten, review of Room Service, The New Yorker, 18 April 1953, 68.
4
2 Richard Watts, Jr., "The Glum Return of Room Service," review of Room
Service, Ne1v York Post, 7 April 1953.
"IT SOUNDS Too MUCH LIKE C0.\1RADE''
warhorse beyond its actual energy .. . It isn't hard to see
why Room Service once won for itself a nice, fat run, but
this time it has been whipped too hard by some over
eager and insufficiently-skilled clowns.43
47
This new production had been mounted in haste, possibly even
in desperation. Perhaps the new producers were more timid about fully
realizing the play's subversive spirit during this new era, or perhaps they
lacked the talent to do so. It is likely that they saw Room Service as a finan-
cial sure thing, a smash hit that had been remade in Hollywood twice and
further popularized through countless amateur productions. Maybe they
were counting on nostalgia to make it a success. Yet, as critics noted, the
atmosphere that had produced the original play seemed to have passed
forever. "Can we ever find a road back to the callow, disarming naivete of
these plays?" asks the Commonwea/.44
Intriguingly, while many reviews lament the play's diminished
hilarity, some show a strain of self-reflection as well. "Room Service isn't
what it once was," the critics seem to say, "but neither is the audience."
William Hawkins of the New York Sun expresses this view of the revival
most concisely: "If it does not have the ring or smell of a fabulous hit
nowadays, it is because we have changed rather than that it is the least bit
less expert of its kind."45
Though the production probably was a bit "less expert," and
though it probably did pull its ideological punches, Hawkins nonetheless
raises an excellent point. The New York audience of 1953 was no longer
in tune with the 1937 ideology of Room Service. In an era where even a hint
of communism could no longer to be taken lightly, the popular crowd
was less likely to celebrate the waggish insidious attacks on authority fig-
ures that the "old" Room Service delivered. While many had no love for
Senator McCarthy, in the spring of 19 53 that disaffection could be more
comfortably embraced in the theatre through patronizing Arthur Miller's
new play, The Crucible, which happened to be in the midst of its own ini-
tial Broadway run at the time.
After the failure of the 1953 Room Service revival, Boretz strug-
gled to mount another play in New York. When that proved unsuccess-
43 Walter F. Kerr, review of Rt!om Service, New York Herald Tn'bune, 7 April1953.
4
4
Hayes, review of Room S eroice, Commonweal, 24 April 19 53, 72.
4
5 William Hawkins, "Rt!om Service Still Big Laugh Getter," review of Room
Service, New York Sun, 7 April 1953. Emphasis added.
48 TRAINOR
ful, he then left the country to join the cadre of Hollywood refugees in
Franco's fascist Spain where he remained until the dissolution of the
Hollywood blacklist allowed his return to employment in the United
States.
One might consider the failed revival of Room Service in Raymond
Williams's theoretical terms. As a cultural product of the Depression, the
play contained ideological elements that were, in 1937, viably emergent.
The play's pro-labor, pro-Russian, and anti-government motifs suggest-
ed, at that time, active alternatives to the dominant capitalist ideology.
Even if the play's ideological gist of triumph over institutional authority
reached the audience only on a subliminal level, it nonetheless reached
them and subsequently became a part of a healthy ideological dialectic.
But by 1953, the height of the Red Scare, the national attitude had
changed significantly. In that year those same motifs- while they might
still be opposed to the dominant ideology-had ceased to be emergent.
They were no longer in a state of ascendancy or of becoming, but rather
in a state of popular recession. Perhaps they smacked (unconsciously) of
communism, whose tide had by then ceased to rise in the United States.46
Thus, the subversive farce no longer offered the same "Freudian pleas-
ure" that it once had, not because it had changed, but because its associ-
ations were no longer ascendant in (or secretly desired by) the popular
imagination.
46 In fact, within a matter of months any formal involvement with the
Communist Party of the United States would be made illegal by the Communist Control
Act of 19 54. Party membership would then become punishable by fines and imprison-
ment.
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AI"'D THEATRE 20, NO. 2 (SPRING 2008)
A NATION IN NEED: REVELATIONS AND DISASTER RELIEF IN
THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT
ELIZABETH OSBORNE
The movement of flood waters is an example of the
blind legality-one might almost say constitutionality-
of Nature. There is no appeal from it, and no amending
process.
1
R. L. Duffus
In January of 1937, the upper Midwest experienced one of the most
costly disasters in its history. Though the year began innocently with a bit
of a chill and a mild excess of rain, the end of the month would see the
Ohio River, the mighty Mississippi River, and many of their tributaries at
some of the highest flood levels ever recorded. Flood waters poured into
cities and towns from Pennsylvania through Ohio, Virginia, West
Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, and
into Mississippi and Louisiana. Between 18 January and 5 February, 385
people were killed, one million were left homeless, and property losses
exceeded $500 million (approximately $6.5 billion today; see Figure 1).2
Although one might expect to see the government send sub-
stantial aid in such a situation, one might not expect government-spon-
sored aid to come in the form of theatre. Yet the Federal Theatre Project
(FTP) served as one means of addressing this national catastrophe. At
the invitation of the American Red Cross, community and recreational
drama expert Herbert Price organized an expedition into the depths of
the flood zone. He departed with a traveling company and a single truck
in mid-February, producing performances in concentration camps
throughout Tennessee, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.3 This activ-
I R. L. Duffus, "When Wind and Water Strike at Man," New York Times, 7
February 1937, 125.
2 "Flood of '97: Infamous Floods," The Cincinnati Enquirer, Commemorative
Special Section, "Rivers Unleashed," http:/ / www.enquirer.com/flood_of_97 / history
S.htrnl (accessed 20 July 2007).
3 Note that the term "concentration camp" was not yet emotionally loaded in the
mid-1930s. Instead, it was the term of choice for locations that harbored flood refugees.
so
OSBORNE
ity, largely ignored by theatre scholars and the FfP itself, was a vital part
of National Director Hallie Flanagan's goals for the FfP on both a
regional and national scale. In order to address this fundamental gap in
scholarship, I will deflne Flanagan's goals, outline the progress of the
flood tour, and discuss the challenges that confront a researcher in this
type of search, as well as suggest se\eral reasons for the omission of
these events from the historical record to date. First, however, it is nec-
essary to understand the circumstances and aftermath of the Great Flood
of 1937.
An Imminent Disaster: Setting the Stage
When considering environmental catastrophes of the Great Depression,
the Dust Bowl tends to receive the majority of the attention. However,
other weather disasters happened as well. Earthquakes rattled
Californians in Long Beach (1933), the Great New England Hurricane
struck (1938), and a series of deadly tornadoes swept through central
Illinois (1938), to name only a few of the many natural disasters that
plagued the United States during the Great Depression.4 Amid these
other devastating events, the Great Flood of 1937 does not stand out as
unusual; probably because of this, it is often ignored as just another
weather event that caused suffering during an already distressing time in
the nation's history.
That the 1937 flood took place less than a year after another dev-
astating and deadly flood, is perhaps more noteworthy. In March of 1936,
heavy spring rains and melting snows merged in a devastating flood.
Within one week, flood waters poured into cities and towns along the
Connecticut River and its tributaries; Pittsburgh, Springfield
(Massachusetts), Binghamton, and many others cities and towns from
Maine to the Midwest saw unprecedented waters, and damages through-
out the 12 affected states again reached over $500 million.s Determined to
prevent another such calamity, the government stepped into action; the
Flood Control Act of 1936 gave the federal government the authority to
4 R. L. Duffus, "When Wind and Water Strike ar Man," New York Times, 7
February 1937, 125; "10 Die, Loss Heavy as Rains Lash East," New York Times, 21
September 1938, 27; Warren Moscow, "Floods Add Peril to New England," New York
Times, 23 September 1938, 22; "Tornadoes Kill 27, Injure Hundreds; 5 States Stricken,"
New York Times, 31 March 1938, 1; "Long Beach Gripped in Terror of Shock," New York
Times, 11 March 1933, 1.
5 "The Great Flood of 1936," http:/ /www.wgby.org/localprograms/flood
(accessed 18 October 2006).
A NATION IN NEED 51
HOW RA1N BROUGHT ON THE FLOOD
Figure 1: Map of the Eastern United States showing the areas affected by the
Flood of 1937. The image shows the amount of precipitation received
between January 1st and January 25th. The central areas, receiving 16-20 inches
of rainfall, suffered most from the floods. Image courtesy of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Climatic Data Center,
Asheville, North Carolina; originally printed in "How Rain Brought on the
Flood," Chicago Dai!J Tribune, 29 January 1937,4.
institute multi-state collaborations in the fight against Mother Nature.
Though it seemed impossible that a natu.ral disaster could be
more devastating than the flood of 1936, the flood of 1937 caused even
more damage than its predecessor.6 In Cincinnati, for example, the flood
of 1936 reached just over sixty feet; in 1937, the water was nearly twenty
feet higher, earning it the dubious status of the highest flood waters on
record to this day. It caused ten gasoline tanks to explode and destroyed
the homes of about twenty percent of the local population (an estimated
6 Renowned filmmaker Pare Lorentz immortalized the Flood of 1937 in his
1938 WPA film The River. It is interesting to note that Lorentz's f!.lm deals with the topic
of the Flood of 1936, but since he was ftlming in the midst of the Flood of 1937 (and
had significant budget constraints), he simply shot footage of the current flood and
decided to use it in the film instead.
52
OsBORNE
100,000 people)J Large parts of Cincinnati burned while flood waters
prevented the firefighters from reaching the flames. The American Red
Cross (ARC) described the events as an "inferno of water" that "only a
Dante could describe in verse, or a Wagner in music, the overwhelming
character of the flood at its worst and the amount of human misery it
caused."8 Due to the collisions between a stalled cold front and a series
of moist tropical air masses, more than 165 billion tons of rain fell on the
Ohio River Valley in January 1937.
9
More than one million refugees fled
from the 12,721 square miles affected, and arrived destitute at the camps
of the ARC.to
On the Road: The Federal Theatre Project
The FTP stands alone as the only real attempt at creating a national the-
atre in the United States. One of the frequently lampooned Arts Projects
created under the aegis of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New
Deal, the FTP was established in 1935 and existed for four short, turbu-
lent, and exhilarating years. Under the leadership of Hallie Flanagan, the
FTP employed more than 13,000 unemployed theatre professionals
throughout the country, brought theatre to an audience of more than 30
million, and fought to provide locally relevant theatre for the people of
the United States in rural as well as urban settings.! I
In addition to putting thousands of unemployed theatre profes-
sionals back to work, Flanagan and her FTP struggled to provide some
much needed emotional and moral support for a struggling nation. 12 Her
7 "Flood of '97," The Cincinnati Enquirer, Commemorative Special Section,
"Rivers Unleashed," http:/ /www.enquirer.com/flood_of_97 /historyS.html (accessed 22
July 2007).
8 American Red Cross, The Ohio-Mississippi Vallry Flood Disaster of 1937 Report of
Operations, (Washington, DC: American Red Cross, 1937), 17.
9 Ibid., 10-11.
to Ibid., 78.
II Though this article will not focus on the life of Hallie Flanagan, she was a
fascinating woman. Further information can be found in: Hallie Flanagan, Arena (New
York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940); Jane DeHart Mathews, The Federal Theatre, 1935-
1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967); and Joanne
Bentley, Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
12 The project established five regional centers: New York (New York), Boston
(Northeast), Chicago (Midwest), Los Angeles (West), and New Orleans (South). Each
A NATION IN NEED
objectives were to:
Give employment to needy theatre professionals in
socially useful projects which will rehabilitate them, con-
serve their skills, and at the same time, bring to thou-
sands of American citizens not hitherto able to afford
theatre going, a planned theatrical program, national in
scope, regional in emphasis, and American in democra-
tic attitude.t3
53
Note Flanagan's multiple goals in this statement. Her desire was to both
train and employ out-of-work theatre professionals and develop an audi-
ence from a specific group of Americans-those who had not been able
to afford or attend theatre previously. To accomplish this mission,
Flanagan created an organization that was simultaneously national and
local. The FTP was to have the strength, unity, and resources of a nation-
al theatre while it served the needs of numerous specific, widely varied,
cities and towns throughout the country. Though the relative successes
and failures of the FTP are often debated, the flood tour is an excellent
example in which Flanagan's goals of a sweeping national theatre were
realized. Here was a production team, composed of members from a
variety of locations and backgrounds, creating a series of music and
vaudeville skits for a widespread audience of varying class and age. They
performed primarily in concentration camps-liminal locations that
housed Americans from both urban and rural environments.
For weeks, the preparation for and anticipation of the mobile
unit that was to tour the flood zone was the primary topic of conversa-
tion for FTP administrators touting the benefits of a national theatre. E.
E. McCleish, Acting Deputy Director, explained their purpose as com-
plementing the rescue efforts of the ARC:
The concentration camps give such shelter, as the Red
Cross in the flood emergency can set up, to many thou-
sands who have lost homes and belongings in the flood
center was designed to develop locally reJe,ant theatre, and to serve as a resource for the
rural areas surrounding it.
13 Hallie Flanagan, "Excerpts from National Director's Report, January, 1939,"
Federal Theatre, National Archives and Records Administration, Works Progress
Administration, Federal Theatre Project, Record Group 69 (hereafter NARA), Entry 920,
Regional Publications Describing Federal Theatre Activities, 1936-39, Box 357, "The
Prompter," 1.
54
waters. The Red Cross considers it highly important in
rehabilitating these families to build up and maintain
morale; one of the greatest difficulties in the refugee
work is lifting the spirit of the homeless.t4
OSBORNE
References to morale abound in the literature of the ARC, particularly
when disasters require the long-term care of refugees, as in the case of
the 1937 flood. To help with the rebuilding of morale, the ARC assigned
Recreational Directors to coordinate activities for both children and
adults. These activities ranged from organizing sports and games to var-
ious forms of entertainment from both inside and outside the camps. In
the Flood of 1937, the ARC report noted:
The refugees were in a state of mental and physical
shock. Unless this condition were changed the adjust-
ment to temporary hardship would be even more diffi-
cult and the recovery of pre-disaster morale would be
greatly delayed. It was seen that programs on both active
and passive recreation would do more to help the flood
victims reestablish themselves physically and mentally
than any other measure that might be undertaken. Is
The FTP flood tour was one of many activities that addressed this need
for recreational programs, and was welcomed by ARC officials. And so,
the two organizations formed a symbiotic relationship: the FTP offered
a pre-packaged program of entertainment and the ARC legitimized the
work of a national theatre hoping to establish itself as socially useful.
One challenge of conducting this type of research is that the
records of a theatre troupe traveling and performing in a disaster area
tend to be somewhat haphazard. In this case, the troupe's leader, Herbert
Price, supplied several first-hand accounts of the activities to both
Flanagan and Pierre de Rohan, editor of Federal Theatre (the FTP maga-
zine). However, there remains little in the way of local newspaper articles
regarding the performances as most of the area newspapers were closed
due to flooding. The normally exhaustive FTP administration was neces-
sarily meager since the company was on the road. This particular comp-
14 E. E. McCleish to Lawrence Morris and Mrs. Charles Tidd Cole, 17 February
1937, Memorandum, NARA, Entry 839, General Correspondence of the National
Office, 1935-39, Box 10, "Flood Area Truck Tour-1937," 1.
15 American Red Cross, The OhioMississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1937, 121.
A NATION IN NEED 55
any had no major stars to attract additional attention, so Price's reports
constitute some of the only records of this adventure. While this leads to
necessary questions about Price's reliability, it is important to note that a
variety of memos, letters, and other administrative material surrounding
the flood tour generally corroborate his reports; however, to date, his
reports are the only first-hand accounts that I have been able to locate.
In the summer of 1936, an Englishman by the name of Herbert
Stratton Price had appeared in Flanagan's Washington office and asked
for "something hard to do." He was an actor, director, and stage manag-
er with a background in sociology and a particular interest in rural com-
munity drama.
1
6 Price was ideally suited to an endeavor such as the flood
tour, so the following year when he proposed that the FTP make a con-
nection with the ARC and offer moral support to victims of the Great
Flood of 1937, Flanagan asked him to work up a plan. The company was
comprised entirely of volunteers and planned to be on the road from
three weeks to two months, depending on the duration of the flood. As
Price explained to Flanagan in his plan, "as I see it, Clearing Houses have
been set up on the outskirts and highlands of some of the larger cities in
the stricken area of the Southland."
17
He highlighted a series of refugee
camps on the banks of the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Cairo, in
Paducah, Kentucky, and then into Coffee County, Tennessee, and
through Memphis. In many of these places, the ARC had evacuated
refugees from their home states into those less severely affected by the
flood. Residents of Mississippi, for example, fled to large camps in
Birmingham, Alabama. Price suggested:
1) That we do not strike the larger Clearing Houses.
2) That we concentrate on camps of 500 up to 5,000.
3) That we use the Fair Grounds in Memphis, Tennessee
as our working base.
4) That I proceed to this working base as soon as I can
clear matters of importance in New York relative to my
program in Georgia.IS
16 Flanagan, Arena, 91.
17 Herbert S. Price to Hallie Flanagan, 5 February 193 7, Memorandum, NARA,
Entry 839, General Correspondence of the National Office, 1935-39, Box 10, "Flood
Area Truck Tour-1937," 1.
18 Ibid., 1. Price's focus on the moderately-sized camps was likely designed to
accommodate the ARC needs. Larger camps had personnel specifically dedicated to recre-
56 OSBORNE
This proposal experienced the fastest approval and the fewest bureau-
cratic hindrances I have seen in my research on the FTP. Price sent his
suggestions to Flanagan on 5 February. Flanagan forwarded the request
to Ellen Woodward, Assistant Administrator of Women's and
Professional Proj ects and the person in charge of all four of the Works
Proj ect Administration's (WPA) Arts Projects. Woodward spoke to
Aubrey Williams, who was second-in-command to Harry Hopkins, head
of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the parent
organization of the WPA. The same day that Price submitted the plan to
Flanagan, Woodward received approval from Williams for the flood tour
and authorized Flanagan to proceed. t9
While Price planned upwards of seventy-two performances for
the two months the company would potentially be traveling in the flood
zone, other FTP companies worked the situation as well. In Cincinnati,
for example, the local FTP unit traveled voluntarily:
Over flooded roads 70 to 90 miles a day, setting up their
makeshift scenery in any hall or school available in the
flooded towns . . . [they] played by candlelight and
lantern light to the cheers of mothers and fathers and
children whose minds have been lifted from their wor-
ries.20
That the Cincinnati unit was willing to travel through these regions with
little notice (and no additional "hazard" pay) indicates the lengths to
which the people of the FTP were willing to go during this national dis-
aster. Though they were not the only unit outside of the flood tour to do
this, the specific references to the other FTP units no longer exist.
In documenting the flood tour activities, Price peppered his
arion in those locations, so they were equipped to handle the entertainment needs of
those camps. Many of the more moderately-sized camps received recreational directors
from the national ARC; these direcrors had the background to organized entertainment
on a grand scale, but lacked the local contacts to make the system work practically. Thus,
the FTP offer was particularly suited to this level of concentration camp.
19 EllenS. Woodward to Hallie Flanagan, 5 February 1937, Memorandum,
NARA, Entry 839, General Correspondence of the National Office, 1935-39, Box 10,
"Flood Area Truck Tour-1937," 1.
20 E. E. McCleish to Lawrence Morris and Mrs. Charles Tidd Cole, 17 February
1937, Memorandum, NARA, Entry 839, General Correspondence of the National
Office, 1935-39, Box 10, "Flood Area Truck Tour-1937," 2.
A NA'!10N IN N EED 57
reports with pithy puns-the company's truck "acted up," for example-
but his accounts also vividly described the flood victims and the concen-
tration camps, which were segregated by race, gender, and class. One of
the first performances was at a camp in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the
ARC turned an old shirt factory into an assembly hall, dining room, head-
quarters, and refuge for about 750 African Americans. All the refugees
had been evacuated from the considerably more rural environment of
Paducah, Kentucky. According to Price, "they were not allowed to leave
the building unless under escort by special permission. The local author-
ities were afraid the refugees might wander off and get lost, as this was
for the majority, the first contact they had ever had with city life."2I He
wrote of the only bit of cheer in the camp coming from three pet
canaries singing from their cages in a dark corner of the women's sleep-
ing quarters, and noted a sign that read "ONE AcciDENT MIGHT TAKE
ALL THE JOY OuT OF LIFE FoR You AND YouR FAMILY," a remnant
from the building's days as a shirt factory.
22
White refugees stayed in an
adjacent building.
The racial segregation experienced in the Knoxville concentra-
tion camps was not unusual, and speaks to an anxiety that surrounded the
liminal communities created by the flood. Floods and other natural dis-
asters may have been great equalizers, but not when refugee camp group-
ings were determined. The concern that African American refugees from
small towns would "wander off and get lost" in the big city leads one to
wonder about the underlying reasons informing this choice. Were author-
ities really worried about the welfare of the African American refugees or
were they bothered by the possibility of African Americans wandering
through the city of Knoxville unescorted? Moreover, what if these
African Americans decided that they preferred Knoxville to their own
communities in rural Paducah? Numerous scholars have described the
conditions in rural southern communities as "atrocious" for African
Americans, noting that blacks were required to work so hard that culture
and pleasure often seemed less important than mere survival.23 That said,
my intent here is not to interrogate the reasons behind the segregated
21 Herbert Price, "Federal Theatre Mobile Variety Unit: Players Entertain
Flood Refugees," NARA, Entry 952, New York City Amateur Drama Department
Records & Herbert S. Price, Box 523, "Price File-Flood Area Material," 2.
22 Ibid.
23 Valerie Grim, ''African American Rural Culture, 1900-1950," Rural South,
1900-1950, ed. R. Douglas Hurt, (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003),
108-111.
58 OSBORNE
camps or their interactions with the community at large, but to wonder at
the FTP reaction (or lack thereof) to the situation. Price noted that
African Americans were housed in different camps, and implied that
these camps enjoyed less in the way of comforts than did those housing
white refugees. Yet, he did not seem to feel that any kind of public com-
ment or reaction on the racial segregation (and condescension) was war-
ranted. In light of the FTP initiatives dealing specifically with African
Americans, it is troubling that the FTP seems to have turned an institu-
tional blind eye in this instance.
The FTP company touring the flood areas built a stage out of
loaned lumber and performed for more than 900 refugees in Knoxville.
On the second morning in Knoxville, they performed for another group
of "underprivileged men, women and children" in a small local mill; that
Price distinguished between the refugees and the "underprivileged" is
remarkable. He did so throughout his reports, carefully noting the times
that the company played to impoverished people, and again when the
impoverished people were also flood victims. On another occasion, the
flood tour played to "so called 'poor whites' from Ark[ansas];" Price
explained that these people were "sometimes known as 'river-bottom'
folk," but went into no further detail to show why this distinction was rel-
evant to his report.24
Their travels and his chronicles continued in this vein. As Price
described in his reports, and as the letters of support from ARC recre-
ation directors corroborated, dirty, crowded, despairing refugee camps
saw a glimmer of hope when the company performed. Price's traveling
company played in Civilian Conservation Corps barracks, on their truck,
in the community sleeping quarters, and in factories, schools, and the
great outdoors (See Figures 2 and 3). In Tullahoma, Tennessee, they per-
formed on two tabletops and the audience perched on beds, tables, and
even on the cross-beams of the roof to see the show. In Forrest City,
Arkansas, the company played outside (in February) and, while the audi-
ence did not seem to mind the cold, damp air, the pianist, cello player,
and violinist had to "run around between numbers to stay warm."25 The
travel was grueling, and often involved lengthy struggles to remove the
truck from huge tracks of knee-deep mud or detours of up to 100 miles
when the floodwaters washed out roads or bridges. They used audience
24 Herbert Price, "Federal Theatre Mobile Variety Unit: Players Entertain
Flood Refugees," NARA, Entry 952, New York City Amateur Drama Department
Records & Herbert S. Price, Box 523, "Price File-Flood Area Material," 2.
25 Ibid., 9.
A NATION IN NEED 59
Figure 2
Figure 3
This truck is an example of the type of vehicle that would have traveled
through the flood zone with the Federal Theatre Proj ect. Note that the side of
the truck folds down and uses boards to stabilize the portion of the stage that
projects out. The challenge of using this type of vehicle during the aftermath
of the flood would have been two-fold. First, the ground needed to be fum
enough to provide good support for the stage. Second, outdoor performances
depended on the cooperation of the early-February weather, something that
was in short supply that winter. Images courtesy of Library of Congress,
Federal Theatre Project Collection, Box 1190, "Portable Theatre (Caravan)-
New York, New York Area, Set Up."
60 OSBORNE
members in the performances, bringing them on stage and having them
participate in the varied skits and numbers. In addition, each performance
ended with a "community sing" in which some member of the refugee
group--often a minister or spiritual leader- would lead the audience and
actors in a rousing chorus of "Goin' Home."
26
At times the community
sing would go on for half an hour or more after the performance offi-
cially ended.27
The audience response to the traveling troupe was largely posi-
tive. An area director of the Recreational Refuge Program expressed her
thanks in a letter, writing, "the audience was delighted and sat in wide-
eyed wonder thruout [sic] the performance. Of course, in many cases it
was the f.trst time they had seen a 'real show' and all of them agreed that
it was a big treat."28 Another Director of the Division of Recreation
Projects wrote to Flanagan: "The Supervisor of one of the Nashville
parks, where the Troupe played to a group of about two hundred chil-
dren, telephoned the following day to express her appreciation of the
f.tne spirit of the Unit who entered so wholeheartedly in the spirit of the
occasion, playing and singing with the playground children a half hour
after the closing performance."29
The Costs and Benefits of the Tour
Clearly, Price and the company felt that their work was worth the hard-
ships they endured, as did the FTP administrators who touted the tour.
For Price, though, there was one additional sacrifice. The time and ener-
gy of touring would ultimately pull Price away from his efforts to set up
more permanent rural FTP efforts, which would have enormous reper-
cussions for the attempts to establish a truly national theatre. He had
26 Though there are many songs called "Goin' Home," it is likely that Price is
referring to a spiritual based on the second movement of Antonin Dvorak's Sy,phof!Y No.
9. It is often requested at funerals, and some rank it as second only to "Amazing Grace"
as a hymn for solemn occasions.
27 Herbert Price, "Federal Theatre Mobile Variety Unit: Players Entertain
Flood Refugees," NARA, Entry 952, New York City Amateur Drama Department
Records and Herbert S. Price, Box 523, "Price File-Flood Area Material," 2-6.
28 Armita Schaumburg to Herbert S. Price, 1 March 1937, NARA, Entry 952,
New York City Amateur Drama Department Records & Herbert S. Price, Box 523, "Price
File-Flood Area Material," 1.
29 Ruth Ray to Hallie Flanagan, 8 March 1937, NARA, Entry 952, New York
City Amateur Drama Department Records & Herbert S. Price, Box 523, "Price File-
Flood Area Material," 1.
A NATION IN NEED 61
worked for more than a year to convince the national administration that
an outreach project in the rural south would satisfy a local need, employ
theatre artists, and help to secure the FTP's position in Georgia and the
South. He received approval for a 90-day experimental partnership with
the recreation program and chose five people to send into small Georgia
communities as Drama Consultants. Their mission was "to organize and
develop Community Drama Groups in five districts."30 More specifically,
these five people had three months to travel into the rural towns of
Georgia, incite or capitalize on local interest in theatre, and create drama
that the people of the community would somehow pay to maintain once
the three-month experiment ended. For Price, the stakes were high; the
success of the program depended on the contacts that he had made dur-
ing the organization of the experiment.
The Georgia Experiment began in early January 1937; the flood
tour began only a few weeks into this program, when the community
leaders were scheduled to lay the framework for their programs. Price put
this aside and toured the Midwest with the flood tour; he was virtually
unreachable during this crucial period, unable to provide anything but the
most cursory assistance to the five people charged with spearheading the
project. The Georgia Experiment stumbled along without his
indomitable energy, contacts, and resources; by the time he returned from
the flood tour the Georgia Experiment was in its final stages.
Unfortunately, it closed with little fanfare at the end of its 90-day trial
period.
The Georgia Experiment offered the very real potential of
becoming a localized, national theatre for the rural areas of the South;
this could have been a turning point for the FTP, not only in the South,
but also as a national entity. The flood tour trumped this effort, both with
Price and with the national administration; the flood tour robbed the
Georgia Experiment of potential resources and energy, and eclipsed the
Georgia Experiment in the rhetoric surrounding the effectiveness of the
FfP within the framework of a national theatre. Thus, in spite of the
short-term gains of the flood tour in the national perception of the FTP,
the long-term loss included a worthwhile project that could have changed
the proverbial face of the FTP and theatre in the South.
It is also important to note that the Flood of 1937 came at a cru-
cial time for the FTP nationally. Having finally found its feet, determined
30 Herbert S. Price, "Federal Theatre Community Drama Program in Georgia
(Rome to be included)," NARA, Entry 952, Correspondence of Herbert S. Price-
Coordinator for Community Drama, New York City, Box 523, "Herbert S. Price,
Correspondence," 1.
62 OSBORNE
where theatre people were eligible for relief, and deployed companies
throughout the country, the FTP was finally beginning to raise its stan-
dards. No longer was the administration satisfied by a unit simply over-
coming the bureaucratic and practical difficulties and opening a show. As
McCleish explains: "The press comment generally throughout the coun-
try on Federal Theatre as an enterprise is losing its superficial acerbity of
criticism and shows signs of editorial acceptance of the project as a cul-
tural development worthy of support."3t Here was an opportunity to
capitalize on this critical shift, showing that the FTP could be more than
entertainment; it could minister to the emotional wounds of the country
in a very public, service-oriented way.
Shifting Currents of Scholarship
Ironically, the aforementioned change in perspective from the FTP's crit-
ics highlights the attitude that likely relegated the flood tour-and many
other touring and rural companies on the FTP payroll-to obscurity. As
the scathing critiques gradually softened, the FTP began thinking of itself
in more professional, highbrow terms, and the FTP leadership focused
less on lowbrow forms such as vaudeville and traveling tent shows.
Instead, the Living Newspapers, splashy big-city musicals, and controver-
sial pieces such as The Cradle Will Rock-comparatively highbrow
forms-received the majority of the attention. Keeping the purposes of
the FTP in mind, lowbrow forms such as the popular entertainments that
played to rural audiences are certainly worthy of investigation, and vital
to understanding this one and only foray into a national theatre.
Surprisingly, the ample archive can quickly become a hindrance
in this type of exploration. The archival documents surrounding the FTP
number in the millions when one considers the combined resources of
the Library of Congress, National Archives, George Mason University,
and the many other smaller institutions that house pieces of the FTP
story. One of the challenges with conducting the research for this article
has been that the archives are organized primarily in terms of people,
location, and production. This organization causes serious problems
when one is attempting to locate the activities of a traveling company
that performed miscellaneous, unnamed vaudeville skits, and which
included few major personalities. By its very nature, the present state of
the archive limits the possibilities of researching traveling productions
31 E. E. McCleish to Lawrence Morris and Mrs. Charles Tidd Cole, 17 February
1937, Memorandum, NARA, Entry 839, General Correspondence of the National
Office, 1935-39, Box 10, "Flood Area Truck Tour-1937," 3.
A NATION IN NEED 63
such as this one.32
Yet much of the organization in place at the major archives mir-
rors that of the FfP itself. Recall that Hallie Flanagan requested and
obtained one month on the government payroll to collect and organize
all the FfP records in July 1939, immediately after the closing of the FfP.
Flanagan also received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1940
to continue the archiving process, and convinced the president of Vassar
College to secure FfP records for that time period; during this time,
Flanagan wrote Arena, her memoir of the FfP and still the definitive
work on its goals, activities, and scope.33 And so, the form of the organ-
ization of these records emerged from the national administration of the
FfP, suggesting that Flanagan and the FTP itself placed importance on
specific types of performance. This choice implies a hierarchy of value
within the structure of the FfP, minimizing the importance placed not
only on the traveling companies and rural performance, but also on
multi-state activities outside of the prominent nation-wide openings and
well-known living newspapers.
In light of Flanagan's assertions that the FfP would seek out
previously unknown audiences in areas of the country that had been
untouched by theatre, this implication is troubling. This apparent incon-
gruity between stated FfP ideology and practice may be linked to the
need to establish the vitality of the FfP in a way that was intelligible to
those who provided funding or other support for the organization, par-
ticularly critics, congressmen, and other political bureaucrats. Since these
32 I should note that it is not my intent to accuse the archives of bias here.
Records must be organized based on a system of some kind, and the majority of the
archives I have used have done an admirable job of maintaining the records of a major
national theatre from the Great Depression.
33 The organization of the FTP records v:as a monumental task. In the one
month the U.S. government granted flanagan and her small Washington, DC, staff, their
primary concern was shutting down a national theatre operating in 20 states with more
than 8000 employees, millions of dollars in equipment, dozens of theatre leases, out-
standing royalties, and many more administrative details. The Rockefeller Grant and the
support of Vassar College provided the comparative calm required to begin the task of
archiving the FTP the following year. Flanagan hired a small staff, worked our of Vassar,
and used the archives she created as the basis for Arena, a book that contains a clear agen-
da; Flanagan wanted to recall the successes of the FTP, explain (though not apologize for)
the failures, delineate the reasons for its downfall, and advocate for a national theatre in
the U.S.A. She felt that the FTP was maturing just as Congress abolished it. At this point,
several groups, including the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), were
agitating for the creation of a new national theatre and it seemed very possible that such
a theatre could be realized in the near future. Flanagan, Arena, 368-73; Bentley, Hallie
Flanagan: A Lift in the American Theatre, 351-2.
64 OSBORNE
potential supporters were more numerous in urban areas, it would be log-
ical to shape the archive in a way that would appeal to these outside
reviewers. I t is possible, then, that this organization may not be any indi-
cation as to what was actually valued by Flanagan and the FfP; instead,
it may conform to the expectations (real or imagined) of these outsiders,
which brings questions of the nature of the archives themselves to the
forefront of this investigation.
Mterpiece: And the Waters Recede
To this point, the tent shows, rural enterprises, and traveling companies
of the FTP have been largely ignored; this trend began with the FfP and
the normally politically-savvy Flanagan, and has continued in modern
scholarship.3
4
In light of the FfP's role as a national theatre-funda-
mentally and repeatedly defined by its relationship to the working class in
both urban and rural settings-this is a lamentable omission that has col-
ored the ways in which scholars perceive the FfP as a whole. Efforts
such as the flood tour demonstrate the FTP simultaneously at its best and
worst.35 The administration was able to work together quickly and effi-
ciently, use the united resources of the national project, and meet a very
real need of the American people. At the same time, the FfP was not
able to address concerns of race or class, or to tailor the production to
the specific needs of the local populations it addressed in a meaningful
way. In this case though, the needs of the local population may have
become secondary to the needs of the liminal community of refugees-
to boost morale by providing light entertainment in this transitional
moment so as to reinforce the refugees' emotional resources. Thus, the
flood tour itself provided a meaningful and vital service to a large part of
the country. It is the lack of scholarly and critical attention that has con-
fined this lowbrow, rural, and vitally important effort to obscurity; it has
been hidden in plain sight.
34 If one embraces my aforementioned concerns over the nature of rhe
archive, Flanagan's lack of emphasis on these lowbrow forms may actually be an indica-
tion the degree of her political savvy, rather than her lack thereof.
35 It was during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's strike on New Orleans
(2005) that I began to wonder if the National Endowment for the Arts had sent repre-
sentatives to that disaster site as they had to so many others in U.S. history. Though the
NEA sent numerous arts organizations grants and other financial assistance, I have locat-
ed little in the way of direct relief in the form of morale-building for refugees. Though
the Katrina aftermath has not been the focus of this article, the resurrection of FTP sen-
sibilities as described here could have taken steps toward alleviating some of the suffer-
ing of her victims decades later.
JOURNAL OF AMERlCAN DR.\MA AND THEATRE 20, NO. 2 (SPRlNG 2008)
MAKING IT REAL? THEATRE IN TIMES OF VIRTUAL WARFARE
1
ILKA SAAL
Compared to fiction or flim, theatre tends to react fairly swiftly to con-
temporary geopolitical crises such as the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan,
and Iraq,z for instance, by alluding to them in the mise-en-scene of a pro-
duction or by promptly reviving classic war dramas such as The
L:!Jsistrata, and The Trojan Women.3 And yet, there have been few attempts
to turn these contemporary wars into what Brecht has called "die grofien
Gegenstande"-the great discourses of theatre. This hesitancy to present
the experience of war in other than personal terms, to think through
them historically, economically, and culturally could be attributed to the
fact that these wars are too recent (or even still ongoing) to permit a com-
plex artistic response.
4
But it could also be ascribed to the very nature of
1 I would like to thank Robert Vorlid .. -y and Jan Lensen for their patient read-
ings of several versions of this essay and their many insightful comments.
2
The fact that theatre reacts more prompdy than literature or film was brought
to my attention at a conference on "The Literature of War" in Corfu in May 2007, where
several participants underlined the lack of literary responses to contemporary wars. Mark
Rawlinson of the University of Leicester, for instance, pointed to the profound disjunc-
tion between our apprehension of contemporary wars, which has effectively turned war
into a sort of "spectator sport," and our contemporary literature of war, which in resort-
ing to historical fiction prefers to valorize the collective experience of earlier, popular
wars. This paucity of fictional and filmic responses cannot solely be adduced from the
fact that it might be more feasible, economically and logistically, to get up a live per-
formance than to publish a novel or produce a film. Rather, while we encounter a prolif-
eration of war literature and ftlm, they largely tend to revisit past wars, and very few
attempt to apprehend the trauma and pain of current wars (as underlined by such recent
Hollywood feats as Steven Spielberg's Saving Private JYan, 1998; Clint Eastwood's Flags of
Our Fathers, 2006; and Eastwood's Letters from Iowa ]ima, 2006).
3 For instance, the Salzburg Festival of 1992 featured a new adaptation of The
Persians by Robert Auletta and Peter Sellars; The Persians was also the highlight of the last
Theatre Olympics in 2006 in Istanbul, featuring a Greek-Turkish co-production directed
by Theodoros Terzopoulos. The 9/11 terrorist attack on the U.S. and the subsequent
bombing of Afghanistan prompdy triggered the Lysistrata Project, a worldwide theatre
event against war. Other favorites are, of course, Brecht's Mother Courage (most promi-
nently with Meryl Streep in Central Park in the summer of 2006).
4 With this statement, I do not mean to diminish the value of prompt artistic
responses to acts of terror or war. As Marvin Carlson has pointed out in his perceptive
essay on the reaction of New York theatre artists to 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq those
66
SAAL
these wars, or more precisely, to the nature of our contemporary percep-
tion of war.
Ever since the Persian Gulf War, war has been increasingly
staged as a spectacle offered up for consumption by Western audiences.
With its constant live-reportage, it became a media event and was prop-
erly marketed as such, including a cinematic title, "Operation Desert
Storm," and prime-time television coverage. Images of war were relayed
live from the battlefield into our living rooms. We could watch fighters
take off from aircrafts and see live missiles hit their targets in real time.
And yet, those bottle-green images were also oddly hazy and fuzzy, and,
above all, notably devoid of the actual carnage and destruction of war.
Instead they "showed" us a clean war of smart bombs, stealth fighters,
and surgical strikes-" clean" in the sense that it did not show us any evi-
dence of the over 3,500 civilian Iraqi dead, nor of the thousands who
died in the aftermath of the first Gulf War.
Rather than disseminating "objective" information, the constant
reportage served one function only: the normalization of a political cri-
sis, its decline from an exceptional event into quotidian ordinariness,s or,
as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, the "depoliticization" of the political.6 Yet, it
would be wrong to conclude that the media have been hijacked by poli-
tics. On the contrary, the media, in turn, have increasingly instrumental-
ized the spectacle of war for their own legitimization. After all, the
numerous "live on location" reports, so typical of war reportage now,
attest to the ubiquity, instantaneity, and hence omnipotence of the media
in the contemporary world. Thanks to this omnipotence, war no longer
always happens elsewhere, but it also always happens on screen.
In times of such "wartainrnent," the question arises: what are the
possibilities for art to break through the media screen and to contest and
"muddy" its clean narratives and images? Or more specifically: what are
immediate responses (often highly personal and emotional), were necessary forms of wit-
nessing and mourning, while other performances provided incisive political commen-
taries. All in all, the theatre became a crucial forum for supporting and fuelling anti-war
movements such as Not in Our Name and Theatres Against War. See Marvin Carlson,
"9/11, Afghanistan, and lrag: The Response from the New York Theatre," Theatre Survey
45, no.l (May 2004): 3-17.
5 Rainer Emig, "The Double Disappearance Act: War and the Media" in Modern
War on Stage and Screen, ed. Wolfgang Gortschacher and Holger Michael Klein (Lewiston,
NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 228.
6 Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance, trans. Richard Nice (New York: The New
Press, 1998), 73.
MAKING IT E L ~ 67
the possibilities for contemporary theatre to assert its function in the
public sphere and to re-politicize war for its depoliticized spectators? Is
theatre still capable of resensitizing us to violence, of analyzing the
power structures of war, and of opening up a space in our collective
imagination where political alternatives to war can be conceived?
In what follows, I want to ask these questions of two recent the-
atrical attempts to analyze contemporary wars: Sarah Kane's forceful, vis-
ceral reaction to the war in Bosnia, Blasted (United Kingdom, 1995) and
Jonathan Kalb's detached, cerebral response to the ongoing war in Iraq,
Gulliver's Choice (U.S., 2004). Both of these plays deliberately break with
the standard mimetic paradigm that still dominates much of mainstream
theatrical productions, particularly in the United States: realism. As sev-
eral critics have pointed out, realism-especially its naturalist stage ver-
sion-is highly problematic in that it presents us with an interpretation
of reality that strives to pass as reali!J itself Bertolt Brecht vehemently
opposed this form of mimesis, claiming that it operated in concert with
ideology by mystifying the process of theatrical signification and naturaliz-
ing the relation between character and actor, setting and world, so that
"one can no longer interpose one's judgment, imagination and reactions,
and must simply conform by sharing the experience and becoming one
of 'nature's' objects."? Feminist critic Elin Diamond likewise reminds us
that in its dependence and insistence "on the stability of the external ref-
erent, an objective world that is the source and guarantor of knowledge,
realism surreptitiouslY reinforces (even if it argues with) the arrangements of
the world" (emphasis mine).B However, to be critical of war also requires
us to be skeptical of the ways in which war is represented. My interest in
non-realist forms of theatre is therefore primarily motivated by the
assumption that they have a greater potential for alerting us to the ideo-
logical work of mimesis that Brecht and Diamond have warned us
against.
9
7 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1964), 219.
8 Elin Diamond, "Mimesis, l\.limicry, and the True-Real," Modern Drama 32
(1989): 61.
9 Docudramas have certainly also played an important role in responding to
contemporary war and conflict. However, they too tend to rely on an unproblematic
notion of mimesis, which allows them either to reconstruct in journalistic fashion the
events leading up to a crisis (David Hare's Str1f Happens, United Kingdom, 2004) or to
reconstruct the personal biography and views of one particular victim of violence (My
Name is RPchel Corrie, U.S., 2005).
68 SAAL
Foregrounding the theatricality of the stage, the plays of Kane
and Kalb evince a degree of self-awareness and self-reflectivity that
prompts us to pay attention to the mimetic process itself. Yet, in break-
ing with the hegemony of realism, they resort to modernist (rather than
postmodern) strategies: an Artaudian theatre of cruelty in Blasted and a
Brechtian aesthetic of alienation in Gulliver's Choice.1o I am intrigued not
only by these rather different (even antithetical) choices, but above all by
the question implicit in this recourse to modernist aesthetics: In what
ways can modernist techniques enable contemporary theatre to compete
with as well as to challenge the postmodern media aesthetics of our time,
that is, the ubiquitous spectacularization of war and violence? In what
follows, I shall briefly sketch out each aesthetic approach and discuss the
various ways in which they attempt to denaturalize our perception of
war-to return the spectator to an awareness of war as first and foremost
a manifestation of political and physical violence.
Kane's Theatre of Cruelty: Blasted (1995)
When Kane's Blasted opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in
199 5, it elicited much critical outrage and protest. The Dai!J Mail consid-
ered it a "disgusting feast of filth" produced by a "sick" twenty-three year
old,
11
while the Evening Standard rejected it as a "Random Tour in a
Chamber of Horrors."tz Kane quickly found herself relegated to the
rows of the "New Brutalists"-a term with which the press sought to
contain and discharge the disruptive energy brought to the British stage
by a handful of young playwrights (such as Mark Ravenhill and Martin
10 Without doubt, Brecht and Artaud played a decisive role in the transition
from modernist to posrmodernist theatre. I nonetheless consider their work and theories
Qate) modernist rather than postmodern, precisely because they are still anchored in the
presupposition of a unified human subject and his/her coherent experience of the world,
which can be explored, criticized, and changed (whether it is by way of visceral immer-
sion into the total work of art or by way of the Both theatre artists,
moreover, still assume the privilege of taking a position vis-a-vis and outside the object
of their critique. However, if we follow Fredric Jameson's definition of postmodernism,
then one of its defining criteria is precisely that " the luxury of the old-fashioned ideo-
logical critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable." See
Fredric Jameson, Postmodemism, or the Cultural Logic of lAte Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), 46.
11 Jack Tinker, "The Disgusting Feast of Filth," Dai/y Mail, 19 January 1995, 5.
1
2 Bick Curtis, "Random Tour in a Chamber of Horrors," Evening Standard, 19
January 1995, 46.
!\1AKJNG IT REAL? 69
McDonagh) who, tired of the hegemony of psychological, bourgeois
realism, sought to revive the ritual function of theatre as a site of expe-
rience rather than representation. It is in the spirit of such iconoclasm
that Kane once described her dramaturgical mission as "put[ting] people
through an intense experience. Maybe in a small way from that you can
change things."
13
Blasted opens with a deceptive mimicry of the "talking head"
realism that dominated British stages for most of the Thatcher era. The
stage set suggests a "very expensive hotel room in Leeds-the kind that
is so expensive that it could be anywhere in the world."I4 Enter an attrac-
tive couple: Ian, a middle-aged journalist and Cate, his very young ex-girl-
friend. As spectators we lean back comfortably in expectation of yet
another realist play. But the opening words slightly jar our expectations:
"I've shat in better places," Ian declares sardonically in an idiom drasti-
cally at odds with the setting (3). Indeed, as the action evolves, it becomes
increasingly clear that this is not our average bourgeois living-room
drama. Instead, the dialogue throughout the first scene continues to skirt
the boundaries of the comfortable and acceptable. Ian turns out to be an
extremely homophobic and xenophobic alpha-male, whose machismo
depends entirely on swearing, waving a gun, guzzling gin, and harassing
Cate. Cate, on the other hand, appears to be a somewhat obtuse ingenue,
who sucks her thumb for most of the play and refuses to take a clear
emotional or moral stance on Ian's behavior. Over the course of the next
half hour, Kane sends these two characters on a rollercoaster ride that
alternates between feelings of tenderness (at times even love) and
extreme emotional and psychological abuse. Since neither character fits a
clear moral mold, it is hard for us to completely sympathize with or con-
demn either of the two. And yet, we are surprised, if not shocked, when
the opening of the second scene reveals to us that Ian has raped Cate.
The flower bouquet that had previously adorned the room is now
"ripped apart and scattered around the room" (24).
Kane, however, does not leave it at such pretty symbolic allu-
sions to acts of violence. With Cate's rape the action begins to unravel at
a breathtaking pace. As we ponder how to take Cate's comment, "it looks
like there's a war on" (33), figuratively, an armed soldier bursts into the
room, overwhelms Ian, urinates onto the bed, and declares, "Our town
13 Kane quoted in Ken Urban, "An Ethics of Catastrophe: The Theatre of
Sarah Kane," PeiformingArts jouma/23, no. 3 (2001): 36.
14 Sarah Kane, Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), 3. All subsequent ref-
erences to the play are given in parenthesis.
70 SAAL
now" (39). By the end of the second scene the "very expensive" hotel in
Leeds is literally blasted open by a mortar bomb. For the rest of the play,
the living room realism of the first half is invaded by a full-scale war of
unimaginable atrocities: the soldier rapes Ian at gun point, sucks out Ian's
eyes and eats them, before he finally takes his own life. After his mutila-
tion, Ian remains reduced to mere physical existence: shirting, masturbat-
ing, devouring a dead baby, before he, too, fmally attempts to die. Cate,
who had escaped the sniper's intrusion by fleeing through the bathroom
window, returns from the war zone, her body scarred by rape and vio-
lence. She brings food and drink. As rain drips on Ian's head protruding
from his self-made grave, the former vegetarian Cate calmly eats her fill
of sausage and gin, and then proceeds to feed Ian as well. "Thank you,"
Ian utters, as the play ends.
How did we get from the comfortable bourgeois realism of the
opening scene to this theatre of cruelty? What links the date rape in a
four-star hotel to the atrocities of war? For Kane the link is obvious:
"The logical conclusion of the attitude that produces such isolated rape
in England is the rape camps in Bosnia; and the logical conclusion to the
way society expects men to behave is war."ts But Kane's sophisticated
dramaturgy does more than simply link domestic to political violence.
Replacing language with visual imagery and extreme action, she creates a
visceral spectacle that, as Antonin Artaud suggests, "wakes us up nerves
and heart."16 As spectators we are suddenly deprived of the conventio-
nal Aristotelian categories of a well-defined plot, character, and thought
and are instead tossed into the middle of a devastating moral landscape,
abandoned there without maps.
Just like Artaud, Kane systematically deconstructs and disman-
tles conventional text and language. From the beginning, Cate's speech is
marked by frequent stuttering, giving way to fainting spells and complete
blackouts, while Ian obsessively reduces any kind of alterity (female, for-
eign, homosexual) to profane swear words. All of the characters, more-
over, frequently omit personal pronouns and verbs from their sentences,
communicating with mere fragments of speech. Language is fmally com-
pletely erased in the extended silence that concludes the play. This break-
down of language goes hand in hand with the gradual collapse of empa-
thy and the fragmentation of the human subject-most vividly expressed
when the soldier recounts his girlfriend's death: "Col, they buggered her.
1
5 Quoted in Urban, "An Ethics of Castrophe," 44.
16 Antonin Attaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 84.
!'vlAKJNG IT REAL? 71
Cut her throat. Hacked her ears and nose off, nailed them to the front
door" (47).
At the same time, the fragmentation and loss of speech also
reveal the playwright's profound skepticism with regard to the mimetic
capacity of language to capture the reality of war, violence, and pain. As
Elaine Scarry points out, pain presents us with an acute epistemological
and practical dilemma: to have pain is to have certainty, to hear about pain
is to have doubt. "Thus pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once
that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be conflrmed."17
While pain actively resists and even destroys language by returning us "to
a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes
before language is learned," it is nonetheless imperative for us to objecti-
fy pain, so that we can speak on behalf of those in pain and eliminate
their suffering. Is This task, however, confronts us with yet another dilem-
ma, for it is precisely in the process of objectification that pain becomes
detached from the subject who experiences it and opens itself up to rein-
terpretation and appropriation. "There is no language for pain, on the
contrary language often works to mask pain," Scarry concludes.19 The
actual pain of war is largely erased when being redescribed as an acci-
dental by-product of war or as "the cost of freedom." As Scarry
adamantly insists, however, the main purpose, substance, and outcome of
war is injury-"to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue."20
Kane seems acutely aware of the function of language, particu-
larly that of the media, to mask rather than to expose the reality of war.
Ian, after all, is a journalist who makes a living by reporting kinky sex
crimes: "I do other stuff. Shootings and rapes and kids getting fiddled by
queer priests. Not soldiers screwing each other for a patch of land" (49).
It is, furthermore, not incidental that the playwright, besides dismantling
her protagonist's linguistic abilities, also deprives him of his eyesight-
the very tools of his trade. I nherent in this allusive gesture to Oedipus
Tjrannus is the radical abdication of logos, of Western thought.
But just as Kane systematically fragments, dismantles, and
reduces our conventional notions of language, subjectivity, and morality,
17
Elaine Scarry, The Bot!J in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York: Oxford Universiry Press, 1985), 4.
18 Ibid., 13.
19 Ibid.
2
0 Ibid., 63.
72
SAAL
she also rebuilds thought in the creation of stark visual imagery. Like
Artaud, Kane creates with the help of archetypes and symbols a language
"halfway between gesture and thought" that allows her to locate, visual-
ize, and, ideally, purge our latent social disorders and dormant cruelties.zt
If these images are dark and disturbing, it is not the fault of the theatre
but of life, as Artaud reminds us.22 Consider for instance the series of
tableaux that conclude Blasted:
Darkness.
Ught.
Ian masturbating . ...
Darkness.
Ught.
Ian strangling himself with his bare hands.
Darkness.
Light.
Ian shifting. And then trying to clean it up with newspaper.
Darkness.
Ught.
Ian laughing f?ysterical!J.
Darkness.
Light.
Ian having a nightmare.
Darkness.
Ught.
Ian crying, huge blooc!J tears. He is hugging the Soldier's boc!J for
comfort.
Darkness.
Light.
Ian !Jing very stz/4 weak with hunger.
Darkness.
Light.
Ian tears the cross out of the ground, rips up the floor and lifts the
baf?y 's boc!J out.
He eats the bai:J.
He puts the remains back in the bai?J 's blanket and puts the bun-
dle back in the hole.
A beat, then he climbs in after it and lies down, head poking out
21 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 89.
22 Ibid.
MAKING IT REAL? 73
of the floor.
He dies with relief
It starts to rain on him, coming through the roof (59-60) .23
This stark imagery and extreme action "disturbs our senses' repose," pro-
voking us to react.2
4
However, unfortunately this reaction often merely
exhausts itself in the indignant departure of spectators in mid-perform-
ance, as happened during a production at the Berlin Schaubi.ihne a few
years ago, where a good third of the audience left before the end of the
play.2s
For those who stay, however, this theatre of cruelty can have a
productive effect. While our ftrst reaction to the intense experience we
have just been put through might resemble that of the seventy-year-old
lady at the Schaubiihne who loudly announced to the rest of the audi-
ence, "I need a schnapps," the lively debates among spectators that
ensued already in the theatre lobby indicate that the initial stunned silence
eventually gives way to renewed thought.26 Similar to the sublime, Kane's
provocative imagery and shocking action compel the mind to grasp the
ungraspable. It is precisely in this threshold moment, where conventio-
nal thought breaks down, where comfortable moral designations fail,
where, as Ken Urban puts it, "everything needs to be rethought," that the
possibility for utopian thinking might open up again.27
23 The physical violence in this scene recalls Edward Bond's drama Saved
(1965), in which a group of young men stone a baby to death, as well as the public out-
cry prompted by this particular scene (Saved, like Blasted, premiered at the Royal Court
Theatre in London and elicited a similar maelstrom of protest from the critics). Kane's
deployment of violence, in general, seems to be indebted to that of Bond (as are many
playwrights of Kane's generation). But even more so than her precursor, Kane, in a rad-
ical Artautlian gesture, not only blasts open social taboos but mimesis as such.
24 Anaud, The Theatre and its Double, 29.
25 Blasted was staged as Zerbombt in spring 2005 at the Schaubiihne am Lehniner
Platz in Berlin, directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Accortling to newspaper reviews, the
autlience at the London premiere in January 1995 reacted very much like the Berlin autli-
ence. See Robin Stringer, ''Walk-outs at Royal Court 'atrocity' play," Evening Standard, 19
January 1995, 5.
26 That the immetliate reaction to Kane's play seems to be a predominantly
somatic one is further underlined by Dai!J Telegraph critic Charles Spencer, who found the
play so upsetting that "hardened theatre critics looked in danger of parting company with
their suppers." Quoted in Stringer, ''Walk-outs at Royal Court 'atrocity' play," 5.
27 Urban, ''An Ethics of Catastrophe," 46.
74 SAAL
Like Artaud, Kane operates on the premise that "the public
thinks with its senses rather than with reason."28 It is the unique capacity
of theatre to expose its audience to such an un-mediated somatic experi-
ence of sound, images, gestures, smells, and bodies. In contrast to televi-
sion, film, or photography, the theatre audience cannot easily escape this
encounter. On the contrary, if "[t]elevision permits you to be a spectator,"
then "theatre makes you a participant," as Peter Sellars maintains.29 When
Kane assaults us with a total spectacle of visual, verbal, and bodily cruel-
ties, she makes deliberate use of our experience of being in the theatre. The
very ontology of the theatre (its immediacy, presence, corporeality)
enables her to re-create (rather than merely represent) the uncertainty of
war, the loss of subjectivity, as well as the pain of war outside language
itself It is "precisely at the moment where the mind requires a language to
express its manifestations that theatre rediscovers itself," Artaud wrote.JO
In these sublime instants, theatre moves from mimesis (imitation) to poiei-
sis (creation).
The provocative title of the play, therefore, not only comments
on the abruptness and irreversibility with which war uproots our quotid-
ian lives. In detonating the comfort zone of "a very expensive hotel in
Leeds," Kane also blasts open the presumptions of conventional mimesis
(bourgeois living room drama) to represent-let alone, understand-the
chaos, pain, and loss the human subject experiences in war. This radical,
iconoclastic gesture is at the very heart of the play's attempt to break
through the media screen that has effectively sheltered the Western spec-
tator from the atrocities of war.
Kalb' s Iraq Lehrstiick: Gulliver's Choice (2004)
Jonathan Kalb's play Gulliver's Choice is an adaptation of Heiner MUller's
Mauser (1970), which itself is an adaptation of Brecht's learning play Die
Majfnahme (The Measure Taken, 1930). Both of these earlier plays consider
an abstract proposition: the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the
collective in times of fundamental social transformations. Fascinated by
this philosophical premise, Kalb tried to adapt MUller's reworking of
Brecht for American audiences, but found that the play would not yield
to the logic of American individualism. As Kalb explains:
28 Artaud, The Theatre and It1 Double, 85.
29 Peter Sellars, "Introduction" in Peter Sellars and Robert Auletta, The Persians
ry Aescf?yii/J: A Modern Version (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1993), 7.
30 Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 12.
:MAKING IT REAL?
Mausels dramatic fuel is its sense of emergency; the
action is set at a crucial point during the Russian civil
war, when the survival of communism hangs in the bal-
ance. Any American adaptation thus needs extreme his-
torical circumstances of its own, an analogous sense of
emergency in which the survival of basic democratic
principles is at stake. Horribly, the Iraq war dropped
these circumstances into my lap.3t
75
In moving from the Russian civil war to Iraq, Kalb replaces rev-
olution with occupation, collective interest with "the obligation to an
abstraction called freedom."3
2
It remains to be asked whether these terms
are indeed interchangeable; whether it makes sense to restate Brecht's and
MUller's theoretical query as the rather cynical, political question about
the need for the dismantling of democracy to make the world safe for
democracy. But the more interesting issue at stake is: how effective is the
austere didacticism of epic theatre in examining what happens to the
individual and the collective under the conditions of institutionalized vio-
lence? And how effective is it in re-politicizing our perception of war?
In adapting Muller's Mauser, Kalb takes up the modernist form
of the Lehrstiick, the learning play. Brecht developed this form of drama
between 1929 and 1933, in a period in Weimar Germany marked by
intense economic, social, and political turmoil. Borrowing from the
Japanese Noh play, the Lehrstiick was conceived as a minimalist thought
experiment, as a condensed, theoretical investigation of human behavior
in extreme situations. It was primarily intended as a learning experience
for actors rather than spectators. Brecht believed that "the execution of
certain actions, the assumption of certain attitudes, the rendition of cer-
tain speeches [would] exert a profound social impact on the actor."33
MUller takes up this notion when he suggests that the text of his play
should be read by different groups of spectators rather than actors.34
3! Jonathan Kalb, "Gulliver's Choice: Notes on the Text," Theater 35, no.l
(2005): 40.
3
2
Ibid.
33 Translation mine. Bertolt Brecht, Werke: Grofe Kommentierle Berliner und
Franlifurter Ausgabe, vol xxii/ i, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and
Klaus-Detelf Muller (Berlin: Aufbau and Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989-1998), 351.
34 Heiner Muller, "Note" in Heiner Muller, The Battle: PI'!]S, Prose, Poems, ed. and
trans. Carl Weber (New York: Performing Ans Journal Publications, 1989), 133.
76 SA.AL
Kalb's directions are less strict, but he too recommends that "an open
exploration in rehearsal is the best way to ensure that questions are put
to the audience openly, so that learning has a chance to occur."3S
The contained form and controlled environment of the
Brechtian Lehrstiick seems in many ways antithetical to the Artaudian the-
atre of cruelty. Kane's visceral simulation of the loss of certainty, of
ethics and logos, experienced in the liminal space of war is replaced in
Kalb's play with a detached conceptual argument aimed primarily at the
cognitive engagement of performers and spectators. Instead of visual
shock, Kalb deploys the rigid structures of verse and meter; instead of
affect, he relies on disinterested, logical reasoning carried out in dialogic
exchange.
The theoretical investigation of what happens to individual need
versus collective interest is carried out via the interrogation of two indi-
vidual players by a "control chorus." In Brecht's and Muller's plays the
chorus represents the interest of the Communist Revolution; in Kalb it
metonymically stands in for the American occupation forces in Iraq. The
central question in all three plays is to what extent the freedom of the
individual and the individual himself need to be sacrificed so that free-
dom can be guaranteed to all human subjects. In 1930 Brecht had argued
that, from a purely theoretical point of view, the sacrifice of the individ-
ual was indispensable to the implementation of communism. Forty years
later, in the grip of Stalinist repressions strangling the Eastern bloc,
Muller's answer was much more ambiguous, provocatively asking, "Why
the killing and why the dying/ If the price of the Revolution is the
Revolution/ Those to be freed the price of freedom."36 Kalb takes up
this ambiguous proposition, demanding like Muller: "Will the killing stop
when freedom has triumphed?/ Will freedom triumph? How long will it
take?"37 What is more, in contrast to both his predecessors, Kalb ques-
tions not only the means by which the collective cause is enforced but the
very viability of the cause. Freedom is here first and foremost the free-
dom of the market and of consumerism, of "Pressing remotes, swiping
debit cards/ Doing everything else back home/ That we cannot let stop,
35 Kalb, "Gulliver's Choice: Notes on the Text," 42. Kalb's first workshop-like
production of the play with the New Group in a bare black-box theatre in New York
(2004) suggests such intimate pedagogical exchange with the audience.
36 Heiner Muller, "Mauser" in Heiner Muller. The Battle: Plays, Prose, Poems, 125.
37 Jonathan Kalb, "Gulliver's Choice," Theater 35, no. 1 (2005): 52. All subse-
quent references to this edition will be given in parentheses.
MAKlNG IT REAL? 77
or even pause,/ Or the terror will have won" (SO).
Like Muller, Kalb renders problematic the relationship of the
individual to the collective in two respects: empathy, on the one hand, and
cold-blooded reason, on the other. These two "tragic flaws" are embod-
ied by two individual players: Captain Gilmore Gulliver III, commander
of a Special Op Squad Zero and Captain Hector Hernandez, former
commander of this very same squad. Both of them fall short of their
mission to exterminate those who the occupation has designated as "ene-
mies of freedom" and are therefore asked by the chorus to consent to
their own deaths. Hernandez's case is the one originally addressed by
Brecht: human empathy and identification. When charged with the exe-
cution of three Syrian refugees, the Chicano soldier suddenly realizes that
"they were workers and refugees, not soldiers or spies, (that] their hands
had calluses like my Oaxacan father's did after thirty years of paving
roads and filling potholes" (46). Recognizing that "their enemies are my
enemies," Hernandez is no longer capable of killing on behalf of the
occupation (46). His identification and empathy with the "enemy," how-
ever, have profound consequences, for in the wake of the captain's fail-
ure to kill, two suicide bombs go off at the nearest check-point.
Hernandez himself therefore needs to be eliminated, a task given to
replacement officer Gulliver. Gulliver seems to be free of the fatal flaw
of identification: "I had no eyes for his hands/ As he stood before my
rifle, face to the wall/ Whether callused or smooth/ Brown, black, or
white/ They were bound by cord/ And we killed him with my hand"
(48).
Gulliver's case is more complex and ambiguous than
Hernandez's. A fervent believer in the abstract principle of freedom, he
completes his daily task of killing for the occupation disinterestedly and
without emotion. Official command translates directly into action: ''The
eyes I saw these enemies with/ Were my bullets/ And the mouth I spoke
to them with/ Was my rifle" (48). Eventually, however, the daily killing
exerts its toll on him, too: "I'm a human being. A human is not a
machine. To kill and kill and stay the same after each death/ I couldn't do
that. Give me the sleep of the machine," he asks of the occupation (54).
Since respite is impossible, Gulliver undergoes a remarkable
transformation. At first there is the recognition that the so-called "ene-
mies of freedom" are fuelled by a similar dedication to an abstract prin-
ciple as Gulliver himself, that their causes are, in fact, interchangeable and
that therefore they as soldiers are interchangeable:
78
His kind and mine have flourished lessons
For five thousand years
With crucifix, pike, gallows, and guillotine
Wielded by my enemies who are also his enemies
With my rifle pointed at his back
I am crucifix, pike, gallows, and guillotine
Standing before my rifle face to the wall
I am the rifle pointed at my own back. (51)
SAAL
This moment of recognition does not, however, lead to identification
with the enemy and the abdication of violence as in Hernandez's case.
Rather, it culminates in the profound alienation of the individual from
himself: ''And I saw he who was I kill/ Things made of flesh and blood/
.. . he who was I didn't stop killing them" (52). Such schizophrenic per-
ception of the self, the loss of a unified subjectivity, leads to the complete
dismantling of the human subject and its reassembling as a soulless
automaton. Having internalized the logic of occupational violence,
according to which "an enemy [is] a thing into which one shoots until/ A
friend rises from the mutilated flesh," Gulliver now stands outside the
realm of ethics: "I have no more qualms/ The dead don't bother me any-
more" (52). Like Brecht's Galy Gay, he has been transformed into the
mindless killer Uriah Jip, a machine on a rampage: "Opening fire on full
automatic/ Shrieking as he watched the heads explode/ And the bones
splinter/ Replacing his magazine three times/ And shrieking at the
corpses/ Until he had no more bullets left/ And no more voice either"
(53). The lack of scruples, prudence, and stealth, however, is naturally as
detrimental to the cause as empathy. Gulliver, too, is forced to beg for his
death at the hand of the military tribunal.
Like Brecht in Mann ist Mann (Man is a Man, 1925), Kalb takes
the instrumentalization of violence in war to its logical conclusion: the
transformation of the human individual into a dispassionate android.
Francis Ford Coppola had engaged in a similar thought experiment in his
Vietnam allegory Apoca(ypse Now (1979). Kurtz, however, represents the
system's excess, its aberration-Frankenstein's monster turning against its
creator. Brecht's Uriah Jip and Kalb's Gulliver, by contrast, remain the
ordinary foot-soldiers who lack the ambition for transcendence, the
power to recreate themselves in the excess of affect. The constant expo-
sure to violence results here in the annihilation of human subjectivity-
and not its transformation into the Nietzschean post-human.
In order to underline the annihilation of subjectivity under the
conditions of war, Kalb eschews the baroque spectacle of visual excess
MAKING IT REAL? 79
and visceral affect characteristic of Coppola's ftlm for the detached, calm,
and purely rational argumentation of the Lehrstiick. We are refused the
aesthetic experience of the sublime. On the contrary, we are repeatedly
confronted with the monotonous mantra of duty reiterated by individual
players and chorus alike, sometimes as ritualistic evocation, sometimes as
mere mimicry of official policy: "Knowing the bedrock of liberty/ In the
city of Tikrit as in other cities/ Is a clear and pure picture/ Of the death
of its enemies,/ Knowing the lawn must be sleeplessly weeded/ And
seen to be weeded so that it stays green" (44). As Kalb explains, the point
of such tedious repetition is not to demonstrate the chorus's faith in the
fetishized phrases they utter but to show that "like Gulliver, they are
caught in a machine whose main presence in the play is the rhythmic,
repetitive language."38 What remains at the end is the triumph of form
over content, of ideology over ethics, of the war machine over human-
ity.
Where Kane pushes mimesis via the total spectacle into poieisis,
Kalb challenges it with repetition. The repetitive invocation of duty
accompanied by a repetitive cycle of violence suggests imitation for the
sake of imitation. In this, it evokes Homi Bhabha's concept of colonial
mimicry, but Kalb's use of repetition lacks the latter's ambivalence and
erraticism.3
9
Rather, similar to Diamond's assessment of feminist theatre,
it continues to carry with it "a commitment to the truth value of one's
own position, however, complex and nuanced one's account of that posi-
tion might be."
4
0 In this regard, Kalb's deployment of repetition is
indebted to the Brechtian Cestus. After all, his is a didactic drama in the
epic tradition, and as Brecht insists, in epic theatre the mimetic principle
is replaced by the gestic principle.41 The Cestus-which Roland Barthes
so succinctly explained as "a gesture or a set of gestures ... in which a
whole social situation can be read"
4
?-is one of the primary means in
Brechtian aesthetics (along with the V-e.fftkl) for rendering the world in
such a way that the workings of power are defamiliarized (veifremdel) and
38 Kalb, "Gulliver's Choice: Note on the Text," 42.
39 See Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse" in The ucation of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-92.
40 Diamond, "Mimesis, Mimicry, and che True-Real," 59.
41 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 139.
4
2 Roland Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein" in Image-Music-Text, ed.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 73-74.
80 SAAL
historicized and thereby made subject for critique and, ideally, change.
Realism, or mimesis itself, is therefore not so much a matter of technical
principles (Lukacs's artful masking of the processes of abstraction and
organic integration of the universal with the particular) but of praxis and
utility, of effecting a workable rendition of the world, "ein praktikables
Weltbild."
4
3 Kalb inherits this particular notion of mimesis. In the Cestus
of repetition he succinctly distills the underlying logic of a regime that
can sustain itself only via a repetitive cycle of violence. He furthermore
unmasks how ideology (consensus with the cause) sustains itself by pure
imitation.
In sum, Kane and Kalb put very different aspects of war up for
debate. Kane demonstrates the systematic dismantling of the human sub-
ject by violence and shows the failure of language to capture the pain and
suffering of those violated by war. At the same time, her total spectacle
of cruelty attests to the poetic power of theatre, its capacity to create
(rather than simply re-present) an intense visceral experience, which ide-
ally, in shattering conventional thought, can jump-start our capacity to
conceive of alternatives to war. Kalb, on the other hand, by resorting to
the stringent form of the Lehrstiick traps us in the detached logic of rep-
etition and containment, forcing us to weigh carefully the arguments pre-
sented by chorus and players on behalf of a collective cause that puts the
very survival of the human being into question. Both approaches jolt us
out of the complacency of "wartainment," compelling us-even when
they offend us-to take an emotional, critical, and ethical stance vis-a-vis
the violence and destruction we are watching.
Modernist Tactics Against Postmodern Warfare
Notably, in their attempt to counter the dominant media narratives of
war, to denaturalize and repoliticize our perception of violence, Kane
and Kalb resort to distinctly modernist aesthetic techniques: the absorp-
tion of the spectator in the total work of art on the one hand; and her
deliberate distantiation from the stage through the methodical deploy-
ment of Cestus and alienation effect, on the other hand. These two
approaches, Artaudian and Brechtian, are also the principal strategies at
work in a number of other contemporary dramatizations of war-
43 Brecht, Werke, vol. xxii/i, 550. As Brecht declared in response to Georg
Lukacs's attack on the modernist technique of montage, '1\rt does not become unrealis-
tic by changing the proportions, but by changing them in such a way that if the audience
took its representations as a practical guide to insights and impulses it would go astray in
real life." Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 204.
MAKING IT REAL? 81
inclucling various attempts of combining the two-such as Biljana
Srbljanovic's Fami!J Stories. Belgrade (Serbia, 1998), Caryl Churchill's Far
Awqy (United Kingdom, 2001), and Falk Richter's Seven Seconds (Germany,
2003). But how effective are these older, modernist aesthetics in address-
ing postmodern warfare? While they evince a keen awareness of the
intrinsic link between mimesis and ideology, they do not yet ask to what
extent our perception of reality is always already mediated. Is it still pos-
sible to return us to a place where questions about violence, pain, and
human subjectivity in war can be asked independent of their media rep-
resentation?
Kane and Kalb alert us to the ubiquitous presence of the media
in the theatre of war: Kane chooses a journalist for her protagonist, while
Kalb repeatedly refers to "embeds" and cameras recorcling the deeds and
trials of Gulliver. And yet, in a bold iconoclastic gesture, Kane simply
negates the power of the media by depriving Ian of his sight and voice.
Kalb, on the other hand, suggests that power works independent of the
media, and, in fact, it can even control it by allowing or disallowing their
presence. The tribunal's main charge against Gulliver is not his indis-
criminate killing of civilians but his failure to "secure [his] area from spy-
ing eyes/ So that enemies appeared only as enemies/ And no one could
prove otherwise" (55). In this manner, both works insist that the tight
nexus of war and media in Western culture can simply be unraveled-a
position that strikes one as somewhat naive from the point of view of
contemporary theories of postmodern culture.
As critics like Guy Debord, Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, and
Slavoj Zizek have insisted, one of the crucial markers of postmodernity
is that the clear demarcation between reality and representation, on which
older modes of cultural production could still rely, is no longer sustain-
able. While the Western spectator might fantasize about the existence of
a "Real" behind the appearances of commodified media images, so Zizek
argues, our "ruthless pursuit of the Real" is but "the ultimate stratagem
to avoid confronting the Real," allowing us to turn the Real into the final
theatrical effect (as evident in such blockbusters as The Matrix and The
Truman Show).
4
4
The primacy of representation over reality in Western culture
poses two relevant problems for the discussion of war in art. First, it sig-
nificantly changes our notion of subjectivity and with it our perception
of reality. The persistent spectacularization of the Real goes hand in hand
44
Slavoj Zizek, "A Holiday from History," in Johan Grimonprez, Dial History
(Brussels: Argos Editions, 2003), n.p.
82 SAAL
with the profound alienation of the individual. As Debord writes with
regard to the fetishization of spectacle in modern society, the more read-
ily the spectator "recognizes his own needs in the images of need pro-
posed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence
and desires . ... The individual's gestures are no longer his own, but rather
those of someone else who represents them to him."45 How does this
alienation of the individual in the spectacle affect his perception of vio-
lence? How can we even begin to grasp the reality of war when the out-
break of combat is timed to coincide with the evening news, when
"information" consists in the relentless inundation of the spectator with
images that demonstrate nothing except the ubiquitous presence and
omnipotence of the media? More importantly, what are the possibilities
for critique and resistance if the very desires and needs of the human
subject are always already mediated and therefore alienated?
Second, significant changes in warfare itself have changed our
perception of war as well. Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio have shown
how over the course of the past century warfare has been increasingly
rendered in trompe l'oeil. As ar.mies no longer need to encounter each other
directly thanks to long-distance firing devices, as the scene of battle has
been diffused over space and time, ocular proof of military operations
has been replaced by mimetic evidence. What counts is no longer the
actual presence of the enemy in the field but their virtual presence on the
radar, sonar, or thermal screen.4<' This tendency to replace actual presence
with virtual representation has had a profound impact on the participants
of war. As early as 1920, Ernst Junger described his experience of the
first industrialized warfare (World War I) as one of profound alienation:
"In this war where fire already attacked space more than men, I felt com-
pletely alien to my own person, as if I had been looking at myself
through binoculars."
47
How much more would soldiers feel this alienation
some eighty years later when they can detect and destroy a target without
ever lifting their eyes off a screen?
4
8
45 Guy Debord, The Sociery of Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995 (1967]),
23.
4
6 Paul Virilio, ''A Travelling Shot over Eighry Years," in The Vinlio Reader, ed.
James DerDerian (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 95-116.
47 Ernst Junger, Stahlgewitter (Steel Storms, 1920), quoted in Virilio, The Virilio
Reader, 99.
48 The modern military's reliance on mimetic rather than ocular proof and the
concrete implications of such substitution for the soldier's experience of war is most
MAKJNG IT RF..AL? 83
This progressive mediatization or virtualization of warfare has,
of course, also affected our spectatorship of war. "More and more we
lose our unmediated view of things . . . the map instead of the terrain,
the statistics instead of the facts," Virilio writes. "First the soldier became
an unknown quantity, then the army, now the target as welJ."49 With the
Persian Gulf War, the system of virtual detection and deception, of
screen simulation and dissimulation, has been perfected to the point
where, from the point of view of the spectator as well as of many par-
ticipants, war has become fully virtual-prompting Baudrillard to wonder
whether the Persian Gulf War, in fact, ever took place at all. What could
possibly have been real about a war fought entirely on radar and televi-
sion screens, he asks, a truly spectacular teatrum belli, whose main point it
was to provide the Western spectator with "a perfect semblance of mili-
tary defeat ... in exchange for a perfect semblance of victory for the
Americans?"so In short, if virtual warfare is marked, as Virilio suggests,
by the "fusion of object and its image equivalent, a confusion of presen-
tation and representation," then the traces of this fusion and confusion
certainly also affect our perception of war.s1
Already the terms of debate regarding war and violence seem to
have shifted. According to Baudrillard, the scandal of war today consists
"no longer in the assault on moral values but in the assault on the reality
principle."S2 Virilio likewise points out that "the TRUE and the FALSE
will soon become obsolete, the ACTUAL and the VIRTUAL progres-
sively taking their place, to the great detriment of public credulity."53 But
aside from sidestepping the possibility for an ethical critique of war, the
poignantly driven home by the following episode form the Vietnam War, recounted by a
U.S. fighter pilot: "I have bombed, and sem my troops bomb, on specific targets where I
have watched the bombs pour in and seen the target blow up, with walls or structures flying
across the area, only to be dragged right back in the same place because the film did not
look like that to the lieutenant who read it way back up the line. I have gone back on these
targets and lost good people and machines while doing so, and found them just as I
expected, smashed." Quoted in Virilio, "A Traveling Shot," 111-112, emphasis mine.
49 Quoted and trans. in Emig, "\Y./ar and the Media," 230.
50 Jean Baudrillard, The Gu!f War Did Not Take Place (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 71.
51 Paul Virilio, "Desert Screen," in The Virilio Reader, 176.
52 Baudrillard, The Gu!f War Did Not Take Place, 76.
53 Virilio, "Desert Screen," 176. Emphasis in the original.
84 SAAL
complete virtualization of war and of our perception thereof also has
important political implications. Virilio insists that the "tyranny of real
time" radically undermines the very possibility of democracy: "How to
share power when the time in which it manifests itse!f escapes us? How does one
hope to control decisions that not only escape us by virtue of their speed,
but which also escape their 'authors' by the very automatism of the
materiel [sic] that make these decisions for them?" he asks. "Can one
democratize ubiquiry, instantanei!J, omniscience and omnipresence which are
precisely the privileges of the divine, or in other words, of autocracy?"S4
While postmodern theory has been asking these complex ques-
tions about the implications of postmodern warfare for the Western
viewing subject for over fifteen years now, we do not yet find them
reflected in our literature or drama of war. Although several plays have
begun to draw our attention to the intrinsic nexus of war and media, it
has rarely become the guiding theme for a full exploration of how con-
temporary media aesthetics along with the virtualization of warfare have
impacted our perception of war.ss I have not yet found a play that
engages these hard questions put to us by postmodern theory.
And yet, many contemporary plays do succeed in competing
54 Ibid., 181. Italics in original.
55 To giYe three examples here: Gregory Burke's Black Watch (United Kingdom,
2006) takes note of the influence of popular culture (particularly of DaYid Lean's 1962
film epic Lawrence of Arabia) on the Scottish regiment's perception of their mission in
Iraq; it even slyly hints at the fact that military operations seem to be lagging behind media
operations, but in the end this quasi-docudrama, too, insists not only on the authenticity
of the soldiers' experience of war but, what is more, that this experience can be directly
relayed to the audience. Trevor Griffiths opens his play The Gulf BehJJeen Us: or Truth and
Other Fictions (United Kingdom, 1992) with a powerful montage of threads of English and
Arabic, interspersed with commercial jingles, political litanies, the sound of air raids, and
video footage of famous air strikes. According to Jeanne Colleran the playwright thereby
slyly reverses the power of "total Tv," annexing technology and media for a total the-
atrical representations that tacitly demonstrates "what oversaturated viewers may neglect:
that there are absences in coverage, holes where human voices speak in sounds both
strange and familiar." Jeanne Colleran, "Disposable Wars, Disappearing Acts: Theatrical
Responses to the 1991 Gulf War," Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 621. Colleran's valorization
of the play as a postmodern strategy against postmodern warfare is perhaps a bit too
enthusiastic, given that the rest of the play attempts to recuperate underneath the debris
of war, through the person of a mysterious storyteller/master gilder Peter O'Toole, the
country's "heritage of antiquity." Finally, I think, it is Elfriede Jelinek who most effectively
captures the extent of the Western spectator's detached and disinterested perception of
war in her satirical mimicry of embedded journalism, Bambi/and (Austria, 2003)-a text
that rambles on and on as pure narcissistic self-reflection, rather than as the purveyor of
objective information, let alone a mediator for empathy.
MAKING IT REAL? 85
with the technological age and in breaking through the media screen by
providing us with what Peter Sellars calls an "alternative public informa-
tion system that is able partially to humanize the denatured results of our
vaunted and costly objectivity."56 Sellars hopes that in this manner theatre
can not only restore a more sophisticated level of outrage and empathy
to our perception of history but also encourage us to accept some of the
responsibility for it. Without doubt, Kane's Blasted and Kalb's Gulliver's
Choice have the potential to prompt a more sophisticated perception of
reality, to question the ideological premises of mimesis, and to trigger the
outrage and compassion that Sellars speaks of In this regard, they also
attempt to rephrase the experience of modern warfare in those ethical
terms that Virilio found so blatantly missing in the work of the media.
Arguably, however, this aesthetic, political, and ethical achieve-
ment is made possible only thanks to the playwrights' continuing invest-
ment in a rather conventional notion of warfare. For Kane and Kalb, war
still functions for the most part as an unmediated "Real," which has the
power to violate, corrupt, and dismantle "real" human subjects and
which also still leaves the human subject with a "real" ethical choice: the
choice of empathy, of resistance, or of self-sacrifice.57 Thus Kane con-
cludes her nightmarish vision of violence and destruction with the words
"Thank you"-if delivered with appreciation, these words suggest that
an ethics does exist between wounded bodies, that humanity can
reemerge from catastrophe.58 For Gulliver, too, some kind of healing,
restoration of human subjectivity is accomplished in the end, when,
though clearly afraid of death, he freely chooses to sacrifice himself to the
demands of the occupation. In the end, both plays afflrm their faith that,
even under duress, an autonomous human subject does exist and that he
or she continues to be capable of autonomous choices.
This faith in an autonomous human subject goes hand in hand
56 Sellars, "Introduction," 7.
5
7
Without doubt, war continues to be an unmediated real from the point of
view of those directly exposed to it. "Virtual" wars do, after all, inflict real wounds. This
fact is driven home by a number of contemporary performances such as Heather Raffo's
solo performance, 9 Parts o/ Desire (U.S. 2006) or Gregory Burke's Black Watch (United
Kingdom, 2006). I am here, however, more concerned with the possibilities of develop-
ing aesthetic strategies that address the particular position of the Western viewing subject
than with the effect of war on the individual psyche of the combatant and/or the civil-
ian and his/her community or with the experience of loss and mourning.
58 As was, for instance, the case during the 2001 Royal Court Theatre produc-
tion in London, directed b)' James Macdonald. Here actor Neil Dudgeon uttered Ian's
final lines "full of calmness and appreciation." See Urban, "Ethics of Catastrophe," 46.
86 SAAL
with an essential assertion of mimesis itself. While Kane and Kalb are
both keen on breaking with a particular kind of mimesis (as defined by
Lukacs, as practiced by the established theatres in New York and London
as well as on our television and computer screens), they also affirm that
the world can and ought to be represented, that the very act of (re)pres-
entation can provoke and renew our capacity for critique-whether by an
aesthetics of cruelty or an aesthetics of alienation. Affirming this aes-
thetic/ ethical imperative, they also continue to subscribe to some con-
cept of mimesis that remains anchored in what Jameson calls, "a form of
aesthetic experience which yet lays claim to a binding relationship to the
real itself."S
9
Even while posing questions about violence and representa-
tion that are not easily answered, Kane and Kalb, in the end, eschew the
self-reflectivity and skepticism typical of postmodern theory.
Ultimately, we are left with a profound disjunction between the
ways postmodern theory reflects about war and the ways in which con-
temporary theatre does. Why this disconnect? Without doubt, the objec-
tion to war also requires us to be suspicious of its representations, in the
media as well as elsewhere. But can we still afford the luxury of the old
fashioned denunciation of the media for their complicity in war? Is the
modernist theatre perhaps too idealistic when it posits itself outside the
object of its critique? If so, how to assert an artistic critique of war,
which is at one and the same time capable of deconstructing the nexus
of war and media, of demystifying the media aesthetics, as well as of
reflecting to what extent our perception of war is always already prede-
termined by the media? On the other hand, is postmodern theory per-
haps too radical in its heightened skepticism of the "Real"? Is it perhaps
also too self-absorbed, too focused on the problems of the Western self
and in this manner unwittingly deemphasizing the fact that even virtual
wars inflict real wounds, that they continue to burn, blast, shell, and cut
human tissue? In short, what kind of theory and what kind of theatre do
we need to understand the pain of others as well as our own precarious
situation as their viewing subjects? And how are we to wed these two
tasks in theory and praxis?
5
9 Fredric Jameson, afteNord to Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst
Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukacs, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1999
(1977)) , 198.
JOURNAL OF DRAMA AND THEATRE 20, NO. 2 (SPRING 2008)
SINGING HER OWN SONG: WRITING THE FEMALE PRESS
AGENT BACK INTO HISTORY
MARLIS SCHWEITZER
In 1902, the Grand Rapids Herald offered compelling evidence of women's
incursions into the field of press agency:l
Only a few years ago a woman "advance man" was a
being unknown, unhonored, and unsung, but now she is
corning right along singing her own song, or the song of
her "star," she makes herself known in short order, and
she is at the same time making an honored and com-
fortable place for herself as well.2
By 1909, the Chicago Tribune reported that there were at least five women
working "in advance" of traveling productions.3 Their responsibilities
included everything from coordinating advertising, posting bills in suit-
able locations, and visiting editors from the local newspapers, to arrang-
ing hotel accommodations, organizing railroad transportation, setting
ticket prices where no fixed schedule was in place, and "in fact everything
that a man in a similar position would be required to do."
4
As these examples suggest, early-twentieth-century female press
agents were highly visible, public figures, celebrated for breaking gender
1 I would like to thank the members of the ATDS Publications Committee for
their direction in revising this essay. Kim Marra, in particular, offered some much appre-
ciated guidance. My Canadian colleagues Kim Solga, Jenn Stephenson, and Laura Levin
also offered helpful feedback on an earlier draft.
2 "Woman Press Representative," Grand Rapids Herald, 27 December 1902, Idah
McGlone Gibson, ,ol. 237, 21, Robert Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Collection,
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations
(hereafter RLC).
3 ''Women as Ad,ance Agents," Chicago Tribune, May 1909, Idah McGlone
Gibson, vol. 239, 69, RLC. I use the term press agent here to refer generally to the indi-
viduals who fulfilled a number of public relations services for theatre companies, recog-
nizing that by the first decade of the twentieth century the profession was becoming
increasingly specialized.
4 "Mrs. Gibson, Advance Agent," vol. 237, 82, RLC. Channing Pollock, Harvest
of My Years: An (New York: Bobbs Merrill Co., 1943), 114.
88 SCH\X'EITZER
barriers and making themselves "known." Yet despite assuming an active
presence as writers and subjects in newspapers and even onstage, very lit-
tle is known of these women today. Why? One explanation is that as cul-
tural intermediaries-individuals who move between the realm of pro-
duction and consumption, promoting commodities and engineering cul-
tural transformation in an apparently seamless way-press agents make
difficult historical subjects, irrespective of gender.s Theatre historian
Vincent Landro cites this "tendency towards anonymity" as the most
obvious reason why press agents have slipped from the pages of most
theatre histories. Because so much of their work happens "behind the
scenes" they have necessari!y remained on the periphery, shadowy manip-
ulators of performers' careers and personae. Landro further suggests that
historians may have inherited the anti-commercial bias and "general con-
tempt towards publicists" initially expressed by early-twentieth-century
commentators, many of whom viewed press agents as "swindlers and
liars."6 Indeed, it has only been within the last decade or so that cultural
historians, following Bourdieu, have begun to investigate the work of cul-
tural intermediaries-advertising agents, record executives, management
accountants, etc.-in an effort to develop a more thorough understand-
ing of cultural processes.
7
In highlighting the work of influential male press agents such as
Melville Stoltz and the deliciously-named A. Toxen Worm, Landro offers
a helpful starting place for thinking about the central role of the early-
twentieth-century press agent in the formation of modern celebrity cul-
ture. a I wish to build upon this work by looking specifically at the women
5 On cultural intermediaries see Sean Nixon and Paul du Gay, "Who Needs
Cultural Intermediaries?" Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 495-500; Keith Negus, "The
Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance Between Production and
Consumption," Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 501-515.
6 Vincent Landro, "Faking It: The Press Agent and Celebrity Illusion in Early
Twentieth Century American Theatre," Theatre History Studies 22 Qune 2002): 95-113.
Theatre histories with some discussion of press agents include Benjamin McArthur's
Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984);John
Frick's NeiV Yorks First Theatrical Center: The Rialto at Union Square (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1985 [1983]); and Susan A. Glenn's Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of
Modern Feminism (Cambridge, J-..1A: Harvard University Press, 2000), 35-36, 55, 64.
7 Bourdieu discusses the emergence of "new cultural intermediaries" in
Distinction: A Socia/ Critique of the judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), 359.
8 Of Danish descent, Worm's full name was Conrad Henrik Aage Toxen
Worm. The Eugene O'Neill NeiVsletter VII, no. 3 Winter, 1983. http:/ /www.eoneill.com/
library/ newsletter/vii_3/vii-3c.htm. (accessed 27 June 2006). l discuss stunts executed by
SINGING H ER 0\VN SONG
89
who participated in the star-making process, paying particular attention
to the gender biases they encountered along the way. In so doing, I also
hope to extend previous explorations of gender dynamics within the
early-twentieth-century commercial American theatre, seen most notably
in Susan A. Glenn's Female Spectacle, M. Alison Kibler's Rank Ladies, and
Kim Marra's Strange Duets.9 These histories expose the sexist, oppressive
working conditions that defined the turn-of-the-century commercial the-
atre, while highlighting the subversive performance strategies that female
performers put to good use in challenging male hegemony. Female press
agents experienced similar forms of gender oppression but their journal-
istic training equipped them with different tools for responding to sex-
ism. Whereas early-twentieth-century actresses had to tread carefully
around feminist issues lest they alienate conservative audiences, female
press agents seemed to have had fewer qualms about expressing feminist
political perspectives and advocating for others.IO The great irony, of
course, is that these same women also played an active role in the objec-
tification and commodification of female performers. Working alongside
male producers, directors, and choreographers, female press agents trans-
formed naive young girls into sophisticated beauty experts and promot-
ed an increasingly narrow ideal. The figure of the press agent thus pres-
ents a fascinating opportunity to explore the multiple hierarchies that
shaped early-twentieth-century theatre and celebrity culture.
Enter the Female Press Agent
Women's foray into the male-dominated world of press agency is perhaps
best understood within the context of the "incorporation" of the
American theatre in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The
rise of the Theatrical Syndicate, a loose organization of six theatre man-
agers and booking agents who effectively cornered the theatrical market
Stoltz and Worm in "Survivi ng the City: Press Agents, Publicity Stunts, and the Spectacle
of the Urban Female Body," in Peifonnance and the Ciry, ed. Kim Solga, D.]. Hopkins, and
Shelley Orr (Palgrave: forthcoming 2009).
9 Glenn, Female Spectacle; M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and C ~ t l t r a l
Hierarcf(y in American Va11deville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999);
Kim Marra, Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865-1914 (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2006).
lO Leslie Goddard, '"Women Know Her to Be a Real Woman': Femininity,
Nationalism, and the Suffrage Activism of Lillian Russell," Theatre History Studies 22 Qune
2002): 138-142; Glenn, Female Spectacle, 136-137.
90 SCHWEITZER
by pooling their resources and controlling the booking of most major
theatres across the United States, signaled a major step in the homoge-
nization and consolidation of American commercial entertainment. But
the Syndicate's dominance was short-lived. Beginning in 1905 and con-
tinuing for over a decade, the Shubert brothers from Syracuse, New York,
challenged the Syndicate for control of the theatrical market. In addition
to producing a diverse range of shows, from serious dramas to spectac-
ular revues, the Shuberts built new theatres where they could not get into
Syndicate-controlled houses. The Syndicate responded in kind, precipi-
tating a major boom in theatre construction across the country. With
huge theatrical empires under their control and hundreds of productions
heading out on the road each year, the Shuberts and the Syndicate
formed press departments and hired teams of press agents to sell their
shows. ll Given such demands, it is perhaps not surprising that they wel-
comed women into their ranks. Sending a female press agent out on the
road was news. And news was publicity.
Of course, by 1905 press agency was already a well-established
profession. Some accounts date theatrical boosting as far back as the sev-
enteenth century, although most accounts of American press agency
begin with P. T. Barnum.l2 What was new about early-twentieth-century
press agency, however, was its highly symbiotic relationship with mass
circulation newspapers. l3 The new style of yellow journalism promoted
by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer called for exciting, sen-
sational news and press agents were all too willing to help out. In fact, as
former agent turned dramatic critic Walter Prichard Eaton observed in
1907, "theatrical 'boosters' are invariably taken from the editorial staff of
II On "incorporation" see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America:
Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). On the Syndicate see
Peter A. Davis, "The Syndicate/Shubert War," Inventing Times q ~ ~ a r e Commerce and Culture
al the Crossroads of the World, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
1996), 151; Vincent Landro, "Media Mania: The Demonizing of the Theatrical
Syndicate," Journal of American Drama and Theatre 13, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 23-50. On the
Shubert press department, see Brooks McNamara, The Jhuberts of Broadwqy: A History
Drawn from the Collectiotl! of the Shubert Archive (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 59-
63.
12 Landro, "Faking It," 96; Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), 113. Several essays in the collection Theatre
and Celebrity in Bn'tain, 1660-2000, ed. Martha Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005) discuss the existence of proto-publicists as early as the seventeenth cen-
tury. See also Renee Sentilles, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of Celebrity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
13 For more on this relationship, see Schweitzer, "Surviving the City."
SINGING H ER OwN SONG 91
newspapers."I4 Well-educated, worldly, and trained to write swiftly in a
fresh style that balanced sophistication with accessibility, journalists were
ideally suited for the demands of press agency.
But what was in it for the agents? Why did such skilled men and
women give up their careers in journalism for the relative triviality of rep-
resenting a star performer? The most obvious answer is that press agency
offered greater fmancial benefits and professional independence than
that available in most newsroom positions. 'Where you earn probably
two thousand a year as a newspaper writer," a former male agent
explained, "you will earn from three to five thousand a year as a press
agent. And then think of the independence you gain-no more white
slaving at the editor's desk until all hours of the night; master of your
own time and movements; all that is reguired being to get plenty of good
articles into the papers and attend to the necessary business details."
1
5
Although female press agents earned less than their male colleagues-
receiving $75 to $125 a month-they still made considerably more than
women in most other professions.
1
6 The promise of adventure and free-
dom also seems to have been a major draw, especially for women looking
to escape traditional familial and societal expectations.
Although--or perhaps because- so much of their work was
solo, female press agents made the most of personal networks. Indeed,
while some found employment alongside or with the assistance of a well-
connected husband, father, or male associate, others worked their way up
the theatrical ranks with help from female friends. Like many of her
peers, Anna Marble started out as a journalist, writing fashion columns
and other "women's interest" stories for the Brookfyn Eagle (Figure 1). But
in 1900, at the urging of her cousin Mary Marble, whose husband John
Dunne had "a big interest" in the musical comedy Florodora, she was hired
to write copy celebrating the show's costumes.
Her work was apparently so successful that by opening night, she
was "regularly employed as press agent for the company."17 Marble fol-
14
Walter Prichard Eaton, "Footlight Fiction: The Wonders Performed By Press
Agents," American Magazi11e, December 1907, 164; Also see Landro, "Faking It," 100; and
"Noted Writer! Idah McGlone Gibson Represents Star of 'East Lynne,"' Grand Rapids
Evening Post, 27 December 1902, Idah McGlone Gibson, vol. 237, 21, RLC.
IS "A Theatrical Press Agent's Confession and Apology," The Independent, 27 July
1904, 191.
16 "Women as Advance Agents," 69.
17 No tide, 15 June 1905, Locke Envelope 1782, Mrs. Channing Pollock (Anna
Marble), RLC.
92
SCHWEITZER
lowed up her success with Florodora by working as an advance agent for
society woman turned actress Elsie de Wolfe in The ~ of the World, a
society drama featuring thousands of dollars in designer Paris gowns. IS
This position led directly to a two-year stint as press representative for
the Victoria Theatre, run by de Wolfe's companion Elisabeth Marbury, a
job that allowed her to remain in Manhattan.l9 After the Victoria, Marble
served as press representative for Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan
Opera House, where she endeavored to "conduct his campaign in rivalry
with the Metropolitan."20 By 1909, she had become the publicity manag-
er for the Hippodrome, New York's largest performance venue with a
seating capacity of 5,200.21 When she eventually left this post in 1912, the
New York Telegraph celebrated her as "one of the foremost publicity pro-
moters of either sex in America."22 Although Marble undoubtedly bene-
fited from her status as the daughter of playwright and actor-manager
Edward Marble and as the wife of former press agent and playwright
Channing Pollock (whom she married in 1906), it was her female con-
nections that helped secure her place as a press agent of note.23
Nellie Revell similarly benefited from female friendships (Figure
2). She started out as an advance agent for traveling circuses-theatrical
legend holds that she was born on the Barnum and Bailey circus lot to a
family of circus performers-but it was her friendship with dramatic cri-
tic Amy Leslie of the Chicago Daz!y News that allowed her to enter the
arena of "legitimate" theatre.24 "Had it not been for the co-operation and
boosting my own sex gave me," Revell later explained, "it is well within
the realm of possibility that I would now be massaging floors and bathing
18 Kim Marra, "Elsie de Wolfe Circa 1901: The Dynamics of Prescriptive
Feminine Performance in American Theatre and Society," Theatre Survry 35, no. 1 (May
1994): 100-120.
l9 "Anna Marble on Tour" 1 February 1908; No title, 15 June 1905, Locke
Envelope 1782, Mrs. Channing Pollock (Anna Marble), RLC.
20 Pollock, Harvest of My Years, 155.
21 Tom Fletcher, "New York Architecture," http:/ /www.nyc-architecture.com/
GON/GON027.htm (accessed 30 July 2006).
22 "Anna .Marble Leaves," New York Telegraph, 1 November 1912, Locke
Envelope 1782, Mrs. Channing Pollock (Anna Marble), RLC.
23 "Anna Marble Pollock," September 1907, Locke Envelope 1782, Mrs.
Channing Pollock (Anna Marble), RLC.
2
4
New York World, 2 June 1916, Locke Envelope 1876, Nellie Revell, RLC.
SINGING H ER 0\'<IN SONG 93
Figure 1: Press agent Anna Marble, described by the New York Telegraph as
"one of the foremost publicity promoters of either sex in America."
Courtesy: Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations
Figure 2. Portrait of Nellie Revell by James Montgomery Flagg. Frontispiece to
Nellie Revell, Right Off the Chest (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1923).
94 SCHWEITZER
windows."25 With Leslie's encouragement, Revell found employment with
such big-name managers as Florenz Ziegfeld, Percy G. Williams, and the
Shubert brothers, becoming one of the most successful and outspoken
female agents of the period.26
As Marble and Revell's experiences suggest, female networks
provided a crucial service to women who regularly confronted the sexist
attitudes of their male counterparts and the challenges of a system
designed by and for men.2
7
Despite breaking down certain gender barri-
ers, female agents were excluded from gentlemen's clubs, bars, and other
establishments where male agents forged friendships with dramatic crit-
ics and conducted business with theatre managers. Indeed, many agents
found employment with managers because of their journalistic acquain-
tances. "Because I could slap [Hearst syndicate critic] Alan Dale on the
back, had a nodding acquaintance with [New York Tribune legend] William
Winter, and from force of habit dropped the usual 'Mister' in addressing
other reviews of plays," one anonymous male agent explained in 1913, "I
was supposed to have an inside track to editorial rooms along Park Row,
Herald Square, and Long Acre, where the big New York papers are being
whirled into circulation all day long and most of the night. I was a desir-
able asset."28 This passage represents Manhattan editorial rooms as
25 Nellie Revell, "Woman's Sphere as a Press Agent," The Green Book Album,
June 1911, 1331.
2
6 Revell, "Woman's Sphere," 1331; Locke Envelope 1876, Nellie Revell, RLC.
27 Numerous scholars have emphasized the importance of women's support
networks for personal, political, and professional advancement. See for example, Blanche
Wiesen Cook, "Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal
Eastman, Emma Goldman," in A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of
Amencan Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Plech (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1979), 416; Linda Perriton, "Forgotten Feminists: the Federation of British
Professional and Business Women, 1933-1969," Women$ History Review 16, no. 1 (March
2007): 79-97; Serena Zabin, "Women's Trading Networks and Dangerous Economies in
Eighteenth-Century New York," Earjy American Studies 4, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 291-321. On
female friendships and networks within the theatre industrr see Susan Torrer Barstow,
"Ellen Terry and the Revolt of the Daughters." Nineteenth-Century Theatre 25, no. 1
(Summer 1997): 5-32; Kim Marra, "A Lesbian Marriage of Cultural Consequence:
Elisabeth Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe, 1886-1933," in Passing Peiformances: Queer Readings
of Leading Players i11 American Theater History, ed. Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra, (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 1 04-128; Alfred Allen Lewis, Ladies and Not
So Gentle Women (New York: Viking, 2000).
28 "The Autobiography of a Theatrical Press Agent," The American Magazine,
April 1913, 67.
SINGING H ER 0wN SONG 95
torial rooms as homosocial spaces where men "slap" one another on the
back and discard social formalities in favor of camaraderie. This is a
world where women do not exist.
Perhaps the most obvious sign of the female press agent's exclu-
sion was the Friar's, a gentlemen's club started in 1904 by Charles
Emerson Cook, David Belasco's press representative. Cook originally
established the Friar's in a bid to distinguish legitimate press agents from
the unsavory types who passed themselves off as press agents to gain free
tickets, but it soon welcomed actors and other male professionals into its
ranks. 29 Still, while Vaniry Fair joked in 1908 that Anna Marble had
achieved such an advanced position within the profession that she should
become an honorary "Friaress," the doors to the clubhouse on West
Forty-eighth Street remained flrmly closed to women.30
Female press agents were not without their own clubs, however.
In 1912, Nellie Revell joined the board of directors for the Professional
Women's League, an association founded by Mrs. A.M. Palmer in 1891
to offer emotional, financial, and professional support to actresses and
other professional theatre women.3
1
Later in her career Anna Marble
became a member of the feminist club Heterodoxy, which boasted many
of "the most unruly and individualistic females you ever fell upon,"
including Susan Glaspell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and other
Greenwich Village intellectuals.32 But as much as these clubs offered sup-
port and encouragement to their members, they did little to address the
particular experiences of the female agent and may have even reinforced
the gendered division within the profession by securing women's place on
the margins. 33
29 McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 75.
30 "When Women Work," Vanity Fair, March 1908, Locke Envelope 1782, Mrs.
Channing Pollock (Anna Marble), RLC.
31 Nellie Revell, New York Telegraph, 25 April 1912; McArthur, Actors and
Amencan Culture, 75. Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, '"A Doublet and Hose in My Disposition':
Sexology and the Cross-Dressed Theatrics of the Professional Women's League," Theatre
History Studies 15 Gune 1995): 105-122.
32 Nelligan, in Linda Ben Zvi, Susan Glaspell.- Her Ufi and Times (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 90. Inez Haynes Gilmore Papers, 1872-1945; Heterodoxy to
Marie, scrapbook of photographs and appreciations from members of Heterodoxy Club
to Marie Jenney Ho\\'e [1920], 73v. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA.
33 The P. W L. is primarily remembered today as an actress's club and very lit-
tle is known of its non-performing members.
96
SCHWEITZER
Female press agents nevertheless managed to find employment
and make their way into editorial rooms by fulfilling a need that their male
colleagues could not. "The female advance or press agent has the repu-
tation of knowing her show and of being able to get better material from
her woman stars than they will accord the men," the Chicago Tribune
explained, "that is when these people are inclined to be charry about what
is written about them."3
4
Female press agent's familiarity with fashion and
beauty culture, often acquired through years of working in the trenches
of the woman's page, gave them a decided advantage over men. This was
certainly the case for Anna Marble, whose experience interviewing female
stars and writing about stage fashion first for the Brookfyn Eagle and later
for the New York Evening Telegram allowed her to speak authoritatively
about the latest stylistic trends.35 In 1904, manager Edward C. White sim-
ilarly turned to former dramatic critic Idah McGlone Gibson "to write a
notice or two for Miss [Mildred] Holland, embracing, eyes, hair, com-
plexion, number of baths and massage treatments it takes to keep an
actress playing such a heavy part as Catherine, in perfect health."36 In this
instance, it was Gibson's connections with society columnists and her
"friendship and sympathy" for Holland, more than her ties to dramatic
critics, that made her a valuable asset to White and his star.37 Already con-
versant in the language of image management, female press agents pack-
aged theatrical stars as pleasant commodities, encouraging female audi-
ences to believe that with the right face cream, corset, or hat, they too
could acquire the star look.
Performing Press Agents
As active participants in the standardization of beauty ideals, female press
agents were especially attentive to their own performances of gender. In
a lengthy article entitled "Woman's Sphere as Press-Agent," published in
34 "Women as Advance Agents," 69.
35 "Anna Marble on Tour" 1 February 1908, Locke Envelope 1782, Mrs.
Channing Pollock (Anna Marble), RLC Channing Pollock later benefited from her expert-
ise while writing a series of fashion articles for the New York Evening World signed by
Lillian Russell. Pollock, Harvest of My Years, 140.
36 Letter from Edward White to Mrs. Idah McGlone Gibson, 13 October 1904,
Gibson vol. 238, 13, RLC.
37 Letter from Edward White to Mrs. Idah McGlone Gibson, 25 May 1904, vol.
237, 106, RLC.
SINGING HER OWN SONG 97
the Green Book Album, a theatrical journal intended both for profession-
als and the general public, Nellie Revell urged prospective female agents
to "forget you are a woman."3B Those who played up their femininity to
win over an editor, she explained, would ultimately fail unless they also
addressed that editor's professional needs and personal idiosyncrasies:
"What one editor may like, the man in the newspaper office across the
street may not even look at." It was not enough for a female agent to fall
back on her looks or male civility; she had to "study the policies of the
newspapers, but also the fads and foibles of the individual men 'holding
down' desk jobs in newspaper offices."39 "My idea of the woman press-
agent," Revell concluded, "is that she must be womanly, aggressive, have
ideas in plenty, courage, tact, energy, and be dominated by one determi-
nation-to batter down all obstacles."
4
0 Although in other passages,
Revell upheld the idea of woman's essential nature (suggesting for exam-
ple, that a woman was better suited to press agency because she "natu-
rally has more intuition, a more complete grasp of details, a keener imag-
ination") her formula here offered a striking collision of gendered char-
acteristics. In juxtaposing "womanly" with "aggression," "courage,"
"tact," and "energy"-words that, as Judith Halberstam has shown, are
most often associated with masculinity- Revell uncouples masculinity
from maleness, opening up an exciting new range of power positions for
female exploration.4I
Certainly, as the cartoonist Thornton Fisher suggests in Figure 3,
Revell was a force to be reckoned with. Rushing into the newsroom, bun-
dles of stories and photographs in her arms, the fashionably-dressed yet
rather unfeminine woman depicted here looms over the sweating, cower-
ing figure of the Managing Editor. She is forceful, energetic, larger-than-
life. The text bubbles and notes posted around the newsroom indicate
that she is a regular to the paper and accustomed to receiving special
treatment. Even the "big murder story'' has been "shoved" aside to meet
her demands for space.
Outside the newsroom, female press agents like Revell continued
to challenge gender norms and gain visibility through performance, stag-
ing promotional stunts for their clients and themselves. Through inter-
38 Revell, "Woman's Sphere," 1332.
39 Ibid., 1330.
4
0 Ibid., 1332.
4! Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
98
SCHWEITZER
Figure 3: Thornton Fisher's cartoon of Nellie Revell while she was working as
a circus press agent. Right Off the Chest. New York: George H. Doran Co.,
1923, 237.
views, articles, and public appearances, they spoke openly about their
experiences in a male-dominated profession and urged other women to
pursue professional careers. This willingness to "go public" and expose
the labor involved in the publicity process seems antithetical to the very
concept of the press agent; such exposure makes sense, however, in light
of the phenomenon of female stunt journalism. Beginning in the 1890s
and continuing into the second decade of the twentieth century, young
women like circumnavigating traveler Nellie Bly "insinuated themselves
into prisons, hospitals, asylums, circuses, and brothels, joined caged ani-
mals in zoos, kicked up their heels with cabaret dancers on stage, and
caught rides in newfangled vehicles from automobiles to airplanes."4
2
As
historian Jean Lutes argues in her recent study of turn-of-the-century
female reporters, this kind of "participatory journalism" was one of the
very few strategies available to women hoping to "break out of the
women's pages."43 Adventurous women like Bly reached the front page by
42 Jean Lutes, Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction,
1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell UniYersity Press, 2006), 2.
43 Ibid.
SINGING HER OWN SONG 99
playing into shifting discourses on women's roles in public life and by
quite literally making spectacles of themselves.
44
Like stunt reporters, although to a lesser degree, female press
agents represented an exciting new frontier in turn-of-the-century gender
relations. Certainly as the following letter sent to Idah McGlone Gibson
from the Gilliams Press Syndicate suggests, newspapers and press syndi-
cates were excited by the concept of the female press agent:
We should like to make yourself the subject of a special
newspaper article and desiring that whatever we publish
be absolutely authoritative, we take the liberty of
addressing you to solicit the favor of your valued assis-
tance.45
In 1902, when Gibson arrived in her home town of Grand
Rapids, Michigan, ahead of Rebecca Warren, the star of East Lynne, the
local paper focused almost exclusively on the female agent, detailing her
career trajectory and her ongoing work as a lecturer. For her part, Gibson
seems to have enjoyed the spotlight. She not only granted personal inter-
views to reporters in many of the towns she visited, but also delivered a
series of free public lectures on "The Ethical and Artistic Side of the
Drama."46 This academic tide belies the actual content of Gibson's lec-
ture, which, as the following description suggests, learned more towards
gossip than critical analysis:
She [Gibson] will tell many stories of famous actors this
evening and she has with her a large number of auto-
graph photographs of the great English stars, all of
whom she has known and to whose personal lives she
introduces her audience. The lecture is absolutely free to
everyone, and at its close very beautiful booklets con-
taining portraits of a popular actress will be given to
everyone in attendance.47
44 Ibid., 4.
45 Letter from the Gilliams Press Syncticate to Mrs. Idah McGlone Gibson, vol.
237, 79, RLC.
46 Letter from Edward C. White, Manager. 13 October 1904, Idah McGlone
Gibson, vol. 238, n.p., RLC; "Woman Press Representative," 21 .
47 "Was Born in City of Flint," Flint News, 6 January 1903, RLC, New York
Public Library, vol. 237, 25.
100 SCHWEITZER
Instead of publicizing Warren and staying behind the scenes as one
would expect of a press agent, Gibson presented herself as the star of
her own drama, consigning Warren, the unnamed "popular actress" men-
tioned above, to the sidelines.
Although Gibson's primary goal seems to have been selling her-
self, Nellie Revell and Anna Marble used their position to actively chal-
lenge gender ideologies and advance women's rights. "The expression
that woman's sphere is the home, is as hackneyed as it has been proven
to be fallacious," Revell argued in 1911. "In a study of history, we find
that in spite of the handicaps, rather than because of any help given
them, women have often taken quite as active a part in the affairs of state,
war and letters as have the so-called sterner sex."48 Anna Marble agreed,
and in a 1912 interview with journalist Ada Patterson-a stunt reporter
in her own right-she encouraged women to continue pursuing profes-
sional careers after marriage: "Marriage is not an occupation under all cir-
cumstances," she explained, "it is an archaic idea that as soon as a woman
gets married she should end her business life."49 Although frequently
identified as "Mrs. Channing Pollock," Marble not only continued work-
ing after her marriage but also retained her maiden name, refusing to give
up her hard-won professional identity.
In addition to speaking openly about marriage and women's
work, Marble also used her position to promote the suffrage cause. While
working for Percy Williams in 1908, she staged a brilliant Election Day
stunt, "arranging with the suffragettes to carry on their own little
sideshow election in the various Williams houses." Marble's ingenious
scheme "won Percy Williams' theatres columns of space on a day when
every newspaper in the country is devoted almost exclusively to election
news" and further secured her reputation as a top agent.50
Yet while stories about women press agents made for good news,
they did little to win over male reporters and press agents, who often felt
threatened by their female rivals. "The chivalry of men press agents is not
so apparent [as other men]," Gibson observed in a 1909 interview, "and
the woman in this kind of business will know much opposition. The man
advance agent is tenacious of his job with its perquisite and lets any
48 Revell, "Woman's Sphere," 1332.
49 "Wives Should work to Learn Dollar's Value,"' Neu; York Journal, 2 April
1912, Locke Envelope 1782, Mrs. Channing Pollock (Anna Marble), RLC. On Patterson,
see Lutes, Front Page Girls, 13, 33.
50 ''Anna Marble Makes a Record," New York Telegraph, 5 November 1908,
Locke Envelope 1782, Mrs. Channing Pollock (Anna Marble), RLC.
SINGING H ER OWN SONG 101
woman who tries it know that she isn't wanted-unmistakably."st Some
female agents tried to temper their relationships with men, especially
reporters, by appealing to their egos and playing up their feminine
charms. 52 "There is no reason on earth why a woman press agent may not
retain her personality, her womanliness, her dignity, all through her work,"
Anna Marble asserted. "Indeed, this dignity will help her in the long run.
It is an asset in this business as in any other."S3 But sometimes dignity was
not enough. As the following account of Nellie Revell's experience with
the Shubert brothers suggests, when called upon to get tough with their
male counterparts, female agents often came out on the losing end.
A Stunt Gone Wrong
In 1912, Revell arranged with department stores 1n c1ttes across the
United States to stage a unique fashion show featuring six showgirls from
the touring Shubert musical revue Whirl of the Worfd. 54 In exchange for
the showgirls' labor and in anticipation of the large crowds that such an
event would attract, department stores agreed to provide all the advertis-
ing and all of the gowns, wraps, and millinery worn by the showgirls. In
a letter to].]. Shubert, she confessed "a certain amount of pride in secur-
ing a corner window ... in the Fair store [in Chicago] for a gown display
and for one of our frames [showing pictures from the production) and
mean to have it photographed and sent on ahead to every manager on
our route and try ... to pull it in big cities."55 Shubert wrote back to con-
gratulate Revell for her "good idea." "I want you to make the best show-
ing of any press agent in this country," he urged, "and I am sure that you
will get some big results."S6 Revell's letters offer few clues to why she
51 "Women as Advance Agents," 69.
52 "Plays and Players," 12 November 1903, ldah McGlone Gibson, vol. 237,82,
RLC.
53 No title, Locke Envelope 1781 Mrs. Channing Pollock (Anna Marble), RLC.
54 Telegram from Nellie Revell to J. J. Shubert, 13 September 1912; Letter from
Nellie Revell to ]. ]. Shubert, 27 September 1912 Box 4265 (August 1912-December
1912), Nellie Revell, Shubert Archives (hereafter SA).
55 Letter from Nellie Revell to J. J. Shubert, Sunday 1912, Box 4265 (August
1912-December 1912), Nellie Revell, SA.
56 Letter from]. ]. Shubert to Nellie Revell, 16 September 1913, Box 4265
(August 1912-December 1912), Nellie Revell, SA.
102 SCHWEITZER
ftxed on the idea of a "Gown display," although given her professional
relationships with other women writers and her previous experience plac-
ing fashion stories on the women's page, she was undoubtedly aware of
the fashion show's growing popularity in this period.57 "I note that you
say that a woman can sometimes get an angle on another woman,"
Shubert wrote to her in another letter. "It also applies that she can get an
angle on anything, because they do not expect that a woman is on to a
great many things."58
But success did not come easily. On August 23, shortly after her
contract began, Revell informed]. ]. that "conditions have changed con-
siderably, since I left Chicago, especially in the newspaper game. They are
harder than they ever were before, and I believe the hardest place in the
country at present for press agents, is Chicago."59 Her subsequent deci-
sion to stage the Whirl of the World fashion show can therefore be inter-
preted as an attempt to penetrate the tough Chicago "newspaper game"
and demonstrate that she could compete with other agents, including
those working for the Shuberts' main rivals, reviled Syndicate producers
Klaw and Erlanger. But in this, Revell was outmoded. Although the Whirl
of the World "Beauty Squad" was a huge hit in Chicago, Kansas City, and
St. Louis, by mid-October her rivals were closing in. "I experienced con-
siderable difficulty in placing the dry goods stunt," she informed]. ]. on
October 23, "owing to the fact that the Red Widow Co. had used it a few
weeks previous-just like the Madame Sherry Co. had in Cincinnati."60
Revell found it almost impossible to compete for press coverage in towns
where Klaw and Erlanger, the producers of Madame Sherry and The Red
Widow, controlled the local theatres.
Male advance agents working for the Shuberts also began to use
the fashion show stunt, much to Revell's displeasure. In November, she
57 My forthcoming book on the role of early-twentieth-century commercial
theatre in the formation of American consumer culture includes a chapter on the the-
atrical fashion show craze.
58 Letter from].]. Shubert to Nellie Revell, 14 September 1912; Letter from
Nellie Revell to J. J. Shubert, Tuesday, 1912, Box 4625 (August 1912-December 1912),
Nellie Revell, SA.
59 Letter from Nellie Revell to].]. Shubert, 23 August 1912, Box 4625 (August
1912-December 1912), Nellie Revell, SA.
60 Letter from Nellie Revell to]. J. Shubert, 23 October 1916; Letter from
Nellie Revell to].]. Shubert, 16 October, 1912 Box 4265 (August 1912-December 1912),
Nellie Revell, SA.
SINGING H ER OwN SONG 103
wrote to ]. ]. and requested "as a special favour to me" that he prevent
Mr. Priest, another Shubert agent, from copying her stunt: "Let the men
who begrudge women a place in their field, get their own ideas and not
use mine," she argued, "especially balling it up the way he did, and antag-
onizing the girls and creating division among them." According to Revell,
Priest had mercilessly exploited the showgirls in Boston, expecting them
to model four days for four hours straight each time: "They were not
even given a drink of water nor allowed a 10% rebate on the things they
bought. Some man from the store showed a 'Simon Legree' proprietor-
ship over them that was very offensive." By contrast, she explained:
I have never asked the girls but [two] hours, and then
only one day, and I have casually remarked to the Dry
Goods men how Mr. so and so [sic] in another town had
given them corsets and silk stockings and long gloves
and fancy neckwear and toilet articles and had served a
delightful luncheon to them, and of course they all fell
in line and did the same thing. I have always jollied the
merchant into serving a fine lunch for them, and the
girls usually leave loaded down with presents .... The
girls from the ''Whirl of Society" wrote on to some of
them [in the "Passing Show"] and told them about the
Dry Goods Man in Kansas City, following one of the
girls to the next town, bringing her a sealskin coat, so
that the "Passing Show" girls regard me as a sort of
Goddess of Liberty or Procuress or something.61
Revell presents herself as a beneficent, cajoling, kindly
"Goddess," the antithesis of the exploitative, unrelenting, Simon-Legree-
like male press agent. Rather than insist that the showgirls work for her,
she worked to procure fashion accessories, elegant lunches, and other
treats for them. Despite her best efforts, however, Revell could not stop
other agents from using her stunt and ]. ]. simply seems to have let
them.62
61 Letter from Nellie Revell to J. J. Shubert, 30 November 1912, Box 4265
(August 1912-December 1912), Nellie Revell, SA.
62 Letter from Nellie Revell tO J.]. Shubert, 17 December 1912; 17 December
1912; 17 March 1913, Box 4265 (August 1912-December 1912;January 1913-September
1917), Nellie Revell, SA. Despite these difficulties, Revell had some success staging a sim-
ilar promotional stunt for the Passing Show of 1912. Letter from Nellie Revell to J. J.
Shubert, 22 January 1913, Box 4265 (Jan. 1913-Nov. 1917), Nellie Revell, SA.
104 SCH\VEITZER
By May 1913 much larger forces were also converging against
Revell. In a letter to J. J. dated May 15, A. Toxen Worm, head of the
Shuberts' publicity department, complained that "everywhere and in
every city" Revell,
was at cross purposes with the local manager and with
the newspaper men, and that in some places the critics
themselves [said] that if Revell were to come back ahead
of another show they would not receive her in the
offices. She is simply a pest and uses terrible language in
addressing them. This coincides with what Mr. Johnson
of the Washington Star told me, that he would not allow
Revell in his office again. Mr. Hauser of the New York
Times told me the other night that there is a standing
order in the office of the New York Times not to answer
any telephone calls from Revell. She never should have
been with a $2.00 attraction or with any firm conduct-
ing first class theatres. She belongs in the varieties and
with Marcus Loew.63
Shortly after receiving Worm's letter, the once supportive ]. ]. Shubert
fued Revell without explanation.64
The exact circumstances surrounding Revell's dismissal are
unknown. Perhaps she was too bold in her dealings with her male peers.
Perhaps her performance of "womanliness" was not enough to counter-
balance the aggression, courage, and energy with which she approached
her job. Perhaps she lacked the requisite tact to smooth over editorial
egos. Or perhaps Worm and his fellow agents felt threatened by her suc-
cess and lied to get her fired. Ironically, the following notice from the New
York Dramatic Mirror, written while Revell was working with the Shuberts,
suggests that she had many supporters who considered her a highly
skilled and professional agent, contrary to Worm's allegations:
Nellie Revell comes under the heading of pub-
licity men by virtue of her occupation. Also
because a notice of Miss Revell's activities was
63 Letter from A. Toxen Worm to J. J. Shubert, 15 May 1913, Box 76, Worm,
April-December 1913, SA.
64 Letter from Nellie Revell to J. J. Shuberr, Box 4265 Qanuary 1913-November
1917), Nellie Revell, SA.
SINGING HER OWN SONG
sent in by a mere man of Chicago. He informs
The Mirror that "she returned to Chicago and
was warmly welcomed by the press, which has
given her more space than vouchsafed to any
other agent who ever made Chicago."6S
105
Whatever the nature of Revell's offense, it is certainly likely that
the real issue was not her behavior per se but her visibility and her refusal
to play the role of "passive" female. She was too loud, too strong, and
too present for the men around her to stomach. And for that she was dis-
missed.
Female press agents were "pests" who used "terrible language";
courageous adventurers who advanced political causes; and skilled self-
promoters who outshone their clients. But because the nature of their
work was invisible-even if the women themselves were not-they have
remained "hidden in plain sight." A comparison with the demise of the
female stunt reporter may also be instructive here. According to Jean
Lutes, the growing movement away from sensationalism towards an
objective style of news reporting in the 191 Os made female stunt
reporters and their sob-sister counterparts "easy targets for press critics
scornful of the excesses wrought by competitions such as the epic circu-
lation battle between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer."66
This rejection of spectacle and excess had a similar effect on theatrical
press agency.6
7
By 1910, critical observers and insiders themselves
reminded press agents that they needed newsworthy material to get past
the editorial desk.68 The best stories were those that "appear(ed] on the
local page as straight news and not in the dramatic drift, which always has
the hallmarks of having been prepared by the agent."69 In a journalistic
environment built around perceptions of fact and truth, ridiculous stunts
65 "Among the Publicity Men," Ne111 York Dai!J Mirror, 4 September 1912, 16.
66 Lutes, Front-Page Girls, 6.
67 "Press Agency," New York Daify Mirror, 9 May 1908, 4.
68 Leander Richardson, "Where are the Press Agents of Yesteryear?" Vaniry
Fair, October 1914, 39; Fred Schader, "The Real Press Agent," Variery, December 1914,
33; Roy S. Durstine, "The Up-to-date Press Agent at Work," Printer's Ink, 9 March 1916,
101-102.
6
9
Hugh Pendexter, "On the Trail of the Press Agent," The Green Book Album,
January 1910, 221.
106 SCH'.'<'EITZER
and perky female press agents no longer made headlines. 70
Yet while female press agents may have stopped "singing their
own songs," their voices remain in the hundreds if not thousands of
news stories, interviews, and photographs they so skillfully persuaded
editors to publish. These voices call attention to the intersecting hierar-
chies of gender, class, and education that informed the work of male and
female agents; they highlight women's involvement in the objectification
and commodification of theatrical celebrities; and they enrich previous
understandings of the strategies that were available to women looking to
affect change within a patriarchal system.
70 This is not to suggest that female press agents simply stopped working.
Despite a lengthy illness in the late teens and early twenties, Revell continued to work as
a magazine writer and later published two books about her experiences as an invalid.
Anna Marble's professional activities after 1912 have been more difficult to track,
although her involvement with Heterodoxy suggests that she too maintained an active
presence within New York's theatrical and intellectual circles. Nellie Revell, Right Off the
Chest (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1923); Revell, Fighin' Through (New York: George
H. Doran Co., 1925).
JOURNAL 01' AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 20, NO. 2 (SPRING 2008)
(RE)CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY: HARLEM
EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE AND SOCIAL PROTEST
ADRIENNE C. MA.CKI
This Hole is our inheritance of sorts.
Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Plqy
Absence, invisibility, a hole: these obstacles challenge an understanding
of African American theatre history of the early twentieth century.t
Though the records of production at noncommercial black theatres are
scarce, uncovering the activities of the Little Negro Theatres of Harlem
enables scholars to re-imagine the story of its members and their con-
tributions to this erased narrative of black performance.2 Towards this
end, reconstructing the history of Harlem's Little Theatres is an act of
"reading absence" --chasing a fleeting record glimpsed in the all-but-lost
pages of scrapbooks and nearly forgotten memories of its aging partic-
ipants. It also recognizes the shortfalls of methods to accommodate a
rich, but methodologically inaccessible record which requires sifting
through myth, gesture, secrets, and memory. As Odai Johnson explains,
searching for the unseen is an excavation into the ghosted materiality of
performance that once was and is no more, yet whose residue and traces
may be made legible, may yet be read for the materiality of performance
that once was and the memory they yet contain.3 The materiality and
1 I am indebted to Heather Nathans for her support of this project, and to
David Krasner, Harry Elam, Dorothy Chansky, Mike Sell, and Peter Reed for their feed-
back on earlier versions of this essay. I am also grateful to the American Association for
University Women and the American Society for Theatre Research for their generous
funding which made this work possible.
2
Although the work of experimental, nonprofessional theatres of African
Americans were comparable to the theatrical activities of Hull-House, Neighborhood
Playhouse, and the early days of the Provincetown Players, a history of racism has large-
ly dismissed black amateur performance as unworthy of scholarly review. Such racial and
sexual discrimination by major white institutions, critics, and theatrical unions during the
first half of the twentieth century has gready impacted the advancement of African
Americans in design and production. While such black performers as Rose McClendon,
Ethel Waters, Freddie Washington, Charles Gilpin, and Paul Robeson were catapulted
from the whirlwind of the Little Theatre into the limelight of commercial theatre, few
African American "behind-the-scenes" theatre artists received attention-unlike early
twentieth-century designers Robert Edmond Jones and Lee Simonson, and directors
Arthur Hopkins and Maurice Browne.
108 MACK!
memory of how African Americans situated themselves within national
identity, paradoxically fighting for acceptance and autonomy, are hidden
in plain view. Although this social-protest theatre of the Harlem
Renaissance is virtually invisible due to racism and the dismissal of com-
munity theatre (as amateur and insignificant), my intent is to reconstruct
the remains paying particular attention to black community dynamics and
how artistic practices developed at the Harlem Experimental Theatre
(HET), one of the most significant Little Negro Theatres of this era.
Despite the paucity of evidence, this essay examines the HET's
influential legacy by demonstrating how it emerged as a microcosm of
pioneering black performance and community empowerment. It also
reveals how the group's idealistic efforts culminated in the creation of a
forum where African Americans could challenge stereotypes of min-
strelsy, while simultaneously assimilating into white society. Through this
forum artists could explore roles that honored black identity on stage and
off, representing subtle acts of rebellion against the establishment. This
essay not only provides highlights of the group's production history to
illuminate how the company relied on techniques of the Little Theatre
movement which resulted in dynamic intersections of black and white
culture, but also suggests how HET both reflected and reified the prob-
lematic idea of community. In many ways, HET was a product of its
complicated intraracial network, an important source of evidence that
influences the way scholars read the performances.
HET emerged in and was influenced by the post-Reconstruction
era independence movement and Marcus Garvey's Black Nationalist
movement in the 1920s, and helped redefine American theatre, con-
tributing a community-based performance history rooted in identity for-
mation, group building, and "communitas." Victor Turner describes
communitas as the experience of group cohesion when people bond
together, especially in the act of ritual, and this ritual figures in the pro-
duction and reception of HET's performances.4Turner's theory of com-
munitas informs what I mean by community, particularly in the way the
group is "acutely conscious of membership" through "affiliation with
some pervasive social category" such as class or race.s By community, I
also mean a conceptual group identity which mobilized American and
3 Odai Johnson, Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre (New York:
Palgrave, 2006), 2.
4 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Plqy (New York:
Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 45-46.
s Ibid., 44.
(RE)CONSTRUCriNG AND I DENTITI 109
diasporic blacks in the United States against a common oppressor. More
specifically, this community was largely comprised of a Harlem-based
outpost of black intellectuals and literati from W E. B. Du Bois's
"Talented Tenth," who maintained a wider reach beyond New York.
Baz Kershaw's "communities of location" also inform my
understanding of this particular community which was "created through
networks of relationship formed by face-to-face interaction within a geo-
graphically bounded area," as well as "communities of interest" that
reflected "ideologically explicit" networks, even when members hail from
a "different geographical area."6 Both communities intersected at HET.
Given that Harlem's black population comprised northern and southern
blacks as well as immigrants from Africa and the West Indies, Kershaw's
"communities of interest" shed light on how Harlem's black community
"recognize( d) their common identity," despite differences in ethnicity and
geography.
7
"Communities of interest" also describes the interchange
between Harlem's theatre artists and white Little Theatre practitioners
and academics. Communities of interest and communities of location
emerged from the "development of community self-help agencies (assist-
ed by the Church and other resources); and the realization that the com-
munity itself needed to maintain a self-sustaining support system for a
group under siege," as David Krasner rightly contends.s Both reflected
the growing activism in Harlem and directly resulted in increased theatri-
cal activity. Such deliberate attempts to build community led to Harlem's
Little Negro Theatres, which provided a kinship network and instilled
cultural pride, but at the same time concretized class distinctions.
The act of building community was particularly significant for
African Americans, according to Paul Gilroy. He argues that the complex
notion of community in black culture signifies not only the act of con-
gregation and the space where this process is enacted, but also:
It has a moral dimension and its use evokes a rich com-
plex of symbols surrounded by a wider cluster of mean-
ings. The historical memory of progress from slave to
citizen actively cultivated in the present resources
6 Baz Kershaw, The Politics if Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention
(London: Routledge, 1992), 31.
7 Ibid.
8 David Krasner, "The Theatre of Sheppard Randolph Edmonds," New
England Theatre Journal 16 (2005): 21.
110
provided by the past endows it with an aura of tradition.
Community, therefore, signifies not just a distinctive
political ideology but a particular set of values and
norms in everyday life: mutuality, co-operation, identifi-
cation and symbiosis ... . The social bond implied by use
of the term "community" is created in the practice of
collective resistance to the encroachments of reification,
"racial" or otherwise.9
MAcKJ
If Gilroy's interpretation of community posits the political and social
efficacy of group coalition, then the participants and spectators of HET
formed a community of interest and of location, united by the desire to
invoke collective resistance. As a result, the local stage offered an imag-
ined inclusive representation but also perpetuated class stratification.
Of course, the process of community building was not entirely
new. Historically, "communal orientation was a legacy of the slave expe-
rience," owing to "the extent to which the fate of individual blacks was
linked to the fate of blacks as a whole."to According to Evelyn Nakano
Glenn, "segregation enabled blacks to carve out social spaces within
which alternative visions of society and community would thrive."ll
These social spaces were most often in community institutions, like the
church and fraternal and mutual aid organizations, as well as shops, social
associations, and bars. Robin Kelley maintains that these social spaces
"constituted a partial refuge from the humiliation and indignities of
racism, class pretensions, and wage work, and in many cases they housed
an alternative culture that placed more emphasis on collectivist values,
mutuality, and fellowship."
12
If founding Little Negro Theatres stemmed
from this collectivist act to fashion an alternative vision of society, then
HET's amateur performances represented a symbolic negotiation for
social action.
It is important to note that Harlem's black community was
simultaneously united and divided at this time. In fact, one of the most
contentious social ills facing Harlem was internal racial strife, which split
9 Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 234-35. Emphasis mine.
tO Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Umqual Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American
Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 127.
11 Ibid.
!2 Robin Kelley, Race Rebels (New York: Free Press, 1994), 36.
(R.E)CONSTRUCJlNG COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY 111
the black population in terms of class and ethnicity. After the late 1890s,
blacks migrated to Harlem in large numbers, increasing its population
with blacks from the South as well as immigrant blacks from Africa and
the Caribbean.t3 Similarly, in the 1920s, the largest influx of black immi-
grants (primarily from the British West Indies) settled in Harlem.I4 As
Gilbert Osofsky points out, this settlement of West Indian Negroes
"added another complicating dimension to the racial problems of this
community-one that fostered discord rather than harmony among the
city's Negroes."
15
Class consciousness characterized immigrant as well as
American blacks, and such concerns created hierarchies of power that cut
across ethnic lines.
It is striking that despite this internal racism, there was a sem-
blance of unity in many community institutions and social groups.
Although it would be disingenuous to describe all intraracial relations as
harmonious, HET stands out as a paradigm of intraracial collaboration,
and as such merits further study, particularly because it commanded a
wider presence than its Harlem-based roots would suggest. The group
not only enjoyed coverage in the local black periodicals, such as the
Amsterdam News and New York Age, but also in the Chicago Defender, which
linked its activities to a larger audience of black intellectuals through a
pervasive print culture. As one of the most influential black weekly peri-
odicals, the Chicago Defenders readership at its height was approximately
500,000 people across the United States.
1
6 Similarly, the rise of a black
print culture, with publication of black-authored plays in anthologies and
journals like Opportunity and Crisis, emphasized a "readerly" audience,
13 According to Cary Wintz, "In 1920 black Harlem extended from 130<h Srreet
to 14Sth Srreet and from Fifth to Eighth Avenue, and it contained approximately 73,000
blacks." Cary Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University
Press, 1988), 20. The middle class and the black churches played a significant part in shap-
ing the black community of Harlem due to their wealth and prominence, and as Harlem
grew with the onset of new subway routes, the black elite flocked to homes in this dis-
trict. However, at the same time, the city rapidly devolved into a slum with discernible
economic and social problems.
14 Irma Watkins-Owens, "Blood Relations: West Indian Immigrants and Urban
Community in Harlem," (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1983), 3.
1
5 Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper & Row,
1968), 131.
1
6 More than half of its subscription base was outside of Chicago, and with the
help of Pullman porters and entertainers this periodical traversed the nation, from the
North to the South.
112
MACKI
which as Carol Allen argues, helped "extend theatricality's power to cover
and reach across black community strata including the reading group, the
classroom, the head shop (beauty parlor and barber), and the profession-
als' waiting area, the major sites where discussion and debate is fos-
tered."17
A B(l)ack Ground: Building An Alternative Playhouse as a
Community Mission
From 1928 to 1934, HET emerged from the ashes of W E. B. Du Bois's
renowned troupe, the Krigwa Players, directly answering his call for a the-
atre about us, by us, near us, and for us. It aspired to continue from where
the Krigwa Players left off, involving many of the former's founding
members. When HET took over the basement Library Theatre at 135th
Street, it entrenched itself in Harlem, with increased community out-
reach, interracial collaboration, and educational programming. Like the
Provincetown Players, the company was not entirely concerned with imi-
tating professional theatre, but at the same time it often relied on profes-
sional actors and directors, and strove for high reviews in the black press.
Unlike other Little Negro Theatres, such as the Aldridge Players and the
New Negro Art Theatre, it was not explicitly attempting to parlay its
experience in order to simply transfer to the legitimate stage.IS Instead,
the group integrated itself into the social fabric of the community's
everyday existence. More than any other black company of the period,
HET maintained its dedication to providing a public service and to devel-
oping artists. According to BET's Executive Director, Regina Andrews:
Community theatre is an important factor in the educa-
tional, social, and recreational life of the people. It sup-
plies an outlet for self-expression which is inherent in all
of us. It provides a stimulant or an incentive to person-
ality improvement.19
17
Carol Allen, Peculiar Passages: Black Women Pfay11mghts, 1875-2000 (New York:
Peter Lang, 2005), 92.
18 The Aldridge Players appeared under the direction of Frank Wilson in
August 1926, and in the following year, Hemsley Winfield led the New Negro Art
Theatre's temporary relocation to the basement Library Theatre in September 1927.
1
9 Regina Andrews, "The Community Theater: A Part of the Life of the
People," radio speech, (14 September 1934), Regina Andrews Papers, Box 9, folder 11,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
(RE)CONSTRUCTING COMMUN11Y AND lDENTI1Y 113
Largely because of its location and non-professional status, Andrews
sought to reassert the group's identity outside of the mainstream theatre;
and as Andrews makes clear, the group measured its effectiveness not by
the standards of professional theatre, but based on its ideological and
practical impact on the community and the group's participants. In par-
ticular, its efficacy was tied to the group's investment in theatrical train-
ing, which was open to Harlemites as well as the theatre's members.
However, this mission-to supply a support system, an educational envi-
ronment, and platform for activism-would be undermined by the
group's concurrent desires to improve its professional offerings, distinct
from remaining focused on theatre for social change. That is to say, when
it recruited leadership from professional theatre, it may have lost sight of
its roots in community efficacy. Similarly, it would be challenged by crit-
ics who exhorted its leadership to promote professional standards. This
focus on improvement and professionalism were reasonable expecta-
tions, but at odds with the group's seminal philosophy-providing a
voice for self-expression. As Dorothy Chansky points out, such divergent
interests between "social and aesthetic concerns and the assumption that
two cannot merge without one suffering," were endemic to the Little
Theatre movement.20
At the same time, the group endeavored to furnish "authentic"
representations of black identity during a time when black authors and
artists were encouraged to think in terms of racial uplift.2
1
Like its fore-
runner, HET intended to "make a definite contribution to Negro drama
and literature, by encouraging the writing of Negro plays and the produc-
tion of original plays wherever possible," and establishing a permanent
repertory theatre in Harlem.
22
The group's political agenda, however, was
hidden in plain sight: its efforts were a conscious response intended to
20 Dorothy Chansky, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the
American Audience (Carbondale: Illinois University Press, 2004), 57.
21 Racial uplift was at the center of discussions by black leaders W E. B. Du Bois,
one of the founders the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and
Alain Locke, the Harvard-trained professor of philosophy at Howard University. Du Bois
rallied behind a theatre committed to propaganda and social action, while Locke encouraged
African American artists to develop a folk art tradition celebrating their identity. Little
Theatre in particular, according to Locke, was of special value to African Americans
because it offered "a deeper racial significance and inspiration." Repertory Playhouse Associates
Proscenium Newsletter, May 1933, C. Glenn Carrington Papers, Box 145-26, folder 16,
Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
22 Andrews, "The Community Theater," 2.
114 MACKI
evade and challenge institutional racism. If we consider, as historian Kevin
K. Gainer asserts, that African Americans "sought to rehabilitate the race's
image by embodying respectability, enacted through an ethos of service to
the masses," then it is possible to read HET's performances as concen-
trated acts of reclamation.
2
3 The group staged plays in the name of pub-
lic service and represented blacks as creators of culture, especially in its
productions of Climbing Jacob's Ladder and The Duchess Sqys Her Prqyers.
These works not only strove to rehabilitate the race's image by supplying
plays that reversed racial indignities and restored honor, but also served as
subde acts of resistance by mobilizing the collective community.
A Blueprint for a National Black Theatre: The Praxis of Space
and Community
That its nusston was indelibly tied to location not only illustrates
Kershaw's community of location, but also suggests the company's link
to Du Bois's manifesto in terms of forging a pan-African black theatre.
The group's chosen site-the 135th Street Public Library-deliberately
connected HET with its theatrical predecessor and with the Harlem
library as a symbol of learning and educational resources. Gay McAuley
argues that a theatre's "space is, of course, not an empty container but an
active agent; it shapes what goes on within it, emits signals about it to the
community."24 In this way, the Library Theatre at 135th Street framed the
activities of HET as autonomous acts. Similarly, in an attempt to con-
struct a national and diasporic identity linked by racial subordination, the
group's marketing brochure deliberately identified the importance of
Harlem's diverse matrix of ethnicities. Whereas the Krigwa Players
implicidy modeled inclusive representation, HET explic.idy claimed a
diasporic identity:
Harlem is the meeting place on this continent of the col-
ored world. Here are people from all the States of the
Union, from Canada, Central and South America, from
Asia, many European countries, from all parts of Africa.
Here lie dormant many dramatic stories of the Old
South and the New South, of peoples adjusting themsel-
23 Kevin K. Gainer, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the
Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), xiv.
2
4
Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1999), 41.
(RE)CONSfRUcnNG COMMUNITY AND I DENTITY
ves to new and strange environments. Here are clashes of
different philosophies, the constantly occurring dramatic
episodes along the Negro-white front.2S
115
Clearly, the group's notion of Harlem as a meeting place for diverse races
indirectly furthered Du Bois's directive about creating theatre "about us,"
"by us," "for us," and "near us," by challenging the essential notion of
what defines "us." By expanding "us" to include Afro-Canadian,
Southern black, West-Indian, or African peoples, this organization served
as a paradigm for greater intraracial cooperation and a model of creative
production of diaspora. At the same time, the brochure's deliberate inclu-
sivity and transnational identity reflected the company's aspiration to pro-
vide a sanctuary for diasporic communities, which was significant in a
period known for its deeply entrenched segregation. That the theatre
actively sought to bridge intraracial gaps between the races was daring,
especially when there was significant internal conflict among black peo-
ple.26
In particular, its leader, Andrews, consciously endeavored to ease
black-on-black tension when she stated, "it's important that we recognize
the contributions of West Indian Americans to our American culture."27
She envisioned a theatre that would integrate all shades, dispelling racism
among blacks and whites. Perhaps her own ethnic background factored
into the group's defense of diversity. As a child of mixed African,
American Indian, Swedish, and Jewish descent, she would likely
empathize with diasporic populations.
2
B Largely due to Andrews's influ-
ence, resourcefulness, and leadership, HET enjoyed a longer existence
than its predecessor. Andrews credited several Harlem churches and
25 Harlem Experimental Theatre Brochure, 1928-1931. Regina Andrews
Papers, Box 1, folder 9, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
26 See Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck (1925) for a tragic dramatic represen-
tation of color prejudice amongst blacks.
27 Regina Andrews in Lofton Mitchell, Voices of the Blade Theatre (Clifton, NJ:
James T. White and Company, 1975), 67.
28 Like many Harlemites, Andrews came to New York seeking work in 1923.
With Du Bois's help, she secured a clerical position at the public library, and eventually
worked her way up in the library's administration, retiring in 1967 as the supervising librar-
ian of the Washington Heights branch. That she was in proximity to Harlem's prominent
intellectuals, activists, and artists contributed to HET's long-term success. In fact, her
friends included the most influential voices of the Harlem Renaissance in theatre, litera-
ture and art, such as actors Rose McClendon and Richard B. Harrison, writers Langston
Hughes, Rudolph Fisher, and Jessie Fauser, and artist Aaron Douglas and his wife, Alta.
116 MACKJ
community organizations with HET's solvency, emphasizing the impor-
tance of community backing in providing "financing and encourage-
ment."29 For instance, Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop granted the com-
pany rehearsal and performance space in the auditorium of the St.
Phillip's Parrish House (one of Harlem's most prominent and wealthy
churches), and the Witoka Club on West 145th Street frequently provided
facilities for fundraisers, including dances and afternoon teas, with guest
speakers like Alain Locke and Sue Ann Wilson, the national executive of
the Drama League of America. 3D Similarly, other events featured honored
guests from the NAACP, such as DuBois, Mary White Ovington, and
Walter White. These activities demonstrate HET's wider network, assem-
bling Harlem's elite community as well as often aligning with prestigious
white allies to secure public support, ideologically and financially.
In addition, HET appealed to national educational organizations,
including the American Association for Adult Education (AAAE), which
"served as a clearing house for information on the adult education move-
ment nationally," and linked "religious organizations, labor groups, civic
societies, and city governments."3
1
AAAE established the Harlem Adult
Education Committee, which partnered with the theatre to offer an eight-
week dramatic training course "expand[ing] the 'cultural, vocational, and
social' horizons" of black residents in Harlem.JZ As a result of HET's
collaboration with the Harlem Adult Education Committee and success-
ful fundraising, the theatre offered open admission, enabling it to attract
audiences in the midst of the Depression. More importantly, this initia-
29 Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre, 73. St. Phillip's Parrish House, 135th
Street YMCA, and 137'h Street YWCA were among HET's supporters, providing meet-
ing and rehearsal space.
30 St. Philip's owned tenements on 135rh Street, and was accused of exploiting
black tenants. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1983), 20. The Witoka Club hosted civic associations, luncheons, teas,
concerts, and dances.
31 Vincent P. Franklin, "Education for Life: Adult Education Programs for
African Americans in Northern Cities, 1900-1942," in Harvey Newfeldt and Leo McGee,
ed. Education of the Amen-can Adult: An Histon"caf Overvie1v (New York: Greenwood Press,
1990), 121. American philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, co-owner of Sears, Roebuck and
Company, partnered with Booker T. Washington to support public education for blacks
in the south, and later funded adult education programs.
32 Ibid. AAAE and HET offered a series of discussion groups on drama, liter-
ature, art, and radio, which may have been inspired by the kind of programming offered
by the Drama League of America.
(RE)CONSTRUcnNG COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY 117
rive exemplified the kind of interracial leadership and management advo-
cated by educator Alain Locke in order to ensure "integration of blacks
into the public institutions of American society."
3
3 At the same time, this
partnership provided a model for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal
programs, in particular the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project.
These practices raise at least one glaring question: with free admission,
who came to see the productions? Although it is impossible to answer
definitively, it seems likely that the group attempted to serve an econom-
ically challenged population.
With financial support from various charitable organizations and
the black elite, HET expanded, and looked to the national Litde Theatre
movement in order to shape its vision, suggesting the group's desire to
assimilate and incorporate white aesthetics. In particular, Andrews was
inspired by the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina,
founded by the father of American folk drama, Frederick Koch. It is
interesting that Koch promoted folk drama while working in the most
rudimentary of spaces, drawing on the local community to fashion a the-
atre that sprang from the people.34 Like the Carolina Playmakers, HET
relied on local labor to build a theatre for the people, and by the people.
On the other hand, Koch often used actors in blackface, which HET
would revise in order to reclaim black identity.
Perhaps Andrews was most fascinated by Koch's definition of
folk drama, which centered on locally based drama as an expression of
the community. According to Koch, "folk" described a form of "drama
which is earth-rooted in the life of our common humanity."3s This con-
cern with "common humanity" and the need to cultivate community
drama informed the group's artistic mission. But, unlike Koch with his
black-faced actors, Andrews maintained that black drama should reflect
black life accurately:
33 Ibid.
34 The members of HET may have also been encouraged by the Playmakers'
earnest attempts to perform for more than seven years without adequate facilities. Relying
on the help of members of the university community and the srudent body, the group
renovated a public school building, extending an apron stage over a row of seats in the
auditorium. They constructed a proscenium arch, hung a brown curtain, built makeshift
lighting from tin can spotlights and built a framework to hang theit flats and scenery.
Walter Spearman, The Carolina Pltgmakers, The Firs/ Fifry Years (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1970), 13-15; and Frederick Koch, Carolina Folk Plays (New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1941), xii.
35 Koch, Carolina Folk Plqys, xiv.
118
Through our production of unpublished plays we can
supply our potential dramatist with a work-shop. In such
a work-shop the Negro playwright can complete a man-
uscript for production, the theme or ending of which
does not have to be changed for Broadway producers
nor will there be the necessity for considering box office
receipts. We must develop our Negro drama to include
the problem of the Negro worker and the present day
Negro social drama theme.36
MAcK!
While the commercial theatre was marked by minstrelsy and stereotyped
roles, the Little Negro Theatre strove to create alternative visions of
black life. Ironically, although Andrews claimed that her theatre was not
bound by the same commercial pressures, she was in fact subject to
another set of criteria that was also restrictive-that of the purpose of
black drama, and whether it should promote aesthetic standards for the
sake of art or should serve a higher calling in advocating social justice.
Despite this perpetual struggle in black art, Andrews maintained that the
group provided an experimental space, a "laboratory for the Negro play-
wright," where blacks could assimilate into the broader network of
American culture while also achieving autonomy. Relative financial inde-
pendence allowed the group to promote subversive, serious drama, and
largely to disregard conventional Broadway standards.
Play Selection of Harlem Experimental Theatre
Although little is known about the specific criteria of the group's play
selection process, the records indicate that Harold Jackman served as
chair of the play-reading committee, and he actively sought out new plays
by black writers.37 When the company produced social protest and folk
plays by black dramatists, including Georgia Douglas Johnson's Plumes,
and original plays by HET members, such as Robert Dorsey's Waxen li!J
and Get Thee Behind Me Satan, and Regina Andrews's Underground and
Climbing a c o b ~ Ladder, they ultimately achieved this mission. However,
36 Andrews, "The Community Theater," 3.
37 Jackman wrote to Willis Richardson on 9 October 1933 looking for a new
full-length play to produce during HET's the nexr season. Willis Richardson Papers, Box
1, folder 18, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts.
(RE)CONSTRUCTING C OMMUNI1Y AND 1DENTI1Y 119
plays from black playwrights were scarce, and according to Andrews,
HET deliberately chose not to "limit ourselves to Negro plays until we
could produce our own."38
Despite efforts to revise the repertoire, the group was often
restricted to many of the standard black-themed plays by white authors,
including Paul Green's The No 'Count Bqy and Ridgely Torrence's The Rider
of Dreams. HET also selected plays that had been popular fare in the
National Little Theatre competitions-including English playwright
George Calderon's Little Stone House. Although performing white-
authored plays (with or without black characters) was often necessary, the
decision to do so was the result of a complex negotiation of identity pol-
itics. On the surface, it seemed that the reliance on white-authored plays
was a practical solution to the shortage of texts by blacks, but upon clos-
er inspection it revealed that the group may have struggled with defining
its identity, trying to appease multiple demands from the audience and
members to show that its members could 1) perform in roles previously
denied to them, 2) earn respect from white institutions by staging plays
by whites, 3) restore truth and integrity to roles previously played by
whites in blackface,39 and 4) envision new representations of black iden-
tity reflective of the community's diverse experiences.
The difficulty of maintaining its ideological premises as an
organization consistently rooted in the interests and the needs of the
community resulted in what appears to be a split identity, or alternately,
reflected the company's double consciousness. Du Bois's The Souls of
Black Folk voiced this challenge of striving to internalize black and
American identity: "One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro;
two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in
one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder."40 Paul Gilroy expanded Du Bois's theory, describing double
conscwusness as:
an unhappy symbiosis between three modes of think-
38 Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre, 74.
3
9
The most conspicuous example of the group reclaiming black roles was in
their decision to revive The No 'Count Bqy, which had garnered national attention in the
National Little Tournament when the Dallas Little Theatre performed it in blackface,
securing the first place trophy in 1925. For an excellent analysis of the Dallas Little Theatre
and its production of The No 'Count Bqy, see Chansky, Composing Ourselves, 186-215.
40 \'(/. E.B. DuBois, SouLr of Black Folk, http:/ /www.yale.edu/lav:web/avalon/
treatise/ dubois/ dubois_Ol.htm (accessed 8 December 2007).
120
ing, being, and seeing. The first is racially particularistic,
the second nationalistic in that it derives from the nation
state in which the ex-slaves but not-yet-citizens find
themselves, rather than from their aspiration towards a
nation state of their own. The third is a diasporic or
hemispheric.
41
MACK!
Harlemites may have experienced this divide-striving for acceptance,
assimilation, and equality while negotiating these often contradictory
demands. Assessing HET's play selection vis-a-vis Gilroy suggests that
the group's disparate agenda(s) emerged from grappling with these three
ways of thinking, seeing, and being, resulting in an attempt to articulate
difference and provide authentic negritude without upsetting the status
quo. But, notions of authenticity trafficked in the same essentialism that
its advocates tried to dispel, thus reinscribing "exclusivity," according to
J. Martin Favor.42 Such exclusivity prohibits diversity in terms of ethnic
origins, geography, class, gender, and education.43
Audience and Community: Incorporating America
The organization's mixed repertoire of plays by black and white authors
raises several questions about the audience, available plays, and expecta-
tions audiences held about black theatre within Alan Trachtenberg's
"incorporated America," an America which emphasized "new hierarchies
of control" and privileged "'elite' culture."
44
While we do not have
detailed records regarding the spectators, the list of subscribing patrons
includes several of Harlem's elite: famed actress Edna Thomas, musician
Jimmy Lunceford, and Reverend John J. Johnson from St. Martin's
Church. Careful review of the subscription list demonstrates that at least
five doctors supported the group.45 Other recognizable patrons included
41 Paul Gilroy, The Block Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 127.
42 J. Martin Favor, A11thentic Blacknm (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999),
19-20.
43 Ibid., 12, 16, 21.
44 Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of Ammca, (New York: Hill and Wang,
1982), 4, 9.
4
5 Dr. Lowell Wormley was merely one of the many educated specialists, and a
Howard University graduate, who went on to become an important surgeon in Arizona.
(RE)CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY 121
Wendell Imes, the son of the prominent Reverend William Imes, and
Winifred Norman, the granddaughter of black inventor Lewis Latimer.
But, this inventory is woefully incomplete-no records remain regarding
the non-paying audience generated when HET promoted an open admis-
sion policy. Even so, the group's subscription list suggests a distinctly
class-based patronage, drawing from Harlem's educated upper and mid-
dle-class blacks, which directly paralleled the group's administrative man-
agement under Andrews, Jackman, and Dorothy Peterson.46 In other
words, the group's desire to access the community-at-large, at least in
terms of generating an economically diverse audience, may have been an
empty gesture that did little more than effectuate existing class hierar-
chies.
Also incomplete is evidence fully documenting the group's pro-
duction history.47 I discovered that although Harold Jackman was one of
the most avid collectors of black theatre memorabilia, he denied histori-
ans access to his own involvement with HET.
4
8 Despite the fact that
Jackman chaired the group's play selection committee and directed for
the company, his papers reflect the same erasure found in the annals of
theatre history-he catalogued mostly professional theatre, subordinating
his own personal contribution and the work of community theatres at
large. On one level it is surprising that Jackman, as an arts patron, activist,
and a member of the NAACP, either directly or indirectly obscured black
theatre history. But, in many ways, this erasure points to the ambivalent
relationship blacks often had with their own art-and community theatre
46 Peterson temporarily served as HET's Executive Director before Andrews,
and performed professionally with Richard B. Harrison in Green Pastures (1930), and
appeared in the long-running Don't You Want to be Free (1938) with the Harlem Suitcase
Theatre.
47 In an interview with librarian Jean Black-well Hutson, Andrews explained that
she deposited her collection with the Audience Development Committee (AUDELCO).
But, despite repeated attempts from this researcher to comact AUDELCO, the organiza-
tion failed to respond. Without confirmation from AUDELCO, it is unknown if the
materials survive, or if they are available. I agree with Jonathan Shandell who asserts in
"American Negro Theatre: Staging Inter-racialism in Harlem, 1940-1949," that Andrews's
scrapbook appears to be lost. Regina Andrews, interviewed by Jean Blackwell Hutson, 16
July 1986, video recording, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
48 His archives at the Atlanta University Center preserve countless programs
and clippings on the Harlem Unit of the Federal Theatre Project, American Negro
Theatre, Negro Ensemble Company, and Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre-groups undeniably
linked by commercial success. See Countee Cullen and Harold Jackman Memorial
Collection, Robert W Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center.
122 MACKJ
in particular-signaling how its "taint" of amateurism and institutional
racism prevented many from valuing their work unless it was embraced
by legitimate markers of success-namely Broadway. This ideological
divide permeated HET's membership, in spite of Andrews's intentions to
provide a community theatre divorced from Broadway; yet by providing
an alternative to the professional stage it neither escaped comparison nor
achieved equality. Inevitably, it succumbed to and reified the same pres-
sures it sought to alleviate.
Nevertheless, piecing together the scattered newspaper clippings
and programs reveals a richer history than this absence would suggest.
HET not only sustained activity during one of the country's most
depressed periods, it also presented opportunities for aspiring artists to
practice their craft, and introduced a trio of little known black design-
ers-Robert Dorsey, Pheon Hood, and Charles Alston-and black direc-
tors, including Robert Dunmore, Jack Percy Bond, and Emmet Lampkin.
While HET launched the careers of several black directors, it simultane-
ously drew on the directing expertise of such seasoned white theatre
practitioners as director Carl Glick, a Northwestern graduate and co-
author of Curtains Going Up; director John O'Shaughnessy, who later
directed for the American Negro Theatre and on Broadway; and sea-
soned veteran Margaret Lesueuer, from the Sargent School of
Dramatics.49 The collaborative efforts of the group's committed mem-
bers and this intraracial group of directors formed communities of inter-
est that stretched HET's geographic and racial boundaries.
A Trio of Designers: Designing Space, Community, and
Iconography
HET's designers, Robert Dorsey, Pheon Hood, and Charles Alston,
formed an integral component in fabricating a black community on stage
which sustained the community at large by validating the beauty and
complexity of black life. These designers provided a visual connection to
a long history of African ritual and performance by fashioning alterna-
tive visions of collective identity that provided a substantial departure
from exoticism and the white conception of African primitivism.
Revising idyllic minstrelsy stereotypes not only resulted in more authen-
tic representation of black culture, but also fostered pride and self-
esteem.
49 Glick's 1938 Curtain; Going Up discussed Little Theatres across the United
States, but failed to cite his work with the HET, or mention other African American com-
panies.
(R.E)CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY 123
While studying at the Mechanics Institute of New York, Robert
Dorsey created original sets for all of HET's production, fusing space,
place, and meaning.so Historical evidence chronicling his work is sparse;
however, if we are to believe critical descriptions of his ability that, "in
this branch of the arts, this young man has great talent, which deserves
to be encouraged," then Dorsey laid the foundation for Perry Watkins,
who was to become the first African American designer on Broadway. 5
1
By 1941, Dorsey was described in the society pages as an artist, actor, and
interior decorator who regularly entertained renowned black celebrities at
his parties.
52
Unlike Harlem Renaissance painters Aaron Douglas and Louise
Latimer, who worked with the Krigwa Players, Dorsey was not classica-
lly trained as a visual artist.S3 Instead, he was an actor and playwright
whose technical training in building and design was effectively utilized to
create geographically specific black spaces. As Edward Soja argues, "The
organization and meaning of space is a product of social translation,
transformation and experience."S4 In this way, HET was concerned with
cultural space as a socially constructed entity expressing social relation-
SO Mechanics Institute is one of the oldest, privately-endowed technical schools
offering free evening instruction to students in New York and is affiliated with the
General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York.
51 Edward Perry, "Harlem Little Theatre Offers Fine Dramas," Chicago Defender,
2 May 1931,11.
52 His guestS included Avon Long, a professional stage, screen, and television
actor; Kelsey Pharr, who performed in the Negro Playwright Company's 1940 production
of Big White Fog; professional dancer and choreographer Felicia Sorel, who went on to
train famed chorographer Jerome Robins (who choreographed West Side Story and Fiddkr
on the Roty); and Rosetta LeNoire, who trained at the American Negro Theatre, became a
professional stage and screen actress, and founded an interracial theatre company, AMAS
Repertory in 1968. Bessye Bearden, "New York Society," Chicago Defender, 1 November
1941, 17.
53 Prior to becoming one of the most prominent artists of his era, Aaron
Douglas was recruited by Du Bois tO design scenery and poster art for the Krigwa Players.
Louise Latimer, a nearly forgotten artist, continued her association with the Krigwa
Players long after Douglas ended his. While Douglas's art was stylized, Afrocentric, and
graphic, Latimer's rendition of black subjects often demonstrated European influences
with graceful brushstrokes and realistic details. Latimer's obscurity is due in large part to
her gender, and that she was eclipsed by the more famous Douglas, even though she was
a greater contributor to the Krigwa Players.
54 Edward Soja, Postn1odern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory
(New York: Verso, 1989), 80.
124 MACK!
ships, class, and economics. This was reflected in how Dorsey re-created
recognizable black cultural environments-often revealing a world of
urban overcrowding and poverty using the techniques of the Little
Theatre movement that evoked familiar sights, sounds, locales, and expe-
riences of black life in all of its complexities.
According to the company's promotional materials, "his creative
ability tends toward the modernistic, shown by the sheer realism which
his imaginative effects have struck."SS The reference to "modernistic"
indicates Dorsey's inspiration from expressionist design in the New
Stagecraft. At the same time, the impact of his "sheer realism" suggests
how his spectacle had affected a shared response using culturally speci-
fic interpretations of space and place, alternately re-imagining the open
vista and longing for a displaced homeland, replicating the slum concli-
tions of the urban tenements or the communal space of the black
church.
Part of the group's efforts to construct a collective memory
included a nostalgic vision of the South which Dorsey rendered in his
"charmingly beautiful" set for Paul Green's The No 'Count Bqy, considered
the "high spot in the presentation of this play," according to a local black
press reviewer.sG Like the Provincetown Players, HET realized great
effects, despite the limitations of its small stage, as illustrated by drama
critic Basil Winter's review: "Dorsey deserves especial credit for his inter-
esting setting. Handicapped by a very small stage, he overcame this by
using a gauze curtain to create an effect of distance."S7 Winter's reference
to the gauze curtain suggests the designer's familiarity with modern
scenery employed by the Art Theatre movement, especially those semi-
nal productions viewed by African Americans, such as the Provincetown
Players' landmark The Emperor Jones (1920) and the Moscow Art Theatre's
Lower Depths (1923).
Despite the absence of illustrative drawings and photographs of
each set, several common techniques emerged and were utilized by com-
parable black theatre groups during this period, which can help the his-
torian to re-imagine what is irrecoverable. Negro Little Theatres capital-
ized on curtains to stand in as make-shift scenery, borrowing this popu-
lar technique from the national (white) Little Theatre movement. Little
Negro Theatre director Pearl Pacheco Williams of Chicago's Richard B.
55 HET Brochure, 1928-31.
56 Amsterdam News, 28 May 1930.
57 Chicago Defender, 7 June 1930, 11.
(RE)CONSTRUCTING COMMUNIJY AND JDENTIJY 125
Harrison Players observed that by 1927 the use of drapes and lighting
were in vogue. She explained that "we often staged with only a sugges-
tion of what the property and scenery should be."Ss This seems to be the
effect that Dorsey attempted with his design for Mary Cass Canfield's The
Duchess Sqys Her Prqyers in 1930. A production photograph demonstrates
his minimal set, consisting primarily of a curtain backdrop, a centrally
placed altar adorned with two candelabra and a crucifix dominating
upstage center (Figure 1).
The photograph reveals how the simple setting paled in com-
parison to the decorative costumes. With their ornate trains and sumptu-
ous fabric, the women's decoratively embroidered dresses stood out
against the unobtrusive drapery. s
9
While this emphasis on ostentatious
costumes is not unusual in the Little Theatre movement, in the context
of black culture this elaborate dress served as a form of racial uplift,
demonstrating that blacks could successfully assume roles previously
denied to them. Robin Kelley maintains that "seeing oneself and others
'dressed up' was enormously important in terms of constructing a col-
lective identity based on something other than wage work," while simul-
taneously enacting a "public challenge to the dominant stereotypes of the
black body ... reinforcing a sense of dignity that was perpetually being
assaulted."60 Thus, the act of "dressing up" can be viewed as a perform-
ance of resistance.
Whereas The Duchess Sqys Her Prqyers modeled an identity that
blacks aspired to, Andrews's Climbing Jacob's Ladder (1931) depicted a
world that was more reflective of their current predicament. Dorsey's
understated church setting for The Duchess sharply contrasted with his
work on Andrews's social protest play. In this latter design, Dorsey
offered a more fully realized set, including the pews of the church, and a
large mosaic on the center of the back wall.
58 Pearl Pacheco Williams, Black E:>.perience in Little Theatre and the Richard B.
Harrison Plrgers (Chicago: privately printed, 1976), 27.
59 As Constance Mackay explained even the most unimaginative halls were
transformed with uncomplicated backdrop scenery or hangings. "The use of simple flat
backgrounds for modern or decorative scenes, and the use of one scene for a number of
different purposes made by changing its lighting and accessories," was common at Little
Theatres. Constance D'Arcy Mackay, Costumes and Scenery for Amateurs (New York: Henry
Holt and Co., 1932), 5. Similarly, vibrant costumes juxtaposed against a simple wall pro-
vided ample visual interest, and the insertion of a door or a window added sufficient vari-
ety. For further discussion of common white Little Theatre sraging practices, see Mackay,
Costumes and Scenery for Amateurs.
60 Robin Kelley, Race Rebels (New York: Free Press, 1994), 50.
126 MACK!
A raised platform, marking the "front" of the church where the
pastor stood facing his congregation, was positioned on stage right
(Figure 2). In his design, the congregation (which signified the black com-
munity-at-large) dominated center stage. These photos, coupled with sur-
viving records from comparable Little Negro Theatres, indicate that
Dorsey may have been influenced by Gordon Craig and Max Reinhardt.
This is best illustrated by his use of platforms, drapery, and lighting to
suggest a setting. Though it is impossible to tell from the black-and-white
photos, Dorsey probably relied on color for balance.6t
Dorsey's scenography represented the bleaker aspects of the
black community as well. While no pictures or scripts remain from HET's
original productions during the 1932 spring season (which showcased
one-acts by the group's members, such as Dorsey's Waxen Li!J, Andrews's
Underground-a story of the slaves' freedom flight with the Underground
Railroad-and Ted Marcin's Eviction), it is possible to recreate what
Dorsey would have generated.6
2
These plays share a concretized reflec-
tion of specific locations as either sites of oppression or hope drawn
from the collective memory of black experience. According to the pro-
gram, Eviction was set in Harlem in the 1930s, Waxen Li!J was set in a " flat
in the Negro section, East Side, N.Y," in January, and Underground was set
in the "interior of a river cabin" in the early morning of February 1855.63
Knowing Dorsey's penchant for modified realism, the settings likely
reflected the particular environment of these three worlds-black
domestic spaces, evoking the characters' living conditions and harsh eco-
nomic realities.64
6! Pacheco noted that directors of her era used color to balance the stage, such
as her colleague and collaborator, German director, Alfred Franz Stury. Although Stury
directed another theatre group, he volunteered to help the Richard B. Harrison Players
with scenery and lighting. He escorted Pacheco to area theatres so that they could study
their stage and equipment. Pacheco, Black Experience in Lttle Theatre, 29.
62 Regrettably, no further information regarding these plays is available. The
only evidence of their existence is from the company's program. But, given the plays' set-
tings and their titles, and knowing the subject matter of the Underground, it would seem that
these plays concerned the bleak existence facing African Americans post-emancipation.
63 Program, Regina Andrews Papers, Box 1, folder 9, Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture.
64 Perhaps Martin's Eviction revised the melodramatic Harlem (1929), attempting
to dispel stereotypes about black urban life. With its raucous rent-party scenes glamoriz-
ing black urban poverty, Harlem was not embraced by the black community, but was a
commercial success at Broadway's Apollo Theatre. Accordingly, perhaps Eviction more
fairly rendered the struggle of blacks during the Depression-era to fmd work and the
challenges of keeping their homes. Similarly, Waxen Lly may have dealt with imminent
Figure 1: Richards-Ward Photo Studio. Scene from the Harlem Experimental
Theatre production of The Duchess Sqys Her Prqyers with Edna Lewis Thomas
(left), Ira De Augustine Reid, and Regina Anderson Andrews. Regina Andrews
Photograph Collection 1930. Courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
Figure 2: Scene from the Harlem Experimental Theatre production of Climbing
JacoH Ladder by Regina Anderson Andrews. Regina Andrews Photograph
Collection. Courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and
Tilden Foundations.
128 MACK!
Dorsey's interior sets for the above productions were comple-
mented by Pheon Hood's costume design. Hood affiliated with the group
in the early 1930s, and designed costumes for Eviction, Waxen L!J, and
UndergrounJ.65 Although active with various women's groups, Hood seems
to have earned her living designing flashy costumes for cabaret singers
and dancers; she also worked as a costumer for Harlem's renowned
Cotton Club.66 In addition, Hood was involved with charitable organiza-
tions such as the Utopia House, a community center.providing arts-and-
crafts programs to Harlem's youth. 67 As early as 1927, Hood circulated
among black theatre's acclaimed pioneers, such as Richard Huey, Zora
Neale Hurston, Richard B. Harrison, and Abbie Mitchell.68 According to
the society gossip pages, Hood dated Charles Alston, who taught at the
Utopia House and worked with the Harlem Experimental Theatre. Later,
she was linked to Jack Carter, a professional black actor.69 It is likely that
either Alston encouraged Hood to design for HET, or Hood, with her
interest in theatre and costuming, persuaded Alston to participate in
HET.
Despite the fact that she was cited as "one of our best young
designers in these parts," Hood's specific contributions to costume
design are lostJO According to Bessye Bearden, "many of the lovely stars'
death and funeral arrangements, and may have been inspired by Georgia Douglas
Johnson's Plumes (1927), which HET produced circa 1929, concerning a poor southern
black mother who wrestles with how to best provide for her terminally-ill daughter-
whether to honor her with a memorable funeral service or further her costly medical
treatment. Or Waxen Lify may signify the Depression era, poor knick-knacks (as opposed
to expensive fresh flowers) that decorate an otherwise bleak, drafty black tenement.
65 She may have worked with the group previously, but no records documen-
ted her presence before 1932.
66 Her work is not recognized in the Cotton Club programs on file in the
DeWah Jackson Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
6
7
She helped design cosrurnes for a pageant commemorating the George
Washington bicentennial celebration and aU to pia House benefit fashion show at Rockland
Palace on 7 May 1932, which were in vogue in both black and white communities.
68 The society pages reveal Hood's social network, which included attending a
tea honoring Rose McClendon and Evelyn Ellis for their work on Porgy. Bessye Bearden,
"Tidbits of New York Society," Chicago Deftnder, 17 December 1927, 11.
69 Carter appeared in Goat Alley (1927), Porgy (1927), and Stevedore (1934) . Ted
Yates, "New York After Dark," Chicago Deftnder, 1 December 1934, 9.
70 Chicago Deftnder, 23 August 1941,17.
(RE)CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY 129
clothes of the stage and screen have been designed by the litde M.iss."7J
However, Hood may have designed primarily for cabaret shows and black
celebrity performers because racist and sexist theatre unionization made
it difficult for her to work in professional theatre.7
2
Visual artist Charles Alston, who later ran the Art Workshop in
Harlem for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), appeared in
HET's productions, and created an African mask cover design for the
theatre's new program and publicity materials in the early 1930s. While
the previous poster and program designs by Aaron Douglas featured a
kneeling woman, which spoke to the strength and creativity of black
women-and to the theatre's leadership by women like Dorothy Peterson
and Regina Andrews-Alston's tri-mask design honored HET's commit-
ment to its African roots. Its modernist wood-block print style combined
African iconography with art deco, which were both in vogue at this time.
According to art historian James Porter, many black artists of the period
were influenced by the "geometric shapes of African sculpture."73 Alston
did not specify which African masks inspired him, but freely admitted his
affinity for African sculpture and its influence on his work since 1925
when he attended an exhibit of African sculptures and masks at the
Schomburg Collection.7
4
Based on his design, specifically the contrast
markings of the center mask, the construction of the slanted eyes (on the
profiled masks) and the protruding lips, the image seems to resemble
Liberian masks, either from the Bass a or Dan tribe. 75
Afrocentric masks were not unusual in a period when Harlem's
artists and intelligentsia looked to Africa for identity and inspiration.
Accordingly, Alston's iconography manifests its connection to a long his-
71
Ibid.
72 This situation would be somewhat remedied with the advent of the Federal
Theatre. Racism and sexism persisted, however, as illustrated by Hilda Farnum's experi-
ence. This designer and wardrobe mistress for the Negro Unit in Harlem was denied
union membership to the Wardrobe Attendants Union in 1941 when she attempted to
work on the US.O. Camp touring shows after the close of the FTP.
73 James Porter, Modern Negro Art (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 105.
74 Lemoine D. Pierce, "Charles Alston-An Appreciation," The International
Review of African American Art 19, no. 4 (2004): 36.
7
5 If Alston's designs are inspired by Bas sa dance masks, it is interesting to note
that these masks were worn by men in ceremonial performances characterized by femi-
nized movement. Mario Meneghin, "The Bassa Mask" African Arts 6, no. 2 (Autumn
1972): 47-48.
130 MACK!
tory of African ritual and performance. Scholar Kobena Mercer main-
tains, "The image of the African mask recurs, from the Harlem
Renaissance through [Romare] Bearden ... as a constant and distinctive
visual trope of the diasporic imagination. It signifies something pro-
foundly important to the condition of double consciousness."
7
6 Alston's
design is especially fitting, for at this stage in its career, HET's program-
ming acknowledged the group's African roots and modernist stance. At
the same time, the mask as a signifier of modernism helped establish a
distinctive African modernity and conveyed the group's increasing sense
of double-consciousness as they aspired to promote an autonomous
black identity.
Directing and Acting: A "Community" Effort in Black and White
In addition to the designers whose contributions reflected concrete real-
izations of black culture, HET made room for unsung artists in all areas
of production, including acting and directing. In particular, several key
directors emerged to lead the group's efforts, serving as teachers to a
largely amateur ensemble, and joined nonprofessional actors from
Harlem with celebrity performers. Although I want to resist categorizing
these directors by skin color or race, it is clear that HET was shaped by
the way members aligned themselves with particular communities-be it
white academia, black academia, white Little Theatre, or professional
industry-which included black entertainers who had crossed over to
radio and the commercial stage. Unfortunately, little is known about their
rehearsal methods, casting, or directorial vision. Despite the scant histor-
ical evidence, however, mapping these networks of performers and direc-
tors points to the increasingly complicated and slippery notion of com-
munity and reveals how these individuals articulated the group's compet-
ing agendas for self-expression and professionalism. Although they com-
prised an intraracial network of white and black, professional and ama-
teur, academic and community theatre constituents, in many ways these
artists also enabled HET to bridge those divergent positions.
One of the earliest directors from white academia was Helen M.
Brooks, who headed the Drama Department at Hunter College in
Manhattan, which at the time was a women's college. Hunter College was
not only open to students of all ethnic backgrounds, but also it had
7
6 Kobena Mercer, "Diaspora, Aesthetics and Visual Culture," in Black Cultural
Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, ed. Harry]. Elam and Kennell
Jackson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 156.
(RE)CONSTRUCilNG COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY 131
already begun to produce a steady stream of black teachers, which
increased the school's credibility as an allyJ7 Yet, on the surface it would
seem that relying on outside white directors belied the group's interest in
sustaining its own community and raised the question-who has power
and what art is privileged in such an arrangement? While it may have been
indicative of the group's competing agendas to be more professional and
to achieve recognition, on closer inspection, such practices may have also
served as a temporary solution in order to access the "master's tools."
In May 1930, Brooks directed The No 'Count Bqy and The Duchess
Sqys Her Prqyers. By staging blacks in upper class roles typically denied to
African Americans, Duchess empowered the performers and the audience
by revising expectations about the kinds of roles blacks could perform.
Interestingly, it was a white director whose methods helped the group to
promote a progressive racial agenda by using reversal and reinscription as
strategies to destabilize hegemonic structuresJS Not only did the produc-
tion realize a complex negotiation of identity and activism, it employed a
combination of professional and nonprofessional black actors. Brooks
cast guest artist Edna Lewis Thomas, a respected actress in professional
theatre, in the role of the Madonna in The Duchess Sqys Her Prqyers.7
9
Thomas played opposite to Regina Andrews, an amateur playwright and
librarian, and activist and sociologist Ira De A. Reid, who had initially
appeared with the Krigwa Players. Andrews claimed that such practices
strengthened the company's artistic standards by encouraging guest
artists from the legitimate stage to coach RET's amateur members. This
assertion begs the question-what kind of art did HET aspire to create
and to what end? Whose aesthetics were valued?
But, as amateur actor Ira De A. Reid demonstrated, not all of the
group's members desired careers in commercial theatre. Many of the
77 Susan Elizabeth Frazier, Lucille Spence, Gertrude Elise McDougald Ayer,
and Layle Lane were among Hunter College's former black students who worked as edu-
cators in the city. For a detailed study of three of these activist teachers, see Lauri
Johnson, "A Generation of Women Activists: African American Female Educators in
Harlem, 1930-1950," ]o11rnal of African American History 89, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 223-240.
78 As David Krasner cogently points out in his study of nineteenth-century
performers, black entertainers used these strategies to great effect to problematize white
claims of black authenticity. See David Krasner, Parody and Do11bie Conscio11sness in African
American Theatre, 1895-1910 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 25-27,29-35.
79 She appeared with Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones (1925), and performed
in Lu/11 Belle (1926) and Por;gy (1929) on Broadway. During the Federal Theatre Project, she
was cast in Voodoo Macbeth (1936).
132 MACKJ
group's participants and its audience were just as likely to be part of a
larger circle of Harlem's prominent citizens and activists. so That is to say,
HET members comprised and circulated among this coterie group of
black intellectuals who congregated at the literary salons of Andrews and
Gwendolyn Bennett, contributed to the pages of black periodicals like
Fire!, Opportunity, and Crisis, served as race leaders in the civil rights move-
ment, and formed the next generation of black educators. For them, the
Little Theatre served as a site of congregation, self-expression, and
"community labor."B
1
Like many other Little Theatres, HET was beset by contradic-
tions-striving to be professional or to promote self-expression-and a
myopic sense of itself and of its "community." It fumbled to define itself
within those contradictions, and faced the added responsibility of inter-
vening with Locke and Du Bois's predominant ideas of what drama
should do for the race: employ art for propaganda or utilize art for its
own sake.B2 All the while, it depended on support from an elite audience
and desired recognition during an era that looked to Broadway as the
arbiter of taste and high culture. Yet, amidst this swirling debate of pro-
fessional theatre and aesthetic standards, the group showcased up-and-
corning black directors, many of which emerged from academia. Doing
so helped HET to have a direct impact on the way blacks were repre-
sented on the stage.
One of the most productive of these incoming directors was
young Northwestern graduate of Speech and Dramatics Robert
Dunmore, who joined the troupe in 1930. Hailing from one of the coun-
try's most prominent drama departments, Dunmore, like Brooks, helped
to circulate the new techniques of the Art Theatre movement, increasing
the intersection of black and white culture. He staged new plays by black
authors, and extended his influence to Little Negro Theatres in Chicago
80 Such intellectuals and activists included Hubert Delaney, Jessie Fauser, Ethel
Ray Nance, and E. Franklin Frazier. Delaney, one of Harlem's prominent families, was an
active figure in the civil rights movement of the 1920s and 1930s and became a judge.
Nance worked with Charles S. Johnson and the Urban League's periodical, Opportum!J,
and hosted salons at her apartment with Andrews and Gwendolyn Bennett. Frazier was
a sociologist, educator, and activist.
81 Allen, Peculiar Passages, 86.
82 For studies on Du Bois's and Locke's theories of black drama, see Samuel
Hay, African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), and David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre,
Drama and Perfomrance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927 (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
{RE)CONSTRUCI1NG COMMUNllY AND lDENTllY 133
and Evanston, including the Richard B. Harrison Players.83 According to
HET's promotional materials, his "interest and ability have always been in
the dramatic field and his life has been spent in training for this work."8
4
Dunmore's most acclaimed production, Climbing Jacob's Ladder,
played to capacity audiences of three hundred people in May 1931.85 It
was an especially brave undertaking given that it was one of the few pub-
licly performed lynching dramas from this period, and concerned a
church group in Mississippi who pray and raise funds to save a local boy
accused of raping a white girl.86 The production called for thunder sound
effects and lightning flashes at the climax to signify God's divine inter-
vention and required a larger cast entailing more complex staging than
many of the group's previous offerings.8
7
In fact, the photograph from
Andrews's collection illustrates how challenging it was to place more than
twenty-five bodies on a small platform stage (Figure 2). Dunmore artful-
ly arranged the actors, demonstrating careful composition and variety in
83 By the 1920s, Northwestern offered one of the country's most vibrant
drama programs, with 26 productions per year, courses in play production, advanced play
production, acting, pantomime, history of American theatre, directing, playwriting, the-
atre for children, and classes in scenery and design.
8
4
HET 1928-1931 Brochure. During his short stay in New York, Dunmore
was involved with several HET productions, including rwo Little Theatre favorites,
George Calderon's tragedy, Little Stone House, and A Sunny Morning by brothers Serafin
Alvarez and Joaquin Alvarez Quintero, as well as three one-acts by local writers: Harry
Kemp's The Prodigal Son, Robert Dorsey's Get Thee Behind Me, Satan, and Regina Andrews's
Climbing jacob's Ladder. Upon his return to Chicago, Dunmore served as assistant director
for the Negro Little Theatre of Evanston, and became active with the Federal Theatre
Project. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, he also worked with the Richard B. Harrison
Players, as a playwright, actor and direcror. However, a tour of duty in World War II
ended his theatrical career, and he died shortly after his milirary release.
85 Chicago Defender, 23 May 1931,3.
86 Lynching was a brutal reality during this period as a way to impose racial
hierarchy. For a thorough discussion of lynching dramas see Judith Stephens, "Racial
Violence and Representation: Performance Strategies in Lynching Dramas of the 1920s,"
African American Revie111 33, no. 4 (Wimer 1999): 655-671; and "Politics and Aesthetics,
Race and Gender: Georgia Douglas Johnson's Lynching Dramas and Black Feminist
Culrural Performance," Text and Performance Quarter!J 20, no. 3 Ouly 2000): 251-267.
Andrews explained that she was influenced by Ida B. Wells Barnett's recording of lynch-
ings in Red Record for the NAACP, and wrote it under her pseudonym, Ursula Trelling.
8
7
Unfortunately, how these flashes were executed was not documented by
Dorsey or Andrews, but the fact that the stage hands were able to manipulate the light-
ing suggests a lighting system that allowed adjustment of the lights. Clearly, the well-timed
booming thunder claps were also essential for the effect.
134 MACKI
level and focus.
With its political subject matter, Climbing Jacob's Ladder was sig-
nificant in its own time and clearly impacted its audience and the black
community-at-large. Not surprisingly, it attracted Du Bois's interest and
support. After HET's production, Du Bois sent the following note:
The second play [Rose McClendon's direction of The
Rider of Dreams] was beautifully done, and the flrst one
[A Sunt!J Morning, directed by Robert Dunmore] was not
at all bad; but the third, your play was thrilling. I enjoyed
it immensely, and it gripped the audience. Congratula-
tions on it."88
Du Bois's comment indicates how such a production could inspire
Turner's idea of communitas by enacting a ritual prayer and staging the
real anxiety experienced by blacks at this time, ultimately bonding partic-
ipants and spectators in an invocation for justice and safety.
Since this production received more critical attention from the
black press than any of the group's previous shows it served as a call to
action with its explicitly confrontational politics.s9 With its widespread
coverage in the Chicago Defender, it emerged as a bold act against the estab-
lishment during a period of considerable growtl1 and change for the
organization. One of these changes included a new venue for the group.
Inexplicably, after several years of residency at the 135rh Street public
library, HET vacated the group's home. Possible controversy surround-
ing the play and its writer may have precipitated backlash from the
Harlem library theatre, which was run by whites, thus leading to the
group's sudden move to St. Philip's Church Parish House.
Following Dunmore's direction of Climbing Jacob's Ladder, black
educator Jack Percy Bond joined the company in November 1931 as a
director. Whereas Dunmore was nurtured in a predominantly white envi-
ronment before coming to HET, Bond began his career as an amateur
playwright in New York, developed his skills at historically black institu-
tions, including performing with the Washington, DC chapter of the
Krigwa Players and directing at Howard University. Although his stint
with HET was poorly documented, Bond is worth discussing as he blend-
ed a career in Little Theatre, activism, and educational drama.90 He worked
88 Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre, 79.
89 Chicago Defender, 2 May 1 9 31, 11.
90 In the late 1930s, Bond taught English and Drama, directed the Richard B.
(RE)CONSTRUCfiNG COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY 135
in the Harlem Little Negro Theatre movement, social work, and returned
to historically black institutions, which is significant in that he contributed
to community building and forged links between educational institutions
and Little Negro Theatres. Like Dunmore, he also aided in the formation
of a bigger theatrical community and network beyond Harlem.
During the Spring 1932 season, Bond directed Waxen Li!J and
Underground. These new black-authored plays formed the group's ftrst full
season of original work; and it seemed that the organization had turned
the corner to become what Andrews described as the "creative produc-
tion center for the playwright, the actor, the costume and the stage
designer and the director."9
1
In addition, Bond's residence marked an
exciting time for HET: they were rehearsing Andrew Burris's new three-
act comedy, You l'vf.ust Be Born Again, three times a week. This selection
was one of the few full-length dramas HET produced, which suggests
that HET was poised to take on more complex projects.
If Dunmore and Bond represented the new guard in black the-
atre, then white director John O'Shaughnessy was their counterpart in the
white Little Theatre movement. Like Dunmore, O'Shaughnessy had
recently launched his stage career. Prior to directing one of HET's most
highly touted productions, Ernest Culbertson's three-act play Goat Allry
during the 1933 season, he was affiliated with the Repertory Playhouse
Associates (RPA), an actor training program for black students which was
an offshoot of the Laboratory Theatre. O'Shaughnessy worked with act-
ing teacher and director Richard Boleslavksy, a former member of the
Moscow Art Theatre. With the support of Rose McClendon, James
Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke, RPA founded the short-lived Negro
Repertory Company.n O'Shaughnessy served as its manager and director,
participated in the social protest plays of the short-lived Actor's
Repertory Company, and later directed on Broadway.
Harrison Players of the A & T Litde Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, and partic-
ipated in the intercollegiate drama festival initiated by S. Randolph Edmonds. Bond left A
& T to supervise race activities and vocational training for the North Carolina National
Youth Administration, but returned to a career at historically black colleges in the 1950s,
serving as director of Admissions and Placement at Morgan State College. He also acted
as a judge for high school play tournaments in West Virginia. See Chicago Difender, 19
December 1936, 2; Chicago Difender, 5 May 1937, 8; Chicago Difender, 22 October 1938, 6;
Chicago Difender, 29 October 1938, 5; Chicago Difender, 23 April 1938, 4.
91 Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre, 76.
92 Besides Boleslavsky, its teaching faculty was comprised of Maria Ouspenskaya
(formerly of the Moscow An Theatre) and members of the Neighborhood Playhouse.
136 :MACKJ
At HET, O'Shaughnessy's revival of this controversial Broadway
tragedy was heralded as HET's most polished production to date in terms
of acting, direction, and design, according to Harlemite Bessye Bearden's
biased review in the Chicago Defender. This is especially interesting because
Goat A/lry was one of the few serious plays with an all-black cast per-
formed professionally in the 1920s, but it met with opposition from black
audiences and black critics. At the time, black leaders were conflicted as
to whether or not it endorsed racial inferiority because of its preoccupa-
tion with violence and setting in a "squalid dwelling," emblematic of
Washington, DC's slums. 93
Goat A/fry opened at the group's new Little Theatre at the YMCA
on 135th Street, perhaps to call attention to the oppressive struggle as an
agitational strategy of raising awareness, rather than endorsing such con-
diti?ns. Throughout its history, HET confronted problems within the
black community through re-enactments and reclamations which stressed
the group's connection to memory, geography, and history, with the
objective of exposing hegemonic institutional relationships. However,
what this production conveyed about urban blight and violence against
women is up for grabs, because interracial collaborations inevitably raise
questions about the director's intent and the overlapping but separate
communities of Harlem's elite and the white theatre community. Given
his extended affiliation with other black-interest group such as the
Repertory Playhouse Associates and ANT, it seems likely that his motives
were not exploitative.
Whereas O'Shaughnessy, Bond, and Dunmore were emblematic
of the new guard directors, Rose McClendon and Emmet Lampkin were
black theatre's veterans. Clearly, some of the group's members wanted to
achieve professional standards and sought out McClendon to direct larg-
ely because professional theatre remained the touchstone of good art.
According to Andrews, working with such seasoned performers as
McClendon and Lampkin and established white Little Theatre directors
provided practical training and reflected HET's desire to develop its
members.9
4
At some level, HET was either concerned with raising the
quality of its productions, or hoped that involving credible professionals
would help the company achieve its mission of improving training for
aspiring performers.
Besides McClendon, black directors from the professional indus-
9
3 Ernest Howard Culbertson, Goat Alii!) (Cincinnati: Stewart Kidd Company,
1922), 11.
94 Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre, 75.
(RE)CONSTRUCfJNG COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY 137
try included Emmet Lampkin, who directed and performed in a revival
of The No 'Count Bqy in June 1933. Lampkin began his training with the
Karamu House Gilpin Players in Ohio, and like McClendon, maintained
a professional career as a member of the CBS radio cast for John Henry,
Black River Giant. He also continued his Little Theatre work for personal
fulfillment and to connect with the local theatre community, which bears
mention because several successful entertainers of the black stage, like
Williams and Walker, rarely returned to Harlem to lead local companies
and nurture emerging talent.95 Instead, Lampkin gave back to the com-
munity by sharing his experience with the next generation of performers.
He also returned to the Little Theatre because it remained a place where
Lampkin could play a broader array of roles which were unavailable to
him in commercial theatre.
After Goat Allry, news coverage of the organization's produc-
tions dramatically dropped off after 1933, but HET's executive board
continued meeting until February 1935 in the home of the committee
secretary, Alta Douglas. There is, however, little surviving evidence to
reflect a continued presence on the stage in 1935, which coincided with
the beginning of the Federal Theatre Project. Ultimately, the group prob-
ably fell prey to the same challenges facing Little Theatres- lack of
resources-and was subsumed by the formation of Harlem's Negro
Unit. Many of its members continued performing with the FTP and sub-
sequent Little Theatre groups.
Harlem Experimental Theatre's Impact
The group's aim to establish a training school linked it to DuBois's stance
that education was central to resolving race and class problems. Such
endeavors-building an "inner culture" and supplementing education-
were acts of resistance, a strategy for furthering the place of blacks and
helped distinguish HET from its contemporaries.% HET's initiatives also
aligned the group's efforts with Alain Locke's promotion of black theatre
training programs. He explained that community theatres provided the
best environment for nurturing nascent actors and playwrights (who
would in turn help the race) because the local stage generated a "safe"
95 Before joining HET, Lampkin performed with professional black actor and
playwright Frank Wilson in a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
96 WE. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; rept., New
York: Atheneum, 1992), 667.
138 MACK!
space, free from the prevailing minstrelsy stereotypes.97 Interestingly,
development and education were not limited to HET's actors; its pro-
gramming was open to all. Besides partnering with the Harlem Adult
Education Committee in 1933, the group sponsored classes in voice,
speech, and stage makeup. HET also offered a playwriting class taught by
white Broadway playwright and Little Theatre impresario Carl Glick, who
directed for HET in 1932.98 In addition, HET collaborated with the 137th
Street YWCA to establish a dance class led by African American dancer
and choreographer Edna Guy, one of the black pioneers of dance, who
helped launch the career of Katherine Dunham.99 These initiatives illus-
trate the efficacy of a community theatre, measuring its merit not simply
by aesthetic criteria, but by its social use.
In terms of creating serious "native" drama, and upholding Du
Bois's manifesto, HET was more successful than its predecessor, not only
because it persevered through an economically trying period while main-
taining a longer record of performance, but also because the group effec-
tively collaborated with various organizations and worked cross-cultural-
ly with white directors who helped the group to advance its racially pro-
gressive agenda. In this way, HET emerged from multiple communities
yielding complex racial aesthetics, with networks that bridged white and
black, professional and amateur, academic and community theatre. It also
reflected Montgomery Gregory's assertion about black theatre's potential
to effect change:
97 At Howard University, Locke and fellow Harvard-educated Professor
Montgomery Gregory sought to establish a nationally recognized training program that
would produce future leaders and teachers through a curriculum that included literature,
acting/ directing and technical production, and building a national black theatre, the
National Negro Theatre. This National Theatre intended to eradicate prejudice by earn-
ing "the respect and ... admiration of the world." Montgomery Gregory, "The Negro
Theatre, Department of Dramatics, Howard University," brochure, Thomas
Montgomery Gregory Papers, Box 37-3, Folder 93, Manuscript Division, Moorland-
Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
98 Glick was the former director of the Little Theatre in San Antonio, Texas.
99 Guy trained at the Denishawn School, an acclaimed school of modern
dance, with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Guest speakers were often invited to discuss
the Little Theatre movement and different phases of HET's activities. Such guests includ-
ed firmly established members of the Little Theatre community, and professionals from
the legitimate stage as Mary Henderson, who worked with Eva le Gallienne and the
Fourteenth Street Civic Repertory Theatre; black Broadway actor Alston Burleigh,
renowned for his work in IVm, Little Chi/lun (1933); and Wayland Rudd, who performed
in the Hedgerow Theatre production of Emperor Jones in the early 1930s.
(RE)CONSTRUCTIZ..:G COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY
What the Irish players have done for the Irish people,
what the Jewish players are doing for the Jewish race, the
Negro should have the opportunity of doing for his
race .... Such a theatre would not only have the poten-
tialities of a distinctly new contribution to our native
drama but it would also prove a potent agency for the
amelioration of race friction. too
139
HET confronted racism, inside and outside the black community, and
with the success of such plays as Climbing Jacob's Ladder, the company
delivered dramas of the social protest tradition. Although several of the
group's original scripts are apparently no longer extant, and much
remains unknown about the organization, they fostered an autonomous
black identity, and ushered in the next generation of writers, directors,
designers, and performers.
Notwithstanding these accomplishments, Andrews would argue
that BET's most significant contribution was its legacy, not only in pro-
viding a foundation for Harlem's Negro Unit during the Federal Theatre
Project, but also galvanizing future Little Negro Theatres to follow its
model of generating resistant work and promoting an emboldened vision
of black identity on the stage, one that did not limit its concern with
shades of skin color, but rather a (political) racial identity that strove to
equalize opportunity and empower all blacks. When Andrews maintained
that BET's efforts "inspired other groups and may have been the shot in
the arm that brought the Federal Theatre (WPA) to New York," she con-
firmed HET's central, but often unrecognized place in black theatre his-
tory.IOJ However, with its membership and participants largely comprised
of Harlem's black elite, HET's representation of race was often contra-
dictory and class-based, which potentially perpetuated hierarchical power
relations even as it intended to dispel the larger problems of racial mar-
ginalization.
100 Montgomery Gregory, "For A Negro Theatre," The New Republic, vol.
XXVITI, no. 363 (16 November 1921): 350, Folder 103, Box 37-3, Thomas Montgomery
Gregory Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard
University.
101 Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre, 80.
CONTRIBUTORS
ADRIENNE C. MAcKI is a Lecturer in Theatre at Boston College. She is
the recipient of an American Association of University Women
Educational Foundation Fellowship, an American Society for Theatre
Research Dissertation Fellowship, and is an Affiliate Scholar of the David
C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of
African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of
Maryland. Her articles have appeared in New Eng/and Theatre Journal and
Theatre History Studies. Research interests include African American the-
atre and gender and performance. She completed her doctoral disserta-
tion, "Staging the 'Folk': A History of Harlem Renaissance's Art Theatre
Movement, 1920-1 940" at Tufts University. She also serves as the
Assistant Secretary for the Black Theatre Network.
HEATHER S. NATHANS is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the
University of Maryland, where she is also the Associate Director of the
David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of
African Americans and the African Diaspora. Nathans is the Vice
President of the American Theatre and Drama Society. She is the author
of Ear!J American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the
Hands of the People (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and the forthcom-
ing Slavery and Sentiment on the American S !age, 17 8 7-18 61: Lifting the Veil of
Black. Her work has appeared in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre,
New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Hisf01J' Studies, Ear!J American Studies,
and the Penn9lvania History Journal.
ELIZABETH OSBORNE is an Assistant Professor in Theatre Studies at
Florida State University. Elizabeth's research interests focus on early
twentieth-century American theatre, particularly the Federal Theatre
Project, and the relationship between theatre and its surrounding com-
munity. She has presented her research IFTR, ASTR, ATHE, ALA,
Theatre Symposium, and MA TC. Her article, "Worshipping at the Altars
of Steel: Yankee Consternation in the Deep South," appears in Theatre
Symposium. Currently, she is pioneering a hybrid version of Introduction
to Theatre using the best of technology and face-to-face teaching, and
will begin teaching history and literature courses in American Theatre in
the Fall 2008 semester.
ILKA SAAL received her Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University and is
142
now working as Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Richmond, Virginia, where she teaches Drama and Theater as well as
American Studies. She is the author of New Deal Theater: The Vernacular
Tradition in Amerkan Political Theater (2007), Dramatizing the Disease:
Representations if AIDS on the U.S. American Stage (1997), and several arti-
cles on American drama.
MARLis SCHWEITZER is an Assistant Professor in Theatre Studies at
York University in Toronto. Her research, which centers on explorations
of gender, sexuality, and commodity culture, has appeared in such jour-
nals as American Quarter!J, Journal of Women's History, and Theatre Research
in Canada. She is currently completing a book entitled Becoming Fashionable:
Actresses, Fashion and American Consumer Culture, which explores the role of
early-twentieth-century Broadway theatre in the formation of American
consumer culture. She is also beginning work on a project that will inves-
tigate the often "unseen" and therefore little-acknowledged work of cul-
tural intermediaries-press agents, photographers, casting agents, book-
ing agents, literary managers, and administrative assistants-in the devel-
opment of modern American celebrity culture between 1850 and 1920.
SEBASTIAN TRAINOR is a Ph.D. candidate in the Theatre History, Theory,
and Criticism program at the University of Washington. His current
research focuses on theatre riots, reassessing their historiography in rela-
tion to the immediate local politics in which they participated. This essay
concerning Room Service is his first published article.
BARRY WITHAM is Professor in the School of Drama at the University
of Washington. He has published extensively on modern drama and the-
atre history and is a member of the College of Fellows of the American
Theatre. As dramaturg for the Seattle Repertory Theatre he worked on a
variety of new plays including Herb Gardner's I'm Not Rappaport and
Richard Nelson's Between East and West. In 2003 Barry was the recipient
of the Betty Jean Jones Award from ATDS and a distinguished teaching
prize from the University of Washington.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
roMANIA After 2000
Edited by Saviana Stanescu and Daniel Gerould.
Translation editors: Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraff.
This volume represents the first anthology of new
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This publication produced in collaboration with the
Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Bucharest.
Buenos Aires in Tronsloti on
Translated and Edited by jean Graham-jones
BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical collabora-
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Theatre Research Resources in New York City
Sixth Edition, 2007
Editor: jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most
comprehensive catalogue of New York City research
facilities available to theatre scholars. Within the
indexed volume, each facility is briefly described includ-
ing an outline of its holdings and practical matters such
as hours of operation. Most entries include electronic
contact information and web sites. The listings are
grouped as follows: Libraries, Museums, and Historical
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Comedy: A Bibliography
Editor: Meghan Duffy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould
This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers, stu-
dents, artists, and general readers interested in the theo-
ry and practice of comedy. The keenest minds have been
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ed to this most elusive of genres.
Price US$to.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould
Witkiewicz
SEVEN PLAYS
This volume contains seven of Witkiewicz's most impor
tant plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor Brainiowicz, Gyubal
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Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus
Translated and Edited by David Willinger
Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch
language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish by birth and
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els, and collections of poetry. He is renowned as an enfant
terrible of the arts throughout Europe. From the time he
was affiliated with the international art group, COBRA, to
his liaison with pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the
celebration of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has
careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden
and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his times.
Price US$15.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Cent er.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY100164309
Visit our website at: http: / / web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-8171868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Four Plays From North Africa
Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four modern plays from the
Maghreb: Abdelkader Alloula's The Veil and Fatima
Gallaire's House of Wives, both Algerian, julila Baccar's
Araberlin from Tunisia, and Tayeb Saddiki's The Folies Ber-
bers from Morocco.
As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has recently
begun to be recognized by the Western theatre community,
an important area within that tradition is still under-repre-
sented in existing anthologies and scholarship. That is the
drama from the Northwest of Africa, the region known in
Arabic as the Maghreb.
The Arab Oedipus
Edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus leg-
end by four leading dramatists of the Arab world. Tawfiq
Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali Ahmed Bakathir's The
Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus
and Walid lkhlasi's Oedipus as well as Al-Hakim's preface
to his Oedipus on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a preface
on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general
introduction by the editor.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic the-
atre has only recently begun to be felt by the Western the-
atre community, and we hope that this collection will con-
tribute to that growing awareness.
THE ARAB OEDIPUS
FOUR 'LAYS
Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Vi sit our website at: http:/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
The Heirs of Moliere
Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson

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This volume contains four representative French comedies
of the period from the death of Moliere to the French
Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover by Jean-Frant;ois
Regnard, The Conceited Count by Philippe Nericault
Destouches, The Fashionable Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de
la Chaussee, and The Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya.
$"'"':...-.n..r .......... r.........,.
Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit
and spirit of the originals, these four plays suggest some-
thing of the range of the Moliere inheritance, from comedy
of character through the highly popular sentimental come-
dy of the mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that employs
the Moliere tradition for more contemporary political ends.
L...,..fl.'"-'<111 ........ .
Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most important
melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or }afar and Zaida, The
Dog of Montargis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher Colum-
bus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or The Scot-
tish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's
"Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's
plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright,
"Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."
Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most
stunning effects, and brought the classic situations of fair-
ground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of
a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th centu-
ry. Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY1oo16-4309
Visit our website at: http:// web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Zeami and the No Theatre in the World
Edited by Benito Ortolani and Samuel Leiter
This volume contains the proceedings of the "Zeami and
the No Theatre in the World" symposium, held in New
York City in October 1997, in conjunction with the
"Japanese Theatre in the World" exhibit shown at the
same time at the Japan Society. The book contains an
introduction and fifteen essays, organized into sections
entitled "Zeami's Theories and Aesthetics," "Zeami and
Drama," and "Zeami and the World."
Contemporary Theatre in Egypt
Edited by Marvin Carlson
This publication includes the transcript of the February
1999 Symposium on Contemporary Egyptian Theatre, held
at the City University of New York Graduate Center, as well
as three plays by Egyptian playwrights: The Last Walk by
Alfred Farag, The Absent One by Gamal Maqsoud, and The
Nightmare by Lenin El-Ramley. It concludes with a bibliog-
raphy of English translations and secondary articles on
the theatre i n Egypt since 1955.
(Hl!Ur'i'.._oUI"'Ih olr inf ~
Price USSts.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fi fth Avenue, New York, NY1oot64309
Visit our website at: http:/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212817-1868