T H E OX F OR D HA N DB O OK OF

A M E R IC A N
DR A M A
THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

AMERICAN
DRAMA
Edited by
JEFFREY H. RICHARDS
with
HEATHER S. NATHANS

1
 3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Oxford handbook of American drama / edited by Jeffrey H. Richards
with Heather S. Nathans.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–973149–7
1. American drama—History and criticism. 2. Theater—United States—History.
I. Richards, Jeffrey H. editor of compilation. II. Nathans, Heather S. editor of compilation.
PS332.O94 2013
812.009—dc23
2013013571

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free  paper
 Contents

Preface ix
List of Contributors xi

Introduction 1
Jeffrey H. Richards

1. Theatre Companies before the Revolution 16

Odai Johnson
2. Revolutionary American Drama and Theatre 32
Jason Shaffer
3. Early Republican Drama 50
Jeffrey H. Richards
4. The Politics of Antebellum Melodrama 67
Scott C. Martin
5. Minstrelsy and Uncle Tom 81
Sarah Meer
6. Representing Ethnic Identity on the Antebellum Stage, 1825–61 97
Heather S. Nathans
7. Antebellum Plays by Women: Contexts and Themes 114
Amelia Howe Kritzer
8. Reform Drama 130
Mark Mullen
9. Antebellum Frontier and Urban Plays, 1825–60 149
Rosemarie Bank
10. Late Melodrama 159
Mark Hodin
vi CONTENTS

11. A New Realism 173

Mark Fearnow
12. American Musical Theatre, 1870–1945 189
Thomas S. Hischak
13. The New Woman, the Suffragist, and the Stage 203
Katherine E. Kelly
14. The Rise of African American Drama, 1822–79 218
Marvin McAllister
15. The Provincetown Players in American Culture 234
Brenda Murphy
16. Eugene O’Neill 248
Steven F. Bloom
17. Naturalism and Expressionism in American Drama 264
Julia A. Walker
18. American Political Drama, 1910–45 280
Christopher J. Herr
19. The Federal Theatre Project 295
Barry B. Witham
20. African American Drama, 1910–45 307
Kathy A. Perkins
21. Arthur Miller: A Radical Politics of the Soul 322
Jeffrey D. Mason
22. Tennessee Williams and the Winemiller Inheritance 340
Stephen Bottoms
23. Experimental Theatre: Beyond Illusion 356
Theodore Shank
24. Post–World War II African American Theatre 375
Harry J. Elam, Jr.
25. The Postwar Musical 392
Michelle Dvoskin
 CONTENTS vii

26. Postwar Protest Plays 408

S. E. Wilmer
27. Feminist Drama 425
Dorothy Chansky
28. Postwar Drama and Technology 441
Roger Bechtel
29. Drama and the New Sexualities 455
Jordan Schildcrout
30. Political Drama 470
Stephen Watt
31. Ethnicity and Postwar Drama 485
Jon D. Rossini
32. Running Lines: Narratives of Twenty-First-Century
American Theatre 500
Marc Robinson

Index 523
 Preface

Jeff Richards was the first person to footnote my research. I was still in graduate school
at the time, and it is impossible to describe the thrill of having someone whose work
I so admired point to a piece that I had written as worthy of consideration. Over the
years that I had the pleasure of knowing him, Jeff remained as I found him from the
time of our first encounter at an academic conference in 1998—kind, gracious, encour-
aging, and collegial. I appreciated the paths he paved for scholars of American theatre
and drama, and I was honored that as my work and career progressed, we were able to
collaborate on various projects.
The Oxford Handbook of American Drama realizes Jeff ’s vision to offer students of
American literature, drama, and culture a collection of essays that transcends the merely
factual or encyclopedic. Instead the collection presents a series of arguments, debates,
and new interpretations of some familiar histories. I hope the collection will be a testa-
ment to his vision and a work that ignites new conversations about the field to which he
was so devoted.
It was my privilege to help bring the work through its final stages after Jeff ’s passing.
I thank the authors, Oxford University Press, Jeff ’s family, and the two colleagues who
assisted me—Jessica Krenek and Michelle Granshaw—for their work, time, patience,
and commitment.
Heather S. Nathans
 List of Contributors

Rosemarie Bank has published in Theatre Journal, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, Theatre

History Studies, Essays in Theatre, Theatre Research International, Modern Drama, Journal
of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Women in American Theatre, Feminist Rereadings of
Modern American Drama, The American Stage, Critical Theory and Performance (both
editions), Performing America, Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance,
and Of Borders and Thresholds. She is the author of Theatre Culture in America, 1825–
1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and is currently preparing Staging the Native,
1792–1892. A member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, a past fellow
of the American Philosophical Society and several times a fellow of the National
Endowment for the Humanities, she was the editor of Theatre Survey from 2000 to 2003
and currently serves on several editorial boards. She is past president of the American
Theatre and Drama Society, past convener of the International Federation for Theatre
Research’s Working Group in Theatre Historiography, and has served several terms on
the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research. Dr. Bank is
professor of theatre at Kent State University.
Roger Bechtel is an associate professor of theater at Carleton College. He is the author
of Past Performance:  American Theatre and the Historical Imagination (Bucknell
University Press, 2007). Among the books he has contributed chapters to are The History
of Collective Creation and The Wooster Group and Its Traditions, and his articles have
appeared in Theatre Journal, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and New England
Theatre Journal. He is also the artistic director of the intermedia performance company
Big Picture Group.
Steven F. Bloom is associate vice president for academic affairs, dean of undergraduate
education, and professor of English at Lasell College in Newton, Massachusetts. He
is the editor of Critical Insights: Eugene O’Neill, published in 2013 by EBSCO/Salem
Press and the author of the Student Companion to Eugene O’Neill, published in 2007
by Greenwood Press. He is currently chairman of the Board of Directors of the
Eugene O’Neill Society, and he has served as a member of the Board since 2000. He
was president of the Eugene O’Neill Society from 2006 through 2007, vice president
from 2004 through 2005, and he was the founding book reviews editor of The Eugene
O’Neill Review from 1988 until 2004. He has published numerous articles and reviews
on O’Neill in The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, The Eugene O’Neill Review, and elsewhere
(most recently in Eugene O’Neill’s One-Act Plays: New Critical Perspectives, edited by
xii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Y. Bennett and Benjamin D. Carson), and he speaks frequently on O’Neill at

many professional conferences and public forums.
Stephen Bottoms is professor of contemporary theatre and performance at the University
of Manchester, UK. His books include  Sex, Drag and Male Roles  (with Diane Torr,
2010), Small Acts of Repair (with Matthew Goulish, 2007), Playing Underground (2004),
and The Theatre of Sam Shepard (1998). He edited Methuen’s student edition of Tennessee
Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (2000).
Dorothy Chansky is an associate professor and head of history/theory/criticism
in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University. She is the author
of Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience and is
completing a book about domestic labor on the American stage.
Michelle Dvoskin is an assistant professor of theatre history and theory in the
Department of Theatre and Dance at Western Kentucky University. Her writing has
appeared in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, edited by Raymond Knapp,
Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Broadway: An
Encyclopedia of Theater and American Culture, edited by Thomas A.  Greenfield
(Greenwood Press, 2010).
Harry J. Elam, Jr. is the Olive H.  Palmer professor in the humanities and the
Freeman-Thornton vice provost for undergraduate education at Stanford University.
He is author of  Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and
Amiri Baraka; and  The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson; and coeditor
of five books,  African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader;
Colored Contradictions:  An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama;
The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium; Black Cultural
Traffic:  Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture; and  The Methuen Drama
Book of Post-Black Plays. His articles have appeared in  American Theater,  American
Drama,  Modern Drama, Theatre Journal,  Text and Performance Quarterly as well as
journals in Belgium, Israel, Poland, and Taiwan. He has also written essays published in
several critical anthologies. Professor Elam is the former editor of Theatre Journal and
is on the editorial boards of Atlantic Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre,
and Modern Drama.
Mark Fearnow is a professor of theatre at Hanover College. He is the author of three
books:  The American Stage and the Great Depression:  A  Cultural History of the
Grotesque (Cambridge University Press, 1997 and 2007); Clare Boothe Luce: A Research
and Production Sourcebook (Greenwood, 1995); and Theatre and the Good: The Value of
Collaborative Play (Cambria, 2007). Essays appear in TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre
Survey, The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Changing the Subject:  Marvin
Carlson and Theatre Studies (University of Michigan Press, 2009), and The Oxford
Companion to Theatre and Performance (2010).
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Christopher J. Herr is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance

at Missouri State University. His recent writing on twentieth-century American drama
has appeared in To Have or Have Not: Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modernist
Theatre (McFarland, 2011), edited by James Fisher, and in Blackwell’s A Companion to
Satire (2007), edited by Ruben Quintero.
Thomas S. Hischak is an internationally recognized author and teacher in the
performing arts. He is the author of twenty-four nonfiction books about theatre, film,
and popular music, including The Oxford Companion to the American Musical, The
Rodgers and Hammerstein Encyclopedia, Through the Screen Door, The Tin Pan Alley
Encyclopedia, Off-Broadway Musicals Since 1919, The Disney Song Encyclopedia, The
Jerome Kern Encyclopedia, American Literature on Stage and Screen, Theatre as Human
Action, and The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (with Gerald Bordman). He is
also the author of thirty-three published plays which are performed in the United States,
Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. Hischak is a Fulbright scholar who has taught
and directed in Greece and Lithuania. Since 1983 he has been professor of theatre at the
State University of New York at Cortland where he has received such honors as the 2004
SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity and the
2010 SUNY Outstanding Achievement in Research Award. 
Mark Hodin is professor and chair of the English Department at Canisius College in
Buffalo, New  York. His writing on American drama and performance has appeared
in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Literature, and American Literary
History. He contributes a chapter on David Belasco to Countering Shylock as a Jewish
Stereotype, edited by Edna Nahshon and Michael Shapiro (Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming, 2014).
Odai Johnson is a professor in theatre history and head of the theatre PhD program at the
University of Washington. His articles have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey,
New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Symposium, and the Virginia Magazine of History
as well as contributions to numerous anthologies. His books include Rehearsing the
Revolution (University of Delaware, 1999), The Colonial American Stage: A Documentary
Calendar (AUP, 2001), and Absence and Memory on the Colonial American Stage
(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005). Professor Johnson is the director of the UW’s Center for
Performance Studies and a Donald E. Petersen endowed fellow.
Katherine E. Kelly has recently retired as an associate professor of English from
Texas A&M University where she taught modern drama, film, and Irish culture for
27 years. She has edited several collections, including Modern Drama by Women: An
International Anthology 1880s–1930s (Routledge, 1996), two Cambridge Companions
on the plays of Tom Stoppard and G. B. Shaw, and a section in Bonnie Kime Scott’s
(ed.), Gender in Modernism (University of Illinois Press, 2007). In addition to
an early book, Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy (University of Michigan,
xiv LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

1990), she has published essays on George Bernard Shaw, the Actresses’ Franchise
League, Ibsen and Modernism, Theatrical Sociability, and the feminist history play
(Theatre Journal, December 2010). She is currently compiling an organic garden in
Bryan, Texas.
Amelia Howe Kritzer is a professor of English and theater at the University of St.
Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, teaching a variety of courses in drama and theater at the
undergraduate and graduate levels. She is the editor of Plays by Early American Women,
1775–1850 (University of Michigan Press, 1995), and has published a number of essays on
early American drama and theater. She has also written Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher
Britain (Palgrave, 2008)  and The Plays of Caryl Churchill:  Theatre of Empowerment
(Macmillan, London, and St. Martin’s Press, 1991), as well as numerous essays on the work
of Caryl Churchill and various aspects of contemporary British drama. With Miriam
López Rodríguez, she is currently compiling a volume of essays to be titled “Woman on
Trial: Gender Construction in Plays about Accused Women.”
Scott C. Martin is a professor of history and American Culture Studies at Bowling
Green State University. His interests include nineteenth-century US history, cultural
studies, and alcohol and drugs history. His most recent book is Devil of the Domestic
Sphere:  Temperance, Gender, and Middle-class  Ideology, 1800–1860 (Northern Illinois
University Press, 2008).
Jeffrey D. Mason is the author of Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller, as
well as Melodrama and the Myth of America (which received an honorable mention for the
Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History), and with J. Ellen
Gainor, he co-edited Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theatre. He
has directed over fifty productions, including A View from the Bridge at the University of
Oregon and Death of a Salesman, and he has played over thirty roles, including Danforth
in The Crucible. He retired as dean of the College of Arts and Letters at California State
University, Sacramento, and he previously held an appointment as professor of theatre
arts at the University of Oregon.
Marvin McAllister is an assistant professor of English and African American studies
at the University of South Carolina-Columbia. His most recent publication is Whiting
Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance (University
of North Carolina Press, 2011). His previous monograph is White People Do Not Know
how to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William
Brown's African and American Theater (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Sarah Meer is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow
of Selwyn College. She is the author of Uncle Tom Mania:  Slavery, Minstrelsy, and
Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s, as well as articles, among other things, on the Ethiopian
Serenaders and on Dion Boucicault. She also co-edited Transatlantic Stowe:  Harriet
Beecher Stowe and European Culture.
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xv

Mark Mullen is an assistant professor of writing in the University Writing Program at

the George Washington University in Washington, DC. He has served as director of
First-Year Writing and is a member of GW’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers. His
work on US antebellum melodrama has appeared in Nineteenth Century Theatre and
New England Theatre Journal among others. His recent work focuses on the connections
between creative learning in videogames and the writing classroom and has been
published in Eludamos: Journal of Computer Game Culture, Computers and Composition
Online, and The Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. His essay on the challenges of
teaching the game review genre, “On Second Thought . . .” has just been published in the
collection Rhetoric/Composition/Play Through Videogames; the article “Students’ Rights
and the Ethics of Celebration” is forthcoming in Writing Program Administration.
Brenda Murphy is Board of Trustees distinguished professor of English, emeritus at the
University of Connecticut. Among her eighteen books on American theater and drama
are: The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (2005), O’Neill: Long Day’s
Journey Into Night (2001), Congressional Theatre:  Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage,
Film, and Television (1999), The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights
(1999), and most recently, Understanding David Mamet (2011). The Theatre of Tennessee
Williams will be published by Methuen in 2013.
Heather S. Nathans is professor and chair of the Department of Drama and Dance at
Tufts University. She is the editor for the University of Iowa Press’s series, Studies in
Theatre History and Culture. Her publications include:  Early American Theatre from
the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson; Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage,
1787–1861; Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance (co-editor
and contributing author), and the forthcoming Hideous Characters and Beautiful
Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage. Nathans has held
over twenty-five research fellowships, including ones from the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library with the NEH, the American Jewish
Archives, and the Mellon Foundation. She is the president of the American Society for
Theatre Research.
Kathy A. Perkins is a professor of dramatic art at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. She is the editor/co-editor of several anthologies focusing on women
from Africa and the Diaspora including Selected Plays:  Alice Childress, Black Female
Playwrights:  An Anthology of Plays Before 1950, and African Women Playwrights and
Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women. She has also published several
articles on African American theatre history.
Marc Robinson is a professor of theater studies, English, and American Studies at Yale
University and professor adjunct of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale
School of Drama. He is also chair of the Yale College Theater Studies program. His books
include:  The American Play:  1787–2000 (Yale University Press, 2009)  and The Other
xvi LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

American Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1994). In addition, he is the editor of

three books: The Myopia and Other Plays by David Greenspan (Critical Performances
series, University of Michigan Press, 2012), The Theater of Maria Irene Fornes (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999), and Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (Faber and
Faber, 1994). For his work, he has been awarded the 2009 George Jean Nathan Award
and the 2010 George Freedley Special Jury Prize (both for The American Play), the 1999
ATHE Outstanding Essay Prize, and the 2004 Betty Jean Jones Award for outstanding
teaching of American drama.
Jon D. Rossini is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at
UC Davis. He is the author of Contemporary Latina/o Theater:  Wrighting Ethnicity
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). His recent publications include “Teatro
Visión and the Limits of Chicano Politics in Neoliberal Space” in Neoliberalism and
Global Theatres: Performance Permutations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), “Teatro” in the
Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature (2013) and “Siting Geography: Octavio Solis,
Family Borders, and the Real Local” in Performance, Politics and Activism (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013).
Jordan Schildcrout is an assistant professor of theatre and performance at Purchase
College, State University of New York. His articles on LGBT theatre and representation
include “Queer Justice: The Retrials of Leopold and Loeb on Stage and Screen” (Journal
of American Culture), “The Closet is a Deathtrap: Bisexuality, Duplicity, and the Dangers
of the Closet in the Postmodern Thriller” (Theatre Journal), and “The Performance of
Non-Conformity on The Muppet Show—or, How Kermit Made Me Queer” (Journal of
Popular Culture).
Jason Shaffer is an associate professor of English at the United States Naval Academy.
He is the author of Performing Patriotism:  National Identity in the Colonial and
Revolutionary American Theater (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). His recent
work on early American theater history has also appeared in Intertextuality in American
Drama (McFarland Press, 2013), edited by Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy, and
The Oxford Handbook to Early American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2008),
edited by Kevein J. Hayes.
Theodore Shank is a distinguished professor of theatre, emeritus, at the University
of California, San Diego. He is the founding editor of TheatreForum, an international
journal of innovative performance. Previously, he was founding chair of theatre at
the University of California, Davis. His most recent of eight books is  Beyond the
Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (University of Michigan Press, 2002).
Julia A. Walker is an associate professor of English and drama at Washington University
in St. Louis. She received her PhD from Duke University in 1995, and taught at the
College of William & Mary and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before
assuming a joint appointment in the English and Performing Arts Departments at
Washington University in St. Louis in 2008. Walker is the author of Expressionism and
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Modernism in the American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and is currently
working on a book manuscript entitled Modernity & Performance: Enacting Change on
the Modern Stage. She has published articles in several academic journals and edited
collections, and is currently serving as book review editor for Theatre Journal.
Stephen Watt is Provost Professor of English and adjunct professor of theatre and
drama at Indiana University Bloomington. His most recent books include Beckett and
Contemporary Irish Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2009), winner of the Robert
Rhodes Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies, and a new printing
of When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare:  Essays on Nineteenth-Century British and
American Theatre (University of Georgia Press, 2011).
S. E. Wilmer is a professor of drama and former head of the School of Drama, Film
and Music at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Theatre, Society and the
Nation:  Staging American Identities (Cambridge University Press, 2002)  and (with
Pirkko Koski) The Dynamic World of Finnish Theatre (Like Press, 2006). Books that
he has edited or co-edited recently include (with Audrone Zukauskaite):  Interrogating
Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2010), Native
American Performance and Representation (Arizona University Press, 2009) (with Anna
McMullan), Reflections on Beckett (University of Michigan Press, 2009), and National
Theatres in a Changing Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). He has also served as a
visiting professor at Stanford University and at the University of California at Berkeley.
Barry B. Witham is professor emeritus and former executive director of the School
of Drama at the University of Washington. He is the author of The Federal Theatre
Project: A Case Study (Cambridge, 2003) and most recently A Sustainable Theatre: Jasper
Deeter at Hedgerow (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
T H E OX F OR D HA N DB O OK OF

A M E R IC A N
DR A M A
 I N T R O DU C T ION

JEFFREY H . RICHARDS

This volume in the Oxford University Press Handbook series is the most comprehensive
multiauthored book on American drama currently in print. Representing the work of
more than thirty authors, the Oxford Handbook of American Drama contains essay-length
chapters organized historically and generically, and it covers the origins of theatre in
North America; major dramatic developments in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twenti-
eth centuries; and new work and trends in the twenty-first century. As such, this book can
serve in several capacities: as a major source of new perspectives on drama and theatre in
colonial North America and the later United States; as a text that can be used as a critical
and historical resource in drama classes at many levels; and as a stimulus to further schol-
arship in the field. Because it is organized in full-length essays rather than brief entries,
the Handbook offers the advantage of comprehensive views along with developed exam-
ples from hundreds of plays. In its scope and variety of viewpoints, this volume occupies a
unique position in the historical and critical literature on American drama.
One feature to be noted is the emphasis on drama before the age of Eugene O’Neill. In
many courses on American drama, early plays are often covered hurriedly in order to get
into the twentieth century. Although this book has a majority of its chapters devoted to
post-1914 drama, it has sixteen chapters that take into account the periods before then.
Rather than slight phenomena such as comedies of manners or melodrama, this vol-
ume accepts them as important elements of pre- or proto-realist theatre; in other words,
rather than taking the rise of Ibsenism as the defining moment in US dramatic history,
the Handbook pursues the precursors to O’Neill, Miller, and Williams with equal vigor
to their successors, noting the significant cultural space occupied by genres like min-
strelsy or reformist drama. Thus, there is an implied historical frame to the book, even
if successive chapters overlap or even recur to slightly earlier work than the chapters
before. In other words, each essay brings forth its own perspective, while still occupy-
ing a historical niche organized roughly as follows: the beginnings to 1860, 1860 to 1910,
1910to 1945, and 1945 to present. Naturally, some chapters overlap with others regarding
2 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

playwrights or trends discussed, but for the most part, even essays that cover similar ter-
ritory most often choose different plays or authors to emphasize.
Why American drama at all? For one thing, drama is tied intimately to cultural for-
mation in ways that other literary genres are not, even in times when drama is scorned.
Colonists in Jamestown were told to eschew “the players,” with the implication that
theatrical activities in the age of Shakespeare would be distracting or undermine the
serious business of forming a colony; by the same token, nonconformist colonials in
New England feared the establishment of theatre as undermining their claims to live in a
godly commonwealth. The very fact of denial indicates the potential power of drama and
theatre as the media of cultural reflection or cultural change. Despite admonitions and
prosecutions, however, theatre erupted here and there, even in the seventeenth century
in British North America—in Virginia, in Massachusetts, and in Jamaica, for instance—
suggesting that a theatrical urge preceded the institutional development of playhouse
performance in the English-speaking New World. By 1700, with the growth and stabil-
ity brought by coastal urban establishment, conditions improved for mounting at least
amateur theatricals. A half century later, professional actors arrived from Britain, bring-
ing with them new plays and heightened performance expectations. In another half cen-
tury, permanent companies had established themselves in New York, Philadelphia, and
other cities, encouraging to some degree native authorship among Anglo-Americans,
with a significant surge in dramatic writing and publication from 1787 to 1800. Even so,
it is only after the end of the eighteenth century that American-authored dramas take on
important local features, developing characters such as the Yankee or the urban fireman
and creating new forms of theatre such as the minstrel show.
The nineteenth century is the great age of mass theatre. Rapid urban development
brought the stage not only to rising cities like Cincinnati and Mobile but also to smaller
towns in the west. Playhouses were fitted with new technology to accommodate larger
stages and audience spaces as well as new energy sources such as gas lighting in the 1830s
and electrical lighting in the 1880s. With each change in audience demographics or
playhouse technology and design, concomitant alterations in drama took place, such as
the shift from the wide and tall proscenium stages of the 1830s to the box sets of the early
1900s, or the flame-lighted houses early in the century and the darkened houses—made
possible by electricity—at the end of the 1800s, which fostered the movement from
large-scale melodramas to more intimate plays. But until the 1870s, at any rate, theatres
were built to accommodate an audience that spanned the socioeconomic spectrum
from servants and slaves in the galleries to artisans and clerks in the pit and middling
families and elites in the boxes (with plenty of exceptions and crossovers). Thus, dramas
were written to appeal broadly. This did not mean there was no art to such dramas, but
it was a different kind of aesthetic and expectation than playhouse patrons demanded in
later eras. One of the assumptions of this volume is to accept the taste of the time as con-
stituting a theatre that people wanted to see, even if by our current measures we would
prefer to see something of more recent and recognizable vintage.
Clearly, the twentieth century has produced the most innovations in drama, far more
than can be covered in detail even in a volume of this sort. Even so, the persistence of
 INTRODUCTION 3

older notions of playwriting or the echo of those older types in more recent plays (like
the minstrel show in George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum [1986]) tells us that contem-
porary drama is not merely a modern or postmodern development but often depends
on a historical understanding of previous theatres and dramatic types. In a sense, every
play has multiple histories: its own as a written and acted text, situated in the era of its
composition; the previous plays and performances it evokes; and the larger cultural his-
tory in which it is embedded. Being able to read through this Handbook enables a reader
to make the kinds of connections in which multiple histories are present and inform
other histories to which each play is related.
The title of this volume is also crucial: American Drama. Despite the intimate relation-
ship between drama and theatre, they are not the same. This is apparent in this volume,
when theatre historians and critics on the one hand, and dramatic literature scholars
on the other, tackle a play. Performance conditions and circumstances matter a great
deal to some writers, while the text is the thing for others. Even though drama is the
operative term, many of the contributors start with the theatre itself. Readers are thus
guaranteed to get multiple perspectives on situating a text: Timeless words? Bounded
performance? Literary art? Cookie-cutter template? Product of a political movement?
In the case of this book, all of the above phenomena and then some provide critical and
historical angles by which to evaluate plays. Nevertheless, the larger frame of this vol-
ume stresses the text more than performance, although that is complicated by contem-
porary performance artists who resist the dissociation brought about by severing a text
from its enactment.
If anything, the Handbook of American Drama stresses richness and variety over the
three centuries discussed between its covers. This can be seen even in the first half dozen
chapters, which examine the period up to 1800. Some of the writers, like Odai Johnson
and Heather Nathans, have their training in and work for theatre departments; oth-
ers, like Jason Shaffer and myself, have their training in and work for English depart-
ments. But a reading of all together will show the degree to which theatrical and literary
methodologies overlap and inform each other. The point is that the contributors to
this volume have various backgrounds, including international, and different kinds of
expertise; the ideal reader of this volume is someone open to that variety.
For all this volume contains—a glance through the index will show how much is
here—it cannot absorb everything. For example, there are two chapters that examine in
total the musical theatre from 1866 to the present, but there is not one dedicated to the
ballad operas and other forms of singing drama before that. Fortunately, there are won-
derful published resources, including Susan Porter’s With an Air Debonair, that cover
early musical drama, and some of the chapters mention plays with music, but given the
commonplace use of music in antebellum theatres, whether scored for the play being
performed or not, the presence of music is something one assumes, even if I regret not
having a chapter dedicated to the subject from an early republican and antebellum per-
spective. By the same token, some major playwrights get less treatment than they prob-
ably should, Sam Shepard and Edward Albee being two of them, although neither of the
last persons mentioned gets ignored in the critical literature. But such figures as Eugene
4 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams get significant attention in this volume
along with a host of undervalued writers and performance artists. Indeed, one of the
great strengths of the essays in the Oxford Handbook of American Drama is the inclu-
sion of discussions about dramatists whose excellent work has been undervalued by the
academy.
The volume opens in chapter 1with a look at the theatre world of pre-Revolutionary
British America by theatre historian Odai Johnson. Johnson lays the groundwork for
the collection by establishing the critical history of theatre’s formation in the colonies
and the significant figures who led to the permanent establishment of the theatre in an
environment where opposition to the stage was widespread and powerful. Johnson pays
special attention to David Douglass, the first real theatrical entrepreneur and leader of
the American Company of Comedians. Douglass developed a successful business by
building theatres in several cities, defending the legitimacy of theatre against antithe-
atrical forces, and guiding a corps of moderately talented actors and scenic artists while
making possible the long-term establishment of theatre as an American institution.
Johnson brings forward fresh information about this period, providing a distinctive and
foundational examination about the beginnings of American dramatic culture.
Jason Shaffer, in chapter 2, takes Revolutionary-era theatre as his purview, examining
the several types of dramatic text produced during the period. As he notes immediately,
the drama of the Revolution is largely a page rather than a stage art. Politics dominates
the drama being produced; Shaffer focuses, for example, on the propaganda plays of
Mercy Otis Warren as establishing a Whig voice, while scattered plays by other writers
provide a Tory view of the conflict. Among other plays represented is the Tory ballad
opera The Blockheads, one of several dramas to use allegorical figures to make its con-
temporary point. In addition, Shaffer takes note of the collegiate playwriting culture that
developed at several institutions, with the emergence after the war of The Contrast, a
professionally produced comedy of manners written by a native-born American writer.
To be sure, American playwrights were, by economic necessity, amateurs, but finding
that on occasion a local writer could have his work staged by a permanent company
made possible the slow development of the profession of playwright in the United States.
In chapter 3, I examine the post-Revolutionary fixation on republicanism as the moti-
vating source for dramatic themes by American writers. In a continuation of some of the
issues facing patriot writers like Mercy Otis Warren, the postwar dramatists looked to
the stage in part as if it were a schoolhouse of republican virtue; therefore, as the essay
contends, one finds actual schoolmasters turning to drama (as some had before the war)
to inculcate civic virtue as much as to entertain. Playwrights also saw an educational
function as part of their justification for becoming dramatists in the first place. The
essay examines a variety of play types, but all the ones mentioned develop something
of a republican theme, whether wrapped in tragic or comic garb. Preparing the way for
much later political drama, as described in some of the essays on twentieth-century and
twenty-first-century theatre, the republican political plays of the 1780s to 1820s both
verify the establishment of a republic as the chief end of the United States and suggest
the differing ways a republic might be enacted and celebrated.
 INTRODUCTION 5

The fourth chapter explores American melodrama with a political twist. Scott Martin
investigates the plays commissioned by Edwin Forrest, as well as other contemporary
dramas, in the terms of nineteenth-century topical issues and political movements.
Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville and his commentary on Americans and the the-
atre (which Martin challenges), Martin notes both the democratizing impulses of the
stage and the love for Shakespearean-type vehicles that jointly animated US theatre;
plays like Metamora or The Gladiator, two of Forrest’s most successful prize dramas,
while set in the past, had the means to provoke passions over modern events, including
slavery and Indian removal. Of course, melodrama, a mode of theatrical presentation
that deliberately employs an artificial style of emotive presentation for the purpose of
evoking feeling, is everywhere on the antebellum stage, but as a system of histrionic rep-
resentation, it is more complex than simply Pearl Pureheart fends off Snidely Whiplash.
Martin’s chapter suggests some of that complexity, particularly in the political arena.
Certainly, one of the topics discussed by Sarah Meer in chapter 5, Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
proved to be the most successful of all melodramatic plays of the nineteenth-century
stage. Meer’s essay, however, links the Uncle Tom material to minstrelsy, a distinctly
nonmelodramatic mode that runs on parody and satire for its fuel. Meer argues that
blackface entertainment has a multiple history; in other words, the fact of a blackened
face onstage did not, especially in the minds of those who created entertainment out of
blackface, immediately constitute a commentary on race. Meer speaks of the “oblivi-
ousness” of such early minstrel plays as William Leman Rede’s Life in America (1836)
to race as a political issue. Nevertheless, race is a component and no more so than in
the stage versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe herself seems
to have adopted minstrel techniques in the novel, which were then easily turned into
minstrel-type scenes and dialogue. The complex intertextuality of these versions along
with minstrel plays shows that a cultural analysis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin has vastly more
lines of influence than a simple context of antislavery can hold.
If blackface theatre is a dominant form in antebellum stage life, it is also only one of
many ethnic-inflected theatres in the nineteenth century. Heather Nathans, in chapter 6,
explores the “crazy-quilt of ethnic types” that defined the American stage. Plays with
Native American, Irish, and Jewish characters proliferated between the Revolution and
the Civil War (many of them also coming as imports from Britain) and they launched
more homegrown ethnic plots and motifs. Yankees, Germans, Dutch, and French char-
acters also emerged during this period and, in the hands of American playwrights, took
on distinctly local coloring. As Nathans explains, the “cultural palimpsest” of ethnic
variety engages both with individual ethnic groups and the broader issue of national
cohesion. In short, she shows how much American drama is indebted to ethnically
defined characters, white or black or other, for its Americanness.
Along with ethnicity as a defining marker of character, sex and gender also serve to
demarcate the drama. As Amelia Kritzer notes in chapter 7, the presence of a growing
corps of female playwrights, though hardly a majority, allowed women to define female
stage characters, rather than simply receive them as a fixity from male authors. Kritzer
provides a fairly comprehensive accounting of the women who wrote for the stage
6 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

during the antebellum decades, from well-known figures such as Anna Cora Mowatt to
lesser-known writers such as Elizabeth Crocker Bowers. While female dramatists chose
a broad variety of themes and settings for their plays, they tended to avoid politics except
by implication of the cultural and social situation of women themselves. One persistent
motif is the “powerless” woman, Kritzer argues, a figure who emerges in the failure of
1790s feminism to take hold in American society. Love stories, then, become fraught
with peril because of the power wielded by men in the marriage market; even in plays
with marriages, women are exposed to dangers nonetheless, even when their spouses
are virtuous. Kritzer provides a freshly conceived framework by which to adjudge the
achievement of female dramatists in the antebellum period.
If the general tenor of plays by women about women emphasizes a lack of power, the
countervailing force, drama as a vehicle of social reform, also pertains in the nineteenth
century. As Mark Mullen explores in the eighth chapter, certain plays or play types used
melodrama as a mode of reformist presentation to encourage audience identification
with a number of issues, notably abolition (covered in chapter 5) and temperance, dis-
cussed in this essay. For Mullen, reformist melodrama, notably temperance plays like
The Drunkard, “articulate a discourse of masculine self-empowerment,” a clear contrast
to what passes as feminist drama during the antebellum period. The key is seeing the
drama as drama with its own peculiar traditions, not simply as an extension of reform,
even if reform is a significant influence. In temperance plays, for example, one finds both
reform language to quit drinking and a more common dramatic theme of the establish-
ment of virtue in men. Mullen challenges us to consider the investment of corporate
interests in nineteenth-century theatre and the place of reform within a socially accept-
able middling morality.
Reform drama often plays out in urban contexts. Rosemarie Bank, in chapter  9,
investigates the scenic poles of city and frontier as sites for theatre. The frontier served
as a markedly American location, particularly when peopled by Native characters or
dialect-spouting frontiersmen, but it also served as a register of modern concerns, nota-
bly Indian removal and white expansionism. Urban plays direct their attention, says
Bank, to such matters as poverty, the seductive dimension of city life, and the threats
to middling (as in rural) morality brought about by exposure of new residents to urban
corruption. However, the city is not uniformly presented as bad; while the Tiffany fam-
ily in Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion flees the city at the end, the greenhorn in Benjamin
Baker’s A Glance at New York, while frequently hustled by lower-class slum dwellers, also
learns to appreciate city life through the figure of Mose the fireman. Both scenic types,
then, in Bank’s view, contribute to a growing American sensibility that distinguishes US
plays from European.
Following the Civil War, theatre underwent some profound changes slowly
at first, then with increasing speed as the nineteenth century drew to a close.
Pseudo-Shakespearean tragedies such as George H. Boker’s Francesca da Rimini (1855)
gave way to a number of popular styles. Playhouses, which had grown in size during
the antebellum period, now found that the mass audiences prior to 1860 or 1870 began
to move to smaller, more specialized theatres, meeting the entertainment needs of
 INTRODUCTION 7

differing groups: variety shows and burlesque for working-class audiences, on the one
hand, and dramas and comedies aimed at the lives of the bourgeoisie on the other. At
the same time, the mechanics of theatre were also changing; gas lighting, the standard
after the 1830s, gave way at century’s end to electric lights, at least in the larger cities,
thereby making possible the darkening of the house in ways that increasingly isolated
patrons from each other. A play like The Contrast captures the life in the boxes and pit,
where everyone can see each other, converse, and carry on social practices while the play
is playing, a life that over time gave way to darkness and solitude. Thus by 1910, the end
point for several of the chapters in this section, theatre was poised to make its next big
move, to the small playhouse and the experimental play, which launched what many
consider the modern era in American drama.
Mark Hodin describes the development and changes that happen to melodrama
as one century gives way to the next. Hodin, in chapter 10, interrogates the dominant
narrative about melodrama that realism, a superior type, replaced melodrama in the
creation of modern drama. Using a number of fin de siècle commentators as a vantage
point, he shows how the difference between realism and melodrama can be as much
tone as anything else or perhaps just attention to detail. In other words, it is not melo-
drama per se that is the source of scorn for an emotive theatre but the writing to formula
for the playhouses aimed at working-class audiences. A writer like William Gillette, in
this view, offers a “theatrical” presentation of middle-class life; that is, the melodrama
infuses what looks like realism: “the cool manners of charismatic characters,” as Hodin
puts it. This chapter forces reconsideration of what melodrama means in an age that
ostensibly rejects it but finds it of continuing use, even—or especially—in the hands of
Eugene O’Neill.
Nevertheless, the persistence of melodrama could not stop a new realism from tak-
ing shape during the change of centuries. Mark Fearnow uses chapter 11 to examine
what passed as realism before the “golden age” of 1920–1970 and the slowness with
which American playwrights adopted the changes fostered by Ibsen and others. Citing
William Dean Howells as an early exponent of realism in his fiction, Fearnow explains
how in his dramas he backed away from a full-blown Ibsenism for comic portrayals in
short plays. When a play modeled after Ibsen did emerge from an American pen, James
Herne’s Margaret Fleming, it failed to secure production outside its small, private stag-
ings, despite Howells’s support. Still, its writing and production remain signal events in
American dramatic history, as Fearnow describes in some detail, and Herne’s essay, “Art
for Truth’s Sake,” emerges as a classic statement of a new dramatic aesthetic. Despite this
promising beginning, relatively few realists emerge before 1920. Those who do—Clyde
Fitch in The City, Edward Sheldon in Salvation Nell, and Rachel Crothers in A Man’s
World—keep alive the playwright’s wish to describe life as lived rather than as desired. In
short, this chapter makes the case that realist plays before O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon
present matter still worthy of investigation.
The rise of realism, strangely enough, coincides with the development of musical the-
atre. As Thomas Hischak demonstrates in chapter 12, the first “modern” style musical
is probably The Black Crook, a post–Civil War extravaganza that proved popular with
8 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

audiences, setting in motion a craving for plays with (at least partially) linked music and
song. However, the fully integrated musical did not arise until sometime later, setting in
motion a period frequently referred to as the “golden age” of musical drama. While most
theatregoers are familiar with Oklahoma!, Hischak provides names of dozens of musi-
cals of various types, offering a comprehensive look at the emergence of the musical and
its growth to the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard still recognizable to audiences in
the twenty-first century. And although the musical is rarely considered to be “realistic”
like Ibsen’s work, Hischak notes that the musicals at the end of the period (1945) are not
froth but engage in an integrated fashion with something approximating real life.
Katherine Kelly in chapter 13 examines the transatlantic nature of the New Woman
drama that emerged at the end and beginning of two centuries. Her primary American
exemplar is Rachel Crothers, whose dramas about independent-minded women,
including He and She and A Man’s World, created new models for the portrayal of
female characters. This is not to say that the dramas were radical portrayals, but they did
amount to a significant departure from the beleaguered and often passive heroines of
earlier epochs.
The New Woman arose a generation before the New Negro, but that did not mean that
there was not something new about African American drama in the nineteenth cen-
tury. We know, for example, that African Americans had formed theatre companies as
early as 1801, twenty years before the well-known African Theatre of New York, but there
is no evidence of black playwriting prior to 1822 (although it is likely there were origi-
nal contributions, even if they cannot be documented now). For Marvin McAllister in
chapter 14, a few key documents and historical moments that can be substantiated sug-
gest the active theatrical self-definition of black writers and performers during the era of
slavery and emancipation. Examining four key performing moments, McAllister charts
a liberatory impulse among persons of color in creating distinctive drama and theatre.
From William Brown’s groundbreaking play (not extant) The Drama of King Shotaway
in the 1820s, to William Wells Brown’s The Escape (the first published play by an African
American), to the post–Civil War minstrel-inflected dramas Out of Bondage (featuring
the African American actresses the Hyers sisters) and Peculiar Sam (written by the black
author Pauline Hopkins), African Americans sought to adapt Anglo-American forms to
their own “peculiar” situation. Beginning and ending with Shotaway, McAllister dem-
onstrates the likely politics behind early efforts at a black theatre and the resistance to
adopting minstrelsy as a mere imitation of white practice.
The year 1915 brought war to the headlines and drama to the docks, with both merg-
ing in the work of the Provincetown Players, a pioneering group that helped launch the
“little theatre” and experimental theatre movements in the United States. In chapter 15
Brenda Murphy chronicles the extraordinary output of the Players who, in the space of
eight years, produced nearly one hundred original works that engaged with the newest
aesthetic trends, notably realism and modernism. Although the identification of Eugene
O’Neill and Susan Glaspell with the group is well known, especially through such plays
as Glaspell’s Trifles and O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, Murphy notes that another forty-five
writers contributed plays of varying kinds to the enterprise. A notable trend among
 INTRODUCTION 9

many plays was the importance of feminism. Female writers, actors, and technicians
constituted a significant minority of those involved, and the group was able to stage such
feminist-influenced works as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo and Glaspell’s The
Verge. As Murphy makes clear, the Provincetown Players did more than grease the skids
for O’Neill’s later, commercially successful career; their daring, even their dramaturgical
failures, opened possibilities for the American stage (including for women, socialists,
and African Americans) that had not been imagined a decade before.
Emerging from the Provincetown period, one playwright from the group continued
to gain critical and commercial success: Eugene O’Neill. Steven Bloom in chapter 16
provides a summary view of the Nobel Prize winner’s career, taking readers from the
playwright’s early career as a maker of one-act naturalistic melodramas, to his major
experimental phase in the 1920s and critical acclaim, to his last plays, now considered to
be his greatest achievements. Of course, the actual trajectory of his career was hardly as
smooth as that outline suggests; O’Neill struggled with alcoholism into the 1920s, spent
time in psychoanalysis, married and divorced several times, was estranged from his
children, got into near fisticuffs with actors playing parts in his plays, and suffered from
a debilitating illness in his last dozen years. But Bloom allows us to measure the lifetime
accomplishment of a writer who perhaps more than any other single author changed the
shape of American drama toward the kind of realism that Ibsen was once scorned for.
In Bloom’s view, O’Neill’s dramas reach for a nobility of being, even amidst the drunken
losers of The Iceman Cometh or the sad Jim Tyrone and Josie Hogan in Moon for the
Misbegotten. In essence, O’Neill’s experimental dramas made way for a playwright able
to overcome the limitations of the experimental label through postmortem critical
success.
O’Neill also participated in two literary trends of the early twentieth century, natu-
ralism and expressionism, that often get short shrift in studies on American drama.
But as Julia Walker makes clear in chapter 17, both movements appeared in the work
of other playwrights whose work defies the rising standard of realism. Naturalism, she
argues, has often been seen as a debased or lesser form of realism, something writers
exercise in their apprenticeship but give up once they become mature playwrights. But
by looking at some oft-ignored plays, including several by Theodore Dreiser, Walker
demonstrates that whether or not influenced by German expressionists, for instance,
American playwrights developed an interest in the working-class characters of natu-
ralism and the symbolic psychology of expressionism in aesthetics that rejected the
recognizable living-room scope of realism. By establishing the historical-cultural con-
text of early twentieth-century dramatic authorship, Walker forces readers to recon-
sider these movements as integral to theatre of the period and not merely outliers to the
O’Neill-to-Miller-to-Williams trajectory of American drama.
Perhaps one of the results of formal experimentation was the development of a rich,
varied, and sometimes challenging political drama between the wars. In other words,
playwrights from the 1910s onward and particularly in the 1930s availed themselves
of differing modes and appeals in their plays, from the fantastic to the gritty realistic.
Christopher Herr, in his essay, traces the diversity of styles used and attitudes taken by
10 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

politically influenced dramas from the ones that supported capitalism in the 1920s to the
increasingly oppositional leftist dramas of the 1930s to the pro-war (or antifascist) plays
of the 1940s. As Herr makes clear, “political drama” is itself a contentious term: how
much political content does it take to make a play political? One of the strengths of this
essay is its willingness to consider shades and to provide guidelines. For example, Herr
notes that O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape has a scene at a radical labor office and a socialist char-
acter who spouts slogans, but he explains that the play is not ultimately political in its
way of reading the protagonist, Yank. On the other hand, Herr demonstrates that much
of the overtly political writing produced dramatically demanding work; he brings for-
ward key writers like John Howard Lawson, both a practitioner of leftist politics himself
but also someone interested in form and craft. For this period, “political” is not neces-
sarily a delimiting or pejorative term; instead it is one that indicates how much politics
and its expression were embedded in the culture of the period.
Coincidental with the period of political drama, the Federal Theatre Project pro-
vided writers and actors opportunities to continue working during the Depression.
Often accused by its enemies of being no better than political agitation, the FTP, as
Barry Witham explains in chapter  19, offered a variety of plays and performances,
some with a political edge, some not, but in the end, the charges by conservatives that
the FTP was a staging ground for Communist propaganda led to its demise after only
four years of operation. Nevertheless, a number of plays that emerged from the conten-
tious project struggles did show an experimental and political edge. Witham focuses
on a few key plays such as Lashin and Hastings Class of 29 and Theodore Ward’s Big
White Fog, the latter of which played in Chicago (also the setting of the play). Ward’s
work was seen by small audiences but artistically it is probably one of the finest dra-
mas to emerge from the FTP. Although many FTP productions were never seen again
after their original staging, Ward’s drama and Theodore Browne’s Natural Man, first
produced by the Seattle Negro unit, both experienced revivals after the FTP had been
closed down. With its Living Newspapers and other shows often drawing large crowds,
the FTP exerted in its time a distinct influence over the concept of drama in America,
bringing audiences to playhouses and warehouses that might never have seen a play
outside of high school before. In that sense, it did serve as a “people’s theatre,” despite
the FTP’s short life span.
Indeed, FTP productions can be considered as an extension of the efforts in the early
1900s to create a more broad-ranging dramatic art for African Americans, one that
expanded the options available to actors, writers, and technicians of color. In chapter 20,
Kathy Perkins traces the efforts of a number of people, notably African American
women, to establish new voices in the American theatre. Perkins notes signal moments
in theatre during this period, not only the FTP Negro Unit productions but also the
staging of the groundbreaking Rachel by Angelina Grimké, the development of the Little
Negro Theatre movement, and the establishment of African American acting troupes
such as the Lafayette Players and the American Negro Theatre. Although many African
Americans found opportunities to perform outside the usual song-and-dance venues,
those same professionally motivated theatre people struggled in a segregated climate to
 INTRODUCTION 11

make ends meet. The FTP provided temporary relief for some, but many aspiring actors
and others staged their plays at historically black colleges and universities. Writers such
as Mary Burrill, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston emerged out of
these efforts between the wars, even if they found their work rejected by the FTP and
other venues. As Perkins remarks, African American dramatists and theatre workers
had to learn to rely on themselves rather than the largely segregated white theatre for
opportunities to pursue their craft.
In chapter 21, Jeffrey Mason opens the section on post–World War II drama with a
chapter on Arthur Miller as a transitional figure in politically-edged drama. Mason takes
note of Miller’s apprenticeship in the 1930s, a period of intense leftist political activism
spurred by the conditions that caused the Great Depression. As an occasional worker for
the Federal Theatre Project and as someone who came of age during the development
of radical plays such as Waiting for Lefty, Miller had, by 1947, a long view of how drama
might treat the worker beyond Odets’s “Strike!” In fact, Mason argues that labor issues
were no longer current when Miller wrote his labor-oriented plays; after all, the play-
wright was caught up in the threats to free speech by the anti-Communist hysteria of the
1950s. The Crucible is not the only play to be influenced by a witch-hunt, but by literal-
izing the metaphoric one of the 1940s and 1950s, Miller weaves in his own experience as
a man under suspicion into the political history of the country itself.
By contrast, the Tennessee Williams of the same period had other priorities than
naked politics, although Williams could not ignore the politics of repression fostered
by the Cold War and other factors. Following Mason on Miller, Stephen Bottoms
argues that the aesthetics of Williams’s negotiations between his own instincts and the
demands of a commercial theatre not only produced a distinctive style but also antici-
pated, even fostered, the new experimentalism that arose in the 1950s and 1960s. In
chapter 22, Bottoms devotes much of the early part of his essay to the character Alma
of Summer and Smoke, a play that, compared to Williams’s two earlier successes, The
Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, was a box-office failure. If Alma’s sexu-
ality was too much for tender critics in 1948, her return to the stage in a 1952 revival
at an Off-Broadway theatre set in motion a reevaluation of the play and the making of
Summer’s reputation as one of Williams’s best dramas. Other Off and Off-Off produc-
tions of Williams one-acts followed, providing energy to a less commercial, more dar-
ing drama than the playwright could risk on Broadway boards. Yet at the same time,
Bottoms explains, a play like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which raises homosexuality directly
as a theme, does not commit itself to an overt reading of Brick’s sexuality or Maggie’s
materialism. Thus a hundred years and more after the tiptoe erotics of plays like The
Drunkard or The Octoroon, Williams, for all his daring, still cannot escape the strait-
jacket demands of the commercial stage.
Yet by the 1960s, all the limitations on theatre were crumbling in the face of more
widespread experimentation and an increase in the number of directors and playhouse
managers willing to take risks with language and subject matter, especially the sexuality
Williams struggled so hard to express. As Theodore Shank demonstrates in chapter 23,
experimentation in the theatre is not merely words but also images and performance;
12 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

for Shank, experimental means experiential, a theatre that resists conforming to pre-set
templates. From such seminal groups as the Living Theatre and the performance art-
ists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, experimental drama took on a variety of shapes
and colors to the point that now experimentation is seen as more like the norm of an
expressive theatre rather than Broadway. With the “post-porn” satires of the perfor-
mance artist Annie Sprinkle or the mutilations of Ron Athey or the immigrant theatre
of Guillermo Gòmez-Peña, experimentation expresses the broadest possible range of
human experience; in other words, it is no longer a contained, white, middle-class insti-
tution but a stage full of challenges to every standard held dear by the very group most
likely to attend a Broadway show.
In some ways, every play by a black author has something experimental about it. What
is the form, the mode, the voice that should be used? In the twenty-first century, there
is no easy answer to that question, except to note the diversity within African American
writing and the richness of language, theme, and image presented in performances
instigated by the texts of black writers. For Harry Elam, Jr., in chapter 24, however, one
motif does stand out that marks the post–World War II African American drama: the
family. Family dramas had appeared in the early part of the century as well: Angelina
Grimké’s antilynching play, Rachel (1916), or Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog (1938),
for instance, or such postwar dramas as A Medal for Willie or Take a Giant Step. With
Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (1959), however, says Elam, “the representation of
the black family as a locus for racial discourse reached a watershed moment.” Elam dis-
cusses the “legacy” of the Younger family’s life insurance money, and legacy can be said
to be a part of the family dramas of the period, certainly in material evidence in August
Wilson’s later The Piano Lesson or in the experimental family plays by Suzan-Lori Parks.
But the strength of African American drama can be found in its self-satire, as in George
C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, or in its fronting the history of black people in America,
as in works by Parks, Wilson, Baraka, and others. Elam takes readers to 2010, to the
emergence of “postblack” theatre and Parks’s Book of Grace. As he makes clear, African
American drama is an ever-expanding, dynamic art that at once pushes black-authored
plays to new arenas of expression while at the same time providing echoes of plays and
experience past.
Something of the same thing might be said of musical theatre, although the general
reaction to post–“golden age” productions is one of melancholy over the alleged decline
in quality from the heyday of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Michelle Dvoskin resists the
golden age trope, however, by way of providing an opening to consider other kinds of
musicals to the integrated or book type. Her essay in chapter 25 examines the critical
response to the postwar musical, noting not only the persistence of the book musical
standard but also the biases against the use of popular culture as a basis for a contempo-
rary production. Part of the problem has to do with the importance of Broadway to the
continuation of the musical; as both the location of the only large group of theatres still
willing to mount musicals (with their high ticket prices) and a concept, Broadway looms
large over thinking about such plays. But as Dvoskin explains, there is kind of a catch-22
involved: musicals are too popular, and therefore not art, or not popular enough, and
 INTRODUCTION 13

therefore elitist. Maybe a question to ask is why musicals are subjected to this kind of
critique perhaps more than other forms of theatre. At any rate, Dvoskin asks us to think
about the place of musical theatre not simply as a past event but also as a present and
evolving phenomenon.
The Broadway musical is rarely identified as a protest medium, but in postwar theatre,
theatrical protest proliferated in a variety of non-Broadway venues, including farmers’
fields and small stages in many locations. S. E. Wilmer’s essay in chapter 26 details the
many protest movements and theatre types that emerged particularly after 1960, many
stimulated by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Civil Rights Movement, and other
political protest organizations. Wilmer provides glimpses into the varying techniques
and often outrageous performance practices of protest theatre groups, even to the use
of genitals as dramaturgical media. From such groups as Black Liberation theatre, El
Teatro Campesino, Split Britches, and the Living Theatre, as well as from a host of indi-
vidual performance artists, often incendiary shows developed, putting the lie to the
traditional role of the theatre as affirming dominant cultural values. Companies pro-
tested the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan conflicts, while more established forms of
protest—Marxist or anticapitalist, for example—found renewed energies in post-1960
social rebellions. Ethnic protest (African American and Native American in particular),
challenges to heteronormative sexuality, and mock affirmation are all part of the pro-
test theatre scene. Although theatre, even in its conservative forms, has always served a
protest function, Wilmer demonstrates the degree to which protest in the last fifty years
particularly has burst the boundaries of orthodox theatre practice in the United States.
One type of protest theatre that has had broad-ranging implications is feminist the-
atre, a theatre too complex to be limited by the word “protest.” In chapter 27 Dorothy
Chansky addresses the panoply of feminist drama, from the “liberal” feminist drama
of Wendy Wasserstein to the radical feminism of the critic and theorist Jill Dolan, and
everything in between. Chansky notes, for example, the various waves of feminism
and the spread of feminist thought and principles into all aspects of theatre, but at the
same time, she discusses how success breeds self-critique, with feminists questioning
aspects of other feminists’ practice. Still, feminism continues to exert pressure not only
on repertoire but also on performance; for many feminist theatre workers, as Chansky
describes, the goal of parity in positions of authority and throughout the theatre world
remains a yet unreached goal. One of the pleasures of this essay is finding so many peo-
ple linked under the feminist label: Marsha Norman, Muriel Miguel, and Suzan-Lori
Parks are three very different but important voices in the feminist drama world. If pro-
test is an instigating force behind feminist theatre, then the richness and diversity of
plays within that label show that it continues to provoke new and intriguing work.
In the way that feminism’s main thrust is to provide new definitions for women, tech-
nology is daily extending new and often disturbing ways of being human. Although
scholars may think of the 2000s as the age of technology, Roger Bechtel in chapter 28
reminds us that issues surrounding technology have been present in drama since the
beginning of the twentieth century. Whether it is the phones on stage that appear from
the 1890s onward or the other devices in such technology-aware dramas from the 1920s
14 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

as Machinal and The Adding Machine, drama and machinery have been intimately
linked. Bechtel demonstrates that even a gauzy drama like The Glass Menagerie has its
vision of technology in the rival devices of the Victrola of Amanda and the television of
Jim. Later plays complicate the technological, as with David Mamet’s The Water Engine
or Arthur Kopit’s The End of the World, showing how the destruction of the planet or
threats to traditional understandings of being human are linked to our endless tinkering
and mechanical invention. Bechtel closes with two plays by John Jesurun, including one
that brings us into the Internet age. As he asks about Jesurun’s Firefall, “how do we write
our social narrative in an age that has lost its belief in belief and shifted instead to tech-
nology?” This is a question Bechtel poses amidst a play filled with computer projections,
as if to say we cannot even ask without technology entering at some fundamental level.
Technology and politics are dominant sources of themes in contemporary drama;
so is sexuality. Jordan Schildcrout surveys the ways in which playwrights have left the
closet and brought gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered characters into mainstream
theatre. Chapter 29 notes early attempts to represent queer experience on stage, notably
the efforts of Tennessee Williams to raise homosexual situations without depicting gay
characters directly.
With the Stonewall riots of 1969, a new consciousness of radical activism led to the
rapid increase in the portrayal of LGBT characters onstage (instead of, as with Skipper
in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, always off ), both as radical protest against the straitjacket of
heterosexual normality and as a strategy of familiarizing Americans with the ordinary
lives of people across the sexuality spectrum. Schildcrout brings forward many exam-
ples, including such (now) classics as Angels in America or Torch Song Trilogy but also
more recent evolutions of LGBT-themed dramas. His point is that the panoply of sexual
experience is ripe for dramatic representation, bringing new voices and situations under
the gaze of American spectators.
Stephen Watt’s reflections in chapter 30 demonstrate the complex nature of theatre
when it engages the political, where questions of form play as much a part in conceiving
politics as the topical matter alluded to by such plays. Using an attack on political theatre
in the New York Times by Christopher Hart, Watt examines key theorists and dramatic
texts for the substance that Hart claims does not exist in such plays as Caryl Churchill’s
Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. In dramas like the “Vietnam Trilogy” by David
Rabe or Megan Terry’s Viet Rock, dramatists abandon the traditional bourgeois play
format to capture differing reactions to the war experience. Black revolutionary and
Chicano activist writers also create a new political theatre colored by ethnic strivings.
Watt discusses many plays not otherwise engaged with in other chapters, including ones
by Sam Shepard and Arthur Miller, expanding our understanding of “political theatre”
as something more challenging than agitprop partisanship. He concludes with Lynn
Nottage’s Ruined, showing the continued vibrancy of political theatre when directed at
such places of conflict as central Africa and putting the lie to Hart’s critique.
Of course, we should remind ourselves that there is no pure “politics”; rather the polit-
ical is interwoven with special interests of all sorts. To be ethnic, for instance, is to be
political, if the ethnicity claimed is not already established within the acceptable space
 INTRODUCTION 15

of mainstream culture. Jon Rossini’s essay establishes some of the directions one might
take in evaluating the recent performances of racialized ethnic identities in American
drama. Rather than cover all ethnic groups—there is, after all, not much of a theatre for,
say, Welsh Americans—Rossini isolates such unassimilated ethnic identities as Puerto
Rican, Mexican, Asian (mostly Japanese and Chinese), and Native American, and he
explores the theatres to emerge from them in the last four decades. From such founda-
tional theatrical groups as East West Players and Native American Theater Ensemble,
dramatic texts and performances have emerged to tell stories not fully rendered in
white-controlled theatres. These are not merely local color expressions but products of
an overt rejection of assimilationism and declarations of the need for “potential social
liberation.” Ethnicity, like so many other topics covered in this volume, is one more deli-
ciously complicating factor in sorting out the direction of “American” drama.
In the final chapter, Marc Robinson traces how far the familiar narrative structures
of American drama have traveled in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From
O’Neill, Stein, and Albee, to works presented by contemporary performance troupes
such as New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma and Elevator Repair Service, Robinson
examines the impulse to experiment with storytelling—to disrupt and reconfigure lin-
ear narratives into forms simultaneously more disorienting and more comforting to
modern audiences. As Robinson notes, “Narrative . . . is never neutral.”
In the end, there is no one American drama but many. Past and present are fluid; old
styles mix with new cultural conditions. This volume makes possible a consideration of
many of those dramas that in turn will serve as inspiration to seek out others. Even as
American drama is in some ways a self-negating system, overturning itself many times
over, it creates tradition out of its impossible diversity.
 CHAPTER 1

T H E AT R E C OM PA N I E S B E F OR E
T H E R E VOLU T ION

ODA I J OH N S ON

“We begin to feel somewhat alive here, the theatre is established” (Luffman 1789, let-
ter xxvii, 119). So boasted one plantation owner from the isolated Leeward island of
Antigua, and so confirmed many other auditors with a certain pride as they wrote back
to England about the arrival of theatre in the Anglophone colonial world. “Deliverance
from gothick rudeness” is what it meant to another writer from the Bahamas, when a
new playhouse was established in Providence. As the South Carolina Gazette from
December 29, 1746, makes clear, the theatre became the home for “politeness and every
honest art” in the cities of British North America, as well as finishing school, a poor
man’s grand tour (Burling and Johnson 2001, 128).
Establishing the theatre in America is the theme of this opening essay, from the first
generations who carried it across the Atlantic to the first generations who missed it
among the London luxuries they left, or to those who never knew it firsthand. It came
as an occasional indulgence to towns too small to support it, who supported it any-
way. It came with a certain charisma of London urbanity, of polite society, of immoral
vagrancy; it was both new and familiar, welcomed and resisted. In many ways, the intro-
duction of theatre in America is as ordinary as its introduction into any British province,
but this province developed into a nation, and the architects of that radical movement
were some of the biggest theatregoers on the continent, and that makes the ordinary
relationship of politics and the playhouse extraordinary.
If one returns to thinking of British North America as it was prior to the Revolution
that created America, the colonies were socially and politically an extension of Great
Britain. During the great crisis, it was an evident fact that Burke and Franklin both
repeatedly pointed out: Americans were British, not some alien race. Their dress, man-
ners, customs, social structures, juridical systems, education, currency, commerce, and
religion were all provincial British. And at no place in the social topography of British
America were Americans more British than in the theatre of colonial America, where
London-trained actors carried over the latest London plays. In this regard, the playhouse
 THEATRE COMPANIES BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 17

fashioned Britishness. It modeled polite and urbane manners and it brought colonists a
long way from London a little closer to the capital of British culture: this, more than any
other factor, accounts for its great popularity. This essay seeks to trace the key points in
establishing the British theatre in colonial America.

Early Efforts

The social topography of establishing theatre in British America was also quite simi-
lar to that within the provinces outside of London. Small enterprising bands of resi-
dent amateurs—like the unfortunate trio in Accomac, Virginia, who were brought to
court by a neighbor for performing plays, and won the suit, because there was noth-
ing illegal about performing plays, or single trained actors, like the young Tony Aston
who washed up in South Carolina in the first decade of the eighteenth century—found
audiences receptive to their efforts but could not sustain anything at all like a season.
They drifted into early America like they had to Edinburgh or Dublin early in the eigh-
teenth century, and into Bristol, Bath, and Kingston, Jamaica, by mid century: they were
true strollers, essaying the small towns and leaving little record of their wares. Small
amateur companies dotted the social landscape in the early decades of the century in
Virginia, Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia, long before permanent theatres were
built. They fitted up long-rooms, court rooms, ordinaries, and taverns; they played a few
nights or a few weeks. The absence of early newspapers compounds the problem of doc-
umentation, but the scattered diaries, letters, and court records alert us to an occasional
presence of actors moving below the threshold of civic visibility early in the eighteenth
century. Antitheatrical legislation, abundant in the northern colonies (Massachusetts,
Connecticut, and the northern-minded Pennsylvania), is also likely indirect evidence of
the presence of strollers in the first decades.
Among the more promising early efforts to establish a more permanent theatrical
presence in the colonies were those of Thomas Heady in New York, William Levingston
and Charles and Mary Stagg in Williamsburg, and Henry Holt in Charleston. All had
minor London credentials, all were residents of their respective cities, and all developed
small companies that endured for several seasons there.
Heady, who advertised himself as a “barber and peruque maker,” had assembled
or arrived with a company of some nature in New York in 1732. T. Allston Brown in
his History of the New York Stage (1903, 1–2) lists the names of several cast members,
and a few of their plays are known, but unfortunately the names are no longer verifi-
able (Johnson 2005, 201–4, 213–14). Nonetheless, some evidence of their activ-
ity is preserved. They rented a space from Rip Van Dam, the interim acting governor
of New York, in 1732 and fitted it up into a small theatre. Scattered references to their
performances run for several years, 1732–34, including the poignant account of one
Elizabeth Asbridge, who described her agonized temptation to take up acting with the
company, “then at New York.” Their theatre at Nassau Street found remembrance on an
18 ODAI JOHNSON

early map of New York, but after 1735, we hear nothing more of the company (Odell 1927;
Johnson 2004).
In Williamsburg, William Levingston, an Ordinary (tavern) keeper, began to offer
entertainment during the court season (the spring and fell terms in which litigants
descended on the capital to settle their back-country cases), and to this end he acquired
several indentured servants specifically for their talents. An indenture contract is pre-
served (reprinted in Burling and Johnson 2001, 100–101) between Levingston and
Charles and Mary Stagg, dancers from London, that included the stipulation that they
“endeavour to obtain a Patent or a Lycense from ye Governor of Virginia for ye sole priv-
ilege of Acting Comedies, Drolls, or other kind of Stage Plays.” Other indentured ser-
vants over the next few years are assumed to have provided the cast and costumes for the
venture, as plays were indeed mounted. This venture was operational by 1718 and spotty
records (most by William Byrd) testify to its ongoing operation through at least 1723,
and occasional notice by visitors, like Hugh Jones, who noted the playhouse in 1724,
and William Hugh Grove, who as late as 1732 wrote “there was a playhouse managed by
Bowes, but having little to do is dropped” (Rankin 1960, 16). Bowes presumably man-
aged the venture after Levingston was litigated out of the county in 1723.
Another serious early effort came at the hands of Henry Holt, an experienced dancer
from the London stage, who arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, in November 1734.
He quickly advertised to open a dance academy and seems to have met with some suc-
cess. By the following year he boasted a company of actors, rented a space, and began
a small season in 1735 while he floated a subscription scheme to build a permanent
theatre. This scheme found encouragement and the Queen Street Theatre opened on
February 12, 1736. Some financial difficulties between partners on the building nearly
scuttled the venture, but he and his dance assemblies and occasional plays dodged the
misfortune and continued until late May of 1737, when Holt left the colony for New York
(Curtis 1968; Willis 1968).
Although none of the early ventures endured, they were not without legacy. When the
professional companies arrived with the next generation, they traveled to the same cities
in New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and found the markets already in place.
But much like attitudes in the provinces of Great Britain, the theatre was not always
accepted without challenge. There were certainly religious opponents, particularly in
New England, that never relaxed their legislation and against which the theatre battered
awhile and retreated to friendlier colonies. Boston’s prohibitions were early and endur-
ing and saw little professional theatre prior to the Revolution. Pennsylvania’s first pro-
hibitions against the theatre had been ratified in the colony in 1682, repealed in England
in 1692, re-ratified in 1699 and 1700, repealed again in England in 1705, re-ratified in
Pennsylvania in 1706, repealed in 1709, prohibited again in 1711, and repealed again in
1713 (Pollock 1968, 4–6). But we must resist the temptation to construct the early his-
tory solely as an incursion into Puritan morality. Every company that ventured into
Philadelphia, for example, from the 1720s on, found both a ready market of a certain
high level support, and religious and economic opposition. Throughout the century, the
support generally trumped the opposition.
 THEATRE COMPANIES BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 19

More often than not, the real objections that prevented theatre from taking a hold in
colonial America were economic ones. The cities were simply not large enough to sup-
port a resident company. The largest American cities at midcentury each had a popu-
lation of fewer than 20,000 people. This meant that any theatrical offering would be
occasional and any company would be itinerant. These claims were quite just, and yet
the theatre was allowed anyway, and this speaks to the great desire on the part of the
colonists to approximate London culture.
Though they were an ocean away, the drive to acquire London urbanity found its
greatest appetite in the theatre. That largely accounts for the presence of playhouses in
communities clearly too small to accommodate one, such as Halifax, Nova Scotia, which
hosted Mr. Mill’s company in 1768 (Burling and Johnson 2001, 309–17). They would have
it nonetheless, and this desire is what drove the career of the provincial theatre. By mid-
century, the first serious full-company professional attempts were essayed.

Hallam Company

It would not oversimplify the matter to claim that professional theatre in America began
with a murder in a London Greenroom. The unfortunate death of Thomas Hallam in
1735 at the hands of Charles Macklin dashed the last best hope for this large family of
actors. Thomas Hallam was the only one of the clan working at a patent theatre. His
sons Adam, George, William, and Lewis; their wives; and his daughter Ann and her
husband were all working at unlicensed theatres. With the passage of the Licensing Act
(1737), that meant illegal theatres opened and closed and were on-again-off-again in
Goodman’s Fields and Sadler’s Wells. After the death of Thomas Hallam, the family’s
hopes in theatre rested solely in evading the law. By the close of the 1740s, that prospect
looked dimmer and dimmer. Court summons from the late 1740s and December of 1750
only confirm the difficulty of operating illegal theatres. By 1751 the company’s costumes
were under seizure of law, and something desperate had to be done (Highfill et al. 1982,
vol. 7).
Lewis and William began looking elsewhere. By this time the provincial circuits were
quickly filling up. The two hired an agent, one Robert Upton, to embark to America and
reconnoiter the landscape for a potential theatrical market. He landed in New York late
in 1750 and found a market soon enough—and actors already in it.
It was a company led by Walter Murray and Thomas Kean. Their early years, like those
of most actors in the provinces, are nearly lost. They first met the public on a stage in
Philadelphia, in 1749, at the warehouse of William Plumstead. There is some evidence of
a brief clandestine season earlier in the year, perhaps even during the winter of 1748–49,
as they were suppressed by the city council in early January. This may have been stu-
dents, or some combination company. Small records persist through the summer and
fall, including an August production of Addison’s Cato (originally 1714). Certainly by
the following winter the Murray-Kean company was well staffed enough to introduce
20 ODAI JOHNSON

themselves in New  York, secure permission to play, and open a theatre on Nassau
Street: “Last week arrived here a Company of Comedians from Philadelphia, who, we
hear, have taken a convenient Room for their Purpose, in one of the buildings lately
belonging to the Hon. Rip Van Dam, Esq; deceased, in Nassau Street, where they intend
to perform as long as the season lasts” (New York Gazette and Weekly Post-Boy, March 6,
1749/1750; Johnson 2005, 109–13).
They played two or three nights a week in New York throughout the spring of 1750 and
were popular enough to continue until the heat of summer forced a brief recess. Their
bills were not the latest of London fare, but it was the first sustained season New Yorkers
had seen in twenty years. They played Farquhar and Fielding, Otway and Dryden, and
played into July, and then opened again in mid-September for a serious season that
remained the longest single engagement of any company in North America, playing
through mid-July of 1751.
Thomas Kean had left the stage that year, but we find him back in the company in
August when Walter Murray traveled down to Williamsburg to secure permission for
his players to open a theatre in the Virginia capital. They opened with the fall court, and
hubbed out, at least to the port city of Norfolk that winter.
Robert Upton, meanwhile, had arrived in New York, found a city that had just sup-
ported eighteen months of theatre and, perhaps unwisely, cobbled together his own
company. Few of the names represent any seasoned actor, and it should not surprise
us to find it was a short-lived venture. They opened in December 1751 and closed in the
first week of March. Upton claimed to sail back to England, but his backers, the Hallam
brothers, claim never to have heard more from him. But somewhere, somehow, it was
communicated to them that America had at least two promising cities, New York and
Williamsburg, and that was enough for the Hallams to seriously consider outfitting a
professional company with their remaining stock scenery and costumes and crossing
the Atlantic (that and their own foreclosure at Goodman’s Fields).

The Hallams’ First Tour

A small but curious undocumented mystery is that the Hallams had sent Robert Upton
as an agent to scout New York, but they themselves sailed to Virginia instead. What they
had heard about either colony, we do not know. Later recollections reveal the dismay of
the company, after weeks at sea, sighting for the first time a barren land, and wondering
how on earth they were to support themselves in the wilds of America. Their fears were
very real. Even though the Murray-Kean company had just performed somewhat suc-
cessfully in Virginia that previous winter and spring, when the Hallams arrived in June
1752 and introduced themselves, they were mortified to find that permission to perform
was absolutely denied them. The news was devastating. They had invested everything
they had in this venture; they were a long way from home, at great expense, and dead in
the water without the Lieutenant Governor’s permission. And that kind favor did not
 THEATRE COMPANIES BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 21

happen all summer. One resident, George Gilmer, an apothecary turned doctor, writ-
ing to Dr. Thomas Walker, a member of the Virginia Assembly, noted their presence
this way:

I have nothing to trouble you with only the arrival of Hallam and his Company. The
Governor and Council, because you would not pass a bill for suppressing ordinaries
and players, have an order that no player should act here; which is likely to prove the
utter ruin of a set of idle wretches, arrived in Lee, at about 1,000 expense. (Gilmer,
Letterbook, June 30, 1752)

It might suggest that one legacy of the appearance of the Murray-Kean Company
was a bill brought forth to suppress all players, and although the bill was not passed
by the assembly, the new company, upon arrival, may have inherited the resentment of
the council. The immediate effect was twelve unemployed actors with no money and
nowhere to go.
The Murray-Kean company, meanwhile, traveled up Tidewater to Annapolis,
Maryland, and opened a theatre there. As in Virginia, they played the capital and
hubbed out to the surrounding townships. A couple of the minor Hallam Company
actors joined their venture, as it seemed to be the only game in town, but the Maryland
engagement appears to be the Murray-Kean’s last season as a company. We find several
of their names scattered across the colonies in the decade to come: Charles Woodham
became a printer in Jamaica; Walter Murray and Mrs. Dowthaite, an actress, settled in
Maryland and returned once to the stage as actors with Douglass’s American Company
in the 1760s.
As the summer wore on, the Hallam Company by patience, perseverance, or new
character letters (those essential documents of reference with which, through which,
social advancement was allowed), finally impressed their credentials on the gover-
nor and at last wrung a slow leave from his grace. There is a note of some relief in their
allowance:

We are desired to inform the publick, that as the Company of Comedians, lately from
London, have obtained his honour the Governor’s permission, and have, with great
expense, entirely altered the playhouse at Williamsburg to a regular theatre, fit for the
reception of ladies and gentlemen, and the execution of their own performances, they
intend to open the first Friday in September next, with a play, call’d The Merchant of
Venice (written by Shakespeare) and a farce, call’d The Anatomist, or Sham Doctor.
The ladies are desired to give timely notice to Mr. Hallam, at Mr. Fisher’s for their
places in the boxes, and on the day of performance to send their servants early to
keep them, in order to prevent trouble and disappointment. (Virginia Gazette,
August 21, 1752)

“Servants” in colonial Virginia culture referred to the ladies’ slaves. They would be sent
to the theatre to hold places in the boxes and then either dismissed or given gallery tick-
ets. When Hallam boasted of converting the Murray-Kean space into a proper theatre,
he was thinking of a proper provincial theatre in size, but a London playhouse in scope.
22 ODAI JOHNSON

There was, for example, room for a small orchestra, a traditional box, a pit and gallery
division, and spikes across the stage, though there is not a trace of a major disturbance to
require the latter. It was a London look, and they were the Company of Comedians from
London, and that was their attraction over the strollers who had come before them.
William Dunlap, whose early career overlapped with the lag end of Lewis Hallam’s,
records the repertory, the newest of which (George Barnwell, or the London Merchant)
was already twenty-five years old when it debuted in America. The plays were the old
favorites of Farquhar and Shakespeare (adapted), early century Rowe and Cibber, with a
sprinkle of old Restoration comedies. With the exception of the farces, they were not, by
any stretch, the latest goods of London.
Their entry experience in Virginia appears to have been replicated in New  York,
rather identically. They were initially repulsed, apparently sent back to Virginia for a
character letter, and it later arrived with over a hundred signatures. In the interim, they
went public with their plight, including the great absconding of Robert Upton, pled
their poverty, distanced themselves from their “theatrical predecessors,” and a month
or more later finally extracted leave from the governor to play a season. They opened
in New York in mid-September and played two or three nights a week until the end of
March 1754. Sometime late in that season, Lewis Hallam dispatched one of his actors,
Patrick Malone, to Philadelphia to begin negotiations in that city. A heated press debate
ensued on the virtues and immoralities of the stage, with petitions and counterpetitions,
but in the end the company was allowed a brief season of twenty-four plays with the fol-
lowing provisos: (1) that nothing indecent or immoral be performed; (2) that one play be
donated as a civic benefit; and (3) that the manager would give bonds for the payment of
all debts incurred by the company. This last was embarrassingly all too necessary, as the
company had already protracted debts left in Virginia that had now gone into arrears,
including the mortgage on their theatre, which defaulted to the lenders. It alerts us to the
possibility that Hallam never intended to return to these sites.
Philadelphia indemnified itself against debts, and the company refitted Plumstead’s
warehouse, now titled “the new theatre.” They won a few supporters, including the gov-
ernor, as their three-night-a-week season was extended beyond their contractual allow-
ance. They closed their season well into June with their promised civic benefit, at which
they placed nearly 100 pounds into the hands of the directors of the Charity School, who
were among the most vocal objectors to the actors.
Their last season on the American continent was the winter of 1754–55, when the
Hallam Company introduced themselves to the polite society of Charleston, South
Carolina. Charleston was the most affluent of their cities, and it had long supported
amateur theatre. There is little record of their season there, including their theatre.
The original Queen Street Theatre was likely destroyed in the great hurricane of 1752.
What records we have are laconic, extracted entries from the now-lost diary of Mrs.
Manigault, who noted only she “went to the play” (Manigault 1919, 59).
After the close of the Charleston season, the Hallam Company all but disappeared.
They did not return to any of their previous established theatres on the continent. They
forfeited their theatre in Williamsburg and retained no claim on the others. Instead,
 THEATRE COMPANIES BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 23

they sailed to the Caribbean, and here most of them were not heard from again.
What evidence we possess places the few survivors scattered among the islands of the
Anglophone Caribbean. John Singleton, one of the actors in the company, left a poetic
composition that describes island travels, later published in Barbados, where he took up
residence as a printer, which might suggest the company played among the more popu-
lous island centers (Singleton 1767). Certainly the names of Patrick Malone and his wife,
also of the company, would show up in the playbills on St. Croix in 1770. Lewis Hallam
had died, presumably on the islands, circa 1755–56; his brother William returned to the
company shortly after (1758) and met his death on Tortola, as his will indicates (Myers
and Brodowski 2000).
The demise of the Hallam Company was the least documented period of their ten-
ure; the company’s final years, their denouement, without record, may have miserably
capped a disappointing venture to the new world. Somewhere on the island circuit, a
few remnants of the Hallam Company, mostly family (Mrs. Hallam; her sons Lewis, Jr.,
and Adam; their cousin Nancy Hallam; John Harmon and his wife, Catherine), crossed
paths with another troupe, managed by David Douglass; the two groups merged and in
that union lay the foundation of the American theatre.

David Douglass and the American

Company

For a man who left an enormous legacy on the American theatre, we know very little
of the private life of David Douglass (1720–89). He was a Scotsman by birth, a recipi-
ent of a good education, and trained as a printer originally, maybe in Edinburgh. Of
his impressions or involvement in that critical time of the Jacobite uprising of 1745, and
its brutal reprisals, we have not a trace. Anecdotally—and so far that is all we have on
his early years—he came to Jamaica as an actor recruited by John Moody. Moody then
had a better London offer, and Douglass remained in Kingston (Bernard 1887, 269–71;
Dunlap 1963, 33–35). Here was a solid company, with strong leadership and good civic
support, and from what little we know of their activities—precious little—they survived
the decade of the 1750s by playing across the Anglophone Caribbean. They were cer-
tainly based in Kingston, Jamaica, but some record of them in Barbados is preserved in
George Washington’s journal, when he first traveled off the Continent, and among his
new exposures was viewing the professional theatre in Bridgetown, Barbados. Douglass
and this Jamaican company crossed paths with the Hallams somewhere on the island
circuit, not likely as so romantic an encounter that Richardson Wright envisioned as a
union celebrated with “Rum [and] brown girls”; more likely both companies were strug-
gling and saw the advantages of a union (Wright 1937, 39). Douglass carried a character
letter from the Danish governor of St. Croix, so we know he was traveling wide and far
among the islands. The critical decision was to merge with the remainder of the Hallams
24 ODAI JOHNSON

and return to America. Somewhere along the way Douglass married the former Mrs.
Hallam, and the company arrived in New York in November 1758. Once on the conti-
nent, the recorded narrative is on firmer footing.
Their reception was no better than Lewis Hallam’s five years earlier, and in some
regards it was a great deal worse. He and his company were also denied permission to
play. Douglass did everything he could do wrong. True, he had arrived with letters from
St. Croix, but that was a Danish island, a long way out, and its opinion didn’t rate very
highly. He arrived in the midst of an election, which meant in the thick of a local power
dispute between the two rival families, the Levingstons and the Delancys. Douglass
allied himself with the third party, Cruger, at the loss of the other two. He rented a the-
atre space on Cruger’s Wharf before he had secured permission to play, and he laid out
his own money to fit it up. His application to perform was met with an emphatic denial,
and then he compounded his mistakes with an even larger one: he evaded permission
by advertising “A Histrionic Academy.” This subterfuge fooled no one and earned even
more resentment. He did the only thing left for him to do: go public and be humble. He
hung his head in the press, pleaded his poverty, begged for earnings enough to get them
out of town, and the council relented. He was granted thirteen nights to play and get out.
The mistakes in New York would never be made again. If the company’s debut in
New  York was a debacle, it provided a lifetime of lessons for its manager. Douglass
would thereafter secure his permission before moving his company, he built his the-
atres on other people’s money (subscription schemes), he avoided partisan politics to
the very end, and most importantly, he allied himself with every person of power in
colonial America. Douglass would seek to associate with every governor and lieutenant
governor, every planter and printer, and he would join every social club, subscribe to
newspapers and magazine, donate to every civic charity: he would, in short, become the
most well-connected man in America.
His next successes, in Philadelphia in 1759 and in Annapolis and Williamsburg in
1760, proved this exactly. He and his actors would be creditable. Unlike the Hallams,
who operated like a pirate raid on fragile communities, Douglass became a property
owner, a citizen of all colonies. His debts were settled, his actors never jailed, his theatres
remained in his possession, and he returned to every colony he played.
So began his early years in America in New  York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, and
Williamsburg: each season was more successful than the previous one. Where Lewis
Hallam played each city once, mortgaged his theatre, and never returned, Douglass con-
structed his business on a sustainable circuit of owning theatres and returning. I don’t
want to make too much of actors paying their bills, but credit went a long way in a cul-
ture that eschewed ready money (specie). Even tidewater pastors were paid in hogs-
heads of tobacco. To be creditable was a major social accomplishment.
Among his other accomplishments were that he built and rebuilt theatres, improving
them with each remodel, promising always the latest from London, and replacing the
hastily built structures with a healthy subscription scheme. The theatre in Annapolis
gave way to the new uptown West Street Theatre. The old Queen Street Theatre in
Charleston was replaced by an elegant new playhouse on Church Street. His costumes
 THEATRE COMPANIES BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 25

were also surprisingly rich (as seen in a portrait of Nancy Hallam, painted by Charles
Willson Peale) and spectators routinely praised his “scenes and machines” in the papers.
Indeed, there is often a surprised tone in the writers’ voices, as if astonished by the qual-
ity of the theatrical product so far from London.
Between 1758 and 1774 Douglass developed and maintained a circuit of theatres from
Charleston to Newport, Rhode Island, and he managed a sustainable touring circuit
of northern cities alternated by southern swings. One year they played New York and
Philadelphia, summering in Rhode Island; the next year they traveled to Annapolis,
Virginia, and Charleston. He recruited from London or the islands, commissioned new
scenery directly from London, brought out the latest plays, and maintained good work-
ing relations with British-appointed governors and an increasingly agitated American
radical base. He was, for example, stranded in Charleston when the ports closed dur-
ing the Stamp Act. He had returned from a London recruiting trip and half his com-
pany was in Barbados and could not rejoin him. He and his six new recruits opened
up the theatre anyway and played right through the Stamp Act, with half a company
and a deeply divided town. In the early 1770s when the various merchant associations
called for boycotts of all British goods (due to the Non-Importation Agreements), he
and his London-trained actors continued to offer the latest London plays to the same
signatories who boycotted all British goods, including Washington and Jefferson, who
purchased some twenty-one tickets to the playhouse on the very week they drafted and
signed the Virginia Association. Douglass and his American Company seemed to be
exempt from the political turmoil that swirled around them.
And business was good. At his peak, Douglass owned seven theatres, all built by sub-
scription (that is, advanced money in exchange for tickets, then reverting to Douglass’s
sole ownership at the close of the season); he enjoyed six-month seasons in a large circuit
he commanded with no serious rival. He moved in the best company; dined with gov-
ernors; clubbed with the horse crowd in Maryland, the musical society in Charleston,
and the planter-elite in Virginia; was welcomed among the St. Andrew’s Society of
wealthy Scotsmen; was a Mason when Masons represented the influential elite; and
sold box tickets to the most important people in colonial America. When Washington
notes in his personal cashbook for October 1772 “[paid] By Douglass’s Company £1/ 19,”
that sum was placed into a familiar palm, one whom Washington had known for over
twenty years. Indeed, in one year, Washington attended performances by Douglass and
his company in four different cities. Similar interest is documented in other founders’
letters, as seen in this extract from Thomas Jefferson’s Memorandum Book, for October/
November 1770:

26 Oct— pd. at playhouse 5

27 Oct— pd. for play ticket 7/6
29 Oct—pd. for play ticket 7/6
30 Oct—pd. for play ticket 5
31 Oct—pd for punch at play house 7 2 d
1 Nov—pd for play ticket 7/6
26 ODAI JOHNSON

2 Nov—pd for d[itt]o 7/6

3 Nov—pd for play ticket 7/6
4 Nov—pd at playhouse 2/6
6 Nov—pd for play ticket 7/6
Pd at playhouse 1/3
7 Nov—pd for play ticket 7/6
8 Nov—pd for play ticket 7/6. (Bear and Stanton 1997, 1:210–11)

Today, we would call that a theatre binge. The young Jefferson was in the theatre five
nights out of six, and he was in good company. The lieutenant governor of the colony
sponsored “command” performances, and he shared his box with George Washington.
The dense concentration of power in the house was part of the dynamic of every col-
ony. In Annapolis, during the racing season when Douglass carried his company to
Maryland, three governors, Washington, and two future congressmen could all be
found in the same side boxes on the same evening.
There was, from time to time, the old opposition, the old fight to make theatre a
“rational entertainment.” Most of the serious objections were economic, and they had
a good point there. Without major population centers (and even New York had fewer
than 20,000 people), companies were itinerant and they carried earnings out of town. In
small communities, this could be a serious concern. Douglass usually built in a two-year
re-charge cycle.
By 1770, it was clear that the American theatre was here to stay. Douglass had suc-
ceeded where the Hallam Company had not, and much of this is credited to solid man-
agement and very good actors. One notes the surprise in the voice of many who wrote of
the American Company:

Before I close my letter, I must desire you tell BC and WC that (contrary to their
prognostications) I  have spent my time here [Baltimore] as agreeable as it was
unexpected; I  mean the Theatre. The American Company have performed here
the greater part of the summer, and notwithstanding the disadvantages of an
inconvenient playhouse, and hot nights, have been universally well received and
encouraged. They really have much merit. You know I was always of opinion,that
I  could never sit out a play represented by American actors—but I  must confess
acknowledge my error. (Maryland Gazette, August 20, 1772)

With theatres in Charleston, Williamsburg, Norfolk, Annapolis, Baltimore,

Philadelphia, New York, and an unchallenged circuit, business was good in America—
right up to the summer of 1774.

Minor Companies

Though Douglass’s was by far the most dominant circuit in colonial America, his
American Company was not entirely alone. There were many transitory companies,
 THEATRE COMPANIES BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 27

scratch companies, even fugitive companies cobbled together to capitalize on a ready

market in venues too small for the American Company or who took advantage of their
absence.
There was certainly a company almost continuously playing in and around the
island of Jamaica throughout the 1760s. Many small pieces of evidence document its
existence: the largest is the ready pool of actors easily recruited from the islands. When
John Henry and the survivors of the Storer family joined Douglass and the American
Company in 1768, they had left a fully functioning company in Kingston that seemed to
continue performing even after the loss of five players.
One Mr. Mills operated a small circuit in North Carolina, a colony not blessed with
dense centers of population or an educated elite. Nonetheless, Mills played in New Bern
and Halifax for six months or better in 1768, before removing to Halifax, Nova Scotia
and, later still, down to the Caribbean.
In New England, one intrepid Mr. Morgan began a series of musical “recitations” in
Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He took on such classics as John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera
(1728), singing all the roles, in the guise of a concert. Encouragement led him to assem-
ble a small company, and his ambitions soon developed into something more difficult to
disguise as an “exhibition.” He and his company strutted and fretted its hour upon the
stage in Portsmouth in 1773 but was, alas, soon heard from no more.
The most damaging and disreputable company with the borrowed name of the New
American Company belonged to the management of William Verling. Verling was
recruited by Douglass back in 1766 when half of his regular company was stranded in
Barbados. Douglass had returned from London with five good actors (“in a singing way”),
and he filled out his company with a few local recruits. Verling, originally from Norfolk,
Virginia, was among these. He remained only through the close of the 1766 season, then
pirated a copy of Douglass’s (pirated) performance of George Alexander Stevens’s popu-
lar one-man show, Lecture on Heads (1765), and toured solo. Somewhere in 1767 Verling
cobbled together a cohort that included several enterprising or disgruntled actors from
the American Company and attempted a few inroads into Douglass’s circuit. By the wide
swath of litigation left behind (and suits against Verling occupy thirty-two continu-
ous pages in the Anne Arundel County Court records), Verling and his New American
Company were never serious rivals to Douglass (Anne Arundel County Judgment Records,
EB-2). Hounded by suits and the husbands of absconded wives, Verling and his com-
pany fled the continent and were next heard from in St. Croix, as the Leeward Islands
Company, where they flickered a few brief seasons until a great hurricane of August 31,
1772, destroyed their theatres and they were heard from no more (Johnson 2003, 29–41).
Among other minor companies we must acknowledge two other traditions that per-
sisted through the century: the vibrant academic tradition in colonial America, and the
equally ubiquitous military theatre, both of which kept the tradition, the repertory, and
the desire for theatregoing alive in the absence of the professional companies. Many
early colleges boasted a vibrant, if occasionally clandestine, theatrical culture. Yale’s
Linonian Society commenced its tradition of performing plays in December 1754 and
were reprimanded and fined for it. Nonetheless, they continued for the next twenty
28 ODAI JOHNSON

years; some years they were caught, some years not, performing in and around New
Haven, Connecticut. Students at Harvard, not to be bested, also began a clandestine tra-
dition of student and then ex-student performances around Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Students at the College of New Jersey (Princeton), the College of Philadelphia under
Provost Smith, and the College of William and Mary all enjoyed amateur and occasional
student theatricals (Johnson 2008, 175–88).
It is an odd concept today, but eighteenth-century warfare was a fair-weather game,
and when the boys of summer went into their winter quarters, balls, assemblies, and
theatre were the order of the day. We find small notices of such activity from Nova Scotia
to Havana, Cuba. Such indulgences cost General Howe the war, or so claimed many who
watched him sit idle and well-manned while Washington and his fragile troops starved
at Valley Forge, but the tradition of winter quartering was firmly established and winter
theatricals were a part of that tradition.
During the early years of the Revolutionary War, the British military comman-
deered the John Street Theatre in New York for a lengthy season of well-supported and
well-documented plays. When they moved to Philadelphia, they opened the Southwark
Theatre and enjoyed a leisured winter of entertainment. Earlier, in Boston, they had
played at Faneuil Hall, and on one famous occasion, the performance was interrupted
by an American volley on the town.

Congress and the Revolution

By 1774, as it became increasingly clear that the fabric of American and British identi-
ties was splitting and becoming two irreconcilable positions, Douglass began to openly
market rebellion. The American Company’s last season in Charleston featured a series
of deeply divided plays that took civil war and rebellion for their subjects. Addison’s
Cato was a benefit selection (not by Douglass), but he did mount King John, Douglas,
Macbeth, and Julius Caesar all in the last three weeks of his season.
Still, to sensible people, war was unthinkably remote. And even Douglass closed out
in Charleston with every expectation of returning in two years, after a long normal
northern swing. He had just built a new theatre, indeed, signed a fifteen-year lease on
the land; he had just dispatched Lewis Hallam, Jr., back to London to recruit more actors
and freshen up the scenery. His last public notice in the South Carolina Gazette (June 16,
1774) promised his return after seasons in New York and Philadelphia, “with a theatri-
cal force hitherto unknown in America.” The company broke up for the summer, as was
their custom when flush from a good season, with the expectation they would all recon-
vene in New York in the fall.
That season never happened. Tensions between the colonies and Great Britain esca-
lated, representatives from each of the colonies gathered in Philadelphia, while British
troops began to muster in New York. Douglass re-fitted the John Street Theatre and
awaited permission to open and, more importantly, for hostilities to settle down.
 THEATRE COMPANIES BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 29

He waited all through October, when word was sent by his old Virginia patron, Peyton
Randolph, now the first president of the first Continental Congress, that consensus
was shaping toward open resistance, and a general spirit of husbanding resources was
the order of the day. All frivolous spending, entertainments, horse racing, extravagant
funerals, and playgoing would be curtailed until hostilities ceased. The eighth resolution
passed by the Continental Congress on October 20, 1774, effectively ended the theatre in
colonial America.
But Douglass and his company did not leave in October, or November, or December.
They waited in New York, and, as is often the case, it is the interims that are most reveal-
ing. His new recruits arrived, expecting to work, and joined the other unemployed
actors, who sat and watched and wondered how far this would really go. Nobody
thought it would come to this. To war with Great Britain? It is difficult to look beyond
the charisma of the Revolution, but it was, at the time, utterly unprecedented. The
American Revolution was the inspiration for a string of rebellions that threw off impe-
rial, monarchical, or colonial powers across the west in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, but it had no historic precedent itself. Every previous attempt
throughout the century—by the Irish, the Jacobite rebellions of the Scots, the Indian
uprisings in America, the slave rebellions—had been mercilessly quashed. Those elo-
quent hotheads in Congress, who sounded like Cato’s patriots, did they know this never
worked? To a Scotsman like Douglass who lived through the ’45, who played Cato and
fell on his sword for liberty, the Revolution must have seemed like another romantic but
ultimately doomed uprising.
It was not until early February that Douglass and his company sailed away from
New  York. They got away on one of the last passenger ships before the harbor was
closed, and sailed to Kingston, Jamaica. Douglass left his theatres and returned to the
Anglophone Caribbean circuit he had left eighteen years earlier in order to sit out the
war. They shuttled between Kingston, the port town, and Spanish Town, the seat of
government, eventually opening a third theatre in the northern naval port of Montego
Bay. By that time, his wife, Sarah Hallam Douglass, had died, and Douglass himself had
retired from the management; sold or transferred his interest to her son, Lewis Hallam,
Jr.; and secured a license as the King’s Printer. In that profession, perhaps the one he
originally trained for so many years earlier, he earned the permanence he had never
enjoyed as an actor. He bought a house and two carriages, remarried a doctor’s daughter,
had two children late in life, and purchased a host of slaves who worked in his print shop
and bookstore. He secured lucrative government contracts and civic positions, and he
died wealthy, by island standards.

Straddling Nation

The notion that the American Company was American in anything but geography is
difficult to document. They played at the behest of the Crown-appointed colonial
30 ODAI JOHNSON

governors, and their playbills all boast the obligatory “vivat rex and regina”; Douglass
maintained a personal correspondence with many Crown-appointed officials as the
head of his patron base. He carried personal letters from many governors and lieutenant
governors; he was certainly a familiar of the Colden family in New York, the Penns in
Philadelphia, and the attorney general of South Carolina, Egerton Leigh. He also found
great support among many of the architects of the Revolution to come: Washington
and Jefferson were fixtures in the Williamsburg theatre, but signers Samuel Chase and
William Paca were his proxies in Annapolis. Peyton Randolph, the first president of the
First Continental Congress, could write personally to Douglass when the talks turned
serious, asking that he set aside his business. He was a businessman, not a revolutionary.
When the war broke out, not a single actor from the American Company joined
either party. When men and some women from many, many professions gave up their
livelihoods to throw in with Washington and the cause—the painter Charles Willson
Peale, the bookseller Henry Knox, the student Alexander Hamilton, the entire faculty
of William and Mary—the actors did not. Not a one. Nor conversely were they among
those loyalists who remained and followed the British military. Douglass and his actors
claimed neutrality and went to Jamaica “until the unhappy differences that subsist
between the mother country and her colonies in America subside” (New York Mercury,
February 6, 1775).
It was their largest market in which to sit out hostilities, but Jamaica was also a stag-
ing ground for the British fleet, and the British military remained a staple of the audi-
ence base. There, John Henry wrote a play called The Soldier’s Return (not published),
but he was not himself that soldier. Nor did they remain to be the camp followers of
British troops in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Rather, with no neutral place to
go, they went to the next best thing: the islands. There they derived their support from
a mixed audience of British military, merchants, and planters. They lost a great deal of
their standing and support in America for leaving, and after the war, the new managers,
John Henry and Lewis Hallam, Jr., would have to regain the confidence of the American
public. The sense was that they had been a little too cozy with the British during the
war. And occasionally one finds this claim borne out, as once in Montego Bay when
somebody broke into the theatre and stole all the company costumes, the British sol-
diers there mounted a special benefit performance of their own to help the American
Company recover and replenish their stock; this was just a week after a devastating hur-
ricane left the bay with untold property damage and displaced residents. I find it curious
that the American Company was least American, politically and geographically, at its
most critical moment.

A Note on Sources

The theatre in all the major cities in early America and Jamaica has received individ-
ual treatments; some sites, New York in particular, have been the subject of multiple
 THEATRE COMPANIES BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 31

histories. Among these are studies by Thomas Pollock about Philadelphia, by George
Odell about New  York, by Eola Willis about Charleston, by Richardson Wright and
Errol Hill about Jamaica, and by Jared Brown about the theatre during the Revolution.
Collectively, the documentary evidence regarding performance in the colonial period,
companies, seasons, repertory, casts, legal notices and reviews, where known, has been
chronicled, city by city, by Burling and Johnson. Hugh Rankin’s The Theater in Colonial
America, though now more than fifty years old, is still very useful. Much interpretive
work regarding what such plays to such audiences meant still remains to be done.

Works Cited
Anne Arundel County Judgment Records. Annapolis, MD: State Archives.
Bear, James A., and Lucia C. Stanton, eds. 1997. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, Accounts with
Legal Records, and Miscellany, 1767–1826. Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bernard, John. 1887. Retrospections of America, 1797–1811. New York: Harper and Brothers.
Brown, T. Allston. 1903 [1964]. History of the New York Stage. New York: Blom.
Burling, William, and Odai Johnson. 2001. The Colonial American Stage, 1665–
1774: A Documentary Calendar. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Curtis, Julia. 1968. The Early Charleston Stage: 1703–1798. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University.
Dunlap, William. 1963. History of the American Theatre. 1832. Rpt. New York: Burt Franklin.
Gilmer, George. Letterbook, Ms. Rockefeller Library, Williamsburg, VA.
Highfill, Philip, Jr., Kalman Burnim, and Edward Langhans, eds. 1982. A Biographical Dictionary
of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–
1800. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Johnson, Odai. 2003. The Leeward Islands Company. Theatre Survey 44.1, 29–42.
———. 2004. New Evidence of Early Actors in New York. Theatre Notebook 58.1, 3–10.
———. 2005. Absence and Memory on the Colonial American Stage. New  York:  Palgrave
Macmillan.
———. 2008. Drama in the Academies of Early America. In Early Modern Academic
Drama.Jonathan Walker and Paul Streufert, eds. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 175–88.
Luffman, John. 1789. Brief Account of the Island of Antigua, . . . In letters to a Friend. London.
Manigault, Ann. 1919. Extracts of the Journal of Mrs. Ann Manigault. South Carolina Historical
and Genealogical Magazine 20.3, 52–63, 204–12.
Myers, Robert, and Joyce Brodowski. 2000. Rewriting the Hallams: Research in 18th Century
British and American Theatre. Theatre Survey 41.1 (May), 1–22.
Odell, George C. D. 1927. Annals of the New York Stage. Vol. I. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1927.
Pollock, Thomas. 1968. The Philadelphia Theatre in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Greenwood.
Rankin, Hugh. 1960. The Theater in Colonial America. Chapel Hill:  University of North
Carolina Press.
Singleton, John. 1767. A Description of the West Indies. Bridgetown, Barbados: G. Esmond and
W. Walker.
Willis, Eola. 1968. The Charleston Stage in the XVIII Century. New York: Benjamin Blom.
Wright, Richardson. 1937. Revels in Jamaica. New York: Dodd, Mead.
 CHAPTER 2

R E VOLU T IONA RY A M E R IC A N
DR A M A A N D T H E AT R E

JAS ON SHA F F E R

The drama of the American Revolution, like that of the colonial era, evolved chiefly
on the page rather than on the stage. In the case of the colonial era, an American
playwright’s effort might occasionally find its way onto the professional stages that
developed in the colonies during the eighteenth century; however, events leading
up to the colonial rebellion precluded any such opportunity for aspiring playwrights
of the Revolutionary period until its very end. In October 1774, the Continental
Congress passed a resolution strongly discouraging the staging of plays, along with
other purportedly wasteful activities such as horse racing and cockfighting ( Johnson
and Burling 2001, 474). Thomas Wignell, an actor who would go on to considerable
fame after the Revolution, had just arrived from London to begin his acting career
in the Americas when news of the resolution reached New York. He was reportedly
“under his hairdresser’s hands” when informed of the will of the Congress (Dunlap
2005, 39). Such were the vicissitudes of life in the eighteenth-century American
theater.
This shuttering of the circuit of professional theaters that stretched from Charleston
to New York did not completely snuff the composition of dramas, nor even the staging
of plays, in the Revolutionary period. A long-standing tradition of collegiate theatricals,
some countenanced by school administrators and some performed “underground” by
students at the risk of expulsion, continued, and amateur theatricals were performed by
both British and American troops during the war (Brown 1995, 22–68, 85–132; Shaffer
2007, 105–37). Moreover, authors well versed (through either reading or playgoing) with
the structure of the British dramas popular in the colonies, such as the patriots Hugh
Henry Brackenridge, Mercy Otis Warren, and Robert Munford, along with numer-
ous anonymous authors both patriot and loyalist, composed plays that chronicled the
upheavals of the tumultuous wartime birth of the independent United States of America
(Philbrick 1972, 7). In some cases, indeed, it appears that real-life drama and the amateur
theaters of the Revolution even joined forces: Claude Robin, a French chaplain visiting
 REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 33

Harvard in 1781, observed the students enacting tragedies “taken from their national
events” (Robin 1784, 17).
While the dramas of the Revolution were deeply concerned with events on American
soil, the models according to which they were written were decidedly British in nature.
Fortunately for American authors, British playwrights in the eighteenth century treated
contemporary affairs with regularity and skill. Eighteenth-century comedies focused
on satirizing the foibles and moral failings of British society, and although direct treat-
ments of current political events were rare in eighteenth-century tragedies, such plays
frequently engaged with political themes, including the conflict between liberty and tyr-
anny that dominated the rhetorical battles of the Revolution (Loftis 1963, 5–6). Even for
those who lived in the theater-averse New England colonies, references to Shakespeare
and political tragedies such as Joseph Addison’s neoclassical hit Cato (which was staged
at Valley Forge by Washington’s troops) resounded throughout the newspapers and
pamphlets published by patriot activists both before and during the rebellion (Shaffer
2007, 30–65). Many of the dramas written in the Revolutionary era echoed these nar-
rative tropes or exceeded them by depicting directly the events of the war, resulting in
propaganda efforts that might be considered on par with the lesser melodramas and
farces produced in the British theater (Granger 1960, 17). While critics of these plays
generally find that the texts lack the careful structure of works written for professional
performance during the period, their authors without question clearly understand and
deploy the drama’s power to communicate directly with the reader and the great power
of combining personal political passions and compelling contemporary history in a dra-
matic format (Meserve 1977, 65; Philbrick 1972, 3).
Despite the diverse political opinions expressed by the characters of Revolutionary
dramas, taken as a group the plays display a common concern with the shared or col-
lective memories of both metropolitan and colonial Britons in the eighteenth century.
As the rhetoric of the patriot movement in the colonies shows from the very earliest
disputes between colonial settlers and their government in Great Britain, the exception-
alist view of Great Britain as the beacon of liberty in the modern world was common
to Britons in the Americas and the home islands. This worldview included reverence
for a long line of political martyrs and fallen war heroes, among the latter some who
had died fighting in the Americas. This shared cultural heritage produces a marked split
among the plays and theatrical productions of the Revolutionary era. Those favoring
the American cause, whether before or after the outbreak of the Revolution, stressed the
heritage of so-called British liberty in the colonies and argued that America had become
its true repository, while Britain had declined into a tyranny. Those favoring the mainte-
nance of strong ties between the Crown and the colonies (disregarding the Declaration
of Independence) stressed this common political and cultural heritage as a bond that
should not be put asunder. In each case, the authors found themselves wrestling with a
common set of cultural memories in their efforts to establish a sense of political com-
munity in the minds of their readers and audiences. In effect, for a propaganda play to
hit its mark, it had to convince its audience to believe in either the perpetual union of
Britain and its colonies or in the new union between those former colonies established
34 JASON SHAFFER

by the Declaration of Independence. After the Revolution, moreover, the producers of

the first plays and theatrical entertainments by American authors found themselves
with a similar set of problems. How, they would have to decide, should the history of
the Revolution be represented in the theater, and what, precisely, would this new people
known as “Americans” look like when presented onstage so that audiences would see
themselves in those characters and thus recognize themselves as Americans (whatever
that word might mean)?

Mercy Otis Warren: The Female Patriot

Ironically, the first playwright of the Revolutionary era was excluded by virtue of her
sex from direct participation in the political processes that determined the course of
American history during this period. Mercy Otis Warren, a poet, playwright, and his-
torian of the American Revolution, was born in 1728 to the politically prominent Otis
family of Massachusetts (Richards 1995, 2). Her father, James Otis, Sr., was an important
player in the politics of the colony, and her brother, James, Jr., would try an important
challenge to the Crown’s search-and-seizure policies in 1761, when the idea of a colonial
rebellion was virtually unthinkable. Her husband, James Warren, became the Speaker
of the Massachusetts Assembly during the Revolution. Mercy Warren, along with other
prominent women such as Abigail Adams, would find herself close to the great events of
her lifetime, but she was largely prevented from taking an active role in shaping them.
Warren, however, found a vehicle for political participation through anonymous publi-
cation, producing both tragedies and satires on current affairs without revealing herself,
thus ventriloquizing the voice of a presumably white male patriot author (Cima 2006,
107–8). Given the dangerous political climate in which she wrote, it was hardly unusual
for an author of controversial political literature to write anonymously; indeed, almost
all the propaganda written on both sides during the Revolutionary era was published
without attribution. In Warren’s case, however, anonymity both required her to reject
her identity and allowed her to assume an air of authority that would have been unavail-
able to her as a woman.
In March and April of 1772, the American Company, the most successful theater
troupe in colonial North America, was playing in Williamsburg, Virginia. During those
same months, Mercy Otis Warren fired the first “shot” in the drama of the American
Revolution by anonymously publishing excerpts from a blank verse tragedy, The
Adulateur, in the Massachusetts Spy, a radical newspaper (Johnson and Burling 2001,
401–2). Set in “Upper Servia,” a stand-in for her colony, Warren’s play constructs a
pitched battle between tyranny and patriotism. Her aspiring despot is a governor,
Rapatio, who parallels Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, a long-standing
political rival of the Otis clan (Richards 1995, 8–9). Opposing Rapatio is a group of patri-
otic Servians determined to fight for their liberties against his ambition. They all bear
names recalling heroes of the Roman Republic—a typical touch in the propaganda of
 REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 35

the patriot movement (Bailyn 1967, 26). Chief among the patriots is Brutus, a stand-in
for Warren’s brother James Otis, who, owing to declining mental health, had left public
life by the 1770s. Warren thus presents contending spokesmen for liberty and tyranny
(Warren 1980, ix). While Rapatio declares his own inherent corruption, Brutus tutors a
younger patriot, Marcus, in the virtues necessary to fight Rapatio and his crew of adulat-
ing (flattering) cronies.
Warren’s initial dramatic efforts channel her political principles into an allegory that
would have been easy for her readers to decipher. Unfortunately, Warren’s authorial
anonymity rendered her work vulnerable to being co-opted, and in 1773 a collaborator
published a longer version of The Adulateur as a pamphlet, including many scenes that
Warren did not write. Warren disavowed these scenes, which depict events surrounding
the Boston Massacre of 1770 and include strong calls to self-defense in the name of the
memories of those “Servian” forefathers who founded their country’s liberty (Richards
1995, 87–88). Warren responded to this literary hijacking by printing scenes from a
sequel, known as The Defeat, in 1773. In The Defeat Rapatio continues his ambitious
rampage, but the patriots of Servia eventually rebel, and the conclusion features Rapatio
on a scaffold, foretelling his own doom for his tyrannical overreaching. This fragment
explicitly reprimands unjust or despotic rule while also perhaps implicitly parrying
underhanded publishing tactics.
Following suit, as tensions escalated between the colonies and Britain between 1773
and 1775, Warren turned her attention to satire. In 1775 she published The Group, a
stinging anatomization of the flawed characters of many of the most prominent gov-
ernment officials and Tories in Massachusetts. While the Warrens’ old enemy Governor
Hutchinson had left for England and been replaced by a military governor, General
Thomas Gage, and while Warren seems to show relatively little animosity toward some
of her Tories, who feature such comic names as Crusty Crowbar and Hector Mushroom,
Warren still has a rich array of targets at her disposal (Quinn 1943, 41–42; Richards 1995,
94). The play’s three acts are dominated by discussions among the Governor’s Council,
including Hazelrod (Peter Oliver, Hutchinson’s brother-in-law and Chief Justice of
the Massachusetts Supreme Court), Brigadier Hateall (Timothy Ruggles, another old
enemy of the Otises, an attorney with a violent temper), and the turncoat Whig Beau
Trumps (Daniel Leonard, a close friend of John Adams), about their reasons for attach-
ing themselves to the cause of tyranny, in which each character reveals his own essential
moral bankruptcy (Richards 1995, 93–98). The play closes with a meeting of the council
in which Gage (here known as Sylla) resists the incitements of his councilors to wreak
violent havoc on his fractious subjects, citing the common love of liberty that binds
Britain and Servia, most notably the example of General James Wolfe, who fell in 1759
leading a joint force of British regulars and colonials in an assault on the city of Quebec
(Warren 1775, 17). As his disappointed councilors depart the stage, still planning to urge
Sylla on to violence, a woman enters and delivers a dire warning that the issues of the
day must eventually come to blows between the noble patriots of Warren’s tragedies and
such venal creatures as the Tories of The Group: “While Freedom weeps that merit could
not save / But conq’ring Hero’s [sic] must enrich the Grave” (Warren 1775, 22). Having
36 JASON SHAFFER

taken the measure of the friends of the Crown and found them fit only for satire, Warren
closes her play with the promise of a grave both tragic and heroic for those patriots who
must inevitably take up arms against them.

Satirical Dialogues and Farces

Warren’s tragedies, while perhaps plodding when compared to the pace of entertain-
ment in the twenty-first century, generally exhibit a good sense of stagecraft. The Group,
however, despite its virtues, seems entirely too “talky” for the stage, a problem it shares
with several early loyalist satires. Many of these works have far more in common with
the traditions of Platonic or poetic dialogues than they do with works composed for the
stage. Ironically, the pseudonymous author of one of these satires, “Mary V.V.,” in the
1774 A Dialogue, between a Southern Delegate, and His Spouse, on His Return from the
Grand Continental Congress, seeks to trade on the very female authorial identity that
Warren sought to suppress. This poem, written in a form of rhymed couplets known as
hudibrastics, after Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, a Restoration poem that satirizes the radi-
cal Presbyterians and others who opposed the Stuart monarchy, implicitly connects the
colonial patriot movement, especially in the New England colonies, to the traumatic
memory of the English Civil War in the seventeenth century (Philbrick 1972, 32). Having
returned from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia firmly convinced of his abil-
ity to meddle in imperial politics, the delegate faces his clamoring wife, whose tongue
he is unable to control, an inversion of the “natural order” of marriage that the satirist
clearly intends to imply a similar usurpation of legitimate authority by the delegate
and his fellows (Richardson 1993, 30). The wife pointedly draws attention to her hus-
band’s intellectual shortcomings and emphasizes the grave danger in which his politi-
cal affiliations may place himself and their home: “Could I see you in Prison, or hang’d,
without Pain? / Then, pray, have I not reason enough to complain?” (Mary V.V. 1774, 9).
Challenging royal authority, the wife reminds her husband, has its risks, and he will not
suffer them alone.
The Dialogue illustrates two major approaches used by loyalist satirists: lampooning
the patriot movement as a dangerous rabble intoxicated by radical oratory, and using a
subdued “common-sense” tone to remind their readers of the benefits of British citizen-
ship and the dangers of rebellion. The 1774 Debates at the Robin-Hood Society focuses on
the former. The play depicts a meeting of a group of buffoonish patriots attempting to
pass a series of rebellious resolutions regarding the rights of colonial citizens, quite pos-
sibly a parodic reaction to the congressional adoption of the Suffolk Resolves, a series of
potentially revolutionary resolutions originally passed by the Massachusetts House in
reaction to the so-called Intolerable Acts that shut the port of Boston after the Tea Party
(Meserve 1977, 75–76). The Robin-Hoods are almost entirely incapable of managing a
coherent debate, with the exception of an attorney, Mr. Silver Tongue, who guides the
resolutions to approval. Full of irony and malapropisms, the play recalls the scathing
 REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 37

British political satires of earlier decades, not least because of the author’s clever use of
allusions. One character, Matt of the Mint, bears the name of one of the thieves in John
Gay’s popular ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera, and Mr. Silver Tongue shares his name
with the corrupt attorney in William Hogarth’s famous series of engravings, Marriage
à-la-Mode. The unmistakable message of the play is that the Congress is a pack of crimi-
nals and fools being led by smooth-talking, conspiratorial attorneys.
The “common-sense” model of loyalist satire is best represented by Jonathan Mitchell
Sewall’s 1775 Cure for the Spleen, a dialogue that takes place in a Massachusetts tavern
among a minister, a deacon, a justice of the peace, and several other prominent local
citizens. Sewall, the attorney general for Massachusetts and quite possibly the most
important apologist for royal prerogative in the colonies, had before this pamphlet
undertaken in print to defend the British troops involved in the Boston Massacre and,
later, the embattled Governor Hutchinson (Berkin 1974, 89–93). Sewall’s play attempts
some small degree of characterization: Justice Bumper, for instance, has a habit of mak-
ing jokes that only he finds funny, and Deacon Graveairs has a nagging cough. The goal
of the play is not character development, however, but debunking the major arguments
of the patriot movement, which Sewall goes about with legalistic, methodical diligence
through the speeches of Parson Sharp (10–11). While the play begins with a considerable
difference of opinion among these men as they gather to talk politics over a pipe and a
drink, by the end of the play Parson Sharp has used legal precedent to convince Trim,
the local barber, to stop cynically using radical political rhetoric as a way to increase the
trade in his shop. Sharp also persuades Puff, the play’s only unabashed patriot, to back
away from a movement whose platform “sounds too much like treason” (32).
Intriguingly, after the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and the colonies, the
dramas produced during the Revolution seem to become eminently more stage-worthy,
perhaps as the goal of weighing contending arguments gave way to the desire to capture
the rush of current events as an unprecedented civil war engulfed the British Atlantic.
The satirical salvos fired by each side shared a common goal of stressing the coward-
ice of the enemy; it became essential “to show the officer of one army quaking at the
thought of engaging with the other in combat” (Brown 1995, 74). This cowardice is read-
ily visible among the British generals in the 1776 farce The Blockheads; or, The Affrighted
Officers, which is sometimes, albeit controversially, attributed to Mercy Otis Warren
(Richards 1995, 102–4; Warren 1980, xvii–xvii). Set in Boston during the siege of 1775–
76 that followed the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord, the play opens
with the encircled British generals faced with the prospects of their troops being cut
down by rebel riflemen or starved due to the lack of supplies in the besieged city—a
grave situation that contrasted sharply with the theatricals produced during the siege’s
early stages by General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, which included a satire he
composed on the blockade of Boston Harbor (Brown 1995, 22–29). In the aftermath of
the costly British victory at Breed’s (Bunker) Hill, the rebels begin to fortify Dorchester
Heights with artillery, which places the entire city in peril. While the generals initially
show a readiness to attack, once the rebel fortifications have been completed, they
quickly prepare to evacuate the city. As Puff, the stand-in for General Sir William Howe,
38 JASON SHAFFER

commander of the British forces at Boston, declares of the assembled American troops,
“I remember Bunker-Hill, I shall never forget their civility toward me . . . how I came
off alive is a miracle; whiz, whiz, good Lord, how it makes me shudder to think of it!”
(Anon. 1776b, 14). As the British retreat, moreover, their decision takes a disastrous toll
on the Boston loyalists who will be forced to abandon their lives of relative prosperity
and become exiles in Canada. Grouchily examining the situation, one of the British offi-
cers, addressing the unseen Burgoyne, declares “here is more matter for your humour.
You may give us a second edition of your farce” (13).
A loyalist farce, The Battle of Brooklyn, also published in 1776, can be viewed as “the
mirror image” of The Blockheads (Brown 1995, 73). Written after General Howe’s forces
soundly beat Washington’s army at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, very nearly
ending the war, this satire depicts both the Continental Army’s generals and its common
soldiers as cowards and scoundrels. The play focuses its animosity on Washington and
his deputies, Israel Putnam and William Alexander, Lord Stirling. Putnam, while not a
coward, is depicted as a radical Puritan intent on enriching himself by stealing livestock
confiscated from Long Island loyalists. Stirling is a cowardly drunkard who must keep
himself inebriated with peach brandy merely to entertain the thought of conflict with
the enemy. Washington, meanwhile, asks himself in a soliloquy, “O! cursed ambition!
What have I sacrificed to thee?” and carries on an extramarital affair with a servant girl
named Betty (Anon. 1776a, 15). Encompassing both the disastrous battle and the narrow
escape of Washington’s army to Manhattan after the battle, the play concludes with a
scene between Joe King, Stirling’s valet, and his fellow servant Noah, who determine to
abandon the Continental cause and “renew [their] allegiance to the most amiable and
virtuous Prince, that ever sway’d a sceptre” (27). As in the case of the Southern delegate
and his wife, the play thus concludes with the self-important rebels chastised for their
hubris, while those in less exalted social positions (women, servants) reasonably advo-
cate continued allegiance to Great Britain.

Leacock and Brackenridge: Dramas of

Patriot Sacrifice

While satire was deployed by dramatists on both sides during the Revolution, tragedy
generally remained the domain of patriot propagandists. One work from 1776, however,
experimented with genre blending. The Fall of British Tyranny; or, American Liberty
Triumphant, written by a patriot Philadelphia goldsmith named John Leacock, mixes
“British-Tory farce” and “patriot tragedy” with sometimes quite astonishing, although
uneven, results (Richards 1991, 249). Leacock’s text is framed by all the apparatus one
might expect from a professional playwright in the eighteenth century, with a dedica-
tory epistle from “Dick Rifle,” one of the Continental riflemen who frightens the officers
in The Blockheads, and a hortatory prologue delivered by “The Goddess of Liberty.” The
 REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 39

first two acts somewhat fail to live up to this promising prefatory material, presenting
allegorical scenes set among British politicians viewed as friends and foes of America.
The main villain is Lord Paramount, an aspiring tyrant modeled on the Earl of Bute,
George III’s former tutor, who despite having long since lost his political influence
remained a patriot bugbear. Opposing Paramount’s desire to enslave both Britain and
America are a collection of parliamentary heroes who support the Americans’ defense
of their rights, even though the play occasionally mischaracterizes those who, like Lord
Wisdom (William Pitt the Elder, Lord Chatham), favored leniency with the Americans
but vehemently opposed independence (Philbrick 1972, 47). With the third act, how-
ever, the scene switches to besieged Boston, where a series of tense interactions between
patriots and loyalists in the city gives way to a pastoral satire where two shepherds, Dick
and Roger, discuss the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord as though the
colonials were defending their flocks from wolves. Dick and Roger then break into a
song praising Tammany, a legendary Indian chief who became an alternative ancestor
for American revolutionaries seeking to eradicate Britishness from their political gene-
alogy (Deloria 1999, 13–14). This jovial moment is neatly counterpointed, however, by a
scene of sentimental tragedy in which a Massachusetts woman named Clarissa (perhaps
after the famous sentimental novel) is informed that her husband, son, and brother have
all died at Breed’s Hill, driving home the cost of the war for the reader.
The play’s fourth and fifth acts fulfill Leacock’s shifting emphasis on the events rather
than the causes of the conflict. The play’s fourth act consists of an uncomfortable series
of scenes chronicling the schemes of Lord Kidnapper, a stand-in for Lord Dunmore, the
former royal governor of Virginia, to raise a regiment of slaves to fight the Continentals
by emancipating those who enlisted under him. Dunmore did, in fact, raise almost one
thousand such troops, who defeated a unit of Virginia militiamen at Kemp’s Landing
near Norfolk in 1775 before Dunmore and his unit were eventually captured, released in
1776, and ultimately retreated to occupied New York (Holton 1999, 155–59). The scenes
are profoundly unsettling for the modern reader: Cudjo, the leader of the slaves, speaks
in a crude ebonic dialect; Dunmore’s subordinates mock the former slaves’ appear-
ance and African heritage mercilessly; and Dunmore’s reputation for philandering here
spills over into his keeping a group of emancipated women below decks on his flagship
as concubines (152). If the Indian chief Tammany in the third act provides a national
symbol around which Leacock’s American readers can unite, Dunmore and his African
American regiment provide a powerful symbol of an alien other, the rejection of which
provides a far less wholesome foundation for a collective political identity.
The play’s concluding act, true to the work’s loose structure, leaves Lord Kidnapper’s
campaign unresolved and shifts instead to two tragic events from the American inva-
sion of Canada in 1776:  the death of General Richard Montgomery in his assault
on Quebec and the capture of Colonel Ethan Allen and his troops in Allen’s heedless
attempt to take Montreal. The act opens with a defiant Allen confronting his British cap-
tors before being chained by the British, all the while pouring forth the “liberty or death”
rhetoric that is the hallmark of patriot propaganda from the Revolution. With Allen
chained, thus providing an American hero for the play’s conclusion, the scene shifts to
40 JASON SHAFFER

Washington’s encampment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the general and his

subordinates, Charles Lee and Israel Putnam, receive the news of Montgomery’s loss
and Allen’s capture. The play concludes with a meta-theatrical flourish in which all three
generals draw their swords, vowing to fight “to the last in support of liberty and [their]
country” and to “revenge . . . Montgomery, and [the] brutal treatment of the brave Allen”
(Leacock 1776, 65). This ritualized moment, which invites the reader to join in common
cause with the Continental commanders, is echoed in the play’s epilogue, delivered by
“Mr. Freeman,” who urges his audience to “with one voice proclaim INDEPENDENCE”
(66). Mixing genres and switching locations at times without warning, Leacock seeks to
summon from the cacophony of current events a common, national American voice.
Both the conclusion of Leacock’s play and his efforts to promote a sense of national
identity, especially through his play’s tragic fifth-act news, mirror the tragedies of Hugh
Henry Brackenridge, the most prominent American examples of the genre written dur-
ing the Revolutionary period. Brackenridge’s The Battle of Bunkers-Hill (1776) and The
Death of General Montgomery, In Storming the City of Quebec (1777) both “attempt to
transform, through an American dramatic art, Patriot military defeats into triumphant
testimonials to a new national spirit and to translate colonial military heroes into mar-
tyrs to American liberty” (Richardson 1993, 36). By focusing on the dreadful sacrifices
being made by American patriots, Brackenridge treats the early battles of the Revolution
in much the same dramaturgical fashion as the plots of patriotic tragedies that were
popular both with readers and audience members in the colonial era (Shaffer 2007,
28). He also situates the deaths of General Joseph Warren at Breed’s Hill and General
Montgomery at Quebec within a chain of heroic sacrifices that stretches from republi-
can Rome to the French and Indian War.
Brackenridge was an apt candidate to write tragedies. As a student at the College
of New Jersey (now Princeton University), he studied rhetoric under the college’s
president, the Rev. Jonathan Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister and signer of the
Declaration of Independence. He wrote his first dramatic composition, a poetic dia-
logue called The Rising Glory of America, for the college’s 1771 graduation, along with
his classmate and friend, the patriot poet Philip Freneau (Shaffer 2007, 123–26). He also
briefly served as a chaplain in the Continental Army. Brackenridge’s tragedies illustrate
not only his patriotic idealism, but also his familiarity with Roman and British history
and with classical literature, all of which he deploys in these tightly woven neoclassical
tragedies to considerable effect.
At times, Brackenridge’s fascination with the classical world can be distracting.
Throughout both plays, enraged officers (both British and American) repeatedly call on
their troops to sacrifice the enemy in battle as a hecatomb—a ritual slaughter of one
hundred head of livestock—to either the cause of kingship or liberty and the memory
of a fallen American patriot. Perhaps more than any other Revolutionary writer, how-
ever, Brackenridge displays a keen understanding of the power of theatrical bloodshed
to galvanize an audience’s loyalties. When Colonel Thomas Gardiner, preparing his men
for the British assault at the battle of Breed’s Hill, encourages them to emulate the three
hundred Spartans at Thermopylae (Brackenridge 1776, 16), both the author’s fixation on
 REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 41

tragic sacrifice and his skillful ability to build moving genealogies for American patrio-
tism become evident. (Gardiner did, in fact, die in the battle, as he does in the play.)
When General Joseph Warren dies under the British assault, he declares in his dying
speech that his countrymen should not weep for him, since his name will be enshrined
in a pantheon of classical and British opponents of tyranny, all those “of old or modern
memory, who liv’d, / A mound to tyrants, and strong hedge to kings” (29). Brackenridge’s
Americans fight so nobly that even the British commander, General Howe, is forced
to admit that while his ultimately victorious regulars fight without patriotic vigor, the
rebels prove themselves “The sons of Britons, with the genuine flame, / Of British heat,
and valour in their veins” (35). As suggested by both Howe’s comments here and Howe’s
hesitation to confront the Americans for a second time in The Blockheads, defeat on the
battlefield can nonetheless yield a propaganda victory.
Brackenridge deploys a similar logic in The Death of General Montgomery, making
the most out of the rich symbolic possibilities of a battle before the walls of Quebec.
Montgomery, a former British soldier who married into a powerful New York family,
had served in North America during the Seven Years’ War, which made his martyrdom
all the more powerful in that he could be said to have served both Britain and America,
but he chose to die fighting for the cause of the rebellion. His death at Quebec also made
him an uncanny double for General James Wolfe, whose death while battling the hated
French in 1759 led more than one author to impress his memory for the American
cause. Indeed, no less gifted a propagandist than Thomas Paine used the ghosts of both
Montgomery and Wolfe in propaganda dialogues written in 1775 and 1776, respectively
(Richardson 1993, 28–29). Brackenridge’s Montgomery, before the American assault,
ruminates on Wolfe’s victory and, pondering his own upcoming battle, declares that
had Wolfe lived to see this day, he never would have “drawn his sword, / In Britain’s
cause—in her unrighteous cause” (Brackenridge 1777, 27). Brackenridge makes of
Montgomery a prophet when Wolfe’s ghost enters the stage amid the slaughter wherein
not only Montgomery but several of his young subordinates lose their lives, addressing
the American dead and declaring that from their deaths “shall amply vegetate, / The
grand idea of an empire new, / . . . / in these fair provinces, United States” (38). While the
play ends with the gory image of Montgomery’s bloody corpse suspended from the walls
of the city and the American force subjected to insult and abuse by their British captors,
once again Brackenridge’s poetic touch recovers the symbolic value of a bitter loss on the
battlefield in an effort to produce an “American” tragedy.

Uneasy Comedy: Patriotism, Loyalism,

and Wartime Satires

If the Abbé Robin’s notes from his American tour are to be believed, students at
Harvard College staged the propaganda plays of Leacock and Brackenridge during the
42 JASON SHAFFER

Revolution: Robin’s notes include among the subjects of their theatricals “the battle of
Bunker’s Hill, . . . the Death of General Montgomery, . . . and the Fall of British tyranny”
(Robin 1784, 17). Such productions must have been rather rough around the edges,
despite the fact that students in Cambridge had been performing plays with some regu-
larity since 1758, defying the strident antitheater bias of many New Englanders (Shaffer
2007, 113–17). Ironically, perhaps the most stage-worthy play of the Revolution, one writ-
ten by a resident of theater-friendly Virginia and notable for its lack of propagandis-
tic zeal, has left behind no record of a performance either amateur or professional. The
Patriots, a comedy by Robert Munford, combines the popular eighteenth-century form
of the sentimental romantic comedy with a satirical treatment of conditions in Virginia
as so-called Committees of Safety sought out loyalists and troubled the traditional def-
erential political culture that had previously dominated the mid-Atlantic colonies.
Wealthy, educated, and descended on his mother’s side from the influential Bland
family, Munford exemplifies the “gentleman author” of the eighteenth century, pre-
cisely the sort of man who might dabble in drama (Philbrick 1972, 258). Born in
1730 in Prince George’s County, Virginia, where he was left poor early in life by his
father’s death, Munford was educated at the Wakefield School in Leeds, England, by
his wealthy uncle, William Beverley. Upon returning home and establishing him-
self in Virginia society, he amassed a respectable estate for himself in Mecklenberg
County and became an active participant in the colony’s patrician, paternalistic poli-
tics, serving, among other offices, in the House of Burgesses, in the Virginia General
Assembly, and as a major in the Continental Army (Moody 1966, 11). Having voiced
insufficient support for the Revolution in its earliest stages, however, Munford suf-
fered from insinuations that he was a neutralist, or worse still a loyalist; indeed,
the political principles on display in The Patriots are anything but boldly national-
istic. The play, which is studded with allusions to the popular British comedies of
Sir Richard Steele, George Farquhar, the Duke of Buckingham, and David Garrick,
brings together two pairs of young lovers while attacking the evils that can be facili-
tated by loud, hypocritical proclamations of love for one’s country (Richards 2005,
116; Richardson 1993, 43).
As a Virginia gentleman of good breeding and good fortune, Munford viewed poli-
tics as an art practiced by dedicated men such as himself wielding power for the com-
mon good. Munford’s first play, The Candidates, written in 1770, illustrates how fragile
this balance of power can be, however. The play depicts an election for the House of
Burgesses in which one former Burgess, Worthy, has declined to run for reelection. As
a result, his companion in devoted public service, Wou’dbe, is faced with the challenge
of running among a field of candidates that includes the inebriated country gentle-
man Sir John Toddy and two aggressive social climbers, Strutabout and Smallhopes, in
a campaign sure to be dominated by vote-buying and the distribution of liquor to the
electorate. Only when Worthy is persuaded once again to join the political fray is the
commonweal properly served as he and Wou’dbe are reelected. Such challenges to the
traditional pre-Revolutionary order would only increase in Virginia after the outbreak
of the war (Richards 2005, 116–17).
 REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 43

Committees of Safety, originally authorized by the Continental Congress in 1774 to

enforce a ban on the sale of British goods, at times as the war dragged on offered over-
zealous local patriots a vehicle through which to interrogate and try those suspected
of loyalism and put their confiscated estates up for sale—an abuse of power one could
hardly call surprising in wartime (Richards 2005, 105–6). The Patriots presents such a
committee run entirely amok. Composed mostly of well-intentioned but hotheaded
and overhasty men such as Mr. Brazen, a gentleman of great patriotic passion but little
political understanding, Munford’s Committee is also steered into potentially repressive
actions by the guidance of another member, Mr. Tackabout, a vociferous Whig who is,
in fact, a Tory, but disguises his true leanings by loud speeches and hauling others before
the Committee to have their political leanings assayed. The Committee’s two main tar-
gets, Meanwell and Trueman, are not loyalists, but because their patriotism is rooted
in quiet principle rather than breast-beating nationalism, they easily fall under suspi-
cion of loyalism—an aspersion that also threatens to cost Trueman the wedded bliss he
so desires with Brazen’s daughter, Mira. Munford illustrates the potential for the abuse
of interrogative power in wartime not only through the persecution of Trueman and
Meanwell, but also through the Committee’s investigation of a group of Scotsmen—who
were a common presence in the Tidewater region as merchants and factors—merely for
the crime of being Scottish, which inherently renders them suspicious (115–16). (The
dangerous ignorance and hubris of the Committee is mirrored in the play by the miles
gloriosus—braggart soldier—Captain Flash, a recruiting officer who is Brazen’s pre-
ferred candidate for marriage to Mira.) Only after Trueman’s bold defense of his repu-
tation, in which he declares, “if a real attachment to the true interests of my country
stamps me her friend, then I detest the opprobrious epithet of tory, as much as I do the
inflammatory distinction of whig,” and through the backfiring of one of Tackabout’s
schemes are Munford’s heroes cleared of suspicion (Munford 1798, 105). Brazen agrees
to let Trueman marry Mira, and Tackabout is dismissed with a swift kick to the posterior
from Trueman. Whether or not Munford’s ethic of elitism and noblesse oblige could
survive the Revolution as anything more than the happy ending of a comedy is, however,
another story.
Rather than arguing the cause for or against independence or attempting to forge a
collective identity, Munford’s text seems concerned with pointing out specific flaws in
the social and political mores of Virginia. Three other late satires from the Revolutionary
era share a similar concern with what one might refer to as “local color” in a war that
spanned the Atlantic. In Boston, two of these satires, The Motley Assembly (1779) and
Sans Souci (1785)—both of which have been controversially attributed to Mercy Otis
Warren—sought to arrest the decline of republican virtue in Massachusetts, while a
London-printed satire on the Revolution, The Blockheads; or, Fortunate Contractor
(1782) pays particular attention to the purported folly of the citizens of occupied
New York in trusting the American alliance with the French (Philbrick 1972, 343–44;
Richards 1995, 104–7; Warren 1980, xx–xxiii). Both The Motley Assembly and Sans Souci
focus on the breakdown of the partisan divide between patriot and loyalist in wartime
Boston, a phenomenon evident in the presence of both camps at formal gatherings
44 JASON SHAFFER

and card parties. In The Motley Assembly, the voices of republican virtue are two young
Army captains, Aid and Careless, who each face the choice of whether or not to pay his
respects to the young ladies of loyalist families. While disregarding the odious politics
of their parents, both decide that such sentiments should always be challenged, or bet-
ter yet their professors cut dead socially. In Sans Souci the corruption of Boston soci-
ety seems even worse as its luminaries gather to gamble, an activity that is approved of
not only by society ladies but by the attorneys and doctors present. Only two allegori-
cal characters, Mrs. W—n (Mercy Otis Warren) and Republican Heroine (the British
republican Catherine Macaulay, a correspondent of Warren’s) disapprove of the immo-
rality and mixing of political affiliations on display among the card players.
In the hodgepodge of the 1782 ballad opera The Blockheads, the author has intermin-
gled allegorical scenes of the goddess Americana being betrayed by Gaul, the embodi-
ment of the Americans’ French allies, with two other plots suited to perhaps the most
conservative of American cities during the Revolution, not least because in 1782 it was
still occupied by the British. In the first plot, a barber named Shaver sells off his stock of
wigs (with a pun on Whigs) to become a contractor, a merchant who sells to the govern-
ment, only to find that, despite his newfound wealth, his old friends reject him. In the
other plot, Mynheer Van Braken Peace (a joke on New York’s Dutch origins) is blinded
by a French physician, Deception, and is only rescued by advice from a British doctor,
Meanwell, and by an English sailor who ropes Van Braken Peace in the street and leads
him to safety. While more partisan than Munford’s play, each of these late satires seems
to share particular local concerns that coexist with, and at times overtake, the broader
ideological claims of the playwright.

Amateur Theatricals and the

Revolution’s Theatrical Afterlife

While comparatively few of the propaganda plays of the American Revolution appear
to have been staged, amateur theatrical productions continued in a number of venues.
At Dartmouth College in 1779, students staged two dramatic dialogues written by John
Smith, a member of the faculty (Moody 1966, 3). Administrators at Harvard, Yale, and
the College of New Jersey, all of which had officially frowned on student theatricals
prior to the war, authorized or turned a blind eye to student performances, especially
of patriotic pieces, during the Revolution (Shaffer 2007, 113–37). British military the-
atricals, a long-standing tradition, continued in occupied territory, most notably dur-
ing the 1777–78 occupation of Philadelphia and in occupied New York (Brown 1995,
45–56, 85–132). While American military theatricals were much rarer, they did occur
sporadically during the Revolution, and in 1781–82 General Washington and the French
ambassador Luzerne attended two performances together in Philadelphia (Brown
1995, 138–39). The first, Francis Hopkinson’s patriotic oratorio The Temple of Minerva,
 REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 45

featured actors dressed as the Geniuses of France and America, whose alliance is blessed
by the goddess Minerva (Hastings 1926, 315–16). The second show featured a French
comedy, followed by a British farce and an illuminated spectacle honoring the thirteen
states and Washington’s leadership (Brown 1995, 139). Perhaps even more intriguingly,
professional theater began to reemerge during the early 1780s as negotiations to termi-
nate the war dragged on, with professional companies reemerging in Maryland and in
New York. The plays performed by these companies, however, were still British, and this
general dearth of American plays in the theaters even after independence raised one
of the more intriguing questions for lovers of the drama in the new American repub-
lic: what sort of play is proper for an American audience?
This question proved to be remarkably difficult to answer in the early years of postwar
independence. Unquestionably, during this period the people of the United States went
through a convulsion of nationalist cultural sentiment. Indeed, when Lewis Hallam,
Jr., and John Henry, managers of the pre-Revolutionary American Company, brought
their actors back to North America from a decade-long sojourn in the West Indies, they
felt the need in 1785 to rename themselves as the Old American Company as a way of
stressing their long-standing friendly ties with the new republic. Their initial attempts to
market patriotic spectacles, pantomimes, and comic dances, however, rapidly became
stale with the New York audiences that they first courted (Nathans 2003, 45). This failure
suggests a certain shift in the tastes of some audience members caused by the ongoing
prevalence of British plays in the available repertoire and the dominance of European
and British dramaturgical models for American playwrights beginning to experiment
with the form. Such influences “became an inescapable fact of the literary and cultural
life of the new republic” (Richards 2005, 3).
This challenge also represented a tremendous opportunity, however, for an author
who could pen a script that could capture the imagination of an audience by capitaliz-
ing on patriotic sentiment and the exciting events of recent history; a writer might have
the opportunity not only to shape the formation of a new, specifically American drama,
but also to engage in the broader discussion of what this new person, an “American,”
might be. While patriotic spectacles of the sort that Washington and Luzerne
attended in Philadelphia did not prove to be particularly good commercial draws as
the Revolution wound down, this did not stop budding young authors from writing
them, appealing to a sense of national unity that was often reinforced with allusions
to the martyred dead of the Revolutionary cause. One such work is John Parke’s paean
to Washington, Virginia: A Pastoral Drama, on the Birthday of an Illustrious Personage
and the Return of Peace, February 11th, 1784. The script consists of several translations
of Horace’s poems praising rustic life welded to some original lyrics. Set on the banks
of the Potomac, Virginia features a number of young shepherd swains and their rural
damsels singing the praises of Daphnis (Washington), the hero who has saved them
from war. At the conclusion, the Genius of Virginia enters and summons forth a train
of Revolutionary martyrs, chief among them General Warren, who join in a closing
chorus in praise of Daphnis. The piece appears never to have been enacted, even by an
amateur troupe.
46 JASON SHAFFER

While spectacle languished, some new efforts were made to generate full-length plays
that incorporated recent events into more ambitious dramatic models. The author of
The Double Conspiracy (1783), for instance, combined elements of melodrama and satire
to considerable effect in dramatizing life in Connecticut during the Revolution, par-
ticularly the smuggling of contraband British goods that took place between New York
and its northern neighbor via Long Island Sound. The dual conspiracies referred to are
an attempt by patriot gentlemen such as the characters Frankly, Standwell, and Fearless
to publicly reinforce the ban on the British trade. They also try to sniff out both loyalists
and the conspiracy of the local loyalists to smuggle in not only goods, but also possibly
armed loyalists from outside the state who will burn and pillage with impunity. Despite
the danger of the Tory plot, its local leader, a farmer named Gibber, is such a hapless vil-
lain that he can barely contain his secrets at any point in the play, and he turns a blind
eye as his daughter, Betty, engages in premarital sex with a British spy. While this play
also remained unproduced, its use of local detail suggests a genuine step forward among
these dramatic experiments. Likewise, Barnabas Bidwell, a student at Yale in 1784, wrote
a domestic tragedy, The Mercenary Match, that was acted by his classmates. For this play
Bidwell placed the war in the background to chronicle the sufferings of an ordinary
married couple, a model reflecting the so-called domestic “she-tragedies” of Nathaniel
Rowe from the early eighteenth century and George Lillo’s The London Merchant, a pot-
boiler of middle-class morality that was one of the few plays acceptable to even anti-
theatrical New Englanders. In The Mercenary Match, Mrs. Jensen, who was persuaded
by her late father to enter an arranged marriage with her husband, whom she does not
love, is convinced by the conniving Major Shapely to murder her husband before he
sets sail on a two-year mission to France on behalf of the United States. The murder
plot, of course, goes ludicrously awry, and bodies drop at a rapid pace in the closing
act, which owes something to Othello as well as Rowe. Nonetheless, Bidwell, who went
on to a career in Massachusetts politics before fleeing to Canada pursued by charges of
embezzlement, produces a moderately successful tragedy on a British model that none-
theless grafts Revolutionary history and distinctly American characters onto his source
material (Meserve 1977, 128).
Not all attempts to channel British dramatic models were successful, however. For
instance, in 1784 Peter Markoe, a Philadelphian born in St. Croix and educated at
Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn, offered Lewis Hallam his tragedy The Patriot Chief (Meserve
1977, 151). Written in high-flown blank verse and set in the ancient kingdom of Lydia,
The Patriot Chief echoes the patriotic tragedies of the Augustan era, which, to maintain a
certain distance from contemporary politics, often took place in such exotic locations as
antique Rome or Scythia. Such plays, especially Nathaniel Rowe’s Tamerlane, had been
moderately popular with colonial audiences (Shaffer 2007, 88–89). Markoe’s play, which
features an aging king facing a military uprising at the hands of his brother-in-law and a
surprise twist in the concluding act that the two men’s sons had been switched at birth,
is a fine example of the genre but seems to have offered nothing new to the American
stage. Hallam declined to produce it.
 REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 47

Before the decade was out, however, the Old American Company did produce the first
play by a native-born author to be produced professionally in the independent United
States: Royall Tyler’s The Contrast. Tyler, a Harvard graduate and attorney who had once
courted John Adams’s daughter Abigail, had been dispatched to New York on behalf
of Massachusetts as part of the Commonwealth’s pursuit of fugitives from the failed
Shays Rebellion. During his time in New York, his comedy opened on April 16, 1787. The
Contrast, a comedy of manners that owes a clear debt to the contemporary works of the
British playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, turns loose on self-consciously sophisti-
cated New York two relics of Revolutionary New England: the priggish patriot Colonel
Henry Manly and his bumbling country manservant, Jonathan. Jonathan’s misadven-
tures and mannerisms, especially his bad luck with sophisticated city girls and his impo-
litely straightforward manner of conversation, would inspire the stage Yankee, one of
the most important stock characters of the nineteenth century.
It is Jonathan’s employer Manly, however, who brings the drama of the
Revolutionary era to both its theatrical culmination and its close. Visiting New York
in order to lobby Congress for pensions for some of his wounded subordinates from
the Revolution, Manly makes a spectacle out of himself not only by his public protes-
tations of love for his country and his brothers-in-arms, but also by wearing about his
old uniform coat, rescuing his sister from assault by an Anglophile fop named Billy
Dimple, and wooing Maria Van Rough, the high-minded daughter of a New York mer-
chant whose own highest ideal is commercial self interest—or, “mind[ing] the main
chance” (Tyler 1997, 56). Manly bears onstage the historical legacy of the Revolution: a
strict republican ideology, an admiration for patriotic heroes such as Washington, a
keen memory of the sacrifices made by men such as the wounded veterans for whom
he pleads, and a distinctly American sense of nationality, one to which he alludes with
rather comic frequency throughout the play. By reincorporating the self-appointed
bearer of the Revolution’s residual culture into civilian society through his marriage
to an admiring woman raised in the purple of commerce, Tyler offers his audience
the opportunity to embrace both Manly’s self-professed Americanness and his prior
heroism, along with that of the other men to whose examples he refers throughout the
play. Manly, speaking onstage for the first time a few months before the United States
Constitution was adopted, seems to put himself, ultimately, not only at the mercy of
his betrothed, but of the popular sovereignty of the audience of this play that bridges
the gap between the drama of the Revolution and that of the early republic: “I have
learned that probity, virtue, honour, though they should not have received the pol-
ish of Europe, will secure to an honest American the good graces of his fair country-
women, and I hope, the applause of THE PUBLIC” (57). The British actor Thomas
Wignell, finally introduced to the American stage in the 1780s and standing in the
background of Tyler’s closing scene wearing Jonathan’s rustic costume as this line was
delivered by actor-manager John Henry, must surely have wished for much the same
thing from the audiences of the newly independent United States at the close of the
Revolutionary era (Moody 1966, 30).
48 JASON SHAFFER

Works Cited
Anon. 1774. Debates at the Robin-Hood Society, on MONDAY NIGHT, 19th of July, 1774.
New York: Printed by the Robin-Hood Society.
Anon. 1776a. The Battle of Brooklyn. New York: J. Rivington.
Anon. 1776b. The Blockheads; or, The Affrighted Officers. Boston: Printed in Queen Street.
Anon. 1779. The Motley Assembly. Boston: Nathaniel Coverly.
Anon. 1782. The Blockheads; or, Fortunate Contractor. London: G. Kearsley.
Anon. 1783. The Double Conspiracy. Hartford, CT: Hudson and Goodwin.
Anon. 1785. Sans Souci, Alias, Free and Easy. Boston: Warden and Russell.
Bailyn, Bernard. 1967. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press.
Berkin, Carol. 1974. Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist. New York:  Columbia
University Press.
Bidwell, Barnabas. 1784. The Mercenary Match. New Haven, CT: Meigs, Bowen, and Dana.
[Brackenridge, Hugh Henry.] 1776. The Battle of Bunkers-Hill. Philadelphia: Robert Bell.
———. 1777. The Death of General Montgomery, in Storming the City of Quebec. Norwich, CT: J.
Trumbull.
Brown, Jared. 1995. The Theatre in America during the Revolution. New  York:  Cambridge
University Press.
Cima, Gay Gibson. 2006. Early American Women Critics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Deloria, Philip J. 1999. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Dunlap, William. 2005. A History of the American Theatre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Granger, Bruce Ingham. 1960. Political Satire in the American Revolution, 1763–1783.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hastings, George Everett. 1926. The Life and Works of Francis Hopkinson. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Holton, Woody. 1999. Forced Founder: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American
Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Johnson, Odai, and William J. Burling. 2001. The Colonial American Stage, 1665–
1774: A Documentary Calendar. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
[Leacock, John.] 1776. The Fall of British Tyranny; or, American Liberty Triumphant.
Philadelphia: Styner and Cist.
Loftis, John. 1963. The Politics of Drama in Augustan England. Oxford: Clarendon.
Markoe, Peter. 1784. The Patriot Chief. Philadelphia: Printed for the author.
[Mary V.V.] 1774. A Dialogue, between a Southern Delegate, and His Spouse, on His Return from
the Grand Continental Congress. New York: n.p.
Meserve, Walter J. 1977. An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 1828.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Moody, Richard, ed. 1966. Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762–1909. Cleveland, OH: World.
Munford, Robert. 1798. A Collection of Plays and Poems by the Late Colonel Robert Munford, of
Mecklenberg County in the State of Virginia. Petersburg, VA: William Prentiss.
Nathans, Heather S. 2003. Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into
the Hands of the People. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Parke, John. 1786. Virginia: A Pastoral Drama, on the Birthday of an Illustrious Personage and the
Return of Peace, February 11th, 1784. Philadelphia: Eleazer Oswald.
 REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 49

Philbrick, Norman, ed. 1972. Trumpets Sounding: Propaganda Plays of the American Revolution.
New York: Benjamin Blom.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. 1943. A History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil
War. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Richards, Jeffrey H. 1991. Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World
Stage, 1607–1789. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 1995. Mercy Otis Warren. Boston: Twayne.
———. 2005. Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Richardson, Gary A. 1993. American Drama from the Colonial Period through World War
I: A Critical History. New York: Twayne.
Robin, Claude C. 1784. New Travels through North America, in a Series of Letters. Boston:  E.
E. Powers and N. Willis.
[Sewall, Jonathan Mitchell.] 1775. Cure for the Spleen. Or Amusement for a Winter’s Evening;
Being the Substance of a Conversation on the Times, Over a Friendly Tankard and Pipe.
Boston: n.p.
Shaffer, Jason. 2007. Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary
American Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Tyler, Royall. 1997. The Contrast. In Early American Drama, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards, 6–57.
New York: Penguin.
[Warren, Mercy Otis.] 1773. The Adulateur. Boston: n.p.
———. 1775. The Group. Boston: Edes and Gill.
———. 1980. The Plays of Mercy Otis Warren, edited by Benjamin Franklin V. Delmar,
NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints.
 CHAPTER 3

E A R LY R E P U B L IC A N  DR A M A

J E F F R EY H . R IC HA R D S

Despite the presence of theatres in colonial North America and the writing of closet
dramas about the war, theatre as a professional activity remained on uncertain ground
as a result of the Revolution and other social factors. Theatre buildings were unused
or appropriated by an occupying British military. Investors scattered. Audiences were
often put into uncomfortable positions of supporting an institution favored by the late
enemy. More than anything, Americans had little direct involvement in theatrical enter-
prises. Not only did relatively few colonials write for the stage, but also native-born indi-
viduals rarely took to the boards as actors or managed companies. But by 1800, new
playhouses appeared in multiple cities; fresh talent arrived on North American shores;
investors regrouped and organized not only in New York and Philadelphia, but also in
smaller cities like Norfolk; and most importantly for our purposes, residents of the new
republic began to write in unprecedented numbers for the living theatre rather than the
theatrum mundi. The half century following Cornwallis’s surrender turned the United
States into a genuine theatre culture.
Although it is impossible to find common ground for all American plays between
1785 and 1830, one large theme does stand out: the drama as a vehicle for republican sen-
timents. Comedies and tragedies, farces and operas, all manage to speak to the attempt
to define American interests or even an American identity. This essay, like many of the
others in the collection, makes no pretense at being comprehensive, but it does look to
examine some of the differing voices in the creation of a republican drama.

Early Depictions of Republicanism

Mercy Otis Warren, whose role as a political closet dramatist is covered in Jason Shaffer’s
“Revolutionary American Drama and Theatre” in this volume, hoped in the 1780s to
lead the United States to a newly conceived theatre where republican virtues could be
touted from the playhouse and not merely the page. Writing with her five sons in mind
 EARLY REPUBLICAN DRAMA 51

(most notably the second, Winslow), all of whom came of age during the Revolutionary
period, Warren conceived two five-act poetic dramas that she attempted to circulate
in London theatrical circles, but without success. She published them in 1790 with her
poems, and she earned the praise of a writer who would follow her lead, Judith Sargent
Murray, but because her conception of drama better suited the taste of an earlier period
than the late eighteenth century, she never had the pleasure—or misfortune—of see-
ing either the Ladies of Castile or The Sack of Rome realized onstage. Even so, her work
deserves attention as an early attempt to turn republican values into dramatic art.
The heroic republicans in Ladies of Castile are Donna Maria and Don Juan, charac-
ters from sixteenth-century Spanish history that Warren intended to represent her and
her husband, James, at least in the eyes of her sons. In the absence of the Holy Roman
Emperor, Charles V, who has established his government in Flanders, republican
rebels challenge the authoritarian rule of the house of Ferdinand. Maria and Juan de
Padilla take leadership of the anti-authoritarian forces, and, not surprisingly from this
author, the principal female character, Maria, proves to be the more dynamic character.
Warren’s Maria, for instance, justifies extracting cash from the church to support the
rebel cause on the grounds that the church has been an institution of oppression. Maria
is also a feminist and stands against the misogynist royalists by rejecting their attempts
to limit female participation in the civic order. As in her letters, Warren stops short of
an ideological feminism; she feared in real life to engage in male versus female debates
during wartime because they might sap the energies of a Revolutionary people, and so
Maria reasons in the drama. Still, the playwright leaves the impression that suppressing
women’s contributions to a state conceived in republican virtue is a mistake (Oreovicz
1992; Richards 1995, 108–14). The drama affirms the necessity of a house united in a type
of meritocracy against the inevitably divisive hereditary sinecures and corruption she
feared from Federalists.
The Sack of Rome takes place in the era of Attila the Hun. Once again, strong-minded
women populate the imagined stage, most notably the republican virgin, Eudocia.
Rome deserves to fall, based upon its many corruptions. Most notable of its faults, the
base treatment of women stands out as the main interest of the drama. As in her prewar
closet dramas, Warren in Sack of Rome imagines a society where men’s virtues are mea-
sured by their attitude toward women. Those who abuse or denigrate women deserve
death or condemnation; those who recognize the moral power of virtuous women earn
plaudits. Although Eudocia dies at the end, she successfully resists rape and thus viola-
tion, serving as a model of the self-sacrificing patriot woman (Richards 1995, 114–20).
For both of her verse dramas, Warren imagined a reading and viewing audience of peo-
ple with sufficient historical and literary education to recognize the depicted incidents
as bearing by analogy on the American scene; unfortunately for her, the imagined
United States had only moderate interest in being taught republicanism from the stage.
Neither the British nor the American playgoer was sufficiently interested in republican
women characters, for instance, to support playwrights whose primary goal was con-
verting the old British playhouse into a feminist school of virtue—at least not in the
mid-1780s.
52 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

Warren was but one of several playwrights who took their republicanism seriously.
As in prewar schools, plays served as more direct forms of instruction than Warren’s
ambitious if flawed dramas maintained. One example of a more didactic writer is Jabez
Peck, the presumed schoolmaster author of Columbia and Britannia (1787). Rather than
set the play in Rome, Peck uses the standard Romanized character names, dividing his
characters among male Columbians (republican American patriots), male Britons,
and the female allegorical figures of Columbia, Britannia, and Gallia. Following in the
mode of Warren, John Leacock, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Peck provides ideal-
ized or demonized characters to match the roles they are assigned by patriotic history,
along with a “stain’d with the blood, / That gushes from the veins of children” rhetoric
(Peck 1787, 34). Lord North is Paramount (in Leacock that name is used for the earl of
Bute); Benedict Arnold is Perjerus, “a traitor.” The imagined situation is that, following
the Seven Years’ War, Columbia and Britannia are united in peace. However, the British
government attempts to corrupt Britannia, leading to conflict with Columbia. Gallia
intervenes on the side of Columbia, and the republicans win the war. In the end, all three
female characters join hands in mutual friendship, an echo of an earlier scene in which
three of the Columbians unsheathe swords and hold them up as a sign of defiance. Peck
wrote this, he claims, as an exercise in “elocution,” presumably for students at Clinton
Academy in East Hampton, New York, where Peck taught classics, and as a lesson in
the origins and meaning of the Revolution. In essence, Peck claims a common heritage
and set of beliefs among the three nations but also puts forward the United States as
a fully constituted power, on the level with France and Britain. For this author, as for
later schoolmaster-playwrights, drama serves as a didactic tool for the establishment
of a republican civics and code of conduct, but it also reminds readers of the felt need
among American patriots to create a common history—in this case, one grounded on a
period of extraordinary virtue and the production of heroes, of whom Fabius (George
Washington) is the most prominent.
The notion of the stage as the nation’s academy of virtue held great attractions for a
number of US writers: more teach than delight, to recall Philip Sidney. Peck most likely
had his students execute Columbia and Britannia under the guise of teaching elocution
in the evolving role of schoolmaster/stage manager. Another such writer a decade later
adapted to the increasing stability of theatre as a cultural necessity. Charles Stearns, a
minister and preceptor of the Liberal School in Lincoln, Massachusetts, may have been
the most prolific American playwright of the 1790s. Rather than simply provide elocu-
tionary vehicles with obvious morals, Stearns looked at the professional stage in Boston
as well as the scripts of British plays available and rewrote the dramas to match the abili-
ties of young people so that they could grasp their meaning. This meant eliminating the
allegorical and symbolic characters of Peck and other pedagogues and replacing them
with characters that more resembled those on the boards of the professionally enter-
taining stage. Stearns’s method was to rewrite popular plays so thoroughly as to be new
works but to contain enough echoes of the original to satisfy parents that Stearns knew
the stage. Naturally, the plays affirm the value of moral behavior, adapted to the minds
of children and adolescents, but do so with characters whose deportment on stage more
 EARLY REPUBLICAN DRAMA 53

resembles the speakers in such popular dramas as Edward Moore’s The Foundling (1748;
Richards 2010, 83–87).
Somewhat less moralistic, but certainly as political, are several dramas that circu-
lated in print or manuscript but never made it to the stage. The Federalist writer Samuel
Low satirized his opponents in The Politician Out-Witted (1789). Low created a contem-
porary comedy of characters in New York, with typical late eighteenth-century types
like the old men, Trueman and Old Loveyet, who battle over politics and the fates of
their children. Low appeals to an in-crowd by having his two principal female charac-
ters, Harriet and Maria, talk about the current stage, but otherwise the talking parts all
resemble stock characters from British drama: the rural oaf, the French barber, the fop,
and the gossip being several. Indeed, at the end of the play, the country fellow, Humphry,
claims that the action just seen “is, for all the world, like the show I see t’other night, at
the Play-house” (Low 1789, 71). Low’s principal interest is the new constitution and his
undisguised desire to see it passed. His Anti-Federalist mouthpiece, Old Loveyet, is a
typical senex and a fool besides, who makes democracy appear to be the witless creation
of fools in general, while Federalism, with its retention of an elite, emerges as the only
sensible alternative (Meserve 1977, 144–45).
A somewhat more sprightly effort appeared that same year, a musical printed in
Boston but never staged. The Better Sort; or, The Girl of Spirit (1789), seems to have been
written by William Hill Brown, author of the novel The Power of Sympathy (1789), but
without a professional stage in the city at that time, the author had no chance to see his
comedy realized by actors. Because the tunes to the songs are all indicated, one could
stage this “operatical, comical farce,” as the title page calls it, even now. Like Low’s play,
Brown’s relies on familiar types from British drama, including the Mrs. Malaprop figure
(taken from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals), Mrs. Sententious, and the modi-
fied miles gloriosus figure, Captain Flash (borrowed from David Garrick’s Miss in Her
Teens), who affects the English sophisticate among the American rubes. The play has a
nationalist message, but, like a number of works from this early national period, it often
directs its more biting satire against American ignorance (in the Yankee figure Yorick)
than against the English roué (Flash). This is not too different from Royall Tyler’s The
Contrast (1787). Yorick is allowed to recover some of his Yankee notions in service of an
emerging American nationalism, but as with Low, drama in the 1780s and 1790s tends
to enforce class positioning rather than overturn it. With Federalists the prime movers
(but not exclusively so) behind the professional stage, one is not surprised to see a num-
ber of early plays adapting the class structure of British drama to American terms rather
than create new models wholesale; for the theatrical establishment, democracy threat-
ened institutional verities— apparently, even the mild republicanism of Low and Brown
was too much for theatre managers.
Authors like Warren, Peck, Stearns, Low, and Brown wrote for a combined stage, one
that contained some mixture of civics, morality, and entertainment, that attracted writ-
ers in the first two decades of the new republic, but that after 1800 became the prov-
ince of village pageants and children’s recitations rather than the expanding professional
theatre.
54 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

American Infiltration of a
British Stage

Meanwhile, American playwrights tried their wares on the professional stage, at once
succeeding in expanding the number of voices heard in the playhouse and yet failing
to alter more than slightly the overwhelmingly British repertory that stage managers
and audiences demanded. What impresses is not the success of American writers but
their efforts to find distinctive niches within the larger temple of Anglo-American
dramatic authorship. The “long” 1790s (1787–1801) inspired lawyers, diplomats, hair-
dressers, painters, actresses, and essayists to try their hands at writing for the stage.
Flush with excitement over current events—the creation of a new constitution, the
French Revolution, the open arena of republican cultural formation, and the stirrings
of abolition and women’s rights movements—writers in the United States sought to
make at least some of those events aspects of their plays. At the same time, American
authors faced enormous hurdles. The elite investors in local playhouses had great
power over the repertory, sometimes in conflict with popular tastes (Nathans 2003).
Stage managers brought with them from England the British system, a strictly hierar-
chical and rigid notion of character portrayal and intra-company politics that culmi-
nated in the early 1800s in the establishment of the star system. Anyone writing for the
“American stage” had to master the “British system”—a largely inflexible set of rules
and expectations that worked against encouraging more than token local author-
ship. The wonder is that any American managed to get staged at all (Richards 1997,
ix–xxxvii).
As Jason Shaffer notes in the foregoing essay, Tyler’s The Contrast became the first
American play to have anything like success on US stages. Not only did the comedy have
the unusual good fortune of being performed three times in its first season in New York,
but it stayed in repertory into the nineteenth century in several cities. Not surprisingly,
Tyler pushed his luck. At least two other plays, May-Day in Town (1787) and The Georgia
Spec, which premiered in Boston in 1797, appeared in New York for token performances
and then vanished from theatrical history, never seen again on American stages or even
printed either in full or at all. Despite the discouragement and his decision to suspend
playwriting activities, Tyler himself did not quite abandon the stage. In the early 1800s,
he turned to poetic theatrical criticism in the mode of Charles Churchill and Robert
Lloyd, authors of satiric reviews of the London theatre in the 1760s, but now with the
Boston stage in mind. But Tyler’s critiques differed from those of his British predeces-
sors in his essential hostility to the stage as an institution. By the time in his late life when
he turned to writing biblical dramas, Tyler had rejected the stage altogether (Richards
2005, 296–315). It was as if in the 1810s the playwright had turned back to the theatre of
virtue imagined by Mercy Otis Warren thirty years before.
Tyler’s contemporary William Dunlap, a painter by trade who had spent several years
in England, also heard the siren call of the stage in the late 1780s. Although Dunlap had
 EARLY REPUBLICAN DRAMA 55

no equivalent early success to the New Englander’s The Contrast, he made a living from
the stage in ways very few other Americans could match. First as a playwright (a delib-
erately imitative one), then a translator from the German, and then a professional stage
manager, Dunlap was the most prominent American working in the theatre of the new
republic. Late in his life, years after he had left any professional connection with the stage,
he wrote what was then the definitive history of American theatre (Dunlap 1833). In the
early twentieth century Dunlap earned the sobriquet “Father of the American Theatre,”
a misleading title. The American theatre was, even in Dunlap’s hands, a British theatre
of sorts; nevertheless, while he learned to meet the taste of the age for imported dramas,
both as a translator of August von Kotzebue and manager of New York’s John Street and
Park Theatres, he sought on occasion to develop a drama that built on American materi-
als. Dunlap’s efforts and troubles are instructive for American theatre overall.
Dunlap’s first success was a sequel to two plays by the Irish writer John O’Keeffe, The
Poor Soldier (1783) and Patrick in Prussia (1786). Centering on an Irish servant, Darby’s
Return (1789) allows the eponymous character to recount his adventures in America
and Europe, as suggested by O’Keeffe’s two original plays, both popular in the United
States. The author creates comedy from the recognition in the audience that Darby is
a coward-braggart who, back in Ireland, stretches his achievements beyond all credu-
lity, but Dunlap Americanizes his character by having Darby observe the celebration
of the new constitution in the United States and offer a paean to freedom: “Oh may
their little country ever prove, / The land of liberty and seat of love” (Dunlap 1789, 13).
This strategy—building upon well-known British works but introducing local inter-
est—would serve a number of American playwrights in the first half century of the
republic.
His most notable play is André (1798), a daring effort to make a tragedy out of a
famous event in Revolutionary history, the capture and hanging in 1780 of Major John
André, the alleged British spy. Dunlap felt he had to wait to bring the play forward; many
New Yorkers retained sympathies for André, who had entertained them in occupied
Manhattan with the military players in the British army, leaving Dunlap with the tick-
lish task of pleasing patriots, who saw André’s hanging as justified, and former Tories or
British sympathizers, who viewed the British major as a martyr-hero to Washington’s
cruelty. As with Peck’s elocutionary drama, the key figure is the Washington stand-in,
The General, a rather feebly heroic leader who struggles with his decision to hang
André. The original staging of the play was marred by butchered lines and some local
politics, and despite a full house on opening night, the drama quickly lost its audience
by the third night. Dunlap gave up on the play; it was, after all, equivocal on who was the
hero: Washington? André? The young Virginia hothead, Bland? That equivocation mir-
rored the culture overall: was theatre to be a continuation not only of the British system
but also of British sympathies? Or would there be a new theatre ahead, one that tried for a
more honest look at mythic events—the forerunner to a startling new realism? Both and
neither. Five years after the theatrical failure of his set piece, Dunlap recast it as a musical
comedy to be used as an afterpiece. The Glory of Columbia, Her Yeomanry! (1803) made
heroes out of the farmer-militia who captured André. That vehicle suited the audience
56 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

better—it lasted, in various versions, for another half century on the American boards
(Richards 1997, 58–61; Richards 2005, 124–39; Trees 2000).

Staging the Exotic

If using American history was one way Columbian dramatists sought distinction,
others turned to more exotic locales than New York or Boston. As a strategy, staging
the exotic proved mutedly successful. David Humphreys, a diplomat and one of the
Connecticut Wits, entered the theatrical lists with his translation of Antoine-Marin
Lemierre’s The Widow of Malabar (1790), staged by the Old American Company in 1790
and 1791. Where that company failed to stage a number of New York–set plays writ-
ten after The Contrast, one set in colonial India moved the managers to action. For the
most part, Humphreys is faithful to the 1770 French original in language and staging;
he uses verse and keeps the dramatic centerpiece, the sati (widow immolation) and the
funeral pyre. Lemierre meant to satirize the clergy and their baneful effect on French
society, with the successful rescue of the widow a statement about enlightenment and
the eradication of superstition from society. However, Humphreys alters the ending and
adds his own prologue in order to affirm American republicanism as the ideal social
framework. Although the managers staged the play three times over two years, a mark
of its popularity, a British translation by Mariana Stark of the same play replaced that of
Humphreys—another lesson in the difficulty of maintaining an American presence on
US stages (Richards 2008).
A locale closer to American shores, although still with exotic elements, the Caribbean,
marked the play by J. Robinson, The Yorker’s Stratagem (1792). An actor with the Old
American Company, Robinson provided his employers with an entertaining comedy
of American sea captains and island folk, including main roles for characters in black-
face (Goudie 2006, 153–74). Many of the plays in this period make mention of black
dialect characters or allow them brief appearances onstage; few, if any, of those in
white-operated theatres were played by African American actors. The play conceives
the possibility that one of the blackface characters, Banana, will marry a white heiress,
but the collapse of that scheme seems less for reasons of race than class, even though
much of the comedy relies on humor generated from faux black dialect. In any event,
the island exoticism did not compute into multiple performances. Whether the main-
land racial situation made repetition of the comedy impossible or not, Robinson, like so
many other playwrights writing for a North American audience, had no further success
as a published or performed author in the United States.
Part of the theatrical curiosity about the exotic had to do with the expansion of US
commercial interests around the globe; another part had to do with foreign affairs. In
both cases, the expansion of American shipping and US military and diplomatic pres-
ence across the globe essentially made all locations potential settings for “American”
plays. As in the case of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary didactic drama, writers
 EARLY REPUBLICAN DRAMA 57

for the new national stage sought a republican idiom within a system that resisted repub-
lican values. Susanna Rowson, a writer who had relative success negotiating both system
and local politics, used her personal experience as a child in Massachusetts and early
adulthood as a writer and actress in Britain to merge politics and art into a hybrid form.
Cashing in on her status as a new actress to Philadelphia (but schooled in the British
system) and her desire to win the favor of city republicans, Rowson penned and acted in
her musical drama, Slaves in Algiers (1794) in her first season in the United States. One
of the few late eighteenth-century American plays currently read and studied, Slaves
attempted to draw its audience with a variety of appeals. Naturally, the North African
locale provided the sort of exotic setting that Humphreys found congenial with Widow
of Malabar, but Rowson was also playing to the audience’s recognition of the capture of
Americans by Algerian corsairs as a recent event. Rowson’s task was to tame both the
exotic location and the threat posed by Islamic captivity and reconceive them as a pleas-
ing comedy.
She achieved that end by working the system. Ensuring that her husband and her
sister- in-law, both actors in Thomas Wignell’s Philadelphia company, had parts in the
evening’s entertainment (always a main play plus farce or other afterpiece), Rowson cast
herself as well as Olivia, the young republican heroine. The play features an Algerian
despot, Muley Moloch; captive women of various nationalities; and the strong-minded
republican mother, Rebecca. The plot is simple enough: will the virtuous captives free
themselves from the clutches of the tyrannical Moslem and his minions? Rowson’s inno-
vation is to center the action on the women. Not only are Olivia and Rebecca stalwarts in
virtue and republicanism, but the English Jew (by birth) Fetnah also shows pluck, brav-
ery, and filial devotion even to a scoundrel father. Rowson’s larger than normal female
cast, while in the end espousing only the mildest feminism, makes a statement about the
importance and bravery of women to a republic. Her estranged couple, Constant, once a
British soldier in the Revolution, and Rebecca, the American woman who had to marry
her officer on the sly against her father’s wishes, represent the reunited Anglophone
nations—or so Rowson hoped to enact. With a distant and exotic enemy, the Islamic
other, who in addition to his unscrupulous behavior is also a comic buffoon, Rowson
encourages her audience to unite under multiple flags and in essence put aside their
national differences for a transatlantic republicanism that enables women to be full (or
at least fuller) partners in its execution.
European settings provided a certain exoticism in depicting the pursuit of republican
virtues. Sarah Pogson’s The Female Enthusiast (1807) follows the eponymous Charlotte
Corday through a fiction of the French Revolution and the 1793 murder of Jean-Paul
Marat, which, while real enough as a historical event, has been much altered to meet the
needs of drama. We meet familiar American republican sentiments spoken by French
characters, as by Henry Corday:

the bias of my mind Fondly inclines to sweet domestic life; But principle, love of true
liberty, and my torn country’s welfare all prompt me to every action that may evince
my zeal for each. (Pogson 1995, 143)
58 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

Once again, we see American drama affirming the domestic versus civic duty theme,
with both as virtues but one or the other the virtue of the present hour. Meanwhile,
Marat enthuses over his destruction of enemies to the Revolution; he imagines each
head rolling like “an abject football” (155). After Corday kills him—a woman in action
on a civic stage—the play debates with itself about the meaning of revolution. In essence,
Pogson affirms a conservative revolution, one that validates liberty and virtue over
social upheaval. In fact, the character Duval sees the United States as the ideal, where
every citizen can support himself and every “female who respects herself is safe” (161).
In the end, after Charlotte is executed, her brother Henry calls on the surviving sym-
pathetic characters to “cross the Atlantic wave” to America and live among “the sons of
true-born liberty” (181). Thus the French Revolution on stage is really the American one
replayed, affirming liberty without violence as true republicanism.
Among other European locations for republican drama, Switzerland made an appro-
priate choice. Providing background with such historical characters as William Tell and
events as the Battle of Morgarten (1315), in which Swiss confederates defeated an invad-
ing Austrian force, the émigré Frances Wright introduced her verse drama Altorf (1819)
to an American audience. Wright’s story is fiction. A Swiss patriot, Eberard de Altorf,
finds his loyalties pressed from several sides: a fellow Swiss soldier, de Rheinthal, con-
tends with him about leadership; an Austrian kinsman, de Rossberg, appears in Swiss
territory as a spy to detach Altorf from the Swiss ranks; and the knight’s love, Rosina, de
Rossberg’s daughter, appears in disguise to lure him from his virtuous and republican
wife, Giovanna. As a love tragedy, of course, everything ends badly for the principals, but
the British-born Wright uses the opportunity to draw analogies between ancient bat-
tles for Swiss independence and the attainment of freedom of expression in the United
States, and she contrasts both with the England of the present day. “America is the land
of liberty,” Wright expresses in the preface. “Here is the country where Truth may lift
her voice without fear; where the words of Freedom may not only be read in the closet,
but heard from the stage.” This is not the case overseas: “there is not a stage in England
from which the dramatist might breathe the sentiments of enlightened patriotism and
republican liberty” (Wright 1995, 218). Her hope, as a new arrival in the country, was to
contribute to “the land of liberty and of genius” (219). Part of the liberty also had to do
with women and their roles in republican politics. Giovanna and Altorf have no sensual
chemistry, but they respect each other’s virtues and nationalism. Rosina, Altorf ’s true
love, at first only cares about love, nothing about politics. By the end, though, she real-
izes she has swayed Altorf to leave the Swiss camp, making it impossible, in his own eyes,
to return alive. Giovanna enters the final scene “rolled in a soldier’s mantle” and survives
the suicides of the lovers to pronounce the final words.
For Wright, uncontrolled physical love undermines virtue and republicanism and
must be surmounted to achieve the freedom she speaks of in her preface. In other words,
women should not be content to be swayed by amorous passion but should find higher
passions to obey.
Native Americans served as homegrown exotics on the American stage. In New York
and Philadelphia, among other cities, Native emissaries to treaty negotiations often
 EARLY REPUBLICAN DRAMA 59

attended the theatre as guests or by their own choice, and they were sometimes encour-
aged to perform dances. Thus it was not unusual in cities near Indian populations to
encounter the real thing in attendance in the 1790s and early 1800s. However, as Native
populations were threatened by white encroachment, theatregoers contented them-
selves with tawny-painted white actors performing identity, as concocted by white play-
wrights. This led to a fad in Indian dramas in the 1830s and 1840s, before the collapse
into parody (as in the work of John Brougham) in the 1850s and the end for a long time
of serious “Indian” characters and plays.
In the 1780s and 1790s, Native characters served as models of virtue and repub-
lican restraint. Royall Tyler exploits this tendency in the “Song of Alknomook,” as
sung by his character Maria in The Contrast, whereby the eponymous Indian repre-
sents stoic self-sacrifice along a republican model. The lost opera Tammany; or, The
Indian Chief (1794), by Anne Kemble Hatton, also featured Native characters voic-
ing republican principles, as did the largely lost play Volunteers (1795) by Susanna
Rowson. The tendency to see Natives as Rousseauvian innocents would eventually
turn as the culture grew increasingly hostile to the notion of Indians as fighters for
independence: better to see them as doomed savages, remnants of a world fast clos-
ing upon them, than as people with parallel goals of simplicity and liberty. Thus the
actual performances of Native people are swallowed up in the imagined acts of an
English stage.
One of the earliest surviving postwar plays with an Indian theme is James Nelson
Barker’s The Indian Princess (1808). Written during the Captain John Smith revival in
the early nineteenth century, Barker’s “melo-drame,” with music by John Bray, appeared
in the author’s native Philadelphia and other cities two decades before the craze for
Indian plays really took hold, but it exerted sufficient influence on future portrayals
of Pocahontas (even borrowed by Walt Disney for the 1995 feature cartoon). Barker’s
operatic text, meant to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of
Jamestown, opens with the Jamestown explorers making landfall and celebrating their
enterprise. Exotic touches, like imagining Pocahontas hunting flamingoes, merge the
play space of the theatre with the fantasy of Caribbean adventure tales. The supreme
leader of the Indian confederation that Smith and the Virginia Company encountered
in 1607, Powhatan, in Barker is a largely toothless character who dotes on his princess
daughter but is easily swayed to perfidy by the sorcerer Grimosco. The play recounts
some of Smith’s recorded adventures, including the threatened head-bashing, and tells
of others that appear in his late-life autobiography rather than his Jamestown writings,
but the pivot point of the drama is Pocahontas’s conversion from savage huntress to
cooing lover in the arms of John Rolfe. She learns, for example, that erotic love, which
apparently Indians don’t comprehend, is what separates the savage from the civilized
person—and thus herself from her people. Barker fantasizes that Native women are the
accommodating middle between European imperialism and savage fixity. In true melo-
dramatic fashion, the hyper-masculine Native warriors are expelled from the stage, leav-
ing the princess to celebrate Jamestown along with the other white characters (Richards
2005, 166–87).
60 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

When two decades later the young American actor Edwin Forrest initiated a con-
test for the best play with an indigenous subject, the Indian concept play received its
first major boost. The playwright of Metamora, John Augustus Stone, crafted a drama
around the historical figure of King Philip, the English name for the Wampanoag
leader, Metacom. Once more, history serves as a source of material, but now European
is matched with American, continuing the trend to stress both American distinctive-
ness and its English and British traditions. On the one hand, Metamora emphasizes his
Nativeness through his athletic prowess and skill in nature, hunting the most danger-
ous animals and leaping down frightening stage precipices. On the other, his simplicity
and odd mixture of natural virtue and savage bloodlust make him the ultimate victim
against European craftiness and subtlety. As in Indian Princess, where Smith is viewed
as a virtual god by young Natives, we see Metamora largely through the eyes of young
and innocent European observers, who find in the fated chieftain much to admire and
absorb into the (future) American character. But the point is, as with other such dramas,
that the Indian character cannot survive in Native bodies. Rather, only whites—like the
actor playing Metamora—can properly synthesize the noble dimensions of the Native
character with the inevitable triumph of white civilization (Sayre 2005, 80–125).
In other words, the Native hero is a type of the republican but is not a republican him-
self. He fights with bravery for his country, he sacrifices his own pleasures for the greater
good of the people, and he resists tyranny, all good republican actions, but he has no
future because his idea of country is in direct conflict with that of Anglo-Americans.
Both Metamora and Carabasset (1830), a drama by the Maine playwright Nathaniel
Deering, serve to elevate the heroic individual native but ultimately to denigrate
Indians as a whole. Deering’s drama is also historical, based on the English mas-
sacre of Kennebec River Natives at the Indian town of Norridgewock in 1724. Long a
touchy subject in Maine—historians divided between sympathy for the French-allied
Kennebecs and hatred for the French priest who kept them under Rome’s thumb—the
Norridgewock killings made a good drama. Carabasset lacks the overwhelming char-
acter of a Metamora, but he dies in a similar fashion, a brave resister to incursion, even
while the playwright carefully avoids blaming the English for the event. Carabasset is
one of Gordon Sayre’s heroic Indian chieftains, although he and the play in which he is
contained have attracted little critical attention (Sayre 2005, 23–24). As happens during
the early national period as a whole, the Native represents the republican without being
republican.

American Variety

In many ways, American playwrights sought to emulate their British confreres by writ-
ing comedies of manners, social comedies, satiric pieces, comic operas, and tragedies,
along with, from the early 1800s onward, melodrama, but set them in relatively familiar
scenes in the United States or even tried to replicate British settings. In the latter case,
 EARLY REPUBLICAN DRAMA 61

writers for the American theatre sometimes misgauged the US audience. Mrs. Sarah
Marriott, an actress for the Old American Company in the 1794–95 season, offered up
a piece of syllabub called The Chimera; or, Effusions of Fancy (1795) twice during the
acting year but found little support either time. Not only did she add to a stage already
saturated with farces that contained characters like Marriott’s Lord Aberford and Sir
Lambert Martin, but she also attempted to glorify her attempt through what spectators
saw as a pretentious prologue, full of “Love and Freedom” rhetoric and with appeals to
the “Great WASHINGTON” or apostrophes to “O America!” (Marriott 1795, 3). Her
example—Edinburgh native, but American failure—suggested strongly that US audi-
ences wanted something more than mere Britishness on their boards (Richards 2005,
31–32).
Better efforts, but with no more success than Marriott achieved, came from the
Massachusetts writer Judith Sargent Murray. An essayist and poet, Federalist and femi-
nist, Murray took advantage of the newly opened Boston theatre to offer up two dra-
mas, one each in 1795 and 1796. Although the earlier Virtue Triumphant (also called The
Medium) had a certain sprightliness to it as a comedy of manners, her more captivat-
ing play was The Traveller Returned, a comedic drama about the Revolution. As with
Marriott, Murray, too, has her paeans to Washington and America, but they come
organically from the plot, even if it is borrowed from a British source (Richards 2005,
85–104). Rambleton, an American whose prewar marriage ended badly and caused him
to remove to England, returns in disguise to Boston (we presume—no city is named)
near the end of the war to see whether he can salvage his relationship with Louisa
Montague, his estranged wife. The patriotism enters through Rambleton/Montague’s
son, Harry Camden, an American officer full of noble republican principles, who nearly
marries his sister until all the revelations at the end clarify the relationships. At the same
time, Murray injects a comedy of types through Rambleton’s Irish servant Patrick, who
speaks in traditional “bulls” or ridiculous stage Irishisms, and through the villains, the
Vansittarts (the husband within this couple is afflicted with a blundering, stage-Dutch
pronunciation). Thus Murray unites a many-pronged love plot with issues arising from
the war. In one scene, for example, Rambleton is grilled by a committee of safety, curious
about his wartime years in Britain. But finally it is not so much the war itself as the com-
plexities of Anglophone relationships generated by transatlantic conflict and exchange.
Although Mrs. Montague admits her fault in the original breakup of her marriage, she
also appears as an intelligent, even intellectual woman at a time when there were few
such models on either the British or the American stage. The playwright has all the
Montagues revealed to each other and the proper relationships established at the end,
but Murray’s point is that reintegration of American society will take time. The place of
ethnicity, after all, has been reduced to comic typing, not full absorption into a repub-
lican polity, even if, for the Anglo-American characters, some manner of transatlantic
union may be fulfilled.
Another social comedy with interesting locational themes is John Murdock’s The
Triumphs of Love (1795), a play with only a single performance to its credit. Murdock,
a Philadelphia hairdresser, tested the elite bias of the stage by offering up a play full of
62 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

democratic sympathies. Taking those further than most American playwrights of the
era, Murdock has his Irish character, Patrick, triumph both over his Anglo-American
employer, Peevish, and get the Anglo-American servant girl, Jenny. Even more intrigu-
ing, the author allows his Africanist character, Sambo, to achieve a status as “citizen”
in ways few dramatists exercised for their black characters. Murdock clearly rubbed
against a variety of social prejudices and no doubt irritated some of the elites he mocks
in his play, as with his succeeding play, The Politicians (1798), where multiple blackface
characters engage in political discussion with republican and democratic overtones.
Thus we see that native-born playwrights who set their plays in American locales and
address American themes do not necessarily fare better in the playhouse than non-
native writers with insider connections like J. Robinson and Sarah Marriott.
For all the struggles of American playwrights to create lasting hits, the number who
achieved anything like a repertory standard is very small. Dunlap’s conversion of André
to The Glory of Columbia provided one palpable hit; John Daly Burk’s Bunker-Hill; or,
The Death of General Warren (1797), provided another (much to Dunlap’s disgust). Full
of fustian and fury, but a great stage spectacle, Burk’s tale of bravery on both sides of the
conflict remained in demand for several years. The Irish writer became southern by his
residence in Petersburg, Virginia, but when he wrote Bunker-Hill, he was an active émi-
gré, onboard ship ahead of the defeat of the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798. The play
begins with the aftermath of the Lexington-Concord battles and ends with the conclu-
sion of the Bunker Hill fight and the death of General Joseph Warren, long recognized as
one of the first martyrs to American freedom. Burk uses a British officer, Abercrombie,
as his touchstone for the meaning of the Revolution. Although a loyal Brit, Abercrombie
sees on his own side a loss of principle; England, he thinks, is like “ancient Rome when
she had lost her rights” (Burk 1966, 73), a parallel that is extended later in the play.
Complicating his life is his love for Elvira, an American woman, who pulls away when
he cannot renounce his allegiance to a corrupt power. Of course, Abercrombie dies in
battle and Elvira mourns extremely—it is what spectators expect from war tragedies.
But the final scenes focus on Warren, who declares “My countrymen have fought with
Spartan valor, / Like hungry lions, bathing them in blood” (85), his death, and a pageant
of liberty to close, a Columbian spectacle of overthrowing tyranny and achieving free-
dom. Here the émigré outpatriots the patriots in speaking republican truths.
Although most of the writing for the theatre in the United States occurred in north-
ern states, the southern theatre did generate original works. John Beete, for instance,
an actor in Charleston, mounted his Contrast-like comedy The Man of the Times; or,
A Scarcity of Cash (1797) in that city. Set in Philadelphia and dealing with one of the
frequent monetary crises of the early republic, The Man of the Times satirizes the money
grubbers among the Americans for their antisocial attitudes. The problem is that native
republicanism is stifled by imported corruption. Early on, one of the characters praises
the improved US educational system, noting that “Republicans can only be properly
instructed in republican governments” (Beete 1797, 2). However, the thrust of the play
is vigilance against the undermining of republicanism for liberal acquisitiveness and
greed. Old Screwpenny is a miser of the first order, a recognized type of the British stage.
 EARLY REPUBLICAN DRAMA 63

His son, Charles, noteworthy as a playboy of sorts, now returns from Europe with dif-
ferent eyes, seeing his country as a place he wants to improve. By defeating his father’s
schemes to defraud and accumulate, Charles essentially declares that unbounded
desire for wealth is antirepublican and anti-American. Thus the “man of the times”—
the self-serving person—“will be hated and despised, and virtue be ever crowned with
success” (38).
Another writer from the South who entered the Charleston theatrical lists was William
Ioor from the now-extinct town of Dorchester, South Carolina. One of his two known
plays, Independence (1805), sounds as if it will follow in the “Great WASHINGTON”
mold, but by plot and setting, it seems far from it. Based on an English novel and set
in England, Independence looks more like the effort of a mooning Anglophile whose
idea of American theatre is a British theatre that happens to be in a former colony than
of a Francis Marion patriot. However, through the invocation of a capitalized “inde-
pendence” motif, Ioor intends the theme to carry its message to theatrically national
Americans. The conflict between the independent farmer, Charles Woodville, and the
tyrannical landlord, Lord Fanfare, could be easily translated into a familiar theme in
republican drama without ever changing the local from the Isles. Thus Ioor, while tram-
pling through some of the same lord-of-the-manor territory plowed by Marriott, insists
through his repetition of “INDEPENDENCE” that the play has everything to do with
the freeholder, wherever he may be, as the bedrock of society.
Ioor’s other play, The Battle of the Eutaw Springs (1807), is overtly set in the New
World, this time Revolutionary South Carolina. But in some ways, it dilutes its repub-
licanism through comic nonsense involving the antiquated stage virgin and other low
characters. The battle was a real one, leading to major casualties on both sides, although
technically a British victory. In the end, a soldier on the British side, one Queerfish, who
is noted more for his cowardice than anything, ends up quitting the British service and
becoming in peace an American citizen. This transformation is no doubt key for Ioor.
While the General Nathaniel Greene character is the one to declare, “We are free!” it is
Queerfish who represents the American hybrid character: an Irishman in the British
army turned American citizen. Whether in Charleston or Savannah or New  York,
American playwrights often temper their nationalism with republicanism as the true
cause they honor, suggesting that for decades after the Revolution, a profound ambigu-
ity in identity persisted between a localized ideal like the American nation and a more
transatlantic one, the republic of virtue.
The War of 1812 provided further fodder for American playwrights. St. George Tucker,
whose manuscript play The Wheel of Fortune (1797) covers some of the same territory as
John Beete’s Man of the Times but never saw the stage, wrote two plays on the new war,
one at the beginning and one at the end, based upon newspaper accounts. Neither of
those plays was staged—again a testimony to the difficulty of access for American writ-
ers to the professional theatre (Richards 2010, 87–92). Mary Carr published her drama
of the war, The Fair Americans, in 1815, and while there is no extant record of a produc-
tion, Amelia Howe Kritzer argues on circumstantial grounds that it may have been per-
formed under a different name (Kritzer 1995, 16–17). In any event, Carr’s play follows a
64 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

familiar theme, or set of themes: how the war divides friends (British and Americans)
and splits families and villages, and how it reinvigorates republican principles. In Act 3,
for example, two older men, Harley and Fairfield, discuss the meaning of the war. For
Harley, a veteran of the Revolution, the conflict restores Revolutionary values. For one
thing, “ ’Tis the only expedient we could resort to, to prove that we are not the poor,
mean, pusillanimous nation Europe thinks us.” More importantly, the war will resolve
certain outstanding issues left over from the prewar conflicts that occurred in the United
States over the embargo of a few years before, including, “First, our manufactories will
improve; that will call our natural productions into use. Next, the customary luxuries
will fall into disuse; that will introduce simplicity of heart and manners” (Carr 1995,
197). These republican ideals also infuse many of the female characters; Anna and other
young women make a flag, which they present to the soldiers in an elaborate ceremony
in Act 4. This leads later to Anna and Sophia being captured by Indians, then rescued
by the senior Harley, in a scene that leaves the Indians as the villains, with two British
soldiers as aids to Harley in saving the young women. Complications arise when the two
Brits are captured by American forces, but in the end Sophia is engaged to Belford, one
of the British prisoners, as a sign of the national amity to succeed the war. As with the
Revolution, American drama, conceived upon a British stage, provides outlets for the
desire to reunite with Britain as cultural kin under the same transatlantic sky.
One other phenomenon to note is the return of the Yankee. After a few Jonathan char-
acters in the immediate postwar period, Yankees appear occasionally until the 1820s,
when their revival begins. Plays like David Humphreys’s Yankey in England (1815) keep
the type alive, while Samuel Woodworth’s successful comedy The Forest Rose (1825),
urges the type onward. The place of the Yankee is a complex one. Known now largely as a
bumpkin or cornpone character, a simple blunderer, the Yankee had many variations, all
of them in service to different kinds of comedy. In The Contrast, Jonathan is both a cow-
ard—a “waiter” rather than soldier—and a true-blue American. In Forest Rose, Jonathan
Ploughboy is clever and belittling. Tyler has his Yankee serve as the object of humor
through his abject naiveté; Woodworth has his make his humor from the Africanist
servant, Rose, whose color and other racially marked characteristics are mocked by
Ploughboy. The two wars are now in the past (although there is a British villain in Forest
Rose) and so, it seems, is some of the republican rhetoric of earlier dramas. To be sure, in
Woodworth there is much “simple cot” talk to establish a theme of rural simplicity, but in
the union of villain and villagers in the mockery of Rose, an insidious element becomes
overt: mocking the victimized other. Race and class both inflect what passes as republi-
canism in drama; keeping the simplicity of Colonel Manly’s speeches in Tyler becomes
impossible in the racialized world of plays like Woodworth’s (Richards 2005, 226–37).
After 1830, the rise of type drama, topical plays, ethnic drama, and other United States–
inflected forms pushed republicanism to the rear of the stage. Yet for more than four
decades, Americans sought to give their plays the stamp of uniqueness through the expres-
sion of republican principles. But the drama has its own laws, its own energy, and could not
be reduced to a political formula. No one argued with virtue, but over time it became sepa-
rated from the politics of sacrifice that gave the American doctrine of virtue its civic energy.
 EARLY REPUBLICAN DRAMA 65

Works Cited and Further Reading

Barker, James Nelson. 1997. The Indian Princess. In Early American Drama, edited by Jeffrey H.
Richards, 109–65. New York: Penguin.
Beete, John. 1797. The Man of the Times; or, A Scarcity of Cash. Charleston, SC: Young.
[Brown, William Hill.] 1789. The Better Sort; or, The Girl of Spirit. Boston: Thomas.
Burk, John Daly. 1966. Bunker-Hill; or, The Death of General Warren. In Dramas from the
American Theatre, 1762–1909, edited by Richard Moody, 61–86. Cleveland, OH: World.
Carr, Mary. 1995. The Fair Americans: A Play of the War of 1812. In Plays by Early American
Women, 1775–1850, edited by Amelia Howe Kritzer, 183–215. Ann Arbor:  University of
Michigan Press.
Deering, Nathaniel. 1830. Carabasset. Portland, ME: Colman.
Dunlap, William. 1789. Darby’s Return. New York: Hodge, Allen, and Campbell.
———. 1833. History of the American Theatre. 2 vols. London: Bentley.
———. 1997. André. In Early American Drama, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards, 63–108.
New York: Penguin.
Goudie, Sean X. 2006. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and
Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Humphreys, David. 1790. The Widow of Malabar. In Miscellaneous Works, 115–76.
New York: Hodge, Allen, and Campbell.
Ioor, William. 1805. Independence; or Which Do You Like Best, the Peer or the Farmer?
Charleston, SC: Bounetheau.
———. 1807. The Battle of the Eutaw Springs. Charleston, SC: Hoff.
Kritzer, Amelia Howe, ed. 1995. Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
———. 1996. Playing with Republican Motherhood: Self-Representation in Plays by Susanna
Haswell Rowson and Judith Sargent Murray. Early American Literature 31: 150–66.
Low, Samuel. 1789. The Politician Out-Witted. New York: Ross.
Marriott, [Sarah]. 1795. The Chimera; or, Effusions of Fancy. New York: Swords, 1795.
Meserve, Walter J. 1977. An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 1828.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Murdock, John. 1795. The Triumphs of Love; or Happy Reconciliation. Philadelphia: Folwell.
Murray, Judith Sargent. 1995. The Traveller Returned. In Plays by Early American Women,
1775–1850, edited by Amelia Howe Kritzer, 97–136. Ann Arbor :  University of Michigan
Press.
Nathans, Heather S. 2003. Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into
the Hands of the People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oreovicz, Cheryl Z. 1992. Heroic Drama for an Uncertain Age: The Plays of Mercy Warren.
In Early American Literature and Culture: Essays Honoring Harrison T. Meserole, edited by
Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, 192–210. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
[Peck, Jabez.] 1787. Columbia and Britannia. New London, CT: T. Green.
Pogson, Sarah. 1995. The Female Enthusiast. In Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850,
edited by Amelia Howe Kritzer, 137–81. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Richards, Jeffrey H. 1991. Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World
Stage, 1607–1789. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 1995. Mercy Otis Warren. Boston: Twayne.
———, ed. 1997. Early American Drama. New York: Penguin.
66 JEFFREY H. RICHARDS

———. 2005. Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———. 2008. Sati in Philadelphia: The Widow(s) of Malabar. American Literature 80.4: 645–75.
———. 2010. Print, Manuscript, and Staged Performance:  Dramatic Authorship and Text
Circulation in the New Republic. In Cultural Narratives:  Textuality and Performance in
American Culture before 1900, edited by Sandra M. Gustafson and Caroline F. Sloat, 73–96.
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Robinson, J. 1792. The Yorker’s Stratagem; or, Banana’s Wedding. New York: Swords.
Rowson, Susanna. 1995. Slaves in Algiers. In Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850, edited
by Amelia Howe Kritzer, 55–95. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Sayre, Gordon M. 2005. The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures
of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Shaffer, Jason. 2007. Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary
American Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Stearns, Charles. 1798. Dramatic Dialogues for the Use of Schools. Leominster, MA: Prentiss.
Stone, John Augustus. 1995. Metamora; or The Last of the Wampanoags. In American Drama,
Colonial to Contemporary, edited by Stephen Watt and Gary A. Richardson, 52–79. Fort
Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace.
Trees, Andy. 2000. Benedict Arnold, John André, and His Three Yeoman Captors: A Sentimental
Journey or American Virtue Defined. Early American Literature 35: 246–73.
Tyler, Royall. 1997. The Contrast. In Early American Drama, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards, 1–57.
New York: Penguin.
Warren, Mercy Otis. 1790. Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous.Boston: Thomas and Andrews.
Woodworth, Samuel. 1966. The Forest Rose; or, American Farmers. In Dramas from the American
Theatre, 1762–1909, edited by Richard Moody, 155–74. Cleveland, OH: World.
Wright, Frances. 1995. Altorf. In Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850, edited by Amelia
Howe Kritzer, 217–78. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
 CHAPTER 4

T H E P OL I T IC S OF A N T E B E L LUM
M E L ODR A M A

S C OT T C .   M A RT I N

When the “revolution that has changed the social and political state of aristocratic peo-
ple” emerges in literature, noted Alexis de Tocqueville, that most perspicacious observer
of antebellum American democracy, “it is generally first produced by the theatre, and
there it remains always visible” (Tocqueville, 2000, 465). Though writing about the
American scene, Tocqueville may have been thinking as much about his native France
as the United States. The French Revolution produced, among other changes, radical
departures in theatrical writing and performance. The modern genre of melodrama,
Peter Brooks noted, emerged at this historical moment, when a “world where the tra-
ditional imperatives of truth and ethics” had been violently displaced, but where the
“promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as way of life” became an “imme-
diate, daily, political concern” (Brooks 1976, 15). Tocqueville’s comments on theatre
appeared in the second volume of Democracy in America, published nearly ten years
after his nine-month tour of the United States in 1831. As such, they partook more of the
author’s continuing ruminations on democracy in general than those in the first volume,
in which he strove more to describe and analyze the particular situation in the United
States. As we shall see, melodrama assumed different political dimensions in antebellum
America than in revolutionary France, despite Tocqueville’s interest in tracing the com-
mon impact of democracy on both societies.
Still, Tocqueville got many things correct, particularly his estimation of the dra-
matic and theatrical tastes of the American democracy. In democracies, Tocqueville
explained, people listen to plays but do not read them. The majority “who attend the
acting on the stage do not seek pleasures of the mind, but lively emotions of the heart.
They do not expect to find a work of literature, but a spectacle” (Tocqueville, 2000,
467–68). Tocqueville does not mention a penchant for melodrama specifically, but his
analysis here and elsewhere in Democracy in America points to why this genre became
so popular in the decades before the Civil War. Citizens of democracies, he elaborated,
have little experience contemplating anything beyond their own concerns; issues of
68 SCOTT C. MARTIN

social character or human nature appear immense and somewhat unfathomable. When
“drawn out of himself ” and depicted on the stage, a democratic citizen expects an “enor-
mous object” to look at, and it is “only at this price that he consents to tear himself for a
moment from the small, complicated cares that agitate and charm his life” (Tocqueville
2000, 464).

Melodrama, Politics, and Antebellum

Audiences

Despite the keenness of his eye and the brilliance of his analysis, Tocqueville erred in
some of his judgments about antebellum theatre and melodrama, sometimes fail-
ing to discern trends that would define the American stage. Democratic peoples,
Tocqueville opined, had little interest in erudition or “what took place in Rome and
Athens,” demanding rather “a picture of the present” (Tocqueville 2000, 466). Clearly,
he missed Americans’ capacity to see themselves as heirs to the nascent democrats of
antiquity, as in Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), or their tendency to
identify their own concerns with broader examinations of the human condition as pre-
sented in Shakespeare. He also grossly underestimated the popularity of the theatre and
the emergence of a mass theatrical audience. Tocqueville expected that the diversity
and geographic distribution of American audiences would eliminate “rules and liter-
ary conventions” entirely and “substitute the caprice of each author and each public”
(Tocqueville 2000, 468). Yet melodrama emerged as the dominant dramatic form, par-
tisan causes and issues trod the boards along with actors and actresses, and Americans
flocked to see performances of a relatively small collection of plays in all parts of the
country. What the usually insightful Frenchman failed to apprehend was that the impact
of economic imperatives, sociocultural differentiation, and partisan divisiveness would
shape antebellum theatre in distinctive ways, producing deviations from the general
democratic tends he sought to limn. In short, Tocqueville gauged broad trends in demo-
cratic culture but failed to account for the particular forces that would produce a distinc-
tive politics of antebellum melodrama.
Some definitions are in order here. Politics should be taken not merely in its parti-
san context, though many issues and positions championed by the two major antebel-
lum parties, the Whigs and Democrats, did figure in stage productions: alcohol policy,
abolitionism, sectionalism, and Indian policy, to name but a few. In a broader sense,
stage drama enacted other forms of politics as well: cultural politics related to contested
ideas about American identity, class politics tied to the socioeconomic structures and
patterns emerging particularly in urban areas being transformed by market capitalism,
gender politics connected to the transformation of male and female roles during the first
half of the nineteenth century, and ethnic/racial politics linked to the growing presence
and importance of the United States’ nonwhite and non-English-speaking population.
 THE POLITICS OF ANTEBELLUM MELODRAMA 69

Nor were these politics strictly compartmentalized or mutually exclusive. Stage repre-
sentations of immigrants or foreign nationals, for instance, might touch upon partisan
causes such as alcohol prohibition while also highlighting questions of American iden-
tity. To complicate matters further, this political jumble arose not just from the texts
of play scripts, but also from the acting, scenery, direction, theatre finances, audience
response, and local circumstances that animated words and transformed them into
live performance. In examining the politics of melodrama, then, we must take a more
expansive view of the “political” than might emerge from a discussion of partisan issues
or party structures.
Melodrama also requires some explication. As used here, melodrama refers not solely
to a literary or dramatic genre but a cultural style that suffused antebellum American
life. As Mark Mullen suggested some years ago, antebellum melodrama is most fruitfully
approached as a “mode of cultural discourse” rather than a genre. This cultural mode
consists of “certain assumptions about character and its representation, an inflection
that can be given to a storytelling voice whatever the medium . . . novels, poems, political
oratory, newspaper reporting and photographic textuality.” Melodrama may be remem-
bered as a defining characteristic of the antebellum theatre and dramatic writing, but, as
Mullen points out, melodramatic themes, styles, and conventions influenced a variety
of cultural forms from fiction to oratory. A melodramatic vision and style informed,
for example, the popular stories and novels of such authors as T. S. Arthur and Lydia
Sigourney and the political speeches of legislators like Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay.
For a discussion of theatre per se, this means that melodramatic styles and sensibilities
infused other genres, which contemporaries might not have considered melodrama.
Two of Edwin Forrest’s signature roles, Metamora and Spartacus, for instance, emerged
from his desire for tragedies on American themes written by American authors. While
structured like tragedies—the heroic protagonist, after all, dies at the end—these plays
contain histrionic and plot devices that partake much of the melodramatic mode
(Mullen 1999, 99).
This problematizing of “politics” and “melodrama” reflects some of the difficulties
experienced by theatrical authors, producers, and actors during the antebellum period.
Simply put, they had to write, produce, and perform plays that would draw crowds
sufficient to meet expenses and provide at least a modest profit. Antebellum theatre-
goers wanted plays that reflected their national experience and differentiated their cul-
ture from that of the Old World, particularly from England. Americans demanded, as
Tocqueville noted, to “be spoken to about themselves, and they demand a picture of
the present” (Tocqueville 2000, 466), and would tolerate nothing less. Given the limited
audience for theatricals in American cities, at least at the beginning of the antebellum
era, and the persistent financial difficulties associated with theatre, this meant that the
plays presented had to pay homage to spectators’ patriotic proclivities.
To do this, plays had to be distinctly American and to bespeak patriotism, in author-
ship, content, or performative style. The demand for an American drama sparked a
number of playwriting contests, the most famous of which were those sponsored by
Edwin Forrest during the 1820s and 1830s. Forrest, a canny entrepreneur even in his
70 SCOTT C. MARTIN

early twenties, sought heroic roles to suit his muscular physique and bold acting style,
but he also recognized the value of patriotism in the theatre. In late 1828, “desirous
that dramatic letters should be more Cultivated in my native country,” Forrest offered
financial incentives for the best five-act tragedy of which the “hero or principal char-
acter shall be an aboriginal of this country.” Forrest’s venture proved wildly success-
ful. The play contests generated favorable publicity for him, produced any number of
popular dramatic vehicles that matched his histrionic talents, and, arguably, stimu-
lated American playwriting. These included John Augustus Stone’s Metamora; or, The
Last of the Wampanoags (1829), Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), and
Bird’s The Broker of Bogota (1834). Forrest performed these three plays hundreds of
times over the next forty years, growing rich from the consistently heavy gate receipts
they generated. Forrest’s contests spawned imitators, but his were by far the most suc-
cessful, probably because of his intuitive grasp of the politics of antebellum melo-
drama. The prize plays sprang from the pens of American authors and featured main
characters who embodied American themes and values, either in their persons or in
their actions. By appealing to distinctively American traits, topics, and ideals, actors,
managers, and playwrights drew audiences large enough to support theatres and their
companies. In the antebellum theatrical context, patriotism, not sex, sold (Moody
1960, 88).
The importance of patriotism in melodrama emerged in more than just the content of
plays. After a steady diet of almost exclusively British actors on American boards before
1820, antebellum audiences preferred American actors to their English counterparts,
detecting in the former the egalitarian virtues they cherished and, in the latter, the aris-
tocratic hauteur they abhorred. Melodrama as cultural style played itself out in audi-
ence response to the rivalry between Edwin Forrest and the English tragedian William
Charles Macready in the late 1840s. Initially friendly, the two stars ran afoul of each
other during Forrest’s tour in England during 1846. The insecure and somewhat para-
noid Forrest suspected that Macready used his influence in the English dramatic world
to have the American booed in the theatres and reviewed unfavorably in the press. In
retaliation, Forrest hissed Macready’s performance of Hamlet in Edinburgh, and the
feud was on in earnest.
When Macready toured the United States in 1848, Forrest’s fans, many of whom fre-
quented the pit of the working-class Bowery Theatre in New York, expressed their out-
rage at the supposed slight of their hero. Steeped in the bombastic, if not hyperbolic,
political rhetoric of the Second Party System, Forrest’s supporters viewed the rivalry
between the two actors in melodramatic terms, casting Macready as the embodiment
of aristocratic evil and Forrest as the epitome of democratic virtue. Inflamed further by
radical elements of the Democratic Party led by E. Z. C. Judson, a nativist and literary
hack who wrote under the nom de plume Ned Buntline, Forrest’s supporters construed
what was in reality a clash between two egos as nothing less than a threat to American
national dignity and cultural autonomy. When both actors appeared as Macbeth in US
theatres in early May 1849, events came to a boil. After disrupting Macready’s perfor-
mance at the Astor Place Opera House on May 7 by throwing a variety of objects on the
 THE POLITICS OF ANTEBELLUM MELODRAMA 71

stage during the play, the anti-British mob continued its harassment of the embattled
tragedian. Only a petition signed by forty-eight prominent New Yorkers persuaded
Macready not to leave the country immediately. Determined to drive Macready from
the stage, Forrest’s supporters gathered outside Astor Place three days later on May 10,
when Macready was again to present Macbeth. Alerted that there might be trouble that
night, the city authorities dispatched police and militia to maintain order. As if per-
forming roles in the final act of a melodrama, all parties brought events to a violent
denouement. The crowd grew unruly and aggressive, throwing stones and refusing to
disperse. As the situation grew more dangerous, the militia fired into the crowd, leaving
more than twenty dead and scores wounded. Though most New Yorkers condemned
the mob violence that precipitated the riot and its attendant casualties, this enactment
of the politics of melodrama did force the patrician Macready off the American stage.
In this instance, Tocqueville was more prescient than perhaps he knew, in predicting
that democratic peoples would sweep away aristocratic theatre by “riot” (Cliff 2007;
Moody 1958).

Melodrama and the Problem of

Antebellum Patriotism

Yet violence aside, eliminating the vestiges of theatrical aristocracy proved difficult in
practice, for patriotism had many faces. Two of Edwin Forrest’s prize plays demonstrate
the complexities of appealing to antebellum patriotism. Forrest’s play competitions
had two goals: to exploit the public’s desire for American plays by native authors and
to provide the tragedian with bold, engaging roles that exhibited his peculiar histrionic
gifts. Ideally, these goals would be complementary, producing works of literary merit
that also drew crowds to witness Forrest’s performance. As Forrest learned, however,
the goals of nurturing American dramatic literature and developing vehicles to expand
his wealth and celebrity sometimes conflicted, as they did in the case of Caius Marius,
his second prize play (Smith 1968). The tragedy, by Richard Penn Smith, concerns the
downfall of its title character, a Roman general who rose from humble origins to mili-
tary glory and eventually the consulship. In Smith’s rendering, Marius espouses demo-
cratic sensibilities in his love for the common people of Rome:

The people are the fountain of all power

Which springing from that source direct, is pure [ . . . ]
Yes, my friend, the people’s rights must be restor’d to them
But no mild measures can effect that end. [I:3]

If this sentiment resonated with Jacksonian audiences, so did Marius’s contempt for
Roman patricians. While patriots speak against oppression with “feeble tongues,” the,
72 SCOTT C. MARTIN

Infant Liberty sleeps undisturb’d.

If one had but the manhood to stand forth
And vindicate his nature, tyranny
Would tremble in her seat, and e’en our lords
Who as they pass the streets in full flown pride,
Disdain the honest artisans they meet
As the base earth they tread on—
Even they Would feel their inborn littleness, and shrink
Beneath the frown of those they rule with scourges. [I:3]

Clearly, Smith’s Marius presented qualities well suited to a Jacksonian hero: a man of the
people overtly hostile to the pretensions of superiority among the supposed aristocracy.
In one sense, then, Caius Marius appears to be in step with the democratic spirit of the
times and to the histrionic proclivities of its star, Edwin Forrest. Other factors, however,
militated against its widespread popularity with democratic audiences. Though both the
historic and dramatic Marius rose from obscurity to prominence, their path to greatness
was not exactly in line with rags-to-riches stories that would be popularized by Horatio
Alger and others in the coming decades. Rather than succeeding by dint of natural talent
and hard work, the Marius of Smith’s play employed questionable, if not outright disrep-
utable, tactics to gain office and claim credit for military triumphs achieved largely by
others. Marius’s ambition leads to even more damning actions wholly out of character
with the democratic heroes of other melodramas. Violence in the service of the people
might be acceptable, but even righteous wrath apparently had to be bounded by vir-
tue and compassion in antebellum melodrama. Seizing power, Marius becomes a brutal
tyrant, whipping up popular rage against Rome’s elite that results in bloody excesses.
When informed that Rome has put a price on his head as a traitor, Marius exhorts his
son, Granius:

Swear not to leave of all her guilty towers

One stone unmov’d. Let not her temples nor
Her gods escape the general scathe and ruin.
Let neither age nor sex awaken mercy;
But slay the husband in the wife’s embrace;
The trembling daughter clinging to her sire.
And e’en the infant at the mother’s breast,
As ye wouldst crush the Hydra in the egg. [III:3]

Interestingly, Marius’s instructions for butchering wives, daughters, and children

directly contradict the actions of Metamora, the savage hero of Forrest’s wildly popu-
lar first prize play. The Wampanoag chief showed mercy to Oceana and her father,
Mordaunt, sparing them from a fiery death in the midst of his war against his people’s
English oppressors (Stone 1829, 217). In contrast, Marius claims to be merciful, but to his
enemies, his protestations ring hollow:
mettelus Thou merciful!
Yea, as the famish’d wolf. Thou merciful!
 THE POLITICS OF ANTEBELLUM MELODRAMA 73

Behold the dwellings pillage’d and consum’d;

Our matrons fleeing from their ravishers;
Our children slaughter’d and the public streets,
O’er-flooded with the richest blood in Rome.
marius’ Tis for the people’s good such riches flow
Thus publickly. [V:4]

Marius, then, demonstrated through his actions that he was a different kind of hero than
those who would later enthrall antebellum audiences. Spilling blood might be necessary
to preserve virtue, but reveling in violence was entirely another matter.
Though critics judged Caius Marius a fine piece of dramatic writing, it appears not to
have resonated with antebellum audiences. Forrest produced the play only twice, and
while it continues to be regarded as one of Smith’s finest works, it all but disappeared
from the stage and the public mind. The problem seems to have been the moral flaws of
the protagonist. Though ostensibly a selfless democrat and enemy of aristocratic pre-
tension, Marius reveals a darker, megalomaniacal side during the play. His willingness,
even eagerness, to shed blood mercilessly had callously rendered the character unat-
tractive to antebellum audiences, despite Marius’s championship of the Roman people
against aristocratic tyranny. By the end of the play, Marius appears as a melodramatic
villain, rather than a fatally flawed tragic hero. Forrest never excelled at playing vil-
lains, and democratic audiences disliked moral ambiguity in the presentation of their
idol. With Caius Marius, the goals of developing a sophisticated American drama and
producing a star vehicle for Forrest conflicted. The play provided ample material for
the display of Forrest’s muscular physique and histrionic talents, but its bloodthirsty
protagonist apparently did not jibe with audiences’ expectations and desires for an
American hero.
Compare Caius Marius’s failure with the huge success of The Gladiator, another of
Forrest’s prize dramas (Bird 1831). Robert Montgomery Bird’s Roman tragedy, played by
Forrest as melodrama, recounted the tale of a first century BCE slave rebellion led by the
Thracian gladiator Spartacus. In contrast to Marius, who glories in battle, Spartacus, a
Roman prisoner and slave, disclaims any wish to fight in the arena, despite his martial
prowess.

spartacus I will not fight. I will contend with mine enemy

When there is strife between us, and if that Enemy be . . . a Roman, I will give him
advantage
Of weapon and place; he shall take a helmet and
Buckler; while I, with my head bare, breast
Naked, and nothing in my hand but my Shepherd’s staff, will beat him to my feet
And slay him. But I will not slay a man
For the diversion of Romans. (Bird 1831, 245)

Even the prospect of freedom does not tempt Spartacus to spill another man’s blood:

bracchius Wilt thou be free?

74 SCOTT C. MARTIN

spartacus Free!
bracchius Take the oaths of a gladiator and kill me a score of lusty fellows—
spartacus A score! Kill a score of men? In cold blood? and for the diversion of Rome’s
rabble? I will not! (Bird 1831, 245)

Personal safety or advantage do not move Spartacus. Only the prospect of being
reunited with his wife and child, whom he believed were dead, is enough to goad him
into the arena. Even then, Spartacus recoils at the thought of killing for the entertain-
ment of others (“Will it not be enough, if I disarm or worst my enemy? May I not spare
him?” [Bird 1831, 250]). Learning that the other gladiators hate their Roman masters
as much as he, Spartacus begins to concoct a plan to revolt against Rome.

spartacus Were it not better

To turn upon your masters, and so die,
Killing them that oppress you, rather than fall,
Killing your brother wretches?
crixus True it were.
Put arms into our hands, unlock our dungeons,
And set us among the citizens,
Then ask this question.
spartacus Do you say this? By heaven,
This spirit joys me.—Fight ye all today? . . . .
Two hundred pairs!— Four Hundred
Arm’d slaves, that hate their masters! (Bird 1831, 250)

Once in the arena, Spartacus reluctantly kills his first opponent but cannot go on, his
revulsion toward murder is too great. Love of family and country impel him onward,
however, when his owner promises to purchase Spartacus’s wife and son and send the
three back to Thrace at the end of the games: “Shall we see Thrace again? Let him come
on, yes, though it sick my soul, let him come on!” (Bird 1831, 252). The next opponent
turns out to be Spartacus’s brother Phasarius, whom he thought had died at the hands
of the Romans. Together, the brothers inaugurate a slave revolt, leading the gladiators
against their Roman masters:

spartacus Death to the Roman fiends, that

make their mirth
Out of the groans of bleeding misery!
Ho, slaves, arise! It is your Hour to kill!
Kill, and spare not—For wrath and liberty!—
Freedom for bondmen—liberty and revenge! (Bird 1831, 254)

After initial success, the revolt founders on the mutiny of some of Spartacus’s subordi-
nates and because of the defection of Phasarius, who longs to sack Rome. For his part,
Spartacus yearns only to regain his home and family, averring that he “did not fight
 THE POLITICS OF ANTEBELLUM MELODRAMA 75

for conquest, but for a passport to our several homes. What care we then to waste our
vigor on the gates of fortressed cities?” (Bird 1831, 256–57). His divided troops cut to
pieces, Spartacus suffers the further horror of his wife and child being captured and
killed. Despite his hatred for the Romans, however, Spartacus spares the lives of two
young lovers, the niece and son of two of his enemies, because his wife had pitied them
and interceded for their safety. Succumbing to a blood lust borne of grief and despair,
he vows to battle on despite certain defeat (“My grief is blackened into scowling ven-
geance . . . Pillow’d on death, thus shall my slumbers be. Come, battle, battle” [Bird
1831, 274]). Ultimately, his reduced ranks overwhelmed by superior Roman numbers,
Spartacus dies in a mad rush to kill Crassus, the Roman general. Still, the play’s melodra-
matic ending provides a very different estimation of Spartacus than did Smith’s portrait
of Marius. The gladiator’s enemy, Crassus, eulogizes him thusly:

Thy bark is wreck’d, but nobly did she buffet

These waves of war, and grandly lies at last,
A stranded ruin on this fatal shore.
Let him have burial, not as a base bondman.
But as a chief, enfranchised and ennobled.
If we denied him honor while he lived,
Justice shall carve it on his monument. (Bird 1831, 275)

A comparison of Smith’s Caius Marius and Bird’s The Gladiator yields insight into the
politics of antebellum melodrama. First, in spite of the antebellum public’s desire for an
American drama not dependent on British models, works of literary merit by American
authors were not enough to generate popular support and patronage. The characters
and action had to accord with Americans’ vision of themselves, and they had to speak
to the audience’s hopes, desires, and values. The grasping and ambitious Marius failed at
this, while the dutiful and just Spartacus succeeded. It was not that Americans as demo-
crats cared little for times past, as Tocqueville suggested, but rather they expected melo-
dramatic protagonists to represent what they took to be their characteristic virtues.
Second, The Gladiator’s success and longevity—Forrest performed it for four decades,
and others followed after his death—points to changes in the market for theatre during
the antebellum era. As the brief bits of dialogue quoted above suggest, a slave violently
throwing off his unjust bondage might present an uncomfortable theme in a nation
struggling with political and sectional polarization over the issues of slavery and aboli-
tion. In 1831, after all, the same year in which Forrest first performed the play in New York,
William Lloyd Garrison began publication of The Liberator in Boston, and Nat Turner
embarked on his bloody rebellion in Virginia. Robert Montgomery Bird himself recog-
nized the potential for trouble, remarking that if the play were performed in the South,
he, the manager, and the actors risked the penitentiary. Apparently, Bird underestimated
white Southerners’ facility for separating their own slave system from those of former
times, or of seeing in Forrest’s character the typically “American” qualities they prized in
themselves. As long as the play came across as patriotic rather than topical, Southerners
and anti-abolitionists could stomach its slave revolt theme. The play was performed
76 SCOTT C. MARTIN

below the Mason-Dixon line, but with less frequency than elsewhere in the country, par-
ticularly as sectional antagonism increased in the decades leading up to 1860. What pre-
served The Gladiator’s popularity was the growing market for theatre in the North and
West. Expanding populations in urban areas and the presence of entertainment-hungry
urban migrants in rural areas meant that melodrama no longer had to evoke univer-
sal public support to remain financially viable. Despite political change and increas-
ing sectional hostility, The Gladiator could play to packed houses in New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, and points west, and infrequently or not at all in areas of the country hostile
to abolition, without compromising the profits of its backers. As we shall see, the chang-
ing political scene and expanding market influenced not just the patriotic/heroic brand
of melodrama, but other types as well (Grimsted 1968, 169; Moody 1960, 239).

The Limits of Reading Politics in

Antebellum Melodrama

Beyond espousing patriotism, melodramas had to resonate with their audiences in some
specific way, whether through style or content. Specificity, however, did not always mean
topicality, if the play in question explored themes and issues ostensibly analogous to the
American experience. Robert T. Conrad’s Jack Cade, the Captain of the Commons (1835)
concerned a fifteenth-century English peasant rebellion, but its themes of revolt against
monarchy, corruption, and unfair taxation struck a chord with Americans separated
by only a generation or two from the revolutionary struggle with Great Britain. Thus
Tocqueville was incorrect in predicting that democratic audiences would not patron-
ize plays from a previous era. The enormous popularity of Shakespeare in the United
States during the nineteenth century belies his claim. Shakespeare’s plays employed
broad themes of ambition, avarice, love, and betrayal, and they included characters such
as overreaching nobles and feckless servants that were easily translatable into the con-
cerns of antebellum Americans. As Lawrence Levine notes, Shakespeare’s “attraction for
nineteenth-century audiences was due in no small part to the fact that he was—or at
least was taken to be—in tune with much of nineteenth-century American conscious-
ness.” Moreover, Shakespearean tragedy lent itself to melodramatic adaptation and revi-
sion to suit American tastes and sensibilities. If King Lear seemed too dark, for instance,
the plot could be altered to reunite the troubled king with his daughters in a happy end-
ing (Levine 1988, 39).
Still, Americans appreciated authors and managers who found material for plays
in their own experience and history. In the past twenty years or so, theatre historians,
particularly those influenced by literary and cultural studies, have found in antebellum
drama a variety of covert (and generally unsavory) political messages in support of a
cluster of partisan causes ranging from Indian removal to nativism. Dramatic texts and
 THE POLITICS OF ANTEBELLUM MELODRAMA 77

productions obviously contain multiple levels of meaning and will lend themselves to
appropriation by political partisans. In the overwrought context of Second Party System
politics, however, dramatic authors appeared to eschew such associations, treading
carefully to avoid alienating audiences heavily invested in the melodramatic rhetoric of
Whig, Democrat, and third-party partisanship. The economics of theatre differed from
those of the press, which supported blatantly partisan newspapers tied to political par-
ties. These publications vied with each other for political advantage, and, given the size
of the market for newspapers, publishers worried little or not at all about offending read-
ers of opposing political persuasions. Managers, actors, and playwrights did not enjoy
the same luxury. Because of the precarious financial position theatre companies were
always in, managers had to commission and present plays responsive to the contempo-
rary political scene to draw audiences, while ensuring that the content did not affront
the partisan sensibilities of a significant portion of the spectators. Profit margins were
simply too slim to risk driving away paying customers. As David Grimsted observes,
even “farces, like The Bank Monster; or, Specie and Shin-Plaster, ‘an excellent hit at the
time,’ ” let alone melodramas, “had to ‘keep free from political allusions’ ” (1968, 161).
Actors, who often commissioned plays to serve their particular talents and needs,
understood well the necessity of avoiding partisan conflict that would decrease admis-
sion revenues. James Hackett, a popular comedian, Shakespearean actor, and theatrical
impresario, is a case in point. In 1834, Hackett wrote to John Neal, a talented but erratic
writer and critic, recounting his disappointment with a piece he had commissioned, a
“one act farce, the idea of which I had given a New York writer and based on ‘Major
Jack Downing.’ ” Jack Downing, a universally recognized character in antebellum popu-
lar culture, was the creation of Seba Smith, an influential humorist and writer. Smith’s
Downing stories used a Maine farmer’s rise to public office to satirize the democratic
turn in American politics that brought unlettered, and sometimes unqualified, men into
state and federal governments characterized by venality and incompetence. Smith, a
Whig, intended the Jack Downing stories to lampoon the excesses of Jacksonian democ-
racy, but he poked fun at both parties and the American political system in general.
Hackett, however, merely wanted to create another rendition of the wildly popular stage
“Yankee” that had populated American comedies and farces since the late eighteenth
century and been played with great success by actors like George Handel Hill, Dan
Marble, and Hackett himself. Hackett told Neal that the resulting farce “does not please
me,” and solicited the author (“you I have understood are one of the ‘Major Hacks’ ”) to
write something more suitable:

I think some trait in the Major’s character might be amusingly developed, that was
not essentially political, and which the popularity of his name and writings might
make uncommonly interesting and attractive. His retirement to Downing Ville, the
congratulations of his friends and neighbors on his great consequence—his own
election for some Town office—(a scene yet untried on our stage) also a country scene
with some prudish old Yankee maid . . . And the whole spiced with some pungent
78 SCOTT C. MARTIN

glances at the present state of affairs, without going deep enough to offend any party,
I think could be worked up so as to produce good dramatic effect.

Though Major Jack Downing was a celebrated and popular vehicle for political com-
mentary and criticism in print, Hackett recognized that he could not fill the same role on
stage without risking the alienation of some audience members. Rather, Hackett envis-
aged the dramatic production emphasizing Downing’s regional attributes, as a sharp-
witted but unsophisticated Yankee would prove palatable in New England as well as the
rest of the country (Hackett to John Neal, March 10, 1834, in Richards 1933).
The imperative of not offending any party applied equally to tragedy and melodrama.
Here, too, sectional as well as partisan politics raised issues, sometimes unintentionally.
One anecdote concerns an 1831 performance in Augusta, Georgia, of Metamora; or, The
Last of the Wampanoags, the first of Edwin Forrest’s prize plays. John Augustus Stone’s
play, which Forrest commissioned as a tragedy but which fit comfortably in the prevail-
ing melodramatic style, retold the story of King Philip’s War. Metamora, the title char-
acter, presented a noble savage that allowed Forrest to show off his muscular physique
and his bold, expressive acting style. On the face of it, Metamora offered a politically
neutral plot unlikely to excite partisan ire, despite its debut during the height of political
debates about the wisdom and justice of removing Indian tribes from their tribal lands
in the northeastern United States. The play contained an attractive and sympathetic pro-
tagonist; opportunities to denigrate English, rather than American, treatment of Native
people; and the comforting prospect that Indians would, after all, disappear. In eastern
cities, where Forrest introduced Metamora, no controversy arose, and critics and audi-
ences alike praised Stone’s play and Forrest’s acting. In Georgia, however, where Indians
and Indian removal remained a sore point, at least one audience reacted with hostility.
Georgians, who stood to benefit handsomely from the expropriation of Indian lands,
justified their seizure of tribal property with recourse to stereotypes of migratory sav-
ages who could not adapt to farming, civilized life, or cohabitation with a supposedly
superior race. The fact that many southeastern tribes had established permanent settle-
ments, practiced agriculture, formed representative governments, and even ascended to
the pinnacle of Southern civilization by owning African American slaves complicated
this narrative, so any depiction of Indians as admirable or virtuous galled the white pop-
ulation. In Augusta, an angry audience reaction reflected this unanticipated dynamic.
“Forrest believes that d___ed Indian speech,” an actor reported one indignant Georgian
as saying, “and it is an insult to the whole community.” Forrest cut short his run, and
doubtless thought more carefully thereafter about where and when he performed his
signature role (Murdoch 1880, 298–300).
Over the course of the antebellum era, some aspects of the politics of melodrama
changed. With the decay of the Second Party System and the decline of the Whigs by
the early 1850s, previously proscribed topics became more acceptable. While many of
these will be examined elsewhere in this publication, a brief discussion is in order here.
Temperance, for example, began the antebellum era as largely a moral issue, with the pre-
dominant tactic of reformers being some form of suasion aimed at drinkers themselves.
 THE POLITICS OF ANTEBELLUM MELODRAMA 79

As time passed, and moral suasion proved ineffective, temperance became politicized
as reformers called for coercive legislation to stop liquor trafficking. The Second Party
System attempted to mediate and minimize the polarizing effects of these calls for prohi-
bition, and it succeeded until the passage of the Maine Law in 1851. By then, the Second
Party System was crumbling, and the American public grew more receptive to what had
previously been radical ideas. This transition is reflected in melodrama. W. H. Smith’s
The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (1844) denoted itself as a “Moral Domestic Drama”
and relied on a moralistic, nonpartisan answer to intemperance. Edward Middleton, the
drunkard of the title, reforms through the aid and example of a wealthy reformed ine-
briate, allowing the play to avoid any legal or partisan prescriptions for combating the
liquor trade. Contrast this with William W. Pratt’s stage adaptation of T. S. Arthur’s Ten
Nights in a Bar-room (1858). Ten Nights relates how a new tavern in Cedarville compro-
mises the moral health of the entire town, in addition to devastating the lives of individ-
ual characters. By the late 1850s, moral suasion no longer seemed a viable reform tactic
in politics or on the stage; the persistent problem of alcohol required stronger measures.
Though the stage version of Ten Nights eschews the book’s violent ending, in which the
townsfolk root out moral decay by destroying the tavern, it does come out strongly for
prohibitive legislation, a plot device that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.
Race, abolition, and sectionalism, all explosive political issues largely avoided by
melodrama through the 1840s, also became less taboo by the 1850s. In addition to the
demise of the party system that had contained these volatile questions, demographic
change also contributed to the emergence of these subjects on the stage. The growth
of population centers in the north and west made productions aimed at those markets
more feasible, while the growing sectional animus generated interest in topics like slav-
ery and abolition in Northern cities. Most of all, however, the tremendous success of
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) paved the way for a politicized, if not
partisan, stage treatment of slavery. Like the book, George L. Aiken’s theatrical adapta-
tion unequivocally endorsed immediate abolition, a radical position on the fringes of
American political and cultural life until very recently. There was still room for more
circumspect approaches to slavery, however. Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon; or, Life in
Louisiana (1859) took an ambiguous stance on slavery, perhaps in response to the furor
over Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the impending sectional crisis. Boucicault cannily wrote
the play to admit of varying, even opposite, readings. For opponents of the institution,
The Octoroon provided evidence of its cruelty: slave auctions, the separation of families,
and the specter of interracial sex. For proslavery enthusiasts or Southern partisans, the
play presented slavery as a humane institution characterized by mutual feelings of obli-
gation between whites and blacks, along with disastrous meddling by incompetent or
malicious Northerners in Southern society. Even Boucicault’s play recognized a com-
mon politics of melodrama, however, in that Zoe, the title character, must die at the end
rather than be united with her white lover, an outcome unacceptable in either section.
In the end, the Civil War inextricably changed the politics of American melodrama.
In the altered political landscape of the postwar years—the travails of Reconstruction,
the solidification of the Third Party System, and the enfranchisement of African
80 SCOTT C. MARTIN

Americans—many of the partisan issues that had shaped and limited antebellum melo-
drama no longer applied. With Americans intent on political reunion, sectional recon-
ciliation, and national prosperity, the imperatives of patriotism and partisanship that
had animated antebellum melodrama receded. In their place emerged, on the one hand,
explorations of social problems like crime and poverty that had no easy solutions or
obvious partisan associations, and, on the other, conventional escapist vehicles intended
to entertain without provoking serious political reflection. As Tocqueville noted, the
drama, or melodrama, of “one age will never suit the next if an important revolution has
changed manners and laws” (Tocqueville 2000, 469).

Works Cited
Bird, Robert Montgomery. 1834. The Broker of Bogota. In Representative American Plays, edited
by Arthur Hobson Quinn. New York: The Century Company, 1921, 209–251.
Bird, Robert Montgomery. 1831. The Gladiator. In Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762–
1909, edited by Richard Moody. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1966, 229–275.
Brooks, Peter. 1976. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the
Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Cliff, Nigel. 2007. The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama and Death in Nineteenth-Century
America. New York: Random House.
Grimsted, David. 1968. Melodrama Unveiled:  American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850.
Berkeley : University of California Press.
Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Moody, Richard. 1958. The Astor Place Riot. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 1960. Edwin Forrest: First Star of the American Stage. New York: Knopf.
Mullen, Mark. 1999. Sympathetic Vibrations:  The Politics of Antebellum Melodrama.
Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine.
Murdoch, James E. 1880. The Stage; or, Recollections of Actors and Acting from and Experience of
Fifty Years: A Series of Dramatic Sketches. Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart & Co.
Richards, Irving. 1933. The Life and Works of John Neal. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University.
Smith, Richard Penn. 1968. Caius Marius: A Tragedy. Edited by Neda McFadden Westlake.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Stone, John Augustus. 1829. Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags. In Dramas from the
American Theatre, 1762–1909, edited by Richard Moody. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing,
1966, 199–227.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2000. Democracy in America. Translated, edited, and with an introduction
by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 CHAPTER 5

M I N S T R E L SY A N D U N C L E  TOM

S A R A H  M E E R

Nineteenth-century blackface entertainment was an important and widely influ-

ential cultural form. It involved white men painting their faces black with burnt cork
and then representing themselves as “negroes,” “ethiopians,” or “darkeys.” Critics have
disagreed, however, about what blackface entertainments meant to their audiences or
what performers intended them to mean. Since at least the 1850s blackface has been
denounced in some quarters as a clear outgrowth of a racist culture, and its survival
or revival has provoked consternation and abhorrence. Nevertheless, commentators
have variously also drawn attention to minstrelsy’s complex origins, early ambiguities,
diverse audiences, and its mutation over time, and it has become clear that blackface
has not always been, and certainly has not only been, about racist impersonation and
denigration.

The Meaning of Minstrelsy

Songs and dance routines seem to have been performed in blackface in the United States
at least since the 1820s: these came to be known as “Ethiopian delineation.” In the 1830s,
T. D. Rice scored a giant hit with a song and dance supposedly based on a limping slave
called Jim Crow, while in 1842 or 1843 a group of men offered blackface musical enter-
tainment under the name “Virginia Minstrels”; under their influence “minstrelsy” came
to be the generic term for a specific form of blackface theatre (Lhamon 1998, 59; Toll
1974, 30). Both Rice and one group of Virginia Minstrels took their acts to London and
were rapturously received (Rice in 1836, the Virginia Minstrels in 1843). Minstrel troupes
proliferated throughout the 1840s and 1850s; some New York City theatres were specifi-
cally designated minstrel “halls,” and the minstrel show, though always offering a variety
of acts and a large quotient of music, gradually developed a more tightly organized and
even fixed structure. Predominantly appealing to working-class male audiences at first,
by the 1850s minstrelsy was also attracting the middle classes, women, and children. In
82 SARAH MEER

this decade it also seems to have grown less sympathetic to the black figures it portrayed,
and after the Civil War many minstrel acts became more pointedly and grossly demean-
ing in their representations of black people, even though black performers increasingly
took part in minstrel shows.
A central concern of commentary on minstrelsy has been to uncover what it reveals
about nineteenth-century race relations. Early analysis of minstrelsy treated it actu-
ally as African American culture, with Constance Rourke seeing it as an adaptation of
African American humor (1931; 1942, 262–74). In the late twentieth century, the prob-
lematic implications of racial impersonation became the focus, and Alexander Saxton
and David Roediger argued that in the Jacksonian period minstrelsy allowed white
working-class audiences to negotiate class status, rivalry with free blacks, and new urban
and industrial work practices. In the 1840s, Irish immigrants in particular used black-
face to imagine their own place in the United States (Roediger 1991, 65; Saxton 1990),
just as, Michael Rogin argued, later Jewish immigrants would do (Rogin 1998). For these
writers, blackface was thus partly about finding and claiming “whiteness.”
Eric Lott shifted attention to the gender and sexual politics of this class self-definition,
emphasizing minstrelsy’s interest in masculinity, its cross-dressed “wench” figures, and
its interest in black bodies. He argued that an undercurrent of homosexual desire, as
well as a fascination with African American culture, is discernible in some acts. Above
all, minstrelsy put on the stage the cultural and political anxieties of US citizens in the
1850s; it was “a harbinger of the Compromise of 1850,” the racial and sectional crises Lott
calls “America’s 1848” (1993, 209, 106).
Subsequently, analysis of early blackface performances has stressed their theatrical
ambivalence, and researchers have reinforced Lott’s assertion of the interracial cultural
exchange at the heart of the form. Dale Cockrell argues that early nineteenth-century
“Ethiopian” entertainment had origins in both preminstrel blackface theatre (“black”
roles played by whites in plays like Othello, The Padlock, Jonathan in England), and
folk practices and performances that involved wearing black masks (mumming, cal-
lithumpian bands, charivaris, carnival). Many of these originated in Europe but had
also developed into traditions in the United States and across the Caribbean. In these
early forms, blackface disguise signaled a ritual event, or burlesque. Because these
festivities often accompanied social inversion rituals, like the “Lord of Misrule,” they
prefigure minstrel burlesques of upper-class habits and entertainments as well as
black ones: they ridiculed “up and down the social ladder simultaneously” (Cockrell
1997, 94). It was this complexity that later made blackface a useful form for developing
the national discussion of slavery, “for it was, like the folk theatricals, implicitly para-
doxical and dynamic” (54). W. T. Lhamon finds another pretheatrical origin in the
dance competitions at Catherine Market in New York City. Here, for a prize of a bas-
ket of eels, black dancers thrilled racially mixed audiences from the Five Points and
poor areas of the city. This suggests, of course, an important African American con-
tribution, as well as an interracial experience that was then reflected in the blackface
form. Lhamon draws attention to what he calls the “compaction” of blackface song,
its ability to harbor numerous and conflicting attitudes and allusions, which might
 MINSTRELSY AND UNCLE TOM 83

make its ultimate meaning irresolvable (1998, 53). It was also “the first Atlantic mass
culture” (58).
These examinations of minstrelsy’s racial meanings have emphasized the imperson-
ation involved in wearing blackface, but William Mahar has drawn attention back to the
nature and content of performances. The staple fodder of minstrel entertainment, at least
in the 1840s and 1850s, was musical burlesque. In particular, minstrel shows burlesqued
opera and, after the 1850s, particularly Italian opera. In minstrel versions, for example,
of Bellini’s 1831 opera La Sonnambula, choruses were translated into American English,
including stage “Black” English; the characters were reimagined as typical blackface
characters; and the opera’s harmonies were yoked with minstrel songs like “Lucy Neal”
(Mahar 1999, 107). The parody would have been enhanced if audiences knew the origi-
nal, but it also disseminated a good idea of the music and the plot to those who didn’t.
Mahar calls it “opera for the masses” (101). Because minstrels especially parodied for-
eign music and foreign artistes, they Americanized or domesticated foreign material,
through a distancing device that made it “black.” Mahar draws attention to the patri-
otic, national, and even postcolonial aspects of this process. Nineteenth-century com-
mentators, with varying degrees of seriousness, identified in minstrelsy America’s first
national music, Bayard Taylor writing in 1849 that “the Ethiopian melodies well deserve
to be called, as they are in fact, the national airs of America” (quoted in Rourke 1942,
272). In Mahar’s account, the minstrel show thus offered an ironic and good-humored
version of the nativist suspicion of foreign theatricals that contributed to the Astor Place
riot of 1849.
So minstrelsy was a form of a peculiarly national significance, but it was also transna-
tional in its origins and the material it fed on. It became an international phenomenon,
not only generating an enduring blackface industry in Britain (including local troupes),
but also later influencing the Cape Carnival tradition in South Africa, Concert Parties
in Ghana, and perhaps the stage “negros catedráticos” of Cuba’s teatro bufo (see Cockrell
1987; Cole 2001; Erlmann 1991; Lane 2005, 239).

Parody or Travesty?

Stressing the burlesque functions of minstrelsy, and its debt to older blackface maskings
that had no specific reference to any ethnic population, is illuminating and important.
It certainly helps explain the energy of minstrelsy and the power that it exerted over
audiences. Nevertheless, increasingly if perhaps intermittently, minstrel performance
was able to create an extra charge, or to double its edge, by emphasizing its apparent
reference to real people, its claim to “Ethiopian delineation.” Some of the competing
functions of blackface in the United States are suggested by Jill Lane’s history of Cuban
blackface, showing that it drew simultaneously on a demand for operatic parody and
nationalist (or anti-imperial) literary experiments with realism: “the impulse toward
early ethnographic representation of nonwhite people oscillated between realism and
84 SARAH MEER

parody, between documentation and discursive containment” (Lane 2005, 20). It seems
important to examine how much blackface performance was intended—or received—
as realism and how much as caricature. And if it was regarded as caricature, was it par-
ody or travesty? What was its presumed relation to actual persons?
Commonly adduced as evidence on this question are the nineteenth-century myths
that blackface songs and dances were borrowed by white performers from individual
black people (Lott 1993, 18, 43, 56–62). There were also claims that audience members
for certain performances thought they were seeing real black people (Twain 1960, 62).
It might, however, be argued that these claims themselves represent an elaboration of
travesty, a further play with the conventions of artifice and representation that a theatri-
cally self-conscious form like minstrelsy flaunted. This is borne out to some extent by
blackface’s many references not only to blackness and whiteness but to blackening and
whitening. In Oh Hush! or, The Virginny Cupids!, for example, one of the many blackface
plays developed for T. D. Rice, the characters are current or retired bootblacks. There are
several references to a well-known boot polish, “Day and Martin,” and the song lyric,
“De greatest man dat ever libed was Day and Martin” (reprinted in Lhamon 2003, 148,
151). Later a character hides in a cupboard, gets agitated, knocks down a shelf, and gets
covered in flour. He then explains his peculiar appearance: “Ise been out whitewashin’ ”
(Lhamon 2003, 155–56). These jokey references to everyday and accidental processes of
blackening and whitening all suggest that the blacked-up state of the performers was
in itself fascinating. Certainly, stage blackface was recognized as theatrical convention.
Mahar reproduces a stage direction from Sam’s Courtship (1852), which categorizes
blackface as a stage “type” among many: “The parts of Sam and Sarah can be played in
White or Black; or Sam can be played in Dutch” (quoted in Mahar 1999, 185). The cheer-
ful suggestion that a part would work equally well played “black,” “white,” or “Dutch,”
raises the question, as Mahar argues, “about whether blackface comedy provided ‘por-
traits’ of African Americans or whether race should be considered the primary subject
matter of all forms of blackface minstrelsy” (186).

Blackface and Slavery

It is now very difficult to believe that the success of blacked-up entertainment was
unconnected with the glaring irony of a slave-owning democracy, and its racial injus-
tices. Interpretations of minstrelsy as a cultural manifestation of racial tension or guilt
now seem compelling, if not inescapable. But in the twenty-first century the most alien
or inexplicable aspect of minstrelsy may be the evidence that the slavery question was
not always regarded as significant, that so many people did not reflect on the rendering
of racial difference into jokes. In Mahar’s words, “racism was [blackface’s] underlying
reason for exploiting the low status of African Americans as a comic device” (1999, 186);
the extent to which that reason remained underlying and went unremarked seems its
most extraordinary feature today.
 MINSTRELSY AND UNCLE TOM 85

Slavery, emancipation, and abolition are incidental devices in Life in America, a

three-act play written by William Leman Rede for T. D. Rice to perform as Jim Crow in
London in 1836. In the play, Jim Crow and his black friends are part of the local color that
some Europeans encounter when they leave Britain for New York. Crow, who is a run-
away slave from Virginia, signs up as a servant to the Englishman Blinkinsopp. Crow is
also a scamp (one of a long line of naughty servants on the stage, white and black). When
Blinkinsopp goes out on the 5th of July, which is celebrated as “Abolition Day” by black
New Yorkers, Jim invites his friends to a ball in his master’s rooms. In an extraordinary
parody of the celebrations that African American New Yorkers really held on that date
after 1827, the blackface characters in the play have a procession, led by Crow on a white
horse. To a tune from Obi, an 1800 English drama set in Jamaica, the crowd sings:

Fifth July Fifth July!

Eb’ry color’d soul be gay
Banish Care Banish Care
Strike de bango [sic] dance and play
Freedom reigns o’er the plains
Bobolition for de nigger
Beat big drum, tamborine thrum
On dis happy day.

Crow then makes a speech:

JIM CROW: Gemmen, I’s puted to dress you on dis occasion. I wish de task had fall’n
into better hands, but, though oder gemmen speak more abler, no gemman could
feel more deeper. You, de enlighten’d gemmen, whom I dress, know dis is de day
of our Bobolition. Well, gemmen, I make no long rigmarole furder dan to say, the
gemmen I ‘tend ‘pon hab gone out for de day. And I hab trown open his room for a
Ball! (Rede 2003, 430)1 

Like the musical reference to the “Jamaican” play, the allusion to the banjo and the tam-
bourine suggest a performative, or even theatrical, idea of blackness in this scene, and
it works with the carefree and irresponsible attitude of these characters to undermine
the reference to abolition, not least since their pronunciation mangles it to “bobolition.”
Lhamon describes Crow’s speech as “Abolitionist,” partly on the basis of its characteriza-
tion in contemporary reviews, but, strikingly, the “oratory” offers no thoughts on the
significance of the anniversary. Aside from the hint of emotion in “no gemman could
feel more deeper,” Crow’s speech is mainly about his unfitness to purvey the speech,
itself a self-reflexive performativity. Rather than stressing the significance of abolition,
the scene turns it into the occasion for another Jim Crow caper, in this case, throwing
a party in his master’s absence. This is the background to later scenes in which Crow’s
master turns up, “Negroes and constables” join in a “skirmish,” Crow calls “Fight for
cause of bobolition,” Blinkinsopp buys Crow’s freedom, and at last all dance to the Fifth
of July song (3:4–5). So although this play makes liberal use of slavery and abolition, it
is as exotic detail, deployed in lighthearted situations, and the slavery question seems
86 SARAH MEER

to be merely something that appends to black characters, like banjo and tambourine
music. Although audience sympathy is conscripted for the enslaved Jim Crow, his con-
dition is one of the markers of the New York setting, rather than the center of any serious
consideration of the slavery question. And of course the play was staged at a time when
Britain itself had only just initiated the abolition of slavery in its colonies (1833). Here,
because the play’s most engaging character is meant to be black, and the question of
slavery seems naturally to attend the evocation of black people in the United States, the
issue is drawn into this blackface performance, in a (blackface) mode that is inherently
ridiculous, lighthearted, parodic. So blackface does come to have a relationship to the
urgent political questions, but incidentally, and the unmotivated way that this connec-
tion is established on the stage suggests that these questions are not expected to provoke
a powerful response in the audience. The attitudes displayed here, in relation to race
and slavery, are thus unconscious. And as the play was first performed in Britain these
attitudes may cast more light on British audiences than American ones. But the play’s
obliviousness is a central feature of much blackface humor and is no less disturbing for
all that.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

So, certainly at first, many of minstrelsy’s performers and fans were not making seri-
ous connections with current affairs (though we should generalize cautiously about
variety entertainment, with its fluid and fragmented show structure and permutations
of performance and reception). But those connections were certainly made in Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was quickly transformed into theatre
and then incorporated into minstrel shows.
The novel was serialized in the antislavery National Era in 1851–52, then published
in book form, and became a success to rival minstrelsy itself, both in the United States
and all over the world. A response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was designed to promote antislavery sympathy. It focused on the Christian family man
Tom, sold South away from his wife and children, and on the brave mother Eliza, who
took flight with her son, Harry, rather than lose him to a slave dealer. It was also, like
the majority of American representations of black people in the 1850s, indebted to min-
strelsy. Two characters, Harry and Topsy, are explicitly compared to Jim Crow, before
they sing, dance, or do imitations to amuse adult whites; another character, Adolph, is
reminiscent of minstrelsy’s black dandies.
The novel deploys the same structure as a type of minstrel dialogue: the Endman and
the Interlocutor routines. On the stage, this involved blackface characters engaging
with an unblacked master of ceremonies, or Interlocutor, who would speak in a for-
mal, educated, even ornate style, while the Endmen sported “black” accents, and with
misunderstandings, malapropisms, and interruptions subverted the conversation (Lott
1993, 218; Meer 2005, 30–33). Audiences may have identified as much with the Endmen
 MINSTRELSY AND UNCLE TOM 87

as with the Interlocutor in these scenes, if the Endmen were enjoyably disruptive, and
the Interlocutors pompous. Stowe replaced the Interlocutor with white women: Mrs.
Shelby, who is sympathetic to the runaway Eliza, and Miss Ophelia, who tries to bring
Vermont habits of order and piety to the recalcitrant Topsy. The apparent contrast
between Stowe’s Endmen and Interlocutors is as deceptive as the relationship may have
been on the stage. Although the slave Sam disobeys Mrs. Shelby’s instructions that he
is to help the slave catcher, the reader knows that both are keen to delay proceedings so
that Eliza can get away, and so the apparent class, race, and gender conflict is not at all
what it seems. Similarly, Topsy’s subversions of Miss Ophelia may be interpreted as a
comic turn, designed to elicit laughter at the ignorant black character, but they are also
potentially evidence of the barbarity of her upbringing, of being parted from her parents
as a baby and raised by a “speculator” in human beings.
It is worth noting that these echoes of blackface take place in a novel. Uncle Tom’s
Cabin is sentimental, in the sense that it is designed to elicit emotion from the reader,
but in the 1850s this was envisaged as a powerful and potentially life-changing process.
The novel is also realist in that it attempts to transport the reader to a lifelike world, ren-
dered in sufficiently faithful detail in character and setting to make it a credible repre-
sentation of that world. It was admired by one of the greatest realist novelists in English,
George Eliot, who asserted that “Mrs Stowe has invented the Negro novel” (Eliot 1980,
43). Moreover, one of Stowe’s main models was Charles Dickens, whose novels com-
bine realism with other elements: idealism, symbolism, and also grotesque caricature.
John Romano has argued that Dickens’s claims to realism include “intense topical-
ity, . . . reformist or simply descriptive journalism . . . frequently dense specificity of detail
in familiar and ‘typical’ settings.” Stowe’s novel exhibits all of these too, but most impor-
tantly it also parallels “the emotional claims [Dickens’s] novels make upon us, now held
under the rubric of ‘sentimentalism.’ We care about the characters because we accept,
in some way, the idea that they are real” (Romano 1978, 3). Like Dickens’s grotesques,
Stowe’s blackface characters may sometimes or partly have been read as caricatures,
especially as stage minstrelsy was consumed as travesty or parody. But she also made
readers care very much indeed about the fate of those characters, and there is clear evi-
dence that some accepted “the idea that they [were] real” (Meer 2005, 49, 177–80).

Tom Shows
Minstrel references to Stowe complicated matters still further. Minstrel show allusions
to Uncle Tom’s Cabin adapted Stowe’s narrative for the repertoire of burlesque, but there
were also full-scale attempts to stage the novel that addressed its claims to realism. There
were fiercely proslavery rewritings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, such as Sam Sanford’s (played
in Philadelphia) and also Nelson Kneass’s operatic burletta for Christy and Wood’s min-
strel hall in New York. These showed contented slaves on happy plantations, and the
authors reversed some of Stowe’s most significant moments: rather than slaves running
away, fugitives were shown returning; marriages took the place of the enforced partings
88 SARAH MEER

of husbands and wives. Other minstrel shows reinforced Stowe’s message:  Boston’s
Ordway’s Aeolians put on an antislavery Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which it advertised as being
“in strict Accordance with the Book” (Meer 2005, 68). Sometimes a company may have
taken up more than one attitude to Stowe even within the same show: minstrel song-
books contain both sympathetic songs about Stowe’s novel and attacks on its author.
There were also at least nine different (nonminstrel) dramatizations of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin in the United States in the 1850s, produced in Baltimore, Boston, Troy,
Philadelphia, New  York City, New Orleans, Chicago, and Detroit (Birdoff 1947;
Gossett 1985, 260–83; Mason 1993, 210 n. 6; Toll 1974, 88–97). The two most signifi-
cant were by George Aiken and H. J. Conway. Conway’s Uncle Tom played first at the
Boston Museum in November 1852, then at Barnum’s Museum for two months at the
end of 1853, and in a brief revival in 1855. Aiken initially produced a four-act version
based on the first half of the novel. This proved highly successful at Troy, New York,
in September 1852; Aiken then turned the latter end of the novel into another four-act
drama. Finally, he combined the two in a six-act play, which was again hugely popu-
lar at Troy (a ten-week run) and then again at Albany. It transferred to A. H. Purdy’s
National Theatre in New York City, where it filled the house between July 1853 and May
1854. It was Aiken’s adaptation (or versions of it) that became the definitive Tom play,
and it remained hugely popular until the end of the century, a staple for touring com-
panies and tent shows in the 1870s. Aiken’s and Conway’s plays competed during the
two months when they coincided in New York, with P. T. Barnum’s advertising suggest-
ing that Conway’s version was the more pro-Southern, and anti-black, interpretation
(Birdoff 1947, 89). Supporters of the rival productions at one point came to blows in the
street; Eric Lott has interpreted this as a theatrical version of the sectional tensions of
the 1850s, a “small war” (1993, 223–24).
The line between Uncle Toms for the theatre and the minstrel hall was not always clear.
Blackface performers T. D. Rice, Frank Brower, and John Mulligan took parts in Tom
plays. Deacon Perry, a character in George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was absorbed into
the minstrel repertoire (Meer 2005, 105, 122–23). More usually, minstrel jokes and songs
were redeployed in Tom shows. At such moments the plays insert material more like the
self-referential tradition of blackface travesty than the realism of Stowe’s novel. Aiken’s
play even rehashes the “blackening” joke of the Ethiopian sketches:

cute:  . . . Look here, Charcoal!

topsy: My name isn’t Charcoal—it’s Topsy.
cu te: Oh! Your name is Topsy, is it, you juvenile specimen of Day & Martin?
(Aiken, 5.2)

Minstrelsy was not the only theatrical mode that Tom plays drew on, however: melo-
drama was also an influence. Spectacular scenes were created from Stowe’s more dra-
matic episodes: slave flights and resistance to pursuers, the slave auction, Simon Legree’s
torture of Uncle Tom. Stowe’s novel, with its idealized mothers, families, and homes, also
slotted into the tradition of plays aligned with popular moral causes like temperance. As
 MINSTRELSY AND UNCLE TOM 89

a result, Tom plays offered heroic blackface roles, as well as minstrel ones. The way in
which Tom plays were perceived to have enlarged the possibilities (and the status) of
playing black is illustrated by the legend that the actor G. C. Germon was initially reluc-
tant to take the role of Uncle Tom, because he associated any black role with playing a
“Jim Crow darkey” (Birdoff 1947, 42).
Despite their rivalry, Aiken’s and Conway’s plays are similar (although our knowledge
of the latter is complicated by the sole survival of a later script, which may incorporate
elements of Aiken’s play). Although neither is as unambiguous a strike against slavery
as Stowe’s novel, they both retain something of its direction. Aiken’s Eva feels “sad” for
her father’s slaves and she wishes she could free them; Tom in the same play insists to his
master that benign treatment is no substitute for liberty (Aiken, 3.2; 4.2). In Conway’s
play, Eliza’s husband, George, describes the cruelties of the slave system and asserts his
fundamental rights: “am I not a man, as much as anybody?” (Conway, 1.5). At the same
time, both plays undercut their antislavery gestures by killing off Simon Legree; the dra-
mas make Legree personify the horrors of the system, so his death appears to resolve the
troubling slavery question before the final curtain. In Conway’s play, the point is further
diluted in the slave auction scene (2.2), because he introduces two comic observers, Miss
Ophelia, who in his version is called Aunty Vermont, and her ponderous Yankee suitor,
Penetrate Partyside.
Stowe herself adapted Uncle Tom’s Cabin for dramatic lectern readings. The Christian
Slave was a substantial three-act play, written especially for the African American
performer Mary Webb, who presented it in Boston and other Northern cities in 1855,
before taking it to London in 1856. Several critics have suggested that Webb’s restrained
style counteracted or corrected the distortions of minstrel Tom shows (Clark 1997, 346;
Gardner 2005, 262). Certainly, we should place Webb’s performance alongside the tradi-
tion of black abolitionist lecturers like Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown,
whose oratory allowed them to demonstrate and embody the fallacy of racism, to testify
to slavery’s horrors, and to rehearse the arguments against it. Their powerful presences
at the lectern moved audiences and also demonstrated gifts of reasoned and persua-
sive argument. Nevertheless, the performativity demanded of black speakers could in
some cases look like the outgrowth of a culture in which blackface minstrels gave mock
speeches, like Jim Crow’s on “Bobolition Day.” Stowe’s play for Webb was not very dif-
ferent from dramatizations like Aiken’s. It placed less emphasis than the novel on “good
mother” roles and expanded on the blackface scenes, including those with Topsy. It even
suggested music from Stephen Foster’s minstrel show repertoire.
The close relationship between Aiken’s, Conway’s, and Stowe’s plays and their fidelity
to the novel can be seen in an important scene that also illustrates the part minstrelsy
played in all these versions. In chapter 20 of the novel, New Englander Miss Ophelia is
given by her cousin St. Clare a naughty slave girl called Topsy. The gift is a mischievous
challenge, because it will be a huge undertaking to raise this girl who has been abused
and neglected by a speculator. Topsy is introduced as blackface entertainment (“rather
a funny specimen in the Jim Crow line”), and straitlaced Miss Ophelia’s encounter with
her is at first amusing:
90 SARAH MEER

Sitting down before her, she began to question her.

“How old are you, Topsy?”

“Dun no, Missis,” said the image, with a grin that showed all her teeth.
“Don’t know how old you are? Didn’t anybody ever tell you? Who was your
mother?”
“Never had none!” said the child, with another grin.
“Never had any mother? What do you mean? Where were you born?”
“Never was born!” persisted Topsy, with another grin, that looked so goblin-like,
that, if Miss Ophelia had been at all nervous, she might have fancied that
she had got hold of some sooty gnome from the land of Diablerie. (Stowe
1994, 209)

But although Topsy’s “goblin-like” grin and cheeky repartee are reminiscent of min-
strelsy’s grotesque bodies and subversive Endman routines, her ignorance would worry
nineteenth-century readers, especially when Ophelia begins to examine her spiritual
condition:

“Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?”

The child looked bewildered, but grinned as usual.
“Do you know who made you?”
“Nobody, as I knows on,” said the child, with a short laugh.
The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added,
“I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.” (210)

Stowe’s scene borrows from the ambiguities of minstrel show performance: some read-
ers may see Topsy as just a comic turn, in the blackface style; others may register the
pathos of the little girl deprived not only of parents but also of knowledge of her divine
Maker. The dialogue is both a performance in the “Jim Crow line” and a condemnation
of a system that allows children to be “raised by a speculator.”
In the dramas, Aiken, Conway, and Stowe herself all retained this scene. Aiken and
Conway both added a catchphrase for Miss Ophelia (“shiftless”). Conway, in keeping
with his general tendency to undermine antislavery scenes with comedy, made his
Yankee character, Penetrate Partyside, emphasize Topsy’s ignorance rather than its
causes:

penetrate: Wall since I’ve been here, I’ve seen two distinct specimens of the nigger
creation generally—one altered externally into a full blown puppy—and the other
ain’t equal intellectually to a half grown squash! (Conway, 3.1)

Both plays move much more rapidly than the novel from the potentially poignant
exchanges about birth, parentage, and God to questions about Topsy’s skills, which
emphasize her status as a slave. The shift in tone takes place within a line in Aiken and
Conway:
 MINSTRELSY AND UNCLE TOM 91

topsy: Nobody as I knows on, he, he, he! I ’spect I growed. Don’t think nobody
never made me.
ophelia: The shiftless heathen! What can you do? What did you do for your
master and mistress? (Aiken, 2.2)
aunty: . . . Do you know who made you?
topsy: Nobody as I knows on. he. he. he!—I ’spect I
growed don’t think nobody never made me.
aunty: The shiftless heathen! What can you do? What did you do for your master
and mistress? (Conway, 3.1)

The emphasis on comedy rather than pathos is reinforced in Aiken when Topsy, almost
immediately after this discussion, steals a ribbon and a glove from Miss Ophelia and
declares, “I’s so awful wicked there can’t nobody do nothin’ with me. I used to keep old
missis a-swarin’ at me half de time. I ’spects I’s de wickedest critter in de world.”
Yet the differences in tone between the novel and these dramatic versions cannot be
put down to the fact that Stowe’s novel was intended to combat slavery, while the plays
were primarily designed to capitalize on the novel’s success. For Stowe made similar
choices in The Christian Slave. Although she extended this scene in her play, includ-
ing a more extensive and chaotic catechism, in that play too the dialogue moves rapidly
from “ ’spect I grow’d” to “Do you know how to sew?” and “What can you do, what did
you do for your master and mistress?” (2.6) This suggests that the elision was produced
in all three versions by the need to condense scenes for performance. In The Christian
Slave, too, Topsy’s spiritual condition is made a comic characteristic, just as it is in Aiken
and Conway, and it becomes a catchphrase: “I’s so awful wicked there can’t nobody do
nothin’ with me. . . . I ’spects I’s the wickedest crittur in the world.”

Beyond Uncle Tom

Mary Webb’s lectern readings suggest other ways in which Stowe’s conscription of min-
strel conventions for Uncle Tom’s Cabin had an impact beyond the book. In the confines
of a realist novel, the ambiguous, self-consciously theatrical relationship “Ethiopian”
acts had with black people could turn into something more straightforwardly rep-
resentational. Uncle Tom’s Cabin influenced the way real people were seen and imag-
ined: tourists described southern girls as Topsies, and the black lecturer Josiah Henson
was introduced in Britain as “Uncle Tom” (Meer 2005, 49; Winks 1985). So although the
lectern play was a performance, the relationship between the (African American) reader
and the drama specially created for her is likely to have been perceived as authenticat-
ing. Even more comprehensively than Henson’s, Webb’s public appearance and recep-
tion were tied into the fictional black characters that Stowe had imagined, and Stowe’s
idea of African American experience may have seemed to audiences to be authenticated
by Webb.
92 SARAH MEER

The apparent inescapability of this process is illustrated by a play that William Wells
Brown wrote for his own lectern performances. The Escape: or, A Leap for Freedom (1858)
provides a fascinating example of the way blackface style and characterization continued
to insinuate itself into quite different forms of representation during the 1850s. In the pub-
lished version of his play, Brown included an “author’s preface” that explicitly asserted the
play’s realism in aid of its antislavery argument: “[m]any of the incidents were drawn from
my own experience of eighteen years at the south. . . . The ignorance of the slave, as seen
in the case of ‘Big Sally,’ is common wherever chattel slavery exists” (Brown 2005, 373).
Interestingly, despite Brown’s insistence that the play reflects his experience, it seems to be
indebted in several places to Stowe’s novel. The “leap” of the title borrows from Eliza’s flight
across a frozen river in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Brown’s fugitives, like Eliza’s family in the book,
are harbored in a Quaker household, and in both a gentle Quaker mother presides over
a welcoming breakfast table (Brown 2005, scene 4; Stowe 1994, 116–23). There is even a
textual precedent for the “Big Sally” scene that Brown suggests is drawn from his observa-
tion: it is very closely based on the catechism scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In The Escape, Brown’s version of this interrogation is sinister—the inquisitor is a slave
trader called Walker, a hypocrite, who cites scripture as he handcuffs his slaves:

walker: How old are you, Sally?

sally: I don’t know, sir:  but I  heard once dat I  was born at sweet pertater
diggin’ time.
walker: Ha, ha, ha. Don’t know how old you are! Do you know who made you?
sally: I hev heard who it was in de Bible dat made me, but I dun forget de gentman
name. (2.2)

Unlike Stowe, Brown offers only one interpretation: along with her birthdate, Sally has
been denied her Bible, by men who distort its message for their own greed. Stowe drew
on the ambiguity of blackface, but in echoing her in this scene Brown instead insists on
the reality “common whereever chattel slavery exists.” And yet a major strand of his play
is devoted to a style of comedy that seems to be lifted wholesale, without any antislavery
spin, from the blackface stage.
Paul Gilmore has examined Brown’s use of blackface types in his novel Clotel (Gilmore
1997, 744). Brown drew on the minstrel tradition extensively for his play, too. He rewrote
blackface songs for it (“Dandy Jim,” “Dearest Mae,” “Wait for the Wagon”), made jokey
references to others (“Buffalo Gals”), and created scenes that derive directly from the
“Ethiopian Sketches” of the minstrel stage. The slave hero and heroine are called Glen
and Melinda, but there is also a clownish slave, who like many blackface characters has
a classical name, “Cato” (later he adopts the more pompous “Alexander Washington
Napoleon Pompey Caesar”). Cato’s master, a doctor, entrusts him with making pills,
pulling teeth, and bleeding patients, the slaves of nearby plantations. Cato, however, is
an unreliable servant like Jim Crow and Topsy, and he messes up his medications, pulls
the wrong tooth from a sufferer, and struts about vainly in a doctor’s coat. He courts
 MINSTRELSY AND UNCLE TOM 93

the ludicrously named Tapioca but is also keen to enter the marriage that his mistress is
forcing on an unwilling slave called Hannah.
Cato offers a buffoonish parallel to the main plot. In Act 4, Glen and Melinda escape.
In Act 5, scene 2, they sing a sentimental song about the North Star, which represents
their hopes of freedom:

Star of the North! though night winds drift

The fleecy drapery of the sky
Between thy lamp and me, I lift,
Yea, lift with hope my sleepless eye,
To the blue heights wherein thou dwellest,
And of a land of freedom tellest.

In the following scene, Cato also runs away, and he sings, to the tune of “Dearest Mae,”
his own song of rebellion, a jaunty ditty in weakly rhyming couplets. Cato’s speech is
marked as “black”-accented, unlike Glen’s with its elevated style and diction, and Cato’s
song similarly contrasts with the poetic register and more complex rhyme scheme of
Glen’s North Star song. Cato glories in stealing from his master to escape:

Massa gave me his ole coat, an’ thought I’d happy be,

But I had my eye on de North Star, an’ thought of liberty;
Ole massa lock de door, an’ den he went to sleep,
I dress myself in his bess clothes, an’ jump into de street. (5.3)

It is disturbing enough to find these blackface scenes in a play with claims to verisimili-
tude and personal experience. How did audiences read Cato, a blackface caricature in an
antislavery play, delivered by a black abolitionist who was himself a former slave? Vain,
lying, selfish, Cato comes close to justifying the claims the slaveowners in the play make
about black people—his faithlessness echoes Mrs Gaines, for example, who asserts that
slaves’ “attachment can’t be very strong” (2.1). But it is more astonishing to note, in view
of the claims of authenticity in the author’s preface, how much Brown allows Cato to
mirror his own story: Brown himself was enslaved to a doctor, who used him as an assis-
tant, and when he escaped he, too, changed his name to reflect his circumstances, add-
ing the “Brown” in honour of the Quaker who helped him (Gardner 2005, 367). Eric
Gardner argues that Brown is using minstrelsy tactically in order to sneak across his
message in a jokey form. He suggests that Brown’s readings were “a key step—not only in
terms of authorship, but of a set of strategies for Black writers (and especially dramatists)
to deal with minstrelsy” (2005, 368). It might also be argued, however, that Brown’s play
demonstrates the insidious ubiquity of blackface forms in the 1850s, that they not only
influenced but also helped determine the possibilities for abolitionist writing, including
some black writing. Echoing minstrelsy was part of the price of inducing audiences to
learn about slavery. The reviews that Brown published alongside his script indicate that
playgoers themselves registered two sides to his work. As the Seneca Falls Courier put
it, “If you want a good laugh, go and hear him. If you want instruction or information
upon the most interesting question of the day, go and hear him. You cannot fail to be
94 SARAH MEER

pleased” (quoted in Gardner 2005, 434). Minstrelsy and abolition remained distinct for
audiences, but not uncomfortably so.
This might indicate that the success of minstrelsy had made blackface an inescapable
form for writers who wanted to address the slavery question and to represent African
Americans. Not quite, for John Townsend Trowbridge’s 1857 play Neighbor Jackwood,
which ran for three weeks at the Boston Museum, managed to avoid blackface alto-
gether. Set in Vermont, it features only one fugitive “slave” character, Camille/Charlotte,
who is passing for white. Trowbridge resisted what for other playwrights might have
been the temptation to introduce a minor blackface character or two, and he instead
made Yankee types the butt of jokes (Trowbridge 2000, 73–150). One has only to
compare Neighbor Jackwood with Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), to see what
Trowbridge avoided. Boucicault, too, has a light-skinned heroine who is tragically mis-
taken for white, but he also puts up a whole roster of black characters that might easily
have been borrowed from a minstrel Tom play. Boucicault even echoes Topsy’s most
famous line:

george: Were they all born on this estate?

pete: Guess they nebber was born . . . . dey swarmed one mornin’ on a sassafras
tree in the swamp . . . (1987, 1.1)

Like Trowbridge, Boucicault could write a slave heroine with whom his audiences could
sympathize, but in alluding to Stowe’s blackface Topsy, Boucicault emphasized only the
clownish surrealism of her denial of birth, not the antislavery pathos. Although Stowe
had reworked blackface caricature into an implied realism, Boucicault’s reductive treat-
ment suggests that, in many of the representations that she influenced, caricatures
assumed the status of reality.

Note
1. The play was also reprinted, without this scene, in London and Philadelphia as Flight to
America (Lhamon 2003, 430).

Further Reading
Adams, Bluford. 1997. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular
Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Austin, William W. 1975. “Susanna,” “Jeannie,” and “The Old Folks at Home”: The Songs of Stephen
C. Foster from His Time to Ours. New York: Macmillan.
Bean, Annemarie, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds. 1996. Inside the Minstrel
Mask:  Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy. Hanover, NH:  Wesleyan
University Press.
 MINSTRELSY AND UNCLE TOM 95

Brooks, Daphne A. 2006. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom,

1850–1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cantwell, Robert. 1984. Bluegrass Breakdown:  The Making of the Old Southern Sound.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Emerson, Ken. 1988. Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture.
New York: Da Capo.
Hamm, Charles. 2000. Review of Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising
Cain, William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask. Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 53: 165–83.
McConachie, Bruce A. 1992. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–
1970. Iowa City : University of Iowa Press.
Nathan, Hans. 1962. Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Wittke, Carl. 1930. Tambo and Bones:  A  History of the American Minstrel Stage. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.

Works Cited
Aiken, George L. 1966. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reprinted in Drama from the American Theatre 1762–
1909, edited by Richard Moody. New York: World Publishing. (This edition is a composite of
the prompt copies in the New York Public Library.)
Birdoff, Harry. 1947. The World’s Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: S. F. Vanni.
Brown, William Wells. 2005. The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom. In Major Voices: The Drama of
Slavery, edited by Eric Gardner. New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 365–434.
Boucicault, Dion. The Octoroon; Or, Life in Louisiana. 1987. In Selected Plays of Dion Boucicault,
edited by Andrew Parkin. Gerrard’s Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 135–190.
Clark, Susan F. 1997. Solo Black Performance before the Civil War: Mrs. Stowe, Mrs. Webb, and
“The Christian Slave.” New Theatre Quarterly 3: 339–48.
Cockrell, Dale. 1987. Of Gospel Hymns, Minstrel Shows and Jubilee Singers: Towards Some
Black South African Musics. American Music 5: 417–32.
———. 1997. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Cole, Catherine M. 2001. Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Conway, H. J. 1876. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Prompt copy, Boston Museum. Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Eliot, George. 1980. Review of Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp by Harriet Beecher
Stowe. In Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Elizabeth Ammons, 43–44.
Boston: Hall.
Erlmann, Veit. 1991. African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Gardner, Eric. 1998. Stowe Takes the Stage: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Christian Slave. Legacy
15: 78–84.
Gilmore, Paul. 1997. “De Genewine Artikil”: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and
Abolitionism. American Literature 69: 743–80.
Gossett, Thomas F. 1985. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture. Dallas, TX:  Southern
Methodist University Press.
Lane, Jill. 2005. Blackface Cuba, 1840–1895. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
96 SARAH MEER

Lhamon, W. T., Jr. 1998. Raising Cain:  Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.
MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2003. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular
Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft:  Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Mahar, William J. 1999. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum
American Popular Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Mason, Jeffrey D. 1993. Melodrama and the Myth of America. Bloomington:  Indiana
University Press.
Meer, Sarah. 2005. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s.
Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Meserve, Walter J., and Mollie Ann Meserve, eds. 2000. Fateful Lightning: America’s Civil War
Plays. New York: Feedback Theatrebooks & Prospero Press.
Rede, William Leman. 2003. Life in America, the flight, the pursuit, the Voyage. In Jump Jim
Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture, edited by W. T.
Lhamon, Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 210–263.
Roediger, David. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class. London: Verso.
Rogin, Michael Paul. 1998. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting
Pot. Berkeley : University of California Press.
Romano, John. 1978. Dickens and Reality. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rourke, Constance. 1931. American Humor:  A  Study of the National Character.
New York: Harcourt Brace.
———. 1942. The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Saxton, Alexander. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture
in Nineteenth-Century America. London: Verso.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 1855. The Christian Slave: A Drama Founded on a Portion of “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.” Boston: Phillips, Sampson.
———. 1994. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: W. W. Norton.
Toll, Robert C. 1974. Blacking Up:  The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Trowbridge, John Townsend. 2000. Neighbour Jackwood. In Fateful Lightning: America’s Civil
War Plays, edited by Walter J. Meserve and Mollie Ann Meserve. New  York:  Feedback
Theatrebooks & Prospero Press, 67–150.
Twain, Mark. 1960. Autobiography of Mark Twain. London: Chatto and Windus.
Winks, Robin W. 1985. The Making of a Fugitive Slave Narrative: Josiah Henson and Uncle
Tom: A Case Study. In The Slave’s Narrative, edited by Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., 113–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 CHAPTER 6

R E P R E SE N T I N G E T H N IC I DE N T I T Y
O N T H E A N T E B E L LUM STAG E ,
1 82 5 – 61

H E AT H E R S . NAT HA N S

It has been jeeringly said of the American people that they have no
national character; that, made up of shreds and patches from every part
of the earth, they are as motley in manners and sentiments as the many
colored garment of Joseph; and that they present no striking or pervading
characteristics, by which, as the mark of Cain, they may be known in all
times and places. The fact is that there is no people under heaven whose
national character is more deeply and strongly impressed than that of the
Americans; but it is rather an intellectual, than of a physical kind; it is seen
in their minds and heard in their opinions, rather than denoted by the
color of their cheeks or the brogue on their tongues; it results from their
religious, civil, and political institutions, and not from the formation of
their soil or the influence of their climate.
The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature, Fine Arts, and Drama,
December 27, 1828

While the irate author of this passage rails against those who relied on superficial eth-
nic traits to distinguish diversity among various American communities, his words
speak to a familiar issue. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, perform-
ers on the American stage wrestled with how to represent an ever-increasing range
of ethnic groups jostling against each other in urban landscapes or racing across the
western frontier. Irish, German, French, Spanish, Jewish, British, Southern, Yankee,
Native, Quaker, Catholic (African Americans will be addressed in Marvin McAllister’s
“The Rise of African American Drama, 1822–1879”), and others—each of these ethnici-
ties found some version of themselves depicted in the playhouse. The result appeared
as a veritable collection of “shreds and patches” on the national stage. This crazy quilt
of ethnic types challenges the contemporary theatre historian to discern pattern and
meaning—not only in the composition of these types, but in their juxtaposition and
repetition as well.
98 HEATHER S. NATHANS

Adding to the confusion, comparatively few of these ethnic groups were portrayed
onstage by members of their own communities. Class questions further complicated the
mixture, often becoming inextricably intertwined with ethnic identity. And while many
of the antebellum ethnic representations had derogatory elements, others tried to medi-
ate among the emerging racial and ethnic factions in nineteenth-century American
culture. Whether satirical or serious, the representation of ethnic markers on the ante-
bellum stage reveals a society constantly questioning (and sometimes panicking about)
what it meant to be American.
This essay follows the development of ethnic representation in the playhouse. I exam-
ine the rising nationalism of the 1820s, which re-defined white American masculinity
and the relationship of the white man to his racialized counterparts. I question how the
emergence of the bitter party bickering of the 1830s and 1840s shaped the characteriza-
tion of racial and ethnic others onstage. I explore how crises abroad, such as the Great
Famine in Ireland or the various radical revolutions across Europe, drove new ethnic
groups—and thus new dramatic characters—into the American imaginary. I conclude
the essay on the eve of the Civil War, as questions of racial and ethnic allegiance threat-
ened to overwhelm the stage.
Perhaps the most obvious and challenging question in undertaking such an explo-
ration is what constituted an “ethnic” or “racial” representation during the ante-
bellum era? As Kwame Appiah (2005) notes, the temptation is to set up “ethnic” or
“racial” groups in contrast to what may be the assumed baseline of American cul-
ture: Anglo/white masculinity. Yet if an ethnic group denotes inclusion via a shared
set of markers that may include physical characteristics, religion, history, geographi-
cal origin, culture, language, or other signs, then the reductive juxtaposition of
whiteness versus “others” elides the complex tensions that circulated among so many
groups within the young nation. It ignores the ways in which the ethnic boundaries of
one generation dissolved in succeeding eras through assimilation or shifting percep-
tions about what constituted a meaningful difference among diverse communities—
or as one author described it in 1828 New York, how certain groups “transmigrated”
into new ones (“Mr. De Viellecoeur [i.e., “Old Heart”] and His Neighbors,” 1828).
Furthermore, one can misread the way in which nineteenth-century Americans
themselves used the word “ethnic.” The word appears variously throughout ante-
bellum literature and newspapers as a signifier of difference—sometimes in a nega-
tive context and sometimes in a positive one (as when, for example, writers speak of
an “ethnic soul” or an “ethnic poet”).1 Therefore, rather than approaching racial or
ethnic representations on the antebellum stage as a series of binary performances
that staged the us/them dynamic, I focus on the impulse to define difference, and
I connect that impulse to efforts to establish power in antebellum American culture.
I have included the word race occasionally in my discussion because definitions of
racial identity are embedded in questions of ethnic belonging. Despite these perme-
able boundaries and curiously slippery terms, the theme that remains constant is the
quest for power and legitimacy.
 REPRESENTING ETHNIC IDENTITY 99

Between Boundaries and Belonging

Before examining the important year of 1825, it is important to look briefly at the treat-
ment of ethnic types on the American stage in the wake of the Revolution. The imme-
diate post-Revolutionary American theatre featured a surprising range of racial and
ethnic characters (including Africans, Jews, Irish, Quakers, Scots, French, Catholics,
and Native Americans). However, the newness of the American theatre, combined with
the struggles of postwar American culture to consolidate the power of the Revolution
and impose order on a still unruly nation, produced an impulse to make sharp distinc-
tions between what constituted an American character and what marked the racial or
ethnic “other.” Even when the plays were British in origin (as were most dramas on the
postwar American stage), theatre managers adapted the texts to suit American notions
of acceptable racial or ethnic markers. Pro-Jacobin playhouses showcased French char-
acters, pro-Democratic playwrights celebrated “Native” characters, while pro-Federalist
cliques minimized the evils of British characters.
In his fascinating study, Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in
Georgian Britain, Michael Ragussis argues that eighteenth-century audiences relied on
certain character types to create an “ethnic spectacle, used on the stage to locate and
secure the boundary between Englishness and otherness” (2010, 2). American plays
such as The Contrast, The Triumphs of Love, Slaves in Algiers, and André certainly par-
allel this model. Each of these plays highlights distinctions between white, Christian
American citizens and other groups ranging from Jews to Muslims to British nationals.
In each case, the ethnic spectacle onstage is meant to inoculate citizens in the audience
against any potential contamination from ethnic outsiders.
Jefferson’s presidency witnessed an escalation in the representation of new or
re-imagined ethnic characters on the American stage. William Dunlap’s The Glory of
Columbia (from 1803; it is a rewrite of his 1798 play André) hints at the new opportuni-
ties for redrawing the boundaries of ethnic identity in Jeffersonian America. Dunlap’s
original text focused on divisions among British and American ethnic identities (using
the story of the execution of the British spy Major John André during the Revolution).
But, as Jeffrey Richards notes, the play expresses a sense of “dislocation, anxiety, and
uncertainty among those charged with creating a new American drama” (2005, 138). The
Glory of Columbia builds on the original plot of André, inserting a comic Irish character
named Dennis O’Bogg who navigates easily among ethnic allegiances. He deserts the
British army to join the Americans and is captured by a pair of rustic American soldiers.
They marvel at his life story, until one soldier asks, “Dennis, are you most knave or fool?”
O’Bogg replies, “I believe I’m between both” (Dunlap 1966, 109). The American soldiers
warn him not to make a “spectacle” of himself and they sing him a song about how to
behave like a Yankee (110). The depiction of a character moving between ethnic identi-
ties, and the resistance to ethnic spectacle, gained greater currency on the national stage
during the first decades of the nineteenth century.
100 HEATHER S. NATHANS

Mordecai Noah’s She Would Be a Soldier; or, The Plains of Chippewa (1819) extends the
notion of characters that inhabit realms “between” ethnic identities. Though the play,
set during the War of 1812, features characters with specific ethnic markers (including
a French servant and an Indian chief), it does not allow these traits to become the sole
indicators of a character’s status. Noah calls attention to the fact that most Americans
bore some outside ethnic marker; in the very first line of the play, Mr. Jenkins says to his
friend, the French-born Mr. Jasper, “And so, neighbour, you are not then a native of this
village?” (Noah, 124). Noah, a Jewish American of Portuguese descent, embraced his
multiple ethnic identities, and She Would Be a Soldier promises that individuals with
complex ethnic backgrounds may find acceptance in America. For Noah, as for Jasper,
membership in a nation or ethnic group springs not simply from heritage or an acci-
dent of birth, but from a willingness to defend the rights of that group. As Jasper says,
“I . . . aided in establishing a powerful and happy republic” (124). His battles earned him
the right to claim land and citizenship and to start a family in his adopted country.
However, by 1825 the optimism expressed in Noah’s 1819 drama had waned. In
response to troubles abroad and hostility at home, Noah launched Ararat, a proposed
settlement in upstate New  York, intended as a separate Jewish homeland within US
borders. How did the Tammany Democrat Mordecai Noah of She Would Be a Soldier
come to enact this “ethnic spectacle” of separation? If the currents of American drama
had been moving toward a rhetoric of inclusion in the 1800s and 1810s, what had trans-
formed the intellectual, political, and cultural landscape by 1825?

Local Peculiarities: The 1820s to 1830s

During the early part of the 1820s the nation experienced a theatre-building boom as
new playhouses sprang up in major urban centers such as Boston, New York, Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and Charleston, and as frontier cities in Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee,
Florida, Alabama, and others scrambled to install some kind of theatrical entertainments
for their growing populations (McConachie 1992, 6–13). The expansion of regional the-
atrical activity coincided with the expansion of regionally driven politics. The national
election of 1824 pitted numerous candidates against each other, including Andrew
Jackson, Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams. No one candidate received a majority of
the electoral vote, forcing the House of Representatives to make the final choice. Adams
emerged triumphant after a process that would become known as the “Corrupt Bargain.”
The divisive election taught American politicians a lesson. In his encyclopedic study, The
Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, Michael Holt observes that, prior to the election
of 1824, “party building . . . had been largely leader oriented rather than voter oriented”
(1999, 7–8). Determined not to let another chance slip through their fingers, Jackson’s
allies instigated new campaign techniques that included playing on “voters’ emotions,
values, and prejudices” (9). Jackson’s supporters marshaled public performances from
rallies to barbecues to build local or regional parties on behalf of their candidate. The
 REPRESENTING ETHNIC IDENTITY 101

emphasis on local or regional interests rather than a “specific programmatic focus” paral-
leled the theatre’s trend to develop recognizable characters with specific ethnic boundar-
ies—ones that could not be “transmigrated” across.
Playwrights and actors moved in quest of characters with distinctly American char-
acteristics, seasoned with a local flavor. The first Yankee, “Jonathan” in Royall Tyler’s
The Contrast (1787), had appeared primarily as a rustic counterpart to the play’s hero,
Colonel Manly. His character traits were countrified without being (necessarily) specific
to one particular locale. Subsequent Yankee characters in plays such as Jonathan Postfree
(1807) and Love and Friendship, or Yankee Notions (1809) and The Yankey in England
(1815) stood as symbols of regional distinctions, but without the development of distinc-
tive traits that anchored them to a particular ethnic identity. By the 1820s, the Yankee
began to emerge as a more specific regional phenomenon (as in Samuel Woodworth’s
The Forest Rose [1825]). Critics hailed James H. Hackett’s Yankee, Solomon Swap, as an
exemplar of “local peculiarities and manners and habits,” noting that such characteris-
tics rendered “the residents of one part of the nation as different from their brethren as
though the seas divided them” (The Critic, December 27, 1828). Yankee plays prolifer-
ated throughout the 1820s and 1830s, including Jonathan in England (1828), The Liberty
Tree, or Boston Boys, (1832), The Green Mountain Boys (1833), Jonathan Doubikins (1833),
The Yankee Pedlar (1834),The Patriot, The Vermont Wool Dealer (1838), and The People’s
Lawyer, or Solon Shingle (1839). Sometimes Yankee characters appeared among a pano-
ply of other ethnic types in plays such as The Times, or Life in New York (1829). Life in
New York included African, French, and Southern characters, as well as a Yankee named
“Industrious Doolittle.” Actors such as James H.  Hackett, Danforth Marble, Noah
Ludlow, and George Handel Hill became known for their portrayals of Yankee char-
acters. Stage Yankees relied on their native wit to extricate themselves from the com-
plex situations into which their social naiveté often led them. While the Yankee could
navigate across geographical borders, he remained a largely self-contained character.
He might have local roots, but he appeared to best advantage (for either comic or heroic
purposes) when contrasted against different ethnic types, ranging from the Irishman
to the stage African. His most obvious regional pairing onstage—the Southerner—
tended toward drunkenness, profligacy, and hotheadedness (primarily in plays written
by Northern authors for Northern audiences). By contrast, Southern authors, such as
William Gilmore Simms, portrayed the Southerner as honorable and patriarchal (par-
ticularly in his relationship with inferiors).
Playwrights of the 1820s and early 1830s took the Yankee’s hallmark independence
one step further in developing the ethnic spectacle of the Native American charac-
ter. Representations of Indians exploded during the 1820s. But what did the new ver-
sion of the stage Indian represent? In earlier plays such as The Indian Princess (1808)
or She Would Be a Soldier (1819), Native characters had provided a useful foil for white
European or American counterparts. Some (such as Pocahontas in The Indian Princess)
had even demonstrated the potential for assimilation into white American culture. Their
ignorance of white traditions offered ready-made opportunities for whites to preach les-
sons of faith, tolerance, and patriotism.
102 HEATHER S. NATHANS

The theatre of the Jacksonian era presented a more complex interpretation of Native
identity. During the election of 1824, Jackson remarked to a friend that the “gentry class
[expected] to see me with a Tomahawk in one hand, and a scalping knife in the other”
(qtd. in Wiebe 1984, 236–37). Given Jackson’s brutal policies against Native peoples dur-
ing his presidency, his self-description seems at once ironic and sadly appropriate. How
did the systematic erasure of so many Native communities, including the Cherokee,
Chippewa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Seminole, and others translate onto the American
stage? Andrew Jackson gave his first national address on December 8, 1829, during
which he announced his administration’s “Indian removal” policy. Metamora; or The
Last of the Wampanoags opened at New York’s Park Theatre one week later (see Scott
C. Martin’s “The Politics of Antebellum Melodrama” in this volume).
John Augustus Stone’s Metamora (1829), the winner of one of the star actor Edwin
Forrest’s play competitions, helped reinvent the Indian character in the white American
imagination. As Tice Miller notes, Forrest’s “Wampanoag sachem became the tem-
plate for stage representations of the noble redskin: brave, strong, self-sacrificing, and
a child of nature” (2007, 61). Set during King Philip’s War (1675–76), the play chronicles
the destruction of the Wampanoag people. As Jill Lepore notes, “Lines from the play
became household words,” with everyone from little boys to adults quoting Metamora’s
famous speeches (1998, 192). Describing Metamora as an “act of historical ventrilo-
quism,” Lepore suggests that the character co-created by Stone and Forrest allowed
white Americans “to define themselves in relation to an imagined Indian past [empha-
sis mine]” (194). That imagined past, in which the Indian character might embody the
dual roles of the exiled or exterminated Native and the core values of the independent
American spirit rendered Indian removal all the more necessary. And although the
newspaper The Irish Shield described Metamora as “a thing of shreds and patches” and
dismissed it as a spectacle-driven, awkwardly written melodrama, nevertheless, Stone’s
tragedy launched a craze for Indian plays, spawning serious imitations and comic
burlesques alike.
The Indian character entranced both American-born and foreign-born authors.
In 1831, an American author named Dr. M’Henry penned the tragedy Wyoming (per-
formed at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre in February 1831). The play chronicled the
1778 British and Iroquois massacre of American citizens and soldiers in Pennsylvania’s
Wyoming Valley. M’Henry’s choice of story serves three important functions. Situating
the action during the American Revolution highlights American patriotism. Depicting
a massacre of innocent citizens underscores Indian savagery. Linking Indian characters
to British oppressors renders them doubly foreign (to American identity) and justifies
their eradication. On December 30, 1833, the Spanish-born playwright Louisa Medina
premiered Wacousta; or, The Curse at the Bowery Street Theatre. She followed that hit
with Kairisah; or, The Warrior or Wanachtithi in 1834.
The ethnic spectacles enacted on the antebellum stage paralleled the political impulse
to isolate the Indian geographically, trapping him in a tragic, unproductive narrative.
By the 1840s, one critic complained that the number of Indian plays on the American
stage “had become a perfect nuisance” (qtd. in Lepore 1998, 194). In the late 1840s and
 REPRESENTING ETHNIC IDENTITY 103

1850s, the Irish-born playwright and performer John Brougham developed successful
parodies of the genre with his burlesques, Met- a-mora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs
(1847) and Po-ca-hon-tas; or, The Gentle Savage (1855). The devolution into parody sug-
gests that the terrifying Indian figures of Stone’s, M’Henry’s, and Medina’s tragedies had
lost some of their resonance with American audiences by the late 1840s. Such a transfor-
mation implies that the ethnic spectacle of Indian identity had successfully reframed the
Native character in the white American imagination. Some American politicians would
try a similar strategy on Jewish Americans in the coming years.
Well into the first decades of the nineteenth century, Jewish character types onstage
adhered to familiar comic or sentimental types (the latter being largely a post-1795
phenomenon).2 William Pencak has described early American anti-Semitism as
“casual”—suggesting that it sprang more from inherited European traditions than any
active animus against Jewish culture (2005, xi). The pre-nineteenth-century Jewish
American population was relatively small and comprised primarily of Sephardic Jews
settled in Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, Newport, and New York. By the 1820s,
Jewish Americans, who had gained greater acceptance in early nineteenth-century
American culture, found themselves facing a rising tide of prejudice as some Gentile
Americans sought to push back against growing numbers of Ashkenazi immigrants and
expanded Jewish settlement. For example, the Society for Ameliorating the Condition
of the Jews (founded in 1820) promised western lands to any Jews who would convert
to Christianity. The society’s efforts to eradicate the nation’s Jewish population ignited
a furious backlash—prompting one author to pen the popular 1820 pamphlet Israel
Vindicated, in which he claimed, “It cannot be too often repeated that the Jew is debased
only because his natural rights are wrested from him. . . . The Jew is as competent as the
Christian to discharge the duties of civil society, and entertains as high a respect for all
the social virtues.” The author added, “In this country, innumerable proofs are to be
found of patriotism, of talent, and of virtue among the Jews” (Anonymous 1820, v–viii).
Onstage, Jewish characters began to experience pressures to convert or abandon any
attempt to coexist in Gentile culture. The twist in the 1820s and 1830s Gentile representa-
tions of Jewish characters was the new focus on Jewish women as the center of the ethnic
spectacle. Fueled by the craze for Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, with its dramatic tale
of the Jewess Rebecca who refuses to renounce her faith for her Christian suitor and
ends the play in voluntary exile, British and American playwrights flooded the stage
with a new ethnic type: the exotic Jewess.3 Yet, like her Native counterpart, she is ulti-
mately a sterile character. While her beauty and nobility mark her as ultimately desir-
able, her ethnic (or racial) identity as a Jew denies her access to Gentile culture. Unless
she converts, she will never enjoy a happy married life and children.
Intriguingly, the ethnic spectacle being enacted in the antebellum playhouse proved
less effective at marginalizing the Jewish personnel of the theatre, including playwrights,
performers, and managers. Even while Gentile authors reimagined the Jew as a romantic
exile, the presence of what Henry Bial has termed “double-coded” Jewish characters cre-
ated by Jewish authors increased on the American stage. Bial explains “double-coding”
as “the way the work speaks to at least two audiences: a Jewish audience and a general or
104 HEATHER S. NATHANS

gentile audience. . . . Many elements of a performance, from simple aural and visual signs
to complex affective impressions are open to multiple readings. While theoretically
there are as many variant readings of the performance as there are spectators, in prac-
tice, readings tend to coalesce around certain culturally informed subject positions: a
‘Jewish’ reading and a non-Jewish or ‘gentile’ reading” (2005, 16). This double-coding
phenomenon appears in the works of the Jewish playwrights Samuel B. H. Judah and
Jonas B. Phillips.
Judah’s A Tale of Lexington, written for the Fourth of July in 1822, inserts two
Jewish-coded characters into the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Judah claimed that
he wanted to “present to his fellow citizens on the sacred anniversary of their indepen-
dence a dialogue that would bring to their eyes the sufferings and gallantry of their
ancestors in that hour of peril when liberty drew its young existence among them”
(1823b, preface). Although the Jewish-coded characters in the play are clownish fig-
ures, they nevertheless play an important (and even heroic) role. By situating Jewish
characters among the “ancestors” who fought the American Revolution, Judah cleverly
interpolates Jewish American performance into American history, while still allowing
a Gentile audience to read Jewish stage figures as comical and nonthreatening (Feffer
2007). Yet Judah eschewed the nationalistic rhetoric of some of his Jewish contempo-
raries. He ultimately made a significant break with Noah and Noah’s allies in his vicious
poem, Gotham and the Gothamites, in which he ridiculed Noah’s blind patriotic fervor,
calling him a “pertinacious scribbler” of “insipid garbage” (Judah 1823a, 96). Judah’s
diatribes and his dramatic style reveal an intriguing potential dissent within the Jewish
community over how Jewish American ethnicity ought to be represented onstage and
how Jews should participate in American culture. Sued for libel, Judah eventually began
publishing plays anonymously. He grew increasingly critical of Jewish culture and what
he saw as the hypocrisy and superstition dogging the Jewish faith.
By contrast, Jonas B. Phillips appreciated the strides Noah and other early American
Jews had made in bringing Jewish authors to the public eye. Phillips’s patriotic trag-
edy Camillus; or, The Self-Exiled Patriot debuted at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre
on February 8, 1833. Phillips dedicated the play to Noah, thanking him for “the inter-
est you have ever manifested in the cause of the dramatic literature of our country
and the zeal with which your efforts have always been directed to its advancement”
(Phillips 1833, preface). Hailed as an ode to patriotism, the play warns against the dan-
ger of demagogues and preaches the virtues of republicanism. Again, while no overtly
Jewish characters appear (the play is set in ancient Rome), the motif of the patriot in
exile (as many American Jews experienced in the exile in the Jewish diaspora) allows for
a double-coded reading of Phillips’s drama.
By the 1830s, the American stage also reflected a European interest in more complex
Jewish stage characters, including popular productions of Thomas Wade’s The Jew of
Arragon; or, The Hebrew Queen (1830), J. R. Planché’s The Jewess (1835), and Scribe’s La
Juive (1835). TheAnglo-Jewish playwright Charles Zachary Barnett also became popular
on the American stage with several plays featuring strong Jewish characters, including
The Rise of the Rothschilds; or, The Honest Jew of Frankfort (1831), The Dream of Fate;
 REPRESENTING ETHNIC IDENTITY 105

or, Sarah the Jewess (1838), and The Mariner’s Dream; or, The Jew of Plymouth (1838).
Barnett’s plays are openly pro-Jewish and wrestle with questions such as interfaith mar-
riage (from the Jewish point of view). While the stage Jew remained a controversial and
often maligned character, by the mid-nineteenth century, at least the range of roles and
types had expanded somewhat to include possibilities for transformation and successful
incorporation into an American polity. Perhaps the most revolutionary play of all was
a closet drama by Herman M. Moos entitled Mortara; or, The Pope and His Inquisitors
(1860). Based on a real event in Italy during which a young Jewish boy was secretly bap-
tized and then forcibly removed from his parents by the Catholic Church, Moos’s play is
noteworthy for its depiction of a heroic Jewish uprising against religious oppression and
for its representation of the United States as the promised land for Jewish freedom.
The heroic Jewish character types celebrated in the plays of the first half of the nine-
teenth century found an echo in an Irish drama of 1828—Ireland Redeemed; or, The
Devoted Princess. Described as an “Irish historical drama,” and “all taken from Irish his-
tory,” the advertisements for the play proudly proclaimed it “without the introduction of
burlesque or buffoonery.” The author, George Pepper, reminded readers that he “confi-
dently expects on this occasion a liberal patronage from his countrymen” (Albion, 1828),
whom he reminded to “remember Ossian [the Irish mythical figure] under the Exile of
Erin” (Christian Watchman, 1828). Pepper makes a telling promise to the audience that
his play omitted the traditional clowning and stereotyping that often characterized the
stage Irishman. Pepper had a specific agenda in his writing. An editor for the New York
Spy, Pepper also launched the pro-Irish newspaper The Irish Shield in 1828. New York
already had an Irish paper (The Truth Teller), but as The Philadelphia Album and Ladies
Literary Gazette observed, “A vast portion of the population of this country is composed
of the sons of Erin, and their families, and it is such that will be expected to patronize
this project” (Philadelphia Album, 1828).
Pepper used his newspaper to criticize the representation of Irish characters on
the American stage (and his paper is particularly rich in detailed theatrical reviews).
Stage Irish characters pop up in numerous early British and American plays, includ-
ing The Rivals (with the ever-popular Sir Lucius O’Trigger), The Irishman in London,
The Irish Tutor, Lethe, The Triumphs of Love, The Indian Princess, and A Trip to Niagara.
Sometimes they appeared as central characters, but more often they were secondary fig-
ures inserted for comic relief. In January 1829 Pepper complained about a production
of A Trip to Niagara at the Bowery Theatre: “Mr. Wallack is quite incompetent in Irish
parts. . . . Indeed there is no actor on the American stage who can give the faithful and
chaste colouring of the Irish character which is so egregiously mistaken by Mr. Wallack
in his conception and delineation.” Pepper recommends that Wallack model himself
after Mr. Johnstone, “who excelled in his Irish portraits [having] discovered that it is
not the indiscriminate and vulgar adoption of a rich provincial brogue, that can desig-
nate our national character.” According to Pepper, Johnstone had mastered “the smooth
insinuation—the soft waggery—the glowing passion—and that kind-hearted subservi-
ency, which, in endeavoring to alleviate the wants of others, is not quite unmindful of
its own” (The Irish Shield, January 1829; September 1829). Pepper’s ongoing complaints
106 HEATHER S. NATHANS

about the treatment of the Irish on the American stage offer some insight into the social
and political status of Irish Americans during the 1820s. They asked for sympathy and
they demanded full citizenship. Other playwrights and authors shared Pepper’s con-
cerns about the representation of the Irish in American culture. In 1820, the novelist,
poet, and occasional playwright Almira Selden had penned The Irish Exiles in America
as a school play. In the preface she describes her reasons for writing: “The situation,
of the unfortunate Irish Emigrant, is too well known, for any one to suppose, that the
scenes here delineated are the mere dreams of fancy—The American, (though in the
full possession of his darling Liberty) can never fail, of commiserating the destiny of the
Irish Exiles” (1820, preface).
Tyrone Power, a celebrated Irish performer, debuted in America in 1833 and held the
stage until his untimely death in 1841. Power tended to play more genteel Irish charac-
ters, rather than working-class ones. During Power’s heyday the stage Irishman had not
yet become quite so inextricably linked to dissipated behavior, nor had he lost his claims
to citizenship in his adopted country. This may explain in part why authors like Pepper
and Selden focused on national characteristics that linked the Americans and the Irish,
rather than on the class status that might divide them. By the 1840s, the stage Irishman’s
class marker would become one of his leading characteristics. And by the 1840s he would
also become the target of increasing mob violence.

Defining Differences: The 1840s to 1850s

The election of 1840 marked a watershed year in American politics—a change that
translated into the way ethnic identities appeared on the national stage as well.
Michael Holt argues that the 1840 election “established the basic organizational struc-
ture . . . and the basic voter coalition” that would characterize American politics well
into the 1850s. According to Holt, both Whigs and Democrats sought to mobilize
voters primarily by “defining their differences as sharply as possible” (1999, 113–15).
Ethnic identities played a vital role in politicians’ efforts to win allies or invent oppo-
nents. The “hurrah techniques” that Holt describes as a feature of 1840s politicking
bear a strong resemblance to the types of “ethnic spectacle” Ragussis attributes to the
eighteenth-century British stage. Yet the campaigns of the 1840s displayed one sig-
nificant difference. Though they still fixated on ethnic markers as a critical component
of political difference, political leaders also assumed that they would have to develop
some credibility among diverse ethnic populations in order to win their votes. Instead
of compelling conformity to an essentialized notion of American identity, politicians
embraced (albeit temporarily) the ethnic characteristics of their constituents. For
example, in Cornelius Matthews’s comedy, The Politicians (1840), the corrupt politi-
cian Mr. Brisk tells his friend Mr. Crowder, “I’ll go and talk Dutch with the German
voters, and O’hone a little with the Hibernians.” Earlier in the play, the campaigners
 REPRESENTING ETHNIC IDENTITY 107

also remind each other of the need to secure the Quaker vote, coaching each other to
mention “light” in their speeches (Matthews 1840; see also Quinn 1923 and Grimsted
1987, 163–64). Other political plays of the period echoed this theme of leapfrogging
among ethnic communities. While James Ewell Heath’s Whigs and Democrats (1839)
did not draw such specific delineations between diverse populations, it still under-
scored the need for the character of General Fairweather (a would-be politician whose
name is particularly telling) to adapt his style, beliefs, and agenda to the individual
interests of his different audiences.
Some playwrights, such as Matthews and Heath, indicted the hypocrisy of politicians
who tried to gloss ethnic differences, or who, as Holt terms it, “obsequiously whored
after immigrant and Catholic support” (1999, 845). Other playwrights penned works
that indicated just how unbridgeable the gulfs among certain groups had become.
German and Irish migration escalated during the 1840s as conditions in both European
regions steadily worsened. Irish immigrants streamed into American cities, fleeing
famine. German immigrants—both Jews and Gentiles—poured onto American shores
seeking sanctuary from political and religious persecution (particularly after the rev-
olutions of 1848).4 Substantial German and Irish populations emerged in New  York,
Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston—and with these new populations came
a host of new stage characters.
The year 1845 witnessed the birth of the Know Nothing Party, a nativist political
group determined to “reduce, indeed to obliterate, the political influence of Catholics
and foreigners . . . [and] make sure that only native-born Protestants gained elective and
appointive public office . . . [and] stop immigrants from voting.” Party members’ plans
included implementing literacy requirements (to exclude non-native speakers), and
increasing the waiting time for naturalization from five to twenty-one years (Holt 1999,
845–46). The stage produced a mixed reaction to this nativist trend in American poli-
tics. Many managers and playwrights drew even sharper delineations among “ethnic”
types (Jews, Irish, Native Americans, German, French, etc.) and American-born white
citizens, and the minstrel show (see Sarah Meer’s “Minstrelsy and Uncle Tom” in this
volume) became a useful vehicle in this process. Some theatres launched critiques of
the nativist agenda. And still others capitalized on the growing immigrant populations
by creating characters and importing actors to appeal directly to these specific ethnic
groups.
During this troubled period, the stage Yankee emerged as the voice of reason. While
he might cling to his rustic manners and find himself enmeshed in various intrigues, he
symbolized “American” values and disdained foreign airs and graces. The character of
Adam Trueman in Anna Cora Mowatt’s social comedy Fashion (1845) offers the quintes-
sential example. Set in fashionable New York society, the play chronicles the adventures
of Mrs. Tiffany, a would-be lady of society who is duped by con artists and blind to the
true merits of her young governess, Gertrude. Trueman, a farmer from Catteraugus vis-
iting from the country, immediately recognizes the French Count Jolimaitre as a phony,
spots the French maid Millinette as duplicitous, and sees Gertrude’s inner virtue. Later
108 HEATHER S. NATHANS

stage Yankees in plays such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Neighbor Jackwood, and The Octoroon
would retain some of the clownish aspects of their characters, but they would also risk
violence or ruin to defend their beliefs.
Irish performers and plays enjoyed an upsurge in popularity during the 1840s and
1850s, even as violence against the Irish increased throughout the nation. In 1844 there
was a three-day battle in Philadelphia between nativist and Irish factions, leaving six-
teen dead and several buildings destroyed (Hartnett 2002, 86). By the 1850s, anti-Irish
and anti-Catholic violence was a regular occurrence in cities from New York to New
Orleans, with over twenty-two documented riots between 1845 and 1856 (Grimsted
1998, 228). Perhaps as a result, the stage Irishman became more broadly comical and
thus implicitly less threatening to those with anti-Irish sentiments. Among the many
popular stage Irish plays of the 1840s and 1850s were The Whiteboys; or, Macarty’s Fate;
The Irish Heiress; The Irish Attorney (1848); Irish Assurance and Yankee Modesty (1848);
Shandy Maguire (1851); O’Flanigan and the Fairies (1856); Ireland as It Is (1856); The Irish
Broomaker (1856); The Irish Post (1856); The Wild Irish Girl (1858); The Irish Dragoon; The
Irish Fortune Hunter; Ireland and America; Our Gal; The Limerick Boy; Paddy Miles’s Boy;
and The Irish Valet.5
The popular Irish actors John Brougham and Barney Williams exaggerated familiar
Irish traits, at the same time that they tried to infuse their stage depictions of the Irish
with greater humanity. The Spirit of the Times (1844) described one of Brougham’s per-
formances at the Boston Museum as “truthful and beautiful . . . the Irish love of country
and offspring, their intuitive wit and inclination to fun, their occasional great serious-
ness and awful denunciations when excited, their queer admixture of mirth and pathos.”
Brougham wrote plays specifically to represent the Irish character, including The Irish
Yankee (1854), created for Barney Williams, and The Irish Emigrant; or, Temptation
(1856). As T. Allston Brown describes, The Irish Yankee “came very near causing a riot.
The ‘Know Nothing’ agitation was at its height at this time, and the excitement here
was caused by Barney Williams making some allusion to the current events of the day.
Threats had been previously made that Mr. Williams should be hissed off the stage
because of a recent difficulty in Philadelphia, for which he suffered similar treatment.”
Hoping to placate the audience, “Mr. Williams stepped to the footlights and explained
the Philadelphia affair, which he regretted, and assured the audience that no native
American could love and honor the soil more than he did.” As Brown recalls, the affair
had a somewhat comical conclusion: “The following night was a repetition of the same
scene, only the ‘Know Nothings’ assembled in greater force; but, finding themselves
outnumbered by Barney’s free-ticket holders, they concluded that it was the height of
folly to pay for admission, and in this wise to put money into an actor’s pocket whom
they wished to drive off the stage” (1903, 399). Brougham’s The Irish Emigrant makes
specific reference to the famine and to the plight of those Irish unable to find work in
America. As the Irish character O’Bryan says, “I looked into the eyes of the quality folks,
but they carried their noses so high they couldn’t see the starvation on my face.” Though
the other characters describe him as “only an Irishman,” he still proves his integrity and
 REPRESENTING ETHNIC IDENTITY 109

faith against all odds (Brougham 1998, 163). The 1854–55 season also brought a com-
edy entitled The Irish Know Nothing—doubtless in response to the many Know Nothing
attacks on the Irish during that time period.
German immigrants encountered many similar challenges throughout the 1840s and
1850s. Sometimes classed with Irish immigrants among the undesirable new arrivals,
German Americans occasionally allied themselves with the Irish to fight persecution
from the Know Nothing Party (as in the case of an 1855 Chicago riot). In other cases,
Germans joined with the Know Nothings against the Irish (more specifically against
Catholicism). Germans rose up against the Irish in Cincinnati and New York, and in
1852, in St. Louis, German immigrants joined with Ned Buntline (E. C. Z. Judson) to
physically prevent any Whigs from voting in the German ward of the city (Grimsted
1998, 229–30). The shifting allegiance among Gentile German immigrants may seem
surprising, but as Brownson’s Quarterly Review observed in 1855, “We assert the right of
American nationality to reign on American soil, and insist on the duty of all naturalized
citizens to conform to it, and all foreign residents to treat it with respect. But in relation
to religion, to the law of God, we know no nationality.” Religion, in addition to country
of origin, had reemerged as an important distinction in creating ethnic markers. Still,
national traditions remained important to Irish and German immigrants, who founded
social clubs and charitable organizations to enjoy, as Oscar Handlin describes, “the sim-
ple sensation of not being alone among strangers” (1991, 155–59).
On November 10, 1854, the Bowery Theatre produced S. Barry’s farce The Persecuted
Dutchman; or, The Original John Schmidt. Sam W.  Glenn, known for his “Dutch”
(German) roles, played the lead in that farce as well as in The Dutch Guardian. The
one-time minstrel performer Joseph K.  Emmett also made a name for himself in
“Dutch” roles, perhaps not surprisingly because the minstrel stage also featured a num-
ber of Dutch/German characters.6 These new German stage types bore little relation to
the nation’s earliest German and Dutch settlers (particularly those wealthy landown-
ers in Pennsylvania or New  York) or to those characters celebrated by authors such
as Washington Irving—though dramatic adaptations of his Rip Van Winkle would
become one of the hits of the century. Indeed, even Rip Van Winkle became increas-
ingly “foreign” throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The earliest known
stage version from 1829 does not incorporate an accent for Rip. However, according
to Arthur Hobson Quinn, by the 1850s, new versions of the story used a stage “Dutch”
dialect for the character (1923, 329). The period immediately following the Civil War
witnessed an explosion of German-themed plays. Between 1865 and 1870 the follow-
ing titles appeared in the New York repertoire:  The Happy Dutchman, The Dutchman
in Difficulties, The Dutchman’s Dream, The Unfortunate Dutchman, The Dutchman in
Distress, The Shipwrecked Dutchman, The Dutch Merchants, The Rival Dutchman, The
Dutchman’s Ghost, The Dutch Trooper, and Our Dutch Cousin. Such a wealth of plays
in such a comparatively short period of time testifies to the immense popularity of the
character, as well as the postwar prominence of German immigrants in urban American
culture.
110 HEATHER S. NATHANS

Mose, Lincoln, and the Ethnic

Spectacle of Violence

As I have suggested, the representation of ethnic types on the national stage became
increasingly embroiled in class and political debates throughout the antebellum period.
Thirteen years before the Civil War, a stunningly complex character strutted his way into
the American playhouse: Mose, the Bowery B’hoy—a working-class hero who spent his
days moving among all the immigrant populations that had crowded into New York by
the middle of the nineteenth century. Benjamin Baker immortalized Mose in A Glance
at New York (1848).The play captivated audiences well into the 1850s, playing in numer-
ous New York and regional theatres. Embodied by Frank Chanfrau, a Jewish performer
from Five Points, Mose seemed uniquely able to “transmigrate” across ethnic boundar-
ies. Informed by the “accents of race” (including those from African American, Jewish,
and Irish communities), Mose appears in A Glance at New York as the one character
truly at home among a collection of strangers (Lott 1993, 83). Baker’s play constantly
underscores the perils of being “foreign,” a danger that affects not only those who ven-
ture to the city from other parts of the country, but also those who cross invisible lines of
class, racial, or ethnic belonging within the city as well. Only Mose travels through this
diverse landscape successfully (Baker 1848).
Part of Mose’s success came from his willingness (even eagerness) to fight. He fights
to defend his own rights or on behalf of his comrades. By the mid-1850s, the spectacle
of ethnic violence had become sadly commonplace in American culture. The most cata-
strophic violence—the Civil War—was obviously still to come, but the pugnacious eth-
nic types of the 1840s and 1850s demonstrated that a space for this kind of confrontation
had already been created in the American imagination.
In his 1861 inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln promised those living in the
already-divided country that they need not shed blood to preserve the Union but that
he was prepared to take whatever steps he deemed necessary in order to save the nation.
The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, plunged the nation into war,
instantly redrawing lines of allegiance. New layers would be added to ethnic perfor-
mances throughout the war and in the process of reassembling the nation that followed.
As Lincoln observed in his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, “As our
case is new, we must think and act anew.”
In some sense, there is no way to conclude a discussion of ethnic types in the ante-
bellum American theatre. These characters served as a kind of cultural palimpsest
upon which each successive generation inscribed a new ethnic spectacle or struggled
to author a doctrine of resistance. They offer the theatre historian opportunities to
watch a nation exorcise its most vicious demons and celebrate its most endearing
angels. Most of all, these characters show scholars how the theatre helped Americans
think through questions of identity and belonging at a crucial period in the nation’s
history.
 REPRESENTING ETHNIC IDENTITY 111

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Matthew Shifflett, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, for his
assistance with editing and formatting this essay.

Notes
1. For examples, see “Recent Publications Concerning Goethe” (1833) and “The Exile” (1834).
2. Plays with Jewish characters (or descriptions of Jewish characters or Gentiles who disguise
themselves as Jewish characters) performed on the American stage prior to 1820 include
The Fashionable Lover (1772), The Belle’s Stratagem (1780), The Young Quaker (1783),
The Little Hunchback (1789), The Heiress (1786), The Jew and Doctor (1800), The School
for Prejudice (1801), Love Laughs at Locksmiths (1803), The Invisible Girl (1806), The False
Friend; or, The Assassin of the Rocks (1806), Ella Rosenberg (1807), Transformation, or Love
and Law (1810), The Maid and the Magpie (1815), Rochester, or King Charles Second’s Merry
Days (1818), The Jew of Lubeck; or, The Heart of a Father (1819), and The Hebrew (1820).
3. Plays based on Ivanhoe include The Jew and His Daughter, The Hebrew, and The Maid
of Judah (one operatic and one nonoperatic version). Other plays with Jewish heroines
included Thomas Wade’s The Jew of Arragon; or, The Hebrew Queen (1828–30?), The Jewess;
or, The Council of Constance, A Dream of Fate, and Esther, the Royal Jewess; or, The Death
of Haman!
4. Tyler Anbinder notes that German immigrants would have drawn sharp distinctions
among their communities, not only on the grounds of religion, but also on the basis of
point of origin among the German states as well (Anbinder 2001, 45).
5. I have included publication dates for these plays when known. Many are no longer extant.
All of these plays appear in Odell’s Annals of the New York Stage in the chapters covering
the 1840s or 1850s. For an analysis and extended listing of Irish-themed plays published in
America, see Knobel (1981).
6. Schisms among German immigrant groups (particularly Jewish and Gentile) would
produce widely varying interpretations of “Dutch” roles onstage.

Further Reading
Kippola, Karl. 2012. Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage,
1828–1865. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kritzer, Amelia Howe, ed. 1995. Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Meserve, Walter J. 1986. Heralds of Promise: The Drama of the American People during the Age of
Jackson. New York: Greenwood.
Moody, Richard, ed. 1966. Dramas from the American Theatre. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing.
Nathans, Heather S. 2003. Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into
the Hands of the People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
112 HEATHER S. NATHANS

———. 2009. Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Odell, George C. 1927–49. Annals of the New  York Stage. 15  vols. New  York:  Columbia
University Press.
Rebhorn, Matthew. 2012. Pioneer Performances:  Staging the Frontier. New  York:  Oxford
University Press.
Wilmeth, Don B., and Christopher Bigsby, eds. 1998. The Cambridge History of American
Theatre, Volume One: Beginnings to 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Works Cited
The Albion. July 12, 1828.
Anbinder, Tyler. 2001. Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented
Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press.
Anonymous. 1820. Israel Vindicated: Being a Refutation of Calumnies Propagated respecting the
Jewish Nation in which the objects and views of the American Society for Ameliorating the
Condition of the Jews are Investigated. By an Israelite. New York: Abraham Collins.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Baker, Benjamin. 1848. A Glance at New York in 1848. New York: n.p.
Bial, Henry. 2005. Acting Jewish:  Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Brougham, John. 1998. The Irish Emigrant; or, Temptation. Edited by Walter J. Meserve and
Mollie Ann Meserve. New York: Feedback Theatre Books, 1998.
Brown, Thomas Allston. 1903. A History of the New York Stage: From the First Performances in
1732 to 1901. Vol. 1. New York: Dodd Mead & Co.
Brownson’s Quarterly Review. January 1, 1855.
The Christian Watchman. July 11, 1828.
The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature, Fine Arts, and Drama. December 27, 1828.
Dunlap, William. 1966. The Glory of Columbia. New York: Gale, Sabin Americana, 2012.
“The Exile.” The American Monthly Magazine.New York, September 1, 1834.
Feffer, Steve. 2007. “ ‘Judas the Maccabeas’: Samuel B. H. Judah and the Staging of Jewish History
in Early American Melodrama.” Prooftexts 27:3 (2007): 474–99.
Grimsted, David. 1987. Melodrama Unveiled:  American Theatre and Culture, 1800–1850.
Berkeley : University of California Press.
———. 1998. American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War. New York:  Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Handlin, Oscar. 1991. Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hartnett, Stephen John. 2002. Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum
America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Holt, Michael F. 1999. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the
Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.
The Irish Shield: A Historical and Literary Weekly Paper. January 1, 1829; September 1829.
Judah, Samuel B. H. 1823a. Gotham and the Gothamites. New York: S. King.
———. 1823b. A Tale of Lexington: A National Comedy Founded on the Opening of the Revolution.
New York: Dramatic Repository.
 REPRESENTING ETHNIC IDENTITY 113

Knobel, Dale T. 1981. “A Vocabulary of Ethnic Perception: Content Analysis of the American

Stage Irishman, 1820–1860.” Journal of American Studies 15.1 (1981): 45–71.
Lepore, Jill. 1998. The Name of War: King Phillip’s War and the Origins of American Identity.
New York: Random House.
Lincoln, Abraham. Annual Message to Congress—Concluding Remarks. December 1, 1862.
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/congress.htm. Accessed
November 28, 2010.
Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft:  Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Matthews, Cornelius. 1840. The Politicians. New York: B. G. Trevett.
McConachie, Bruce A. 1992. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1830–
1870. Iowa City : University of Iowa Press.
Miller, Tice. 2007. Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Noah, Mordecai Manuel. 1966. She Would Be a Soldier; or, The Plains of Chippewa. In Dramas
from the American Theatre, edited by Richard Moody. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing.
Pencak, William. 2005. Jews and Gentiles in Early America. Ann Arbor:  University of
Michigan Press.
The Philadelphia Album and Ladies Literary Gazette. September 3, 1828.
Phillips, Jonas B. 1833. Camillus; or, The Self-Exiled Patriot. Philadelphia: C. Neal.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. 1923. History of the American Drama, from the Beginning to the Civil
War. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Ragussis, Michael. 2010. Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian
Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
“Recent Publications Concerning Goethe.” The Select Journal of Foreign Periodical Literature.
Boston, April 1833.
Richards, Jeffrey H. 2005. Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Selden, Almira. 1820. The Irish Exiles:  A  Drama in Five Scenes. In Effusions of the Heart.
Bennington, VT: Darius Clark.
Spirit of the Times; A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage.
New York, July 27, 1844.
The Talisman. “Mr. De Viellecoeur and His Neighbors.” New York, January 1, 1828.
Wiebe, Robert H. 1984. The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution
to the Eve of Disunion. New York: Random House.
 CHAPTER 7

A N T E B E L LUM P L AYS B Y
WOM E N :  C ON T E X T S A N D  T H E M E S

A M E L IA HOW E K R I T Z E R

The Antebellum Period

The United States grew and changed at a very rapid pace during the thirty years
(1830–60) of the antebellum era. Despite setbacks such as the depression of 1837–44,
tremendous energy manifested itself in population growth, territorial expansion,
urbanization, industrialization, the building of a national transportation system, and
the development of public education. Vigorous public debate focused on the issues of
slavery, Indian rights, married women’s property rights, citizenship and suffrage, and
national versus state or regional power. Various forms of social action, from small-scale
experiments to mass movements, aimed at reforming individuals and society. Collective
efforts included the Protestant revival known as the Second Great Awakening, the
Abolitionist Movement, experiments in utopian socialism, the Seneca Falls Women’s
Rights Convention of 1848, the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s, and the Temperance
Movement. These developments formed a rich context for work by American
playwrights.

Women Playwrights in the Antebellum

Social Context

Despite the limitations on their participation in political and economic life, women
increasingly took part in theatrical and literary production. Women playwrights often
came from the growing corps of working female actors but also included writers who
supported themselves and their family through a variety of writing and publishing
 ANTEBELLUM PLAYS BY WOMEN 115

activities. The few women writers who wrote only plays were generally drawn from the
acting profession; some female actors, in fact, created good roles for themselves through
writing or adapting plays. The increasing wealth of the American middle class allowed
some women the education and leisure to use writing as a means of self-expression,
without regard for its earning potential. Plays by these women were sometimes per-
formed in professional theatres but were generally intended for a reading audience,
school recitations, or private performances.
Though women clearly constituted a minority of early nineteenth-century writ-
ers, women playwrights produced a significant body of work in antebellum America.
Approximately forty women wrote plays that were published or performed in the
United States during the period; of those, a handful achieved prominence, and several
created lasting impact.1 Numbers, however, are less important than the unique contri-
bution these writers made to the development of American drama. Women authored a
disproportionate share of the noteworthy stage plays of the era, including the extremely
popular melodramas of Louisa Medina and the still-performed Fashion by Anna Cora
Mowatt. Furthermore, most of the known female playwrights of this period wrote con-
sciously as women, creating female protagonists and reflecting on problems and issues
articulated by women. Their plays, therefore, provide a distinctively woman-centered
take on life in antebellum America.
Women who sought professional production of their plays encountered both oppor-
tunities and demands. Theatres multiplied rapidly during the antebellum era, serving
an increasingly urban and affluent population. Operated for profit, they were generally
free of governmental regulation but were subject to informal regulation by the culture of
the communities in which they were located. Theatre managers mediated between the
playwright and performers and the community. Usually an experienced actor, the man-
ager was most often male, though a significant few were female (see Curry 1994; Dudden
1994). Managers in the antebellum period discovered that there were good audiences for
moralistic melodrama, which offered a clear contrast between good and evil, as well as
suspense and scenic spectacle. Several critics have suggested that melodrama appealed
specifically to women; whether or not that was the case, melodrama’s emphasis on what
Peter Brooks described as “the dramaturgy of virtue . . . made visible and acknowledged”
(1976, 27) could logically attract the interest and approval of female audience members.
Within this theatrical context, a few women writers became successful by seizing on and
shaping melodrama. Others ignored it and never achieved theatrical prominence, while
a few found success outside this dominant form.

Women with Connections

The most successful female playwrights of the era were professionals who immersed
themselves in theatre, writing only or primarily for the stage and involving themselves
with production either through acting or close association with a manager. Charlotte
116 AMELIA HOWE KRITZER

Barnes Conner (1818–63) grew up in a prominent acting family, with parents who sup-
ported her theatrical ambitions. Her first play, Octavia Bragaldi (1837), a romantic trag-
edy loosely based on the 1825 murder of a Kentucky politician and attempted suicide of
his killer (factually detailed in Bruce 2006), was introduced by her father on one of his
own benefit nights at Wallack’s National Theatre in New York, with Henry Wallack play-
ing the male lead, while Charlotte Barnes played Octavia (Odell 1928, IV: 218). Barnes
Conner first achieved praise for her acting in a role she had written, the cabin boy in La
Fitte; or, The Pirate of the Gulf (1837), an adaptation (one of several at the time) of a novel
by J. H. Ingraham. Later, when she married the actor-manager E. S. Conner, she often
co-starred with him in her own plays, including The Forest Princess (1844), a patriotic
drama about Pocahontas. Sidney Cowell Bateman (1823–81), who similarly grew up in
one theatrical family and married into another, had her social satire Self (1856) as well
as other works, produced in St. Louis and New York theatres in which her husband and
children appeared as actors.
Louisa Medina (1813[?]–38) came to theatre from obscure origins (see Bank 1983) and
did not have the advantage of family support; however, she allied herself professionally
and personally with Thomas Hamblin, the manager of the Bowery Theatre in New York.
During the years 1834–38, Medina wrote at least eleven plays, generally melodramatic
adaptations of popular novels, and all were produced at the Bowery. Three of Medina’s
plays—The Last Days of Pompeii (1835), Norman Leslie (1836), and Rienzi (1836)—each
had runs of twenty-five days or longer, and the twenty-nine-day run of The Last Days of
Pompeii, a romantic costume drama about the intertwined fates of a Thessalian gladiator, a
blind flower girl, a young Greek nobleman, a beautiful young woman of Pompeii, and a vil-
lainous Egyptian priest, created a record for its time (Bank 1983, 61). Only three of Medina’s
plays are extant:  The Last Days of Pompeii, Nick of the Woods; or, Telie, the Renegade’s
Daughter (1838), and Ernest Maltravers (1838). Nick of the Woods, an adaptation of a novel
by Robert Montgomery Bird, combines the stories of an untutored young woman reared
in the wilderness, a penniless young couple new to America, a crazed avenger who lost his
family in an Indian raid, and several colorful frontier characters. Ernest Maltravers centers
on the ill-fated romance of the title character and Alice Darvil, which begins when she pro-
tects him from being murdered by her outlaw father, and eventually leads to the discovery
that she too is a member of the Maltravers family. Medina’s extant plays all survive in the
form of acting editions, and their cast lists and descriptions of scenery and costumes make
it clear that these elements contributed to the success of the plays. Since Medina lived with
Hamblin throughout the time she served as the Bowery’s principal playwright, she may
have had a voice in these crucial production choices.

Playwriting by Actors and Managers

Female actors and actor-managers often wrote or adapted plays, either to suit their
own talents or because they needed new material. The theatre manager Laura Keene
 ANTEBELLUM PLAYS BY WOMEN 117

(1826–73), who made novelty her specialty, is described by Faye Dudden as continually
“searching for new plays, sometimes even writing them herself ” (1994, 132). Keene’s first
biographer, John Creahan, mentions many adaptations, including her own version of
Camille (1856), described by George C. Odell as unique in presenting the title character’s
life and death as a dream (1897, VI: 454). Keene’s one known play of the antebellum era
is the domestic drama Life’s Troubled Tides (1857), which she presented in her New York
theatre, Laura Keene’s Varieties. Popular female actors who did occasional playwriting
included Julia Dean (1830–66), who toured with her Adrienne the Actress (1853) about
the French tragedienne Adrienne Lecouvrier, and Matilda Heron (1830–77), whose
naturalistic adaptations and performances of Camille and Medea (both performed in
1857) propelled her to stardom. Kate Edwards Swayze (1834–62), who had retired from
acting when she married but returned to it when her husband’s business failed, toured
with her play Ossawatomie Brown; or, The Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry (1859), about the
leader of the antislavery rebellion. Maria Lovell (1803–77) wrote an adaptation of a play
in German by Baron von Münch-Bellinghausen that she titled Ingomar the Barbarian
(1851). Set in Hellenistic Gaul with its action centered on the taming of a rough barbar-
ian by a kind but feisty young woman, this play found notable success with productions
at London’s Drury Lane and New York’s Bowery and Broadway theatres.2

Newcomers to Theatre

While familial, professional, or personal connections provided an advantage, the expan-

sion of theatre in the early nineteenth century made it accessible to newcomers. Anna
Cora Mowatt (1819–70) had no previous experience of theatre until she sought a source
of income after her husband’s business and health declined. Mowatt turned first to dra-
matic reading, and subsequently became both a playwright and a full-fledged actor.
Despite her upbringing in a religion that shunned theatre as immoral, Mowatt found
its financial opportunities much greater than those of more widely approved work such
as school teaching. Mowatt’s comedy of manners Fashion (1845) opened at the Park, the
prestigious New York theatre known for lavish production. It became an instant hit, with
an initial run of twenty-eight nights. Fashion attracted the critical attention of Edgar
Allan Poe, who initially dismissed it as unoriginal but later published a more positive
reconsideration (Odell 1928, V: 100). Fashion proved to be one of the most popular and
enduring of all nineteenth-century plays. Mowatt’s second play, Armand; or, The Peer
and the Peasant (1847), proved an excellent vehicle for her acting talents, though it did
not turn out to be an enduring drama.
Mowatt’s success may have inspired other middle-class women in need of income to
consider the stage. Elizabeth Crocker Bowers (1820–97), the daughter of a Connecticut
clergyman, made her stage debut at New York’s Park Theatre in 1846 at the age of sixteen.
She acted successfully in Philadelphia and later managed both the Walnut Street Theatre
and the Philadelphia Academy of Music. While manager of the academy she produced
118 AMELIA HOWE KRITZER

her own play The Black Agate; or, Old Foes with New Faces (1859), an adaptation of a
novel about Hypatia of Alexandria, the fifth-century female mathematician who was
murdered by a Christian mob. Louise Reeder (fl. 1854–57), “a member of a respectable
family,” according to Ireland, as quoted by Odell, made her acting debut in 1854 (1928,
VI: 366). Reeder wrote two melodramas about working-class women. Mary Morton or,
The Shirt Sewers (1855) won a prize and was performed at Barnum’s Museum. Linda the
Seegar Girl (1857), first performed at the Bowery, became a vehicle for Frank Chanfrau
in the role of Mose and was revived by him in 1859 when he became a theatre manager.
Henriette Fanning Read (fl. 1848–60), a Boston woman, went on the stage in that city,
though without notable success, and wrote several tragedies, including The New World,
published in Dramatic Poems in 1848. Set in Haiti following Christopher Columbus’s
inauguration of a colonial government on the island, it dramatizes a love affair between
a daughter of the native Haitian queen and a Spanish nobleman, which ends tragically
because of the machinations of a villainous colonial official.

Literary Women

In addition to the women who were professionally involved with the theatre, a num-
ber of literary women occasionally wrote plays. Among these were many professional
writers known primarily for journalistic work. Their dramas were sometimes serialized
in periodicals. Mary Carr Clarke (fl. 1809–38), a Philadelphia woman who started the
first American magazine targeted toward women, The Intellectual Regale, or, Lady’s Tea
Tray (1814–15), hovered on the margins of theatre for many years, writing plays, reviews,
and biographies of prominent theatre figures. Carr Clarke achieved success with Sarah
Maria Cornell; or, The Fall River Murder (1833), a play about the recent murder of a young
mill worker that asserted the guilt of a Methodist minister who had been acquitted of the
crime. Produced at New York’s Richmond Hill Theatre, it played to overflowing audi-
ences over a period of three months. Sarah Josepha Hale (1788–1879), the novelist and
magazine editor known for her editorship of the influential Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s
Book from 1837 to 1877, wrote two plays that were serialized in Godey’s. Hale’s plays, both
with male protagonists, differ from the general pattern of female central characters
in plays by women and thus signal her conservative politics regarding such issues as
woman suffrage. Ormond Grosvenor (1838), set in South Carolina during the American
Revolution, highlights the heroism of Isaac Hayne, a patriot captured and executed by
the British; it explores Hayne’s influence on the English aristocrat Ormond Grosvenor,
who renounces his title and supports the Revolution. The Judge: A Drama of American
Life (1851) focuses on how an exemplary jurist and family man acts when offenses he has
firmly sanctioned appear in his own intimate circle.
Plays appear among the varied output of several professional writers who embraced
a range of forms and subjects. Elizabeth Ellet (1818–77), a prolific writer whose output
included biographical dictionaries of eminent women, travel literature, and literary
 ANTEBELLUM PLAYS BY WOMEN 119

criticism, wrote several plays produced between 1834 and 1858. Her only extant play
is the romantic tragedy Teresa Contarini (1835), set in fourteenth-century Venice.
Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806–93), known primarily for her poetry and for essays on
behalf of women’s rights, wrote many plays, some produced and some intended for
amateur theatricals, between 1850 and 1904. Her two antebellum plays are The Roman
Tribute; or, Attila the Hun, produced at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia in 1850,
and Old New York; or, Democracy in 1689, produced at New York’s Broadway Theatre
in 1853. Both are historical dramas; the first envisions a clash between the rulers of
Constantinople and the Huns during the waning years of the Roman Empire, and the
second dramatizes a colonial rebellion in New York.
Two literary women known primarily for writing in other genres created dramatic
works of distinction but encountered difficulties in seeking to have their work pro-
duced. Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz (1800–1853) was a fiction writer who, after leaving
Massachusetts and moving south with her husband, became known primarily for the
books she wrote in defense of slavery. She had not yet become a popular novelist when
she wrote De Lara; or, The Moorish Bride (1831), Werdenberg; or, The Forest League
(1832), and Lamorah; or, The Western Wild (1833). Both De Lara and Werdenberg won
contests organized by the actor William Pelby and were subsequently produced:  De
Lara at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia and Werdenberg at the Park Theatre in
New York. The romantic tragedy De Lara, set in Spain after the defeat of the Moors,
features a young Christian convert whose loyalty is torn between her Christian
lover and vengeful Muslim father. Its preface states that since Pelby actually failed to
come up with the sum he had promised the contest winner, he returned the rights to
Hentz, who licensed the play for performance in several cities and had it published
in 1843. Werdenberg, which is not extant, was, according to Odell, a melodramatic
treatment of the Swiss struggle for freedom that failed as a performed piece (1928,
III: 556).3 Lamorah, performed at Caldwell’s Theatre in New Orleans, portrays con-
flict between Indians and the American army during the settlement of Cincinnati. In
it a young Indian woman, like Pocahontas, saves a white captive’s life by interposing
herself between him and her father. Lamorah, the Indian woman, falls in love with
the man she has rescued, but he loves a white woman who is also held captive. To
free the woman and unite the pair, Lamorah sacrifices her own life, and dies foretell-
ing the future greatness of Cincinnati.4 Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), one of the fore-
most poets of the antebellum era, wrote two plays. Her first, Leonora or The World’s
Own (1857), was performed in New  York at Wallack’s Theatre with Matilda Heron
in the title role. It presents a young and naive woman who is betrayed by a libertine
with the apt name of Lothair. When Leonora finally understands Lothair’s deception,
she becomes transformed into a vengeful fury, eventually destroys him, and finally
commits suicide. Howe’s second play, Hyppolytus, a version of the Greek myth, was
written for the actor Edwin Booth and sent to him in 1858. It was scheduled for pro-
duction in 1864 but was postponed repeatedly and not performed until 1911 (Howe
1965, 73–74). Despite Howe’s disappointment that Hyppolytus was not produced, and
120 AMELIA HOWE KRITZER

her consequent decision never again to write for the stage, both of her plays were pub-
lished and have been anthologized.

Poet Playwrights

Many antebellum poets wrote plays, but most did not attempt to secure production.
Instead they aimed primarily for an audience of readers and typically published their
dramas in volumes that included other poetic work. These volumes were often pri-
vately printed or, if commercially published, brought out by nondramatic publishers.
Women poets of the earlier antebellum period most often wrote on historical or biblical
subjects. Caroline Keteltas wrote The Last of the Plantaganets (1830), an adaptation of
a novel by the same title, intending “from a Christian motive” to redeem the character
of Richard III from the notoriety in which it had been held as a result of Shakespeare’s
play (1844, iii). The last Plantagenet of its title is not, in fact, Richard III but his son by a
secret marriage, who plays a major role in the action. Louisa Jane Park Hall (1802–92), a
New England poet, wrote the dramatic pieces Miriam (1837), and Hannah (1839) about
biblical women of great spiritual power. Perhaps inspired by Elizabeth Ellet’s 1841 factual
account of Joanna of Sicily, Hall also wrote Joanna of Naples (1850) about a medieval
princess who refused to allow her husband (and second cousin) to rule Naples, instead
ruling as its queen. Delia Salter Bacon (1811–59) wrote the romantic historical drama The
Bride of Fort Edward (1839), which dramatizes an incident associated with the American
Revolution. Eliza Lanesford Cushing (b. 1794)  wrote Esther (1840), a blank-verse
play about the biblical-era beauty who saved the Jewish people. Eliza Gabriella Lewis
included The Outlaw, a drama set in Renaissance Italy about a young woman who sacri-
fices her life to reconcile her estranged father and brother, in her Poems (1850).
As the century advanced, women poets, though still among the most conservative
of writers, moved toward greater experimentation and contemporary subjects. Mary
Lowell Putnam (1810–98) wrote the domestic drama Tragedy of Errors (1861) and its
sequel Tragedy of Success (1862) in an unusual style, alternating dialogue with stage
directions or internal thoughts of the speakers composed in rhymed couplets. Jane
Hudson Corwin (1809–81) opened The Harp of Home, her 1858 collection of conven-
tional poetry, fiction, and essays, with an unconventional domestic drama, A Dialogue
Between Mr. Native and Mrs. Foreigner, on Literary Subjects. This piece, between two
characters who clearly reference Corwin and her husband, presents the man arguing
against, ridiculing, and finally forbidding his wife to write, while she reasons with him,
deflects his criticism with sarcasm and wit, and ultimately defies him, insisting that she
will write and publish a book.
Despite the fierce political debates of the antebellum period, very few women dra-
matists chose to write on political subjects. Elizabeth Stryker Ricord (1788–1865), a
pioneering psychologist, head of the Geneva Female Seminary in New York State, and
family friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote Zamba, or, The Insurrection (1842), an
 ANTEBELLUM PLAYS BY WOMEN 121

antislavery drama set during the Jamaican slave revolt of 1831. Sophia Robbins Little
(b. 1799) wrote The Branded Hand (1845) as a tribute to the abolitionist Jonathan Walker,
who was branded on his right hand with the letters “SS” (for slave stealer) after being
convicted in Florida of attempting to help seven slaves escape in 1844.5 Louisa McCord
(1810–79), a Southern woman who advocated for slavery and against public roles for
women, wrote Caius Graccus (1851), a Roman drama in which a mother gives her son
advice to help him in his political career, exemplifying the type of role McCord consid-
ered appropriate for women.

Powerlessness as a Primary Theme

Women’s lack of power stands out as the most pervasive theme of women-authored
plays in the antebellum period. The prevalence of this theme appears particularly strik-
ing when comparing the plays written by women between 1830 and 1860 to those writ-
ten by women in the period 1795 to 1829. Plays by Susanna Haswell Rowson, Judith
Sargent Murray, Sarah Pogson, and other American women of the early national
period expressed confidence in the power of women to function effectively in both pri-
vate and public spheres. The female characters of the earlier plays actively pursue and
attain their goals, supported by a strong female community. Young women express a
readiness to avoid marrying if they do not find worthy husbands, and unmarried older
women demonstrate the positive potential of being single through independent and
productive lives. The optimism in regard to the United States as an arena of unprec-
edented freedom and expanding choices for women peaked during the early national
period and then was lost. A sense of lost confidence, reflected in the theme of power-
less women, relates to changes in American society. Women in the antebellum period
absorbed the shock of a major societal shift that drastically altered their roles and sta-
tus. As Gerda Lerner pointed out in her pathbreaking 1969 essay “The Lady and the Mill
Girl,” the transformation of American society from a predominantly rural one, where
the individual household served as the primary source of productivity, to one where
economic and political power was concentrated in the cities, had a profound effect
on women’s status. Instead of managing the considerable work of the household and
contributing directly to its income, the middle-class woman became an emblem of her
husband’s success through leading a life of idleness and consumption. Working-class
women in poorly paid domestic service and factory work became alienated from their
middle-class employers as the distance between classes increased. While educational
opportunities for females were increasing, professions raised barriers against women.
Rising expectations that resulted from an expansion of the franchise during the early
decades of the nineteenth century were dashed as this expansion halted without
including women. Such developments caused women to resent and eventually protest
their lack of public power.
122 AMELIA HOWE KRITZER

Mary Carr Clarke as a

Transitional Writer

Mary Carr Clarke serves as an instructive example of the change from the early
republic to the antebellum period. Carr Clarke’s three known plays span the years
1815 to 1833 (see Kritzer 1997 for additional discussion of Carr Clarke’s work). Her
first two plays show a movement from autonomy to dependence. The Fair Americans
(1815) presents a rural family impacted by the outbreak of the War of 1812. The women
in the farm household include Mrs. Fairfield, her daughters, and an Irish domestic
worker. Mrs. Fairfield defines and supervises the household’s productive activities
that include milking cows, feeding poultry, cooking meals, baking bread, brewing
beer, pressing cheese, churning butter, spinning yarn, and weaving cloth. The family’s
daughters as well as the servant participate in the work, and they all enjoy remarkable
freedom of movement during their leisure time. Two of the young women are cap-
tured by Indians while out walking, but they are soon freed and suffer no permanent
effects as a result of the captivity. Though the women voice frustration at their lack of
political rights, they take an active part in the chorus of praise that defines America
at the end of the play. Carr Clarke’s second play is The Benevolent Lawyers (1823), an
early melodrama which highlights the precarious position of women. Maria, a lovely
and virtuous married woman, encounters complex threats that include her children.
Though she has a middle-class background, Maria supports her family by sewing
while awaiting the return of her seafaring husband. Her meager income makes her
vulnerable to a villainous landlord’s lustful intentions, and an even greater threat
arises in the form of a vengeful mother whom she has never known. Insanely driven
to harm Maria because of the suffering she endured when this daughter was born
illegitimately, the mother has Maria’s children kidnapped. Maria and her children are
rescued by others, including the benevolent lawyer of the title, but if one link in the
chain of individuals, which includes her sister-in-law, an African American domestic
worker, a pair of Irish workmen, and a Quaker woman, had failed, Maria’s life would
have been ruined.
Carr Clarke’s final play, Sarah Maria Cornell, or The Fall River Murder (1833), drama-
tizes the loss of authority and security inherent in the position of women in the increas-
ingly urbanized and industrialized America. The central character works in a textile
mill, but her independence exposes her to dangers against which her conventional vir-
tue provides no protection. When she attends a religious camp meeting, the presiding
minister rapes and impregnates her, and he subsequently murders her and tries to make
her death appear to be a suicide. Even though he is brought to trial with a great deal of
evidence pointing to his guilt, the minister is acquitted. The fact that this play was based
on the actual murder of a mill worker and trial of a minister in Newport, Rhode Island
(detailed factually in Williams 1993), drives home the point that women’s lack of power
deprives them even of basic access to justice.
 ANTEBELLUM PLAYS BY WOMEN 123

Predominance of Tragedy

Tragedy is the most common form of drama written by antebellum women, and most
of the tragedies highlight the powerlessness of women. Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz’s
De Lara; or, The Moorish Bride, Elizabeth Ellet’s Teresa Contarini, Charlotte Barnes
Conner’s Octavia Bragaldi, Delia Bacon’s The Bride of Fort Edward, Henriette Fanning
Read’s The New World, Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s The Roman Tribute; or Attila the Hun
and Old New York; or, Democracy in 1689, and Julia Ward Howe’s Leonora or The World’s
Own all center on women whose tragic essence consists in their powerless state. Though
the circumstances vary, the central woman usually faces her difficulties alone, with
no mother or supportive community. Some of the plays emphasize a competitive and
masculine culture that marginalizes women by setting the action in a time of war and
placing the woman in the situation of loving a man on the opposite side of the cur-
rent conflict. Zoraya in De Lara loves the Christian prince whose father has defeated
the Moorish people and captured her father. While both she and her father have con-
verted to Christianity, her father has done so to enable his plans for vengeance, and he
forces her to renounce her love. In The Bride of Fort Edward, based on an actual incident
during the American Revolution, the central character, Helen, loves a British officer.
Helen had secretly married Maitland before the conflict separated them, and though
she loves him she also supports the Revolution and has strong ties to her patriot family.
As the Indians allied with the British draw near and her mother and sister flee to safety,
Helen remains alone, convinced that she must wait for Maitland’s promised arrival. Old
New York, which also uses the circumstances of a historical incident, places its action
within a colonial rebellion known as Leisler’s Revolt. The conflict raises the stakes for the
central character, Leisler’s wife, Elizabeth, who was previously married to her husband’s
primary opponent.
An atmosphere of corruption and betrayal intensifies the powerlessness of women in
some plays. The fourteenth-century Venetian setting of Teresa Contarini carries the con-
stant threat of false accusation or betrayal. Forced to marry against her will to free her
father from unjust imprisonment, Teresa meets the man she really loves for a final fare-
well, exposing him to arrest on false charges of treason. Her valiant effort to free him by
telling the truth fails, and his execution propels her to madness and death. The Roman
Tribute, set during the declining years of the Roman Empire, heightens the tension of a
time of peril by portraying divisions among the rulers of Constantinople, including a
pair of potentially powerful women who have served as regents for a mentally incom-
petent emperor. The eventual destruction of the city owes as much to murderous rival-
ries within it as to the threats posed by the Huns. Past mistakes made by the women in
Octavia Bragaldi and Old New York arise from obscurity to envelop the primary charac-
ter and her husband in a complex web of deception and violence.
Although choice of marriage partner had been a liberty generally accorded women
in earlier American dramas, plays by antebellum women cast doubt on the validity of
that freedom. In both Teresa Contarini and De Lara—as well as the melodrama Ernest
124 AMELIA HOWE KRITZER

Maltravers—fathers prohibit the desired love relationship, intent on using their daugh-
ters as tools in a quest for wealth, political power, personal influence, or revenge. In the
plays where young women do exercise choice, their choices often prove unwise and lead
to tragedy. Questions of bigamy arise in two plays. The title character of Octavia Bragaldi
enjoys a happy married life with Bragaldi, but the reappearance of Octavia’s first hus-
band, Castelli, whom she believed dead, destroys her happiness. A powerful noble who
did not treat her well during their marriage, Castelli denies that he and Octavia were
ever legally married. Spurred on by her fury at this lie, Bragaldi assassinates Castelli,
then commits suicide, with Octavia following suit immediately. A  similar situation
occurs in Old New York, when the Crown appointee for governor arrives, and the wife of
Jacob Leisler, the elected governor, recognizes him as the cruel husband from whom she
fled years ago. Leisler’s wife goes mad, murders her own child, and is unable to prevent
her husband’s execution by the new governor.
Because women lack personal power and are subject to the double standard of sex-
ual behavior, falling in love inevitably exposes them to danger. The childlike, unso-
phisticated title character of Leonora or The World’s Own cannot believe that her lover,
Lothair, would fail to keep his promises to her and thus persists in seeking him. When
she finally understands that Lothair has forgotten her existence, after he had seduced
her and bragged of the conquest, she loses her grasp of reason and morality. Rather
than the repentant and pathetic slide toward death of the typical victim in narratives
of seduction and abandonment, Leonora becomes an avenging fiend, gaining a kind of
power through prostitution that enables her to destroy Lothair and his wife and child
before she, too, commits suicide. Helen, in The Bride of Fort Edward, allows herself to
be taken by a party of Indians, because she believes they will conduct her to the British
officer who is her husband. Love exposes Alice Darvil, the innocent young heroine of
Ernest Maltravers, to extremes of evil. Alice’s kindness to the stranger who appears at
her remote cottage develops into love for Ernest and leads her to secretly marry him; as
an unacknowledged wife, she encounters villainous deceptions and threats of rape from
one of his associates. After witnessing a murder in the Maltravers mansion and hearing
her father reveal his suspicion that Ernest is her brother, Alice flees to the mountains to
live with a band of robbers. Eventually the barriers to her love are removed, but by then
Alice has long been mad. Women who love, as can be seen in Octavia Bragaldi, Teresa
Contarini, De Lara, Old New York, The Forest Princess, and Hippolytus, also endanger
their lovers, as other men who desire or claim such women view them as obstacles to be
removed.

Character and Power

While the pattern of action evident in these plays indicates serious questions about
women’s status, looking at these works from outside the action, as forms of expression
by the women who wrote them, complicates the issue of women’s power. In choosing to
 ANTEBELLUM PLAYS BY WOMEN 125

write tragedy, the female playwrights deferred to a traditional worldview. At the same
time, in attempting the blank-verse tragedy, for which the works of Shakespeare stood
as the preeminent model, they signaled seriousness and confidence. They modified the
form by centering it on a woman, and they gave their female protagonists the forceful
speech not accorded women in Shakespeare’s plays. Nina Baym observes that in his-
torical plays by American women the speeches of the female characters fail to accom-
plish the desired objective within the play, such as permission to marry the man of their
choice or the release of an imprisoned loved one. The eloquent speeches of these female
characters could, however, move an audience, and in doing so enhance the power of
the playwright. As Zoë Detsi-Diamanti notes, the female characters of these plays may
be compared with the male characters in such nineteenth-century blockbusters as John
Augustus Stone’s Metamora (1829) and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator (1831).
At their best, they were unforgettable.
Conduct as a measure of character presents a second very important theme that per-
vades all types of plays, whether they are tragedies, melodramas, or comedies. The ideal
woman, as described by a friend of the title character in The Judge, is “one of those pure
beings, gentle, wise, and firm, that mould our [male] sex to highest hopes and aims”
(Hale 1851, 73). The conventional feminine virtues and indirect influence praised in
this speech characterize the great majority of the female characters in dramas by ante-
bellum women, regardless of the characters’ class, religion, race, or nationality. Young
women who make mistakes, as in Leonora, Octavia Bragaldi, Old New York, or Ernest
Maltravers, do so out of love and inexperience, and they suffer greatly for their errors.
Some plays do draw a contrast between virtuous and nonvirtuous women. Fashion, Self,
and Ingomar the Barbarian interestingly attribute failures of character to older women.
The pretentious social climber Mrs. Tiffany in Fashion, who encourages her daughter
to make unfortunate choices; the blindly indulgent mother in Self, who pushes her son
to commit a crime when he runs out of money; and the lazy and self-interested mother
in Ingomar the Barbarian, who pressures her daughter to marry an obnoxious but rich
suitor, all provide a negative contrast to young women who display laudable ideals and
behavior.
Self-sacrifice formed the core of nineteenth-century ideals concerning women. Thus
it is not surprising to find many examples of self-sacrifice among plays by antebellum
women. In the supreme act of sacrifice, giving one’s life, moreover, female characters
achieve the power they otherwise lack to make a decisive difference in the action of the
play. In tragedies, the death of the heroine creates the play’s endpoint and definition,
while in melodrama the death of a major female character provides a turning point in
the action. It is interesting to note the frequency with which female characters at the
bottom of the power structure—those that lack conventional means of attracting and
influencing powerful men, such as the blind girl Nydia in The Last Days of Pompeii,
Telie the renegade’s daughter in Nick of the Woods, and the Indian women in both The
Forest Princess and Lamorah—sacrifice their lives. Nydia, Telie, Isabella in The Outlaw,
and the title character of Lamorah bring about the union of lovers or reconciliation of
family members, thus allowing others to be happy, through their deaths. In other plays,
126 AMELIA HOWE KRITZER

however, the sacrifice has wider implications. When Helen, in The Bride of Fort Edward,
is brutally murdered by the Indians to whom she trusted her safety, her death reinvigo-
rates the soldiers on the patriot side of the Revolution and contributes to its ultimate
success. In The Forest Princess, Pocahontas becomes the cofounder of a new nation,
and in Lamorah a similar Indian woman influences the outcome of a conflict between
Indians and white settlers.

Freedom and Marriage

Comedy, traditionally associated with greater freedom and power for women, proves
true to that pattern in antebellum plays by women, but it usually requires the help and
cooperation of men. In spite of the independence from male authority humorously
communicated in A Dialogue Between Mr. Native and Mrs. Foreigner, the convention-
ally virtuous young women in Fashion, Armand, and Self overcome the difficulties
they encounter only because good-hearted men rescue them. In the romantic com-
edy Ingomar the Barbarian, the strong heroine, Parthenia, almost attains her happi-
ness single-handedly, after adventures that include becoming a slave to free her father
from bondage, and gradually but gracefully persuading Ingomar to give up the life of
an uncouth marauder and become a model citizen. At the end, however, only the inter-
vention of the city’s governor overcomes the treachery of those who oppose Parthenia
and Ingomar’s union. At the same time, because of the kindly protection of paternal
authority figures, the social-climbing and extravagant Tiffany women of Fashion and
the appallingly unscrupulous Mrs. Apex of Self do not suffer permanent harm as a result
of their misdeeds but instead receive only an unforgettable moral lesson and a course of
reform.
The comedies allow self-sacrifice to be reversible. Gertrude, the exemplary woman
in Fashion, sacrifices her reputation when she participates in an attempt to entrap
Jolimaitre, the servant posing as a count in order to marry Serafina Tiffany, but the rev-
elations at the end of the play affirm Gertrude’s purity. Mary in Self loses her home and
her father’s affection when she refuses to blame her stepmother or stepbrother for the
disappearance of a large sum of money, but she, too, regains her rightful position when
the truth is revealed. Comedic plots do not require the ultimate sacrifice even of minor
characters. In Self, the free African American who has been Mary’s nurse and compan-
ion stays with her when Mrs. Apex’s forgery causes her father to turn her out, and Chloe
even offers to sell herself into slavery for Mary’s sake. Mary, of course, rejects that idea,
and her rescuer gives Chloe special praise in the finale, calling her the most unselfish
individual among them.
Though love appears full of dangers, is often thwarted, and sometimes leads directly
or indirectly to death, even the comedies allow little or no space for happiness outside
marriage. Usually forming a central aspect of the dramatic action, marriage encom-
passes and defines the lives of the female characters. Acknowledging the perils of being
 ANTEBELLUM PLAYS BY WOMEN 127

a single woman and the uncertainty of marital happiness, virtually all the plays pres-
ent a dual view of men. Octavia Bragaldi’s husband, Francesco, epitomizes the good
man—one whose nobility derives from actions rather than inheritance, who loves his
wife dearly and trusts her utterly, who speaks with her as an equal and remains true to
her regardless of challenges. The bad men prove to be deceptive, exploitative, control-
ling, brutal, suspicious, weak, and dependent on wealth or high status for their identity.
Being alien in some sense—that is, of a different race, nationality, class, or tribe—does
not prevent a good man from being recognized as such. Respect and love occur across
such dividing lines in a number of plays. In fact, the emphasis in melodrama and com-
edy on the discovery of unsuspected family relationships makes almost any stranger a
potential relative. A capacity for work characterizes the good husbands; even the unfor-
tunate title character of Ossawatomie Brown proves exemplary in this regard. Drinking,
gambling, social pretensions, and dandyism warn of men to be avoided, as Fashion, Self,
and Leonora demonstrate. Inexperienced young women eager for life nevertheless fall
in love with such men. Their inability to read the signs correctly points to a problem
identified by Karen Halttunen: in the “world of strangers” created by rapid urbanization,
population growth, and geographical mobility in antebellum America, it was often the
case that “appearances were valued more than realities” (1982, 34–35). Unfortunately for
the female characters in many antebellum plays (including in works such as the 1844
melodrama The Drunkard by William H. Smith), marrying a good man does not nec-
essarily provide permanent security, as the good men are often removed by villains or
overcome by circumstances that their despairing wives can do nothing to counteract.

Historic and Romantic Settings

The division of dramatic settings into historic and romantic provides what is perhaps
the most compelling overall thematic element in plays by antebellum women. As previ-
ously mentioned, a number of the plays dramatize actual events, employing appropriate
historical settings. Such plays include Sarah Maria Cornell, The Bride of Fort Edward,
The Roman Tribute, Old New York, The Forest Princess, Ormond Grosvenor, Ossawatomie
Brown, The Branded Hand, Zamba, and Joanna of Naples. Others, such as Fashion, Self,
Armand, Nick of the Woods, The Judge, and Lamorah, employ specific and recognizable
settings that are often contemporary to audiences. This type of setting gives the female
characters at the center of the dramas a historical context, with all the potential for dif-
ference and change implied in that specificity. Romantic settings lack such specificity.
Although a time and place may be mentioned, the setting evokes generalized images of
palaces, cloaks, and swords, rather than the accurate representation of an actual time
and place. The plays with romantic settings include De Lara, Teresa Contarini, Octavia
Bragaldi, Ingomar the Barbarian, and Leonora. The romantic setting tends to essential-
ize women by placing the female character outside of history and presenting her as a
universal and immutable manifestation of femininity. The variability of the settings,
128 AMELIA HOWE KRITZER

sometimes in different plays by the same writer, suggests an implicit dialogue about the
definition of womanhood, whether an unchangeable element of humanity or a role that
could change according to historical circumstances. In this respect, it is interesting that
both plays written by Julia Ward Howe, who became a women’s rights advocate after
long decades of suppressing her public voice, employ romantic settings, while those by
Elizabeth Oakes Smith, another women’s rights proponent, use historical settings. The
evidence in these plays of the collective uncertainty and unspoken debate among ante-
bellum women writers regarding definitions of womanhood may be their most impor-
tant legacy.

Notes
1. For a full listing, see the appendix of Kritzer (1995).
2. The play was revived in the 1880s and became a favorite with Julia Marlowe in the lead. It
also formed the basis of D. W. Griffith’s 1906 film.
3. Francis Wright’s tragedy Altorf (1819) also takes the Swiss struggle for freedom as the basis
of action, as did several plays about William Tell written during the nineteenth century.
4. Though this play is not extant, a detailed summary is published in Hall (1833). Its action
is oddly similar to Charlotte Barnes Conner’s 1844 play about Pocahontas, The Forest
Princess.
5. Jonathan Walker was also memorialized by John Greenleaf Whittier in his poem “The Man
with the Branded Hand” (1846).

Works Cited
Bank, Rosemarie K. 1983. Theatre and Narrative Fiction in the Work of the Nineteenth-Century
American Playwright Louisa Medina. Theatre History Studies 3: 55–67.
Baym, Nina. 1995. American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Brooks, Peter. 1976. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. 2006. The Kentucky Tragedy: A Story of Conflict and Change in Antebellum
America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Creahan, John. 1897. The Life of Laura Keene. Actress, Artist, Manager and Scholar.
Philadelphia: Rogers.
Curry, J. K. 1994. Nineteenth-Century American Women Theatre Managers. Westport,
CT: Greenwood.
Detsi-Diamanti, Zoë. 2004. Early American Women’s Romantic Tragedies and the Rhetoric of
Republicanism: The Case of Charlotte Barnes’s Octavia Bragaldi. In Women’s Contribution
to Nineteenth-Century American Theatre, edited by Miriam López Rodríguez and María
Dolores Narbona Carrión, 43–58. Valéncia, Spain: Universitat de Valéncia.
Dudden, Faye E. 1994. Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hale, Sarah Josepha. 1851. The Judge: A Drama of American Life. Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s
Book 42.
 ANTEBELLUM PLAYS BY WOMEN 129

Hall, James, ed. 1833. Western Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal. 1.1:59–65. Cincinnati: Corey
and Fairbank.
Halttunen, Karen. 1982. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture
in America, 1830–1870. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Howe, Julia Ward. 1965. Hippolytus. In America’s Lost Plays, vol. XVI. Bloomington:  Indiana
University Press. Reissue of 1940 edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Keteltas, Caroline M. 1844. The Last of the Plantaganets:  A  Tragic Drama in Three Acts.
New York: R. Crighead.
Kritzer, Amelia Howe, ed. 1995. Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
———. 1997. Mary Carr Clarke’s Dramas of Working Women, 1815– 1833. The Journal of American
Drama and Theatre 9.3: 24–39.
Lerner, Gerda. 1969. The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of
Jackson. Midcontinent American Studies Journal 10: 5–15.
Mirror: A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts. New York, September 21, 1833; October
5, 1833.
Odell, George C. 1928. Annals of the New  York Stage. Vols. 3–6. New  York:  Columbia
University Press.
Williams, Catherine Read. 1993. Fall River: An Authentic Narrative. Edited by Patricia Caldwell.
New York: Oxford University Press.
 CHAPTER 8

R E F OR M  DR A M A

M A R K  M U L L E N

Melodrama and Entrepreneurial

Reform

On the night of June 17, 1850, P.  T. Barnum stood onstage, facing an audience still
wildly applauding the performance that had inaugurated the lecture room of Barnum’s
American Museum as a fully equipped, three-thousand-seat theatre. Although Barnum
had declared his intention to use the space for dramatic purposes in September of the
previous year when he hired the talented actor/manager Francis Wemyss, the bill of fare
remained pretty much the same as it had since Barnum had taken over management of
the museum in the last days of 1841. The lecture room was finally closed for refurbish-
ment in April, and Barnum had whipped up anticipation by trumpeting the expense
of the renovations. The anticipation was also a result of the play that Barnum had cho-
sen to inaugurate the lecture hall as a serious dramatic venue: William H. Smith’s The
Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (1844). The play had opened at Moses Kimball’s Boston
Museum in 1844 where it ran for more than one hundred nights across two seasons, the
first time an American play achieved this feat. Prior to opening at Barnum’s American
Museum in New  York the play had also run for more than one hundred nights at
Barnum’s Philadelphia Museum. The Drunkard’s run at the American Museum eclipsed
all its previous glories: it ran continuously for more than 150 performances, holding the
evening stage of the lecture room from June to October, the first play in New York to pass
the one hundred–performance mark, and setting a record that remained unsurpassed
until the appearance of the Aiken-Howard adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852.
After a few generic openers thanking the audience for its patronage, Barnum
described his motives for adding yet another establishment to an already crowded
New York theatre scene:

I trust that you will believe me, when I pledge my honor, that the thought of gain was
but a secondary consideration with me in making the valuable improvements just
 REFORM DRAMA 131

completed in this establishment. . . . I felt that this community needed and demanded
at least one more place of public amusement, where we might take our children and
secure much rational enjoyment as well as valuable instruction, without the risk
of imbibing moral poison in the chalice presented to our lips. (Barnum’s Museum
1850, 1)
Barnum’s address offers several useful access points for an understanding of the nature
and importance of reform drama on the nineteenth-century America stage. While the
term reform drama covers theatrical presentations dealing with a variety of perceived
social ills, temperance reform not only served as the paradigmatic form of such drama
but, as Barnum’s skillful adaptation of the rhetoric of the poisoned chalice indicates,
also increasingly provided the language and symbolism that helped to frame all reform
initiatives. The temperance crusaders are usually measured against the failure of their
ostensible objective: prohibition of the sale and consumption of alcohol. Nevertheless,
the movement is ultimately responsible for a wide range of individual and collective
assumptions, practices, and discourses that are routinely invoked today whenever there
is a perceived need for temperate or abstinent behavior: the war on drugs, for example,
or advice to “just say no” to sex, even the supposed “epidemic” of Internet addiction.
Moreover, Barnum’s presentation of his own theatrical establishment as offering a more
morally upright form of entertainment highlights the way in which societal behavioral
reform became linked with the discourse of reform of popular entertainment. Thus,
even as he offered a different kind of theatrical content Barnum also took steps to reform
the theatrical space itself by banning the sales and consumption of alcohol on the prem-
ises and eliminating the top tier of seating in order to restrict the activities of prostitutes.
While condemnation of popular culture has a long and inglorious history, it is arguably
temperance reform that furnishes the language of individual helplessness and addiction
that we still hear today in criticisms of the violence of Hollywood cinema or in attempts
to ban video games.
Barnum’s appeal to his audience is predicated on the fact that many of those attending
a performance in his “lecture room” would be inclined to feel that the temperance cause
and theatre made strange bedfellows; a perspective that, as John Frick demonstrates,
has been shared by generations of American Studies scholars (2003, 2). Barnum, how-
ever, clearly understood that far from theatre being antithetical or even peripheral to the
concerns of temperance reform, the two were intimately linked through their shared
reliance on the prevailing conventions of melodrama. Linda Williams, in her work on
the US racial imaginary, has argued that melodrama is neither medium-specific nor an
aesthetic genre in its own right; rather, “it may be more appropriate to its dynamic and
protean nature to see it as a broad aesthetic mode existing across many media and in
certain interpenetrating narrative cycles” (2001, 12). For example, it was melodrama’s
insistence upon the link between individual virtue and collective well-being that under-
pinned not just the performative theatricality of some of the temperance movement’s
most iconic tactics (the signing of the pledge, the drunkard’s experience speech or, later,
the saloon-smashing tactics of Carrie Nation et al.) but the belief that reform of intem-
perate individuals was the key to a reform of the whole of US society. The heavy reliance
on a melodramatic worldview also helps to explain the way in which in the temperance
132 MARK MULLEN

movement a rationalist sensibility often seems to war with an occult framework for real-
ity. Individual reform is often seen as a matter of willpower, on the one hand, but as with
theatrical melodrama the temperance movement as a whole is dogged by the sense that
some kind of otherworldly interference is nevertheless necessary.
It has become common to view the antebellum United States as a “culture of senti-
ment” (to borrow the title of Samuels’s 1992 essay collection). While the sentimental is
now accorded a degree of scholarly respectability, melodrama continues to be regarded
according to many of the criteria formerly used to deride or ignore sentimentality: as
a naive, diminished, superficial form predicated upon easy spectacle and a simplistic
understanding of human relationships and society. Smith’s and Pratt’s work belies this
easy equation between melodrama and sentimentality since both plays contain strong
critiques of sentimental fiction in particular, which they portray as addictive and
self-destructive as the liquor that is their ostensible object. Sentimental culture is, fur-
thermore, regarded by its defenders and detractors alike as a genre written by women,
for women, and dealing with women’s concerns. Temperance drama, however, concen-
trates squarely on the victimization and redemption of masculine virtue, and as such it
constitutes the ancestor of those Hollywood masculine melodramas: the western and the
war film. The hostility of temperance drama toward the sentimental is, therefore, at least
in part, a cover for an attempt by men to appropriate the strains of sentimental empow-
erment. Barnum’s address following the first New York performance of The Drunkard
in which he stages his own redemption as a responsible, virtuous, civic-minded citizen
is therefore entirely representative of the way in which these plays exploited their con-
nection with the melodramatic theatricality of US culture to articulate a discourse of
masculine self-empowerment.

Moderation, Abstinence, and Other

Feverish Passions

Conventional scholarly and popular wisdom maintains that in the antebellum United
States “slavery was the most important political, social, and religious issue on the public
mind” (Hughes 2007, 30). This, however, tends to reflect our retrospective assessment
of what should have been the public’s priorities, based on our knowledge of subsequent
events: to wit, the fact that the virtuous fight against slavery achieved its ostensible goal
while the misguided battle against the demon rum was lost definitively with the repeal
of Prohibition. Moreover, the fact that an issue occupied the political mind—as slavery
clearly did—is, in an age before mass media, no guarantee that it occupied the public
mind. Indeed, until well into the 1850s, the agenda to which history has lent the aura
of inevitability—abolition—was regarded by most US citizens as the lunatic fringe.
From the point of view of most scholars, “temperance agitation . . . was regarded as being
of secondary importance when compared to abolitionism and even women’s rights
 REFORM DRAMA 133

agitation, movements which in their own time were more limited and attracted less pub-
lic attention than did temperance” (Frick 2003, 2).
The antebellum United States was a society obsessed with reform:  in addition to
campaigns to abolish slavery and the liquor trade, US citizens attempted to reform fac-
tory conditions, women’s rights, prisons, and a variety of evils associated with the rapid
urbanization of the nation. Indeed, it may be more accurate to say that the age of reform
was understood by people at the time as an age of “forming.” Jeffrey Richards notes
that the early republic in particular is a culture where “identity is volatile and where
the oppositions that create identity themselves often shift or mushroom or wither in a
relatively short time” (2005, 7), a fluidity that persists throughout the antebellum period.
Americans in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War were highly conscious
of the fact that they were participating in forming a new nation; what gave these many
and various social initiatives their energy was the fact that their participants saw them-
selves not so much as reforming already established institutions and practices, as shap-
ing something not yet fully developed.
It is tempting to see the past as a more sedate place than the always frenzied pres-
ent. Yet it is hard to escape the impression that for at least the urban inhabitants of the
nineteenth-century United States, their world was characterized by ceaseless, bewil-
dering, and often dangerous turmoil. An overheated economy produced recurrent if
unpredictable cycles of boom and bust, with each wave of speculation fueling devastat-
ing financial panics that destroyed the livelihoods of many overnight. New industries,
immigration, and internal migration caused an urban population explosion that dis-
rupted traditional kinship ties and strained infrastructure to (and often past) the break-
ing point. Understood within this context, we can appreciate the appeal and the urgency
of theatrical works that in other lights might appear hackneyed. Thus Charles Saunders’s
Rosina Meadows, the Village Maid (1855) is at first glance a rather unimaginative rework-
ing of the hoary tale of the fallen woman. David Grimsted, while acknowledging the
play’s enormous popularity, nevertheless considers it typical of melodrama in that “its
conventions were false, its language stilted and commonplace, its characters stereotypes
and its morality and theology gross simplifications” (1987, 248). Yet the forced simplicity
and apparently unrealistic moral universe can be read as in part an index of the com-
plexity and chaos of the context that produced it. The play is, in fact, most interesting for
the way in which a story that purports to be a stern lecture on the weakness of woman
is at the same time an indictment of the urban milieu that hastens her slide toward ruin.
Adapted from a best-selling novel of the same name by William English, Rosina
Meadows is also typical of the way in which theatre promiscuously “borrowed” from
other media in the same way that today Hollywood rushes to adapt the latest New York
Times best-seller. Indeed, in the early part of the nineteenth century, theatre adapted
popular print works with an astonishing celerity:  Saunders’s drama appeared mere
months after the first publication of English’s novel. In part this reflects the intel-
lectual ferment and vitality of an age without meaningful copyright protection.
Adaptation or outright plagiarism were the order of the day; celebrated and contro-
versial works received virtually simultaneous publication on both sides of the Atlantic.
134 MARK MULLEN

While we may be tempted to see this as exploitation and villainy of the first order,
these practices allowed theatre to play a vital role in the larger reform conversation
by representing social issues in a way that was accessible to the majority of the pop-
ulation that could not read. Theatre thus not infrequently functioned according to a
“ripped-from-the-headlines” logic recognizable to us from the television police proce-
dural. For example, Mary Carr Clarke’s Sarah Maria Cornell (1833) took advantage of a
recent sensational trial where a New England Methodist minister, Ephraim Avery, was
accused of impregnating and then murdering a local factory worker. Not unexpectedly,
the rush to capitalize on current events sometimes resulted in productions with rather
conflicted reform allegiances. Thus Clarke’s feminist vision of vulnerable working-class
women exploited by cold-hearted men is undercut by a rabid anti-Methodist bias and
panegyrics to the American factory system.
Against this background, temperance reform stands out not merely as an exemplar
of the reforming spirit of the age but also as a cause that shaped and in many ways drove
all other reform movements. Jed Dannenbaum notes that it attracted many who would
have eschewed the radical politics of abolition and the disturbing sights and issues that
were part of prison reform (1984, 11). Participation in the temperance cause was par-
ticularly important for women; the moral respectability of a campaign against alcohol,
coupled with the way in which alcohol was seen as a direct threat to the sacred space of
home and hearth, authorized women to move beyond their designated domestic space
and claim a place in the public arena. Once ensconced within that arena women were
reluctant to leave, and temperance reform thus functions as something of a “gateway
drug” to participation in other reform movements, particularly women’s rights (Martin
2008, 153). The success of the temperance movement thus should perhaps be measured
not by the eventual failure of Prohibition as much as by the success of the campaign for
women’s suffrage.
The reluctance of respectable people in general and women in particular to attend
the theatre has arguably been overstated; in theatre studies as in other areas of scholar-
ship there is a tendency to focus on the morality to which people paid lip service rather
than that which they actually practiced. Yet it is clear that by the 1850s efforts like those
of Barnum and Kimball to reform their theatrical environments were winning not
just new audiences but new practitioners as well. A powerful example of the synergy
between women’s involvement with theatre and their participation in reform move-
ments is Louisa May Alcott’s involvement with the Boston theatre of the 1850s, an expe-
rience that she later filtered through her bildungsroman, Work: A Story of Experience
(1873). Alcott’s heroine, Christie, becomes an actress in the course of working her way
through virtually all of the forms of employment available to women at the time. While
she ultimately abandons the stage, feeling that it is too removed from real life, her acting
talents and her ability to entertain and move people prove to be vital in several of her
future endeavors, most importantly in her ability to forge a reform coalition of middle-
and working-class women at the end of the novel.
The Drunkard opened at Barnum’s museum during one of the high-water marks
of popular enthusiasm for temperance reform (Maine would succeed in passing the
 REFORM DRAMA 135

first total prohibition law in 1851 and a string of Northern states followed suit), the
longest-lived popular reform movement in US history. The play’s composition in 1844,
however, took place in the midst of a period of complex realignments in the aims,
methods, and membership of the movement. Prior to the mid-1830s, the campaign for
temperance had been a broad-based movement that attempted to restrain individual
drinking practices, driven by the fear that in absolute terms Americans were consum-
ing way too much alcohol. Although it is difficult to determine with any accuracy the
amount of alcohol consumed by Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century,
William Rorabaugh notes that even in relative terms Americans drank heavily and
often. Americans in 1979, for example, with much greater resources for the production,
distribution, and purchase of alcohol than their 1830 counterparts, drank only half as
much (1979, 9). Furthermore, the nation’s preferred drink in the antebellum years was
not beer, as it is today, but whisky; in the early 1800s consumption of hard liquor was
almost five times what it is today. Patterns of alcoholic consumption in the early repub-
lic were deeply embedded in traditional communal practices that colonists brought
with them from England, particularly those linked to liturgical cycles and the agrarian
rhythms of planting and harvest. Early temperance efforts were thus part of a concerted
effort by social elites to purge both the workplace and workers’ leisure time of poten-
tially disruptive behaviors in favor of a new model of industrialized efficiency (Adler
1991; Gusfield 1986; Rumbarger 1989). In point of fact, most colonists had little choice
about whether or not to make alcohol a central part of their diet; there were usually few
other options. It was not until medical discourse began to support the call for temper-
ance in “scientific” terms in the wake of the Revolution, and the movement itself began
to move beyond local initiatives to think in terms of regional and organizational issues,
that the cause of temperance gathered momentum.
The congregationalist minister Justin Edwards founded the American Temperance
Society (ATS) in 1826 but temperance reform proved to be a movement that expanded so
rapidly as to be beyond the control of one organization. The ATS gradually became less
a parent organization and more of an informational resource and by 1833 it listed more
than 6,000 independent temperance societies with a million members (Dannenbaum
1984, 21). Some form of national coordination was needed; in May 1833 the United States
Temperance Union (USTU) was formed as an umbrella organization. During the 1830s,
the growth of abstinence societies outpaced that of moderation societies and in 1836 the
national meeting of the USTU (which at that time became the American Temperance
Union [ATU]) formally endorsed the total abstinence position. This generated a split
in the broader temperance movement. The organized temperance movement, increas-
ingly drawn from the working class and an emergent middle class, dedicated itself to
the reform of individual drinking practices through “moral suasion.” Meanwhile,
wealthier members of local communities attempted to regulate society’s drinking prac-
tices through modification of licensing laws, because this attacked working-class drink-
ing while leaving elite drinking practices and the financial base of many communities
untouched. While the latter strategy may strike us as a cynical defense of self-interest,
the dependence of many communities upon liquor revenue was great. For example, in
136 MARK MULLEN

1834 Cincinnati had 223 saloons and taverns, “roughly one for every thirty-eight males
in the city aged fifteen and older” (24); it derived 18 percent of its city revenue from
licenses (Dannenbaum 1984, 25).
By 1840 it was clear that the temperance movement was stagnating. “Once one had
taken the pledge, and had convinced as many of one’s acquaintances as possible to
do the same, the next step was not at all clear. Most people assumed that confirmed
drunkards could not be reclaimed, and that the best hope was to prevent others from
following the same path, so that the next generation might be free from the curse of
drink” (Dannenbaum 1984, 28). As a response to this apparent loss of momentum, the
Washington Temperance Society was founded in Baltimore in April 1840 by six mod-
erate to heavy drinkers. They introduced three innovations into the temperance cru-
sade: they reached out to confirmed drunkards (particularly those from the working
class ignored by the mainstream movement); they decided meetings would consist solely
of people witnessing to their experiences; and they made their meetings open to the
public. Timothy Shay Arthur’s Temperance Tales; or, Six Nights with the Washingtonians
(1848), based on his attendance at several experience meetings, captures the spectacular
revivalist frenzy of the events. Arthur’s account of both speakers and audience insists
upon the power of public language—repeatedly highlighted in these tales through the
transformative potential of both the pledge and the individual stories—in the face of
alcohol’s power to destroy intimate communication.
In describing the larger implications of the work of the temperance movement,
Arthur offers a description that applies equally to the melodramatic worldview:

The present wonderful movement is not the mere work of man, nor altogether under
the control of man. Its cause lies deeply hidden in that invisible world of causes,
whose mysterious action upon this visible world of effects, is often incomprehensible.
The era of intemperance, as a national curse, is past. Whatever of evil uses in society
it has had to perform, we are bold to believe are accomplished, and, like the plague
that once desolated London, will, ere long live only on the page of history a fearful
wonder—an appalling mystery. (1971, 44)

The “appalling mystery” and the means of combating it that Arthur describes are
both powerfully imbued with the occult sensibility that Brooks in The Melodramatic
Imagination considers to be the core of melodrama’s conception of reality:

Melodrama is indeed, typically, not only a moralistic drama, but the drama of
morality: it strives to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to “prove” the existence of a
moral universe which, though put into question, masked by villainy and perversions
of ethical judgment, does exist and can be made to assert its presence and its
categorical force among men. (1985, 20)

For the Washingtonian movement, then, ways of telling become ways of knowing that
afford access to this other reality, allowing the individual struggle between drunkenness
and sobriety to be seen as part of a great cosmic conflict.
 REFORM DRAMA 137

The Washingtonian movement was phenomenally popular but already in decline

by 1842–43, largely because of its lack of coherent organization, differences of opinion
with the ATU, and negative publicity concerning backsliders. Just as importantly, the
Washingtonian approach also failed as popular theatre; while it offered a powerfully
affecting spectacle that seemed well in tune with the melodramatic ethos of its day, it
offered little in the way of a symbolism powerful enough to draw in an audience and sus-
tain a transformative community among the actors. Thus, while members of the upper
class tended to object to the coarseness of the language at experience meetings and the
disreputable appearance of many of the drunkards, they also offered an aesthetic cri-
tique of the movement, maintaining that the “experience” often consisted of a set speech
that most of the drunkards were not able to bring off convincingly (Dannenbaum 1984,
40). The same was undoubtedly true of the formula conversion narratives of early
Puritans, but in such small, cohesive communities where the membership was rein-
forced by geographical proximity and shared social and economic concerns, the fact
that one person’s testimony tended to repeat the pattern and even the substance of
another’s bore witness to the common bond at the heart of the community while at the
same time intensifying that bond. In the more fragmented and divisive communities
that increasingly characterized the antebellum United States, such witnessing appeared
contrived because it evoked a premise that was manifestly not true. An antebellum audi-
ence instead expected a different kind of theatre, a theatre based not on rote recitation
but on complex structures of theme and variation. Such a theatre possessed sufficient
similarity between its instances to enable it to be offered as a moment of ritual interac-
tion, while at the same time allowing enough latitude for a variety of interpretations that
testified to the existence of an increasingly diverse community of interpreters.
Apart from the failure to adapt to a theatrical structure of theme and variation, the
Washingtonians were hamstrung by the ambiguity in their core symbolism, most
importantly the nature and function of the temperance pledge. The “statistical” impli-
cations of the pledge as evidence of a mass movement, its status as a vast repository of
signings, always threatened to diminish the power of the individual act of signing. The
response of the Washingtonians was to transform the pledge from a sign that one has
reformed into a quasi-mystical agent of reform. In the melodramatic worldview, how-
ever, the written word is highly suspect because it is vulnerable to the vagaries of circum-
stance (wills go missing, letters are intercepted). Words themselves are only marginally
trustworthy in many melodramas and are, more specifically, rendered suspect within
the temperance context by the drunkard swearing on everything from the Bible to his
sainted mother’s grave that he will never again touch a drop, only to head straight down
to the tavern. The Washingtonians thus recognized the need for some kind of transfigu-
rative symbolism, but in the melodramatic worldview words are rarely agents of trans-
formation for the characters; even more importantly, they are an ineffective means of
signaling that transformation to an audience because such change is internal. Successful
audience involvement in a good melodramatic narrative demands not the sight of some-
one signing a piece of paper, but a piece of symbolism that gestures toward the ineffable
cosmic dynamic of suffering and redemption.
138 MARK MULLEN

Delirium Tremens

As with other genres of nineteenth-century theatre, many examples of temperance

drama are no longer extant. Moreover, as Frick points out, the vast majority of plays
were produced for the private and occasional amusement of church groups, temperance
societies, and the like (2003, 76). Nevertheless, it is clear that temperance theatre was
ubiquitous in ways that the theatre associated with other reform movements was not.
Temperance theatre existed because there was a market for it, and the market existed in
large part because of the effectiveness of the movement as a whole. This was true even
on the local level. The Ohio publisher A. D. Ames, for example, singlehandedly pro-
duced a deluge of temperance plays during the 1870s and 1880s whose titles—Wrecked
(c. 1877), Adrift! (c. 1880), Lost! (c. 1882)—speak not only to the generalized sense of
urgency associated with the temperance cause, but also to the pivotal role of Ohio dur-
ing the Women’s Crusade of the 1870s.
Those plays that did achieve broader popularity can, as Jeffrey Mason observes, be
divided into two broad categories: the censorious and the regenerative (1993, 71–73).
The former category includes two British examples, Douglass Jerrold’s Fifteen Years of
a Drunkard’s Life (1828) and T. P. Taylor’s The Bottle (1847), both of which portray the
drunkard’s inexorable fall, from first sip to murder and death. In a sequence that reveals
much about the working method of a theatrical world unburdened by the niceties of
copyright, Jerrold’s play is an imitation of an English knockoff of a French play about
the dangers of gambling, Trente Ans, ou la vie d’un joueur (Rahill 1967, 240). Taylor’s
play is also an imitation of sorts, based on Cruikshank’s famous series of engravings
The Drunkard’s Progress—indeed, Cruikshank himself directed the first production
of the play in London in 1847 (240). Both plays were performed regularly across the
United States, although seldom for long seasons. They are, however, typical of censori-
ous reform dramas in that they waver between portraying addiction as the product of
individual weakness and the product of some demonic agency in the drink itself. This
uncertainty creates a larger problem when it comes to imagining a role for individual
agency, because the censorious narrative can envision no clear course of action that
could possibly prevent the addiction or rescue the addict once he has succumbed.
By contrast, Smith’s The Drunkard, as an example of Mason’s regenerative drama, is
replete with the many successful individual ingredients of melodrama: tranquil domes-
tic spaces lost and recovered, hidden wills, sacred memories of fathers, poor idiot rela-
tions, spectacular dances and fight scenes, wifely devotion and maternal forbearance.
But two things weave these fairly typical narrative elements together into a production
perfectly adapted to success on the American stage. Despite the fact that this is a play
ostensibly about the ruin and recovery of Edward Middleton, the play in many respects
belongs to William Dowton, Edward’s faithful friend who also embodies many of the
functions of the stock Yankee character. While the Yankee was the main character in
some plays, more often than not he was a comic subplot foil to the hero’s actions. This
 REFORM DRAMA 139

more characteristic use of the Yankee is represented by Sam Swichell in Ten Nights in a
Bar-Room, right down to the distinctive dialect. In Smith’s play, by contrast, the Yankee
speaks with the voice of the community and often becomes an audience touchstone for
the ethical and moral stance of the play. Dowton’s prominence underscores that in con-
trast to the prevailing norms of temperance discourse, which stressed individual reform,
the real necessity on the part of the temperance movement was for communal recogni-
tion of the afflicted individual. Thus even when Edward is at his most dissolute, William
never wavers in his belief in his foster brother’s fundamental integrity, and he spares no
effort to rescue his brother’s body, soul, name, and fortune.
In the most affecting melodramas, threats to the individual’s bodily integrity repre-
sent the danger to their moral integrity. Furthermore, the imperiled individual char-
acter embodied a threat to the integrity of the entire community. It was the particular
genius of Smith to exploit a form of threat to bodily integrity perfectly suited to the tem-
perance message and which emphasized the danger to the community inherent in the
inebriated individual: the delirium tremens (DTs), or mania a potu as it was more com-
monly labeled in the antebellum period. The first scene of Act 4 is thus the climactic
scene of the play, rather than the denouement that sees Edward reformed or the vil-
lainous Cribbs given his comeuppance; it is the moment at which Edward’s peril is at its
greatest. Having lost his fortune, his station, and his family, the bedraggled Edward is
prevented from strangling his former landlord by William’s timely intervention. Edward
is far gone, raving, in accordance with contemporary temperance imagery, which
achieved iconographic status in many temperance prints, about the “snakes, how they
coil round me” (1844, 50). To get the full impact of the scene one has to imagine the actor
playing Edward engaging in a spectacle of physical turmoil that was seldom equaled on
the antebellum stage, except for perhaps the lingering death of Uncle Tom in the Aiken/
Howard version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Not for nothing did Corson Clarke, who played
Edward in the American Museum Production, become known as “Drunkard” Clarke
for the rest of his career, and not for nothing did the best actors in companies forsake
the usual plum role of villain in favor of the physical extremis of the drunkard. Edward
is preparing to take his own life with a vial of poison, when the philanthropist Rencelaw
enters and dashes the vial from his hand in exactly the sort of “in the nick of time” occur-
rence that seems so forced to critics of melodrama.
The frisson and the innovation of The Drunkard, however, is precisely the way in
which it takes a form that specializes in abrupt turnarounds and transformations and
uses it to challenge a narrative that for many of the audience was very familiar:  the
logical, lockstep progression from first tipple to destitution and suicide. Thus at the
moment where Edward’s sufferings are at their greatest, where his inability to recog-
nize his own virtue is mirrored in the fact that he cannot recognize even his own foster
brother, the irrational intervenes to arrest his downward slide. Rencelaw is introduced
earlier by name only as a philanthropist involved in any number of social causes, but
his appearance at this point in the play, his admission that he was a reformed drunkard,
and his attempt to get Edward to sign the pledge all mark him out to be an adherent of
the Washingtonians. However, it is not the pledge that is the instrument of Edward’s
140 MARK MULLEN

salvation, but Rencelaw himself. To Rencelaw’s request, “Nay, friend, take not your life,
but mend it,” Edward replies, “Nay, friend, you know me not” (1844, 51). In a literal sense
this is true, but melodrama works upon the notion that people are bound together by
currents of fellow feeling so deep as to be invisible and that are only capable of being
brought to the surface by accident. Rencelaw thinks he “knows” Edward through his
status as a reformed drunkard. However the audience knows, as Rencelaw does not, that
when Edward was urged by Cribbs to pass a forged check against Rencelaw’s account, he
refused, even though desperate for a drink. Thus Rencelaw’s recognition of Edward is an
unconscious recognition of his intact virtue.
Bruce McConachie contends that “in moral reform melodrama, charity threatens
the principles of self-control and self-reliance” (1992, 181), an assertion that is at odds
with the action of both The Drunkard and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room where philan-
thropy is presented in an overwhelmingly positive light. Moreover, it is not Rencelaw’s
status that matters, but what he does, the kind of behavior that he models. When
Edward acknowledges his fallen state, Rencelaw says, “There you have the greater claim
upon my compassion, my attention, my utmost endeavors to raise you once more, to
the station in society from which you have fallen”. Shortly afterward, Rencelaw shifts
from first-person singular to plural: “Come with me, we will restore you to society”
(1844, 52). McConachie reads this statement as the cynical salve of a bourgeois culture
obsessed with individual status. But what he appears to miss is precisely Rencelaw’s
shift from “I” to “we.” In melodrama the restoration of the individual to society is also,
and even more importantly, a restoration of society to the individual. If Edward erred
in his addiction to drink, society erred in its abandonment of the afflicted; in the sym-
pathetic moment of melodramatic recognition, the community recognizes not just the
individual, but itself.

You Are What You Read

In marked contrast to The Drunkard, the first appearance of Ten Nights in a Bar-Room
on August 23, 1858, at the National Theatre was a less-than-rousing success, coincid-
ing as it did with a low point in both the membership and effectiveness of the temper-
ance movement, and the play closed after a short run. Such an unprepossessing opening
effectively killed most plays, and yet the play was kept alive with great success on the
backcountry circuit to re-emerge in mainstream theatres a decade later. It was soon
being performed regularly during a period that coincided with the Women’s Crusade
and the foundation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The play went on to
become not only the quintessential temperance story, but as paradigmatic of reform
drama as the Howard/Aiken version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) with which it was regu-
larly performed. The degree to which the two plays operated within the same worldview
is underscored by the fact that Cordelia Howard, who made her name playing the tragic,
dead-before-her-time little Eva in the Aiken-Howard version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin went
 REFORM DRAMA 141

on to play the tragic, dead-before-her-time little Mary Morgan in a production of Ten

Nights in a Bar-Room at the New Bowery in May 1861.
Pratt’s play builds on the central importance of community to the melodramatic
worldview, and it incorporates a shift in the national temperance movement away from
an interest in the effects of drink on individuals and toward a concern with drink as
a destroyer of whole communities. Adapted from an 1854 novel by—once again—the
prolific T. S. Arthur, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There employs Arthur’s
basic narrative conceit of a series of snapshots of a single community from the moment
a new tavern opens through the inevitable destruction wrought on the inhabitants,
culminating finally in the decision of the populace to ban the liquor trade from their
district. Romaine, a philanthropist, acts as an audience surrogate who sets the scene,
comments on the action, and interrogates the characters, underscoring the role of the
philanthropist as an interested and involved observer. In keeping with the changed poli-
tics of the temperance movement, the initiative for changing the community dynamic
has to come from within the community itself. Pratt’s play represents people as having a
certain amount of free will, but once they have succumbed to temptation and fallen into
the pit they need help in order to get out. Joe Morgan, the drunkard, observes that “let
a man once fall—no matter when, no matter where, no matter how much he may have
suffered—the good people of this world raise their hands, set up the long, loud cry, and
the poor inebriate dies—when a timely hand might have saved him” (Pratt and Bennette
1994, 141). The problem with which the play grapples is that this kind of exteriorized
agency, of the sort also evident in The Drunkard, does not work; there is certainly no
shortage of people trying to help Joe Morgan in Pratt’s drama. Rather, Joe’s transforma-
tion, and the beginnings of the transformation of the community as a whole, is achieved
through the death of his daughter, Mary Morgan. Charged with the responsibility of
going to the tavern every night to bring her father home, Mary is one night struck by a
glass hurled at Joe by the angry landlord, and she suffers the obligatory lingering death.
Like Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mary is testament to the power of the other-worldly to
become this-worldly; thus her dying dream is a glimpse of an alternative world that Joe
immediately vows will become reality through human agency. The form of her death
takes him out of his own self-interest and restores to him the sense of the connected
nature of community, connections that are then reestablished at the end of the play
when the community bands together against the liquor industry.
For many modern writers about temperance, the movement draws heavily on the
conventions of a sentimental culture, a rich and complex area of investigation that is,
however, often reduced to pat formulations such as “the sentimental agenda” or “the
sentimental program”:

the sentimental vision [. . .] tends to bolster the interests of the middle and upper
classes; one can sympathize with others only if one has leisure to do so and attention
to spare. Moreover, the sentimental program assumes—even insists upon—a
significant degree of homogeneity in society, and it provides a convenient ground
for arguing in favor of the greater good, for those whose interests diverge are clearly
142 MARK MULLEN

marginal and have somehow strayed from the gentility of the “natural affections.”
The desperate classes—the homeless poor or the workers caught in the maelstrom of
industrial society—are either erased from the sentimental paradigm or reduced to
objects of philanthropy. (Mason 1993, 13)

This view of sentimental culture—happy-minded, dilettantish, selfish—is, however,

very difficult to square with, say, Stowe’s vision of a black man being flogged to death,
or Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills. Moreover, in contrast to the assumed
synonymy of melodrama and sentimentality, for The Drunkard and Ten Nights in a Bar-
Room the sentimental is not an ally but the enemy. In The Drunkard this opposition is
most clearly represented by Miss Spindle, who is first introduced to the audience seated
at a toilette table that “denotes vulgar wealth, devoid of elegance or taste” (1844, 14):

The attractions of the fair sex are synonymous. True, old Bonus is the destroyer
of female charms; but as my beautiful poet, Natty P. says, in his sublime epistle to
Lucinda Octavia Pauline, “Age cannot wither me, nor custom stale my infinite
vacuity. [. ..] They suppose that my heart is unsusceptible of the tender passion. But
the heart can be regulated by money, too. I buy all the affecting novels, and all the
terrible romances, and read them till my heart has become soft as maiden wax, to
receive the impression of that cherished image I adore. (14–15)

That “affecting novels” and “terrible romances” are identified as sources of aberrant
behavior is, of course, nothing new. But the danger that Miss Spindle presents is that she
is the perfect modern consumer. She employs knowledge, both factual and emotional,
in the way that she applies her cosmetics, in order to keep up the appearance of possess-
ing “the charm of refined education” (18) and to facilitate her wholehearted assumption
into the realm of capitalist exchange as a marketable marriage commodity. Not only is
she the picture of false sentimentality and assertive—and therefore, melodramatically
speaking, false—virtue, but as a figure of alienated, private desire, she refuses the para-
digm by which wisdom and self-knowledge are the product of communal interaction, in
favor of invisible private forms of education.
We still might be tempted to dismiss this kind of character as not sufficiently indi-
viduated from the old maid stereotype, or an aberration on the part of The Drunkard
only, were it not for the fact that the same criticism of sentimental culture is leveled even
more forcefully by Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. Pratt’s play introduces the character of
Mehitable Cartwright, a female version of the stage Yankee, the representative example
of which—Sample Switchell—she ends up marrying at the end of the play. Mehitable
shares many of the traits of the male version of the stage Yankee—courage, character,
and a good heart—but as Pratt’s drama opens all of these things are in danger of being
corrupted by her devotion to the trappings of sentimental culture. Upon receiving an
immodest proposal—albeit one carefully couched in the language of romantic love—
from the gambler Harvey Green, Mehitable immediately plunges herself into not one
but two standard romance novel scenarios: “Now isn’t that beautiful! Who knows but
 REFORM DRAMA 143

some rich landlord wants me to run away with him? Oh dear! I shall be stolen away at
night—I know I shall! And the fierce banditti will force me to marry one of their num-
ber—and I shall be obliged to do it—I know I shall!” (Pratt and Bennette 1994, 135). Even
more damning, the influence of novels is directly equated with the pernicious effect of
alcohol. When we meet Sample and Mehitable again near the end of the play she accuses
him of having destroyed all her books, a charge to which he readily pleads guilty. He
adds: “Now, jest give up all your novels, and I’ll give up all the rum, and we shall be better
able to come to some mutual understanding” (1994, 158). The trappings of sentimen-
tal culture induce exactly the same effects as alcohol: a delusory view of the world and
an elevated sense of one’s own importance, coupled with threatened loss of good moral
character and a softening of the intellect. This is obviously a caricature of sentimental
culture, but to find it being mobilized in these plays belies the easy equation between
melodrama and the sentimental. From a melodramatic perspective, sentimental emo-
tion is superficial, individualized emotion. Melodramatic emotion, by contrast, is a
deep, invisible thing, intimately bound up with character, revealed and reaffirmed con-
stantly in the behavioral relations between people. Thus the comic subplot of Ten Nights
in a Bar-Room that presents the destruction of Mehitable’s sentimental novels reinforces
the main plot that leads to the determination of the Morgans, Romaine, and the others
to oppose the liquor traffic in their community, a traffic that for too long has held the
rights of the individual businessman as paramount.

Tableau. Curtain.

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room remains the most popular play associated with any species of
reform, continuing to be performed well into the twentieth century. Moreover, it made
a seamless and almost instantaneous transformation into the new world of cinema,
with a version appearing in 1897, only two years after the emergence of public screening
of motion pictures. Yet one of the factors that has led to the disparagement—or out-
right neglect—of melodrama in general and reform drama in particular is precisely the
fact that it was so popular. Traditions of literary study, especially those associated with
American Studies, have overwhelmingly privileged critical objects and narratives of
marginalization and opposition. However, as William Demastes argues,

issues and ideas that thrive on the stage necessarily survive as a result of public
interest and sympathy; those ideas that don’t survive are for one reason or another
generally out of tune with public sentiment. Brilliance unattended may be worthy
of evaluation, but that which wins an audience has a value of its own. Brilliant or
otherwise, attention must be paid to audience-supported ideas, their aesthetics and
politics, and at very least a grudging intellectual appreciation should be in order.
(2007, 5)
144 MARK MULLEN

Williams goes even further, arguing that our appreciation for the rich variety of US
melodrama should be considerably more than grudging:

melodrama is neither archaic or excessive but a perpetually modernizing form that

can neither be clearly opposed to the norms of the “classical” nor to the norms of
realism. . . .melodrama is still the best, and most accurate description of the serious
narrative and iconic work performed by popular American mass culture, broadly
conceived. (2001, 12)

While plays like The Drunkard and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room were not an explicit stra-
tegic component of the temperance movement, playwrights and company managers
were eager to associate themselves with formal strategies of the reformers (encouraging
people to sign the temperance pledge, for example), and each side benefited enormously
from the association. Temperance drama attracted new groups of people who would
have considered it immoral to attend the regular theatre. Many members of this new,
largely middle-class, audience then began to attend the mainstream theatre, the number
growing as theatrical establishments adopted the management, architectural, and mar-
keting practices of men like Barnum and Kimball in order to render their theatres more
respectable.
Studying reform drama in general and temperance drama in particular is not, then,
important merely to round out the historical record. Reform drama offers a perspec-
tive on the nineteenth century that renders it disturbingly like and unlike our own
time, most notably in the form of a conflicted relationship between reform, gender,
and the theatricality of public culture. In the first place, unlike many other species of
melodrama, temperance drama is a male-centered narrative: it is male virtue that is
imperiled, male virtue that must be recognized, male virtue that must be redeemed.
Traditional melodramas have heroes, of course, but in terms of the occult aesthetic and
community politics of melodrama men are generally either superfluous or simply the
active agents that set the plot in motion, the significance of which is then fought over
and through the bodies of women. In temperance drama women still play vital sym-
bolic roles. Mary in The Drunkard, for example, still undergoes the traditional trials of
virtue, determinedly holding her family together in the wake of Edward’s abandonment
and resisting the sexual depredation of Cribbs. And in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room Mary
Morgan is the sympathetic mechanism of her father’s transformation. But in Smith’s
play the emotional and political hinge is the encounter between Rencelaw and Edward,
and in Pratt’s play the focus is the dual trial of virtue of Joe Morgan and Simon Slade. It is
therefore hardly surprising that when Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted to craft a reformist
narrative directed against the evils of slavery, she drew on the familiar iconography of
the temperance movement with which she and her family were so intimately involved,
and she centered that narrative upon the suffering of a male body.
Arguably because of the importance of the male body in temperance-oriented
instances of a cultural mode that was (and remains) so dependent on portrayals of imper-
iled female virtue, the gender politics of the temperance movement more broadly con-
sidered incorporate a great deal of ambiguity. Martin offers a convincing demonstration
 REFORM DRAMA 145

that “a strand of misogyny runs throughout temperance ideology. . . . Denunciations of

women as causes of intemperance and snares for men, or the celebration of their vic-
timization, often coexisted with, and even underpinned, more positive assessments of
women’s role in the emerging middle class” (2008, 9). Yet the effects of the temperance
movement in general and temperance drama in particular were overwhelmingly posi-
tive for women in practical terms. The performance of dramas in a museum setting, for
example, were vital in drawing women into the antebellum public sphere, enabling them
to visualize an active role in that sphere, and modeling for them ways of deploying the
sympathetic politics of the melodramatic mode to good effect. Martin notes that ante-
bellum gender ideology was powerfully influenced by the eroticization of female endan-
germent articulated in forms such as seduction tales (2008, 155). In a society where most
people could not read, however, this eroticization, together with what would become the
central tenet of the temperance reform movement—defense of the sacred home space—
were most powerfully and pervasively accessible in the antebellum period through the
conventions of theatrical melodrama.
Ultimately, women were able to push the limits of both gender ideology and melo-
dramatic convention by translating the threatened home space from the idealized
middle-class dwelling to the space of an entire community in the Women’s Crusade
of the 1870s (Martin 2008, 152). It is no accident that the popularity of Ten Nights in a
Bar-Room, which rendered visible not only the interior of the tavern but also the inte-
rior of the tavern-owner’s home, coincided with the public openings of taverns and
their contents by women. Indeed, the Women’s Crusade demonstrates an awareness
and canny deployment of melodramatic conventions in public spaces. The image of
Carrie Nation and her crusaders wielding hatchets and destroying men’s property was
so beyond the conventional understanding of women’s character that it tended to be
read as an index of the threat that had produced such aberrant behavior. Even more cru-
cial was the public spectacle of the bodies of respectable women manhandled, bound,
imprisoned by apologists for the liquor trade: one could not script a more archetypal
melodramatic scenario. Furthermore, the heightened visibility of women in the tem-
perance crusade not only proved crucial to the ultimate success of the movement, but
it also enabled women to build organizational and strategic links that furthered their
campaign for the vote.
Yet, in another reversal, it is evident that temperance drama emphasizes in no uncer-
tain terms the need for the community as a whole to control the activity of women,
particularly their consumption of the artifacts of sentimental culture and their ten-
dency toward the creation of disorderly private selves rather than visibly organized
ones. While the temperance drama, then, had undeniably positive material effects for
women, in terms of the portrayal of women in the cultural symbolic as a whole, the
long-term effects tended to restrict the formation of the idea that women could move
out of very narrow parameters of behavior. The ambiguous position of women in both
reform movements and reform theatre is captured in one of those moments (frequent
in the nineteenth century) where drama on the boards merges with the theatricality of
the public sphere. In 1903 Carrie Nation took a break from successfully “performing”
146 MARK MULLEN

on the lecture circuit to perform “for real” in an adaptation of—what else—Ten Nights
in a Bar-Room playing—who else—the suffering mother who loses her son to the
demon rum (Grace 2001, 236). Whereas Alcott’s semiautobiographical fictional hero-
ine, Christie, draws on early work experiences in the theatre in her successful reform
career, the real (albeit larger-than-life) Nation transitions easily from a reform career
to a turn on the boards. Considering the powerful role theatre played in spurring wom-
en’s involvement in temperance and other reform movements in the first place, Nation’s
move seems almost like an act of homage. Given the degree to which Nation appeared to
many to embody a threat to conventional gender roles (Grace 2001, 208), however, the
public embodiment of the conventional suffering mother also looks more than a little
like domestication.
It is not uncharacteristic of the temperance agenda, then, to return to the imperiled
virtue of a particular male body. In this regard, perhaps no one embodies the contradic-
tion of the mid-nineteenth century as fully as P. T. Barnum. As he stands on the stage
of the American Museum lecture hall, soaking up the applause of the crowd, he posi-
tions himself at the forefront of moral reform and a concern for community well-being.
Given his status as perhaps the premiere entrepreneurial capitalist of his generation,
there is more than a little irony in his championing of a play that contains a criticism
of the effects of the commodification of consumption on the community. Yet, huck-
sterism, that curious blend of optimism and opportunism, has always been an integral
component of US reform agendas. At the same time, the appearance of The Drunkard
at Barnum’s American Museum also seems like a familiar, thoroughly modern artistic
moment. When we see today’s oppositional art sponsored by a major corporation, or
theatre performed in a playhouse paid for by corporate donations, we hear the voice
of P. T. Barnum reminding us that the complex symbolic frameworks for mobilizing
individual, community, and, yes, corporate self-(re)fashioning articulated so powerfully
by reform dramas and the melodramatic worldview that underpinned them remain as
powerful in our own time as they were in the apparently distant nineteenth century.

References
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Notes on Drinking as a Symbolic Practice. In Drinking:  Behavior and Belief in Modern
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Gusfield, Joseph R. 1986. Symbolic Crusade:  Status Politics and the American Temperance
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Jerrold, Douglass. 1828. Fifteen Years of a Drunkard’s Life: A Melodrama in Three Acts. French’s
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McConachie, Bruce. A. 1992. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–
1870. Iowa City : University of Iowa Press.
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Saunders, Charles. H. 1855. Rosina Meadows, the Village Maid: or, Temptations Unveiled: A Local
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 CHAPTER 9

A N T E B E L LUM F R ON T I E R A N D
U R BA N P L AYS , 1 82 5 – 6 0

RO SE M A R I E   BA N K

Historians of American drama have said both that its earlier nineteenth-century plays
were a unique and American expression and that US drama of this era is wholly imita-
tive of European examples. Current views (Londré and Watermeier 1998) reflect Harold
Nichols’s argument (1974) documenting the existence of a distinguishing national
drama by 1830, and they displace earlier claims (Hewitt 1959) and later restatements
of them (Miller 2007) that indigenous cultures contributed nothing to the develop-
ment of that drama. Antebellum frontier and urban plays are indigenous in reflecting
both Native American performance traditions (however imperfectly represented) and
those of white indigenes (native-born and adoptive), and such plays testify to Henry
Louis Gates, Jr.’s statement that cultures are mutually constituted and socially produced.
Mutual constitution, however, does not ensure equal production; indeed, both frontier
and urban plays reflect the views of their producers, not of their subjects.
The earliest dramas Europeans made in the Americas (in Spanish and Portuguese)
concerned indigenes and their cultures (Shaffer 2008; Ybarra 2009), and the earliest
performances Europeans recorded were by indigenous people, most often in situations
of cultural exchange (first encounters, diplomatic missions, trade exchanges, and the
like). Each type of “show” embraces a different meaning of the words “frontier” and
“urban,” and it bestows a different perception on the antebellum usage of the words.
“The frontier” is arguably America’s largest totalizing myth, a unique “wild” unknown
in Europe for centuries. Though, at the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Jackson
Turner would define “frontier” as a line of settlement, antebellum Americans more often
perceived of the frontier as a space, rather than a border. As a result, “the frontier” could
transform into diverse and contradictory spaces, meanings, and significations. The
“urban,” characterized by the invigorating but terrorizing city, familiar worldwide for
centuries, offered, in America, a similarly flexible landscape of fluid rules and cultural
signs. The frontier and the urban were productive of distinct dramatic figures during
the antebellum decades—what Constance Rourke (1953), in 1931, called an American
150 ROSEMARIE BANK

commedia dell’arte: the staged Indian and frontiersman, the Bowery B’hoy and G’hal—
and cities were often the ground where staged Yankees and Negroes were encountered
as well. In providing spaces for these figures and their actions, antebellum frontier and
urban plays met not only Noah Webster’s call (in 1788) for American authors (Spiller
and Blodgett 1949, 452), but also the American Quarterly Review’s demand (in 1827) for
a native drama that focused on “those great and illustrious peculiarities of situation and
character” distinct to America (339).

Frontier Plays

Frontier plays by Europeans date to the sixteenth century, and performances by

Amerindians in the New World and the Old were witnessed by Europeans even earlier
than that. By the nineteenth century, frontier plays had inherited (and they reflected) the
dual traditions of literature and of performance. To these, the antebellum period added
an enormous growth in quantity. Don B. Wilmeth has chronicled Indians staged in the-
atres in America between 1606 and 1987. Walter J. Meserve has isolated Indian plays of
the 1830s, while studies focused to the nineteenth century (Grose 1979; Mulvey 1978)
underscore the increase in frontier plays during the antebellum period and their contin-
ued popularity after the Civil War. While some of the hundreds of nineteenth-century
frontier plays indexed have no corroborating production histories and may have served
as reading or as amateur theatre material, annals of theatrical production, such as
George C. D. Odell’s, make evident the energetic piracy of produced texts and the char-
acteristic revision (often renaming) of theatrical fare after a first production. However
slippery the absolute number of frontier plays in the antebellum period may remain, the
perception in those decades of their frequency and popularity can be readily substanti-
ated. A frontier play is one set in a sparsely populated and contested area. The contest
is often—but not always—between whites and Amerindians (whites may also dispute
whites and Amerindians other Amerindians) and the characters are those necessary to
the conflict and appropriate to the setting (soldiers, settlers, traders, Indians, govern-
ment officials, and the like). Occasionally, a frontier character migrates to an urban set-
ting for the sake of making a cultural statement and injecting local color into an urban
drama. The Lion of the West; or, The Kentuckian (1831), for example, combines the already
legendary Daniel Boone and the Davy Crockett of subsequent narratives into Nimrod
Wildfire, and it transplants the Kentucky colonel to New  York City. There, Nimrod
overwhelms the British critic of American manners, “Mrs. Wollope,” with deftly placed
tall tales; dispatches her fortune-seeking, bogus nobleman brother with his long rifle;
and straightens out his own social-climbing, Anglophile aunt with a demonstration of
American grit and independence. Written by James Kirke Paulding and revised by a
consortium of playwrights, the prize-winning Lion of the West offered the Yankee- char-
acter actor James H. Hackett a potent star vehicle and a new character type, the stage
frontiersman, that left decades of theatregoers “tee-to-taciously ex-flunctified” (Bank
 ANTEBELLUM FRONTIER AND URBAN PLAYS 151

1997; Jiji 1983; Paulding, Stone, and Bernard 1954). In addition, The Lion of the West both
drew from and influenced Crockett-lore, native speech and humor, and the American
self-image for generations (Warshaver in Jiji 1983; Saxton 1990).
Though occasionally contemporaneous in its setting (that is, the dramatic locale was a
frontier when the play was first produced), frontier plays are more often retrospectives.
The much-studied Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829) by John Augustus
Stone concerns events historically located in the seventeenth century, for example, as
does George Washington Parke Custis’s Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia (1830).
Even so, history as an item of cultural trade was an important player in the real-time
relationship between the presentation of plays and the historical events unfolding as
play productions occurred. Accordingly, the assimilationist Indian was represented by
the appearance of Custis’s Pocahontas at the National Theatre in Washington, DC, in
1836, coincident with a visit to the capital by John Ross and a party of Cherokees protest-
ing Indian removal. Meanwhile, Stone’s dramatization for the American actor Edwin
Forrest of the ultimate tragic Indian hero owed its success less to its depiction of earlier
American history than to Metamora’s avowedly nativist sentiments and to the passing of
the mantle of “the American” from Metamora’s shoulders to those of the men in Forrest’s
audience (Bank 1997; Mason 1993; McConachie 1992).
Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia was Custis’s second Indian play. It is set, like
Custis’s earlier The Indian Prophecy (1827), in a frontier region of Virginia, and it is
derived from Captain John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, published in 1624, no
flattering account of the Indians Smith encountered. First played at the Walnut Street
Theatre in Philadelphia, where it was elaborately produced, Pocahontas depicts the
arrival of Smith and his cavaliers at what will become Jamestown. The daughter of Chief
Powhatan and a convert to Christianity, Pocahontas is “the friend of the English” against
her father and his warrior chieftain, Matacoran, who want to subdue and expel them.
The English in the play, arrogant throughout, are victorious, thanks to Pocahontas’s
betrayal of her father and her defense of John Smith by throwing her body over his as
Smith’s brains are about to be dashed out. By the end of the play, submissive Pocahontas
is betrothed to John Rolfe and Powhatan has accepted his new role as vassal of the king
of England. Only Matacoran refuses to be conquered and chooses to abandon his home-
lands and retire “to where tradition says, there rolls a western wave” (Custis 1953, 192).
The revival of Pocahontas in Washington in 1836, just as Cherokee removal had reached
a crisis point, was not accidental, nor was its message unclear. For its part, the National
Theatre made the most of the moment by falsely advertising performances in its pro-
duction by Cherokee chiefs of war dances and scalping ceremonies (Bank 1997).
Amerindian performances in cultural venues are seldom included in histories of
antebellum drama, yet they clearly influenced both the real-time relationship among
Amerindians and the historical contexts in which performances occurred and the con-
tent of antebellum frontier plays. In the first case, events like the three-hour performance
in 1822 on the lawn of the White House by a delegation of western Indians of a mock
council, a vigorous dance (in paint and with full weaponry), a mock scalping and toma-
hawking, and the presentation of numerous artifacts to President Monroe in thanks for
152 ROSEMARIE BANK

inviting them to Washington suggests both the earliest sort of red-white cultural inter-
action and cultural exchange through performance (Bank 1997). The fluid movement of
cultural performances from a diplomatic arena to theatricalized or to playhouse venues
suggests the ambiguity of such performances and of readings of them. The Seneca leader
Red Jacket (Sagoyewatha, 1756?–1830) addressed New York dignitaries at Masonic Hall
in New York City in 1828, while “other warriors danced and sang and revealed the cus-
toms of their people” (Odell 1928, 3, 368). Similarly, in 1833, the Sauk leader Black Hawk
(Makataimeshekiakiah, 1767–1838) appeared at the Front Street Theatre in Baltimore in
a joint (though rival) showing with President Andrew Jackson, as part of a prisoner-of-
war tour following the Sauk defeat in the recently concluded Black Hawk War (Drake
1838). The appearance of both Red Jacket and Black Hawk have a life as performances
and as parts of real-time historical events with serious political outcomes at stake. How
would audience members have understood both aspects of these cultural exchanges, or
distinguished their war dances, councils, and demonstrations from those performed by
professional “show Indians” in 1828 at Peale’s New York Museum and at a circus at the
Park Theatre (Bank 1997)?
Historians of American drama, in theatre studies and beyond, have, in the second
case, noted the spectacular elements in frontier plays and textual elements such as ste-
reotypes (for example, noble and ruthless savages), symbolic associations (Indians as
emblems of nature), and plays as extensions of political or governmental policies (of
Indian removal or of the view that [white] civilization must inevitably replace [Indian]
savagery). These works (see, for example, Deloria 1998; Rogin 1975; Saxton 1990; Sayre
2005) are a necessary reminder that cultural performance always trades at a cost. In
addition to frontier plays focusing on red-white interactions, others concern the impact
of frontier environments on social behavior (The Lion of the West) or on the psyche
(Louisa Medina’s Wacousta [1833] and Nick of the Woods [1839]), or they may focus on
other frontiers (Alonzo Delano’s A Live Woman in the Mines [1857]).
Louisa Medina’s Nick of the Woods was an adaptation of Robert Montgomery Bird’s
anti-Indian novel of the same name. Though not a contest play, like Lion of the West and
Metamora, Medina’s Nick of the Woods was a star vehicle for the actor Joseph Proctor,
who created the title character in the Bowery Theatre’s premiere production, and he
played the role—which has six manifestations—for the balance of his career. Medina
centers Nick of the Woods on a disputed legacy involving three cousins and the villain
who has secreted the crucial will. Transported from Virginia to the wilds of Kentucky,
the cousins are caught in a frontier battle between whites and Indians in which Nick (the
Satan or Spirit) of the woods, known to the Indians as the Jibbenainosay, is the figure of
white vengeance, the half-crazed Reginald Ashburn, who murders the kin of Wenonga,
slayers of Ashburn’s family. His endeavors are aided by Roaring Ralph Stackpole, a fron-
tier horse thief and Indian fighter in the bellicose tradition of Colonel Nimrod Wildfire,
and Tellie Doe, one of the cousins, “often dressed as an Indian girl” (Medina n.d.) in the
demure but courageous, all-for-love tradition of Pocahontas. Both plot lines culminate
at the play’s signature waterfall, down which cataract the Jibbenainosay is precipitated
“in a canoe of fire” (Medina n.d.) during the play’s most sensational scene.
 ANTEBELLUM FRONTIER AND URBAN PLAYS 153

Frontier tales and novels frequently provided subject matter for antebellum paintings
and plays (James Fenimore Cooper’s works featured repeatedly). Though frontier plays
developed beyond the 1830s, Medina’s Nick of the Woods typifies much of what was to
come. Here, there are no good Indians, only dead ones; no councils, only confronta-
tions; no coexistence, only removal or elimination. Significantly, elimination is as fatal
to whites (Tellie and Ashburn/Nick) as to Indians; indeed, the play ends with the aveng-
er’s inventory of loss and death—the vanished home and the haunting “remnants of the
loveliness forever lost” (Medina n.d.). Whether social, psychological, comic, or histori-
cal, antebellum plays emphasize the importance of frontiers in the nineteenth century
at the same time that frontier plays assert their cultural influence, even though, true
to their origin as performance rather than literature, few texts of antebellum frontier
plays survive. Those that do survive, however, had and continue to exert a considerable
impact on American culture.

Urban Plays

The antebellum American city, like the American frontier, served as a major site of
indigenous cultural performance. Though cities existed the planet over, no foreign
visitor ever mistook an American city, love it or hate it, for any other. During the era,
American cities grew in number, size, and in dizzying totals of inhabitants—in the
1840s, for example, the urban population increased 92.1 percent, three times the rural
growth rate. Urban growth was fueled by immigration (540,000 in the 1830s, four times
as many immigrants as in the 1820s) and by in-migration, resulting in continuous
turnover, crowding, construction, social change, and a host of anxieties about all these
(Bank 1997).
American urban plays depict the city as a place of both sunshine and shadow, where
all the issues that came to dominate antebellum life—work, class, wealth, gender, race,
public and private behavior, success and failure, morality, authenticity, charity, reform,
and the like—were played out. J. S. Jones’s The People’s Lawyer (1839) offers an American
hero who is both a horny-handed son of toil and a civic-minded gentleman lawyer.
Remembered as a “Yankee play” for its character Solon Shingle, a vehicle for the spe-
cialty actor George Handel Hill, THE PEOPLE’S LAWYER testifies to the skill of jour-
neyman playwright Jones, who also managed the National and Tremont Street theatres
in Boston. Credited with several hundred pieces for the stage, THE PEOPLE’S LAWYER
(in which Solon is written as an incidental comic part) concerns a false accusation of
theft against Boston clerk Charles Otis by his crooked employer Hugh Winslow.
Jones transforms the simple melodramatic plotline of THE PEOPLE’S LAWYER into
a distinctly American play through the character Robert Howard, the titular people’s
lawyer, whose wealthy but unpretending American father (a Revolutionary War vet-
eran) insisted his son learn “a mechanical trade” as well as being educated for the bar
(Jones 423). Freed from the need to practice law as a livelihood, Howard, in his persona
154 ROSEMARIE BANK

as a working man, discovers cases of injustice and, as “one who never pleads except
where he sees oppression preying upon poverty and innocence” (Jones 398), defends
his fellow citizens (in his persona as a lawyer) from the machinations of wealthy and
corrupt villains like Winslow. Howard is an advertisement for an America in which “our
laws are just, our judges are honest men, our jurors are our equals. The right will prevail”
(Jones 413). Public rectitude goes in hand with private virtue, as Howard seeks a bride
drawn to his personal worth, rather than his wealth, and finds her in Otis’s sister, Grace,
who sees that Howard’s right to the title of a gentleman is not invalidated because his
hands are hardened by labor.
The urban class-gap between Howard and Solon Shingle closes around their shared
honesty. Their difference in education is far less significant than the difference in vir-
tue that separates Howard from his class-equal Winslow, who is a forger as well as a
bearer of false witness, stooping to attempt to blackmail Grace into marriage, using her
brother’s freedom as bait. Like her brother, Grace suffers at the hands of the wealthy
when a roomful of rich Boston ladies, to whom she attempts to sell her drawings, look
down their lorgnettes at her simple dress and ridicule the quality of her work. Robert
Howard again sets the correct tone, dismissing the friends who might deride a poor
(but, clearly, well-educated) bride like Grace, at the same time fearing that she might
reject his mechanic self. Authenticity is the key “American” virtue in the play—upright-
ness of character, hard work, and the absence of pretentiousness or artificiality.
The 1830s also saw the rise of city slickers, fashionable gents, and urban toughs. From
1834, George Washington Dixon and T.  D. (“Jim Crow”) Rice offered “Zip Coon” a
chance to strut his urban stuff (Lhamon 2003). On the shadow side, the city is where
the small-town Edward Middleton seeks his fate as W. H. Smith’s The Drunkard (1844),
where Charles Saunders’s title character Rosina Meadows (1843) is seduced and aban-
doned (Grimsted 1968), and where C. W. Taylor’s Little Katy, The Hot Corn Girl (1853)
meets poverty on the mean streets of the land of promise.
The character types of the Bowery B’hoy and G’hal offer a unique American theatri-
cal response to shadow elements in urban life. The B’hoy is the emblem of the manly
white mechanic and he emerges in accounts from the 1830s and in illustrations in the
1840s with a distinct greased haircut, hat, and suit, a characteristic cigar and swaggering
gait, and a distinct urban accent. The New York actor Frank Chanfrau and a journey-
man playwright named Benjamin A. Baker moved the figure to the urban play A Glance
at New York in 1848. Seven “Mose” plays followed in rapid succession until 1850, when
the vogue for the butcher-volunteer fireboy died out as inexplicably as it had arisen
(Meserve 1986; Rinear 1981).
A Glance at New  York pitches a small-town greenhorn, George Parsells, against a
gang of New York City confidence men, who repeatedly swindle him. George’s opposite
is Mose, a butcher-fireboy, who, like his girlfriend Eliza Stebbins (“Lize”), a shopgirl,
successfully negotiates all aspects of the city, enjoys its amusements, and upholds the
nobility of work—and his fire engine. The premise of a visiting tourist and a resident
guide allowed Baker to load the play with known New York locales, popular references,
and contemporaneous theatrical conventions. The play opened with a reproduction of
 ANTEBELLUM FRONTIER AND URBAN PLAYS 155

Steamboat Pier at the foot of Barclay Street, showing an arriving steamboat and a stage
full of newsboys, porters, apple women, cartmen, street urchins, and sharpers. Scenes
of Front Street and Broadway, a ladies’ bowling saloon, a local bar room, New Street,
an auction store, St. Paul’s Church, and Vauxhall Garden introduced local color char-
acters—street sweepers, women in bowling costumes (pants), barmen, people going to
work, and the omnipresent confidence men. There are frequent songs, from an opening
waterman’s chorus to a chorus by the lady bowlers, solo songs and trios by the criminals,
an Irish air in the bar room, and popular songs and Christy minstrel tunes sung by Lize.
Music underscores the action, a gallopade is danced at Vauxhall Garden, and a chance is
provided for Mose to “run wid der machine” (Baker 1848, 9; this is the character’s open-
ing line, played to thundering applause). A ready scrapper, Mose has several fights but
ample opportunity to show off his soft heart and willingness to stand up for the naive
and defenseless.
A Glance at New York and its successors reciprocally staged mechanic culture and cul-
ture for the mechanic, while Lize showed what an independent working woman can
do. Mose and Lize were distinct, flamboyant, and unapologetic characters who upheld
many of the myths of antebellum urban life at a time when American workers were
experiencing increased economic pressure (Bank 1997). Though the fad for the B’hoy
and G’hal died out, the urban types and their characteristics did not. They, like the fron-
tiersman and the staged Indian, the Yankee and the staged Negro, in large part defined
what the word “American” meant for theatre culture in the antebellum decades.
To be sure, it is easy to overstate the impact of Mose and Lize upon American urban
plays. Many of the readings of the antebellum American city reflected in urban plays
have parallels elsewhere in the contemporaneous (at least, the European) world—fear of
the city’s crime and criminals, the ability to obscure one’s real (villainous) nature there,
economic marginality and social indifference, and the like. Two playwrights, as associ-
ated with the London as the New York theatre, Sidney F. Bateman and Dion Boucicault,
both focused plays set in America upon the impact of greed on family life and the need
to locate authenticity in (inner) moral action, rather than (outward) speech, dress, and
manners. Bateman’s 1855 SELF makes these points with a sure theatrical touch, but
Boucicault’s POOR OF NEW YORK (1857), part of his “poor” franchise of urban plays,
cleverly both erases and underscores urban class difference. Derived from Brisbarre’s
and Nus’s LES PAUVRES DE PARIS, Boucicault’s play deftly capitalized on local color—
Union Square, Five Points, Fifth Avenue, the Astors and “Livingstones,” the HERALD
newspaper, the Academy of Music, the Union Club, the panics of 1837 and 1857, and an
all-too-typical blaze in the “full-of-fire city.” At the same time, THE POOR OF NEW
YORK, like THE PEOPLE’S LAWYER, focuses upon authenticity, though less upon
the idea that virtue succeeds through hard work and self-reliance, than that vice falls
through its own duplicity.THE POOR OF NEW YORK is a very urban tale of finan-
cial panic, corrupt financial institutions, and a sizeable swindle. As in Jones’s play, the
rich are depicted as both evil (the banker Bloodgood) and pretentious and artificial
(Bloodgood’s daughter Alida). The symptom of greed—speculation—infects not only
the upper class (even the virtuous Mark Livingstone ruins himself buying fancy stocks),
156 ROSEMARIE BANK

but also middle-class small businessmen like the baker Puffy, who describes how he was
caught in the boom and bust economy of antebellum America (Boucicault 40—41):

[O]ver speculated like the rest on ‘em. I expanded on a new-fangled oven, that was to
bake enough bread in six hours to supply the whole United States—got done brown
in it myself—subsided into Bowery, expanded again on woffles [sic], caught a second
time—obliged to contract to a twelve foot front on Division Street. Mrs. P. tends the
indoor trade—I do a locomotive business in potatoes, and we let our second floor.
My son Dan sleeps with George Washington No. 4, while Mrs. P. and I make out
under the counter; Mrs. P., being wide, objects some, but I says—says I—‘My dear,
everybody must contract themselves in these here hard times.’

Like Winslow in THE PEOPLE’S LAWYER, Bloodgood in THE POOR OF NEW

YORK saves his bank by pretending not to have received a deposit, in this case $100,000
from a Captain Fairweather. Fairweather’s impoverished son, daughter, and widow
struggle for twenty years until Bloodgood’s former clerk, Badger, restores Fairweather’s
receipt to his heirs. Boucicault makes clear that speculating with other people’s money
is the stuff of the tabloids: “Wall Street is a perch, on which a row of human vultures sit,
whetting their beaks, ready to fight over the carcass of a dying enterprise” (Boucicault
48). Far less optimistic about American systems, financial or judicial, than THE
PEOPLE’S LAWYER, Boucicault’s play makes it difficult to locate the poor, whether
in the “impoverished” Livingstone, who owns a square mile of Manhattan real estate,
or in the bankrupt Puffy, who sells hot potatoes from a pushcart, but can still put a
full-course dinner for seven on the table (Bank 57-58). The strongest statement in THE
POOR OF NEW YORK (Boucicault 43) suggests even poverty in America is not what
it seems to be:

The poor! Whom do you call the poor? Do you know them? Do you see them? They
are more frequently found under a black coat than under a red shirt. The poor man is
the artist who is obliged to pledge the tools of his trade to buy medicines for his sick
wife, the lawyer who, craving for employment, buttons up his thin paletot to hide his
shirtless breast. These needy wretches are poorer than the poor, for they are obliged
to conceal their poverty with the false mask of content—smoking a cigar to disguise
their hunger—they drag from their pockets their last quarter, to cast it with studied
carelessness, to the beggar, whose mattress at home is lined with gold. These are the
most miserable of the Poor of New York.

Frontier and urban plays in the antebellum decades answered Webster’s call for native
authors and the AMERICAN QUARTERLY REVIEW’s call for a native drama that
focused upon the “great and illustrious peculiarities” of the American character and of
American life.
Walter Meserve has estimated that “about 90  percent of the plays written in
America during the 1829–1849 period were by actor-playwrights or journeyman play-
wrights” (1986, 160), with commercial rather than literary ambitions. While accurate
to the conditions under which writers wrote for the stage in the antebellum period,
 ANTEBELLUM FRONTIER AND URBAN PLAYS 157

American playwrights nonetheless “showed an understanding of America and drama-

tized American ideas, events, and idiosyncrasies through American characters” (164).
Frontier and urban plays capture these understandings. Though their authors and the
plays themselves are known today primarily to specialists, these dramatists modeled
ways to make the transition from Romantic plays on classical themes to an American
drama indigenous in setting, characters, and ideas.
To be sure, the frontier and urban plays discussed, as well as those omitted here, reso-
nate with foreign examples—the staged Yankee with the British theatre’s Yorkshireman,
for instance, and US urban plays with the city dramas of earlier nineteenth- century
France—but there is really nothing elsewhere like the staged Indian and frontiersman
or the Bowery B’hoy and G’hal, and their staged Yankee and Negro companions. Rather
than re-engaging the nineteenth-century discourse advocating American uniqueness,
however (or taking up the countervailing claim that no distinct American drama worth
discussing exists prior to Eugene O’Neill), we do better to contextualize antebellum
frontier and urban plays to a world that would be irrevocably changed by the American
Civil War. In this way, we may be able to return the works to the historical spaces they
occupied (insofar as we can understand them), at the same time rediscovering what
those cultural spaces mean today (insofar as we can understand ourselves).

Works Cited
“American Drama.” 1827. American Quarterly Review 1: 339.
Baker, Benjamin A. n.d. A Glance at New York. New York: Samuel French.
Bank, Rosemarie K. 1997. Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860. New  York:  Cambridge
University Press.
Boucicault, Dion. 1983. THE POOR OF NEW YORK. In AMERICAN MELODRAMAS. Ed.
Daniel C. Gerould. New York: PAJ Publications: 31-74.
Custis, George Washington Parke. 1953. Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia.
In Representative American Plays, edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn.
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts: 170-192.
Deloria, Philip. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Drake, Benjamin. 1838. The Life and Adventures of Black Hawk; with Sketches of Keokuk, the Sac
and Fox Indians, and the Late Black Hawk War. Cincinnati, OH: George Conclin.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. 1992. African American Criticism. In Redrawing the Boundaries: The
Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and
Giles Gunn, 303–19. New York: Modern Languages Association.
Grimsted, David. 1968. Melodrama Unveiled:  American Theatre And Culture, 1800–1850.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Grose, Burl D. 1979. “Here Come the Indians”: An Historical Study of the Representations of
Native Americans upon the North American Stage, 1808–1969. Ph.D. diss., University of
Missouri.
Hewitt, Barnard. 1959. Theatre U.S.A. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Jiji, Vera, ed. 1983. Showcasing American Drama: A Handbook of Source Materials on The Lion of
the West. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn College Humanities Institute.
158 ROSEMARIE BANK

Jones, J(oseph) S(tevens). 1978. The People’s Lawyer. In Representative American Dramatists,
vol. 2, edited by Montrose J. Moses, 391–424. New York: Arno Press.
Lhamon, Jr., W. T. 2003. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic
Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Londré, Felicia Hardison, and Daniel J. Watermeier. 1998. The History of North American
Theater: The United States, Canada, and Mexico: From Pre-Columbian Times to the Present.
New York: Continuum.
Mason, Jeffrey D. 1993. Melodrama and the Myth of America. Bloomington:  Indiana
University Press.
McConachie, Bruce. 1992. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820– 1870.
Iowa City : University of Iowa Press.
Medina, Louisa. n.d. Nick of the Woods. Boston: Spencer’s Boston Theatre.
Meserve, Walter J. 1986. Heralds of Promise: The Drama of the American People in the Age of
Jackson, 1929–1849. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Miller, Tice L. 2007. Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Mulvey, Kathleen A. 1978. The Growth, Development, and Decline of the Popularity of
American Indian Plays before the Civil War. Ph.D. diss., New York University.
Nichols, Harold J. 1974. The Prejudice against Native American Drama from 1778 to 1830.
Quarterly Journal of Speech 60: 279–88.
Odell, George C.  D. 1928. Annals of the New  York Stage. Vol. 3.  New  York:  Columbia
University Press.
Paulding, James Kirke, John Augustus Stone, and William Bayle Bernard. 1954. The Lion of the
West; or, The Kentuckian. Edited by James N. Tidwell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rinear, David. 1981. F. S. Chanfrau’s Mose: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Folk-Hero. Theatre
Journal 33: 199–212.
Rogin, Michael P. 1975. Fathers and Children:  Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the
American Indian. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Rourke, Constance. 1953. American Humor. New York: Anchor.
Saxton, Alexander. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class, Politics, and Mass Culture
in Nineteenth-Century America. London: Verso.
Sayre, Gordon M. 2005. The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures
of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Shaffer, Jason. 2008. Early American Drama. In The Oxford Handbook of Early American
Literature, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, 453–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spiller, Robert E., and Harold Blodgett, eds. 1949. The Roots of National Culture: American
Literature to 1830. New York: Macmillan.
Stone, John Augustus. 1966. Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags. In Dramas from the
American Theatre, edited by Richard Moody, 205–227. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Wilmeth, Don B. 1989a. Noble or Ruthless Savage? The American Indian Onstage in the Drama.
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———. 1989b. Tentative Checklist of Indian Plays (1606–1987). Journal of American Drama and
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 CHAPTER 10

L AT E M E L ODR A M A

M A R K   HODI N

Melodramatic Rhetoric

There is nothing easier than to give a play a bad name and hang it. How
often, after an evening in which a playwright has entertained, surprised
and even thrilled us for a few moments, do we reward him by shame-
facedly remarking to our semi-profound friends, “Oh, yes, it was an inter-
esting play, but of course it was only a melodrama.”
—Arthur Hobson Quinn (1936, Vol. 2, 100)

Melodrama seems easily defined, for definitions tend to stress the genre’s utter con-
ventionality. Take for example Owen Davis’s often-cited formula:

ACT I—Start the trouble

ACT II—Here things look bad. The lady having left home, is quite at the mercy of
Villain.
ACT III—The lady is saved by the help of the stage carpenter. (The big scenic and
mechanical effects were always in Act III.)
ACT IV—The lovers are united and the villains are punished. (Davis 1996, 299)

Morally simplistic, sentimental, sensational—Davis’s boilerplate also expresses the sort

of cynicism one might expect from an author who, from 1905 to 1910, wrote something
like a play a month for the low-priced theater circuit known as the “10-20-30” (Goff
1959, 201).1 One quotes Davis not simply to establish melodrama’s formalistic properties
but to make a particular argument about its subliterary status, as if the genre’s character-
istic predictability becomes ultimately fulfilled, and condemned, within a rationalized
modern culture industry and its deceived working-class and immigrant constituencies.
As such, we tend to leave Davis behind and to read his frank analysis as something like
an exposé of the ruthless commercialism of melodrama production. However, such
a critical move in fact resembles Davis’s own strategy, for he defines the structure and
160 MARK HODIN

culture of melodrama not to endorse it but to explain for American Magazine’s mid-
dle-class readership “Why I Quit Writing Melodrama,” opening up the space for a more
legitimate practice. “My name, as the author of literally hundreds of bloodthirsty melo-
dramas, was a thing of scorn to the highbrows of the theater,” he wrote later in his autobi-
ography. “The very thought of my being allowed to produce a play in a Broadway theatre
was quite absurd” (Davis 1931, 108). In fact, Davis did go on to prosper on Broadway—
his play Icebound won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923—but his rehabilitation entailed not sim-
ply writing a different kind of play but also defining melodrama and then quitting the
territory.
Constructing the meaning of melodrama in order to articulate the purpose of legiti-
mate drama is, of course, a customary rhetorical strategy—one thinks, for example, of
Douglass Jerrold’s testimony to Parliament’s “Select Committee Appointed to Inquire
into Laws Affecting Dramatic Literature” in 1832, which defined the essence of legiti-
mate drama over and against the visual spectacle of melodrama (1968 [1832], 158),
but the particularly temporal dimension of Davis’s argument (that melodrama has
been quit) is foundational to the history of American drama. The standard narra-
tive centers on the arrival of Eugene O’Neill in the 1920s, taking his bold dramaturgy
and brash attitude as evidence of a modern break from nineteenth-century theatrical
convention. This story reveals the anxiety of its tellers; one senses the relief in Arthur
Hobson Quinn’s “Eugene O’Neill, Poet and Mystic,” the pivotal chapter in his The
History of American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day. “To those who view
our national art through diminishing glasses,” Quinn wrote, “[O’Neill] seems a radi-
cal departure from all before him. But to one who views it in its steady development
he was to be expected” (1936, Vol. 2, 200). In an early review of Quinn’s History, Napier
Wilt had written in The New England Quarterly, “It seems impossible to me that any-
one should believe that a single play written in the United States during the second half
of the nineteenth century is genuinely good” (1928, 429), but twenty years later—after
O’Neill had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1936)—The Literary History of
the United States reformulates this judgment into a condition that was resisted and ulti-
mately surpassed: Sculley Bradley’s survey of American drama from 1860 to 1920 runs
under the title “The Emergence of the Modern Drama.” “The subliterary theatricality of
the period,” Bradley writes, “by illustrating the popular and prevailing taste . . . empha-
sizes the importance of those playwrights who gradually created, in spite of overwhelm-
ing handicaps, a native drama which gave deeper meaning to the theater” (1963 [1948],
1015). In tandem with Joseph Wood Krutch’s standalone chapter on O’Neill—an “inevi-
table central figure” yet still “unique” (1963 [1948], 1237–49) among American drama-
tists—a particular literary-critical strategy takes shape. What was, for Owen Davis, a
tactical opposition between legitimate theater and melodrama expands into a decidedly
antitheatrical position, as if claiming a dramatic tradition required condemning most
American plays as not literature. Twentieth-century historians like Bradley who venture
into nineteenth-century drama can thus embody the myth of O’Neill itself, alienated
and somewhat hostile to theatrical conditions, a situation perhaps best exemplified by
what Alan S. Downer called “Waiting for O’Neill” (1971, 25).
 LATE MELODRAMA 161

Though presumably not intended by Downer, the Beckett-like irony evoked

by his expression appears throughout the O’Neill-centered history of American
drama, especially as melodrama figures in its construction. Long Day’s Journey into
Night (1956) appears to show modern drama repudiating melodrama in the gen-
erational struggle between father and son:  the contest between Edmund’s emer-
gent modern art and James Tyrone, Sr.’s residual romantic melodrama establishes,
in the play’s posthumous production (and resulting O’Neill revival), the dominant
tradition. And yet, Long Day’s Journey reveals this positivistic narrative as wishful
thinking, for the drama resolutely defies attempts to escape the past. The haunting
appears not only in O’Neill’s dramaturgy—an emotionalism that H. G. Kemelman
referred to as “highbrow melodrama” (1932, 482)—but also, as Thomas Postlewait
has argued brilliantly, in the standard history of American drama itself. When they
use Long Day’s Journey to claim modern drama’s triumph over nineteenth-century
melodrama, critics “arrange the history of American drama according to melodra-
matic conventions—a primary conflict between good and bad drama, high and low
culture, innovative art and retrograde tradition, enlightened critique and false con-
sciousness” (1996, 49). In this light, Mary Tyrone’s profound lines can speak for the
disavowal of melodrama in the history of modern drama: “The past is the present,
isn’t it? It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us” (O’Neill
1989 [1956], 90).
As Postlewait makes clear, denying melodrama in American drama history is usually
expressed through formalist analysis, so that the emergence of modern drama becomes
recognized as the triumph of realism over melodrama. While O’Neill’s dramaturgy
could hardly be called “realist” as a whole, his often-expressed disgust for the conven-
tionality and commercialism of his father’s melodramatic theater echoes the discourse
of William Dean Howells’s campaign for literary realism. Crucially, the progressive opti-
mism that often characterized arguments for literary realism has tended to morph into
an historical emphasis on evolution, so that plays that seem to mix realist and melo-
dramatic elements are valued for being transitional while their authors are praised for
resisting theatrical convention before their time. In this formulation, melodrama is cur-
rent but always late—thriving but on its way to extinction.
A much different perspective on melodrama is evident in Montrose Moses’s The
American Dramatist, published in 1911, before realism gained hegemony in American
drama history.

Only a hairline separates the emotion of Broadway from that of the Bowery.
[William] Gillette’s “Sherlock Holmes” was nothing more than a “thriller,” acted
with a certain refinement and a certain reserve, which characteristics are usually
avoided by the manager of melodrama. Not only has the sensational play taken unto
itself a certain formula by which virtue and villainy are expressed, but it likewise
requires a diction which is excessive in its accentuation. When all is told, therefore,
the difference between the legitimate theatre and melodrama lies in this matter of
accentuation (1911, 191).
162 MARK HODIN

Unburdened by teleology, Moses analyzes not realist form but performance style—“excess”
versus “reserve”—and he maps these accents to cultural geography—Broadway and the
Bowery—reading the difference in terms of a “diction” bound up in class and culture.
By shifting the issue from rival dramatic forms to a competition in the cultural field, and
remapping a temporal narrative onto social space, Moses offers a robust method for exceed-
ing the typically reductive analysis of melodrama in American drama history. At the same
time, the approach serves to historicize this critical bias against melodrama, for the cultural
process of differentiation between Broadway reserve and Bowery excess is what ultimately
reduces “melodrama” to the essentially cheap, illegitimate theater Davis denies.
“It is the fate of many amiable words to be debased by vulgar usage until they acquire
a derogatory connotation,” wrote Clayton Hamilton in 1911 (309). “In the vocabulary of
theatre-goers, no word has suffered more from this iniquitous degeneration than the
adjective melodramatic. Careless writers are now accustomed to call a play melodra-
matic when they wish to indicate that it is bad” (310). Hamilton defends melodrama as a
literary form, claiming that its emphasis on situation rather than character has human-
istic value, but the discussion also analyzes shrewdly the sort of antimelodrama postur-
ing that became standard in American drama history. “The very word melodrama has
so fallen into disrepute,” Hamilton observes, “that nowadays when a man puts forth a
melodrama he usually pretends that it is something else and writes in a few extraneous
passages to justify his press agent in advertising it as a social study or a comedy” (310).
If such a disavowal of melodrama resonates with O’Neill, then its rather explicit con-
cern with marketing situates the discourse of modern drama much differently than a
usual grounding in Howells’s realist theory might suggest. While Hamilton’s playwright
would likely not be enshrined in American drama history, his tactic appears to be for-
mative rhetoric.
In what follows, I open up Moses’s “hairline” of separation between Bowery excess
and Broadway reserve, emphasizing how the competing forms of melodrama expressed
different modes of theatricality. Whereas melodrama in the Bowery became associated
with the shock of modern urban life—essentially the definition preserved in the his-
tory of American drama—Broadway melodrama presented ways of keeping composure
within the unsettling modern environment, a performance familiar to middle-class
experience. Finally, I  suggest that this legitimate melodrama that “pretends [to be]
something else” makes visible the unacknowledged theatricality of modern drama.

Bowery Excess

The melodrama is the primary form of entertainment with the Other Half.

—Porter Emerson Browne (1909, 347)

While melodrama is known for moral clarity, it depicts the experience of radical uncer-
tainty, as dangerous situations often materialize suddenly and without warning or
 LATE MELODRAMA 163

justification. From a realist standpoint, this sort of implausibility condemns melodrama

as a romantic evasion of real life. And yet the very randomness of melodrama’s sensa-
tions could be familiar for spectators themselves feeling displaced by massive social
change. For Peter Brooks, melodrama “starts from and expresses the anxiety brought
by a frightening new world in which the traditional patterns of moral order no lon-
ger provide the necessary social glue” (1985 [1976], 20). Modernity makes melodrama
appear “simply normal,” in Eric Bentley’s words, “more natural than Naturalism” (1967
215–16).2 Writing in 1911, Clayton Hamilton confirms Bentley’s observation by remark-
ing that modern experience seems “more frequently melodramatic than tragic” because
“much of our life—in fact, by far the major share—is casual instead of causal” (1911, 310).
Melodrama’s emphasis on action is thus compelling, Hamilton continues, “because
adventure is always with us—it is often an adventure to look over the edge of our morn-
ing paper at the person seated opposite in the subway” (311). The urban encounter is
melodramatic for “us”; the stage villain who appears from nowhere (and keeps reap-
pearing) becomes embodied as an actual, presumably different looking person, while
Hamilton and his readership heroically endure the “adventure” of modern New York
City. The situation brings to mind similar scenarios in realist fiction, where visceral
shock is a given of urban modernity, as if melodrama was the unstable and excessive
modern reality that literary realism was enlisted to contain.
The lurking danger and sudden violence that characterized melodramatic theater
made melodrama a handy metaphor to describe middle-class encounters with urban
modernity; at the same time, however, actual melodrama performance became linked
to working-class and immigrant communities. Moses’s sense that melodrama’s exces-
sive style is rooted authentically in Bowery life, however, is complicated by the fact that
similar entertainments geared to middle-class audiences thrived in turn-of-the-century
New York City, from vaudeville to rubbernecking tours of immigrant neighborhoods.
Moreover, because dramatic texts of popular 10-20-30 melodramas are virtually non-
existent, our understanding of these performances depends on journalistic accounts
often mediated by this middle-class, outsider perspective. Such an investment is cap-
tured in the title of Porter Emerson Browne’s Everybody’s Magazine article, “The
Mellowdrammer,” as if melodrama was a cultural practice known only in the vernacu-
lar of lower-class life (1909, 347). Of course, Browne’s article offers to translate, and he
encourages readers to undertake a slumming expedition as well. “When you have gone
stale on the political play, and the business play, and the sociological play,” he writes.
“When the vaudeville houses no longer possess the power to woo and win your errant
fancies,” then “[get] aboard a trolley, and go down to see what sort of a menu the Other
Half has to gratify its appetites theatric” (347). Although 10-20-30 melodramas often
featured working-class situations, Browne’s search for the cultural practices of “the
other half ” was discovered less in the plot of Bowery melodrama than in the excessive
theatricality of its performance. What appears as sloppy exposition and pasteboard
characterization clears the way for fast-developing episodes, often alternating between
scenes of danger and comic relief and culminating with a spectacular sensation scene.3
In Browne’s condescending view, “the audience swings from one emotion to another
164 MARK HODIN

with all the easy facility with which monkeys in a cage gyrate from trapeze to trapeze”
(1909, 354).
Like other popular urban entertainments, the 10-20-30 aesthetic transformed mod-
ern shock into thrilling performance. However, melodrama’s narrative was fundamen-
tally different from the structure of a vaudeville bill or the design of an amusement park
midway, for the 10-20-30 did not simply reiterate the illogical and chaotic experience
of modern life; it seemed to settle that uncertainty with a happy ending. It is here that
melodrama appears to reveal its ideological work, deceiving spectators that the material
circumstances that produce suffering are ultimately neutralized by a character’s innate
goodness. Stephen Crane analyzes the devastating implications of this kind of mis-
recognition in Maggie: A Girl of Streets, for when Maggie thinks a Bowery melodrama
is “transcendental realism” (Crane 1969 [1896], 36) she reveals not simply bad cultural
taste but a consciousness so warped by sentimentality that she perceives her own mate-
rial struggle only in terms of a moral universe that makes her guilty. With far less sympa-
thy, Emerson Browne also believes the spectators of the “mellowdrammer” mistake the
sham production for reality, calling them “the children of the theatre—the Peter Pans of
stageland” (1909, 354).
Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, Harry James Smith theorized a much different rela-
tionship between audience and performance in the 10-20-30, however. Relating his visit
to the Thalia Theater, Smith includes a running commentary from the woman sitting
next to him, as she reacts passionately to the situations onstage. But rather than offer
this reception as evidence of the spectator’s mystification or innocence, Smith concludes
instead that “the spirit of play is certainly active here, the wish to enjoy the thing to the
full and to give yourself a real part in it” (1907, 321). The audience is not “credulous to
the degree one is at first inclined to imagine: it does not forget that it is witnessing a
stage play” (1907, 321). Rather than posit realist expectations, and then fault audiences
for naively mistaking cheap theatricality for real life, Smith locates the meaning of melo-
drama in the self-conscious theatricality of its reception, when the audience “throws
itself into the spirit of the game” (1907, 321). Indeed, as Ben Singer shows in Melodrama
and Modernity (2001), producers of 10-20-30 shows designed spectacular sensation
scenes to accommodate this desire for theatricality, often exposing the stage appara-
tus to make scenes more thrilling. “It was an awareness that the stunt was risky,” writes
Singer, “that something might go wrong, or the timing might be off, that agitated specta-
tors. They feared the actor’s flesh, not the protagonist’s” (2001, 185).
Recognizing this detached mode of spectatorship makes it possible to theorize a
different sort of reception of the Bowery excess described by middle-class accounts
of 10-20-30 melodrama. For example, the working-class heroine of Edna, the Pretty
Typewriter (1907), written by Owen Davis under the pseudonym “John Oliver,” appears
far from passive in the face of urban danger. The drama begins when Edna, a clerical
worker employed by her cousin in New York City, discovers that she has inherited a
mine owned by her father. The plot is driven by her employer’s attempts to steal Edna’s
deed to the mine, first by subtle means and then by increasingly violent tactics. The play
comprises a series of abductions and escapes, two of which are preserved in promotional
 LATE MELODRAMA 165

posters: Edna leaps from a rooftop to a moving elevated train, and she jumps from one
moving car to another during a chase scene—both feats showcasing the gymnastic abili-
ties of Edna Browning, who played the role of Edna (Goff 1959, 206; Rainey 2009, 111).
While the villain in this piece is Edna’s boss, the drama ensues not within the workplace
but outside in the space of modern New York City, so that Edna’s adventures replay, seri-
ally, the sense of shock noted in middle-class encounters with urban modernity. And
yet, whereas Hamilton’s subway rider may endure his melodrama by hiding behind a
newspaper, Edna is decidedly more active. “[Edna]” saw the means of escape,” writes
Grace Miller White in a 1907 novelization of the play, “and when the elevated train
passed by, she gave a spring like a deer and landed upon the roof of the last car. She
was thrown down by the impact, but falling across the raised portion of the roof on her
hands and knees, was soon enabled to assume a safe position” (quoted in Rainey 2009,
115). As Lawrence Rainey points out in his astute reading of the novel, “Edna’s grasp of
the metropolis . . . enables her to save herself ”; modern “technologies may pose threats
and dangers, but they can also be mastered and prove her means of salvation” (2009,
112). It is possible that working-class spectators saw Edna not as the embodiment of
Bowery excess, as imagined by middle-class observers, but rather as a model for their
playful mastery of it.

Broadway Reserve

People who pay two dollars . . . like their thrills just as much as do the gal-
lery boys who creep into the popular-price galleries for ten cents.
—Alan Dale (1906, 431)

Drama historians have noted a number of improvements to melodrama in legiti-

mate theater during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Characters seem more
rounded: villains are harder to distinguish in the cast (as in the counter-pointed pairs of
lovers in Bronson Howard’s Shenandoah [1888], for example). Stage types are deepened
by ethnic speech and disposition, most famously in Dion Boucicault’s Irish plays, so that
a formulaic structure feels grounded in a particular milieu. Conventional plots became
coordinated with social events—as in Charles Klein’s The Lion and Mouse (1905)—or
were filled with modern discourse (in James A. Herne’s Shore Acres [1892], for example).
Even the happy ending was up for subtle revision, as Howard insisted famously in a lec-
ture at Harvard University, “satisfactory” resolutions could still be consistent with char-
acter motivation (Quinn 1936, Vol. 1, 44–49).
In each reading, melodrama becomes more respectable and higher quality by becom-
ing less melodramatic. However, lest we confuse aesthetic respectability—as presumed
by a realist tradition—for social respectability, we should remind ourselves that before
melodrama became tied to mass culture through the 10-20-30 and early cinema, in the
middle years of the nineteenth century it was an agent for middle-class formation. “For
166 MARK HODIN

the American bourgeoisie,” writes Bruce McConachie, “economic panics, estate fore-
closures, and embarrassing questions about their social origins—the chance events
that structure . . . sensation melodramas—were believable accidents of fate that could
happen to them” (1992, 217). In The Poor of New York (1857), for example, Boucicault
Americanizes Les Pauvres de Paris (1856), by Édouard Brisebarre and Eugène Nus, not
simply by setting the action in New York City but also by orienting the melodrama in
the financial panics of 1837 and 1857 and dramatizing the collapse and recovery of Mark
Livingstone’s economic position. Livingstone’s fall from the comfortable Brooklyn
Heights neighborhood to the Five Points area suggested that status could be determined
by material conditions and environment. However, by insisting upon the structural role
of villainy, the melodramatic plot tended to reify class boundaries. When the banker
Bloodgood’s crime is detected and ultimately rectified, audiences were given the impres-
sion that someone like Livingstone “deserved [his] wealth and position . . . but not [his]
misfortune,” as McConachie puts it succinctly (1992, 215). Thus, spectators may have
been captivated by the dangers endured by Laura Courtland in Daly’s Under the Gaslight
(1867), as she tries to evade sociopaths like Byke and Old Judas in urban New  York
City, but her heroism—famously dramatized in the act of freeing a working-class male
tied to the railroad tracks—is finally comprehensible by a plot twist establishing her
aristocratic birth.
Like the heroes and heroines of melodrama who prevail because of an inherent good-
ness, the middle classes became invested in notions like “character” and “sincerity” as
essential qualities that could not be diminished by unfortunate circumstances. At the
same time, however, class mobility required theatricality, the ability to perform a role in
public. Reconciling belief in an older “culture of character” with an emergent “culture
of personality,” to use Warren Susman’s (1984 [1979], 271–85) terminology, discourse
about middle-class identity in late nineteenth-century America is at once preoccupied
with style and worried about false fronts. This tension between personality and char-
acter appears in attempts to develop a legitimate mode of melodramatic performance
on Broadway distinguished from the 10-20-30. To help clarify this process, I will touch
briefly on work from William Hooker Gillette (1853–1937) and David Belasco (1853–
1931), both of whom accommodated melodrama to middle-class experience by ground-
ing theatricality in character.
In his Civil War play Secret Service (1895), William Gillette embodies an ideal
middle-class performance. Set in the city of Richmond, when the capital of the
Confederacy is under siege from Union forces, the drama centers on the relationship
between Lewis Dumont, a Northern spy working undercover as Captain Thorne, and
Edith Varney, the daughter of a Southern general. In this sense, the play resembled
other Civil War dramas popular with Broadway audiences, like Howard’s Shenandoah
and Belasco’s The Heart of Maryland (1895), where lovers potentially unite and reconcile
warring families. For Secret Service, Gillette further insisted on the unity of time, set-
ting each successive act at one-hour intervals. Not evidence of Gillette’s commitment to
realist theory, however, the play’s real-time action was used to build suspense. In other
words, rather than use realist elements to counteract melodramatic effects, as runs the
 LATE MELODRAMA 167

usual explanation in American drama history, Gillette developed a realistic perfor-

mance style that was essentially theatrical.
For Howells, dramatic realism inhered in the quiet movements of everyday life, but
Gillette made such gestures the basis for melodramatic thrills. Perhaps picking up on
this deconstruction, Norman Hapgood wrote in 1901 that Gillette’s presence onstage is
“apparently natural and disdainful of the theatrical, yet alert, active and deeply theatri-
cal every second” (69). It was as if the subtlety of Gillette’s continuous stage business
made his characters strangely absorbing. “He enters quietly, perhaps stealthily,” writes
Hapgood, “and you look at him. He seems to be doing nothing, but he is doing many
things. He is . . . making a hundred subdued movements of his frame or head or face to
reflect every change in the situation” (70). In Secret Service, gesture and suspense come
together most thrillingly in the famous third act, with clicking telegraph machines. In
order to keep him in Richmond, Edith has secured Thorne a commission to command
the War Department Telegraph Office, and he has to decide whether or not to send a
message that gives the Union advantage in a battle but will likely harm Edith. In the
10-20-30 melodrama heroes and heroines were tested by railroad trains, buzz saws, and
automobiles, but in Secret Service the spectacle resided in Gillette’s hands as he works
the telegraph machine—and his cigar. In the published version of the play, one follows
several pages of dense stage directions as Gillette lights his cigar, chews on it, removes
it from his mouth and puts it on the table, and then relights the cigar—all throughout a
flurry of telegraph messages and finally an assault by Benton Arrelsford, the Southerner
who has suspected that Thorne is a Union spy. When Thorne is shot, “[h]is left hand—
with which he was telegraphing—is covered with blood,” but he “gradually recovers to
erect position again, looking easily front, and puts revolver on the table, picking up cigar
with same hand and putting it casual into his mouth as if he thought he’d have a smoke
after all, instead of killing a man” (1998 [1895], 447).
In this kind of gesture, Gary Richardson sees the cultural origins of “the cool imper-
turbable, understated hero of action adventures, which became a permanent fixture
of American popular drama and cinema”—like “Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in
Casablanca” (1993, 182). In terms of the romance plot, Thorne ultimately chooses alle-
giance to Edith over his political commitment, recalling the pro-Union telegraph he has
sent. But the play’s outcome is understandable more for the ways Thorne’s grace under
pressure is itself the quality for reconciling warring factions. Discovered to be a spy,
Thorne faces a firing squad, but as he continues to speak in a “low voice, off-hand as if
of no consequence” (1998 [1895], 473), Edith’s brother Wilfred “watches him with undis-
guised admiration” before asking that they shake hands (473). As General Randolph
says at the curtain, “There isn’t any doubt whatever that you’d ought to be extermi-
nated right now!—But considering the damned peculiarity of your behavior . . . we’ve
decided to keep you out of mischief some other way” (1998 [1895], 476), and he invites
Thorne to spy for the Confederate side. Most directly, Thorne’s “peculiar behavior” is
his decision to sacrifice patriotism for love, but it glosses the compelling attractive-
ness of Gillette’s reserved theatricality. Recalling Clayton Hamilton’s hypothetical
encounter on the subway, Thorne’s self-composure appears something like a fantasy of
168 MARK HODIN

middle-class subjectivity, a way to “[do] nothing” while “doing many things” and nego-
tiate an unpredictable and threatening urban modernity with cool reserve. Reviewing
Gillette’s similar performance in Sherlock Holmes, Norman Hapgood was as astonished
as the Southerners in Secret Service, for the sort of theater that he had located in the
rival camp now appears unexpectedly attractive. While the play “wallows in incidents
which we sophisticated persons should hardly care to narrate, except ironically, in the
daytime,” Gillette’s performance “takes you through realms that leave you clasping your
chair and waiting with checked breathing for the solution of preposterous situations”
(1901, 74). The value added to the drama was entirely at the level of performance. As
Montrose Moses put it, “[Gillette] turns on green lights in ‘Sherlock Holmes’—the same
green lights that illuminate the page of ‘Ragged Dick’—and people who have patronized
Ibsen’s ‘The Wild Duck’ and ‘Rosmersholm,’ sit enthralled” (1911, 167).
Like Gillette, David Belasco created melodramatic thrills through absorption rather
than sensation, but whereas Gillette drew spectators to the cool manners of charismatic
characters, Belasco captivated audiences by the atmosphere of the entire production.
Famously crowding his sets with hundreds of real properties, from expensive antiques
to bric-a-brac, Belasco also built illusion through an accumulation of minute details, but
what truly distinguished the sort of deep absorption created by his production style was
light. Moses called the emotional effects of Belasco’s sophisticated lighting schemes the
“psychology of the switchboard”—not psychology in the realist sense of character moti-
vation, but the theatricalization of psychological affect—a feeling of electricity expe-
rienced by spectators in live theater (1911, 125). Not only was this mode of absorption
distinguished from the theatricality of the 10-20-30 melodrama, but, in Belasco pro-
ductions, it often provided a means of escape and release from the melodrama of urban
modernity. Describing the opening moments of The Girl of the Golden West (1905)—a
visual sequence that Nicholas Vardac likened to “pan” and “track” shots from cinema
(1987 [1949], 127)—the critic for Life magazine wrote, for example, “one finds one’s
thoughts transferred at once, whether one wishes it or not, from Forty-second Street,
with its cabs and clanging street-cars, and from the interior of a New York theatre to the
land of the setting sun, to the heights of the Sierras, and thence down the valley, until we
are within the walls of the Polka Saloon” (Metcalfe 1905, 640–41). In this sense, Belasco’s
melodrama was escapist theater, but it was an escapism tailored to middle-class desire.
Indeed, despite its dusty mining camp locale, The Girl of the Golden West dramatizes
how theatricality can be respectable.
Like Secret Service, the plot centers on a woman who falls in love with an enemy
in disguise and yet she remains true to her lover when his identity is revealed. When
Minnie Falconer, the “Girl,” meets the road-agent Ramerrez, he is Dick Johnson, “the
one man in the place who has the air of a gentleman” (1983 [1905], 199)  and distin-
guished especially from Jack Rance, the sheriff and a renowned gambler, who sports a
diamond-studded shirt and polished boots but treats Minnie boorishly. Beneath sur-
face appearances, underneath social roles like a sheriff and road agent—or political con-
flicts as in Secret Service—lies a natural goodness that Minnie recognizes, and so, given
the essential character of Johnson (or Thorne), what is wrong with a little theatricality?
 LATE MELODRAMA 169

Minnie’s “utter frankness takes away all suggestion of vice” (1983 [1905], 194), but she
saves Johnson by famously wagering her own body and then cheating in a game of cards
with Rance. What is particularly telling is the self-conscious theatricality of her perfor-
mance, for, just before Minnie pulls the winning cards from her stocking, she distracts
Rance by fainting, playing the melodramatic role to advantage.
Similarly, David Belasco was known for theatrical tricks, but he worked tirelessly
to construct a reputation for artistic excellence. He publicly opposed the Theatrical
Syndicate, often casting himself as the heroic David defeating the Goliath of commer-
cialism and mass production. In interview after interview Belasco insisted that he had
spared no expense or effort in making his latest production the finest theater available.
“I recall that when I produced ‘The Girl of the Golden West,’ ” he wrote, “I experimented
three months to secure exactly the soft, changing colors of a Californian sunset over the
Sierra Nevadas, and then turned to another method. It was a good sunset, but it was not
Californian” (1919, 56–57). Like Johnson and the Girl and like Thorne in Secret Service,
Belasco sanctioned a form of theatricality grounded in character, a kind of performance
that was at once central to middle-class experience and the means for presenting melo-
drama as legitimate theater.

Melodrama and Performance

What will this growing tendency toward elaborate silent effects mean
in the life of our plays? [...] Can the taste of a day . . . be kept alive, unless
people in after generations can read those dramas, and so call for their
occasional performance?
—Norman Hapgood (1901, 71)

I began this essay with the notion that even the most basic definitions of melodrama are
rhetorical, and I have analyzed three related arguments that define melodrama in order
to understand late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American theater: melo-
drama was the lesser species in an evolutionary narrative, challenged and defeated by
a realistic tradition of modern drama; melodrama was a reflection of urban modernity
and mass culture, located squarely in working-class life; and melodrama offered middle-
class spectators ways of negotiating modernity, even as it “pretend[ed] it was something
else” on Broadway. Above all, my main rhetorical investment pivots on the third argu-
ment, for by defining legitimate theater over and against Bowery melodrama, Broadway
melodramas like Secret Service and The Girl of the Golden West in fact generate the basis
for a narrative that erases the plays from memory. The cultural distinction Belasco and
Gillette forged within turn-of-the-century melodrama came to structure the opposition
in American drama history that makes dramatic realism modern and melodrama “late.”
As one might expect, the work of Gillette and Belasco has not received much atten-
tion in American drama history, but what is striking is the prominent role Belasco has
170 MARK HODIN

played in the narrative, as an enemy of modernism. It is as if Belasco’s successful market

strategy is turned against his status as a modern artist, so what was competition between
Broadway melodrama and the Bowery becomes an opposition between Broadway melo-
drama and modern theater. In The New Movement in the Theatre (1914), for example,
Sheldon Cheney describes a moment from Belasco’s production of The Woman (1911)
when the heroine sits alone in a high-rise hotel room. “The audience has been brought
to the point of almost breathless suspense, in the expectation that a certain character
will come up to the girl in the room,” writes Cheney, but “in the midst of this dramatic
silence there is heard the peculiar crescendo squeak of a pneumatic elevator. The sound
is wonderfully imitated. Invariably a rustle runs through the audience, and almost every
person turns to his neighbor to comment on the cleverness of the trick. . . . But in the
momentary interest in this detail, the entire sustained mood is shattered” (1971 [1914]
161). Crucially, Cheney likened Belasco’s scenic disruptions to vaudeville “stunts” (1971
[1914], 161). As a proponent of the so-called New Stagecraft, Cheney did not fault the
production for its lack of dramatic realism but for the mode of its theatricality. In a failed
middle-class performance, Belasco had tried to pass off the Bowery style on Broadway—
glossy personality with no character underneath.
In his groundbreaking The American Play (2009), Marc Robinson reads Belasco’s
de familiarizations as precursors of modernist theater, however. “Belasco’s fastidious-
ness,” writes Robinson, “his obsessive search for the decisive detail that will clinch our
belief . . . also pulls us up short, insisting we remain self-conscious in our surrender to
deception” (2009, 143). Realist fiction may keep melodramatic effects at a distance, but
Belasco’s style shows how performance invariably turns “realism against itself,” the illu-
sion of objectivity ruptured by our attention to the objects themselves (2009, 134–51).
In this manner, Robinson analyzes Gillette’s active hands in Secret Service as
“stand-in[s] for the gestures of playwriting” that “cal[l] attention to the nonlinear, dura-
tional, and often inconclusive logic of every artist’s imagination” (2009, 98–99). If dra-
matic realism has been a stalwart critic of melodrama, then melodrama may also reveal
the limits of dramatic realism and can then show (inverting Sculley Bradley’s classic
literary-historical formulation) how theater gives deeper meaning to drama. In closing,
it seems appropriate to recall that William Gillette said as much in a letter to Arthur
Hobson Quinn. “I thank you for incorporating the Acting Directions with the actual
words spoken . . . notwithstanding your evident opinion that the words constitute the
play” he wrote in a note sent with a revised version of Secret Service that Quinn had
solicited for publication in his anthology, Representative American Plays (1917; Quinn
1936, Vol. 1, 212). “We differ there in a marked degree,” Gillette continued, “—for even in
book form,—to be read only, I would much prefer that people read what my characters
do—how they behave—and what is in their minds—than to merely get the words they
utter” (Vol. 1, 212). Addressing the critic who would become a chief architect of the evo-
lutionary history of American drama, Gillette seems aware of the subliterary fate await-
ing his melodrama, but his forgotten words should inspire scholars who now seek to
comprehend dramatic literature through embodied performance.
 LATE MELODRAMA 171

Notes
1. According to Rahill (1967, 275) the expression comes from a particular circuit of theaters
that advertised tickets for “ten, twent’, thirt’ ” cents. The price scale varied among cheap
melodrama theaters, with some charging as much as seventy-five cents and a dollar for the
best seats.
2. Ben Singer (2001, 59–99) offers the fullest analysis of melodrama in the context of urban
modernization.
3. Singer (2001, 153–157) offers synopses of sensation scenes from more than forty turn-of-
the-century melodramas. See Rahill (1967, 272–83) and Goff (1959) for additional 10-20-30
plot summaries.

Works Cited
Belasco, David. 1983 [1905]. The Girl of the Golden West. In American Melodrama, edited by
Daniel C. Gerould, 183–247. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.
———. 1919. The Theatre through Its Stage Door. Edited by Louis V. Defoe. New York: Harper
Brothers.
Bentley, Eric. 1967. The Life of the Drama. New York: Athenaeum.
Bradley, Sculley. 1963 [1948]. The Emergence of the Modern Drama. In Literary History
of the United States: History, Third Edition, edited by Robert E. Spiller et al., 1000–1015.
New York: Macmillan.
Brooks, Peter. 1985 [1976]. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brown, Porter Emerson. 1909. The Mellowdrammer. Everybody’s Magazine 21, no. 3: 347–54.
Cheney, Sheldon. 1971 [1914]. The New Movement in the Theatre. New York: Benjamin Blom.
Crane, Stephen. 1989 [1896]. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In The Works of Stephen Crane Vol. 1.
Bowery Tales, edited by Fredson Bowers, 1–98. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Dale, Alan. 1906. “Six Effulgent Stars.” Cosmopolitan 15, no. 4: 31–34.
Davis, Owen. 1931. I’d Like to Do It Again. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.
———. 1996. “Why I Quit Writing Melodrama.” In Theatre in the United States: A Documentary
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 CHAPTER 11

A N EW R E A L I SM

M A R K F E A R NOW

Looking at American drama created between 1860 and 1914 from the perspective of the
twenty-first century, one has this knowledge of the events that came in the decades after
that year: through the mode of realism, American drama during the twentieth century
would rise to terrific artistic heights and achieve international influence. Between 1920
and 1970, American writers such as Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams,
Arthur Miller, and Lillian Hellman built a repertory of realistic drama that equaled or
exceeded the quality and scope of the first wave of realistic repertoire built up by Ibsen,
Strindberg, and Hauptmann, and challenged even the accomplishments of Shaw and
Chekhov. Knowing this history, one may ask several questions: what kind of realism
was being produced by American playwrights before that “golden age” of 1920–1970?
What were the forces that influenced the formation of these earlier realisms? And why
were Americans seemingly so slow to embrace realism, a style that had revolutionized
European drama beginning in the 1880s?
In framing these questions as a retrospective, I  will try to avoid organic assump-
tions about how history works. It has been common in much earlier writing across eras,
especially those periodized as is this publication, to describe bodies of work or schools
of playwriting as “growing out” of previous bodies of work or schools of playwriting.
Though attractive as a means of making sense of why cultural products emerge when
and as they do, this narration of history is rarely accurate. How often do we or can
we know that a play or theatre production was directly influenced by an earlier one?
Occasionally writers and producers or their autobiographical records do point to influ-
ences (such as Eugene O’Neill’s reading of Strindberg and Greek tragedies while recu-
perating from tuberculosis at a sanitarium in 1912), but even in these cases the notion
of “influence” seems too simplistic. Artistic creations are made in a context of personal,
economic, cultural, social, and political influences and, even when a simple influence
narrative is promoted by the playwright or producer, the historian should approach the
matter with caution and humility before the complexity of individual creativity and cul-
tural production.
174 MARK FEARNOW

Defining Realism

What do we mean when we talk about realism in drama? For clarity, because of the slip-
pery relationship between text and staging, it is best to adhere strictly to drama and not
to theatrical production. Think, for example, how easily a realistic play may be pro-
duced in a surrealistic or expressionist or Brechtian style. Conversely, a radically anti-
realistic play might be staged in a realistic environment, with what is seen as realistic
acting. So my working definition will avoid mention of a simulated “reality” in a stage
environment.
I am describing realism in drama as a play in which (1) the plot adheres closely to
plausibility and avoids wild coincidence, dreams, fantasies, and soliloquies; (2) charac-
ters behave in ways we find socially typical and psychologically believable in the circum-
stances in which the writer places them; (3) though it may be either serious or comic in
tone, the play deals with serious matters for the society represented and relevant for the
real-life society that comprises the audience; (4) the dialogue approximates language
used by people in the place, time, and social setting represented; and (5) the play pro-
vides adequate resolution in its storytelling and character development so that the audi-
ence is challenged to reconsider or reject a commonly held view on the moral or ethical
questions upon which the story has focused.
It is fascinating to reexamine the matter of Europe-to-United States cultural trans-
mission that had operated powerfully since the beginnings of the American theatre with
the arrival of the Hallams in the eighteenth century. While this essay is going to con-
sider the largely failed endeavors of a few American intellectuals to establish realism in
American drama in the 1890s—typified by James Herne’s Margaret Fleming in 1891—
and will explore in some depth the commercial style of realism worked out by a handful
of playwrights—most notably Clyde Fitch, Rachel Crothers, and Edward Sheldon in the
early twentieth century—the glaring fact is that Americans were slow to accept the new
drama. It was 1920 (the year of O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon) before realism took hold in
the American theatre. That was forty years after this new style, the first that can be called
“Modern,” shook Europe awake from a dream brought on by a mixed draught of roman-
ticism and melodrama.
Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House in 1879, followed by Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of
the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), and Hedda Gabler (1890). Strindberg had gone
down the road toward realism with The Father in 1887, Hauptmann with Before Sunrise
in 1889, and Chekhov began a series of plays that would change the world’s understand-
ing of what a realistic play might be with The Seagull in 1896. Americans, certainly
American intellectuals and writers, knew about these plays. Ibsen’s plays, for example,
were published in William Archer’s English translations in both London and New York
beginning in 1890. Ghosts was staged in Chicago as early as 1882, and A Doll’s House was
staged in Louisville in 1883. London productions of Ibsen, usually in limited runs and
under special “private club” conditions to avoid legal problems, became the causes célè-
bres of the English stage beginning in 1890, and the plays were widely read in Britain and
 A NEW REALISM 175

the United States and widely written about in American magazines and newspapers.
Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession was written in 1893 and staged amid much outraged
publicity in 1902. The protestations of European influence in The Contrast (1787) and
Fashion (1845) notwithstanding, the London stage was still followed closely by America’s
literary and theatrical classes (Franc 1918).
The fifty-year lag between the emergence of realism on European stages and its solid
establishment in the United States (with the Depression-era dramas of Odets and
Hellman) is an example of how transmission, if it exists at all, does not work in a pre-
dictable way. Despite the best efforts of influential cultural leaders—in this case such
eminences as Henry James and William Dean Howells—to bring about a dramatic revo-
lution in nineteenth-century American drama, the event did not take place as the intel-
lectual elite may have planned.
A major reason for this lag was a lack of venues for experimentation. The experimen-
tal theatre clubs that hosted the European pioneers of realism and staged their work had
virtually no corresponding theatres in the United States until after 1914. During World
War I and in the years just afterward, several key small companies were organized under
meager circumstances. The Washington Square Players (1914) and the Provincetown
Players (1915) would prove extraordinarily important in providing a space, actors, and
a means of production for experimental playwrights, some of whom were writing real-
ism. During the era of realism’s establishment in Europe (let us choose 1880 as a reason-
able beginning date) and up to World War I, American theatre was a commercial theatre
with virtually no alternatives in view. Whether organized on a long-run or (rarer)
repertory basis, American producers sought plays that would yield maximum profit.
American theatres had no government subsidies, as existed across much of Europe, nor
any corporate or society patrons. Theatre was, in that era before the triumph of cinema,
a thriving business. Theatre was the dominant popular entertainment from 1860 to 1914,
ahead of music, reading, and even sport. Like all business, theatre was built upon giving
customers what they wanted (the only alternative being to convince customers through
marketing that they ought to want something else), and what these paying audiences
wanted, for the most part, was confirmation of what they already believed.
This new “Modern” form called realism was a radical force that joined in the fin de
siècle motion of turning the world upside down. The questioning of one foundational
social institution called into question all the others and threatened a general tumult. The
cultural historian Jacques Barzun writes that

When Ibsen at long last was tolerated on the stage in this period [the 1880s], his plays
supported the new thesis that the most admired virtues and revered institutions were
obstacles to the good life: marriage, always telling the truth, respect for authority,
propriety at all costs. All ideals in the abstract are causes for disaster to individuals
and ultimately to society. (2000, 616)

Barzun makes the point that Ibsen was not inventing a new form per se but had adapted
the nineteenth-century melodrama to a new purpose:  he put “live characters into
conflicts made memorable by violence” (616). In nineteenth-century melodrama, the
176 MARK FEARNOW

worthy protagonist may be wronged by an unjust society, but ultimately he or she is

restored to that society’s good graces by the end of the narrative and the protagonist
embraces her or his readmittance. The action of the play may reveal some minor flaw
in the social architecture, but the hero has shown the community this flaw and pointed
toward reparation by the fall of the curtain. In the new plays from Europe (by Ibsen,
Strindberg, Hauptmann, Shaw, and others) the whole structure of conventional moral-
ity is revealed as a sham. Who wants to be restored to a deleterious fake? By play’s end,
the audience’s comfort has been removed. They have to look elsewhere for a moral com-
pass. But the source of that compass is elusive in most of realism. Realism is more Shiva
than Brahma, destroying to clear the way for an unknown future, rather than begin-
ning the new creation itself. The “socialist realism” that would in 1932 be promulgated by
Stalin as official state policy of the Soviet Union was not realism at all. Realism is a reve-
lation of truth; it knocks down established creeds and does not build up new ones. In the
few American cases wherein a writer tried to work in the “socialist realist” style—a key
example being Odets’s Awake and Sing! (1935)—the declarations of political cant in the
last scene mar the play rather than fulfill it. Having written a fine and hard play that tears
down a complacent world, the playwright suddenly turns artificial and dishonest as the
writer tries to push up a Marxist vision of a world-to-come on the freshly blasted scene.
Realism does not offer a solution beyond itself. Barzun makes the subtle point that
the new drama offered art itself as the source of a new morality: “Art itself, not this or
that message, was to be the guide of conduct—art by its truth, harmony, and grace
molded the spirit; aesthetics was a form of ethics. . . . In other words, evil is ugly and
detestable” (616).

William Dean Howells and

Literary Realism

In her authoritative booklength study of the first sixty years of American realism,
Brenda Murphy documents the web of theoretical, artistic, and personal connections
between William Dean Howells, Henry James, and the playwright-actor James Herne
(Murphy 1987, 24–85). Howells and James are, of course, remembered as novelists,
though Howells’s position has become more obscure in the interceding decades; but
beginning in the 1880s both were persistent champions of realism in fiction and drama.
Howells and James were prolific creators of fiction as well as criticism and both wrote
plays in their attempts to bring the new style to American letters. Howells should be
given the greater emphasis, since James (1845–1915) moved to England in 1876 and
returned to the United States only rarely. He became a British citizen in 1915 shortly
before his death. Howells was well placed as a regular contributor to Harper’s Magazine
and The Atlantic Monthly (where he served as editor from 1871 to 1881), essential
instruments of American middlebrow intellectual life in the late nineteenth and early
 A NEW REALISM 177

twentieth centuries. Howells’s pronouncements varied from bold calls for a drama that
reproduces life to more gradualist statements, accepting that the shift from romanticism
to realism would take time and require a period of works showing a mixture of styles.
In 1891, Howells wrote in his editor’s column in Harper’s: “The realist cannot all at once
forget the romanticist. Perhaps not till the next generation shall we have the very realist;
which puzzles the groundlings, romantically expectant of miracles that shall clear away
all trace of romanticism in an instant” (Howells 1891, 478).
The plays authored by Howells are a surprise to those acquainted with the writer
through his best-known novels, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New
Fortunes (1890). These novels, notable for their seriousness of tone and the complex
working out of moral choices in the minds of characters, show little resemblance to the
short comic plays, usually subtitled as farce by their author, that typify Howells’s dra-
matic output. These short plays—staged and published between 1877 and 1911—are
satiric, Twain-esque looks at contemporary middle-class or in some cases upper-class
manners and ideas. Howells in fact collaborated on a full-length comic play with Twain.
Originally titled Colonel Sellers as a Scientist in 1883, the material was finally staged as
The American Claimant; or, Mulberry Sellers Ten Years Later in 1887 (Murphy 1987, 53).
Howells, a prodigiously hardworking professional writer with a strong desire to influ-
ence his society, was attracted to the short play form because he could make his points
quickly and without need of psychological explanation. Many of the plays feature the
recurring characters of the Roberts and Campbell families, who get into a decades-long
series of scrapes involving confusions of identity and deceptions to cover social gaffes.
Brenda Murphy puts forward a fascinating theory proposing that Mr. Roberts, the
starry-eyed innocent incapable of successful deception, is Howells’s unconscious depic-
tion of himself, while Mr. Campbell, the trickster whose practical jokes overturn a smug
society’s idea of its own morality, represents Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens (74–75).
These plays are entertaining and still producible, if one can omit or revise the occasional
racist stereotype that arises in the characters of porters and servants. Murphy argues that
the plays contribute in a significant way to the picture of early American realism, but—
despite the ingeniousness of her reading of a number of plays as a psychodrama showing
Howells and Twain as antagonists in an American meta-drama—the plays for the most
part seem trivial in their concerns. Howells’s longer plays tend to be experiments with
the “discussion play” and not very dramatic in the usual sense. Like his stage adaptation
of The Rise of Silas Lapham (with Paul Kester in 1895), the plays feature lengthy exposi-
tory speeches and little external action and it is likely for this reason they have not been
embraced by producers or audiences.
It is no coincidence that the year was 1891 when Howells wrote his Harper’s column
about a gradual introduction of realism in American drama as it blends for a time with
romanticism. The previous year seemed to show the rejection by the American public of
what Howells and others saw as the best realistic play yet written by an American—James
Herne’s Margaret Fleming. Howells and other intellectual proponents of realism, includ-
ing Hamlin Garland, a successful novelist and frustrated playwright, and Benjamin
O. Flower, editorial founder of The Arena, a new progressive magazine of politics and
178 MARK FEARNOW

culture, had worked with Herne and his wife, the actress Katherine Corcoran Herne,
to arrange for a special staging of the play in a converted recital hall above Chickering’s
piano store in Boston, where it was performed in a brief run for an audience of Boston’s
intellectuals. The play had been rejected by the legitimate theatres of Boston, and
Garland would in the twentieth century claim this arrangement of an alternative stag-
ing as the beginning of the “Little Theatre Movement” in America (Hewitt 1982, 165).
This claim is plausible on its face, but the staging should be seen as an isolated incident,
because this avant-garde event, if it led to the Little Theatres, did so from across an inter-
ruption of twenty-five years.

James A. Herne and Margaret Fleming

James A. Herne (1839–1901) was an experienced professional actor who had begun a
playwriting partnership with the young David Belasco (1853–1931) in 1879. Their
co-written plays, along with Herne’s solo-written 1888 temperance play, Drifting
Apart, departed from the prevailing style of sensational melodrama with a clear villain
and hero, and—though unsuccessful with the public—these works brought Herne to
the attention of Howells and Garland. In a key Harper’s column in June 1890, Howells
recounted his attendance at a performance of Herne’s Drifting Apart, and he praised it
as “a play fresh in motive, pure in tone, high in purpose, and very simple and honest in
method” and he looked toward excellent work yet to come. The column was a turning
point for Howells, who had begun to despair that the American drama would turn away
from sentiment and toward “truth” anytime soon, a state of affairs he blamed on critics,
whose insistence upon neatness in plotting had “unnerved” American writers from any-
thing but “well-made” plays resolved with ready-made middle-class solutions (Edwards
1951, 432).
Howells and Garland encouraged Herne in the direction of realism, resulting in his
next play, Margaret Fleming (1890). This play shocked Boston newspaper critics and was
not successful with audiences beyond the coterie in Boston, yet its effect was enough
that Herne was called by sympathetic critics of his day “the American Ibsen.” This title is
an exaggeration. The play started no landslide of new realistic dramas, and Herne’s sub-
sequent plays, including the long-running Shore Acres (1892), eased away from realism
and back toward a more sentimental formula drama.
All known manuscripts of Margaret Fleming were destroyed by fire in 1909. Published
versions are the result of a reconstruction of the play from the memory of Katherine
Corcoran Herne, with the assistance of Hamlin Garland, in 1914. The original story-
line was modified in this re-creation toward a more conventional melodramatic form,
though these revisions may have reflected changes made by Herne himself after the
financial failure of the original play. A detailed summary of the more radical 1890 ver-
sion, published by B. O. Flower in 1899, describes the story this way: Philip Fleming
is a successful and wealthy manufacturer, living happily with his wife, Margaret, and
 A NEW REALISM 179

their baby daughter. Margaret suffers from a rare eye condition that can be affected by
emotional upset. She is warned by her doctor to avoid upsetting situations as they may
cause her to go blind. In a separate scene, the doctor confronts Philip for having fathered
the baby of a former employee. The doctor has just attended the woman, who is near
death. Meanwhile, Margaret has been asked by her child’s nurse to visit the same young
woman, who happens to be the nurse’s sister, to offer assistance. Margaret arrives to find
the woman dead, having left behind the baby and a letter, identifying Philip Fleming as
the father. Margaret is so shocked that she goes blind. The infant is crying wildly, and as
the curtain falls on the act, Margaret is baring her breast to nurse the child.
In the following acts, Margaret refuses to forgive Philip, the infant dies, and Philip
wanders off as a suicidal alcoholic. In the chaos, the Fleming baby disappears. Here is
Flower’s description of the build-up to the final scene:

The closing act occurs after a lapse of four or five years. Philip had failed in business,
and with the failure and the exposure of his immorality he, true to his nature, fled. The
home was broken up, and after a long and dangerous illness Margaret had recovered
only to find that her child had suddenly disappeared during the catastrophe. For
years she patiently searches for her child, visiting asylums and schools and homes in
many cities and towns, but all to no purpose.
The sister of the ill-fated girl had entirely dropped from view during the excitement
which followed the closing scenes of the preceding act. It later developed that she
had abducted the little child and was rearing it in the slums of Boston. By a series of
happenings, which are by no means improbable, the child is discovered by Philip,
and during an altercation with the abductor the two are arrested and brought into
court. Margaret, having come to Boston on the strength of a clew, is made aware of
the discovery of her child: and the last scene presents the blind wife and the recreant
husband face to face in the office of the magistrate. The court officer, seeing a chance
for a reconciliation, thoughtfully withdraws, saying as he retires, “When you want
me, ring the bell.” The husband, beholding his blind wife and seeing how in the once
beautiful face the untold agony of the past years has left its stamp, is overpowered by
a sense of guilt, and the old-time feeling comes over him also. (Flower 1899, 398)

As it turns out, Margaret agrees she can accept Philip only as a friend and never again
as a husband, and he agrees to this verdict. Margaret pushes Philip’s hand aside and tells
him, “Ring the bell.”
The revised version (and the only one now known to be in existence) has a far less
Dickensian second half. In it, the newborn infant does not die, the Fleming baby is
not kidnapped, and Philip encounters Margaret only nine days after the revelation.
Margaret has been offered the hope that an operation may resolve her blindness. Philip
asks her forgiveness, and she only partly refuses, telling him that she will help him to
overcome his weaknesses—curtain. The more conventional ending did not, as it hap-
pened, improve the play’s acceptance by audiences or producers.
The original version of the play, even when told as a bare plot line, does exert a raw power,
suggesting the kind of psychological horror that is conjured by Strindberg’s The Father or
Ibsen’s Ghosts, both of which have to do with the relentlessness of biology in its pressure
180 MARK FEARNOW

against the social constructions of marriage and parenthood. Herne’s plot is in some ways
a reverse image of Ibsen’s Little Eyolf (which the Norwegian would write later, in 1894), in
which the wife’s possessiveness over her husband leads to the death of their child. In the
Ibsen play, it is the husband who is morally repulsed by the wife, though he finally agrees to
remain with her so that they may together atone for the harm they have caused. Like Ibsen,
Herne’s original plot deals with serious matters and forces the audience to face things as
they really are outside the theatre (adultery, death in childbirth, the sexual double standard,
poverty, alcoholism, illness, infant mortality) and Herne avoids the expected melodramatic
gesture of wiping the horror away with the rake’s conversion and the heroine’s super-human
forgiveness. Herne’s plot does rely upon coincidence and is surely on the edge of losing
plausibility, but the piling on of coincidence in serious works can sometimes conjure a feel-
ing of the nightmare or the dark fairy tale, pushing like an unconscious fear from beneath
the surface reality of the work. Unless a manuscript of the original play is discovered, it is
not really possible adequately to evaluate the potential of this innovative play.
Six years after the first performance of Margaret Fleming, Herne made a memorable
mark in American realist theory with an essay published by his loyal supporter Flower in
Arena. The article is titled “Art for Truth’s Sake in the Drama,” and in it Herne is compar-
ing the “Art for Art’s Sake” slogan of the Aesthetic movement, gaining currency among
intellectuals, with its rival, realism. Herne writes:

“Art for Art’s Sake” seems to me to concern itself principally with delicacy of touch,
with skill. It is aesthetic. It emphasizes beauty. It aims to be attractive. It must always
be beautiful. It must contain no distasteful quality. It never offends. It is highbred,
so to speak. It holds that truth is ugly, or at least is not always beautiful. The
compensation of the artist is the joy of having produced it.
“Art for Truth’s Sake,” on the other hand, emphasizes humanity. It is not sufficient
that the subject be attractive or beautiful, or that it does not offend. It must first of all
express some large truth. That is to say, it must always be representative. Truth is not
always beautiful, but in art for truth’s sake it is indispensable.
Art for art’s sake may be likened to the exquisite decoration of some noble
building; while art for truth’s sake might be the building itself.
Art for truth’s sake is serious. Its highest purpose has ever been to perpetuate the
life of its time. . . . But in expressing a truth through art, it should be borne in mind
that selection is an important principle. If a disagreeable truth is not also essential, it
should not be used in art. . . . I hold it to be the duty of the true artist to state his truth
as subtly as may be. In other words, if he has a truth to manifest and he can present it
without giving offense and still retain its power, he should so present it; but if he must
choose between giving offense and receding from his position, he should stand by
his principle and state his truth fearlessly. . . . I stand for art for truth’s sake because it
perpetuates the everyday life of its time, because it develops the latent beauty of the
so-called commonplaces of life, because it dignifies labor and reveals the divinity of
the common man. (Herne 1897, 361–70)

This aspect of Herne’s theory is well stated but not original. Other theorists—from Émile
Zola to Howells—had made similar formulations. What is most original in Herne’s
 A NEW REALISM 181

thinking is found in the least-quoted passages in the essay, having to do with art’s con-
tribution to “race memory.” The passages are open to misinterpretation, but it is clear
from the context that Herne is writing about the “human race” rather than any ethnic-
ity. Moreover, he is not using “race memory” in the Jungian sense of a biological trans-
mission of knowledge through generations. Herne means it in the sense of “cultural
memory.” All art is good, he argues, in that it “serves its time and place and fertilizes
the art to come,” but realistic art is superior to “art for art’s sake” because art for truth’s
sake “contains a larger degree of the vital principles of fertilization.” The “race quality”
of realism is “its supreme quality, and therefore it will better serve the race and the art to
come” (369).
Herne’s theory is really quite radical, if one thinks through its implications. This
line of thinking would suggest, for example, that Menander’s Dyskolos is superior to
Aeschylus’s The Oresteia as a work of art, in that Menander’s comedy deals far more with
the mundane details of daily life in ancient Greece, while Aeschylus peoples his play
with mythological and supernatural characters. Similarly, it seems that photography
would be superior to any stage representation, so long as the photography was docu-
mentary in nature and capturing real human behavior. Of course, Herne might have
replied that the truth of a play like The Oresteia is in what it says about the inner world of
human beings and their struggle to develop a system of justice as a means of controlling
emotions and retribution. Herne died in 1901, so he did not live to see the full documen-
tary potential of cinema or to compare it with fictional works (for example, a Bergman
film) that do not document material reality but may capture inner truths about human
beings and their motivations and conflicts.
None of the American plays in this period qualify as what Harold Bloom calls in
The Western Canon a “canonical work” and none of the playwrights are “strong” in the
sense he developed in The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom is stimulating in his psychoana-
lytic conception of works of art entering into competition (not through any magic, but
through the mental activity of the writer) with those that have come before. “Strong”
works show a writer rebelling against earlier works in an original and creative manner,
while “canonical” works exhibit “strangeness,” a mode of originality that either cannot be
assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange (1973, 9–10; 1994, 3).
Bloom writes in The Western Canon, “when you read a canonical work for the first time
you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expecta-
tions” (3). Bloom sees Shakespeare as the figure against whom most strong or canonical
work is rebelling, and he sees Ibsen as one of the most canonical dramatists, either right
behind Shakespeare or a close third behind Moliere. Ibsen, says Bloom, is “consistently
weird” and his plays possess “a strangeness that refuses domestication” (355). The origi-
nal version of Margaret Fleming may have come closest to this epoch-making strange-
ness, but it is possible that its “lostness” is what provides its strength. The fragmentary is
always more attractive. It is as if one had heard the plot of Woyzeck but had never been
able to read it or see it. Like Margaret Fleming, it would sound hypnotic and strange.
It is important to understand that “weak” in this conception does not mean bad or
unimportant. To say a play is “weak” is only to say that it imitates or rebels against earlier
182 MARK FEARNOW

strong works in unoriginal or predictable ways. “Weak” plays may be very skillfully ren-
dered, socially influential, or even very popular, but they do not change the course of
the dialogue that is going on among artistic creations. I bring in Bloom’s system here
because it offers a meaningful way to analyze the best of the works of “commercial real-
ism” that played an important role in American drama between 1906 and 1914. These
plays are under the influence of Ibsen, and they succeed in applying to the American
idiom the realistic methods that Ibsen developed in plays such as A Doll’s House (1879),
Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Hedda Gabler (1890),
and The Master Builder (1892), while subtracting Ibsen’s radical strangeness.

Clyde Fitch and The City

Clyde Fitch (1865–1909) was an ambitious and energetic professional writer who
authored more than sixty plays in his short lifetime, and he directed most of them in a
highly paid arrangement with the Theatrical Syndicate. His plays are meticulously plot-
ted, with dialogue scenes building to surprising coups de théâtre and jaw-dropping cur-
tain lines. In the 1900–1901 season, Fitch had ten different plays onstage in New York
theatres and on the road (Wilmeth 1998, 9). Fitch wrote and developed adaptations in
a variety of styles, including melodrama, historical costume drama, comedy of man-
ners, and farce, but his most memorable work is his last play, a violent and (in its day)
shocking drama of urban life called The City, staged after Fitch’s death in 1909. This play
is informed by melodrama, and—after inflicting much suffering on his characters—
Fitch provides the happy ending that was required by the commercial theatre of which
he was an essential component. But Fitch gives the play the subtitle “A Modern Play of
American Life in Three Acts,” and so he announces an unusual seriousness of purpose,
which to a large degree he fulfills.
The play begins very much as a family comedy. The Rand family is an upper-middle-class
household, with Mr. Rand the impeccably trustworthy owner of not one but two banks
in the comically named “Middleburg.” The state is left unnamed, leaving it to stand for
any town within the orbit of New  York City, where all three offspring want to move.
(“Middleburg” may be based upon Greenwich, Connecticut, where Fitch owned a coun-
try home.) Mr. Rand is resistant, insisting that the city “turns ambition into selfish greed”
and drives people to ruin in their competition to have more than the next person. The
argument grows heated and Mrs. Rand and her daughter withdraw as Rand and his
twenty-seven-year-old son, George, confront Rand’s refusal to take a corporate position
he has been offered in the city. As the argument reaches a peak, in walks Hannock, a young
man who has been blackmailing Rand, who now feels faint. George goes for whiskey and
Hannock shows a pistol and threatens to kill himself if Rand does not write a check. He
leaves with check in hand, and Rand confesses to George that Hannock is his illegitimate
son. Rand feels suddenly worse, leaves the room, and dies of a heart attack. In a character-
istic flourish, Fitch ends the act with George alone on stage (502):
 A NEW REALISM 183

george: (Stands where [his sister] left him—alone—his head bowed. He straightens
up and lifts his head; and his face flashes with the uncontrolled impulses of youth and
ambition. With a voice of suppressed excitement, full of emotion, and with a trembling
ring of triumph, he says:) The CITY . . .!
Curtain.

Things do not go well in the city. In the ensuing acts, George hopes to be nominated
for governor but is just keeping the lid on corrupt business dealings; the elder daugh-
ter is having an affair and planning to divorce her husband; and the younger daughter
(Cecily) is sexually pursued by the blackmailer, Hannock, who has followed the family
to New York. Here in this city that George saw as the symbol of the energy and poten-
tial of the new century, George’s secretary—Hannock—shoots up with drugs right in
the office and Cecily confesses to George that she and Hannock were secretly married
that morning. Astonished, George cannot tell his sister why this marriage is impossible.
Hannock returns and George reveals to him that he has married his half-sister. Cecily
comes in and as George is about to tell her the truth, Hannock shoots her, killing her.
George stops Hannock from killing himself, even though Hannock begs for the gun
and threatens to tell the police every bit of scandal he knows about the family, ruin-
ing George’s hopes for the future. George is tempted to give Hannock the gun but does
not, finally hurling it through the glass window. Vowing that he must do the right thing,
George has Hannock taken off by the police.
In the final act, George’s fiancée’s brother urges him to burn incriminating papers,
but he refuses. In a long, passionate speech, George declares that it is not the city that
has done this to the family, that cities simply offer so much potential that they bring out
what you really are. His fiancée, Eleanor, tells George that she will stay with him no mat-
ter what, because in facing his failings honestly he has become the man she thought he
was yesterday. The play ends conventionally:

george: (Looking away) Now, I know what those people mean who say a man gets
all the Hell that’s coming to him in this world,—(Looking at her)
—and all the Heaven, too!
finis. (630)

The play—with its substrate of melodrama, its brandishing of pistols, the blackmail-
ing, the corrupt businessmen and secret paternity—is superficially similar to plays by
Ibsen, such as The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler. But Ibsen used those materials in his
“weird” way, and hell has taken over at the end of those plays, not insight and com-
munion. Fitch uses the techniques of realism and constructs with them a vehicle for
exposing human corruption. He seems to defeat his own purpose with the safe end-
ing, making the play into what Brecht called “culinary theatre,” so that his audience
would consume this story breathlessly, sigh at the ending, and then “go have a bite.”
Unfortunately, it was Fitch’s last play. He died as the result of a delayed operation for
appendicitis.
184 MARK FEARNOW

Edward Sheldon and Salvation Nell

Edward Sheldon’s Salvation Nell (1908) is an unavoidable landmark in early American

realistic drama. Sheldon (1886–1946), who was only twenty-two when he wrote the
play, was an early student of George Pierce Baker in his English 47 course in play-
writing, begun at Harvard in 1906. Baker would have an unprecedented influence on
American drama, well beyond that of any other academic. In addition to Sheldon, his
students would include George Abbott, Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard,
and—most famously—Eugene O’Neill. Baker’s Dramatic Technique (1919) summarizes
the content of his teaching, an approach that is essentially Aristotelian, with emphasis
on placing action foremost, creating protagonists who are basically good but make a
mistake, and the development of dialogue suitable for characters based on their social
circumstances. But Baker does not insist upon detailed stage directions, relying more
traditionally on setting as a simple means to provide information. Sheldon’s elaborate
stage directions, including a description of a whole two-page pantomimic scene that
occurs before the first line of dialogue is spoken, owes more to the tradition of “local
color” that built up in nineteenth-century melodrama and was reaching a peak in the
early twentieth century in the scenic naturalism of the playwright-producer David
Belasco. Some critics held that Salvation Nell set a new standard for realism in stag-
ing. “No such artistically realized pictures of actual life,” wrote John Corbin, “have ever
been presented on the American stage” (1909, 15). Sheldon showed a talent for writing
silent scenes, with the action carried entirely upon environment and movement; but
again this was not new, having appeared earlier in plays such as Herne’s Shore Acres
(1892), with Herne’s well-known set-piece as the lovable Uncle Nat, slowly getting the
house ready for the night and then ascending the stairs as the cuckoo clock sounds
and the curtain falls. What made Sheldon’s play seem new was the combination of the
naturalistic slum settings and the serious story about a good woman who saves herself
and then helps others in her harsh world. Nell is not just formed by her environment or
acting in front of it, she is opposed to it. The settings, representing a poverty-stricken
Hell’s Kitchen bar and tenements, are in many ways Nell’s antagonists. In this contest,
Nell wins. She saves herself, her child, her boyfriend, Jim, and countless others through
her urban missionary work.
Although the play is unusually long—three long acts running more than three hours
in performance—and includes fifty-four characters, plus supernumeraries and chil-
dren, the story is very simple. Long stretches of the play, often many pages in length, do
not move the plot forward but instead are devoted to building up details of the urban
environment and its people. If reduced to its plotline and necessary exposition, the play
could be nearly half its published length.
Nell is a scrubwoman in a run-down Hell’s Kitchen bar populated by alcoholics and
prostitutes. Her boyfriend, Jim, beats a man to death, causing Nell to lose her job. She is
about to take an offer to enter a life of prostitution but is offered a way out by Maggie, a
Salvation Army volunteer. Eight years pass before Act 2. Nell is raising her son alone and
 A NEW REALISM 185

has become Captain Sanders in the Salvation Army. Jim returns with plans for making
money through crime. Nell tries to prevent him, but Jim knocks her unconscious, and
thinks her dead when he flees. A week later, Jim returns, having not taken part in the
crime. Moved by Nell’s goodness, he asks her to help him change. They join hands as the
Salvationists sing the hymn, “Abide with Me.”
The play is surely sentimental, but it represents a step toward a less formulaic and
melodramatic American drama. The emphasis on environment would be an influence
on the young O’Neill, whose early realistic play Anna Christie (1921) features a first act
set in a very similar dive and a protagonist who undergoes a similar transformation.
Salvation Nell propelled its young author to national celebrity. He followed this play with
a work concerning a mixed-race secret in the South (The Nigger, 1909) and The Boss
(1911), about a corrupt political boss who uses blackmail to marry the daughter of his
victim. As can be seen from these bare descriptions, both plays are built on ideas already
explored in nineteenth-century melodrama, but Sheldon’s attention to detail in loca-
tion, clothing, daily life, and the greater psychological plausibility render these familiar
dramatic motifs surprisingly fresh.
Sheldon’s career was cut short by illness. He was stricken with a severe attack of rheu-
matoid arthritis in 1915, leaving him bedridden and eventually blind. His artistic output
was severely reduced due to these disabilities and his battle with severe chronic pain.
Writing little himself after 1915, Sheldon became a kind of saint figure to theatrical and
literary folk, who made pilgrimages to his bedside, seeking advice and confessing secrets
(Barnes 1956).

Rachel Crothers

Rachel Crothers (1878–1958) was a completely different kind of playwright. Her early
plays, though written at the same time as those by Fitch and Sheldon, seem much more
modern and viable as stage productions in the twenty-first century. Like Ibsen, Crothers
builds a plausible dramatic situation that demands a moral choice by the protagonist,
but the choices of her protagonists—mostly middle-class young women—are not the
life-and-death choices of Ibsen’s world; rather, her characters make choices that are
life-changing rather than life-saving or life-ending. Crothers does not have the “strange-
ness” or sense of the uncanny that may identify the canonical writer. There are no
insanely danced tarantellas, pistol worship, psychic phenomena, or troll-like rat-wives
luring children to the millstream. Crothers’s plays of this period are highly controlled,
calmly talked through, and supremely rational. Critics have sometimes called them
“discussion plays,” but this seems misleading. There is an abundance of intelligent dis-
cussion in her work. For example, in He and She (1912), the protagonist named Ann
Herford and her friend, Ruth Creel, have a conversation in the first act that sets up the
major question of the play: what choices must a modern woman make if she is to pur-
sue a career, and marriage, and children? Keep in mind that Ruth is presented as a very
186 MARK FEARNOW

sympathetic character, and the playwright is well aware that the things she is saying to
another woman with no men present will be shocking to many people in the audience.

ruth: But I don’t want children.

ann: Oh, Ruth—that’s an awful thing to say.
ruth: Why is it? I  wouldn’t be a good mother. I  think children are wonderful,
beautiful, adorable things. I think they’re the most important things in the world—
but I’m not the Mother type. My work has taken it out of me.
ann: But I’m a mother, and I work. It’s quite possible.
ruth: Oh, I don’t know, even in your case something might happen to interfere
with your work.
ann: Nothing! Nothing ever can.
ruth: It’s children—children—that hold a woman back. I don’t care how strong,
how clever, how great a gift she may have, if she brings children into the world
there may come a time when—
ann: Nonsense—don’t be old-fashioned. Be the woman of the future. Make it
possible—make it right. (Crothers 1919, 940)

As it turns out, Ann does in the end make a choice to put her work as an artist on hold
because she is the only one in a position to save her teenaged daughter from a premature
and unwise marriage. What is unusual is how Crothers gives Ruth’s position a full and
fair hearing. Ultimately, Ruth is forced to choose between marriage and her career (as
a magazine editor) and she chooses the career, without judgment from the playwright.
Crothers in some ways resembles Shaw in her creation of dialectic and her willingness
not to force upon the audience one choice as the only acceptable one.
The discussions among her characters are integral to the action. Crothers’s plays tend
to be relatively brief, set in simple environments of city apartments or rooms of mod-
est houses—the focus is on characters and what they must choose. The central problem
of the play tends to come down to a thorough intellectual and verbal analysis among
key characters. The female protagonist is confidently in charge of the discourse, though
the stakes for her may be very high. The final discussion is the crisis of the play and
leads directly to its resolution. In other words, action remains foremost in her work, and
thought comes second.
In A Man’s World (1909), a young woman writer somewhat confusingly named Frank
Ware is living a contented life in her large house, shared with other artists and progres-
sives. She has raised a boy whose mother died in the house years before. As the plot
develops, Frank learns that her fiancé, Gaskell, is the boy’s father and that he abandoned
the mother, taking no responsibility. Gaskell insists that she should go ahead and marry
him, thus making him the boy’s legitimate father. In Gaskell’s mind, this act will fix
everything. Frank questions him (112–13):

frank: Do you believe it wasn’t wrong—just because you are a man?

gaskell: Oh—
frank: Do you believe that?
 A NEW REALISM 187

gaskell: (After a pause.) Yes.

frank: Oh!
gaskell: Good heavens, Frank, I  thought you were so much bigger than the
average woman. All women kick against this and what good does it do? Why,
since the beginning of time one thing has been accepted for a man and another for
a woman. Why on earth do you beat your head against a stone wall? Why do you
try to put your ideals up against the facts?
frank: I’m not talking about my ideals now, nor the accepted thing. I’m talking
about you, that girl, this child. You think I must excuse what you did—that it
really wasn’t wrong at all, just because you are a man. (110)

Despite Gaskell’s arguments from “nature” and from custom, Frank anguishes at the loss
of her planned marriage; but she is confident she is right to let him go if he will not admit
he harmed this young woman, and Frank stands her ground (113):

gaskell: No! Don’t try to hold me to account by a standard that doesn’t exist.
Don’t measure me by your theories. If you love me you’ll stand on that and forget
everything else.
frank: I can’t I can’t.
grank: I’m not a man to beg, Frank. Do you want me to go? Is that it? Is this
the end?
frank: There’s nothing else.
gaskell: Do you mean that?
frank: There’s nothing else. It is the end. (He goes out closing the door.)

And the curtain falls.

Frank Ware stands in the tradition of Margaret Fleming—the rare female character
in this era of American drama who does not agree to forgive and forget what a man has
done and therefore grant him some kind of rebirth. She is her own person with her own
moral views, and she refuses to toss them away to satisfy convention. She is the New
Woman, and Crothers’s play is among the first to usher in a new realism.

Works Cited
Baker, George Pierce. 1919. Dramatic Technique. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Barnes, Eric Wollencott. 1956. The Man Who Lived Twice: The Biography of Edward Sheldon.
New York: Scribner’s.
Barzun, Jacques. 2000. From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present. New York: HarperCollins.
Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bloom, Harold. 1994. The Western Canon:  The Books and Schools of the Ages.
New York: Harcourt Brace.
Corbin, John.1909. The Drama of the Slums. The Saturday Evening Post, March 20: 15.
Crothers, Rachel. 1915. A Man’s World. Boston: Richard E. Badger.
———. 1919. He and She. [Orig. performed 1912.] Rpt. in Arthur Hobson Quinn, Representative
American Plays. New York: The Century Company, 928–62.
188 MARK FEARNOW

Edwards, Herbert. 1951. Howells and Herne. American Literature 22: 432–41.

Fitch, Clyde. 1915. The City in Plays by Clyde Fitch, 4. Edited by Montrose Moses and Virginia
Gerson. [Orig. published 1909.] Boston: Little Brown, 445–630.
Flower, Benjamin O. 1899. Mr. Herne’s Contribution to Dramatic Literature. The Coming Age
4: 393–404.
Franc, Miriam Alice. 1918. Ibsen in England. Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.
Herne, James A. 1897. Art for Truth’s Sake in the Drama. Arena 17: 361–70.
Hewitt, Barnard. 1982. Margaret Fleming in Chickering Hall:  The First Little Theatre in
America? Theatre Journal, 34: 165–71.
Howells, William Dean. 1891. Editor’s Study. Harper’s New Monthly 83: 478.
Ibsen, Henrik. 1890. Ibsen’s Prose Dramas, translated by William Archer. New York: Scribner.
Murphy, Brenda. 1987. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilmeth, Don B. 1998. Staging the Nation:  Plays from the American Theater 1787–1909.
Boston: Bedford.
 CHAPTER 12

A M E R IC A N M U SIC A L T H E AT R E ,
1870 –1945

T HOM A S S . H I S C HA K

What constitutes a “golden age”? Did the Athenians sitting under the hot sun in the
Theatre of Dionysus realize they were living in a golden age as they watched Antigone?
Did the Londoners standing in the muddy pit of the Globe Theatre laughing at Twelfth
Night know there was something special going on? Maybe the Italian peasants in a
small backwater village in the sixteenth century thought watching commedia dell’arte
actors slapping each other with sticks was a high point of theatregoing. Or what about
the Philadelphians in the nineteenth century weeping over East Lynne? Perhaps they
thought their theatre experience was of the highest caliber. All of these spectators simply
enjoyed what the theatre offered; it was theatre historians who later labeled the eras and
decided which ages were indeed golden. Perhaps it is time to reconsider these labels and
look at different criteria before accepting them so easily. Theatre historians have often
used the surviving scripts as their primary criteria. Because the handful of Greek plays
we have are so good, one assumes that the hundreds of scripts we don’t have were simi-
larly accomplished. Historians call it inference; it could be just wishful thinking. There
are hundreds of American plays from the nineteenth century. Few of them are outstand-
ing and even fewer are ever produced today. Yet more Americans saw more theatre in
the second half of the 1800s than ever before or since. Isn’t that a kind of golden age?
If one considers popularity when assessing a past era, the history of the American
musical becomes very intriguing. After all, what is more populist than a musical?
Because we no longer produce Broadway musicals that originated between 1900 to 1920,
that period is considered a cultural vacuum. Because we are reviving 1950s musicals all
the time, that decade is sometimes crowned as a golden age. In reality, fewer people saw
Broadway musicals in the 1950s than in the 1990s. Does that mean the era of Beauty
and the Beast (1994) and Smokey Joe’s Café (1995) is more golden than the decade of The
King and I (1951) and Damn Yankees (1955)? Few would argue in favor of such a conclu-
sion, yet those two 1990s shows ran three or four times longer than the 1950s examples.
190 THOMAS S. HISCHAK

Similarly, a lot of people saw Broadway musicals between 1900 and 1920 and none of
them complained because there was no Show Boat (1927) yet.
The American musical theatre between the years 1870 and 1945 is the focus of our
attention here. That period begins soon after the new genre is invented and ends right
after Rodgers and Hammerstein revolutionized the art form with Oklahoma! (1943). It
is a period of tremendous change and development, much more so than the sixty-some
years that followed it. And somewhere in there is, perhaps, a golden age. Looking at both
the popularity of musicals and the quality of the works produced, it may be possible to
find a happy medium where the two criteria are met. It might also be possible to view the
current musical theatre in a different light. After all, golden or not, the theatre we have
today is all that we have. It will be up to future historians to label what kind of age it is.

American Spectacle and Laughs versus

European Music and Wit

The freak-accident extravaganza The Black Crook (1866) is generally considered the
first American musical, although Broadway was hardly lacking in musical entertain-
ment before that date. European ballad operas, foreign operettas and opéra bouffes, silly
musical “burlesques” of Shakespeare and other classic works, and minstrel shows pro-
vided each season with two dozen or so musical offerings. The Black Crook, on the other
hand, was uniquely American with its emphasis on chorus girls, spectacle, dancing, and
scenic effects rather than music. The plot may have been Faustian but the presentation,
complete with those infamous chorines in pink tights, was American show business at
its slickest. The Black Crook was not a planned project but a haphazard one in which
ballet dancers were thrown into a fantasy plot and songs were added and deleted as the
performers changed. Like many American products, it was a melting pot overflowing
with various ingredients, both foreign and homegrown. Audiences were fascinated by
the theatrical hodgepodge and the American musical was born. Two years after The
Black Crook an even bigger hit opened: Humpty Dumpty. Billed as a “Spectacular Ballet
Pantomime” and starring the comic G. L. Fox as the title character, it was a musical
adventure that swept a group of children (played by adults) around the globe to various
exotic locations. The show ran longer than The Black Crook, returned to New York three
times in the 1870s, and spawned five sequels. Only two years old, the American musi-
cal had its first Phantom of the Opera (1988). The 1869–70 season saw thirty-nine musi-
cals open on Broadway and a handful of them resembled The Black Crook and Humpty
Dumpty but the majority were still European works and small-scale burlesques. For a
truly American musical, audiences had Fritz, Our Cousin German (1870), which was
more a play with songs but one of the numbers was “(Emmet’s) Lullaby,” which, for the
next one hundred years, was used to help children go to sleep. Joseph K. Emmet played
the funny immigrant Fritz and wrote the lullaby and, while the show did not have a long
 AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE, 1870–1945 191

original run, it returned to Broadway several times and led to two sequels. It was the first
of the many shows about immigrants and ethnic groups that would later culminate in
the rowdy musicals by Harrigan and Hart.
A popular imitation of Humpty Dumpty that demonstrated how much an audience
could embrace spectacle over content was Evangeline; or, The Belle of Acadia (1874).
Little more than a mere burlesque of Longfellow’s poem, the “American Opéra-Bouffe
Extravaganza” strung a series of episodes together with the thinnest of plots and a
score worthy of attention. One of the first musicals in which all the songs were writ-
ten by the same team (the composer Edward E. Rice and the lyricist-librettist J. Cheever
Goodwin), Evangeline boasted no song hits but it was clear the musical numbers were
written with the show in mind. This is not to suggest that the songs were at all integrated
into the action but they served the production well. Evangeline was popular, returning
to New York eight times during the rest of the century. The same statistics can be used
for the extravaganza Around the World in Eighty Days (1875). The Jules Verne novel was
again just a premise to loosely hold together a series of scenes and songs, the musical
numbers so insignificant that they were not even listed in the program. Audiences had
not yet associated good music with American musicals, so the Verne musical ran and
returned over and over again and no one complained about its musical shortcomings. It
seemed that one went to European works by Offenbach and his colleagues for the music
and that one went to homegrown musicals for the spectacle and laughs. Historians read
today about how a musical number performed by Evangeline and her dancing cow
stopped the show every night and they scoff, thinking how low-brow and unsophisti-
cated those early musical extravaganzas must have been. In reality, they were very pol-
ished products and very savvy to boot. Evangeline and similar shows offered the public
something they had never seen before: large-scale spectacle filled with attractive per-
formers and dancing musical numbers. Those early shows were wildly popular and one
didn’t have to spend a week’s wages to get in. Large theatres with widely priced tickets
made Broadway affordable for many. These musicals depended on more than the elite to
run as long as they did.
Populist musical entertainment reached some sort of peak with the Harrigan and
Hart musicals, which were deliciously low-brow and did not rely on spectacle. Edward
Harrigan and Tony Hart wrote, produced, and performed in a series of Mulligan Guard
shows that opened up Broadway for working-class patrons. The musicals had fun with
the ethnic diversity to be found in New York by the late nineteenth century. The two
men had developed their idea of mixing Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, and African
American characters together in a series of vaudeville sketches. With The Mulligan
Guards’ Picnic (1878) they took Broadway by storm. This was not a burlesque of liter-
ary works but a rough-house farce about the rivalry between the different groups. Gone
were the lavish sets, fantastic locales, and lines of chorines. The Mulligan Guard musicals
were all about action and laughs. Ironically, Harrigan and Hart also produced the first
noteworthy songs to come out of Broadway. David Braham was the clever composer for
the series and wrote such songs as “Maggie Murphy’s Home” and “The Babies in Our
Block” that were sandwiched in between all the farce. There were eight Mulligan Guard
192 THOMAS S. HISCHAK

musicals plus a few Harrigan and Hart shows that utilized some of the same characters
from the series. This kind of entertainment waned on Broadway as vaudeville developed
and the cheaper variety houses became the working man’s favorite theatre activity. But
in their heyday, the Harrigan and Hart shows triumphed as populist musical theatre.
Broadway has never seen its like again. The more recent musical farces such as A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) and The Producers (2001) are pretty
tame stuff in comparison.
In 1879 the best of the series, The Mulligan Guards’ Ball, opened and was a hit. It was a
watershed year for the Broadway musical as low-brow met stiff-upper-lip, both surviv-
ing the collision. There had long been a discrepancy between the European operettas
and the American song-and-dance shows and both had found their audiences. But in
1879 H.M.S. Pinafore arrived in New York for the first time and breathed new life into
the foreign musical. The Gilbert and Sullivan comic operettas did not rely on spectacle,
dancing, or familiar comics as the American shows had required, yet they overcame the
differences to become incredibly popular in the States. Audiences who found Offenbach
too European for their tastes had little trouble embracing Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance
(1879), The Mikado (1885), and The Gondoliers (1890). While the Mulligan Guards tore
down the house, the Gilbert and Sullivan musicals used satire (that most difficult of
genres) and vibrant scores to win over their American audiences. These shows would be
revived more frequently than all The Black Crooks and Humpty Dumptys put together;
and they would continue to return on a regular basis for the next ninety years. In fact,
it is safe to say that the only nineteenth-century stage musicals to be staged in the States
today with any regularity are the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operettas.
The fact that American musicals did not immediately try to copy the Gilbert and
Sullivan model is not too surprising. First of all, without copyright enforcement, it was
much easier to pirate the English shows themselves rather than come up with copies.
The year 1879 saw fifteen different productions of Pinafore in New York City, only one of
which was sanctioned by the authors. Second, there was still enough anti-British senti-
ment left in America that some producers opted to defy or ignore the British invasion
and continue to present homegrown shows even if they were not new. In 1879 New York
saw the return of Evangeline, The Black Crook, and Fritz, as well as other revivals of past
favorites. Third, and most sobering, there were no composers or lyricists in the States
who could even begin to match Gilbert and Sullivan’s talents. It would take a few years
before American songwriters took on the comic operetta at all. Instead American pro-
ducers continued to offer variations of the old extravaganza model.
Before leaving 1879 behind, there is one other American musical that opened that
year that ought not be ignored (though it has been for over a hundred years). It was
called The Brook; or, A Jolly Day at the Picnic and it was probably the first musical to have
no plot. A group of stage performers go on a picnic together and entertain each other
with songs, dance steps, and comic sketches. Its limited run of forty-two performances
did not set New York on fire but The Brook did introduce the musical theatre revue, a
genre that would proliferate during the first half of the next century. The Passing Show
(1894) was the first musical revue to become a hit, a grandiose production with over a
 AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE, 1870–1945 193

hundred performers onstage and running for more than one hundred performances,
but one must acknowledge the contribution of the modest and forgotten The Brook.
To illustrate how little the American musical had advanced in twenty years, one must
consider Adonis (1884). This “Burlesque Nightmare,” about a handsome statue who
comes to life and is pursued by so many women that he asks to be turned back to stone,
ran an astonishing 603 performances. The script was a series of sketchlike episodes and
the score was a collection of songs from various sources, exactly as The Black Crook had
been. Henry E. Dixey played Adonis and the role made him a star so he continued to
play it over the next twenty years as the musical returned to New York four times and
toured extensively. If the girls in tights had helped The Black Crook run so long, Dixey in
his flattering tights certainly helped Adonis. It seemed the American musical was stuck,
paralyzed by a leg fetish. This does not make for a golden age of any type.

Enter American Operetta, Musical

Comedy, and the Revue

The year 1891 was one of encouraging prospects. It saw the first successful American
comic operetta, the first engaging American romantic operetta, and the first true musi-
cal comedy as we know it today. The fact than none of these works are still produced
today does not diminish their importance or the impact they made on audiences at the
time. The comic operetta was Wang, a show that recalls The Mikado in its satiric sensi-
bility. The great comic DeWolf Hopper played Wang, the corrupt Regent of Siam who
wants to be king even though the country is financially bankrupt. In a way he succeeds
by marrying a French widow who is so wealthy she can bankroll the entire nation. This
was more than a foreshadowing of The Merry Widow (1907) or The King and I, two later
shows that one cannot help but think of when dealing with Wang. The libretto and lyrics
by J. Cheever Goodwin and the music by Wolson Morse were no threat to Gilbert and
Sullivan but the silly patter songs, the rhapsodic duets, and the sly sense of satire were
definitely in the D’Oyly Carte mold. Two of the songs were so popular that legend has it
when the real King of Siam visited the States forty years after Wang closed, he requested
to hear the two numbers performed. By that time Broadway finally had a first-class
comic operetta in the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing (1931). Unfortunately there have been
too few since.
The 1891 romantic operetta of note was Robin Hood, the most-produced American
operetta of the nineteenth century. This is an impressive statistic until one realizes that
it is difficult to think of any other American operettas of the 1800s. (Victor Herbert’s
biggest hits were in the twentieth century.) The composer of Robin Hood was Reginald
De Koven, far from a world-class talent but a prolific artist who patterned his works on
the best European models. Robin Hood moved from heroics to farce to romance with-
out much difficulty and soon everyone was singing the drinking song “Brown October
194 THOMAS S. HISCHAK

Ale” and getting married to “Oh, Promise Me.” The show returned to New York a dozen
times, toured endlessly, and was still holding the boards (on occasion) up until World
War II. Diehard operetta companies still give Robin Hood an airing every once in a while
and it still has its moments, though there is a lot of fodder in between. Also, the coming
of Herbert, Rudolf Friml, and Sigmund Romberg in the twentieth century left De Koven
back in the old century. All the same, Robin Hood was an important step as it proved
there could be such a thing as a popular American romantic operetta.
The influential musical comedy of 1891 was A Trip to Chinatown, a delightful lark
about some young people out on the town and two older adventurers who get caught up
in all the shenanigans. If Wang brings The King and I to mind, A Trip to Chinatown does
the same for Hello, Dolly! (1964). All the characters end up at a ritzy restaurant trying to
avoid each other, a wallet is lost, and chaos ensues. Charles H. Hoyt wrote the carefree
libretto and catchy lyrics while Percy Gaunt penned the tuneful music. The standout
hits were “The Bowery” and “Reuben and Cynthia.” On tour, Charles K. Harris’s “After
the Ball” was interpolated into the show; it became the biggest-selling song yet to come
from an American Broadway musical. A Trip to Chinatown was not an operetta nor was
it an extravaganza. Instead, it depended on its nimble book, enjoyable songs, and rapid,
efficient staging. In other words, it was a true musical comedy. There may not be many
shows around today that seem directly influenced by Wang and Robin Hood but we cer-
tainly have the descendants of A Trip to Chinatown with us. Make a few alterations to the
plot and update the music and you get something like Hairspray (2002).
This impressive trio of 1891 musicals might lead one to expect the advent of a golden
age but that didn’t happen. The operettas got better, as with John Philip Sousa’s El
Capitan (1896) and the early Herbert works, but musical comedy floundered. The musi-
cal hit of 1903 was The Wizard of Oz, a throwback to the extravaganza show bolstered
by beloved comics, in this case Fred Stone and David Montgomery. George M. Cohan
arrived on Broadway the next year and in shows such as Little Johnny Jones (1904) and
Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway (1906) he refuted European operettas and offered
slam-bang musical melodramas. Sentiment and patriotism replaced comedy in most
cases but the songs were jubilant and Cohan gave Broadway a truly American sound.
Producing the Cohan librettos today is problematic but the songs still sparkle. If anyone
seemed likely to usher in a golden age it was Cohan. But he was not an innovative or
experimental artist and he pretty much repeated the same formula in all of his shows for
a period of thirty years. Cohan opened the door but then just stood there, forcing later
artists to push him aside in order to move forward. The fact that these more adventurous
songwriters and playwrights chose the operetta over the Cohan kind of musical must
have made the shoving aside more painful to the traditional song-and-dance man.
Victor Herbert began writing for Broadway with Prince Ananias (1894) and had
his first hit with The Fortune Teller (1898). His Babes in Toyland (1903) was closer
to the old extravaganzas like Humpty Dumpty than operetta, but in 1905 he and the
librettist-lyricist Henry Blossom presented Mlle. Modiste, a rich blending of operetta
and charming comedy. The plot was a sometimes convoluted tale about a Paris hat shop
salesgirl who has a Cinderella complex: a gushing yearning to go on the stage. The story
 AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE, 1870–1945 195

was far from a nail-biter but the dialogue was sprightly, the characters engaging, and
it moved along pleasantly with songs that actually supported the characters and the
actions. Mlle. Modiste was a success but it didn’t seem to have the impact it deserved.
Herbert and other operetta composers returned to more melodramatic romances and
the light touch of Mlle. Modiste did not resurface until the 1920s. The exception was The
Red Mill (1906), a Herbert work that barely qualifies as an operetta. With the clowns
Stone and Montgomery from The Wizard of Oz playing American con men in Europe
getting tangled with the law and a local romantic triangle, the show was closer in spirit
to A Trip to Chinatown than Herbert’s usual operetta fare. Only when the lovers started
trilling did one recognize Herbert’s sound. Yet Herbert’s musical comedy music was
as accomplished as his operetta music, and The Red Mill was filled with tuneful hits.
Blossom again provided the libretto and lyrics and he did such a good job that it is one
of the few musicals from the early 1900s that can be successfully revived today. When it
comes to pure operetta, the most durable examples from these years came from Europe,
most memorably The Merry Widow (1907) and The Chocolate Soldier (1909).
Despite the efforts of Cohan, Mlle. Modiste, and The Red Mill, romantic operettas
dominated the Broadway musical stage in the 1910s. Herbert offered such favorites as
Naughty Marietta (1910) and Sweethearts (1913), Rudolf Friml entered the game with The
Firefly (1912), and Sigmund Romberg provided The Blue Paradise (1915). None of these
shows would ever be mistaken for a musical comedy. For that kind of entertainment one
had to turn to the notable exceptions of the decades, shows like Madame Sherry (1910),
The Pink Lady (1911), The Girl from Utah (1914), Chin-Chin (1914), and the Princess musi-
cals. The last was a short-lived series of small musicals that was remarkably farsighted.
Jerome Kern composed most of them, with Guy Bolton writing the librettos and P. G.
Wodehouse the lyrics. Because they played at the 299-seat Princess Theatre, the cast,
the scenery, and the pit orchestra were limited in size. Yet these “midget musicals” were
unlimited in everything that was important. The stories were contemporary and sassy,
the music bright and catchy, and the lyrics clever and knowing. Very Good Eddie (1915),
Oh, Boy! (1917), and Oh, Lady! Lady (1918) were the gems of the series, as was Leave It
to Jane (1917), which was put together by Kern, Bolton, and Wodehouse but not pre-
sented at the Princess. How welcome these vibrant little shows must have seemed next
to the fanciful operettas and elaborate musical revues in the bigger houses. No won-
der a whole generation of young songwriters such as Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Richard
Rodgers, and the Gershwins were excited and inspired by the Princess shows. This was
the kind of musical theatre they wanted to write and a decade later they did so. Today the
Princess musicals still impress. Revivals are difficult (though a 1975 production of Very
Good Eddie survived on Broadway for 304 performances) because nothing dates quicker
than contemporary slang and comedy of manners. But the songs remain scintillating
and Wodehouse’s lyrics were perhaps the finest the American musical theatre had heard
up to that point. The Princess series lasted for only four years, hardly long enough to jus-
tify a golden age, but their impact was far-reaching. The real influence the series had was
not seen until the 1920s.
196 THOMAS S. HISCHAK

Before leaving the first two decades of the twentieth century, it is necessary to note
the popularity of a genre long gone in today’s theatre: the spectacular Broadway musi-
cal revue. If there was a golden age for such revues, it was 1907 to 1919. Florenz Ziegfeld
largely invented the genre with Follies of 1907, a rooftop attraction that went over so
well he moved the show into a large theatre; filled the stage with scenery, costumes,
and girls; and offered a new edition every year for the next twenty seasons. How easily
some critics dismiss these grand showpieces as inferior theatre, the Las Vegas enter-
tainment of its day. Yet one cannot ignore the superior songwriters who sometimes
scored the Follies and the stage stars who shone in the series. Ziegfeld himself was not
overly interested in songs but he did hire Irving Berlin and other top talents to score
his revues. In 1912 the Shuberts revived The Passing Show title from 1894 and com-
peted with the Follies with their own series. Later George White offered his Scandals
(emphasizing songs and dance) and Earl Carroll his Vanities (with the focus on semi-
nude chorines). There was no such thing as an overdose of musical revues as far as
audiences were concerned. Here was The Black Crook without the ridiculous story,
Humpty Dumpty for adults, and Evangeline with dozens of girls instead of a cow. Were
the big-time revues a step forward for the American musical? Wouldn’t those early
Berlin and Gershwin songs be better served in a book musical? Shouldn’t Fanny Brice
and Bert Williams have played characters in a plot show? Because modern audiences
have never experienced a first-class Broadway revue there is a prejudice against such
a form of entertainment. It is easy to forget that it was the revue that made Broadway
glamorous. The operettas gave it class, the musical comedies gave it wit, but it was the
Follies and its imitations that gave Broadway cachet. They were the most expensive
offerings each season, demanded the highest ticket prices, and often made the most
money. To sing the lead in an operetta or be featured in a musical comedy was grand,
but to star in the Ziegfeld Follies was as close to royalty as you could get in America at
the time. Hollywood would later eclipse the revues and create an even more celestial
brand of stardom but during those first two decades of the century the revue was the
great dazzler.

Broadway Roars in the Twenties

The year 1919 was a turning point for Broadway. By this time the Theatre District had
relocated to Times Square and a building boom of new playhouses in the area had been
launched. With the end of World War I, theatre activity in New York blossomed as never
before and each season offered more plays and musicals than the previous one until the
stock market crash of 1929. Also by 1919 the term “Broadway” not only meant the theatre
business but also represented a hallmark for American theatre. No longer was a musi-
cal just a successful New York show, it was a “Broadway hit.” The Roaring Twenties were
heady times for many things in America: business, music, architecture, literature, art,
travel, fashion, and technology. The American theatre was no exception. When it came
 AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE, 1870–1945 197

to musicals, the years 1919 to 1929 saw just about every kind of musical theatre genre
flourish. To the many operettas, musical comedies, and revues were added star attrac-
tions (such as Al Jolson’s showcase musicals at the Winter Garden), foreign imports
(as with the star-studded André Charlot’s Revue in 1924), and novelty programs rang-
ing from dance pieces to African American musicals. There was room for everyone and
everything because there were plenty of playhouses and lots of people with money to
spend. Shows didn’t have to run long to make a profit: usually two or three months for a
musical. It was possible at this time for one venue to house five different musicals in one
season and each one was a hit. This accounts for the amazing number of productions
during the 1920s. The 1919–20 season saw forty-eight musicals open on Broadway; the
1927–28 season offered sixty-one. Were they all quality products? Far from it. But with
numbers that high the law of averages was in one’s favor and there were many hits each
season.
The floundering musical comedy genre made the greatest strides in this decade.
Irene (1919) began a parade of Cinderella musicals, shows in which the heroine dreams
of romance, fame, and money—and usually gets all three. The title character in Sally
(1920) went higher than that; she became a Ziegfeld star. Memories of the Princess
musicals fueled such up-to-date musical comedies as Lady, Be Good! (1924), Dearest
Enemy (1925), Tip-Toes (1925), Oh, Kay! (1926), Hit the Deck! (1927), A Connecticut
Yankee (1927), Good News! (1927), Funny Face (1927), and Hold Everything! (1928). Some
went even further, bringing back musical farce in such frantic hits as The Cocoanuts
(1925) and Whoopee! (1928). Whether it was Cohan’s old- fashioned Little Nellie Kelly
(1922) or the zippy, contemporary No, No, Nanette (1925), there was always a musi-
cal comedy bound to please in the 1920s. Also, one must remember that this decade
saw the advent of Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Vincent
Youmans, and De Sylva, Brown and Henderson, and all of these artists had early suc-
cesses in the 1920s.
Although Victor Herbert’s career was winding down, this decade is a high point
for American operetta, thanks mostly to Friml, Romberg, and Kern. Blossom Time
(1921), Rose- Marie (1924), The Student Prince (1924), The Vagabond King (1925), The
Desert Song (1926), Rio Rita (1927), and The New Moon (1928) probably seemed a bit
old-fashioned during the Roaring Twenties but that did not keep them from becoming
giant hits. In the case of Rose- Marie, the authors (Friml, Herbert Stothart, and Oscar
Hammerstein) stretched the limits of the genre and came up with an operetta that
may not have been integrated but was scored with an eye on the plot and the charac-
ters. It was a 557-performance hit on Broadway but ran two and three times that long in
London and Paris. The Depression essentially wiped out the traditional operetta genre
on Broadway (though not in films) so these musical gems from the 1920s represent the
art form at its peak. The same might be said for revues. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1919 is gen-
erally considered the best edition in Ziegfeld’s series and the revues offered by George
White and others also glowed in the 1920s. Even more encouraging, there were many
revues that did not try to copy Ziegfeld’s eye-dazzling panache and found different ways
to entertain using the revue format. The Garrick Gaieties (1925), The Little Show (1929),
198 THOMAS S. HISCHAK

and the Music Box Revues (1921–24) were smaller and more literate and opened up new
possibilities for the genre. Close to being revues were star vehicles in this decade that
were also extremely popular. Al Jolson is the most obvious example. Bombo (1921) and
Big Boy (1925) were book musicals with full scores and large casts but they were primar-
ily showcases for Jolson. He interpolated his song favorites into every show and some-
times dismissed the cast and turned the evening into a one-man concert. Eddie Cantor,
Elsie Janis, Frank Fay, Ned Wayburn, and other stage celebrities did the same thing to a
lesser extent. Sometimes they offered a plot, other times a revue; audiences didn’t seem
to care as long as the star showed up.
With musical comedy, operetta, revues, and star vehicles all shining on Broadway in
the 1920s, one must not get sidetracked into forgetting that a new genre was born in this
decade: the musical play. Show Boat arrived in 1927 with little to foreshadow its bril-
liance. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein had started their Broadway careers in the
1910s with light musical comedies. By the 1920s Hammerstein concentrated on the oper-
etta, which he felt was the best genre for a fully integrated musical. Kern wanted to go
beyond the witty but slight Princess shows but was wary of the Herbert-Friml-Romberg
kind of operetta filled with princes and gypsies. Hammerstein and Kern first worked
together on the lightweight Sunny (1925) and found they were both aiming for the same
result but from two opposite directions. They met in the middle with Show Boat. It was
musical comedy and operetta, the characters and situations dictating what kind of
music was most appropriate for that moment. Mixing the two genres was not a new idea;
after all, Herbert’s The Red Mill had done it successfully twenty years earlier. But creat-
ing a story that demanded such different treatments was unique. We call Show Boat the
first musical play because the story and characters came first, with the music then writ-
ten to satisfy the script’s demands. The fact that it was the most complex, multilayered
story yet seen in an American musical made the task more difficult. Yet Kern’s music
and Hammerstein’s libretto and lyrics met the challenge and Show Boat was a surpris-
ing marvel of a musical. Its book scenes hold up better than most plays from the 1920s,
and its score, both emotionally and sociologically, goes places never before attempted
in a Broadway musical. Structurally Act 2 has its problems so revivals often play loose
with the second half of the show, moving scenes and musical numbers around or adding
songs that the songwriters wrote for later stage and screen versions. But all this is win-
dow dressing; Show Boat still plays beautifully onstage. Time has not dated it as much as
it has matured it.
Ironically, as successful as Show Boat was, it did not start a trend or fad for musi-
cal plays. Hammerstein continued to experiment with the form and sixteen years later
perfected it with Oklahoma! But for the most part Broadway went along as it did before
Show Boat opened. Like any other hit, it returned to New York on occasion but did
not start a revolution of any sort. Perhaps Show Boat was ahead of its time. Or was
Broadway behind the times? One thing is clear: Show Boat is the climax of the prodi-
gious 1920s. An era that overflowed with many shows, many kinds of shows, and many
superior shows culminated in a musical theatre masterpiece. Doesn’t that sound like a
golden age?
 AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE, 1870–1945 199

From Desperation to Inspiration

The roar went out of the 1920s with the stock market crash in 1929 and the 1930s—the
decade always associated with the Depression—began abruptly. Theatre attendance
waned, then plummeted. Movie attendance, on the other hand, climbed prodigiously.
Theatre artists, frustrated with the sluggish productivity on Broadway, went to
Hollywood. It may have seemed like the Dark Ages had descended on the American
musical. Yet the quality, if not the quantity, of Broadway musicals remained high. This
was a decade in which the greatest American songwriters, from the veterans, including
Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein,
to newcomers, such as Arthur Schwartz, Howard Dietz, and E. Y. Harburg, were at the
peak of their powers. The result was a catalog of song standards that still amaze. The
actual shows, however, have not survived as well. The only Broadway musicals from
the decade still performed today with any regularity are Anything Goes (1934), Babes in
Arms (1937), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), and Porgy and Bess (1935), the last generally
put on by opera companies. The list of hits from the 1930s that are rarely revived today is
rather impressive: Strike Up the Band (1930), Flying High (1930), Girl Crazy (1930), The
New Yorkers (1930), Of Thee I Sing (1931), The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), Face the Music
(1932), Music in the Air (1932), Gay Divorce (1932), Roberta (1933), Jubilee (1935), Jumbo
(1935), Red, Hot and Blue (1936), On Your Toes (1936), I Married an Angel (1938), Leave It
to Me! (1938), Too Many Girls (1939), and DuBarry Was a Lady (1939). Add to these some
beloved flops such as Johnny Johnson (1936) and Very Warm for May (1939) and you have
some top-notch theatregoing. Cole Porter’s Anything Goes is perhaps the most familiar
to today’s audiences. Revivals are plentiful yet it is a musical that triumphs over its book.
Audiences patiently laugh at the contrived plotting and cartoonish characters but it is
only the score that soars and without it Anything Goes would be unrevivable.
Also unrevivable today, but the source of superlative theatre entertainment at this
time, were the many revues. The eye-popping Ziegfeld kind of show pretty much died
with the Depression, and the musical revue became more tuneful, witty, and socially
savvy in the 1930s. Consider such revue favorites as Three’s a Crowd (1930), The Band
Wagon (1931), Flying Colors (1932), As Thousands Cheer (1933), New Faces (1934 and
1936), Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), At Home Abroad (1935), The Show Is On (1936), Pins and
Needles (1937), and even the low-brow Hellzapoppin’ (1938) and one starts to realize how
potent this long-gone genre was during this period. While The Band Wagon, with its
dazzling stars (Adele and Fred Astaire, Frank Morgan, Helen Broderick), clever staging
by Hassard Short, and cutting-edge choreography by Albertina Rasch, was considered
the high-water mark for the 1930s musical revue, the show does not live on and histori-
ans have to take the word of enthusiastic critics and playgoers of the time.
All this great entertainment aside, there is a sobering fact about the 1930s that cannot
be ignored: it was not a decade of innovation or marked development. The American
musical progressed very little between 1929 and 1940. The craftsmanship was high
200 THOMAS S. HISCHAK

and the talent was remarkable but few of the works were experimental in the least. The
exceptions are rare. Of Thee I Sing was a satiric triumph, On Your Toes used dance in
interesting ways, and The Band Wagon introduced some effective scenic design ideas.
But for the most part, the decade was a glorious intermission, neither a Dark Age nor a
Renaissance.
One only has to look at the year 1940 to see some real innovation: Pal Joey, the first
“adult” musical; Cabin in the Sky, a Negro folk musical with verve; and Lady in the Dark,
arguably the first “concept” musical. The first half of the 1940s had its fair share of tradi-
tional musical fun: Louisiana Purchase (1940), Panama Hattie (1940), Best Foot Forward
(1941), Let’s Face It! (1941), Something for the Boys (1943), Mexican Hayride (1944), Follow
the Girls (1944), Song of Norway (1944), and Up in Central Park (1945). But those same
five years also offered shows with a kick, works that were not traditional and yet became
successful as they bent the rules. Pal Joey offered the first antiromantic hero, the charm-
ing but alarming cad Joey Evans (Gene Kelly). John O’Hara’s uncompromising book and
the stinging Rodgers and Hart score not only avoided sentiment but also scoffed at it.
Cabin in the Sky, in its genial folklore style, was uncompromising in a different way: it
gave dignity to former stereotypes and portrayed African Americans as living, breathing
characters and not as minstrel caricatures or as the tragic, doomed people in Porgy and
Bess. Lady in the Dark was perhaps the most cockeyed experiment of all: a psychological
musical that moved back and forth from prosaic realism to musical surrealism. Added
to these three musicals were such atypical offerings as the wartime money-raiser This Is
the Army (1942), the satiric fantasy One Touch of Venus (1943), the surprisingly powerful
opera redaction Carmen Jones (1943), the socially conscious rebel Bloomer Girl (1944),
the dance innovation On the Town (1944), and the tragic operetta Carousel (1945). And
(and it’s a big “and”) there was Oklahoma! (1943).
One charts the history of the American musical theatre by this pivotal show.
Everything is either pre-Oklahoma! or post-Oklahoma! This is more than a measuring
device. It is a matter of sensibility. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s seemingly simple cow-
boy musical created what Show Boat struggled to produce: a fully integrated musical.
Not only did the songs spring from the characters and plot, but they also came from
the heart of the piece. No musical number could easily be placed in any other show.
No character in Oklahoma! could simply begin singing another character’s song. Even
the dancing grew out of the characters, though not in the familiar format of the main
character’s wishful dreaming as in Babes in Arms’ “Peter’s Journey” or The Boys from
Syracuse’s “Big Brother” fantasy numbers. “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind,” the dream
sequence in Oklahoma!, was a psychological journey and it showed that the psyche was
not always an optimistic wishing well. This cowboy musical is the most influential of
all Broadway shows because after seeing it audiences did not look at the musical the
same way again. Whereas Show Boat had been a lone wonder, much admired but rarely
copied, Oklahoma! became the model. There would still be plenty of mindless musical
comedies and star vehicles but audiences came to expect even those types of shows to
maintain a certain kind of musical theatre logic. Playgoers still demand it. The most
 AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE, 1870–1945 201

abstract concept musical or derivative jukebox musical today still must conform to the
standards that Oklahoma! and its model insisted on.
In the first five years of the 1940s, the American musical went more places than it
had in all the time since Show Boat. The rest of the decade was filled with hit musicals
that adhered to the Oklahoma! format, such as Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun (1946),
Brigadoon (1947), Where’s Charley? (1948), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), South Pacific (1949), and
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949). Others, usually less successful, dared to go beyond the
model and push the format even further, such as Finian’s Rainbow (1947), Allegro (1947),
Love Life (1948), and Lost in the Stars (1949). There were still far fewer shows opening in
the 1940s than in the 1920s but musicals were running longer than anyone ever thought
possible. This trend continues today. A  handful of mega-hits helps audiences forget
that the quantity (and too often the quality) of Broadway offerings is often very meager
indeed. How ironic that Oklahoma! and the birth of the modern American musical also
signaled the advent of Broadway as a commercial giant. Dozens of shows each season in
the 1920s showed a healthy profit; today one or two cash cows a season makes everyone
feel like business is better than ever. Every season nowadays a few New York playhouses
manage to break the box office records for their venues. With inflated “premium seats”
and rising ticket prices, does anyone but Variety think that is remarkable? Similarly, are
the 1940s a golden age because the decade overflowed with long-running hits?
So one returns to the differences between a populist theatre and one of high quality.
“Populist” is a relative term because the number of people needed to make a hit in 1890
and the number needed in, say, 1990 is enormously different. It seems “everyone” has seen
Phantom of the Opera, but more people have seen The Mikado. The idea of “quality” is also
relative. Contemporary playgoers and critics find the unmotivated songs and creaky plot-
ting of No, No, Nanette or Good News! annoying and try to enjoy the show for the songs
and the camp aspects. But a 1920s audience might look at Cabaret (1966) or Sweeney Todd
(1979) and question how such a dark, cynical experience can be termed entertainment.
Maybe the historian is not the best judge of what makes a golden age if one considers
the theatre experience from the audience’s point of view. In any decade there is always
the sixty-year-old theatregoer who sits in a Broadway playhouse watching a new musi-
cal and, liking it or not, feels the shows are not as good as they were forty years earlier.
In that same theatre sits a twenty-five-year-old patron watching the same musical who
is thrilled that this is not the sort of stuff audiences had to put up with four decades
earlier. For most spectators the golden age occurred in their youth with the shows they
saw when they were between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Historians and critics and
Variety may tell them differently, but they feel they know when things were best.
One final example: Consider the patron whose first musical theatre experiences as an
adult were in the 1970s. History books state that this was a low point for Broadway: it had
the fewest number of shows ever, proportionally more flops than in previous decades,
lots of empty theatres, a crime-ridden Theatre District, a bankrupt New York City, and
so on. Yet that patron might vividly recall seeing a new Stephen Sondheim show almost
every year and A Chorus Line and Ain’t Misbehavin’ and all those edgy Off Broadway
musicals. Looking back, how can that person believe that it wasn’t a golden age?
202 THOMAS S. HISCHAK

Bibliography
Bloom, Ken, and Frank Vlastnik. 2004. Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time.
New York: Black Dog and Leventhal.
Bordman, Gerald. 2001. American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle. Third Edition. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Ewen, David. 1976. New Complete Book of the American Musical Theatre. New York: Henry Holt.
Ganzl, Kurt. 2001. Ganzl’s Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre. New York: Schirmer.
Green, Stanley. 1980. The World of Musical Comedy. New York: A. S. Barnes.
———. 2008. Broadway Musicals Show by Show. Sixth Edition, revised by Kay Green. Milwaukee,
WI: Hal Leonard.
Hischak, Thomas S. 2008. The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and
Television. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jones, John Bush. 2003. Our Musicals, Ourselves. Lebanon, NH:  University Press of New
England.
Kantor, Michael, and Laurence Maslon. 2004. Broadway:  The American Musical.
New York: Bullfinch.
Mates, Julian. 1985. America’s Musical Stage: Two Hundred Years of Musical Theatre. Westport,
CT: Greenwood.
Mordden, Ethan. 1997. Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s. New York:  Oxford
University Press.
———. 1999. Beautiful Mornin’:  The Broadway Musical in the 1940s. New  York:  Oxford
University Press.
———. 2005. Sing for Your Supper:  The Broadway Musical in the 1930s. New  York:  Palgrave
Macmillan.
Norton, Richard. 2002. A Chronology of American Musical Theatre. New  York:  Oxford
University Press.
Sheward, David. 1994. It’s a Hit: The Back Stage Book of Longest-Running Broadway Shows, 1884
to the Present. New York: Watson-Guptill.
Smith, Cecil, and Glenn Litton. 1981. Musical Comedy in America. Second Edition.
New York: Theatre Arts.
Swain, Joseph P. 1990. The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey. New York: Oxford
University Press.
 CHAPTER 13

T H E N EW WOM A N , T H E
SU F F R AG I S T, A N D T H E  S TAG E

KAT H E R I N E E .   K E L LY

The New Woman, like her younger sister, the suffragist, was conceived transatlantically
in both the United States and England. The term itself was coined by the English novelist
Sarah Grand in her 1894 essay, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” but it could
take variant forms, such as “the American Girl,” “the Golden Girl,” or “the Gibson Girl”
in the United States. Part rhetorical, part historical, and part mythical, the New Woman
was produced by a number of social and political forces, among them growing female
working and middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic with a significant proportion of
unmarried women; a loosening of gender roles; the growth of the retail fashion market;
a revision of the laws and norms regulating marriage; a labor market with a demand for
female typists, clerks, and assistants; and a mass press looking for stories to amuse its
largely middle-class subscribers. As a rhetorical catch-all label, the New Woman came to
stand for those who self-identified as resisting the old “True Woman” of Victorian cul-
ture. The stereotype of the late nineteenth-century New Woman, reproduced in journal
cartoons, popular songs, newspaper stories, and stage plays, focused on her appearance,
such as rational dress (typically a divided skirt worn without a corset or tight lacing),
spectacles, sensible shoes, a latch key (for opening the door of her rented room), and
perhaps a bicycle for transportation. This stereotype had a historical precursor in the
nineteenth-century female reformer, whether a temperance worker, a charity organizer,
or an individual needlewoman who sewed for the poor. The notion of service embed-
ded in the middle-class identity of the nineteenth-century woman encouraged a sense
of public obligation initially rooted in religious belief but gradually generalized to the
secular spheres of education, law, and politics. When a self-pronounced New Woman
like Sarah Grand spoke or wrote publicly, she tended to emphasize a woman’s duty to
her sex, especially the less fortunate of her sex, which positioned her between the female
reformer and the suffragist.
Most examples of the New Woman have been taken from the white middle class (or
higher), circa 1860 to 1910, but as more recent research has demonstrated, the Harlem
204 KATHERINE E. KELLY

Renaissance of the 1920s saw the rise of the New Negro Woman, often represented as
a tragic mulatta.1 Situated within a complex relation to racial iconography, narratives
of “passing,” the deep history of chattel slavery, and the rise of the New Negro Man,
the New Negro Woman’s history was distinct from that of the middle-class white New
Woman and has, until recently, been absent from discussions of the New Woman type,
with the possible exception of some attention paid to (mostly middle-class or higher)
Negro Club Women. In the hands of Harlem writers and painters, the mulatta offered
a revision to the racial types of the age and a counterpart to the New Negro Man. The
(white) New Woman, however, was sometimes associated with opposition to those
white men who ridiculed her more overt attempts at questioning gender roles and who
worked to block the emergence of women in the public sphere.

The New Woman and the Stage

Both as a rhetorical type and an actual historical figure, the New Woman had a special
relationship of affinity to the stage. This can be traced to the development of the acting,
playwriting, and entertainment professions as relatively more open to (white) women2
than many others in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to the stage as a
business in which a woman might earn an income equivalent to that of her male peers.
Some of the best-known nineteenth-century actresses, such as Charlotte Cushman,
Laura Keene, and Madeleine Lucette Ryley, were publicly identified with qualities asso-
ciated with the New Woman, such as economic success, personal ambition, geographic
mobility, and public eloquence, although they tended to protect that reputation from
associations with sexual license or political radicalism. Tracy Davis’s historical assess-
ment of nineteenth-century British actresses3 can be applied in a broad way to the sit-
uation of the (white) American actress—most were not stars but poorly paid, socially
suspect, and chronically threatened by unemployment. In both England and the United
States, prostitutes sat in particular locations in the early to mid-nineteenth-century the-
atre (a place also reserved for Negroes in the United States) where police could monitor
them and their customers. By the 1880s, the “third tier,” as it was called in US theatres,
had been closed down, but the link between theatres and prostitutes had been cemented
in the public imagination.
Nevertheless, the exceptional actress could achieve upward mobility through mar-
riage and personal independence through her earnings. Furthermore, changes in
the theatre with the late nineteenth-century arrival of plays by Henrik Ibsen, George
Bernard Shaw, and women dramatists on US and British stages brought controversial
and highly developed female characters with New Woman qualities onto playhouse
stages, where audiences, most notably female audiences at matinee performances, would
flock to see and discuss them as performed by actresses who conducted themselves
onstage and in their private lives very like the New Woman they were representing. In
 THE NEW WOMAN, THE SUFFRAGIST, AND THE STAGE 205

the United States, the actress and activist Mary Shaw, who sat on the board of direc-
tors of the Women’s Professional League for twenty years, chose to play the part of Mrs.
Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts, because of its courage in exposing the falseness of “wifely sac-
rifice in woman.” Insisting on combining her art and her politics, Shaw publicly cam-
paigned for women’s improvement as a guest artist at the 1899 International Congress of
Women in London and drew the criticism of theatre professionals at home who chided
her for taking herself too seriously as a social critic. By her own actions or the percep-
tions of others, the Ibsen actress became conflated with the spirit of reform displayed by
the New Woman.
In England, the actress and writer Elizabeth Robins took a special interest in Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler; she pawned her jewelry and that of her American colleague, Marion
Lea, to raise the money to produce the play. As a young, promising actress in American
melodrama, Robins became widowed and moved from the United States to England
to pursue her acting career. In England, she lived a life unusual for most middle-class
women of her time, enjoying the friendship of a large number of distinguished male
artists and intellectuals, teaching herself Norwegian, and living, in part, by earnings
from her writing. In both her personal and professional lives, she performed the part
of the New Woman, but she took precautions to protect her reputation. When G. B.
Shaw famously made a pass at her in a closed carriage, she threw him out onto the
pavement.

The New Woman as Spectator

This two-way affinity between the New Woman and the theatre grew not only from
the example of actresses but also from a newly emerging class of spectators. The pres-
ence of leisured middle-class women, especially at matinees where female spectators
could attend without a male escort, coincided with the new drama’s interest in the
female protagonist: Ibsen’s Nora, Hedda Gabler, and Mrs. Alving; Rachel Crothers’s
Rhy MacChesney and Frank Ware; Susan Glaspell’s Claire Archer. These heroines
both shaped and reflected an emerging idea of the articulate and “restless” woman
as the sign of coming change. For some of the female spectators at Ibsen’s dramas,
the stage appeared to speak for them about their particular frustrations, hopes, and
fears, especially in the face of hostile reviewers who expressed horror at female specta-
tors’ enthusiasm for Ibsen. As Susan Torrey Barstow has argued, the collective iden-
tity formed by these spectators was ironically produced by the male critics watching
anxiously over the female crowd. In addition to middle-class women of leisure, Ibsen
audiences included intellectuals, writers, and activists, who seized on his plays as sup-
port for their own revolutionary ideas. An American actress and Ibsen veteran, Mary
Shaw, quoted Olive Shreiner, “God did not ask man whether woman should have
power. He gave it to her.”4
206 KATHERINE E. KELLY

The New Woman and the Dramatic

Author: Rachel Crothers and Cicely
Hamilton

The mutual attraction between the New Woman and the theatre extended to the writ-
ing of plays as well. As male actor-managers well knew, authoring a play amounted to
securing a strong part in that play. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century women
playwrights, some of whom had worked as actresses, wrote plays with strong parts for
women, aware from Ibsen’s example that such parts, even—or perhaps especially—
when controversial, could draw and hold audiences. Rachel Crothers (1878–1958) found
the theatre at a young age while acting in school plays in her native Illinois, where she
lived comfortably in an upper-middle-class home afforded by two physician parents.
Ambitious to make her way in theatre, she was finally permitted to move to New York
in 1896–97, at the age of eighteen, where she found no work but enrolled as an acting
student and remained there as a teacher for four years, writing one-acts for her students
and assembling complete productions of her teaching plays, from costuming to set
design and props. Beginning with one-act plays initially based on the conventions of
melodrama, Crothers gradually incorporated features of the new European drama of
Ibsen and shifted her style toward a more realist and taut dramatic economy. By 1899,
Crothers had begun to develop her signature heroine: a clear-eyed, frank, ambitious,
virtuous, and straightforward woman. As her biographer, Lois Gottlieb, has noted,
Crothers’s heroines narrowly skirted offending cultural critics who decried the harsh,
emancipated heroines of Ibsen and others.5
Crothers offers a clear example of a commercially successful American playwright
who represented various versions of the New Woman onstage after beginning her career
as an actress and fighting her way to the position of playwright and director of her own
plays. Crothers’s first New York and London stage success, The Three of Us (1906), fea-
tures a large and compelling role for a sometime New Woman who supports her two
brothers and an Irish housemaid with a small inheritance and their title to a Nevada
silver mine. Courted by several men, she chooses the most modest and ethical of them
as her future husband, while steering one of her brothers away from a life of greed and
compromise. The heroine knows how to conduct business forthrightly and fairly, but
she avoids pursuing wealth solely for the sake of power. Most important, she attempts to
author her own destiny, informing the two men pursuing her, “My honor! Do you think
it’s in your hands? It’s in my own and I’ll take care of it, and of everyone who belongs
to me. I don’t need you—either of you.”6 But this heroine, Rhy MacChesney, also slyly
capitulates to gender roles by manipulating the men around her through flattery and
feigned incompetence. Nevertheless, taken as a group, Crothers’s plays map a series of
possibilities for the white middle-class New Woman in the first two decades of America’s
twentieth century. Rhy MacChesney, the prototypically western heroine of The Three of
Us, succeeds in business by virtue of linking American “common sense” to the moral
 THE NEW WOMAN, THE SUFFRAGIST, AND THE STAGE 207

focus of the Victorian “Angel-of-the-household.” She wistfully recalls her parents’ ele-
gance but despises the privileges of wealth. Uncommonly loyal and patient, she both
mothers and befriends her brothers and her Irish housemaid.
All of Crothers’s heroines belong to the white middle class, but not all of them navigate
gender trouble successfully. In He and She (1911), three sets of couples attempt to work
out the new model of a marriage between two competent, committed professionals. But
only one couple survives, and their survival comes at a price. The brilliantly talented
wife/mother member of a husband-wife architecture team surrenders a promising com-
mission to her jealous husband when she discovers their sixteen-year-old daughter has
fallen in love with a young, penniless, working-class boy. Much to her husband’s relief,
the mother will hand the commission to him while distracting their daughter with a
European vacation. Once again, the private claims of motherhood (and preserving class
position) overwhelm the heroine’s desire for accomplishment in a more public sphere.
As Lois Gottlieb has noted, Crothers’s dramas about “new women” changed over
time to represent not the failure but the long and sometimes faltering resistance of the
middle-class woman to the structures of patriarchy: “The role of feminism in her plays
clearly changes from a coherent and optimistic ideology to a rather shadowy and amor-
phous afterimage.”7 But Gottlieb casts doubt on the critical consensus that the second
half of Crothers’s playwriting career, beginning in the 1920s, charts the failure of the US
women’s movement and the gradual capitulation of the New Woman to a masculin-
ist status quo. By the 1930s, Crothers was writing comedies of manners with multiple
strong roles for women and plots turning less on women’s search for independence
than on wealthy (heterosexual) couples’ attempts to chart a new ground for success-
ful marriage. While hardly the stuff of radical feminism, Crothers’s plays nevertheless
consistently posed to mainstream audiences questions related to the intersection of
gender, power, and sexuality. Her plays demonstrate both the enduring and the limited
nature of the successful American female playwright’s attempts to put gender relations
on display.
Cicely Hamilton (1872–1952), a British actress turned writer, offers a contrasting case
study of the British actress-writer-suffragist-polemicist whose life and work coincided
with one version of the British New Woman’s arc of development. Originally drawn to
the stage but without the benefit of family income, Hamilton toured with low-ranking
companies performing character (rather than ingenue) roles in sensational melodra-
mas. Without the conventional good looks of an actress, Hamilton found herself twice
passed over and even replaced by women serving as her manager’s mistress, an event
that transformed her awareness of gender inequities and that inspired her to write about
“marriage as a trade,” the current state of British marriage by which women sold them-
selves to husbands for a guaranteed annual income. Armed with her rebellion against
the marriage trade, her knowledge of the unequal treatment afforded actresses of
varying “looks,” and the higher pay earned by actors over actresses for similar parts,
she returned to London and began to write for periodicals, then for the stage. She lived
the remainder of her life as a writer, activist, and supporter of progressive causes, chief
among them a woman’s right to choose the single life over marriage.
208 KATHERINE E. KELLY

Hamilton’s popular stage drama Diana of Dobson’s (1908) focuses on a young

middle-class woman forced to earn her income because she is unwilling to marry a man
without the experience of earning his own way in the world. Beginning the play as a
lowly but defiant employee at the Dobson’s Drapery Establishment, where she lives in
the dreary dormitory established for sales clerks, she inherits a few hundred pounds,
takes a lavish European vacation, meets a rather lazy but charming young man, chal-
lenges him to make his own way in the world, and then, weeks later, re-meets him as
a fellow vagrant, starving on a bench at the Thames Embankment where they agree to
marry as equals. Hamilton wrote the play not as a treatise but as an unconventional
romantic comedy with a critical twist. She wanted, after all, to achieve financial suc-
cess with the play while simultaneously exposing the “living-in system” used by employ-
ers like “Dobson’s,” exposing the hypocrisy of the class system, and modeling a young
woman of independent mind, strong backbone, and high spirits.

The New Woman as Director

and Producer

Rachel Crothers taught acting and directed one-act plays during her first five years in
New York, but when she sold her 1908 play, Myself Bettina, to the US actress Maxine
Elliott, Elliott encouraged Crothers to direct and manage the production. While the play
did not succeed, Crothers later expressed her gratitude to Elliott for the opportunity it
gave her, writing in a 1911 Harper’s Bazaar essay that Elliott had “an admiration for and
faith in the work of women.”8 Crothers went on to direct all of her subsequent plays,
traveling to Paris in 1930 to direct a French version of Mary the Third. Her mark as a
director in the first half of her career (roughly 1906 to the early 1930s) was to intensify
the realism of her plays by coordinating and controlling the staging, speech, and move-
ment to create the impression of localized, historically specific settings. In the second
half of her career, she staged Noel Coward–like society comedies set among the wealthy
while continuing to explore issues of sexuality, gender, and power.
In England, the production of Cicely Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s was handled by
another New Woman actress who played Diana, Lena Ashwell, who offered a New
Woman alternative to traditional production techniques. As Christine Dymkowski has
shown, Ashwell assumed the lease on the Kingsway not simply to serve herself with star-
ring roles but also to reform and improve the current system of theatrical production.
Renaming and redecorating the theatre to reflect her new approach, she announced
her intention to offer a repertoire alternating serious plays with comedies and to pres-
ent at matinees adventurous dramas that might not find a sufficiently large audience in
the evenings. She solicited new plays, employed a dramaturg to read them, improved
the music between bills to favor younger composers, numbered all seats, did away with
cloakroom fees, and improved the quality of the programs to justify their price. She
 THE NEW WOMAN, THE SUFFRAGIST, AND THE STAGE 209

staggered seat prices from one shilling upward and made an affordable afternoon tea
available. Through a tactful notice displayed on the proscenium fire curtain, she man-
aged to convince ladies to remove their formidable matinee hats in order to permit all
to see the stage. Thus, not only the content of the play but also its actors, its location, its
physical setting, and its sponsorship reflected a new, critical spirit of reform in the the-
atre and in the women’s movement that revealed the closeness between the New Woman
and the new drama. Not surprisingly, attendance at Diana of Dobson’s favored women by
a margin of 7 to 3. Similarly, Rachel Crothers’s audiences were composed predominantly
of women.
In the details of their lives, especially their financial and social relations, Hamilton
and Crothers had little in common, although both remained unmarried. But the two
of them did make similar choices during wartime. Both Hamilton and Crothers took
leadership positions in organizing and operating theatrical entertainments during
World War I.

The New Woman and Stage Parody

The New Woman phenomenon also produced its own opposition in Rachel Crothers’s
gently satiric Ourselves and Sydney Grundy’s moralistic The New Woman, a more earnest
assault on the intellectual woman and the male aesthete. Crothers’s play, intended for a
knowing audience, pokes fun at a kind of formula feminism by which two young unmar-
ried sisters arrange an experimental trial marriage for the youngest who has been urged
by a conservative father to marry a man of his choosing. The younger sister discovers true
love, both sisters reject the experiment, and each of them becomes united in marriage at
the end. The sisters’ false conversion to formula feminism is exposed by their marriages at
the conclusion. In Grundy’s play, the action also consists of falsely liberated female char-
acters, but in this case, they rediscover their desire for a strong, protective husband, while
the aesthete male, Percy Pettigrew, is exposed as a pompous fool. The womanly woman is
returned to the manly man at the play’s close and the aesthetes have entirely disappeared.
Grundy offers the traditional alternative to the New Woman, while Crothers reserves her
satire for her educated feminist colleagues, whose earnest theoretical beliefs she works to
expose as inadequate guides to the demands of practical living.

The Suffrage Movement and the

New Woman

But while the (white) New Woman was receiving her stage comeuppance, she
was also metamorphosing into the figure of the suffragist. In the United States,
210 KATHERINE E. KELLY

the suffrage movement began promisingly in league with abolitionist activism

but quickly foundered over the issue of race, with post–Civil War white suffrag-
ists becoming divided over the question of enfranchising black men before women.
The American suffrage movement became largely white, with African American
women forming their own suffrage organizations or avoiding the cause altogether.
Nevertheless, both white and black women wrote plays promoting the cause of
women’s rights.9 A large number of white American suffrage dramas were written
and performed as avowedly amateur productions, circulating privately in the man-
ner of “parlor dramas” for use by families or nontheatrical groups without a com-
mercial theatre at their disposal.10 Activists such as Alice Ives (A Very New Woman,
1896), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Something to Vote For, 1911), and Mary Shaw (The
Woman of It, 1914) wrote short suffrage propaganda plays that combined the New
Woman’s interest in emancipation and self-determination with the suffrage cam-
paign’s pursuit of the vote.
African American women began using performance to serve the cause of abolishing
racism and sexism as early as Sojourner Truth’s famous oration “Ain’t I a Woman,” spo-
ken at the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention. But their propaganda writings typically
included appeals for ending racism directed at all African Americans or concerned
matters of more immediate importance to black women’s survival, such as the issue
of birth control.11 Angelina Weld Grimké’s antilynching drama, Rachel (1916), offered
an alternative to white New Woman drama, depicting a young embittered African
American woman who comes to terms with racism by refusing to bear children. The
African American woman activist/artist’s historical experience separated her from her
white counterparts, giving her a unique history to confront and counteract. These two
groups eyed each other warily but did not, with very few exceptions, join forces. In
London, the 1906 arrival of Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters, Sylvia and Christabel,
marked the resurgence of the British woman suffrage movement. Not every New
Woman identified herself as either a feminist or suffragist/gette, but the public appear-
ance on streets and in parks, restaurants, public halls, theatres, churches, and political
meetings of suffrage workers quickly dominated the public discourse about the new
womanhood. Theatricality once again became the ally of activists as a series of mass
public marches, heckling, sidewalk chalking, streetcorner speaking, and newspaper
selling kept suffragists in the public eye. Theatrical display became the signature of all
public suffrage-related events, except for the most secretive and dangerous, for which
theatrical makeup and disguise were sometimes used to conceal the identities of the
activists.12
The Actresses’ Franchise League, one of the dozens of suffrage support groups formed
to support the cause among women and men allied by their interests or profession, was
among the first of the leagues to organize and to lend its expertise to training suffrage
speakers, writing and performing suffrage propaganda sketches, providing entertain-
ment at monthly meetings, recruiting from the theatrical profession, offering the allure
of glamour to suffrage parades, and using theatrical skills to disguise suffragettes wanted
 THE NEW WOMAN, THE SUFFRAGIST, AND THE STAGE 211

by the police. One of the most popular of the propaganda plays, Inez Bensusan’s The
Apple, never mentions the vote but rather tells the story of a brother who, by virtue of
being the only male child in a middle-class family, is given the lion’s share of an inheri-
tance to buy the wife of his choice, leaving his sisters in low-skilled jobs without the
chance to secure an education or to live independently. One sister becomes the victim
of sexual blackmail, forced to protect her father’s employment by giving sexual favors to
one of his superiors. These sketches resembled the US suffrage sketches, confined to one
act and requiring little in the way of setting or props. But at least one full-length suffrage
drama made a bid for a full theatrical engagement.
Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women! appeared in London in 1907 with Robins in the
title role. Best known for her riveting interpretations of Ibsen’s new women—Hedda
Gabler, Nora, and Hilda Wangel—Robins had retired from the stage and taken up the
career of author. Votes for Women! opened at the Court Theatre, managed by Harley
Granville-Barker, and drew comment for its clever use of theatrical convention. Act 1
takes place in a country house, where the attractive Vida Levering is visiting the hostess
to plan a women’s shelter. The other guests represent a political and class cross-section
of the “weekender set.” In this act, Robins inverts the convention by which men talk
politics and women discuss fashion and children. The women in the first act covertly
discuss the suffrage agitation undetected by the men, who discuss trivial pursuits.
The wealthy Scots niece of the hostess, engaged to prominent Conservative politi-
cian Jeffrey Stonor, becomes enamored with Vida Levering and decides to follow her
to town to observe a suffrage rally in Trafalgar Square. The next act, celebrated for
its documentary accuracy, reproduces the scene of a suffrage rally at which a series
of suffrage supporters, beginning with spunky working-class orators and ending with
the upper-middle-class Vida Levering, take the platform to deliver speeches in sup-
port of the franchise for women. In the play’s third act, an extended, indoor confron-
tation scene, it has become clear that many years earlier, Vida had aborted a child
conceived with Jeffrey Stonor out of wedlock. In a tense scene, she reveals to him that
she supports the suffrage cause to work against women’s helplessness and she asks for
his political backing. Like a nineteenth-century reformer, Vida dedicates her life to
improving women’s “helplessness,” and she secures Stonor’s pledge to give the cause
his political backing. Robins used the conventions of melodrama, the documentary,
and the Ibsenite sex antagonism scene to give the play a theatrical legibility for audi-
ences accustomed to these forms. Robins’s variation on the New Woman was explicitly
moralistic and melodramatic. Her heroine in this and other of her plays echoes the
Victorian New Woman, whose dedication to reform carries within it a memory of reli-
gious zeal secularized through the liberal doctrine of individual growth as applied to
women—a new class of proto-citizen. However, as an actress, Robins made her repu-
tation on the Ibsenite New Woman, a conflicted and intelligent but uneducated and
untrained member of her sex whose “newness” amounts to recognizing her entrap-
ment in a limited domestic existence no longer suited to her ambition or her awareness
of herself and her world.
212 KATHERINE E. KELLY

Recent Approaches to the New Woman

As Martha Patterson establishes in a 2005 book, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining

the American New Woman, 1895–1915, the American New Woman was neither entirely
white nor entirely metropolitan. For Patterson, women writers used the trope of the
New Woman for their own rhetorical ends and in a variety of class, racial, and geo-
graphical contexts. The New Negro Woman, for example, was not simply a subset of
the New Woman but a unique category—similar but never identical to the middle-class
white New Woman. Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far’s essays and photographs of Chinese
American women present her as a paradoxical type of the Gibson Girl, already modern-
ized but simultaneously quaintly exotic. Southern regional New Woman types appeared
in stories and novels set in Virginia and the New South, and the protagonist of Edith
Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) takes her newness from the recent arrival
of incorporation, specifically corporate capitalism. In geographical, racial, and eco-
nomic terms, the New Woman was never a single type and she did not represent a single
historical trend.
Ann Heilmann’s 2004 study, New Woman Strategies, locates a new kind of difference
and new techniques of subversion in the writing of three British New Women: Sarah
Grand, Olive Schreiner, and Mona Caird. Determined to reclaim New Woman fiction
from Virginia Woolf ’s dismissal of it as prudish and moralistic, Heilmann has detected
contradictions in the writing of putatively Victorian New Women like Sarah Grand, who
invoked a “higher morality” as evidence of women’s rightful claim to social and politi-
cal authority while, at the same time, “spectacularly” exploring female libidinal desire.
Heilmann reads New Woman fiction through the lens of French feminist theory, noting
its recourse to mimicry, self-reflexivity, libidinality, and performativity as strategies that
reveal the New Woman writer’s negotiation of her position in the literary marketplace
and in platform politics. Mona Caird stands out for her rejection of self-deprecation as a
feminist gesture; her radical sexual politics also set her apart from the other two subjects
of the book—Sarah Grand and Olive Schreiner. This study locates a complex textuality
for each of these writers and touches on same-sex eroticism as a topic explored by the
New Woman writer.
In The New Woman and the Empire, Iveta Jusová situates the New Woman at signifi-
cant moments in imperial history, noting that her proponents, such as Blanche Alethea
Crackenthorpe, argued for her usefulness to the economy and therefore to the empire
by altering the outmoded Victorian system of gender roles and permitting women to
become fully productive citizens that could contribute their energy and ideas to Great
Britain. Her opponents, on the other hand, identified the New Woman as one of the
causes of imperial decline, responsible for the spread of socialism and nihilism, and
therefore enemies of the empire (2005, 4).
Both in her self-creation and her representation by those hostile to her, the New
Woman of recent scholarship embodies a series of contradictions. She is not only a
touchstone for women’s sexuality—both feared and fascinating—but she also looks to
 THE NEW WOMAN, THE SUFFRAGIST, AND THE STAGE 213

the past and the future simultaneously and without apology. Like Elizabeth Robins,
she could adopt the conventions of melodrama to make her situation legible to readers
and playgoers while, at the same time, she could smoke cigarettes, lead a single life, and
socialize with men at will. In a 2010 essay analyzing New Woman cartoons from Punch
magazine, Tracy Collins argues that the Punch illustrations unintentionally endowed the
New Woman with athletic fashions and equipment, lending the type an athleticism and
autonomy mocked by the cartoon’s captions. Other scholars, such as Hyaeweol Choi, are
retrieving non-Western models of the New Woman, such as the Korean New Woman,
whose modernity arose from challenging Confucian gender roles and “by emphasiz-
ing women’s own subjectivities.” Colonialism exerted its own kind of power in the case
of the Korean New Woman, who cannot be understood as a collection of idiosyncratic
individuals but rather as the product of the intersecting pressures of modernity, colo-
nialism, patriarchy, and Korean nationalism. The “Modern Girl” in Republican China
(1911–49) has been read by Sarah E. Stevens as the symbol of modernity in China. Set
against the backdrop of nationalism, modernity, and gender anxieties, she has been rep-
resented as promising and threatening, as both the positive future of a strong Chinese
nation and as a dangerously self-absorbed citizen, a potential devourer of urban men.

The Afterlife of the New Woman

Consensus would suggest that the New Woman is now a relic of the past, of pre- or
first-wave feminism. But if this is so, why have contemporary women playwrights
turned repeatedly to this period and to versions of this type to express their own con-
cerns about the health of feminism in the twenty-first century? The Canadian play-
wright Linda Griffiths’s Age of Arousal (2007), a “contemporary play set in the past,”
telescopes the chronology of the New Woman and suffrage movements, loosely adapt-
ing George Gissing’s novel about the New Woman, The Odd Women (1893), to a story
about same-sex love, typewriting, and political organizing. Griffiths sets the play in 1885,
but she includes events out of historical order from 1869 to 1914. One of the characters,
a distinguished veteran of the forced-feeding campaign during the suffrage movement,
recounts the ordeal for her younger lover, neatly segueing to the post-suffrage period
by claiming, “I had barfed and bled for the last time. I found I wanted money. I wanted
it, I wanted women to have it. . . . Laying down my sword to open a school for female
secretaries.” Griffiths wrote the play from a fear that the suffragettes had been forgot-
ten and from her own ominous sense that feminism has lost ground in recent years,
noting that television and news reporting seem to have returned to treating women as
objects. Referring to her style as “fabulist” rather than “realist,” Griffiths explains that
her play does not intend to document the past but to create a theatre that is playfully lit-
erate, physically suggestive, and emotionally developed. Her representation of the New
Woman brings in the dimension of lesbian love and typewriters—both shedding more
contemporary light on what might have come to seem an “old” New Woman. But even
214 KATHERINE E. KELLY

more important is the tribute she pays to an earlier feminist activism, part admiration,
part nostalgia, but written from a well of contemporary anxiety over the future of wom-
en’s political and personal determination to fight for a role in creating their destinies.
The London-based playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz wrote Her Naked Skin in 2009,
memorializing the militant wing of the suffrage movement through the lens of Midge
Mackenzie’s documentary film, Shoulder to Shoulder, about the Pankhursts and their cir-
cle. Like Griffiths, she makes use of novels of the period and of same-sex love, most notably
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), the source for the doomed lesbian romance
in the play. Using documentary detail to reconstruct some scenes and allowing herself
creative license in others, Lenkiewicz, like Griffiths, works to make the physical and psy-
chological hardships undertaken by suffrage campaigners vivid to their younger counter-
parts for whom the rights to vote, to attend universities, to compete for jobs, to expect an
equal wage had been earned by those who paid a high price to secure their opportunities.
Lenkiewicz looks back with the eye of a twenty-first-century feminist, eager to expose the
contradictions underlying class relations in the movement, bonds of affection between
women, the role of marriage for activists, and the uncertain future of women then—and
now. This New Woman is neither a journalistic type nor a mythic construction but a nearly
forgotten chapter in the ongoing story of women’s fight for autonomy and justice in a time
before the privilege to become an educated and fully functional member of society began
to be taken for granted. As Griffiths has written of her own play, “It’s a cautionary tale.”
As a final example of recent playwrights giving the New Woman a contemporary dra-
matic afterlife, the US playwright Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel (2001) tells the story
of a failed marriage between an African American seamstress and a Caribbean laborer,
who court by way of letters written for them by others. Set in a 1905 New York boarding
house where the heroine, Esther, sews elegant undergarments for well-paying custom-
ers, Nottage’s play tells the story of Esther and George, each of whom disappoints the
other when they finally meet face to face. They eventually separate but not before Esther
becomes (to her joy) pregnant by George. Nottage rescues her heroine, an unremarkable
but dignified seamstress, from historical anonymity by telling her semifictional story in
rich historical detail. Not only Esther’s courtship and marriage but more importantly
her friendships fill in the social network of a Negro New Woman. Esther’s special but
largely unexpressed friendship with a Jewish merchant grows from their shared appre-
ciation for the beauty and richness of well-made fabric and trim. Her second intimate
friendship with the prostitute Mayme survives the knowledge that Esther’s husband
(unbeknownst to Mayme) had become Mayme’s client. Both friendships are unlikely
but life-sustaining, springing from a shared sense of beauty and imaginative sympathy.

Conclusion

Both in her first life, around 1895, and in her recent afterlife, the New Woman has had a
special home in the theatre. She has appeared there in all of the racial and ethnic varieties
 THE NEW WOMAN, THE SUFFRAGIST, AND THE STAGE 215

of the general population in England, the United States, Europe, Canada, and Asia. She
appeared to the younger generation of Virginia Woolf ’s age as outdated, puritanical,
high-minded, and impossibly stuffy, but in her contemporary afterlife, she is inclined
to enjoy lesbian sex and a deeply divided attitude toward modernity. In the West, she
tends to express the goals of liberal individualism except where her connection to com-
munity advances to the fore. In the East, she comes to be associated with the ambiva-
lence of modernity as a rejection of traditional authority. The New Woman is, in her
individualist representation, profoundly apolitical, yet she morphed seamlessly into her
suffragist sister. She has both been relegated to the past of (racist, classist, homophobic)
first-wave feminism and been reimagined as a third-wave feminist who happened to live
one hundred years ago. She haunts us with her promise and her limits. Her partner, the
New Man, appears erratically and not generally in the vicinity of the New Woman. But
if gender is, as some have suggested, a relational concept, then looking for links between
the New Woman and the new man should shed light on both.

Notes
1. The groundbreaking archival work of scholars like Hazel Carby and Claudia Tate has enabled
attention to the New Negro Woman. Recent discussions of the actual and iconic women of
this group include Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual
and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2007); Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New
Woman, 1895–1915 (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2005); and Anastasia Curwood,
“The Marriage of the New Woman and the New Negro,” paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Studies Association, 2009, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/
p114076_index.html.
2. As Jo Tanner and others have shown, the early black dramatic actress faced more numerous
and difficult obstacles to pursuing a stage career than her middle-class white counterpart.
She confronted not only racist stereotypes perpetuated by minstrel shows but also the
syndicate’s control of New York bookings during the 1910s. Their exclusion from syndicate
theatres, however, aided black performers in producing all-black troupes like the Lafayette
Players, which offered training and performing venues to aspiring actors. The equivocal
position of the white actress—both glamorous and suspect, both socially mobile and
carefully watched—would have extended to very few black actresses who faced institutional
and long-term barriers to successful performing careers. See Jo A. Tanner, Dusky Maidens:
The Odyssey of the Early Black Dramatic Actress (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992).
3. Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women:  Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture
(London: Routledge, 1991).
4. Quoted in Albert Auster, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theatre, 1890–
1920 (New York: Praeger, 1984), 81.
5. Lois Gottlieb, Rachel Crothers (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 28.
6. Rachel Crothers, The Three of Us (electronic edition by Alexander Street Press, 2011),
108. Also published in The Three of Us, A Play in Four Acts (New York: Samuel French,
1916).
216 KATHERINE E. KELLY

7. Lois Gottlieb, “Looking to Women:  Rachel Crothers and the Feminist Heroine,” in
Women in American Theatre: Careers, Images, Movements–An Illustrated Anthology and
Sourcebook, edited by Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins (New York: Crown,
1981), 137.
8. Quoted in Gottlieb, Rachel Crothers, 33.
9. Rachel Crothers, a successful commercial playwright, tellingly avoided this topic, not from
indifference but from a reluctance to appear narrowly partisan or antimale in her interests.
See Gottlieb, Rachel Crothers, 75.
10. Bettina Friedl has collected US suffrage dramas in her anthology, On to Victory: Propaganda
Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987).
11. Mary Burrill, for example, published two of her best-known birth-control plays in 1919.
They That Sit in Darkness appeared in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review, a monthly
publication advocating reproductive rights for women; Aftermath appeared in Liberator,
edited by Max Eastman.
12. Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (London: Virago, 1981).

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Choi, Hyaeweol. 2004. An American Concubine in Old Korea:  Missionary Discourse on
Gender, Race, and Modernity. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 25.3: 134–61.
Collins, Tracy. 2010. Athletic Fashion, Punch, and the Creation of the New Woman. Victorian
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Dymkowski, Christine. 2004. Case Study:  Cicely Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s, 1908.
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UK: Nottingham Drama Texts.
Grand, Sarah. 2001. The New Aspect of the Woman Question. In A New Woman Reader: Fiction,
Articles, and Drama of the 1890s, edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson. Peterborough,
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Griffiths, Linda. 2007. Age of Arousal. Toronto: Coach House.
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Hamilton, Cicely. 2003. Diana of Dobson’s. Edited by Diane F. Gillespie and Doryjane Birrer.
Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview.
Heilmann, Ann. 2004. New Woman Strategies:  Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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(December): 575–84.
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Jusová, Iveta. 2005. The New Woman and the Empire. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
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 CHAPTER 14

T H E R I SE OF A F R IC A N A M E R IC A N
DR A M A , 1 82 2 – 7 9

M A RV I N MC A L L I ST E R

What constitutes an African American drama? Is it a staged narrative that simply

brings Afro-Diasporic experiences in the Americas into greater focus, or is it a cultural
product that marries authorship and racial identity? Should we limit this particular
dramatic heritage to black writers or are white playwrights eligible to participate in the
birth and growth of African American dramatic and theatrical production? A quick
glance at colonial and early national American dramas reveals that Euro-American
dramatists were very much involved in scripting second-hand versions of emergent
African American identities and experiences. The white Philadelphia playwright John
Murdock, in his comedy The Triumphs of Love; or, Happy Reconciliation (1794), became
the first American playwright to directly address slavery and the possibility of assimilat-
ing Africans into America’s cultural fabric (Nathans 2009, 40).
Expanding on the crucial issue of citizenship, perhaps the birth of African American
drama is about the politics and economics of representation, in other words, about art-
ists committed to creating roles for real Negro actors to embody? This stipulation would
disqualify perceptive white writers like John Murdock who crafted stage Africans to be
played by white actors in various shades of brown, beige, or blackface. The earliest docu-
mented drama, written expressly for African American actors, did not surface until the
early 1820s, and it was written by a writer of color, William Brown. As the manager of
an all-Negro acting company in Manhattan, Brown wrote and staged an original piece,
eventually titled The Drama of King Shotaway (1822), to create material for his unique
troupe.
The particulars of who is writing what for whom will always play a significant role
in American dramatic production, branding, and politics; however, this essay does not
focus on racial identity as the primary qualification for the birth of African American
drama. Instead, I  isolate two unique factors or conditions precipitating the gradual
emergence of a black dramatic tradition in nineteenth-century America. The first con-
dition is uniquely American and deals with how and where black and white theatrical
 THE RISE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1822–79 219

producers staged African experiences. These artists operated in a representational cli-

mate that was restrictive at best and hostile at worst to the African American image
onstage and beyond. To develop the most conducive forms and forums for dramas of
African American life, black and white playwrights, along with black performers, exper-
imented with minor and major theatrical material in traditional and nontraditional
theatrical spaces. The second factor for this dramatic emergence relates to content and
is decidedly Afro-Diasporic, in that it speaks to the complex narratives of New World
Africans reconstituting identities and cultures in the Americas. Early African American
dramas, according to Daphne Brooks, were about “the self-actualizing process of libera-
tion and ‘reconstructed’ black identity formation” (2007, 13). Early national playwrights,
their black dramatic figures, amateur and professional actors, and integrated audiences
were all actively figuring out “how do we know ourselves” after the trauma of slavery. As
a service to its citizens, old and new, the African American drama helped a young nation
negotiate a significant transition from slavery to freedom.
This essay tracks the American and Afro-Diasporic birthing factors through four
black dramas produced over the course of the nineteenth century. These texts include
plays by two different William Browns: a ship’s steward turned Manhattan theatrical
manager, William Brown, who wrote Drama of King Shotaway; and an antislavery agent
turned novelist, dramatist, and lyricist, William Wells Brown, who wrote The Escape; or,
A Leap for Freedom (1857–58). According to historical documents, The Drama of King
Shotaway debuted in January 1822, but regrettably the text no longer exists, that is, if
William Brown ever recorded his original drama on actual pages. Escape premiered as
a solo piece at an abolitionist meeting in 1857, and William Wells Brown later printed
the text in 1858, making it the first published play by an African American. The third
selected text comes from the white journalist turned playwright Joseph Bradford, who
wrote a musical drama titled Out of Bondage (1876), which was popularized by the mul-
titalented, concertizing Hyers sisters. The final piece is another musical drama, Peculiar
Sam; or, The Underground Railroad (1879), which the singer, novelist, journalist, and dra-
matist Pauline E. Hopkins created expressly for the blackface minstrel star Sam Lucas.

Form and Forum: Creating Spaces for

African American Drama

To establish the proper form and forum for the birth of African American drama,
American artists first had to contend with the Anglo-American legacy of “major” and
“minor” theatrical stratification. This brand of aesthetic hierarchy and British colonial
retention dates back to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603), the age-defining monarch who
appreciated the seductive power of the stage, and, therefore, she restricted “official” the-
atrical production to her most loyal subjects. This relationship between royal author-
ity and theatrical institutions was formalized through the 1737 Licensing Act, which
220 MARVIN MCALLISTER

established two patent theaters in London, Drury Lane and Covent Garden (Conolly
1976). Patent or major theaters were authorized by the Crown to perform legitimate
dramas and comedies, while nonpatent or minor theaters were restricted to illegitimate
pantomimes, ballad operas, and melodramas.
In her work on the British patent system, the theater historian Jane Moody explores
how major theaters functioned as cultural authorities, the unquestioned seats of repre-
sentational power. Nevertheless, she found that competition between London’s major
and minor theaters still flourished because the nonpatent theaters engendered exciting
“counter-public spheres” or subversive alternatives to those major, sanctioned enter-
tainments (Moody 2000). For example, although English melodrama first emerged in
patent houses, this illegitimate, fiercely experimental blend of dumb shows, musical
subtext, and visual spectacle truly flourished in the less conventional, minor theaters.
Even after the licensing act was lifted in 1843, London theater audiences still overwhelm-
ingly preferred and supported this novel and eccentric entertainment born of theatrical
licensing. As the United States forged a new nation, minor representational forms, like
melodrama, minstrelsy, and musicals, would emerge as the bedrock of American theat-
rical production.
Susan Smith, in her study of “bastard” American drama (1997), argued that our
national theater should embrace its nonpatent roots and boldly treat the criticisms often
leveled at minor theaters—aggressively political, culturally specific, and too socially
engaged—as strengths, not weaknesses. By embracing such unique pejoratives, Smith
contends that a history of American drama would emerge where the defining aesthetic is
a vibrant “illegitimacy” marked by political dissension and theatrical experimentation.
The black and white architects of African American drama were committed to exactly
this kind of dynamic counterpublic sphere and were not interested in merely replicating
legitimate European dramas. It is no coincidence that three of the four dramas exam-
ined in this essay rely on melodramatic conventions, specifically popular music as emo-
tional subtext. America’s nineteenth-century theatrical producers and performers were
not above capitalizing on “low-brow” theatrical forms, from the ballad opera to melo-
drama to blackface minstrelsy.
Perhaps the only playwright of our four to embrace conventional dramatic form
was William Brown, but, of course, we can never say with absolute certainty because
an actual text of Shotaway has never been discovered. As far as we know, the origi-
nal Mr. Brown was the first black playwright to create and stage a play in the United
States, but beyond achieving this important theatrical first, this former maritime
worker turned theater owner was well known for cultivating alternative theatrical
spaces where overt confrontation, even insurrection, was staged and celebrated.
Brown’s politically and socially engaged theatrical forum began with an arrest in
January 1822, when he and his company of Negro thespians were jailed for perform-
ing Shakespeare. They were guilty of staging several “unsanctioned” Shakespearean
productions at Hampton’s Hotel in New York City, next door to the esteemed Park
Theatre, the then de facto major theater in the city (Hay 1994; McAllister 2003;
Thompson 1998). Once Brown and company agreed to no longer produce the Bard
 THE RISE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1822–79 221

in their regular repertoire, municipal and cultural authorities released the transgres-
sive, trespassing Negro artists.
Several days after the Hampton’s Hotel arrests, on January 16, 1822, a New York news-
paper, The Spectator, or Commercial Advertiser, ran a portion of Brown’s latest playbill.
It said, “Mr. Brown manager of the Minor Theatre respectfully informs the public, that
in consequence of the breaking up of his theatrical establishment, there will be no per-
formance this week” (Thompson 1998, 87). By renaming his establishment the “Minor
Theatre,” the Negro manager appeared to honor the terms of their jail release and to
accept the overt message behind the arrests: an all-black acting company was a minor
venture at best and would not be allowed to regularly perform Shakespeare in New York
City. One could read the January 1822 Minor Theatre announcement as capitulation to
Manhattan’s informal replication of the major-minor theatrical hierarchy, but Brown’s
true intentions would soon emerge. Although he publicly agreed to play illegitimate to
the Park’s legitimate, the Negro manager’s Minor Theatre did not intend to limit itself to
strictly nondramatic material.
On the same Minor Theatre bill, Brown announced the world premiere of a seemingly
legitimate drama, Shotaway; or, The Insurrection of the Caribs of St. Domingo (Thompson
1998, 87). Immediately after the published portions of the program, the Spectator’s edito-
rial staff praised this dramatic first as a liberating event: “Thus it seems that these descen-
dants of Africa are determined to carry into full practice the doctrine of liberty and
equality, physically by acting plays and mentally by writing them.” Apparently, Brown
had been working on this drama well before the Shakespeare arrests, and the unfortu-
nate interruption of his Hampton’s Hotel residency delayed its premiere. A year and a
half later, in June 1823, Brown would remount his original drama but with a significant
title change. He now publicized the newly christened The Drama of King Shotaway as a
drama about a Carib Indian insurrection on the island of St. Vincent (Thompson 1998,
136). How interesting that the first African American drama was not about American
Negroes but about native islanders in the Caribbean, but more on this complex Native
American–Afro-Diasporic fusion later.
Although a manuscript has never been found, this has not stopped the theater his-
torian Samuel Hay from speculating on the form of Brown’s dramatic first. Hay theo-
rizes that, given the style of Brown’s past productions, the manager probably “spiked”
his original drama “with so many popular songs and dances” (1994, 192). By “spiked,”
Hay is referencing an intertextual aesthetic that Brown cultivated and encouraged in
his theaters, best exemplified by strategic interpolations of popular ballads directly into
Shakespeare’s Richard III (McAllister 2003). Based on this tendency to blend major and
minor material, combined with the aforementioned Shakespeare arrests and a separate
audience-induced riot in August 1822, Brown’s theater had acquired a reputation as a site
of public disturbance where anything could and often did happen, onstage and offstage.
Hay implies that despite the serious subject matter, a West Indian insurrection, Brown’s
Shotaway would have endeavored to entertain his unruly, pleasure-seeking patrons by
any means necessary.
222 MARVIN MCALLISTER

Given Brown’s managerial embrace of illegitimate and legitimate forms, anything

was possible, but I doubt he interjected musical selections into the remount produc-
tion of his first known drama. A closer look at the June 1823 playbill reveals that Brown’s
lead performer, James Hewlett, and the other company members planned to perform
an assortment of songs and dances after the dramatic centerpiece. Also, these sum-
mer 1823 performances were announced as potentially Brown’s final evenings with the
company he created, and as he exited stage left, Brown worked to define his theatrical
reputation on his own terms and to not leave that legacy to sneering newspaper editors,
hooligans, or rival theatrical managers. Insurrectionary content aside, the mere act of
staging a serious drama constituted a form of rebellion against the aesthetic and munici-
pal powers that viewed his forum for Negro talent as strictly minor. In response to white
antagonisms and competitive jealousies, these final performances constituted Brown’s
theatrical last stand, a defining moment metaphorically on par with King Shotaway’s
valiant but doomed uprising against numerically superior British forces.
The second Mr. Brown, William Wells Brown, authored fiction and nonfiction, lec-
tured on the antislavery circuit, served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad,
and even studied to become a physician. W. W. Brown began his multifaceted, omni-
directional journey as a runaway slave from Cincinnati, Ohio, and as a fugitive, he
adopted the new name Wells Brown from the kind Quaker who aided in his escape.
His autobiography, The Narrative of William W. Brown, was published in 1847, and his
major work of fiction, Clotel, the first novel by an African American, was published in
1853. As a prolific and politically committed former slave, Brown rivaled other Negro
runaways turned authors, especially Frederick Douglass, for prominence in the anti-
slavery movement. And what separated Brown from other abolitionists, black or white,
was his firm conviction that to win converts to universal freedom, abolitionists needed
to diversify the forms and forums in which they presented their arguments (Ernest 1998;
Farrison 1969).
After delivering straight lectures, then experimenting with antislavery songs set to
popular melodies, William Wells Brown finally discovered dramatic presentations as a
novel and most effective way to deliver his liberation message. Brown started scripting
and staging one-man shows in which he assumed multiple roles—slave, slave master,
sympathetic abolitionist—and he received such positive feedback that he decided to
transform most of his scheduled lectures into dramatic performances. In his defense of
theater as a proper forum for abolitionist rhetoric, Brown explained how “people will
pay to hear the Drama that would not give a cent in an anti-slavery meeting” (Farrison
1969, 279, 294). Brown had the numbers to prove it; he reported that one night of his solo
show, charging ten cents at the door, could earn five dollars for the great cause, while
three nights of straight lectures typically brought in only ninety-five cents.
In February 1857, Brown began performing his drama The Escape; or, A  Leap for
Freedom on the antislavery lecture circuit and in independent public appearances. In
1858, Brown published The Escape, and thus we have the first extant black dramatic text
to officially mark a potential birth of this tradition (Farrison 1969, 282–84). As far as
form, The Escape was a perfectly illegitimate, counterpublic, minor theater product; it
 THE RISE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1822–79 223

was an odd amalgamation of melodrama and blackface minstrelsy, but it was a combi-
nation that made sense for mid-nineteenth-century America.
The melodramatic, romantic portion of The Escape tells the story of two black lovers,
Glen and Melinda, who are intent on escaping the villainous slaveowner Dr. Gaines and
his equally sadistic wife. Writing about melodrama, racial representation, and national
identity, Linda Williams explains how “melodrama is a fundamental mode by which
American culture has dealt with the problem of moral legibility” (2001, 43). Because
race and ethnicity “represent a primary and enduring moral dilemma of America,” the
racial melodrama has proven crucial in decoding and understanding our thorny, often
divided national culture. Williams argues that the most intriguing aspect of this coun-
try’s continually staged “moral dilemma” is how audiences tended to identify with and
rally around the slave heroes and heroines, the “racially beset victims” of bondage (43).
Based on Williams’s argument, the white patrons attending George L. Aiken’s 1853 adap-
tation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which also blended
melodrama and minstrelsy, were rooting for Topsy or George Harris to triumph over
Simon Legree. Emulating Stowe and Aiken and following the established pattern of
America’s racial dilemma turned melodrama, W. W. Brown turned seemingly victim-
ized runaway slaves into cunning and relatable protagonists.
The minstrel half of Brown’s The Escape relies on a crudely comedic and morally
ambiguous character named Cato who nearly steals the show from the melodramatic
hero and heroine, Glen and Melinda. As an antislavery lecturer in the early 1840s, Brown
had launched his oratorical career just as the producer Edwin P.  Christy was intro-
ducing and popularizing the long-form minstrel show format in New York City. Both
Brown and Christy were competing for control of black male imaging, and, as the his-
torian Paul Gilmore boldly claims, in the “early 1850s minstrelsy provided perhaps the
best forum through which to construct a viable representative black manhood” (1997,
744–46). W. W. Brown fully understood the allure and power of blackface. Ironically,
blackface minstrelsy, what Linda Williams calls “the quintessential expression of white
male racist power and potency,” was also a most potent theatrical vehicle for carrying
the antislavery message of writers like Stowe and Brown (2001, 65).
Before Brown staged The Escape in 1857, numerous minstrel “Tom shows” were criss-
crossing the nation and using Stowe’s (or Aiken’s) Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a public forum
for debating slavery: the kind of serious conversations normally reserved for legislatures,
Supreme Court cases, and political campaigns. Taking more than a few cues from politi-
cized blackface performance, W. W. Brown crafted a unique specialty act in his Cato, a
“representative black manhood” who served to interject popular minstrel material into
an abolitionist context, and vice versa. Earlier in his antislavery agent career, Brown
discovered that “songs contributed to the progress of abolitionism” and so in July 1848,
he published The Anti-Slavery Harp:  A  Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings
(Farrison 1969, 122–23). Brown would interpolate one piece from this collection, “Song of
Freedom,” into the third act of his one-man show The Escape (Hamalian and Hatch 1990,
67–69). This abolitionist ballad, with its soaring liberation rhetoric, would be executed by
the risible Cato and reenergized by the popular minstrel air “Dandy Jim.”
224 MARVIN MCALLISTER

As for delivery, Cato’s lyrical call for bondsmen to “leap” for freedom is remark-
ably free of Negro dialect; in fact, this is the only moment in The Escape where the
blackface-flavored Cato completely transcends minstrel speech. Paul Gilmore reads
theatrical moments like Cato’s freedom song as W. W. Brown mastering the precari-
ous balancing act of “the professional fugitive.” In abolitionist performance contexts,
most audiences expected slaves turned agents, like Brown or Frederick Douglass, to
embody both “the illiterate plantation darkey of the minstrel stage and an eloquent
defender of his race” (Gilmore 1997, 744). Unlike the minstrel pioneer T. D. Rice, who
could bring down houses with his “Jumpin’ Jim Crow” caricature, Brown had to deliver
“down-home” humor cut with effective rhetorical skill. Despite these unrealistic, per-
haps unfair expectations, Brown achieved this sambo-savant symmetry within each
lecture/performance, which was probably his greatest contribution to the antislavery
circuit, American solo performance, and the emergence of African American drama.
The second Mr. Brown arrived at the perfect confluence of form and forum, as he tapped
into the minstrel tradition, free of blackface, combined that with emotionally exploit-
ative melodrama, and integrated this minor theatrical material into an abolitionist arena
where intelligence and performative acuity were respected and in great demand.
The last two playwrights, Joseph Bradford and Pauline E. Hopkins, had significant
work to do in order to match the significant form and forum contributions of both
William Browns, but they would receive ample assistance from their Negro talent.
Both Bradford and Hopkins featured Sam Lucas, a blackface minstrel veteran, in their
pioneering musical dramas, and, without the multitalented Anna Madah and Emma
Louise Hyers Bradford’s Out of Bondage would have never existed. Managed by their
father, Sam Hyers, the two sisters originally toured as a vocal ensemble known as the
Hyers Sisters Concert Company. From 1871 to 1875, they rendered arias and ballads in
small towns and major cities throughout the country. But in 1875, a white producing
organization headquartered in Boston, the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, assumed manage-
rial control of this small troupe, converted the black concertizing sisters into a dramatic
outfit, and introduced the white writer Joseph Bradford into a brand-new world of inter-
racial theatrical production (Southern and Root 1994, xiv–xv).
Originally from Tennessee, Bradford was born into one of the wealthiest slave-owning
families in the state, but he relocated to Boston where he worked as a journalist for the
Boston Courier while writing poems and plays on the side. Most of Bradford’s plays were
light dramas and comedies, and Out of Bondage, written in 1876, was his only musi-
cal drama. Out of Bondage is about a group of escaped slaves and their transition from
slavery to freedom, so not surprisingly, the Redpath Bureau identified Bradford’s work
as the ideal starring vehicle for the Hyers. During the 1876–77 season, Redpath and the
Hyers toured Out of Bondage to opera houses, music halls, churches, and prisons across
the nation, performing for lower-, middle-, and upper-class audiences (Southern and
Root 1994, xxii). For advanced press, Redpath publicized Bradford’s work as “The Great
Moral Musical Drama” and instructed audiences that this special production should
not be confused with a traditional minstrel show (Southern and Root 1994, xv). This
particular branding approach, a moral musical drama, suggests that Bradford was
 THE RISE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1822–79 225

directly addressing the conjoined issues of race, slavery, and emancipation, which Linda
Williams has identified as America’s most enduring “moral dilemma.”
As a black Bostonian who attended the Redpath/Hyers tour, Pauline E. Hopkins was
profoundly inspired by Bradford’s moral and uniquely nonminstrel Out of Bondage.
Writing about the production years later, she recalled how “the introduction of this
drama, in which, for the first time, all the characters were represented by colored peo-
ple, marks an era in the progress of the race.” She also remarked that not “until under-
taken by these ladies, was it thought possible for Negroes to appear in the legitimate
drama” (Hopkins 2007, 120). For Hopkins, this production marked the birth of African
American drama primarily because real actors of color, not Irish American minstrel
counterfeits, were realizing the Negro characters onstage. In addition, a reminiscing
Hopkins recategorized this advertised “Great Moral Musical Drama” as a “legitimate
drama,” effectively subverting the major-minor theatrical hierarchy that had literally
incarcerated a black drama pioneer like William Brown. Finally, Hopkins clearly assigns
most of the credit for this dramatic breakthrough to the leading ladies, to the Hyers sis-
ters, and she never mentions the white playwright Joseph Bradford.
Hopkins probably gave most of the praise to the dynamic Hyers because these women
mirrored her early artistic aspirations. Years before earning acclaim as a writer, Hopkins
ventured into the entertainment world as a singer and was even dubbed “Boston’s
Favorite Colored Soprano” (Wallinger 2005, 32). In 1877, inspired by Bradford’s Out of
Bondage, Hopkins scripted her first play, Aristocracy, A Musical Drama in Three Acts,
but her first produced play, eventually titled Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad,
debuted two years later. Hopkins wrote Peculiar Sam for Sam Lucas, a Boston-based
blackface minstrel star with Callender’s Georgia Minstrels (Southern and Root 1994,
xxiii). Much like W.  W. Brown, Hopkins was not above flirting with blackface min-
strelsy; in fact, Hopkins used Brown’s minstrel turned abolitionist trickster Cato as the
template for her title character (Wallinger 2005, 42).
During the spring of 1879, Z. W. Sprague, owner of the Original Georgia Minstrels,
took this Sam Lucas vehicle on the road, thus making Hopkins the first African
American writer to have a musical produced in the United States. At the time, Hopkins’s
work was titled The Great Moral Drama:  Underground Railroad, and Sprague’s aptly
titled Underground Railroad Company toured the musical throughout the Midwest.
Initial reviews declared the production more minstrel than moral, devoid of a plot, and
merely an excuse to stage some “excellently rendered plantation melodies” (Southern
and Root 1994, xxiv). Like Bradford, Hopkins did rely heavily on well-worn antebellum
imagery; however, she aspired toward something more dynamic than a thin story domi-
nated by minstrel songs or plantation jubilees. In July 1880, Hopkins seized artistic con-
trol from Sprague, when she created the Hopkins Colored Troubadours and restaged her
moral musical drama at a Boston amusement park named Oakland Gardens, under a
new title, Slave’s Escape; or, The Underground Railroad. Hopkins starred in this remount,
alongside her parents, Sam Lucas, and her role models, the Hyers sisters, and local crit-
ics lauded this retooled incarnation as a “stirring comedy-drama” (Hopkins 2007, 288;
Southern and Root 1994, xxiv–xxv; Wallinger 2005, 35–36).
226 MARVIN MCALLISTER

Bradford and Hopkins advanced the African American dramatic form not with dra-
matized insurrections or minstrel-melodrama fusions, but through a performer-driven
ballad opera format. The ballad opera was a specific variety of English opera in which a
simple plot was developed through original lyrics set to recognizable or traditional mel-
odies. This minor theatrical form first arrived in colonial America as French and English
“second companies” took up temporary residence in larger cities and tried to offer lei-
sure alternatives to the major, established theaters. The ballad opera reached its zenith
in American theaters in the early 1800s, so by the 1870s when Bradford and Hopkins
produced their musical dramas, the form was somewhat antiquated. Nevertheless, the
ballad opera format allowed both writers to use popular tunes as a quick way to estab-
lish local color and efficiently advance their narratives (Porter 1991; Southern and Root
1994). Bradford’s Out of Bondage appropriated well-known (at least among Negroes)
spirituals to recreate some semblance of the slave community and also used plantation
minstrel favorites, like Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night” (1853)
and “Old Folks at Home” (1851), to generate a sense of nostalgia for certain patrons. The
touring production of Out of Bondage developed such a strong relationship with black-
face minstrelsy that, during the 1877–78 season, black and white minstrel composers
wrote ballads exclusively for this moral musical drama.
As a ballad opera, or what Eileen Southern calls a “musical character drama,” Out
of Bondage afforded established stars like Sam Lucas the improvisational space in
which to rework familiar tunes and generate new material. Southern even argues “the
label of playwright should also be applied to the actor-musicians of the Hyers Sisters
Combination, for it is clear that they contributed quite literally to the making of the
‘Great Moral Musical Drama’ ” (Southern and Root 1994, xvi). Fresh from his years
as a minstrel Endman with Callender’s Georgia Minstrels, Lucas introduced new
character-driven specialties into Out of Bondage, even if they were incidental to the plot.
Although Redpath publicity worked to distance the touring production from blackface
performance, their press releases proudly proclaimed Lucas’s specialties were among
the “most attractive and amusing features” (Southern and Root 1994, xli).
Upon closer inspection, Joseph Bradford and Pauline E. Hopkins may have been too
reliant on Lucas’s talent. According to the ballad opera format, lyricists typically wrote
new plot-related lyrics to put a fresh spin on a familiar tune. However, Bradford did not
provide a single new lyric for Out of Bondage; instead he expected the Hyers sisters and
Sam Lucas to “improvise their own texts in accordance with the sentiment expressed
in the context of the dialogue” (Southern and Root 1994, xix). Likewise, Hopkins wrote
only two new songs for Peculiar Sam. For the rest of the vocal numbers, she trusted Sam
Lucas would introduce suitable lyrics from his personal repertoire, lines he deemed
proper for his character if not the narrative. Hopkins even includes a note to this effect in
her original script; she wrote that it was “more important that Lucas be given an oppor-
tunity to showcase his latest inventions than that his songs contribute to plot develop-
ment” (Southern and Root 1994, xxvi). Apparently Hopkins was willing to sacrifice
dramatic structure for improvisational brilliance, so let us examine the narratives and
identity journeys these playwrights brought to the stage.
 THE RISE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1822–79 227

Content: Making and Remaking New

World African Identities

Hopkins’s and Bradford’s pioneering plays were publicized as “moral dramas,” but
what was distinctly moral about their work? Eileen Southern explains that both Out
of Bondage and Peculiar Sam worked toward “the spiritual and moral uplift of all of
humanity,” and this “moral theater by African Americans served to draw the races
closer together” (Southern and Root 1994, xi–xiii). This complex and protracted pro-
cess of bridging America’s racial divide began with the two William Browns, who staged
national and hemispheric tales of communal and individual transition. According to
Daphne Brooks, the featured characters in early black dramas were engaged in trans-
forming “the uncertainties of (black) self-knowledge directly into literal and figurative
acts of self-affirmation.” These theatrical figures “confronted the ‘strange meaning’ of
African American identity formation in the ominous historical arc stretching from the
period of antebellum slavery into the early twentieth century” (2007, 3). All four play-
wrights were committed to staging this progression of ex-slaves and other postcolonials
from subjugation to freedom and unlimited possibilities.
Not all literary critics were enamored with the moral mission of early African
American drama. Echoing the stock criticisms leveled at “bastard” early American dra-
mas, the critic J. Saunders Redding declared that William Wells Brown knew nothing
about the stage and that The Escape was “marred by didacticism and heroic sentimental-
ity, its chief characters are but the pawns in the hands of Purpose” (1939, 25, 28). Redding
accused Brown, an antislavery agent, of propagandistic writing because his dramatic
situations and characters were engineered to advance a specific moral and political pur-
pose: the abolition of slavery. Another critic, William Edward Farrison, concluded that
W. W. Brown never did anything original with stock plantation and abolitionist figures
and that when he tried to heighten the language of his hero and heroine, their imitation
Shakespearean soliloquies were uninspired. For Farrison, this was “the worst defect in
the drama,” because by trying to write beautifully instead of simply, Brown made his
characters sound artificial. Farrison’s final and most damning critique: “there is little or
no character development as the action proceeds” (1969, 303–4).
True, over the course of Brown’s minstrel melodrama, neither Glen nor Melinda’s arcs
develop, but this is because they are ideal or aspirational characters. Literary critics like
Redding and Farrison failed to appreciate this important aspect of Brown’s Escape, while
the theater historians James Hatch and Leo Hamalian understood that Brown intention-
ally scripted his melodramatic hero and heroine as “excessively rhetorical” to demon-
strate the depth of thought and feeling Negro slaves were capable of, once fully liberated.
(Hatch and Hamalian 1990, 40). If we remember that the forums for W. W. Brown’s per-
formances were abolitionist meetings and lectures, we can appreciate the significance
of his characters’ rhetorical skill and understand why he projected forward to what
Negroes could be once the proverbial veil of bondage had been lifted.
228 MARVIN MCALLISTER

However, there is indeed character and moral development in The Escape; this dif-
ficult transition from enslaved mentality to liberated self-possession is wonderfully
embodied by Cato, Brown’s blackface minstrel diversion. Cato begins his identity jour-
ney as a selfish house servant who glories in his positions as Dr. Gaines’s medical assis-
tant and Mrs. Gaines’s favored personal servant. Yet even after Mrs. Gaines awards Cato
a slave named Hannah for his wife, he still questions his status as property and launches
into “Song of Freedom,” set to the minstrel melody “Dandy Jim.” By the end of this Act 3
specialty, Cato exhorts all bondsmen, including house servants, to abandon an allegedly
“Christian” America and to flee to Canada where they would be “slaves no more” (Hatch
and Hamalian 1990, 68–69). But a restless Cato does more than merely vocalize his aspi-
rations; he schemes to reach Canada and part of his strategy involves pretending to hunt
Glen and Melinda. In Act 5, scene 4, when Canada is merely a Niagara River–crossing
away, a transformed Cato reveals to the fugitive Glen and Melinda that he is actually
“hunting” freedom and not them (Hatch and Hamalian 1990, 92). In dramatizing these
three stages of emancipation—dissatisfaction to recognition to action—from Cato’s
perspective, Brown uncovered a wealth of character and moral development.
According to Eileen Southern, Hopkins and Bradford created similar characters in
transition, figures who exuded “an innate dignity that demands respect for black cul-
ture” (Southern and Root, 1994, xv, xx). Generating new respect for African American
culture is clearly the agenda in the second act of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Peculiar Sam.
Before running away from their plantation, Hopkins has a group of fugitive slaves pause
to perform the well-known spiritual “Steal Away” (Hatch and Hamalian 1990, 110). On
the contemporaneous blackface minstrel stage, this particular spiritual had grown into
a crowd favorite despite being completely disconnected from its original purpose. For
decades, white audiences were moved by this plaintive jubilee without realizing this
melody constituted a secret call for slaves to join a soon-departing group of fugitives.
The biographer Hanna Wallinger argues that, in Hopkins’s musical, the slaves’ perfor-
mance of “Steal Away” restored the “original and literal meaning of stealing away from
slavery into freedom” (2005, 38). And by staging “Steal Away” in its proper context, a
history of slave resistance through escape, Hopkins challenged audiences to recognize,
appreciate, and respect this specific aspect of African American experience.
Much like the antislavery agent William Wells Brown, Hopkins and Bradford used
their post-emancipation, moral, musical dramas to dramatize an inspirational transi-
tion from enslavement to freedom. Eileen Southern notes how both writers intentionally
depicted African Americans as adapting “to the new lifestyles brought on by emancipa-
tion” (Southern and Root 1994, xiii). Theater critics fully recognized and even respected
these productions as transformative slavery-to-freedom narratives. An Illinois review
of Bradford’s Out of Bondage remarked how the play “was constructed for the purpose
of representing the improvement the race is capable of making when released from the
curse of slavery and made free” (Southern and Root 1994, xlii). For example, in Act 4,
which takes place five years after his group of former slaves have adjusted to emancipa-
tion in the north, Bradford stages a significant musical contrast. The act launches with
a plantation melody performed by a “jolly and wild,” minstrel-tinged character named
 THE RISE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1822–79 229

Henry, but the bulk of this post-emancipation statement of transition showcases a

Negro quartet singing selections from operas like Trovatore and Ernani.
The same Illinois critic remarked favorably that this Act 4 emphasis on “a higher class
of music” demonstrated “the culture which education and years of freedom have pro-
duced.” Extending the musical conversation further, another reviewer from Iowa mar-
veled at how the colored company were not only bringing true “honor and pathos” to
their own jubilees, like “Steal Away,” but also challenging “the white race in their artistic
execution of the higher class of music” (Southern and Root 1994, xlii). Over a decade
removed from slavery, the Hyers sisters and their supporting cast powerfully demon-
strated the impact of freedom on the cultural maturation of African Americans. The
sisters, with assistance from Joseph Bradford, pushed black theatrical production well
beyond blackface minstrelsy, thus creating a template for subsequent groundbreaking
musical theater producers like the Whitman Sisters, Sam T. Jack, John W. Isham, Bob
Cole, and Will Marion Cook.
Pauline E.  Hopkins’s Peculiar Sam further repositioned black identities in a
post-emancipation America. Her musical journey begins with the familiar planta-
tion types popularized on the minstrel stage and revisited in Brown’s antislavery vehi-
cle Escape or in Bradford’s moral musical Out of Bondage. Because Peculiar Sam was
written expressly for him, Sam Lucas took great license in developing the title charac-
ter, and, according to Southern, he produced “a quick-witted, highly respected slave,
successful as a leader, ingenious, and able to propel his several projects to the desired
end” (Southern and Root 1994, xxv). Firmly in control of the physical and psychological
action, Peculiar Sam advances the entire drama through disguise, song, and schemes.
Most crucial to Hopkins’s moral mission of racial uplift, Lucas’s reformed minstrel trick-
ster helps a group of runaway slaves process their impending liberation.
At the close of Act 3, as a group of fugitives wait to cross one last river, Caesar, an
elderly patriarch, suggests they sing one last plantation tune, and they perform Stephen
Foster’s “Old Kentucky Home.” As they bid adieu to the “sunny Souf,” Sam lucidly sum-
marizes this liminal moment for his fellow travelers, with his Negro dialect fully flowing:

I tell you chillern I feels so happy I doesn’t kno’ mysel’. Jes fee’ dis air, it smells like
freedom; jes see dose trees, dey look like freedom. (points across river) an’ look ober
yonder chillern, look dar good, dat ar am ol’ freedom himsel’ (gets happy, begins to
sing) Dar’s only one mo’ riber to cross.
(Hatch and Hamalian 1990, 118)

An unfamiliar, indescribable happiness makes Sam feel like he no longer knows himself,
but in truth, an ontological breakthrough is reshaping his identity. Through sensorial
suggestions to his fellow runaways, Sam links liberation to their natural surroundings
and anthropomorphizes freedom into a human being worthy of song and emulation.
Even as he undergoes a major personal metamorphosis, Sam effectively guides his fel-
low travelers through a momentous process of shedding the old and embracing new
ways of being in and seeing the world.
230 MARVIN MCALLISTER

In Act 4 of Peculiar Sam, after the Civil War has concluded, many of Hopkins’s for-
mer slaves are established in Canada and adjusting to their new independent identi-
ties. The younger slaves have lost their Negro dialects and achieved respected positions
as teachers and artists. An elderly slave couple, still marked by Southern mannerisms
and cadences, have finally married because they are now completely free of interference
from meddling masters and mistresses. In less than a decade’s time, Sam, their peculiar
ringleader, has become an accomplished and respected free citizen in his native land
and is now running for Congress in Cincinnati, Ohio. According to Hanna Wallinger,
Hopkins’s primary message is that, “when given the opportunity, the African American
becomes respectable, pursues a career, and has success in his life” (2005, 41). Her sec-
ondary message is that the United States has progressed rapidly and experienced an
impressive degree of racial reconciliation.
Yet through her title character Hopkins suggests that racial uplift and national prog-
ress do not necessarily mean total erasure or rejection of one’s past. At the close of the
play, candidate Sam, now completely free of his Negro dialect, directly addresses his for-
mer charges and the audience. He says, “Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you will excuse
me for laying aside the dignity of an elected M.C. and allow me to appear before you
once more as peculiar Sam of the old underground railroad” (Hatch and Hamalian
1994, 123). Assuming permission, Sam reverts to his minstrel yet antislavery persona in
order to launch into a plantation dance to the tune of “Gold Slippers.” Reminiscent of
W. W. Brown’s solo duality, Sam’s reversion establishes that he is both a dignified, proud
African American on the verge of elective office as well as that old peculiar Sam who dis-
sembled to escape bondage and helped others do the same.
Returning to the original black dramatist, William Brown, his African American
dramatic first located this dynamic exploration of identity formation in the New
World beyond our national borders. The former ship’s steward adopted a transnational
approach to uplifting African American, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indian identities.
Brown’s 1823 playbill for The Drama of King Shotaway announced his original drama
was “founded on facts taken from the insurrection of the Caravs [sic] in the island of
St. Vincent” (Thompson 1998, 136). His dramatic agenda was to shed dramatic light
on the native Carib uprising against the British in 1795, led by Chief Joseph Chatoyer
(or Shotaway). As an upstart Negro company already notorious for riots and unsanc-
tioned stagings of Shakespeare’s work, depicting an insurrection could not have been
interpreted as anything less than an aggressively political act. Samuel Hay identifies
Brown’s Shotaway as a play written “strictly for political purposes,” probably in response
to the January 1822 arrests (1994, 11). Although Brown began writing this drama before
the actual arrests, I also read his tongue-in-cheek adoption of the “Minor Theatre” and
his pursuit of legitimate dramas like Shotaway as political responses to the cultural and
municipal forces colluding to shut him down.
Brown’s Shotaway belongs to the same theatrical tradition as Richard Sheridan’s
South American insurrection melodrama Pizarro (1799), a play about the legendary
Native American chief Rolla, which William Brown staged a year before his dramatic
debut. In an article on revolutionary black drama, Errol Hill hails Chief Shotaway as
 THE RISE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1822–79 231

“the first revolutionary hero in black drama” (1986, 409). Following Sheridan’s lead, Mr.
Brown did set a precedent for how New World Africans could theatrically stage revo-
lution, yet why would a retired ship’s steward turned Manhattan theater manager dra-
matize a native rebellion on St. Vincent? Samuel Hay believes Brown may have been a
Garifuna, an Afro-Indian black Carib from St. Vincent, and he may have been staging
his own history (1994). Hay probably reached this conclusion because Brown’s 1823 play-
bill shrewdly advertised the original drama as “written from experience by Mr. Brown.”
However, I doubt Brown was born on St. Vincent primarily because his original 1822
Shotaway playbill placed the Carib insurrection on St. Domingo. If Brown were indeed
born on St. Vincent, he would surely know the difference between his native island and
another one. Even if Brown was not born on St. Vincent, he was committed to staging
this complicated native history as accurately as possible, and his commitment showed
in June 1823 when he corrected his earlier dramaturgical inaccuracy and relocated these
particular Caribs from Santo Domingo to St. Vincent.
Based on colonial texts, we know Chief Joseph Chatoyer and his brother DuValle
once ruled St. Vincent and led their native soldiers in a failed 1795 uprising to oust the
British from their island. In terms of racial heritage, the British claimed this particular
group of Caribs had no natural rights to the land because they were not the original
inhabitants; they were in fact black Caribs descended from Africans. Apparently, years
before, escaped African slaves arrived on St. Vincent and intermixed with the native
Carib population to produce a new Afro-Indian, black Carib identity. In response to
these British accusations and to reassert their claim on the island, Chatoyer and DuValle
denied any African ancestry (Young 1795, 106–7). We do not know how Brown handled
this lingering identity question, but his Drama of King Shotaway playbill from June 1823
clearly designated his native characters as “Caravs” and not black Caribs.
If a controversy over African ancestry was not challenging enough, there was another
potentially unsettling detail in this complicated history. Prior to the 1795 insurrection,
Caribs and Brits coexisted peacefully on the island, with both groups benefiting from
a slave-based economy. Chatoyer and DuValle were prosperous slaveowners thanks to
loans from English planters that allowed the brothers to purchase nine African slaves
and establish a prosperous cotton plantation. Writing about Shotaway, Errol Hill con-
cluded that with two million blacks enslaved in North America, Brown’s 1823 account
of a black Carib struggle against British imperialism could have been interpreted as a
“vivid anti-slavery statement” (1986, 409). In historical reality, the two Carib leaders
were fully benefiting from both human bondage and imperialism. It is possible Brown’s
version of Carib history could have been interpreted as “anti-slavery,” but only if the
Negro manager suppressed the slaveownership by his revolutionary heroes.
As a dramatist, Brown was educating Manhattan with his “eyewitness” account of St.
Vincent’s history, but he surely realized he could not tell the full story. To cater to and
cultivate his Negro patron base, Brown probably omitted the slaveholding details, and
I doubt he included Carib denials of African ancestry. Instead of introducing elements
that might divide or anger his public, Brown presumably focused on revolutionary
rhetoric expressive of universal desires for freedom and dignity. Errol Hill argues that
232 MARVIN MCALLISTER

in chronicling a native nationalist like Chatoyer who fought and died for his people’s
liberty, Brown participated in a common theatrical strategy of staging historical events
that paralleled contemporary concerns (1986, 409). Also, by selecting these seemingly
interracial historical subjects, Brown was identifying and strengthening a hemispheric
bond between two oppressed groups: indigenous Caribs and African slaves. Ironically,
by staging native history with an all-Negro company, Brown effectively re-created the
alleged biological amalgamation of St. Vincent Caribs and escaped Africans. On a trans-
national level, Brown’s revolutionary drama linked African Americans in his imme-
diate Manhattan community to enslaved and colonized communities throughout the
Americas. One obvious postcolonial audience was the white and black New Yorkers
who supported Brown’s Minor Theatre during this formative early national period. An
allegedly firsthand account of revolutionary action against foreign intruders would have
reminded these American citizens, and soon-to-be citizens, of their insurrectionary
heritage.

Conclusion

African American drama emerged from stylistic experimentations with minor and
major theatrical forms and in representational forums shaped by political and moral
agendas. Some critics have dismissed the dramatic efforts of William Wells Brown, along
with much of American drama, because these uniquely national plays prioritized social
purpose over aesthetics or dramatic polish. Yet both William Browns, the white drama-
tist Joseph Bradford, and Pauline E. Hopkins all understood their significant roles in not
just the birth of a dramatic tradition but in the reconstruction of Afro-Diasporic identi-
ties as well as the spiritual healing of a nation. They understood the stakes were high for
their black dramatic subjects and their integrated public, as both groups navigated the
difficult transition from slaves or colonial subjects to the living, moral embodiment of
“ol’ freedom himsel’.”

Works Cited
Brooks, Daphne A. 2007. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performance of Race and Freedom, 1850–
1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Conolly, Leonard W. 1976. The Censorship of English Drama, 1737–1824. San Marino,
CA: Huntington Library.
Ernest, John. 1998. The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Brown’s The Escape; Or,
A Leap for Freedom. PMLA 112, no. 5: 1108–21.
Farrison, William Edward. 1969. William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Gilmore, Paul. 1997. “De Genwine Artekil”: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy and
Abolitionism. American Literature 68, no. 4: 743–80.
 THE RISE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1822–79 233

Hamalian, Leo, and James Hatch, eds. 1990. The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology
of Early Plays, 1858–1938. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Hay, Samuel. 1994. African-American Theatre:  An Historical and Critical Analysis.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hill, Errol. 1986. The Revolutionary Tradition in Black Drama. Theatre Journal 38, no. 4: 408–26.
Hopkins, Pauline E. 2007. Phenomenal Vocalists. In Daughter of the Revolution: The Major
Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, edited by Ira Dworkin, 113–22. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press.
McAllister, Marvin. 2003. “White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed
for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour”: William Brown’s African and American Theater. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Moody, Jane. 2000. Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840. Cambridge:  Cambridge
University Press.
Nathans, Heather. 2009. Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil
of Black. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Porter, Susan L. 1991. With an Air Debonair: Musical Theatre in America, 1785–1815. Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Redding, J. Saunders. 1939. To Make a Poet Black. Chapel Hill:  University of North
Carolina Press.
Smith, Susan Harris. 1997. American Drama:  The Bastard Art. New  York:  Cambridge
University Press.
Southern, Eileen, and Deane L. Root, eds. 1994. African American Theater: “Out of Bondage”
and “Peculiar Sam; or the Underground Railroad.” New York: Garland.
Thompson, George A. 1998. A Documentary History of the African Theatre. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
Wallinger, Hanna. 2005. Pauline E.  Hopkins:  A  Literary Biography. Athens:  University of
Georgia Press.
Williams, Linda. 2001. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom
to O. J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Young, William. 1795. An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St. Vincent’s.
London: Frank Cass.
 CHAPTER 15

T H E P R OV I N C E TOW N P L AY E R S I N
A M E R IC A N C U LT U R E

B R E N DA   M U R P H Y

The Provincetown Players was one of a number of American theater groups that were
formed in the early twentieth century as alternatives to the commercial theater. Loosely
joined under the rubrics of Art Theater, Folk Theater, or the Little Theatre Movement,
these groups were composed largely of amateurs who were dedicated to a vision of the-
ater as art rather than commerce, and they sought to realize one or another vision of
what the twentieth-century theater could achieve. Among them were the Hull House
Players in Chicago; the Players in Providence, Rhode Island; the Wisconsin Dramatic
Society; the Boston Toy Theatre; and several groups that had a major influence on the
Provincetown Players: the Chicago Little Theatre, founded in 1912 by Maurice Browne
and his wife, Ellen Van Volkenburg; the Liberal Club or Dell Players of New  York’s
Greenwich Village, founded by Floyd Dell in 1913; and the Washington Square Players,
founded in 1915 by Liberal Club members who wanted to pursue more serious theater
than what Dell was creating.

History

The Provincetown Players began in the summer of 1915 with a group of Greenwich
Village writers, painters, and intellectuals who were vacationing in Provincetown,
Massachusetts. They included George Cram Cook, a former literature professor who
hoped to build an artistic collective in Provincetown, and his wife, Susan Glaspell, a
well-known fiction writer; Neith Boyce, a journalist and fiction writer, and her husband,
Hutchins Hapgood, a journalist and “philosophical anarchist”; John Reed, a Marxist
activist and journalist who was to write Ten Days That Shook the World, his eyewitness
account of the Bolshevik Revolution; Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, the editors of the
major American socialist magazine, The Masses; Mary Heaton Vorse, a well-known
 THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS 235

feminist and labor activist, and her labor-leader husband, Joe O’Brien; the feminist law-
yer Ida Rauh, who was married to Eastman; Wilbur Daniel Steele, a successful young
short-story writer who was seen as the successor to O. Henry; several modernist paint-
ers, including Charles Demuth, Brör Nordfeldt, and Marguerite and William Zorach;
and a young scene designer, Robert Edmond Jones. Only Jones had professional experi-
ence in the theater at this point, but many of the others had come in close contact with
the theater and the issues around the Art Theater in various ways. Reed had directed
the hugely ambitious Paterson Strike Pageant in Madison Square Garden in 1913. Dell
had edited the arts section of the Chicago Evening News, for which Cook often reviewed
plays. Nordfeldt had designed for the Chicago Little Theatre. In 1915, the theater was
seen as a medium in which the exciting new ideas about art and society that were ani-
mating Greenwich Village could be realized by a group of fellow artists through collabo-
ration and without the interference of the frustrating commercial interests that limited
the creative opportunities in most of their work.
After producing plays for two summers in a former fish house in Provincetown that
was owned by Vorse and O’Brien, the group moved to Greenwich Village, where at two
different locations on MacDougal Street on Washington Square it produced an ambi-
tious series of bills from 1916 until 1922, when it disbanded. Besides the unlikely group
of artists, writers, and intellectuals that founded it, the uniqueness of the Provincetown
Playhouse had a great deal to do with its location in Greenwich Village at the height of
the explosion of interest in the Modern, in the arts and in social and political thought,
between 1908 and 1917 that has come to be called the Little Renaissance. As the historian
Arthur Wertheim has described them, the writers, painters, political intellectuals, and
activists who formed the Little Renaissance “were linked together in a common cause to
create a new American culture by overthrowing the genteel tradition” of the nineteenth
century, which they viewed as exhausted and irrelevant. They called for new writing
and painting that expressed the American way of life at the same time that they eagerly
embraced the new modernist developments in the arts they discovered in Europe
and shared a spirit of “iconoclasm, modernism, and cultural nationalism” (Wertheim
1976, 243).
In 1916, Greenwich Village was a close-knit cultural enclave, and the people who were
interested in the new movement were connected in all sorts of venues. They gathered
and socialized at the Liberal Club and the adjacent Washington Square Bookshop on
MacDougal Street; at The Masses, to which a number of them contributed; at Alfred
Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession Gallery, known as 291 for its address on Fifth Avenue; and
at the famous salon of the arts patron Mabel Dodge, who purposely brought together
the seemingly disparate elements of the “New” in her guest lists, such as mingling the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) leaders Emma Goldman and Big Bill Heyward
with the painters Marsden Hartley and John Marin and the intellectuals Hapgood,
Eastman, and Dell, to achieve a creative cross-pollination. The Provincetown Playhouse,
in its final home at 133 MacDougal, was right in the thick of things, located next to the
Liberal Club, where almost all of its founders were members, and it became one of the
central cultural institutions of the Little Renaissance. Thus the Provincetown group was
236 BRENDA MURPHY

uniquely fitted for the cultural work it would undertake: to realize in dramatic terms the
new artistic ideas and cultural values that the members of the Little Renaissance were
laying out for the twentieth century.
In theatrical terms, the Provincetown group was influenced by several important
events that were occurring at the beginning of the twentieth century. One was certainly
the Little Theatre Movement, which gave the Players the idea that serious and significant
art could be created in the theater by amateurs on a shoestring budget if they threw out
the ideas that were animating the commercial theater at the time, particularly the lavish
set design and sensational special effects that characterized the theater of that iconic
turn-of-the-century producer, David Belasco. Several of the original players had seen
some of Maurice Browne’s productions at the Chicago Little Theatre in its tiny space
in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building, and they had a sense of what was possible with few
resources.
At the other end of the spectrum was the mammoth Paterson Pageant, which Reed
had directed and in which Jones and Hapgood had participated. Drawing its inspiration
from the pageants of Percy Mackaye and the civic theater movement, the pageant fea-
tured 1,200 striking workers in scenes that reflected the events of the strike. As Martin
Green has noted, the historical ideal behind the pageant movement “was the Greek the-
ater, which exerted a guiding influence on both society and the state in ancient Greece.
It reconciled the traditions of art with those of democracy” (Green 1988, 164). The pag-
eant form was broad enough aesthetically to accommodate not only democracy but also
the Marxism of Reed; the socialism of Dell, Vorse, and Eastman; and the anarchism of
Hapgood, bringing it together with the Greek ideal of George Cram Cook, whose dream
was rooted in the Nietzschean concept of a Dionysian theatrical collaborative. Susan
Glaspell wrote in her memoir of Cook that Reed had inspired the workers with “the
energy of a great desire, and in their feeling of his oneness with them they forgot they
were on a stage. That too was a night when we sat late and talked of what the theater
might be” (1927, 250).
While the Little Theatre Movement and the pageant were important in the Players’
conceptualization of what a theater might achieve, the direct influences on the
Provincetown’s founding were closer to home. At the Liberal Club, they had all wit-
nessed, and many had taken part in, Dell’s amateur theatricals, which were essentially
self-satires, aimed at many of the beliefs and practices of the Greenwich Village coterie,
such as feminism, anarchism, Futurism, suffragism, and even Montessori schools. Dell
referred to them as “satirical little comedies making fun of ourselves—sometimes mak-
ing fun of the ideas which I was earnestly propagating in The Masses” (Dell 1933, 262).
Participating in Dell’s amateur theatricals made some of the members long to do more.
Thus Ida Rauh, a lawyer who really wanted to act, and Lawrence Langner, a lawyer who
wanted to write and produce, got together in 1914 and began planning a more serious
theater, based on Chicago’s Little Theatre, with which Langner had become acquainted
the previous year when he was in Chicago on business. According to Langner, “as soon
as word spread around among the younger generation that we were going to start a the-
atre, many of the young writers in the Village began to turn out plays” (Langner 1951,
 THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS 237

92). But the Washington Square Players was not necessarily dedicated to the produc-
tion of new American plays. Clearly stated in its aims and objectives was the policy
that, although preference would be given to American plays, “the works of well-known
European authors which have been ignored by the commercial managers” would also be
produced (Langner 1951, 94).
The Washington Square Players, which was the precursor to the Theatre Guild, the
premier American producer of literary drama in the mid-twentieth century, soon
showed a marked preference for the work of modern but established European writ-
ers. Many of the plays the Villagers were turning out were rejected, including works by
John Reed, Neith Boyce, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and George Cram Cook. Cook
and Glaspell, who had been members, quickly dropped out, as did Ida Rauh, who didn’t
care for the parts she was offered. Thus there was not only a ready-made base of interest
for producing plays when the group first gathered in Provincetown the following sum-
mer, but there was also a cache of scripts that the writers were eager to have produced.
Among them were Constancy by Neith Boyce, the first play produced by the group, on
July 15, 1915, in Boyce and Hapgood’s summer home, and Suppressed Desires, by Cook
and Glaspell, produced on the same night. They also included John Reed’s Freedom and
Eugene O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff and Thirst, produced the following summer.
Among the twelve one-act plays produced during the first two summer seasons were
Winter’s Night by Neith Boyce, The Game by Louise Bryant, Freedom and The Eternal
Quadrangle by John Reed, and Trifles by Susan Glaspell.
The success of the second summer season encouraged the group to try a winter sea-
son in Greenwich Village. They drew up a constitution, which was ratified on September
5, 1916, and voted on in a series of resolutions drawn up by John Reed in lieu of by-laws.
Perhaps in direct opposition to the Washington Square Players, the group resolved
that “it is the primary object of the Provincetown Players to encourage the writing of
American plays of real artistic, literary and dramatic—as opposed to Broadway—
merit” and that “such plays be considered without reference to their commercial value,
since this theater is not to be run for pecuniary profit” (Resolutions 1916, 11). Thus the
Provincetown established itself firmly as both an art theater and a playwright’s theater.
Playwrights were to direct their own plays and plays were to be chosen by the vote of the
membership at open readings.
The Provincetown began as a democratic theatrical organization in the service of
noncommercial art, but both the democracy and the rejection of commercial values
were to be compromised almost immediately. A rift arose between those who favored
a democratic organization—Reed, Dell, Hapgood, Bryant, Brör Nordfeldt, and his wife,
Margaret, the secretary-treasurer—and Cook, who was elected president, and his allies,
Glaspell, Ida Rauh, and Cook’s friend from Chicago, Edna Kenton, who wanted a small
board of directors with Cook at the helm. The latter group quickly won out. Early in the
1916 season, decisions on plays were put in the hands of a committee, of which Kenton
eventually became the paid permanent chair. During the first year in New York, most
of the members who were committed to the democratic organization resigned, and the
Nordfeldts, who had openly challenged Cook, were coerced into resigning at a meeting
238 BRENDA MURPHY

that was dubbed “the massacre” by the director Nina Moise (Murphy 2005, 15). The
process of consolidating power into Cook’s hands continued so that by March 1918, the
active membership had fallen to fourteen, and of the original twenty-nine members,
only Cook, Glaspell, O’Neill, and Rauh remained. Glaspell, of course, was married to
Cook. Rauh had a close friendship and probably a love affair with Cook (Black 2002,
12). The Provincetown Players had changed radically in character and had essentially
become Cook’s theater.
Eugene O’Neill managed to remain noncommittal throughout these first two years,
essentially doing what was best for his playwriting career. Two of his plays, The Emperor
Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922), were eventually transferred successfully to
commercial theaters on Broadway. While these productions were proof of the group’s
growing expertise and sophistication, they also flew in the face of their stated opposi-
tion to the commercial theater. The Provincetown’s demise came in 1922, on the heels
of O’Neill’s successful premiere of The Hairy Ape. The playwright had taken the play’s
direction out of Cook’s hands, and Cook and Glaspell left for Greece, where Cook died
in 1924.
Despite these compromises, in one very important way, the Provincetown remained
true to its early principles. It was always, as O’Neill had insisted on naming it in 1916, a
Playwrights’ Theatre. In the course of its brief life, from 1915 to 1922, the group produced
ninety-three plays by forty-seven different American playwrights. It is best known, of
course, for nurturing the careers of O’Neill and Glaspell. It produced fifteen of O’Neill’s
plays and ten of Glaspell’s. But it also produced plays by writers as varied as Edna St.
Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes, Edna Ferber, Floyd Dell, Theodore
Dreiser, and Mike Gold, as well as a host of lesser-known writers. Among them are
plays that have become part of the permanent repertoire, such as Trifles, Bound East for
Cardiff, The Moon of the Caribees, Aria da Capo, The Verge, The Emperor Jones, and The
Hairy Ape. These are important achievements, but perhaps even more interesting are the
eighty-six other plays that reflect the theater and the culture of the early twentieth cen-
tury, when, in a most fundamental sense, the American theater was coming of age and
becoming “modern.”

Realism

One important historical circumstance that affected the Provincetown’s repertoire was
that realism, as practiced by European playwrights like Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg, was
very late in coming to the United States. In 1891, when Europe was becoming accus-
tomed to the frank social realism of such plays as A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of
the People, Widowers’ Houses, and Miss Julie, critics in the United States were still being
shocked by the recognition in James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming of the physical real-
ity that women nursed their babies. In 1905, the cast of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession
was jailed for obscenity. In the same year, the seventeen-year-old Eugene O’Neill read
 THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS 239

and re-read Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) with the fervor of a revolutionary.
He went to see every production of the Abbey Players during their 1911 tour, later saying
that it was seeing those plays by J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory that “gave [him] a glimpse
of [his] opportunity” in the theater, and he praised the naturalness of the Abbey’s act-
ing (Sheaffer 1968, 205). Encouraged by a few critics, such as William Dean Howells
and Hamlin Garland, and a few theater managers, such as Harrison Grey Fiske and
the Shubert brothers, who were willing to take the risk, a few self-consciously realistic
American playwrights were at work on Broadway in the first decade of the twentieth
century—Rachel Crothers, Edward Sheldon, Eugene Walter—but the vast majority of
plays treated contemporary subjects within the conventions of the farce or comedy of
manners, the formula melodrama, or the “well-made play.” Since the 1890s, Howells
had carried on a one-man campaign against this conventional drama in the pages of
middle-brow magazines like Harper’s, calling for an end to the artificial plot in favor of
the representation of “real life” and the replacement of stereotyped and one-dimensional
characters with characters that were animated by the psychological realism that had
gained prominence in American fiction.
Howells’s ideal play was a representation of a contemporary situation, which the audi-
ence could accept as a shared reality, in which significant psychological or social insights
were revealed in the course of a series of events that reflected life as it is through dialogue
that is within the realm of everyday speech.
O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff is the fulfillment of Howells’s dreams for an American
realistic drama, and in this light, it is not hard to see why it achieved the status among
the players that it did. Susan Glaspell summed up the play’s importance, saying that
when the group heard the play read for the first time, “we knew what we were for” (1927,
253–54). The play’s action is as simple as it can be. A sailor talks to his friend about his
life, his dreams, and his regrets and then dies. His life is revealed as at once insignificant
and profoundly important. The situation is believable, and the characters, their relation-
ship, and their values are slowly revealed through straightforward, vernacular dialogue.
Even the play’s central irony, that Yank the lifelong sailor wanted just one thing—a farm
of his own where he could live and be buried on his own land—is uninflected, with the
spectator left to invest it with whatever emotional response the fact produces. What’s
more, the play’s aesthetic is fundamentally realistic. Its meaning is expressed metonymi-
cally rather than metaphorically, suggesting that there are many dimensions of meaning
in the material facts of a human life; the set is the cramped and fetid space of the fore-
castle that represents the men’s existential condition. With the simple set they built in
the Provincetown fish house, the straightforward, simple acting of the mainly amateur
actors, and the sound of the waves famously washing beneath the floor of the theater,
Bound East was played to its best advantage, and it had an enormous impact on the work
that the Players would do in the next few years.
O’Neill’s was not the only take on the new realism produced by the Players in 1916.
Two plays by women, Neith Boyce’s Winter’s Night and Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, may be
seen as the feminist counterpart to O’Neill’s representation of the life of working sailors.
In her account, Glaspell was characteristically modest about Trifles, which had almost
240 BRENDA MURPHY

as big an impact as Bound East. Trifles carries a clear feminist message, but it does so
without an overt discussion of feminist issues. In it, a group of women come along with
the men who are investigating the murder by strangulation of a farmer, John Wright, in
order to get some belongings for his wife, Minnie, who is in jail, charged with the crime.
In the course of the play, the sheriff and the district attorney conclude that there is no
evidence of a motive for the crime in the house. Meanwhile, the women, who have been
concerning themselves with the “trifles” of the housekeeping details in Minnie’s gloomy
kitchen, discover erratic stitching on a quilt, a birdcage with the door yanked off, and
a dead canary whose neck has been wrenched. Putting this together with their knowl-
edge of the two people and their emotionally abusive marriage, the women come to the
unspoken conclusion that Minnie has killed John, and they quickly remove the evidence
of her apparently having snapped and taken revenge for the death of the one thing in
her life that brought her pleasure. Like Bound East, Trifles is fundamentally metonymic.
Minnie’s kitchen doesn’t stand for something abstract: it is her life, and her life is the sub-
ject of the play. Similarly, Minnie doesn’t stand for the abuse of women; she is a woman
who has suffered from abuse, as the women are a community that protects her from a
standard of justice that will not take the reality of her world into account in its judgment.
It is Glaspell’s ability to get the audience to believe in the reality of the situation that gives
the play its power. The kitchen itself speaks as eloquently of Minnie’s life to the audience
as it does to the women onstage.
Preceding Trifles, and in some sense prompting its creation, is Boyce’s Winter’s Night,
which also uses a woman’s kitchen metonymically. Rachel Wescott’s kitchen is the
antithesis of Minnie Wright’s. An attractive room, decorated with bright colors and liv-
ing plants in the depth of the New England winter, Rachel’s kitchen expresses her vitality
and creativity. Her husband has died of a long illness, and Rachel intends to do her full
duty in mourning him as she has done her duty in caring for him, but then she intends
to break free of the farm and establish her dress-making business in a city. When her
brother-in-law asks her to marry him and stay on the farm, she refuses, saying that she
must break free from her prison. This prompts him to go out and shoot himself, adding
the burden of guilt to her burden of mourning, but the implication is that Rachel will
pursue her freedom despite this, finding satisfaction in work that expresses her creative
talents.
The production of this series of plays gives a good sense of the cross-fertilization that
went on at the Provincetown. Both Bound East and Winter’s Night had been written
before the 1916 summer season began, with the reading of Bound East producing the
intense response that Glaspell described. Winter’s Night was produced as part of the first
bill on July 13. It was after this that Glaspell was persuaded by Cook to write a play for
the third bill, opening on August 8. She said that she wrote Trifles in ten days, using her
reportage on an Iowa murder case some years before as the basis for the situation. The
play is also an apt response to Winter’s Night. Rachel Wescott may be a farm wife, but
she is a privileged one, with the leisure and the financial means to decorate her house
and work at dress-making rather than the drudgery of the farm. She has the luxury, in
a sense, of worrying about her freedom and her need to express her creativity. Glaspell
 THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS 241

presents a more elemental and a more common situation. What escape can there be for a
Minnie Wright, caught in an abusive marriage to a mean-spirited and stingy man on an
isolated farm? In that sense, Glaspell’s play takes Boyce’s feminist concerns a step further
to get at a more fundamental representation of the condition of women. Having seen
O’Neill’s play, which was produced after Winter’s Night, she had both his and Boyce’s
realistic aesthetics to draw on, and she made powerful use of these techniques.

Modernism

Part of what made the Provincetown unique was that it was producing this kind of
realism, the full realization of the principles that critics like Howells were enunciat-
ing in a drama that was recognizably American, side-by-side with plays that were
self-consciously avant-garde, seeking to re-invent drama in accordance with the mod-
ernist aesthetics that came both from European models and from America’s home-
grown modernism. A number of the early members, such as Demuth, Nordfeldt, and
the Zorachs, were artists who were well acquainted with modernism and committed to
its principles. Others, like Louise Bryant, were interested in the possibilities of creating
a new modernist drama. The 1916 production of Bryant’s The Game is a good example of
the way the modernist artists were able to collaborate in bringing some of the new aes-
thetic principles into the theater.
The Game is a one-act allegory in which two characters, a female Life and a male
Death, play a daily game of dice for the lives of human beings. They play for the lives of
two potential suicides, Youth, a male poet, and The Girl, a female dancer. During the
play, a number of arguments about the value of life, love, art, and experience are aired.
When the game is played, Life wins, but Death reminds her that they will play again, and
he will eventually win. Youth replies that by then, they will have lived. It’s not a very good
play, but it was one that William Zorach saw as an opportunity to produce as a modern-
ist work of art, an integrated symbolic structure. In the program for the play, he wrote
that it was “an attempt to synthesize decoration, costume, speech and action into one
mood,” and that “starting from the idea that the play is symbolic of rather than repre-
sentative of life,” the set design was meant “to suggest rather than to portray; the speech
and action of the players being used as the plastic element in the whole unified conven-
tion” (Bryant 1916, 28). The Zorachs probably based their ancient Egyptian concept for
the play on Léon Bakst’s design for Diaghilev’s ballet L’après-midi d’un faune, which had
caused a sensation in New York the previous January. Marguerite Zorach designed a
stylized backdrop for the production that was to be the theater’s logo for years. The cos-
tumes were minimal and abstract, and the movements were worked out on a flat plane
to mimic Egyptian wall painting. The Zorachs developed a stiff, nonrepresentational,
abstract acting style for the play, which was suited to Bryant’s allegorical characters and
pseudo-archaic dialogue. The result was an integrated and arresting piece of theater,
combining a modern worldview with the recuperation and manipulation of medieval
242 BRENDA MURPHY

allegory and ancient Egyptian art to create a fragmented new mythology, an aesthetic
strategy that was to be central to high modernism.
Theatrically and aesthetically, The Game could not have been more different from
the realistic one-act plays the Provincetown produced alongside it. That both were
seen as new and modern is a good index of the American theater in 1916. In the next
six years, the Provincetown would continue to produce both kinds of plays, with inter-
esting cross-fertilization among the artists. Another element was added to the mix in
the winter season of 1916, when Alfred Kreymborg, the editor of the avant-garde poetry
magazine Others, had his play Lima Beans produced at the urging of the Zorachs and
John Reed. Taken as a whole, Lima Beans was probably the most experimental modern-
ist production that was done by the Provincetown Players. Kreymborg, who was a musi-
cian as well as a poet, subtitled the play A Conventional Scherzo. In the stage directions,
he described it as a “pantomime dance of automatons to an accompaniment of rhythmic
words, in place of music.” He described the characters as two marionettes, and he later
said that the ideal production of the play would be in a puppet theater, for the move-
ment required was “a semi-dance of gesture, in accordance with the sense more than the
rhythm of the lines” (Kreymborg 1994, 131). Because no one among the Players was pre-
pared to act in the play, Kreymborg recruited two poets from the Others group who were
enthusiastic about experimenting in the theater and understood the modern free-verse
line, William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy. The fanciful but abstract set was designed
by William Zorach, who also played the small role of the vegetable huckster. Kreymborg
directed, beating out the all-important rhythms with a baton.
Along with Millay’s Aria da Capo, Lima Beans was among the best of a number of
modernist experiments by the Players that made use of the deceptively simple frame-
work of fairy tale, myth, or parable to engage with contemporary issues. On the surface,
Lima Beans works at the level of a nursery rhyme. The plot turns on what kind of beans
a young wife will serve her husband for dinner. It begins with her deciding to buy string
beans instead of the usual limas because she thinks he must need a change. When her
husband returns, he throws the string beans out the window, insisting that he wants his
beloved limas every night. The wife then buys lima beans, saying that beans are all alike
to her, and she will be glad to serve her husband limas if that’s what he wants. In the end,
he comes back, and in a spirit of reconciliation offers to eat all the kinds of beans in the
world if it will make her happy. He is overjoyed that she has made him lima beans after
all. The curtain closes on a scene of kisses and talk of love.
At the level of parable, the piece speaks to marital forbearance, the need to compro-
mise one’s desires to preserve a happy union. At another level, Kreymborg makes a
rather mischievous use of the vegetable symbolism to suggest something about sexu-
ality as well. The husband’s paean to his wife’s lima beans, “soft, soothing, / succulent,
caressing, / creamy, / persuasively serene, / my buttery entity” (Kreymborg 1994, 136),
clearly expresses his desire for her, while he rejects the phallic string beans, “elongated,
cadaverous . . . Worms, / snakes, / reptiles, caterpillars” (137). He throws the string beans
out of the house in the name of Hymen, the god of marriage ceremonies. In this sense
the play is also a playful version of epithalamium, a song in honor of Hymen to celebrate
 THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS 243

a marriage. It is modern in the sense that the wife’s sexuality is given equal force with
the husband’s, and she is, in fact, the more sexually sophisticated of the two. Deceptively
simple, entertaining, and humorous, it drew on avant-garde techniques of poetry,
music, dance movement, and staging to reinvent ancient myth in a modern context.
Kreymborg’s influence, and that of the Others group, was evident at the Provincetown
throughout the next several years. He became a member, and, although he complained
that the play selection committee had a bias toward realistic plays, they staged a num-
ber of works by modernist poets, including Maxwell Bodenheim’s Knot Holes and The
Gentle Furniture Shop, Mary Caroline Davies’s The Slave with Two Faces, and Edna St.
Vincent Millay’s The Princess Marries the Page. In 1919, George Cram Cook and Susan
Glaspell took a “sabbatical” from the Players, going to Provincetown to write, and James
Light produced what came to be known as "The Season of Youth" (Sarlós 1982, 107).
This included plays by Others poets Djuna Barnes, Kreymborg, and Wallace Stevens,
as well as Edna Millay’s Aria da Capo, her best play and one of the most important the
Provincetown produced.
In Aria da Capo, Millay drew on an aesthetic that was similar to Kreymborg’s to cre-
ate one of the most effective contemporary artistic statements about World War I. Like
Lima Beans, it has a basis in music. As the title suggests, it is a three-part lyric composed
of three duets, with the ending reprising the opening motif. It also reinvents older lit-
erary traditions, in this case the harlequinade, which has its origins in the commedia
dell’arte, and the pastoral dialogue stemming from Virgil’s Eclogues, creating a bricolage
of literary fragments that relates organically to the situation of the modern world. The
play begins with a duet between the lovers Pierrot and Columbine, which expresses the
carpe diem Zeitgeist of Greenwich Village, ever in search of the new and the pleasur-
able, but also world-weary and somewhat jaded. It is interrupted, and the stage conven-
tions are disrupted, when three more actors arrive on the stage and insist on rehearsing
their own play, which is a pastoral dialogue between the two shepherds Thyrsis and
Corydon. To amuse themselves, the shepherds decide to build a wall between them,
and pretend that each of them owns everything on his side of the wall. The building of
the wall and the dividing of their flocks and the land establishes the concepts of mine
and yours, which in turn engenders feelings of suspicion, greed, selfishness, and fear,
ending in violence, as they kill each other over some jewels that are found on one side
of the wall. The application to World War I, with its trench warfare and its wholesale
slaughter of human beings, was clear to the contemporary audience. In the third sec-
tion, a table is placed over the bodies of the dead shepherds, and Pierrot and Columbine
reprise their dialogue. Against the background of the war, its meaning has completely
changed. The avant-garde movement in Greenwich Village, which its participants liked
to call the “Insurgence,” is exposed as frivolous and self-involved in the context of World
War I. Something more than simple rebellion against past traditions is needed, Millay
suggests, if civilization is to be saved. If the play were produced realistically, this moral
might seem heavy-handed, but the fanciful production by the Players, using an abstract
color scheme, with crepe paper for the wall and confetti for the jewels, put the audience
off guard, giving maximum impact to the irony of the final scene.
244 BRENDA MURPHY

The final two seasons of the Players produced three plays that show the experimen-
tal spirit that was at work among these writers better than anything else: O’Neill’s The
Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) and Glaspell’s The Verge (1921). It was a
long way from Bound East for Cardiff to O’Neill’s final two plays with the group, as it was
a long way from Trifles to The Verge. While each of these plays evinces a deep interest in
human psychology, each has left the conventions of realism behind, experimenting with
arresting new ways to dramatize human consciousness on the stage. O’Neill’s two plays
have often been linked to German Expressionism, in particular Georg Kaiser’s From
Morn to Midnight. Although he acknowledged the expressionist elements of The Hairy
Ape, O’Neill downplayed the influence of the Germans, insisting that The Emperor Jones
was written “long before I had ever heard of Expressionism,” and that although he had
read Kaiser’s play when he wrote The Hairy Ape, it had been planned before that, and
was “a direct descendant of Jones” (Clark 1929, 125).
O’Neill insisted that he came up with the techniques that are associated with expres-
sionism independently of the Germans. Examples include the plays’ juxtaposition of
scenes representing realistic, objective reality with the subjective reality of the protago-
nist; the drum that mimics the heartbeats of Jones throughout the play, accelerating as
his terror rises; the rhythmic movements of the prison gang in Jones and the stokers in
Hairy Ape; the staccato dialogue; the short scenes; and the stylized, distorted sets dom-
inated by dream symbolism that indicate the protagonist’s nightmarish perception of
the events on the stage. These techniques are identical with those used by some of the
Germans, and the basic aesthetic strategy of the plays is the same, the representation
onstage of the subjective reality that is perceived by the protagonist in a way in which
the audience is able to share it. This is something O’Neill had been experimenting with
at the Provincetown for years, notably in Where the Cross Is Made (1918), in which, he
told the Players, everybody is mad except for the girl, and “everybody but the girl means
everybody in this house but the girl. I want to see whether it’s possible to make an audi-
ence go mad too” (Kenton 2004, 82).
There is an important difference between O’Neill’s expressionism and that of the
Germans. O’Neill objected to the fact that German expressionism “denies the value
of characterization.” The Germans’ characters tended to be flat stereotypes meant to
represent classes of people such as workers or universal abstractions. O’Neill wrote,
“I personally do not believe that an idea can be readily put over to an audience except
through characters. When it sees ‘A Man’ and ‘A Woman’–just abstractions, it loses the
human contact by which it identifies itself with the protagonist of the play.” In The Hairy
Ape, he said, “the character Yank remains a man and everyone identifies him as such”
(Eugene O’Neill 1990, 62). This was vital to the audience’s identifying with what he saw
as the play’s universal theme: “Yank is really yourself, and myself. He is every human
being. . . . His struggle to ‘belong,’ to find the thread that will make him a part of the
fabric of Life—we are all struggling to do just that” (Mullett 1990, 35). Thus, although
they certainly have sociopolitical thematic implications, the fundamental object of
O’Neill’s expressionist plays is to bring to life the individual subjective experience of
the protagonist so that the audience might better understand and identify with him. In
 THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS 245

its psychological focus, his drama differed from the class-based social commentary the
Germans usually undertook.
Although The Hairy Ape engages with issues of social class, the inequalities engen-
dered by capitalism, the inadequacy of the labor movement, and other social issues, its
primary objects are the representation of Yank’s existential dilemma and its universal-
ity. Similarly, The Emperor Jones touches on issues of racism, colonialism, the American
justice system, and capitalism, but its ultimate subject is the effect of terror on Brutus
Jones’s unconscious. In this play, the Pullman car porter turned emperor of an island
kingdom is pursued through the forest by subjects who are rebelling against his exploit-
ative rule. The expressionistic techniques are meant to heighten the audience’s experi-
ence of his terror. The audience physically experiences the drum echoing his heartbeat,
the “formless fears” he hallucinates, and a series of hallucinations that take the audience
back progressively both through his memory of crimes he’s committed and through two
iconic events in African American history (the slave auction and the middle passage on
the slave ship) to a mythic and spiritual space in an Africa imagined by O’Neill as the
collective unconscious of the African American people, where he is sacrificed by a sha-
man to a crocodile god, fitting punishment for his betrayal of his people. The play begins
in representational realism, becoming increasingly more subjective in each scene; the
progress is toward bringing the audience to share ever deeper levels of Jones’s uncon-
scious, made viscerally real by the accelerating drumbeat, so that the audience literally
feels his terror. O’Neill’s experiments here are in harmony with American modernist art,
with its interest in the “primitive,” in emotion, in myth, and in the unconscious.
Glaspell’s The Verge is the most completely modernist play produced by the
Provincetown Players, particularly notable for what the modernists called organic form.
Depending on one’s interpretation of the ending, Glaspell’s play is either a celebration
of or a warning against the Nietzschean artist’s willed action in attempting to break
through societal norms and aesthetic conventions to create something entirely new,
which is what Glaspell attempted to do with the play itself. The Verge progresses from a
representational realism in the first scene to a distorted expressionism at the end, when
Claire, an experimental botanist, either goes mad or is swept up in an ecstasy of cre-
ation. It uses experimental dialogue and eschews conventional dramatic form, making
a clear break with realistic drama. Nietzsche was the favored philosopher of the Little
Renaissance, and particularly of Glaspell, Cook, and O’Neill, who embraced the idea of
the artist as Übermensch, moving beyond good and evil and smashing aesthetic barriers
and conventions to create a truly new work of art. But the play moves beyond Nietzsche
as well in its feminist insistence that a woman can assert her own artistic will, not merely
serve the will of a male artist. Claire moves beyond good and evil when she kills Tom,
the lover who would hold her back from her ultimate creation of new life, and the play
ends with her fragmented singing of the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee,” which critics
have taken either as proof of her own power to create a new form of life or as evidence of
the “ultimate inescapability of patriarchy” (Gainor 2001, 163). Just as the play represents
a daring modernist experiment in contrast to the realism of Trifles, Glaspell’s feminism
has moved from an unspoken understanding among women who are excluded from
246 BRENDA MURPHY

power in Trifles to an assertion of the power of creation that women artists can have if
they only have the will to break free of constraints and make their own art.
The 1921–22 season, which produced both The Verge and The Hairy Ape, was the final
one for the Provincetown Players. Various reasons have been given for its demise. Edna
Kenton, who was the Provincetown’s first historian as well as a devoted ally of Cook
and Glaspell, said that it was, ironically, the proof of the group’s achievement, the suc-
cessful transfer of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape to Broadway, that hastened its
demise because it corrupted the amateur ideal that had been its inspiration through
its six rocky years of life. It is certainly true that after Jones’s transfer, the playwrights
were writing with an eye to Broadway and the theater was mounting full-length plays
with curtain-raisers rather than the bills of one-act plays that had encouraged diver-
sity and experimentation. More immediately, the departure of Cook and Glaspell after
O’Neill had removed Cook from the directorship of The Hairy Ape and given it to James
Light spelled the end of the organization. It was to stave off a takeover by Light that
Cook, Glaspell, and Kenton saw to it that the Provincetown Players was incorporated
before they left, with only seven members, Cook, O’Neill, Glaspell, Kenton, the designer
Cleon Throckmorton, the business manager Eleanor Fitzgerald, and the attorney Harry
Weinberger, reserving the theater’s name for future use, and they suspended operations
and leased the building for the next year. Cook died in Greece in 1924. The Provincetown
Players never resumed tenancy of the building, which was rented in 1923–24 by a new
entity called Experimental Theatre, Inc., (ETI) under what became known as the trium-
virate of O’Neill, the designer Robert Edmond Jones, and Kenneth Macgowan, a drama
critic and editor turned producer. The ETI made a number of significant contributions
of its own, including O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, The Fountain, Desire Under
the Elms, and The Great God Brown. As Macgowan said, however, “we carried on to use-
ful ends, but they were not the ends of Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players” (1931, x).

Works Cited
Black, Cheryl. 2002. The Women of Provincetown, 1915–1922. Tuscaloosa:  University of
Alabama Press.
Bryant, Louise. 1916. The Game. In The Provincetown Plays: First Series, edited by Frank Shay,
27–42. New York: F. Shay.
Clark, Barret H. 1929. Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays. New York: McBride.
Dell, Floyd. 1933. Homecoming: An Autobiography. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.
Eugene O’Neill Talks of His Own Play and the Plays of Others. 1990. In Conversations with
Eugene O’Neill, edited by Mark W. Estrin, 60–63. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
(Originally published in 1924).
Gainor, J. Ellen. 2001. Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915–
48. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Glaspell, Susan. 1927. The Road to the Temple. New York: Frederick A. Stokes.
Green, Martin. 1988. New  York 1913:  The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant.
New York: Scribner.
 THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS 247

Kenton, Edna. 2004. The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights’ Theatre 1915–1922, edited by
Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Kreymborg, Alfred. 1994. Lima Beans. In The Provincetown Players: A Choice of the Shorter
Works, edited by Barbara Ozieblo, 131–43. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press.
Langner, Lawrence. 1951. The Magic Curtain. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Macgowan, Kenneth. 1931. Introduction. In The Provincetown: A Story of the Theatre, by Helen
Deutsch and Stella Hanau, vii–xi. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Mullett, Mary B. 1990. The Extraordinary Story of Eugene O’Neill. In Conversations with
Eugene O’Neill, edited by Mark W. Estrin, 26–37. Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi.
(Originally published in 1922).
Murphy, Brenda. 2005. The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Resolutions ordered spread upon the minutes as the sense of the meeting of Thursday, Sept.
5, 1916 (In lieu of by-laws). 1916. Minute book of the Provincetown Players, Inc., from
September 4, 1916, to November 8, 1923, II. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts (microfilm).
Sarlós, Robert Károly. 1982. Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players:  Theatre in Ferment.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Sheaffer, Louis. 1968. O’Neill: Son and Playwright. Boston: Little, Brown.
Wertheim, Arthur. 1976. The New  York Little Renaissance:  Iconoclasm, Modernism, and
Nationalism in American Culture, 1908–1917. New York: New York University Press.
 CHAPTER 16

E U G E N E O’ N E I L L

ST EV E N F.  BLO OM

It was one evening in the summer of 1916 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when

American theatre changed forever. That was when, according to Susan Glaspell, mem-
bers of the Provincetown Players, after listening to a reading of a one-act play by an
aspiring playwright named Eugene O’Neill, “knew what we were for” (Gelb and Gelb
2000, 558; Sheaffer 1968, 347). When the Players produced Bound East for Cardiff that
summer, it marked the fortuitous convergence of the enterprising vision of a fledgling
theatre company with the bold new voice of a determined young dramatist. The result
was the emergence of the “native dramatic art” (Gelb and Gelb 2000, 498) that Glaspell
and her visionary partner, George Cram Cook, were driven to produce. With them,
Eugene O’Neill would define that dramatic art in its infancy, and then, independently of
the Provincetown Players, he would go on to secure its place on the world stage.
O’Neill wrote more than fifty plays. They are populated with people from all walks of
life, from seamen and farmers to businessmen and landowners, from derelicts and pros-
titutes to newspaper editors and professors. His characters face numerous challenges
unique to their times, from the development of technology to the exploitations of capi-
talism and the ravages of war, as well as those common to all times, from marital strife
and sibling rivalry to illness, death, and the need for dreams or illusions to endure life.
Some characters experience the hopefulness of triumph and success, others the hope-
lessness of defeat and failure, and most experience both.
O’Neill once said, “Most modern plays are concerned with the relation between man
and man, but that does not interest me at all. I am interested only in the relation between
man and God” (O’Neill 1961, 115). These words may seem strange coming from a man
who lost his faith at the age of fifteen, but they signify the scale of his reach as an art-
ist. His own words notwithstanding, O’Neill’s dramas are about human relationships;
indeed, there are not many writers who have depicted the dynamics within families
with the emotional punch and psychological insights of O’Neill. That said, however, his
words do explain why at the heart of all of his drama is a human being (or several) stand-
ing alone, attempting to make sense of an inscrutable world and his or her place in it;
these words explain why O’Neill defined the essence of human existence as “hopeless
 EUGENE O’NEILL 249

hope.” In play after play throughout his career, from the earliest naturalistic one-act
plays through the more ambitiously complex theatrical experiments of his middle years
and the powerfully nuanced dramas of his final creative period, it is this vision of the
human condition, as it evolves dramaturgically, that secures O’Neill’s stature as a major
dramatic artist.

Life into Art

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in a hotel in Times Square in
New  York City. The son of the popular nineteenth-century actor James O’Neill, who
earned fame and fortune touring the country in the role of Edmond Dantès in the melo-
dramatic The Count of Monte Cristo, Eugene never knew the stability of a permanent child-
hood residence. The only home he knew as a boy was in New London, Connecticut, where
the O’Neills spent their summers between theatrical seasons. That house in New London
was to become the setting for Long Day’s Journey into Night, the autobiographical master-
piece that O’Neill completed in 1941 but that was not published or produced until 1956,
when it would earn him his fourth Pulitzer Prize, three years after his death in Boston.1 
There is arguably no other literary figure who used the circumstances of his life as the
fabric of his art so deliberately as O’Neill. In his early and middle works, those life events
and the people involved are hidden beneath a fictional veil of varying thickness, but in
the final works of his creative life, the veil becomes quite thin, and ultimately transpar-
ent, revealing the actual ghosts of the playwright’s life. As Stephen Black has demon-
strated in his biography, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, “O’Neill found
a way to use the writing of plays as a form of self-psychoanalysis” (1999, xviii), culminat-
ing in the poignant autobiographical revelations of Long Day’s Journey into Night and its
quasi-sequel, A Moon for the Misbegotten.
Long Day’s Journey into Night is set in the summer of 1912, a turning point in the life
of the playwright. After attempting suicide in New  York City earlier that year,2 the
twenty-four-year-old O’Neill returned to his family’s summer home in New London where
he was diagnosed with tuberculosis (known as consumption at the time) and then con-
fined to a sanitarium, where he read voraciously and discovered his ambition to become
“an artist or nothing” (Gelb and Gelb 2000, 433). In Long Day’s Journey, the mature drama-
tist depicted the complex familial and psychological environment in which the patient had
been immersed and from which his sanitarium stay was an escape (although he only hints
at the circumstances surrounding the suicide attempt earlier that year). Toward the end of
the play, in a lengthy monologue, Edmund reflects on his existence:

It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful
as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home,
who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must
always be a little in love with death! (O’Neill 1988a, 812)
250 STEVEN F. BLOOM

This sense of not belonging, of aloneness, haunted and defined the aging playwright
until his dying day, just as it had haunted and defined the young Edmund Tyrone as he
sits immobilized by the hopeless despair of his family at the end of Long Day’s Journey,
and as it haunted and defined the young Eugene O’Neill who had survived a suicide
attempt, then tuberculosis, and then set out to become an “artist or nothing” by writing
plays. Judging by Long Day’s Journey alone, there would be little hope for the survival of
this young man, let alone his triumph as a great artist. Although the man did physically
escape that debilitating home environment, the playwright, in fact, remained psychi-
cally bound to it forever.

“Ironic Fate” in the Early One-Acts

O’Neill’s earliest plays were one-acts, and many of these plays addressed controversial
topics not common to American drama at the time—including marital stress, infidelity,
abortion, prostitution, poverty, and suicide—in a naturalistic style not common on the
American stage. Of the twenty-five or so plays he had written by 1920, many bore the
marks of a neophyte, some showed signs of genius, and virtually all reflected the vision
of that young man who would later sit in the living room of the Tyrones’ summer house
and bemoan his bad fate to have been born into the human species. The first in a long line
of introspective characters was the one who lay prostrate on the wharf at Provincetown
in the summer of 1916, Yank in Bound East for Cardiff (completed in 1914):

This sailor life ain’t much to cry about leavin’—just one ship after another, hard work,
small pay, and bum grub; and when we git into port, just a drunk endin’ up in a fight,
and all your money gone, and then ship away again. Never meetin’ no nice people;
never gittin’ outa sailor town, hardly, in any port; travellin’ all over the world and
never seein’ none of it; without no one to care whether you’re alive or dead. [With
a bitter smile.] There ain’t much in all that that’d make yuh sorry to lose it, Drisc.
(O’Neill 1988a, 195)

O’Neill’s early one-act plays are populated by numerous characters like Yank, men
(mostly) who are unsettled and alone, if not physically, then psychically, in the face of an
uncertain, and often cruel, world, what O’Neill called “ironic fate”:

By “ironic fate,” O’Neill meant that the lives of the characters are controlled, in
despite of their wills, by a power of destiny that is inexorable, malevolent insofar as it
can be said to have purpose, but in essence meaningless. (Bogard 1988, 17)

In The Long Voyage Home (1917), for example, Olson is left alone at a dingy bar and
speaks of his strong desire to go home—“No more sea, no more bum grub, no more
storms—yust nice work” (O’Neill 1988a, 517)—and his accompanying resolution to
remain sober; yet, in the end, a prostitute tricks him into drinking a glass of spiked
 EUGENE O’NEILL 251

ginger beer that knocks him out, enabling her and her pimp to steal all his money, and
he ends up on board the “worst ship dat sail to sea,” likely to “never see port once again”
(521–22). In The Rope (1918), a prodigal son returns to claim his inheritance from his
miserly father, and as the adults greedily plot against each other to gain the money, the
granddaughter—a child—inadvertently finds the gold coins and tosses them uncaringly
off a cliff and into the sea, leaving the men foiled in their greed by capricious fate. In
play after play, an ironic ending suggests the existence of a powerful and inscrutable
external force that thwarts all human efforts to find contentment and peace. Although
some of the simplistic situations and predictable plot developments in these early plays
can be traced to the melodramatic theatre of James O’Neill, even in these early plays, the
characters struggle with their destiny in a way that suggests something much more deep
and complex than melodrama. As Jeffrey Richards has stated, “O’Neill saw that drama
must . . . boil life down to its essential agonies, then have his characters make of them
the best that they can. In that sense, the author was working more in the tradition of the
writers of Job than of Monte Cristo” (2001, xv).
According to Travis Bogard, it is The Moon of the Caribbees (1917) that truly distin-
guishes O’Neill’s earliest work and evokes the great promise of his future achievements.
While in many of the early plays, truthful character development sometimes overshad-
ows contrived plot developments, these plays were still largely dependent on narrative,
and as Bogard argues, “the significant failure of his earliest works had been failures of
narrative” (1988, 86). The Moon of the Caribbees is a radical departure. It has no plot,
but depends, instead, on mood, as it depicts a day in the life of the characters aboard
ship: “The totality of the drama lies in the mood” (85). Bogard calls the play a “nearly
flawless dramatic poem” (85); the men simply try to overcome with drunken revelry
the melancholy solitude of life aboard ship, and in this, according to Bogard, the play
captures “the fullest sense of life that O’Neill had put on his stage” (86). The dramatist
later called it his “first real break with theatrical traditions. Once I had taken this initial
step, other plays followed logically” (86). He was referring, of course, to the longer and
more experimental plays that he wrote next, starting with Beyond the Horizon (1918),
The Emperor Jones (1920), Anna Christie (1920), and The Hairy Ape (1921), the most criti-
cally acclaimed and commercially successful of this period, which would establish his
reputation and come to define American drama in the 1920s and beyond.

Bold Dramaturgical Experiments:

Masking and Unmasking

Beyond the Horizon is the story of two brothers, one suited to a life on the farm and the
other to a life at sea, who switch roles for the love of a woman, which leads to disappoint-
ment and despair for all concerned. The story is more intricate, and the characters more
complex, than those of the earlier one-act plays, but at the heart of this full-length drama
252 STEVEN F. BLOOM

is still the human being at the mercy of fate. O’Neill’s first full-length play to be produced
and his Broadway debut, Horizon won him his first of four Pulitzer Prizes, but, as Louis
Sheaffer points out, the true significance of the play lies in its unflinching realism:

[O’Neill] had already signaled his intent in his one-act plays. In Beyond the Horizon,
he committed the deed: he introduced the American theater to life, the sad realities
of everyday life, and began changing that theater into one more genuine, more vital,
more sensitive to the human condition. (1968, 418)

Arthur and Barbara Gelb identify another aspect of Horizon that is so crucial to under-
standing O’Neill’s impact on American drama: “Like his work to come, it was boldly
self-revelatory—a long-acknowledged tradition of the great novelist but rarely if ever
displayed by an American dramatist” (2000, 638).
Anna Christie followed in the realistic tradition, boldly placing a prostitute at the
center of a drama that takes place mostly aboard a barge and pits three sympathetically
flawed human beings against that whimsical force of fate, here referred to as “dat ole
davil, sea.” Although in the end, she appears to accept the traditionally gendered role of
the loyal wife who waits patiently and compliantly on land while her seafaring husband
wanders the globe, Anna Christie is a strong, independent woman who rails against the
men who claim to own her and try to control her destiny. A superficially happy ending
led some critics to deride O’Neill for “selling out,” to which O’Neill replied:

The happy ending is merely the comma at the end of a gaudy introductory clause,
with the body of the sentence still unwritten. (In fact, I  once thought of calling
the play Comma) . . . My ending seems to have a false definiteness about it that
is misleading—a happy-ever-after which I did not intend. . . . A kiss in the last act,
a word about marriage, and the audience grows blind and deaf to what follows.
(Sheaffer 1973, 67–68)

The implication of the ending apparently intended by O’Neill is that the characters are
doomed to a life of disappointment in spite of their efforts to defy fate and find happi-
ness together, but the final moments of the play provide enough hope for an audience to
believe the contrary. Although, because of this misunderstanding, O’Neill considered
the play a failure, it nevertheless was commercially successful and earned him his sec-
ond Pulitzer Prize.
O’Neill continued to present controversial subject matter in both The Emperor Jones
(race and racism) and The Hairy Ape (class and capitalism), and in these two plays, the
dramatist experimented more radically with form, using the devices of Expressionism
that had already become quite common in European drama to plumb beneath the sur-
face of the human condition more revealingly than realism could do. At the core of
each play, again, stands a man trying desperately to make sense of, and find comfort in,
his existence. Both plays are episodic, visually and aurally evocative journeys into the
psyches and souls of their central characters, Jones and Yank, respectively, and through
 EUGENE O’NEILL 253

them, into the psyche and soul of the United States of America. Both characters are on
a quest to find meaning, to find self-identity, and like Edmund, to belong; both find
redemption, but, like Yank in “Bound East,” only in death. At the very end of The Hairy
Ape, after Yank is killed by the embrace of a gorilla, the stage directions state, “And, per-
haps, the Hairy Ape at last belongs” (O’Neill 1988a, 163).
During the 1920s, O’Neill’s exploration of challenging, sometimes controversial, top-
ics using nonrealistic, experimental theatrical forms intensified. Welded (1923) was an
intense and honest drama about torturous marital relations, and All God’s Chillun Got
Wings (1923) brought miscegenation to the stage, including the sight of a white woman
kissing a black man’s hand, which led to threats of censorship (Sheaffer 1973, 134–40). In
Desire under the Elms (1924), O’Neill drew on Greek tragedy (i.e., Hippolytus, Oedipus,
Medea) as the foundation for a more contemporary story of lust and greed in America,
with the quasi-incestuous coupling of a young man and his stepmother at the center of
the plot also bringing controversy in the press and threats of censorship. While all three
of these plays are largely naturalistic, Desire, in particular, indicates the expanding reach
of the dramatist, both in terms of form and content. In addition to its aspirations to
frame a tragic vision for America founded on classic Greek tragedy, the play introduced
the use of a single set with removable walls to allow the depiction of multiple simultane-
ous scenes. As Normand Berlin has observed, “This method of staging remains realistic,
but it allows for remarkable fluidity of presentation, and it produces some highly effec-
tive scenes by means of juxtaposition” (1982, 81).
Even bolder experiments with form were still to come, as the dramatist attempted
to represent his grand notions of “an Imaginative Theater” (Sheaffer 1973, 202), tied
to Nietzschean philosophical ideas, and to dig more deeply into the human psyche.
Those that depend on “poetic and lofty subject matter” (201) and physical pageantry
at the expense of the inner lives of characters—such as The Fountain (1922), Marco
Millions (1925), Lazarus Laughed (1927), and Dynamo (1929)—were failures, although
often quite interesting. Others that use theatricality to reveal the “drama of souls”
(Berlin 1982, 97)—such as The Great God Brown (1925), Strange Interlude (1927), and
Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)—were more successful. Each of these plays was intel-
lectually ambitious and stretched the limitations of the theatre, in some cases, beyond
the practical. Lazarus Laughed, with its cast of hundreds, complicated use of masks,
and other logistical challenges, is widely considered to be impossible to produce as
O’Neill envisioned it (Bogard 1988, 279–90), and there have been very few attempts to
stage it.
The Great God Brown and Strange Interlude were both efforts by O’Neill to bring the
dualities of the human personality to the stage by using theatrical devices in more con-
temporary, realistic settings (Bogard 1988, 268). One of O’Neill’s favorite devices was the
mask, derived from Greek drama, but reconceived for a modern audience in psycho-
logical terms: “One’s outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one’s
inner life passes in a solitude hounded by the masks of oneself ” (O’Neill 1988b, 407). In
The Great God Brown, the dramatist used masks to depict this duality in a much more
254 STEVEN F. BLOOM

practical way than he had in Lazarus Laughed, but the use of this device can still seem
heavy-handed and distancing:

We see the mask, but it covers no recognizable face, it responds to no beating heart.
The mask points to the “vision” of a serious, sincere dramatist who seems more
interested in his thesis, in his ideas on Life and God, than in the characters who
present the ideas. (Berlin 1982, 88)

In Strange Interlude, O’Neill used spoken asides, which, although certainly artificial and
overdone (to the extent that they became grist for the Marx Brothers’ parodic mill in
Animal Crackers), prove less distancing than the literal masks of Brown. Considered the
theatrical equivalent of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness (97), the asides were decidedly
“modern”; along with the length of the play (more than five hours with a dinner break),
which gained a fashionable mystique, and the frank subject matter, the device contrib-
uted to the popular appeal of the production:

To a public relatively untutored in such matters, Strange Interlude unquestionably

appeared as a revelation—a kind of primer of new thought, couched in language
and action that opened new vistas in their understanding of human drives. (Bogard
1988, 297)

Strange Interlude was the most commercially successful of O’Neill’s plays during his life-
time (Sheaffer 1973, 288–89), and it earned him his third Pulitzer Prize.
The last important work of this “experimental” period is Mourning Becomes
Electra, in which O’Neill shuns the more contrived of his experimental techniques
and builds on those that were more satisfying. Even more intentionally and transpar-
ently than Desire under the Elms, Electra adapts Greek tragedy (i.e., the Oresteia) to
a mid-nineteenth-century American milieu (the return of a Civil War officer), using
the Greek model to capture the human predicament of balancing free will against an
overwhelming sense of fate and predestination, driven in modern terms by Freudian
insights into the unconscious. Like Strange Interlude, the complete Electra trilogy
challenges the audience’s endurance, again running over five hours and including
a dinner break. Electra uses masks, but in a metaphorical way, as the characters are
described with “mask-like” faces, and the family resemblance among characters is
likened to wearing masks. In Act 3 of “The Hunted,” Orin is haunted by the resem-
blance among the men he has killed in the war: “Their faces keep coming back to me
in dreams—and they change to Father’s face—or to mine—” (O’Neill 1988a, 977), sug-
gesting, of course, the universal human qualities that lie beneath the masks all people
wear. Mourning Becomes Electra has the ambitious reach of O’Neill’s middle plays, but
it is more grounded in psychological truths than the less successful of those plays, and
it is more compelling than the best of them because it is less noticeably encumbered
by theatrical artifice: “O’Neill tells a big story about big passions, and he tells it with
such truth that we get behind life and feel the real reality” (Berlin 1982, 117). Mourning
 EUGENE O’NEILL 255

Becomes Electra marks the beginning of the playwright’s inward retreat and his return
to realism. As Berlin points out, “After the indulgences and excesses of the late twen-
ties, O’Neill began the thirties with a realistic play that solidified his reputation as the
American dramatist, and probably pushed him a giant step forward to the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1936” (117–18).
There was one more accomplishment that preceded the Nobel Prize, one that pro-
vided another push toward the intensely personal realistic plays that would mark the
pinnacle of his achievement: the reputedly somber, ponderous O’Neill wrote his only
comedy, called Ah, Wilderness! (1932), which depicts the family and childhood the play-
wright claimed he wished he had had (Sheaffer 1973, 404), and it reflects nostalgia for a
more innocent time in the United States. Set on July 4th in 1906, it is a coming-of-age
story about Richard Miller, an idealized version of the young playwright himself, who
quotes romantic literature considered risqué at the time, rebels against his parents and
their values, has his first encounter with a prostitute and with alcoholic intoxication,
and emerges a sober and stable young man on the verge of successful adulthood. There
is a secondary storyline about an alcoholic uncle and his failed relationship with a spin-
ster aunt, but the sad hopelessness of life that this plot and these characters represent is
glossed over in the upbeat, comic spirit of the play. John Gassner said of Ah, Wilderness!
that it is “one of the most attractive of American domestic comedies, nothing less and
nothing more” (1965, 34–35). This time, O’Neill uncharacteristically emphasized the
“hope” in “hopeless hope.”
O’Neill received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, the first, and still the only,
American dramatist to be so honored. Had his career ended in 1937, his legacy would
have been that his bold experimentation and adaptation of the innovative techniques of
modern European dramatists to American themes and characters transformed drama
in the United States and gave it a place on the world stage. Those great dramas that in
their own right rose to the level of the works of those European dramatists like Ibsen,
Strindberg, Shaw, and Chekhov were yet to come. The masterpieces that O’Neill wrote
in the late 1930s and early 1940s would confirm the promise that the Nobel committee
perhaps had seen in the influential and important works that they acknowledged with
their award.

Return to Naturalism: The Lie of the

Pipe Dream

The money that came with the Nobel Prize paid to build the house in which O’Neill lived
in Danville, California, called Tao House, where he was to complete his life’s work; this
meant turning decidedly inward, a turn that had begun, to some extent, with Mourning
Becomes Electra and, to a larger extent, with Ah, Wilderness! When he first came to
Tao House in 1938, however, he was working on what, at the time, seemed to be the
256 STEVEN F. BLOOM

pinnacle of his creative work, the ambitious cycle of plays he called “A Tale of Possessors
Self-Dispossessed.” At its most grand, the scheme was for eleven plays, tracing the his-
tory of an Irish family in America from the time of the Revolution until the Depression.
That family’s history would demonstrate the personal, spiritual price of American mate-
rialism, a theme O’Neill had addressed previously in such plays as Desire under the Elms
and Marco Millions. O’Neill found the theme for his cycle suggestively articulated in the
Bible: “For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
(Sheaffer 1973, 442).
Although he never completed the cycle, and in fact destroyed virtually all the notes
and manuscripts for it before he died, he did manage to complete one of the intended
cycle plays while living at Tao House, and that was A Touch of the Poet (1942).3 Although,
like Desire under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra, it takes place in the nineteenth
century, and is not at all autobiographical on its surface, it shares in its style, characteriza-
tions, and thematic implications much more with the autobiographical plays of O’Neill’s
final years. Poet is essentially naturalistic and has a lightness to it that is uncharacteristic
of the middle plays; Stephen Black goes so far as to call it a comedy (1999, 462). Like
those middle plays, any autobiographical references are found beneath the surface. The
grandiose Con Melody, for instance, has much in common with the actor James Tyrone
of Long Day’s Journey and, by extension, with the playwright’s father, James O’Neill. Its
setting in a run-down bar has much more in common with the setting of The Iceman
Cometh than either of the other nineteenth-century settings. In fact, thematically, with
its focus on the life lie, A Touch of the Poet seems very much like a companion piece
to The Iceman Cometh and Hughie. In these late plays, O’Neill’s characters still struggle
with the dualities of personality that he previously dramatized with masks and asides,
but in his return to naturalism, he discovered more realistic ways to stage the dualities,
especially through the use of intoxication and alcoholism (Bloom 1984, 22–27).
Con Melody, having lost through a scandal the status and respectability he had gained
in Ireland, has attempted to start his life anew in Massachusetts, where he has been
tricked into purchasing a tavern that is no longer well situated for success. While his wife
and daughter struggle to make ends meet, Melody presumes to play the role of a gentle-
man and pretentiously condescends to his local Irish patrons. As O’Neill indicates in
the stage directions, “He overdoes it and one soon feels that he is overplaying a role which
has become more real than his real self to him” (O’Neill 1988a, 197–98). As he preens in
front of a mirror, dressed in the “style worn by English aristocracy in Peninsula War days,”
quoting from Lord Byron, he strikes a foolish figure, but as O’Neill also indicates in the
stage directions, “there is something formidable and impressive about him” (198). He is
a strong, charismatic character, more dynamic and compelling than anyone else in the
play, except perhaps his daughter, Sara. When, toward the end, he returns from defeat at
the hands of the servants of the Harford family, he surrenders to reality, killing his mare
and, with her, killing the illusion that has sustained him. At the end, he joins the locals in
the bar, and Sara, sorrowfully asks, “But why should I cry, Mother? Why do I mourn for
him?” (281). Sara recognizes the significance of the life lie, the need human beings have
to create and maintain some kind of sustaining illusion that allows them to overcome
 EUGENE O’NEILL 257

the unpleasant challenges of the reality of their lives and of human life. It is this philo-
sophical question, embodied onstage by identifiably realistic characters with whom a
modern audience can relate, that becomes one of the central questions at the heart of
O’Neill’s other late plays, and that is, in fact, one of the central questions of modernist
thinking in the twentieth century. It is certainly at the heart of the first of the three highly
personal dramas to which O’Neill had turned most of his attention while living at Tao
House, The Iceman Cometh (1939).
In her critique of The Iceman Cometh, Mary McCarthy complained that one “can-
not write a Platonic dialogue in the style of ‘Casey at the Bat’ ” (Sheaffer 1973, 586), but,
in fact, O’Neill could, and did, do just that. The Iceman Cometh is long and repetitive,
but it depicts a couple of days in the lives of a group of alcoholics, whose days are long
and whose lives are repetitive. The playwright himself explained: “If there are repeti-
tions . . . they’ll have to remain in, because I feel they are absolutely necessary to what I am
trying to get over” (Gelb and Gelb 1973, 870). For José Quintero, who directed the suc-
cessful 1956 Circle-in-the-Square production that revived O’Neill’s reputation, Iceman
“resembles a complex musical form, with themes repeating themselves with slight varia-
tions, as melodies do in a symphony” (1957, 28). In The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill returns
to the milieu of many of his earliest plays. Like those plays, Iceman is set in a seamy bar
populated by unschooled and inarticulate characters of varied ethnicities on the low-
est rungs of society’s ladder, but O’Neill dispenses with simplistic plot contrivances and
instead creates a rich and complex character-based drama that is, McCarthy’s comment
notwithstanding, deeply philosophical.
Aside from the only two incidental characters, the police officers who arrive at the
very end, there are seventeen characters in the play, and many of them are onstage for
much of the playing time. Each has his or her own story of disappointment or failure,
and each has his or her own pipe dream that keeps hope alive. All of them drink heav-
ily, seeking solace in their pipe dreams and escape from reality through intoxication.
The dramatic conflict arrives in the person of Hickey, the salesman who arrives twice a
year to buy them drinks and make them happy. On this visit, though, he is selling a new
bill of goods; this time, he is selling the truth, as he forces all of the inhabitants of Harry
Hope’s Saloon to face the truth about themselves. Thus, the drama compellingly poses
the question to the audience: Is it better to live life with illusions, or to face the truth?
The antithesis to Hickey’s philosophical thesis is articulated by the self-proclaimed
“Foolosopher,” Larry Slade: “The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole mis-
begotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober” (O’Neill1988a, 569–70). The discourse is enacted
by the full ensemble, symbolized most poignantly by Harry Hope’s attempt to take his
promised walk around the precinct, only to return to the saloon, frightened and des-
perate: “But bejees, something ran over me! Must have been myself, I guess” (676–77).
So, to Hickey’s apparent surprise, these confrontations lead to universal gloom. Hickey
himself has irretrievably destroyed his own illusion by killing his wife, Evelyn, saying,
“Well, you know what you can do with your pipe dream now, you damned bitch!” (700).
For Hickey, there is no turning back, and at the end, he is taken offstage by the police,
to his execution, he hopes. Of the other two characters who face the truth, Parritt kills
258 STEVEN F. BLOOM

himself, and Larry, the “only real convert to death Hickey made here” (710), sits alone at
the end without hope or purpose, while all the others return to their drunken carousing
and revelry, safe, under the illusion of Hickey’s insanity, in the comfort of their restored
pipe dreams. The philosophical discourse of the drama is made visual in this closing
tableau of the play, in which O’Neill depicts the paradox of human existence that he had
long defined as “hopeless hope”: “because any victory we may win, is never the one we
dreamed of winning. The point is that life in itself is nothing. It is the dream that keeps
us fighting, willing—living! . . . Only through the unattainable does man achieve a hope
worth living and dying for—and so attain himself ” (Gelb and Gelb 2000, 422–23).
O’Neill recognized the magnitude of his accomplishment in Iceman in a correspon-
dence with Lawrence Langner, quoted by the Gelbs:

I have a confident hunch that this play, as drama, is one of the best things I’ve ever
done. In some ways, perhaps the best. What I mean is, there are moments in it that
suddenly strip the secret soul of man stark naked, not in cruelty or moral superiority,
but with an understanding compassion which sees him as a victim of the ironies of
life and of himself. Those moments are for me the depth of tragedy, with nothing
more that can possibly be said. (Gelb and Gelb 1973, 837)

The grounds for these claims are equally, perhaps even more, compelling in Long Day’s
Journey into Night (1941).
The naked souls in The Iceman Cometh are based on many of the people O’Neill
knew in his early days at sea and in barrooms and flophouses, but those in Long Day’s
Journey into Night are based on the members of his own family of origin, as the drama-
tist revealed so transparently, and so poignantly, in the dedication inscribed to his wife,
Carlotta, in the published version of the play:

I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that
enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and
understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones. (O’Neill 1988a, 714)

The repetitive cycle of guilt and blame in the play powerfully suggests that all four Tyrones
are responsible for the family’s apparently hopeless situation (represented by Mary’s mor-
phine addiction, the men’s alcoholism, and Edmund’s consumption) and, at the same
time, that none of them is responsible for it, that they are all just victims, as we all are, of a
mysterious and incomprehensible fate that has hovered ironically over O’Neill’s charac-
ters since his earliest one-act plays. As Mary says to Edmund in Act 2, scene 1: “It’s wrong
to blame your brother. He can’t help being what the past has made him. Any more than
your father can. Or you. Or I” (751). Consistent with the contradictory nature of so much
of her behavior in the play, having said that, Mary, however, continues to blame her hus-
band and sons for much of what disappoints and torments her in life.
To some, O’Neill never quite provides the same forgiving justifications for Mary’s
behavior as he does for the other three characters, especially for the father in his revela-
tory monologue in Act 4, perhaps stemming from a refusal to forgive his own mother.
 EUGENE O’NEILL 259

Throughout the play, Mary is distant and aloof, and aided by the morphine, she retreats
further into her past, erecting an impenetrable wall between herself and her family that
is especially painful for Edmund, who yearns for maternal comfort in the face of his
gloomy diagnosis. After a series of attempts to make that connection with his mother,
Edmund finally lashes out at her in frustration and anger: “It’s pretty hard to take at
times, having a dope fiend for a mother!” (788), and the sound of the foghorn at that
moment reinforces the danger of that penetrating reality. Deeply wounded, Mary
retreats upstairs—“I must go upstairs. I  haven’t taken enough” (789). O’Neill never
allows the damaged mother to return. The next time she appears, in Act 4, she enters as
the young girl she once was, her face “a marble mask of girlish innocence” (823).
Although her face is described as masklike, she, in fact, appears now as one of those
naked souls to whom O’Neill referred in Iceman, one seen with compassion “as a victim
of the ironies of life and of [her]self ” (Gelb and Gelb 1973, 837). She is introduced deri-
sively by Jamie: “The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!” (O’Neill 1988a, 824), and although
Edmund defensively strikes Jamie, the blow does not narrow the gulf between Mary and
the three men. No longer blaming any of them, no longer even acknowledging their
presence, she relives the winter of her senior year of high school, when the Holy Mother
advised her to test her claimed desire to be a nun by “living as other girls lived” to see if
she was really called to life as a nun. As Mary recalls, though, “something happened to
me,” suggesting no personal responsibility and no blame, only fate: “I fell in love with
James Tyrone and was so happy for a time” (827–28). In her final retreat from the family,
Mary does not earn forgiveness, but in this last line, O’Neill implicitly grants her at least
pity and understanding. Mary, in her current state, seems unaware of what happens to
her “after a time,” but the audience knows full well, seeing before them onstage that her
marriage to James Tyrone has led to a life of disappointment, pain, and sadness. Like
The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey concludes with an evocative tableau. Although
all four Tyrones are together in their home, isolated by a wall of fog, each is very much
alone, sadly isolated from each other, emphasizing the irony of Mary’s final words.
In The Iceman Cometh and A Touch of the Poet, many of the characters find solace in the
sustaining camaraderie of others; in Long Day’s Journey into Night, that spirit of camara-
derie does not exist overtly onstage at the very end, but there is some hope implicit in the
strong family bonds that tie the Tyrones together, paradoxically the very same bonds that
cause them to attack each other so relentlessly; these bonds are secured between Edmund
and his father and Edmund and his brother in the final act and lie beneath the surface of
the final tableau. In the last two plays that O’Neill completed, Hughie (1942) and A Moon
for the Misbegotten (1943), the main characters struggle with the same human condition
of aloneness and with similar ties that bind and can help sustain them.
Hughie is the only surviving complete work from another cycle of plays that O’Neill
ambitiously conceived of in his final years, this one to be a series of one-acts about the
deceased, called “By Way of Obit.” In Hughie, O’Neill returns to the one-act format that
he had used to hone his dramaturgical skills as a novice playwright some twenty-five
years previously. Although the dominant style of the play is naturalistic, akin in its
run-down hotel lobby setting and in its characterizations to The Iceman Cometh, it is
260 STEVEN F. BLOOM

apparent that the mature dramatist was still driven to experiment with nonrealistic tech-
niques to bring out the inner thoughts of his characters. The play is essentially a mono-
logue, spoken by Erie, a small-time gambler who lives at the hotel and passes his time in
the lobby regaling the Night Clerk with tales of his exploits with women and dice in the
big city. Most of the Night Clerk’s reactions, however, are unspoken, detailed in the stage
directions, and reportedly imagined by O’Neill to be depicted, along with the activities
on the street outside, through the use of a soundtrack and projected images on a screen
(Sheaffer 1973, 523). Even without these devices, though, the play compellingly depicts
the loneliness of the individual in the modern urban landscape, and, like Iceman, it sug-
gests that the companionship of another human being can help sustain the illusions that
lend meaning to life in the face of a painful and empty reality. Remarkable for its brev-
ity and its use of both external and internal monologues, Hughie is thematically consis-
tent with the other late plays, similarly combining humor and pathos to depict O’Neill’s
vision of the human condition.
A Moon for the Misbegotten, the last play that O’Neill would complete in his lifetime,
is, in fact, a kind of obituary for the playwright’s brother, Jamie O’Neill, conceived in the
same spirit of “By Way of Obit” but in a full-length mode. Jim Tyrone is not dead yet, but
there are many references to his deathlike condition. Jim Tyrone is a broken man. His
joking good humor hides a tortured soul. In a long monologue in Act 3, Tyrone con-
fesses to Josie not only that he has not mourned his mother’s death adequately, but also
that he has desecrated her memory by getting drunk and having sex with a prostitute
every night on the train ride back east while his mother’s body lay in the baggage car.
Seeking and finding forgiveness in Josie’s arms, Tyrone is released from the suffering
of his life to find comfort in death. In the final words of the play, Josie grants Tyrone his
last rites: “May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest
forever in forgiveness and peace” (O’Neill 1988a, 946).
Josie arrives at this moment of absolution at great cost to herself. Long in love with
Jim Tyrone, she invests great hope in their moonlit rendezvous, only to find that he is
too wracked by guilt about his mother to love another woman and that the love he seeks
is the forgiving maternal love that he has never experienced from his own mother. So he
pleads for her forgiveness through Josie, who obliges, and as Tyrone falls asleep on her
breast, comforted by her love and forgiveness, Josie recognizes the painful irony of her
situation, in terms that recall the sense of “ironic fate” with which O’Neill’s characters
have contended from the beginning (Bogard 1988, 17):

God forgive me, it’s a fine end to all my scheming, to sit here with the dead hugged to
my breast, and the silly mug of the moon grinning down, enjoying the joke! (O’Neill
1988a, 934)

So while Tyrone is made whole again in preparation for his death, Josie has lost her hope
for wholeness in a romantic relationship with Tyrone. In Act 4, Josie settles for whole-
ness with her father.
 EUGENE O’NEILL 261

The relationship between Josie and Phil Hogan is perhaps the crowning achievement of
A Moon for the Misbegotten. Having its roots in the relationship between Anna and Chris
in Anna Christie, and drawing from the same well of domestic humor as he had been tap-
ping since Ah, Wilderness!, O’Neill created a father-daughter relationship that is enduring
and sustaining. Their bond is founded on mutual understanding and respect, and they truly
enjoy each other’s company. The joking banter between them gives them pleasure and helps
to pass the time in an otherwise harsh and humorless environment. The loss of Tyrone’s
love, then, is somewhat less traumatic for her because she has her father. Just as O’Neill was
able to imagine a family so unlike his own in Ah, Wilderness!, in Moon, he is able to imagine
solace within a family unlike his own. As Josie bids farewell to the dead Jim Tyrone, she
returns to the comfort of the “fun and excitement” with her father. It was approximately
twelve years later when Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot would introduce the world to
Vladimir and Estragon, two hopeless human beings who endure the challenges of a seem-
ingly pointless existence by waiting it out together, engaging in endless, mutually entertain-
ing banter. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Josie and Hogan appear to have little reason to go
on, yet they do; much the same can be said for Erie and the Night Clerk in Hughie and the
carousing denizens of Harry Hope’s at the end of The Iceman Cometh.

O’Neill’s Genius

O’Neill began his career as a dramatist emulating the great modern European play-
wrights in style and approach; in his final plays, he makes his claim to take a place
beside them as his drama gains the heft of content and vision. The accomplishment
of these plays, according to Berlin, “allows the name O’Neill to be mentioned along
with Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, and perhaps one or two others, as the giants of
modern drama” (Berlin 1982, 130). Linda Ben-Zvi draws a line of connection, and even
influence, between O’Neill and the Theatre of the Absurd: “His plays have within them
the awareness of modern futility and the need to find dramatic articulation of this nul-
lity. . . . They are also important as historical foreshadowings of the theater that was to
follow, the theater of Beckett, of Pinter, and later of Shepard and Mamet, a theater that
O’Neill may in part be responsible for foretelling, even for influencing” (1990, 54).
While working through the psychological and emotional traumas of his own life
through his writing for the stage, Eugene O’Neill transformed American drama and
brought it into the modern era. According to the Gelbs, “No one expressed [O’Neill’s]
creative struggle as tellingly as the equally haunted Tennessee Williams: ‘O’Neill gave
birth to the American theater and died for it’ ” (2000, 640). In 2004, the playwright Tony
Kushner wrote of “the genius of O’Neill”:

In a play called Fog, O’Neill wrote a stage direction which could be used now to
describe Eugene O’Neill’s centrality in American drama, his inescapable presence
262 STEVEN F. BLOOM

in our national theatrical imagination, earned by virtue of his identification of our

“native eloquence”: “. . . the genius of the fog . . . broods over everything” (2004, 256).

The genius of Eugene O’Neill has made all the difference to American drama as it has
evolved from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Notes
1. O’Neill had decreed that Long Day’s Journey into Night was never to be produced and
was to be published only twenty-five years after his death. As the sole executor of his
estate, including all of his written and published works, his widow, Carlotta Monterey,
allowed it to be published and produced in 1956. To this day, there is still disagreement
and uncertainty about whether or not Carlotta was justified in overturning the stated
wishes of her husband. Most scholars agree that the course of American drama would
likely have been very different if Long Day’s Journey had not been published until 1978,
as the playwright originally had stipulated. With the publication and production of this
monumental drama, O’Neill’s stature in the American theatre was revived and his legacy
ensured. For more details, see Gelb and Gelb (2000, 14–22).
2. O’Neill depicted this episode in the one-act play called “Exorcism,” which was written in
1919, produced in 1920, but then destroyed by O’Neill and believed to be lost until a copy
was discovered and published more than ninety years later in 2011 in The New Yorker and
then in book form in 2012 by Yale University Press.
3. A draft of one other play from the cycle survived. Entitled More Stately Mansions, it was
meant to follow A Touch of the Poet in the cycle, with the struggle between the spiritual
and the materialistic in American culture played out within the conflictual relationships
in the Harford family (Deborah, Simon, and Sara). An abridged version was published in
1964 and produced on Broadway in 1967, but O’Neill himself considered Mansions to be an
“Unfinished Work” (Sheaffer 1973, 480).

References
Ben Zvi, Linda. 1990. O’Neill and Absurdity. In Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and
Postmodern Drama, edited by Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn, 33–55. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Berlin, Normand. 1982. Eugene O’Neill. London: Macmillan.
Black, Stephen A. 1999. Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Bloom, Steven F. 1984. The Role of Drinking and Alcoholism in O’Neill’s Late Plays. The Eugene
O’Neill Newsletter 8.1: 22–27.
Bogard, Travis. 1988. Contour in Time:  The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Revised Edition.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Gassner, John. 1965. Eugene O’Neill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gelb, Arthur, and Barbara Gelb. 1973. O’Neill. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 2000. O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo. New York: Applause.
 EUGENE O’NEILL 263

Kushner, Tony. 2004. The Genius of O’Neill. The Eugene O’Neill Review 26: 248–56.
O’Neill, Eugene. 1961. On Man and God. In O’Neill and His Plays, edited by Oscar Cargill, N.
Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher, 115. New York: New York University Press.
———. 1988a. Complete Plays. 3 volumes, edited by Travis Bogard. New York: Library of America.
———. 1988b. Memoranda on Masks. In The Unknown O’Neill: Unpublished and Unfamiliar
Writings of Eugene O’Neill, edited by Travis Bogard, 404–11. New Haven, CT:  Yale
University Press.
Quintero, José. 1957. Postscript to a Journey. Theatre Arts, April: 27–29.
Richards, Jeffrey H. 2001. Introduction to Early Plays, by Eugene O’Neill, edited by Jeffrey H.
Richards, ix–xlvi. New York: Penguin.
Sheaffer, Louis. 1968. O’Neill, Son and Playwright. Boston: Little, Brown.
———. 1973. O’Neill, Son and Artist. Boston: Little, Brown.
 CHAPTER 17

NAT U R A L I SM A N D E X P R E S SION I SM
I N A M E R IC A N  D R A M A

J U L IA A .   WA L K E R

From almost no recognition to a small measure of critical regard, the aesthetic move-
ments of naturalism and expressionism in the American theatre have received con-
siderably less scholarly attention than the varieties of dramatic realism that were
contemporary with them. When treated at all, naturalism is often considered a failed
variant of realism, its “pessimistic” outlook on the human condition at odds with the
native temperament of American audiences. Even in recent considerations by William
Demastes and Robert Andreach, naturalism is treated as a foreign and historical encum-
brance that contemporary American realist and postmodernist plays must slough off.
Expressionism, too, has typically been regarded as a foreign import, a short-lived move-
ment that, until recently, has been dismissed as a minor episode in the history of the
American theatre, significant only for the stylistic innovations it contributed to the
subjective realism of an Arthur Miller or the poetic realism of a Tennessee Williams.
A common critical neglect, however, is not the only reason to consider these two aes-
thetic movements together. Developing out of the same cultural zeitgeist, naturalism
and expressionism share a related aesthetic footprint.
Both movements were reactions to realism, for example, and both are legatees of the
social problem play insofar as they expose social problems to view. That neither pro-
poses a “solution” to those problems is why they were often regarded as pessimistic.
Both also emphasize visual detail over language, using the stage milieu to represent the
invisible but palpable forces that define the conditions of human life. While, in natural-
ism, those forces are primarily sociological, pressing from the outside in, in expression-
ism, they are spiritual, emotional, or psychological, projected back outward onto the
environment, fossilizing the imprint of an organic form misshapen by modernity. As
I will argue, naturalism and expressionism directed these common traits to different
rhetorical purposes, revealing very different aesthetic strategies for appealing to their
audiences’ critical understanding.
 NATURALISM AND EXPRESSIONISM 265

Naturalism

Characterized by the exacting detail with which its stage sets aspired toward verisimil-
itude, dramatic naturalism has often been treated as either a synonym for or an out-
growth of the late nineteenth-century movement of realism. Like realism, it assumes a
scientific attitude toward the world it represents, subjecting the social problems of that
world to an unapologetically dispassionate gaze. Accordingly, naturalism rejects the
idealized vision of character, motivation, and society that nineteenth-century melo-
dramas, with their roots in romanticism, typically staged. When naturalism is differ-
entiated from realism, it is often described as a movement that self-consciously broke
with the traditions of the past, inaugurated by the manifesto-like declaration of Émile
Zola in the preface to his dramatization of Thérèse Raquin in 1873 and programmatically
laid out in his Naturalism in the Theatre (1881). By this reading, naturalism is a modern-
ist rejection of realism—even if realism can also be read as a modernist break with the
past. Alexandre Dumas fils made his own “coupure” with the well-made play tradition
of Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou. What makes naturalism definitively modern,
suggests John Gassner, is its explicit rejection of the Enlightenment premises underlying
realism’s belief in a knowable world. For, where Dumas fils refused the plot contrivances
of the well-made play formula in favor of a more causal narrative logic, Zola directly
refutes even that, calling for “a logic of sensation and sentiment” to replace reason with
unconscious instincts and biological predispositions as the motivating cause of action
(Gassner 1969, 704).
To speak of Zola is to locate naturalism’s origins in France. Indeed, Zola is generally
regarded as the founder of naturalism, and any discussion of the aesthetic movement
must begin with him, especially since its influence on American drama has not been well
documented. This essay thus begins with a general description of the movement as it
appeared in Europe. As we’ll see, naturalism’s impact on the American theatre is largely
uncharted but certainly greater than scholars have acknowledged. Plays traditionally
grouped under the aegis of realism, such as those written by the early Provincetown
Players, for example, bear evidence of naturalism’s influence, especially in terms of their
intellectual foundations.
After all, the free will and rational agency that served as foundational premises of
realist characterization (and, indeed, Enlightenment thought) began to be questioned
seriously by the middle of the nineteenth century. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural
selection made a profound impact on scientific and social thought, effectively displacing
the human agent from the center of history by emphasizing larger environmental and
biological forces to which it was subject. Darwin, of course, was not alone. As the the-
atre historians Marvin Carlson and Dan Rebellato note, the literary historian Hippolyte
Taine and the founding sociologist August Comte also influenced the intellectual and
cultural zeitgeist out of which naturalism developed (Carlson 1993, 277; Rebellato 2003,
925). Like Darwin, these thinkers—along with Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, Friedrich
Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others—emphasized the limits of
266 JULIA A. WALKER

agency by situating human beings within larger systems of historical, biological, eco-
nomic, social, and moral forces. The extent to which those forces set absolute limits
upon human agency was taken up in philosophical discussions of “hard” versus “soft”
determinism, with both views finding their way into naturalist representations onstage.
In plays where the action is “softly” determined, where environmental forces exert what
Raymond Williams calls “limits and pressures” on characters who nonetheless act upon
the basis of reason and judgment, a continuum between realism and naturalism may be
seen. Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916), for example, falls in the middle of such a continuum.
Although the unrelentingly cold and isolated environment of the Wright homestead
has broken Minnie Wright’s spirit, compelling her to murder her abusive husband, Mrs.
Peters and Mrs. Hale are able to deduce her motivations by using their rational facul-
ties and exercising cautious judgment to withhold evidence from a patriarchal judicial
system that is structurally unjust. Drama scholars and theatre historians typically cat-
egorize Trifles as a realist play, taking Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale as the drama’s protago-
nists, but Glaspell’s play is clearly marked by naturalism’s influence, especially if Minnie
Wright is understood as an “antihero” (see below).
This brings us to a consideration of naturalism on the American stage in particular.
Here, as with discussions of naturalism generally, the question of whether and to what
extent it is a break from realism continues to structure most critical discussions. The
literary critic Donald Pizer, who was among the first scholars to take naturalism seri-
ously, treating it as its own aesthetically consistent movement, acknowledges the close
relationship between it and realism, but he identifies each with a different generation of
writers. For him, realism—celebrating the idea of progress and associated with the rise
of the middle class—reached its fullest flowering in the work of William Dean Howells
and Henry James, beginning in the 1870s and 1880s. Naturalism, considered “socially
and morally suspect because of its subject matter” (Pizer 1995, 8), became the hallmark of
writers such as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser in the 1890s and 1900s (3). Although
second-generation naturalists were committed to an aesthetic of verisimilitude made
popular by their realist forebears, they rebelled against their elders’ fixation on the sur-
face details of middle-class life, aggressively portraying all aspects of society, including
those that lay beyond the margins of bourgeois respectability. For critics such as Helene
Henderson and Jay Pederson, Norris’s The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903), in which
he condemns the representational limits of realism, is analogous to Zola’s manifesto-like
break with the earlier movement.
The title of Norris’s tract reveals the extent to which the primary genre of naturalist
expression in the United States was considered to be the novel. Although three of the
four writers in Pizer’s generational schema also wrote plays, few American literary his-
torians discuss their drama as significant either to the corpus of their individual bodies
of work or to the larger aesthetic movements they represented. Only the theatre histo-
rian Brenda Murphy gives serious consideration to the dramatic work of these writers
(among others), but her primary focus is on realism. Without addressing naturalism
specifically, Murphy suggests that it was an outgrowth of—as opposed to a break from—
realism, manifested in regional or local-color plays that often treated rural characters
 NATURALISM AND EXPRESSIONISM 267

with an uncommon seriousness, individuating them and illuminating their personali-

ties through the metaphorical use of setting.
Lula Vollmer’s Sun-Up (1923) serves as a late example of a local-color play that
approaches naturalism in its setting, characters, and dialogue. Its rustic cabin in the North
Carolina backwoods metaphorically establishes the isolationist mind-set of Mrs. Cagle, a
mountain woman whose whiskey-running husband was shot by a revenuer and whose son
dies on a French battlefield in World War I. Mrs. Cagle’s suspicion of all things foreign sug-
gests support for the literary critic Stephanie Foote’s contention that regionalist literature
should be understood in relation to the nativist fears voiced in response to unprecedented
rates of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. Within the
walls of her humble cabin, Mrs. Cagle recognizes only her own authority, defending her-
self from land speculators and agents of the law, offering refuge to a stranger fleeing mili-
tary duty. When the sheriff reveals the stranger to be the son of the man who killed her
husband, she is faced with the dilemma of honoring the family feud by turning him in or
holding fast to her anti-establishment convictions and allowing him to escape. Vollmer’s
resolution, in which Mrs. Cagle lets the stranger go, contrives to turn her antipathy toward
the law into an affirmation of love and universal brotherhood, but, at the play’s end, Mrs.
Cagle leaves her backwoods cabin for the solitude of a jail cell, remaining in symbolic iso-
lation, even if also embedded within the collective social process of the law.
A focus on common or low-born characters such as Mrs. Cagle who exist in relation
to their setting is often cited as a distinctive feature of naturalism. Where realism tends
to focus on middle-class characters, whose struggles to understand and bring order to
their world constitute the dramatic conflict, naturalism enlarges its lens to include char-
acters from the lower strata of society, who are often portrayed as struggling against
their circumstances or environment. While both movements share an aesthetic of veri-
similitude, they differ significantly in their treatment of three primary dramatic ele-
ments—character, conflict, and setting—each of which is tightly interwoven with the
other two. Realism’s focus on bourgeois—as opposed to naturalism’s lower-born—char-
acters, for example, is not simply a difference in the class status of their respective agents
of action. As I have suggested, realism’s foundation in Enlightenment thought, with its
emphasis on reason, structures its conflict between human agents who are understood
to act upon rationally calculated decisions. Naturalism, given its post-Enlightenment
concern with unknowable forces, structures its conflict between those forces and the
often-uncomprehending individuals upon whom they act. But, because those forces are
invisible—palpable, yet without material dimension—they are unrepresentable in the
conventional terms of stage realism. This is why, in naturalism, they are often given a
physical locus in the mise-en-scène. If, in realism, the setting merely orients the audience
in terms of where and when the action is set, in naturalism, the stage milieu has a doubly
representational function. For, while it represents the real material world that its sides of
beef, kitchen sinks, and smoking stoves exemplify, it also instantiates the abstract forces
and concepts that propel the play’s action and that structure our understanding of the
world. Minnie Wright’s kitchen and Mrs. Cagle’s cabin are “real” places as well as sym-
bols of larger social and ideological forces.
268 JULIA A. WALKER

The literary critic Walter Benn Michaels identifies this doubly representational func-
tion as specific to naturalism, suggesting that it is both a deliberate strategy and an epis-
temological problem that originates in late nineteenth-century debates over monetary
policy. In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987), one of several literary
critical studies of American naturalism that reflect a “cultural turn” in understanding art
and literature in relation to significant episodes of cultural and historical change, Benn
Michaels reads several works of fiction against the background of debates concerning
the gold standard, the policy of backing paper currency exclusively with gold, effectively
enacted in 1873 with the Coinage Act.1 For Benn Michaels, American naturalist fiction
gives expression to the cultural fears and uncertainties surrounding this policy by rep-
resenting a crisis in the exchange value between a representation (e.g., paper currency)
and the real (e.g., the gold that backed its value). Although, as with most American liter-
ary critics, Benn Michaels’s focus on the novel excludes consideration of the drama, we
can see how his argument plays out with regard to the mise-en-scène onstage in that it
similarly enacts a crisis between the representation and the real through its doubly rep-
resentational function. The side of smoked beef that hung from tenterhooks suspended
from the flies of André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, for example, is both a side of smoked
beef (the real) and a figure for the forces of appetite and brutality that govern social rela-
tions in the world of the play The Butchers (a representation, understood as such by the
audience). Of course, this doubly representational function is a feature of theatre gener-
ally, where something real (e.g., an actor’s body) appears both as itself and as something
that it represents (e.g., the body of a fictional character). What makes naturalism dif-
ferent is the intense pressure it puts on things within the stage milieu, a pressure that
was historically occasioned by the rise of stage realism and the commodity culture to
which it gives expression. Under naturalism, even methods of characterization changed,
as actors sought to reflect new modes of interacting with a world of things and under-
standing one’s relation to them. As Marvin Carlson points out, naturalism placed such
a strong emphasis on the visual aspects of the stage that Jean Jullien, one of Antoine’s
principal dramatists known for coining the phrase “slice of life,” declared the essence of
drama to lie in movement and action—not in words at all (Carlson 1993, 280).
According to Pizer, realism and naturalism have experienced alternating waves of
critical appreciation within American literary criticism, with naturalism in favor dur-
ing periods of economic hardship, suggesting an ideological difference between the two
movements (1995, 8). Regarded from the perspective of bourgeois realism, naturalism is
generally considered to be an aesthetic failure, which is perhaps one reason why it is sel-
dom discussed in relation to the American theatre. At best, it is patronized as an interest-
ing but ultimately immature phase in the career of a playwright such as Eugene O’Neill.
Many critics glibly characterize it as a foreign import whose “pessimistic” outlook ill
accorded with the native optimism of American audiences. Some critical accounts
purport to identify a logical inconsistency within the movement’s founding premises,
pointing to an irreconcilable “tension between the Naturalists’ idealism—that society
can be improved and progress is possible—and fatalistic determinism: biological, psy-
chological, social, economic” (Henderson and Pederson 2000, 468). To such critics,
 NATURALISM AND EXPRESSIONISM 269

naturalism may share realism’s commitment to exposing social problems with the hope
of ameliorating them, but its foundation in philosophical determinism (whether hard or
soft) is squarely at odds with its progressive aims.
Such dismissals reveal an unexamined critical bias against naturalism, measuring it
by a standard of bourgeois aesthetics that is presumed to be universal. According to such
a standard, audiences are supposed to identify with characters, taking action vicariously
through the movements mimed onstage. But naturalism explicitly rejects bourgeois aes-
thetics—not only in its choice of nonbourgeois subjects as its primary characters but
also in its rhetorical appeal. In naturalism, audiences are invited to feel compassion
for its characters but are understood to inhabit their own different and very privileged
perspective—a perspective that is constituted by the structure of the space between the
auditorium and the theatrical mise-en-scène. Indeed, small independent theatres such
as Antoine’s Théâtre Libre were specifically founded to stage naturalist plays (Hochman
1972; Hodgson 1988; Rebellato in Kennedy 2003). In the intimate space of such theatres,
audiences are situated as scientific observers, whose conscious subjectivities are located
between their ears and behind their eyes, capable of making rational analyses about the
conditions they witness onstage, while understanding that such conditions, their causes,
and possibilities for remediation all have correlates within their own society.
This is why a bourgeois model is inadequate to measure the aesthetic effect of a nat-
uralist play. Premised on a dynamic of Aristotelian identification, this model presup-
poses an emotional and, increasingly in the modern era, a psychological link that binds
the spectator to the protagonist. In realism, where the protagonist discovers the social
problem and analyzes (if not also solves) it, the spectator is asked to vicariously identify
with him or her to arrive at the appropriate insight. In naturalism, the spectator may
sympathize with the characters onstage, but he or she is never expected to identify fully
with them. Indeed, naturalism often features an “antihero,” a character whose actions
are meant to repel the spectator’s identification in order for that character to be under-
stood in light of the larger social and economic systems in which he or she is enmeshed.
In the antihero, naturalism made a decisive modernist break with theatrical tradition,
defying long-held (and often misunderstood) assumptions about the mechanism of
Aristotelian identification and the moral power of the theatre. The antihero’s purpose
was to maintain the spectator’s steady analytical gaze on the social problem presented
onstage in all of its complexity. The literary critic Dana Seitler suggests that this formal
repulsion of identification is a result of naturalism’s fascination with and internaliza-
tion of Darwinian thought, especially its objectification of bodies in finding and mark-
ing racialized traits. Under such a spectatorial regime, the body becomes merely one
object among many. That is why the dense scenic detail of the naturalist stage set is so
important; it gives both substance and representation to the real material conditions
that define social relations. No longer a technological feat that is its own attraction, the
realistic stage milieu presented in the naturalist theatre goes beyond mere coloration
in presenting a character’s habitus; it is a way of representing the totality of the situa-
tion under review. The density of scenic detail, combined with the intimacy of the small
independent theatres on whose stages naturalism was born, facilitated the audience’s
270 JULIA A. WALKER

critical perception of the world before them, almost as if it were rendered under the lens
of a microscope.
The figure of the antihero is key to understanding the aesthetic function of natu-
ralism. Although, in Trifles, Glaspell provides the characters of Mrs. Peters and Mrs.
Hale as points of audience identification, her primary character—Minnie Wright—is
an antihero, an absent presence that disallows identification so that audiences may see
her plight within the larger sociological conditions that have produced it. Likewise,
Vollmer’s Mrs. Cagle is an uncomfortable point of identification. Her last-minute con-
version to universal brotherhood notwithstanding, she is a figure that audiences are
asked to regard in light of the educational and economic limitations she has internalized
as virtues.
While these plays approach naturalism on the continuum from realism, Theodore
Dreiser’s The Girl in the Coffin (1916) lies closer to the naturalist pole. In this play, Dreiser
juxtaposes the death of a young woman against the metaphorical death of the workers’
movement, as a textile strike hangs in the balance between a man’s private grief for his
daughter and his public duty to rally the workers to the cause. The man, William Magnet,
resists all appeals to speak on behalf of the strikers, insisting that he be left alone to his
grief. When John Ferguson, the union organizer, calls on him, he finally relents, but
only upon hearing Ferguson’s story of a miserable private life sacrificed for the sake of
those whose lives can be made better by his organizing efforts. Ferguson’s self-sacrifice,
however, is less than the man’s own; in a plot point involving only him and the house-
keeper, Ferguson is revealed to be the man with whom Magnet’s daughter had an affair
that ended in a botched abortion. Here, Dreiser suggests that happiness is never the sole
experience of a single individual but is always the product of collective social forces, as
Magnet and Ferguson are both shown to negotiate their private needs with those of the
common weal. Neither is a conventional hero, because Magnet is duped and Ferguson
exposed as a cad. Yet the girl in the coffin—who lies upstage center—exists as a figure of
self-sacrificing love, caught between a desire for individual fulfillment and the needs of
others. Like Minnie Wright, she is absent from the action that she sets in motion. As an
antihero, she calls on the audience’s sympathy without inviting its identification in order
to structure its understanding of the larger social forces that govern the lives and even
direct the affections of individuals who are always defined by their social bonds.
Like much of Dreiser’s work, The Girl in the Coffin ends ambiguously. The audience
is asked to understand personal fulfillment in terms of collective needs, but, with the
“life” of the strike ironically undercut by the dead girl who lies upstage, the play is hardly
a paean to socialism or unionization. Nonetheless, the play illustrates the key features
of naturalism by focusing on working-class characters who are set in relation to the
larger economic forces that affect their lives, structuring the conflict in terms of those
characters’ individual desires and their collective needs, and using the door and walls
of Magnet’s house to illustrate the permeable boundary that separates individuals from
their communities. Indeed, the play stands as an example of American naturalist drama
in the way that the characters, conflict, and setting are intertwined to present a “slice of
life” that audiences are asked to analyze with a dispassionate gaze as they contemplate
 NATURALISM AND EXPRESSIONISM 271

correlative problems in American society. Although critically neglected for nearly a cen-
tury, American naturalist drama deserves serious attention for the ways it casts light on
both the social problems taken up by modernist playwrights and the radical aesthetics
they used to invite their audiences to reflect upon those problems.

Expressionism

Like naturalism, expressionism places a heavy emphasis on the scenic milieu, using
a detailed mise-en-scène to establish significance in the world of the play. But where
naturalism aims for verisimilitude, using the environment as a physical locus to repre-
sent abstract social forces, expressionism aspires toward stylization, underscoring the
fact of representation by rendering abstract—often spiritual—forces through the use of
explicit symbols. In this way, it relates to the aesthetic movement of symbolism, which
is why the late plays of August Strindberg are often identified as proto-expressionist.
With its emphasis on milieu, expressionism typically represents the internal spiritual,
emotional, or psychological state of its central character as a projection onto his or her
environment. Thus, in Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923), Mr. Zero’s rage at being
fired from his job is represented by a cacophony of sounds that increase in volume as the
stage floor rotates around and around until a clap of thunder and a flash of red light send
the whole scene into blackness. Such nonrealistic aural and visual effects are meant to
allow the audience to feel Zero’s confusion and mounting anger by presenting the world
of his experience.
Where naturalism represents the impact of social forces on the lives of individuals as a
movement from the outside in, expressionism represents both outside forces pressing in
and internal forces pressing back out onto the environment. Accordingly, the individual
becomes the site of dramatic conflict, situating expressionism firmly within the devel-
opmental trajectory of modern drama traced by the Hungarian literary critic Georg
Lukács in his seminal 1909 essay “The Sociology of Modern Drama.” Expressionism
would seem to be the logical culmination of this developmental trend, even as it dis-
mantles the recognizable elements of traditional dramatic form.
One of those elements is the seamless, causally driven narrative. Expressionism typi-
cally dispenses with that template, substituting instead short inferentially related epi-
sodes. It also rejects individualized human characters in favor of identifiable social
types, assigning them a dialogue of terse telegraphic diction in order to communicate
what Gassner refers to as “generalized protests against the nature of society and the fam-
ily” (1969, 259). The theatre historian Michael Patterson neatly summarizes many of the
movement’s main traits:

the rejection of individual psychology in order to penetrate to the essence of

humanity; a concern with the contemporary social situation; episodic structures
(Stationendramen); generalized, often nameless characters; strongly visual incidents
272 JULIA A. WALKER

in place of scenes depending on linguistic exchange; a highly charged, often abrupt

language (telegraphese); symbolic stage sets, lighting, and costumes; and powerfully
theatrical performances. (quoted in Kennedy 2003, 434)

In his full-length study of German expressionism, Patterson discusses the conflicted

history of the movement’s attempt to represent reality by means of a nonrealistic aes-
thetic. As he relates, an early impetus toward abstraction—meant to represent the
essence of a reality beyond the banal surface of naturalism—veered toward primitivism,
in order to imbue within the coolly analytical register of abstraction a more palpable
emotional experience (Patterson 1981, 57). This led to an intense method of expression-
ist performance known as the “schrei” style, which, according to the theatre scholar Mel
Gordon, is marked by alternating periods of silent stasis and dynamic vocal and visual
intensities in order to create a highly charged emotional pitch (1986, 19). The theatre his-
torian David Kuhns has identified this style of performance specifically with the play-
wright Frank Wedekind, noting that Wedekind performed in his own plays, which were
a model for much of the work produced by the German expressionists. According to
Kuhns, the angular gestures and strained vocals that became associated with Wedekind’s
charismatic style were expressive of a Wilhelmine culture in crisis, especially as experi-
enced by and distilled through the individual self (11–12).
Kuhns’s analysis of expressionist performance reflects a new scholarly trend, one that
does not merely describe the movement’s formal attributes but also considers them in
relation to and as expressions of larger cultural forces. To be sure, earlier landmark stud-
ies by R. S. Furness and John Willett sought to situate expressionism within its historical
and political contexts. Yet, compared to those studies, which focused on the movement’s
core philosophical ideas in relation to its cultural context, this newer wave of scholar-
ship analyzes its distinctive formal elements in relation to that context, regarding them
as expressions of the cultural fears and desires that were then in circulation. By articulat-
ing formal attributes to a specific authorizing culture, this newer scholarly mode thus
distinguishes among individual manifestations of the movement, identifying each as a
specific cultural formation, rather than searching for a moment of absolute origin.
Such an approach invites us to consider the aesthetic formation of expressionism that
arose in the United States in relation to its own cultural and historical context. Previously,
scholars have tended to conclude that the US movement was a mere offshoot of German
expressionism, despite American playwrights’ claims that they were not influenced by
the German movement. O’Neill, for example, insisted that The Emperor Jones (1920)
and The Hairy Ape (1922) were written “long before I had ever heard of Expressionism”
(quoted in Clark 1947, 83), while Rice averred that The Adding Machine was “a spon-
taneous thing. I had no experience with German Expressionism at that time” (quoted
in Elwood 1968, 3). Most theatre scholars have dismissed these demurrals, concluding
that the Americans were simply protecting their artistic egos. This is the reluctant con-
clusion reached by Mardi Valgemae in Accelerated Grimace (1972), the first booklength
study of American expressionism, which is important for giving serious consideration
to the expressionist plays of O’Neill, Rice, John Howard Lawson, and other playwrights
 NATURALISM AND EXPRESSIONISM 273

associated with the art theatre movement of the 1920s. Valgemae nonetheless concedes
the presumed German origins of their experimental form on the basis of formal simi-
larities and an apparent temporal lag between the German and American movements.
There are, however, significant differences between the American and German for-
mations. Patterson’s claim that expressionism “reject[ed] individual psychology” in
favor of a concern with the “essence of humanity,” for example, is particular to German
expressionism. As Gassner points out, this claim was in fact a credo held by the German
expressionist playwright and theorist Paul Kornfeld, who dismissed the (realist) psy-
chologization of character in favor of a style that could represent a deeper spiritual
dimension of existence (Gassner 1969, 259). American expressionist playwrights, how-
ever, did not dispense with individual psychology, even as they used an expression-
ist aesthetic to represent the projection of their characters’ psychological states onto
the world. Characters such as O’Neill’s “Brutus Jones” in episodes 2 through 7 of The
Emperor Jones, Rice’s “Mr. Zero” in The Adding Machine, “Sophie” in The Subway (1923;
1929), and Lawson’s “Roger” in the dream sequence of Roger Bloomer (1923) are all good
examples, as is Sophie Treadwell’s “young woman” in Machinal (1928). A less canoni-
cal text is Alice Gerstenberg’s play Overtones (1915), in which two polite society women
exchange pleasantries over tea, while the veiled figures of their alter egos dance around
them, giving voice to their repressed feelings of jealousy. For Gassner, the American
playwrights’ tendency to address a psychological (as opposed to spiritual) crisis can be
explained by their adoption of the German technique without fully understanding or
ascribing to its attendant philosophy (1969, 259). He, too, assumes that dramatic expres-
sionism originated in Germany and was transplanted to the United States. Yet, as the
date of Gerstenberg’s play suggests, American playwrights were writing expressionistic
plays at the very moment that the German movement was taking root.
Dreiser, for example, pushes the naturalist form into an entirely expressionist direc-
tion in his plays The Blue Sphere and Laughing Gas, both published in Plays of the Natural
and the Supernatural (1916), the same volume that includes The Girl in the Coffin, which
we examined in relation to naturalism. In The Blue Sphere, Dreiser extends the natural-
ist conceit of unknowable forces into both the psychological and spiritual realms when
a toddler, coaxed by “The Shadow” who offers him a mysterious blue ball, roams out of
his yard and into the path of a freight train. The train conductor remonstrates against
himself, grieving, “And I thought I was looking! The first child I ever killed in my fifteen
years!,” suggesting that both he and the boy have been unwitting pawns in a game of fate
(Dreiser 1916, 82). But the conductor’s penultimate line invites yet another interpreta-
tion: looking upon the child that lies on the track, he observes, “Well, it’s a God’s blessing
if a child had to be killed it was a deformed one, anyway,” suggesting that the gate left
open by the brother and the daydream of the young mother are repressed psychological
wishes that the child (identified as “The Monstrosity” throughout the text) would meet
such a fate.
Dreiser’s Laughing Gas is similarly concerned with the psychological and spiritual
realms. But where in The Blue Sphere each realm offers a different set of causes for the
same material event, in Laughing Gas both realms are depicted as existing in separate
274 JULIA A. WALKER

but parallel relationships to material reality. Here, Jason James Vatabeel, “an eminent
physician,” is himself a patient, being treated by his colleague Fenway Bail, “a celebrated
surgeon,” for a cancerous tumor on his neck. Anesthetized with nitrous oxide, Vatabeel
slips into another plane of consciousness, where his ruminations are punctuated by
Bail’s operative commentary, various astral voices (including “Alcephoran,” which
Dreiser explains as “a power of physics without form or substance”), and the pound-
ing rhythm of the universe. When the surgical team runs out of oxygen, Vatabeel’s life
appears in jeopardy, as an assistant runs off for another canister. Meanwhile, a shadow
team takes over the surgery, as Demyaphon (the personification of nitrous oxide)
explains to Vatabeel that life is an endless spiral of repetition and permutation:

The points which you established on your previous circuit of this orbit of materiality,
and which have been counting in your favor, have now been exhausted. This safety
mark, which you have heard frequently mentioned, you yourself established. If you
live it will be by setting a new standard—rendering a new service but in an old way—
over and over and over. Unless you struggle to live—unless you succeed in living.
(Dreiser 1916, 110)

As a new canister of oxygen is administered, Vatabeel wills himself to live, despite his
cynical insight that life is a meaningless sequence of repetitions. When he wakes, he
is laughing—a function of the nitrous oxide, the surgical team explains. Through his
laughter, Vatabeel struggles to explain to them the insight he has gained from his experi-
ences on the astral plane as well as the existential humor of it all.
Laughter is a sort of enacted pun in the play, with two causal sources—one physi-
ological (the nitrous oxide), the other spiritual with a psychological justification in the
material realm (the existential insight into the human condition). While The Blue Sphere
represents the spiritual dimension as an outside force pressing in on the material lives
of the toddler, his family, and the train conductor, suggesting a formal link to natural-
ism, Laughing Gas represents the spiritual dimension both as an outside force acting on
the individual and as an externalization of the individual’s psychological state, moving
Dreiser’s technique in a more recognizably expressionist direction. Published in 1916,
these plays could not have been influenced by the German formation of expressionism.
Like Gerstenberg’s Overtones, they invite us to consider their expressionistic form in
relation to the specific fears and desires circulating within American culture at the turn
of the twentieth century.
In my own work, I have suggested that American expressionist plays give voice to
cultural fears surrounding the new communication technologies that were appearing
at the turn of the twentieth century. When silent film presented mute bodies gesticu-
lating onscreen, when telephones and phonographs rendered disembodied voices, and
when telegraphy produced words out of patterns of electrical impulses, the act of com-
munication—once experienced as an integrated bodily process—was fractured into
independent registers of signification. That gesture, voice, and meaning could be repro-
duced without a body and its authorizing intent raised fears about these new technolo-
gies and their power over the communicative body as well as that body’s vulnerability
 NATURALISM AND EXPRESSIONISM 275

to modernity more generally. Seeking to restore the alienated body to its natural har-
monious balance, a group of antimodernists reacted. Their solution was to proselytize a
variation of Delsartean aesthetics—renamed “expression” by the oratory professor S. S.
Curry—that would properly reintegrate one’s verbal, vocal, and gestural “languages”
of communication. In colleges, universities, and on the lecture platform of circuit
Chautauqua, expression quickly became the expressive culture movement, a zeitgeist
that shaped the literary education of a generation of American playwrights. These mod-
ernist playwrights would go on to ironize Curry’s theory, counterpointing—rather than
harmoniously aligning—the three languages of the body in order to represent the alien-
ated condition of their central characters in their “expression-ist” plays.2 Thus, the term
“expressionist” was not refused by the American playwrights who wrote these formally
experimental plays, even if they disputed the charge that they had been influenced by
the German expressionists.
No doubt productions of American expressionist plays were influenced by the
German movement. Books on European dramatic modernism—such as Sheldon
Cheney’s The New Movement in the Theatre (1914) and The Art Theatre (1917; 1925),
Kenneth Macgowan’s The Theatre of Tomorrow (1921), Oliver Sayler’s Inside the Moscow
Art Theatre (1925) and Max Reinhardt and His Theatre (1926), and Huntley Carter’s The
New Spirit in the European Theatre, 1914–1924 (1926)—would have interested American
theatre practitioners, some of whom attended the actual productions described in these
books while traveling abroad. For those without the privilege of a European sojourn,
touring performances of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1911) and Max Reinhardt’s Sumurun
(1912) as well as exhibits such as the Armory Show in 1913 and films such as Robert
Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921) provided a ready palette of modernist tech-
niques with which to experiment. Moreover, as recent books by Anne Fletcher and
Valleri Hohman document, “American” theatre practices were indelibly shaped by the
work of émigrés such as the scene designer Mordecai Gorelik, the producer Morris Gest,
and the patron Otto Kahn. But the composition of plays may have been an independent
process, especially since literary dramatists were increasingly inclined to identify with a
modernist theatre that, as the theatre scholar Martin Puchner reveals, was “at odds with
the value of theatricality” (2002, 7).
The theatre historian Susan Harris Smith has thoroughly documented a resurgence
of the antitheatrical prejudice in and around the American theatre at the turn of the
twentieth century, noting that such a bias has shaped American literary criticism for
almost a century. One of the reasons for this antitheatrical prejudice—even among play-
wrights—was a backlash against the expressive culture movement and its emphasis on
performance as the full artistic realization of a work of literature. In the hands of expres-
sive culture enthusiasts, poems, plays, and even passages from novels were made mean-
ingful in performance only if the performer thoroughly inhabited them and, through
the use of voice and gesture, literally expressed (i.e., pressed outward) the meanings they
had divined to a receptive audience. Clearly, the expressionists’ interpretive practice was
based on a traditional model of aesthetics that held good literature (including drama) to
be morally instructive. By “inhabiting” a text, one assumed its meanings, taking them
276 JULIA A. WALKER

into one’s physiological being with every breath before exhaling them into the ears of
an attentive listener. That is one reason why the modernist modes of naturalism and
expressionism were so disconcerting. By presenting antiheroes, they repelled audience
identification, implicitly jeopardizing the instructive effect of expressive performance.
The poetry expressed by an actor portraying an antihero was certainly not ennobling.
Like naturalism, expressionism invites its audience to consider the larger social
forces pressing in on the modern subject. But, by pressing the spiritual, emotional, or
psychological state of that modern subject back onto the mise-en-scène, it complicates
the analytical perspective of the scientist regarding a “slice of life” under a slide glass by
inviting the audience to vicariously experience the character’s proprioception of his or
her world. Thus, in Gerstenberg’s Overtones, audience members are invited to observe
the double-bind that a sexual economy places on women, even as—and perhaps espe-
cially because—they acknowledge the experience of jealousy that the play asks them not
just to understand but to see, hear, and feel. Expressionism thus broke with a traditional
model of dramatic identification in favor of a radical aesthetic of spectatorship, but it did
not reject the dominant model of bourgeois aesthetics as vigorously as naturalism did,
maintaining an interest in the idea of the individual as well as a provisional process of
identification.
Few critics have noted expressionism’s reliance on radical aesthetics. In his detailed
account of John Howard Lawson’s playwriting career, however, the theatre historian
Jonathan Chambers takes it as his primary point of investigation, recuperating the
cultural and historical context out of which Lawson developed his aesthetic praxis. As
Chambers shows, Lawson began with an interest in the art theatre, seeking an alterna-
tive to the commercial theatre, and he increasingly moved toward the political com-
mitment to Marxist aesthetics that would define his theory of the drama and mark his
reputation as a Hollywood screenwriter. Chambers traces Lawson’s career arc, noting
that it roughly follows the two-part development of German expressionism described
by Raymond Williams: from a “mystical” focus on the spiritual journey of an alienated
individual to an “activist” concern with the underlying forces behind society’s spiritual
malaise. In Lawson, he sees the full flowering of American expressionism, which left
a lasting legacy in both its thrust toward social issues and its nonrealistic form. From
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) to Naomi Wallace’s Slaughter City (1996) and
beyond, the legacy—if not the formal movement—may be seen to continue.

Directions for Future Research

Because of the long-standing critical neglect and misprision of naturalism and expres-
sionism in the American theatre, both movements are ripe for new scholarly discover-
ies. Foremost among these is the recuperation of playwrights who wrote in these modes,
including fiction writers whose plays have received little scholarly attention; local-color
dramatists whose attention to regional detail exempted their plays from the national
 NATURALISM AND EXPRESSIONISM 277

register of literary-critical significance; playwrights whose plays are modeled upon a

radical—as opposed to bourgeois—aesthetic, leading them to be dismissed by critics
who were simply confused by the proper standard needed to evaluate their worth; and
writers such as Jean Toomer who defied the conventions of genre and media to create
hybrid works that drew from one or both movements.
A second possibility for new scholarly discoveries lies in the reevaluation of
now-canonical American playwrights who began their careers by experimenting in
the style of one or both movements. The recently published early plays of Tennessee
Williams, for example, reveal his debts to naturalism in a drama about a coal-miners’
strike, Candles to the Sun (1936), and to expressionism in his semiautobiographical med-
itation on commercial drudgery, Stairs to the Roof (1947).
Other possibilities abound. The relative dearth of scholarship on American naturalist
drama leaves the field wide open to interpretation, while a cultural-historical approach
to performance and other formal elements invites new ways of understanding both of
these formally inventive movements in relation to the historical period of modernity.
The rapid and thorough-going changes that transformed American culture at the turn
of the twentieth century necessitated new ways of giving voice to and comprehend-
ing those changes; the full extent to which naturalism and expressionism did just that
remains to be seen.

Notes
1. See also Bowlby, Fisher, Foote, Howard, Kaplan, and Seitler. Unfortunately, none of these
critics addresses drama, and theatre historians have yet to draw on this important wave of
critical scholarship to produce a sustained analysis of American naturalist drama.
2. Gordon’s explanation of the early “geist” style of German expressionist performance is in
keeping with my theory, suggesting that the German expressionists also may have had an
ironic relationship to Delsartean theories of expression that were circulating in Germany
and, indeed, throughout Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.

Works Cited
Andreach, Robert J. 2008. The War against Naturalism in the Contemporary Theatre. Lanham,
MD: University Presses of America.
Benn Michaels, Walter. 1987. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley : University
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Bowlby, Rachel. 1985. Just Looking:  Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola.
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Clark, Barrett. 1926 (revised in 1947). Eugene O’Neill, the Man and His Plays. New York: Dover.
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———. 1916. The Girl in the Coffin. In Plays of the Natural and Supernatural. New York: John Lane.
———. 1916. Laughing Gas. In Plays of the Natural and Supernatural. New York: John Lane.
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Fletcher, Anne. 2009. Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik: Scene Design and the American Theatre.
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Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Furness, R. S. 1973. Expressionism. New York: Routledge.
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Glaspell, Susan. 1999 [1916]. Trifles. In Plays by Susan Glaspell, edited by C. W. E. Bigsby, 35–45.
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Gordon, Mel, ed. 1986. Expressionist Texts. New York: Performing Arts Journal.
Henderson, Helene, and Jay P. Pederson, eds. 2000. “Expressionism:  United States, 1920s”
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Hochman, Stanley, ed. 1972. “Expressionism” and “Naturalism.” In Encyclopedia of World
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Hodgson, Terry. 1988. “Expressionist Drama” and “Naturalism.” In The Drama Dictionary.
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Hohman, Valleri. 2011. Russian Culture and Theatrical Performance in America, 1891–1933.
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Howard, June. 1985. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill: University
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Kaplan, Amy. 1988. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago:  University of
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Lawson, John Howard. 1925. Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life. New York: Thomas
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———. 1988 [1922]. The Hairy Ape. Volume I.  The Complete Plays, edited by Travis Bogard.
New York: Library of America.
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 CHAPTER 18

A M E R IC A N P OL I T IC A L DR A M A ,
19 1 0 – 4 5

C H R I STOP H E R J.   H E R R

When Clifford Odets, the most recognized American political playwright of the 1930s,
remarked that “we are living in a time when new art works should shoot bullets” (1939,
vii), he was merely echoing a sentiment that had become the mantra of the burgeon-
ing American political drama over the previous three decades. Plays actively address-
ing sociopolitical issues and urging change upon a nation wrestling with its identity
began on the periphery but came to the center of American dramatic practice by the late
1920s and remained there through the end of World War II. From the first inklings of
an American drama concerned with defining and solving the problems of social justice
in the 1910s, to the explicitly antifascist, anticapitalist, and antiwar plays of the 1920s
and 1930s, then to the dramatic celebration of American democracy in the war years,
American playwrights asserted their right not only to entertain but also to edify, to chal-
lenge, to chastise, and, occasionally, to convert audiences.
The phrase “political drama” is always amorphous and probably ultimately unsat-
isfying; because serious plays invariably engage topics of broad social concern, most
of these types of plays can be seen as political participants in an ongoing conversa-
tion about the central challenges facing the society they reflect. This is certainly true
in twentieth-century American drama, which repeatedly engages recurring social and
political themes: conflicts between the purity of the democratic ideal and the corruption
seeping into democratic practice; conflicts between the ideal of equal economic and
social opportunity and the reality of social oppression and economic struggle; conflicts
between the desire for self-reliance and peace and the necessity of international coop-
eration and mutual support; and conflicts between the rights of individual freedom and
the responsibilities of groups and individuals to each other. These themes are inescap-
ably linked to specific events such as the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti or the Scottsboro
trials, the unionization of the auto and steel industries in the 1930s, the rise of fascism in
Europe, or the causes and effects of the world wars. They are also connected to America’s
 AMERICAN POLITICAL DRAMA, 1910–45 281

sense of itself as a city on the hill, the place of progress founded on the idea of the per-
fectible future.

“This Is America!” Idealism and Oppression

in Early Interwar Political Drama

Certainly a great many of the interwar playwrights saw their work as a direct commen-
tary on contemporary America, but there were notable exceptions. Eugene O’Neill,
the dominant voice of American drama during the period between the wars, wrestles
with all of the general themes listed above, but he is not at heart a political playwright.
Even a play such as The Hairy Ape (1921), which includes direct confrontations between
the classes and a scene at the headquarters of the Wobblies, is not primarily political.
Though he is initially awakened by his confrontation with an oppressive socioeconomic
structure, Yank’s embrace of class-consciousness fails like all his other attempts to find
his true place in the world. The political in The Hairy Ape, as it is in much of O’Neill, is
merely another dead end, a detour on the road to metaphysical and personal truth. As
the example of O’Neill suggests, any study of American political drama requires nego-
tiating a balance between the generally political drama of a socially engaged playwright
and the specifically political drama of playwrights who use the stage to teach, chastise,
inspire, and convert their audiences.
One way to set political drama apart from other serious drama is by examining the
intended effect of the play on its audience. Recognizing that most political plays are
neither able to—nor perhaps intended to—create new beliefs in their audiences, Susan
Duffy argues for them as models of epideictic rhetoric, aimed to praise goodness and
condemn violations of expected social or moral norms. Thus, to be effective, political
plays rely on a shared commitment between playwright and audience; the play seeks
to reinforce their already held moral and social beliefs and to inspire them to shared
political action (Duff y 1996, 12). The historical complexity of American politics dur-
ing a period that swung wildly from progressivism to isolationism to war and back
again, and from the laissez-faire capitalism of the 1920s to the New Deal of the 1930s, is
therefore directly reflected in the increased stridency of political drama and the politi-
cal commitment of the theatres that produced such plays. While few plays fit neatly
into categories, there are a number of recurring central topics in political drama of the
period: plays dealing with oppression of minorities and marginalized groups (appear-
ing throughout the period); antiwar plays (reactions against World War I in the early
1920s and opposition to the approach of World War II in the 1930s); anticapitalism/
antimechanization plays (several in the late 1920s and more in the 1930s); labor plays
(mostly 1930s); plays dealing with social justice (more common in the 1930s); antifas-
cist plays (mid-1930s onward); and pro-American intervention plays (late 1930s and
1940s).
282 CHRISTOPHER J. HERR

American playwrights have incorporated political commentary since colonial times,

but the interwar period was the first to use the stage as a pulpit consistently and effec-
tively. As these writers struggled to free themselves from a sense of inferiority and from
the stranglehold of the producing syndicates that controlled most of the nation’s play-
houses and the content of the plays produced in them, they began to see possibilities for
using theatre to bring about change. In the commercial theatre, plays with broad appeal
were the norm, with sentimental melodrama and social comedy strongly favored and
moral uplift a necessity. Still, the modernist drama that had taken root in Europe forty
years earlier would begin to bloom in the Little Theatre Movement of the 1910s, and
a new generation of American playwrights—including in its first wave Susan Glaspell,
Rachel Crothers, Eugene O’Neill, and Elmer Rice—would write plays reflecting the
political complexities of American life directly from the stage.
Political dramas in the 1910s were relatively few, and topics of political importance—
for example, questions about the role of women in modern America—were generally
subsumed within more commercial works. The relaxation of Victorian strictures and
the Progressive reform mindset had helped to give rise to the “New Woman,” assertive,
educated, capable, and most of all public, determined to carve out a new niche in a stolid
patriarchal order. Women entered universities and the workplace at unprecedented
rates, and Rachel Crothers, most notably with A Man’s World (1909) and He and She
(1911), was among the first to directly address the “woman question.” Both plays expose
the internal contradictions of a society that promises women increasing freedom but
punishes those who stray from traditional gender roles. The protagonist in A Man’s
World, Frank Ware, is a successful novelist who has adopted a man’s name to compete
more successfully in the patriarchal world. She has also adopted a child, Kiddie, who
is actually the abandoned son of Frank’s fiancé, Malcolm Gaskell. Once the truth about
Frank’s abandonment of Kiddie is revealed, Gaskell expects Frank, as a “pure woman,” to
forgive his moral failings and, once she confesses her love for him, to submit to his care.
But Frank refuses to marry him until he takes responsibility for his actions, and the play
ends with the two of them separated. Other plays of the period that deal with the double
standard of behavior include two Pulitzer Prize winners, Jesse Lynch Williams’s satiri-
cal Why Marry? (1917) and Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett (1920), and also Susan Glaspell’s
realistic Trifles (1916). Glaspell’s play, produced by the Provincetown Players, was loosely
based on a trial she covered as a reporter. In the taut, suggestive one-act, which depicts
two rural women coming together to suppress evidence linking a neighbor woman to
the murder of her husband, Glaspell rejects a patriarchal system that is ignorant of and
indifferent to women’s experience; at the same time, she asserts the necessity for women
to band together to resist male violence and oppression.
Just as the New Woman took her place onstage, the Great Migration and the Harlem
Renaissance brought to Broadway what Alain Locke would come to call the “new
Negro.” Plays depicting racial issues became more common on the stage in the interwar
period. Serious plays tried to combat stage stereotypes by treating black characters sym-
pathetically, adapting the melodramatic model to create realistic plays with clear bound-
aries between good and evil (though these plays often seem dated today, engaging in the
 AMERICAN POLITICAL DRAMA, 1910–45 283

same kinds of stereotypes they purport to question): DuBose and Dorothy Hayward’s

folk play Porgy (1927)—later reworked into the Gershwin folk opera Porgy and Bess in
1935—which focuses on a love triangle in the all-black Catfish Row area in Charleston,
South Carolina; Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom (1926), an examination of the plight of
a mixed-race character ostracized from white society; Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun
Got Wings (1924), about the struggles of an interracial married couple; and George
Sklar and Paul Peters’s Stevedore (1934), a labor play that focuses on the dual oppression,
racial and economic, of black dockworkers in New Orleans. Other plays more realis-
tically and more directly addressed issues of racism. One early effort, Angelina Weld
Grimké’s grimly realistic antiracist play Rachel (1916), shows the protagonist, Rachel
Loving, gradually destroyed by repeated horrific incidents of racial violence, includ-
ing the revelation that her father and brother had been lynched. Rachel comes to view
blacks in America as “accursed,” abandoned; despairing, she vows never to bring a black
child into a world of hatred. Grimké’s play, produced under the auspices of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was among the first in
a line of plays dealing with racial topics written in the years leading up to World War II.
Several plays by Langston Hughes, including Soul Gone Home (1937), Don’t You Want
to Be Free (1938), and Mulatto (1935), the first play written by an African American to
be produced on Broadway, depicted various aspects of the black experience in styles
ranging from realistic to poetic. Perhaps the most realistic and influential play on race
produced during the period is Richard Wright’s Native Son, adapted by Paul Green and
staged by Orson Welles in 1941.
The ravages of World War I transformed political drama in the United States, giving
rise to a number of significant antiwar plays in the early 1920s and a series of plays ques-
tioning capitalism in the later part of the decade. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria Da Capo
(1920) is an absurd, symbolic harlequinade that juxtaposes a romance between Pierrot
and Columbine with a conflict between two shepherds. The romance is interrupted by
Cothurnus, the Mask of Tragedy, who ushers the shepherds onstage, where they proceed
to divide the stage with a wall. Eventually, their conflict escalates to the point where both
shepherds are killed, after which the lovers return, continuing their romance while the
dead bodies of the shepherds remain onstage. In a more realistic vein, Susan Glaspell’s
Inheritors (1920) combines antiwar sentiment with a celebration of American pioneer
spirit and an impassioned argument about the dangers of complacency and isolation-
ism—both domestic and international. Set in a small Midwestern town between 1879
and 1920, the sprawling play traces the family of Silas Morton, a farmer who donates his
best land for a university to continue the legacy of sacrifice established by the pioneers
and to expiate the guilt of those settlers for exterminating the Native Americans as they
moved westward. Acts II through IV focus on Morton’s granddaughter, Madeline, his
spiritual heir; she sacrifices her own comfort and safety to defend South Asian Indian
students protesting British rule against attacks by the increasingly isolationist and con-
servative university administration. The play culminates in Madeline’s protest of the
treatment of her friend, a conscientious objector, as a violation of the freedom of choice
the pioneers fought for: “Grandfather Morton . . . we went to that walled-up hole in the
284 CHRISTOPHER J. HERR

ground when they keep Fred Jordan on bread and water because he couldn’t be a part of
nations of men killing each other—and Silas Morton—only he was all that is back of us,
tore open that cell . . . as he cried, God damn you, this is America!” (Glaspell 1987, 152).
Other significant antiwar plays of the 1920s include Robert E. Sherwood’s comic The
Road to Rome (1927) and Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings’s What Price Glory?
(1926), a semirealistic play about soldiers at war notable for its rough language and its
conscious attempts to take the sentimentality and jingoism out of combat.
Both Inheritors and Aria Da Capo were written for the Provincetown Players, which
by 1920 had become one of the most influential outlets for new American plays. In
fact, a large number of the significant political plays of the 1920s were produced at the
Provincetown Playhouse or at the Theatre Guild, even though the latter was relatively
neutral politically. And throughout the interwar period, the role of producing organi-
zations, especially the Left-leaning theatres of the 1930s such as the Group Theatre, the
Theatre Union, the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre, the Prolet-Bühne, and ARTEF, the
Yiddish workers’ theatre, cannot be overestimated. These organizations saw theatre as a
weapon in the service of social and economic change; their members’ political commit-
ment allowed many plays to be produced that probably never would have seen the stage
elsewhere. Indeed, as Harold Clurman and Wendy Smith note in their histories of the
Group Theatre, the decision by the Group to pursue Broadway success increased their
visibility, but it also limited their choice of repertory and eventually caused a political
rift that fragmented the Group.

“It Takes a Lot of Joes”: Staging

Capitalism and Labor

Probably the largest group of political plays written in the 1920s deal generally with the
subject of capitalism and business, particularly as the economic downturn that followed
the end of the war leveled out and the economy began to grow. As Ronald Wainscott has
shown, of the thirty-nine plays on the general subject of business produced during the
years 1921–29, about half offered general support for capitalism and big business and
about half attacked it; the bulk of the anticapitalistic plays were produced in the second
half of the decade, as the financial excesses of the Jazz Age became increasingly worri-
some to the general public (Wainscott 1993, 187). Of the plays in support of business, a
number stemmed from the fear of Soviet Russia—a fear echoing the Red Scares of the
early 1920s. But the anticommercialism plays carried the day not only because they were
written by playwrights of growing repute, including John Howard Lawson, Elmer Rice,
Philip Barry, and others, but also because the visions of capitalist America presented in
those plays were confirmed by the stock market crash in 1929 and the Depression that
followed. Additionally, America’s shift to the political Left after the crash made political
drama more palatable and more popular than it had ever been before.
 AMERICAN POLITICAL DRAMA, 1910–45 285

Among the earliest—and most effective—attacks on commercialism in the 1920s was

Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (produced at the Theatre Guild in 1923), an expres-
sionist satire deriding the increasing mechanization of contemporary life. The play cen-
ters on Mr. Zero, an accountant whose single act of rebellion against a mind-numbing
existence is the sudden murder of his boss. Zero is convicted of murder and executed.
Had the play been fully in keeping with the German tradition of political expression-
ism, Rice’s play might have ended there, making Zero the hapless victim of a con-
scienceless economic system. However, in Rice’s play, Zero is only the victim of his own
small-mindedness: given a chance at redemption in the Elysian Fields—the home of
all artists and freethinkers—he rejects its immorality and is in turn condemned to be
reborn because he has contributed nothing to humanity: “back you go—back to your
sunless groove—the raw material of slums and wars—the ready prey of the first jingo or
demagogue or political adventurer who takes the trouble to play upon your ignorance
and credulity and provincialism” (Rice 1965, 61). Rice’s satirical expressionism attacks
the machine, but even more it condemns the person who refuses to rebel against it;
though deadly serious, the play is comic in tone throughout. On the other hand, one of
the most intriguing plays of the decade, Sophie Treadwell’s acclaimed Machinal (1928),
is an expressionist tragedy. Tracing the life of an unexceptional Young Woman through
various stages of her life—worker, daughter, wife, mother—Treadwell portrays modern
life as hopeless, impersonal, and repetitive. Only when she breaks free of the stultifying,
mechanical world that surrounds her and takes a lover is she able to free herself. But
when she murders her husband as a final act of freedom, her mechanical society cannot
sustain the eruption; she is convicted and electrocuted, destroyed by another machine.
Treadwell structures her feminist, antimechanical tragedy in fragmented, staccato dia-
logue and monologues that suggest both mechanization of human beings but also the
Young Woman’s loss of self in the face of a modern commercial ethos.
Like Rice and Treadwell, John Howard Lawson experimented with form in his plays,
which attacked the capitalist ethos of the 1920s. Lawson’s dramatic attacks on corpo-
rate America were consistent, including Roger Bloomer (1923), Processional (1925), Loud
Speaker (1927), and The International (1928) as well as in a few plays written in the 1930s,
most notably Success Story (1932) and Marching Song (1937). Roger Bloomer traces the
rise and fall of the eponymous character, a bookish boy from Iowa, against the backdrop
of the New York business world. Processional, produced at the Theatre Guild in 1925,
was Lawson’s first real attempt to create political drama with a distinctively American
form. It is experimental, a messy, episodic piece incorporating jazz music as the guiding
structural principle and weaving through the play images of popular culture, vaudeville
routines, antiwar sentiment, and current events. Set amid a coal miners’ strike in West
Virginia, the play depicts a world where everything, personal or professional, is nego-
tiable, with violence as the basis for those negotiations. The International is more topical
but still experimental; based on current events, it depicts a world overtaken by revolu-
tion but ends bitterly, with the bombing of New York and the failure of the revolution.
Lawson ultimately suggests that, without unity, the people will always be at the mercy
of corrupt leaders—Communist, fascist, or capitalist. O’Neill’s Marco Millions (1928)
286 CHRISTOPHER J. HERR

and Philip Barry’s comic Holiday (1928) are both satirical studies of the shallowness of
America’s search for wealth as an end in itself.
Lawson’s Success Story (produced by the Group Theatre in 1932) follows the rise to
power of Sol Ginsberg, who begins as a radical but sacrifices his convictions as he gains
economic success. His triumph strips his life of meaning, hammering home the mes-
sage that the designer Mordecai Gorelik quipped should be the motto of all Group
productions: “what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own
soul?” (Clurman 1945, 35). Other Group productions in this vein included Lawson’s
Gentlewoman (1934); Claire and Paul Sifton’s 1931–, an examination of the economic
conditions around the country in the first part of the Depression; Sidney Kingsley’s
hit play Men in White (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1933), which centered around the
struggles of an idealistic young doctor and featured a discussion of legalizing abortion;
several Odets plays; Paul Green’s Johnny Johnson (1936), an antiwar musical with a score
by Kurt Weill; and The Case of Clyde Griffiths (1937), Erwin Piscator’s adaptation of
Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.
In the 1930s, Lawson’s work was increasingly influenced by Marxism. Indeed, his
growing political commitment reflects a common trend in the period. Many of the
important playwrights of the period saw their work not just as political commentary
but as a direct contribution to class struggle. In the Popular Front era, liberals and left-
ists of all stripes were welcomed into the fold of the antifascist struggle, while a num-
ber of the most radical, including Lawson and Odets, joined the Communist Party, at
least for a time. The effect of Communist ideology on the development of the political
drama of the interwar period is not great, but it is palpable, particularly in plays written
between 1933 and 1937, and reviews of plays in the New Masses and Daily Worker urged
playwrights to use their skills in service of the revolution. Many of the plays that did
so sacrificed dramatic structure to political expediency, which is always a danger with
political drama and which makes many of the plays during the interwar period read
like little more than animated tracts. By the end of the decade, news of Stalinist purges
and constant criticism by Party authorities of plays deemed insufficiently revolutionary
cooled all but the most ardent Communists.
In 1936, Lawson published Theory and Technique of Playwriting, an elaboration of his
playwriting technique developed from two decades of iconoclastic practice as well as
from his recognition of the gap that often existed between revolutionary political con-
tent and effective dramatic structure. Lawson lays out the groundwork for a new kind of
drama, focusing not on individual conflict but on social conflicts, with dialectic rather
than individual psychology serving as the guiding principle of dramatic structure.
Marching Song, produced by the Theatre Union, which had been formed in 1933 as a
fully professional workers’ theatre, was the first play to put Lawson’s new theories to the
test. Over the course of the play, several characters are forced to choose whether they
will stand with their fellow strikers in defiance of the police and factory owners. At the
end of the play, a mass of strikers and supporters fills the stage to stand against the vio-
lent thugs who have just tortured and killed the strike leader and turned machine guns
on the crowd: “there’s people, more’n you could count if you never quit counting. . . . You
 AMERICAN POLITICAL DRAMA, 1910–45 287

hear me, you multitude, power is people!” (Lawson 1937, 158). As was expected in labor
plays, Marching Song ends with a call to action from the audience and a celebration of
the power of the group to defeat the corruption and violence of the system.
Union plays were written for union times. The passage of the Wagner Act in 1935,
protecting the rights of workers to unionize, collectively bargain, and strike, led to a
strong push, particularly by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, to bolster their
ranks with members from industries previously closed to unions. Added to that were
a series of violent confrontations between strikers and strikebreakers—such as the
Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934; the Pacific Longshore strike in San Francisco
in 1934; and the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago in 1937, in which ten strikers were
killed as they protested Republic Steel’s resistance to the union—that kept the issue in
the national headlines and made labor plays topical. Certainly the most successful of the
labor plays of the 1930s was Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, a one-act set in a union
hall. The play, loosely based on a New York cabbies’ strike the previous year, ends with
the discovery that the strike committee leader has been murdered and elicits a rousing
call: “STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!” (Odets 1939, 31). Using audience plants and a fluid
structure to move seamlessly from present to past, the play fits into the tradition of other
agitational-propaganda pieces including, most important, an overt call to action at the
end of the play. Odets constructed the play to make it inexpensive and easy for amateur
groups to produce, but the real innovation of the play was his ability to move it away
from the formulaic sloganeering present in so many other labor plays of the period;
instead, he invested his characters with complex relationships and allowed them to
speak a living street language both poetic and real. He was able to use the form of work-
ers’ theatre to reach beyond the working class and engage with members of the middle
class dispossessed by the Depression and ready for political change.
Waiting for Lefty, which premiered at a benefit night for New Theatre magazine,
became an immediate success and within a short time had moved to Broadway and
had become the most widely produced play in the United States, indicating how closely
aligned the political playwrights were with the prevailing mood in the country. Other
Odets plays, particularly Awake and Sing! (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), and Golden Boy
(1937), are less overtly focused on labor issues but, like Lefty, are concerned both with
the effects of a business ethos that pursues cutthroat competition without regard for
its victims and with the effects of the Depression on the common citizen—not just the
working class, but those in the middle class as well—forced to live in a world where, as
the socialist grandfather says in Awake and Sing!, “economics comes down like a ton of
coal on the head” (Odets 1939, 71).
Waiting for Lefty is just one among dozens of labor plays produced in the 1930s, virtu-
ally all of which champion the rights of the workers to unionize. For example, Albert
Maltz’s Black Pit (produced by the Theatre Union in 1935) traces the struggles of coal
miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The play opens with Joe Kovarsky coming
home from prison after having been framed for dynamiting a mine in an earlier strike.
He is blacklisted, but the mine supervisor gives him a job if he agrees to spy on his fellow
miners. Even though Joe tries to avoid becoming a stool pigeon, his complicity with the
288 CHRISTOPHER J. HERR

mine owners eventually kills one miner, and he is forced to leave town in disgrace as the
rest of the miners begin another strike. Maltz’s play is unusual for the sympathy it shows
toward Joe, but the real achievement in the play is the fidelity with which Maltz captures
the day-to-day life of the miners, including their dialect, their living conditions, and the
dangers they face. Stevedore, Paul Peters and George Sklar’s moving play about striking
dockworkers in New Orleans, was also produced at the Theatre Union (Sklar, Peters, and
Maltz were all on the theatre’s board) in 1934. The play follows Lonnie Anderson, a black
dockworker and union organizer framed by his white boss for attacking a white woman.
Lonnie manages to convince his fellow dockworkers to organize, join with the white
union members, and defend themselves against a gang of vigilantes looking to carry out
lynch justice against him. However, Lonnie becomes a martyr to the labor cause and to
the cause of racial unity.
In addition to those produced by the Theatre Union, other effective pro-union plays
include Albert Bein’s Let Freedom Ring (1935), a taut drama about the mill workers’ strike
in North Carolina in 1929; Lillian Hellman’s Days to Come (1936), in which the labor
drama is set against the backdrop of a family of factory owners facing the decline of
their power and the fragmentation of their moral authority; and John Wexley’s Steel
(produced first in 1931 and in a revised version by the International Ladies Garment
Workers’ Labor Stage [ILGWU] in 1937), which encapsulates the struggle between labor
and management in a series of family conflicts. In addition, there were various musi-
cal revues, including Parade (1935) and Pins and Needles (produced by the ILGWU in
1937, it ran for an astonishing 1,108 performances), that directly addressed issues of labor
and included contributions from people such as Maltz and Mark Blitzstein. As well,
two large-scale productions of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) were directly focused
on unionism in the United States:  Injunction Granted (1936), a Living Newspaper that
traced the history of labor legislation and strikes in America, and Blitzstein’s The Cradle
Will Rock (1937), a satirical musical examining the strike-breaking tactics of the factory
boss and leading citizen Mr. Mister in Steeltown, USA.
The legend of The Cradle Will Rock’s first production often overshadows the play itself.
Scheduled to open under the auspices of the FTP, the actors arrived on opening night to
find the theatre padlocked and the play prohibited. Orson Welles and John Houseman,
the producers, promptly moved the audience to the hastily rented Maxine Elliot Theatre,
where Blitzstein took the stage and began to sing all the parts. Eventually, many of the
performers, prohibited from taking the stage by union and FTP rules, sang their parts
from the audience. The play, which proved popular enough for Houseman and Welles to
produce independently in early 1938, utilizes a Weill-like score and a play-within-a-play
flashback structure to create a cartoonish world where all of the leading institutions—
religion, art, academia, the press, even medicine—have prostituted themselves to the
steel baron Mr. Mister. The venality and shallowness of the members of his hand-chosen
Liberty Committee are contrasted with the resistance of the carefree union organizer
Larry Foreman and the disciplined mill workers. Moll, a young girl forced into prostitu-
tion by economic conditions, serves as the ideal audience for the conflict. Moll opens
the play singing, “I work two days a week . . . So I’m just searchin’ along the street / For
 AMERICAN POLITICAL DRAMA, 1910–45 289

on those five days it’s nice to eat,” but her prostitution is compared favorably to those
who choose to sell their ideals for money (Blitzstein 1937, 1.1). The only hope lies in mass
resistance to Mr. Mister. As Ella, the sister of a hurt factory worker denied compensa-
tion, sings in the play’s penultimate scene:

Joe Worker must know

That somebody’s got him in tow . . .
Yet what is the good
For just one to be clear?
Oh, it takes a lot of Joes to make a sound you can hear!
One big question inside me cries:
How many frameups, how many shakedowns,
Lockouts, sellouts,
How many times machine guns tell the same old story,
Brother, does it take to make you wise? (Blitzstein 1937, 9.53–54)

Thus, through the two-dimensional characters and broad social satire, the stakes in
the labor struggle are made clearly and pointedly. The initial performance took place
just two weeks after the massacre at Republic Steel, and Blitzstein documents the use
of labor spies, university-trained armed strikebreakers, yellow journalism, yellow-
dog contracts, and the threat of violence, all of which were used by the steel industry
to break unions. Though in some ways the play came late in the labor struggle—by
1937, only a few of the most recalcitrant industries remained non-unionized—it can be
seen, along with Machinal, Bury the Dead, and Waiting for Lefty, as one of the iconic
political plays of the period because it so deftly captures the political struggles of
the day.

Happening Here: Dramas of Democracy,

Antifascism, and War

Blitzstein’s satire highlighted the connections between political institutions and social
strife; other satires that focus directly on the political process, while not frequent in the
interwar period, nevertheless number several successful scripts, including Maxwell
Anderson’s Both Your Houses (winner of the 1933 Pulitzer Prize), about the struggle of
an idealistic congressman to derail the familiar business of pork-barrel spending in
Washington; and Of Thee I Sing (the 1932 Pulitzer Prize) a general satire on American
politics written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind and featuring a score by
George and Ira Gershwin. Later in the decade, Kaufman and Moss Hart’s gentle satire—
with a score by Richard Rodgers—of the New Deal, I’d Rather Be Right (1937), features
FDR and members of his cabinet appearing as characters and a dance number by mem-
bers of the Supreme Court.
290 CHRISTOPHER J. HERR

In addition to politically topical satires, several serious plays in the interwar period
directly addressed important criminal trials with political overtones. One of the most
galvanizing events for the Left in the 1920s was the conviction and execution of two
Italian immigrants with ties to the anarchist movement, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and
Ferdinando Nicola Sacco, on charges of murder. Maxwell Anderson returned to the
story in two separate plays:  Gods of the Lightning (1928, with Harold Hickerson) and
Winterset (1935). While the latter is more focused on Anderson’s attempt to retell the
Romeo and Juliet story in modern American verse, Gods of the Lightning is a bold
examination of the need for openness in the rule of law. Another significant case was
the arrest and conviction of nine black men on charges of raping two white women in
Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. The trials highlighted the racial prejudice and kangaroo
courts of the South and the sectarian distrust between South and North, and a num-
ber of plays documenting the case appeared. John Wexley’s They Shall Not Die (pro-
duced at the Theatre Guild in 1934) ends with the jury deliberating over the fates of the
young men. As those seated in the courtroom hear raucous laughter offstage from the
jury room, the defendant’s lawyers rise up in defiance: “No . . . I don’t care how many
times you try to kill this negro boy . . . if I do nothing else in my life, I’ll make the fair
name of this state stink to high heaven with its lynch justice . . . these boys, they shall not
die!” (Wexley 1934, 191). Langston Hughes also wrote a one-act verse play on the case,
Scottsboro, Limited (written in 1931, first performed in 1932), which ties the accused’s
plight together with all—black or white—who are economically downtrodden. The play
ends with the audience chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and Hughes’s stage direction sug-
gests that the “Internationale” be sung (Hughes 2000, 129).
As Hughes’s play shows, the lines between social, political, and economic issues
were often blurred, especially the further Left on the political spectrum one went. One
of the largest groups of political plays written during the interwar period stems from
the Popular Front period, when antiwar sentiment wrestled with the increasingly omi-
nous news from Europe. Many of the antifascist plays are loose allegories, though by
the late 1930s, the threat of fascism had become sufficiently clear that even playwrights
like Robert E. Sherwood, who had adamantly opposed war as a fool’s game in the bit-
terly comic Idiot’s Delight (1936), were cognizant that the defeat of Hitler probably
meant American intervention. Sherwood’s Petrified Forest (1934) is an allegorical crime
drama about the death of the “world of outmoded ideas. Platonism—patriotism—
Christianity—romance—the economics of Adam Smith” (Sherwood 1934, 49); these are
represented by the Englishman Alan Squier, who sacrifices himself to the gangster Duke
Mantee, representing fascism in its most primitive form. Later, however, Sherwood’s
point of view shifted; in There Shall Be No Night (1940), he celebrated the Finnish resis-
tance to the Soviet invasion and clearly presented the need for American intervention.
Other antifascist plays include Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (adapted from
his novel by Lewis and John C. Moffitt), most notable for its production by the Federal
Theatre Project, where the play opened simultaneously in twenty-one theatres in sev-
enteen cities in October 1936. A melodrama set in small-town New England, the play
chronicles the rise of a fascist dictatorship in the United States, made possible by the
 AMERICAN POLITICAL DRAMA, 1910–45 291

failure of community leaders to speak out against the encroachment on their civil lib-
erties. Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (1941) shows the need for active interven-
tion to combat fascism. In the play, the Farrelly family, who has remained resolutely
neutral about events in Europe, is forced to reconsider their apathy when they encoun-
ter the courageous example of a resister to Nazi violence. Elmer Rice wrote a series of
patriotic or antifascist plays in the 1930s, including Judgment Day (1934) and American
Landscape (1938). Irwin Shaw’s The Gentle People (produced by the Group Theatre in
1939) is an allegorical fantasy about two fisherman who get involved with a racketeer,
Goff, but who eventually resist and kill him; and William Saroyan’s In the Time of Your
Life (1940) is a whimsical excursion through a variety of American themes, ending with
the killing of the authoritarian policeman Blick by a character called Kit Carson, whom
Albert Wertheim notes is “the spirit of America and of rugged pioneer individualism”
(2004, 22).
The dangers of fascism had become obvious to most of America by the late 1930s;
however, fears of another world war made many playwrights anxious to avoid American
involvement in resistance against Hitler. Several important antiwar plays were written
in the 1930s. Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead is a moving, poetic, expressionist play set in
the “second year of the war that is to begin tomorrow night” (Shaw 1936, 11). A group of
soldiers killed in battle refuse to be buried, halting the war effort. The women in their
lives are called in to convince the soldiers to be buried, but instead at the end of the play,
the living soldiers have also refused to fight. Shaw’s play is notable for its unflinching
look at the costs of war both to participants and those back home; his characters are
not heroic, but rather ordinary people with ordinary desires killed in a war they nei-
ther understood nor desired. Sklar and Maltz’s Peace on Earth (produced at the Theatre
Union in 1933) follows a university professor’s awakening of conscience to the economic
causes of war. Part labor play and part antiwar propaganda, the play takes a realistic
form until the last act, which shifts to a semi-expressionistic nightmare indicting every-
one but the working class as complicit in the perpetuation of war. Paul Green’s satirical
script for Johnny Johnson (1936), subtitled “The Biography of a Common Man,” shows
the everyman character of Johnny coming to see the pointlessness of war, whereupon
he is institutionalized for madness. Sidney Howard’s The Ghost of Yankee Doodle (pro-
duced at the Theatre Guild in 1937) encapsulates in one family the various attitudes prev-
alent about the war in the 1930s. Initially holding out against war, the idealistic Garrison
family becomes manipulated by an unscrupulous newspaper editor who helps to spark
American participation in an ongoing war as part of a play to win the family matriarch’s
love. Howard’s play is one of the most ambivalent of the antiwar plays, suggesting, like
Sherwood’s Idiot’s Delight, that the power of industry and the press to champion war far
exceeds the power of well-intentioned people to stop it, but at the same time suggesting
it may be necessary for America to defend her interests with military might.
By the end of the 1930s, the Munich concessions, the news of horrors in Stalinist
Russia, and the Soviet-German nonaggression pact had made it impossible for all but
the most fervent Popular Fronters to believe either that a worldwide antifascist move-
ment would be enough to stop Hitler or that America could avoid involvement. The
292 CHRISTOPHER J. HERR

shifts of conscience undergone by Sherwood and Irwin Shaw make it clear that even
those vehemently opposed to the war in the mid-1930s later became willing to recog-
nize the necessity of armed resistance. The victory of Franco in the Spanish Civil War
and the beginning of World War II in the late summer of 1939 sparked another round
of political plays, many of them urging Americans to take quick action to support the
Allies. Maxwell Anderson’s Key Largo (1939), set in the Spanish Civil War and afterward,
focuses on the moral necessity to fight for rights, even against insurmountable odds;
S. N. Behrman’s No Time for Comedy (1939) is a sharp comic look at the moral responsi-
bility of all well-intentioned citizens to do what they can to aid in the antifascist cause.
As Albert Wertheim argues in his excellent chronicle of American drama in the war,
once the United States entered the war in late 1941, the tone of the political drama shifts
accordingly:

Playwrights . . . turned to the new task of helping the public to understand better the
causes for which lives were being sacrificed, the dangerous nature of the enemy, the
heroism of the troops at the front, the excellence of American military know-how,
and the impact of the war on the lives of those at home. (2004, 55)

Though few of the political plays written during the war made a lasting impact on
the American dramatic canon—along with the most radical of the union plays of the
mid-1930s, they are the plays most affected by the passage of time—they are signifi-
cant in their attempt to clarify the meaning of the task that the country had reluctantly
undertaken.
Maxwell Anderson’s The Eve of St. Mark (1942) examines the parallel struggles and
sacrifices faced by both those in combat and those back home, while Sidney Kingsley’s
The Patriots (1943) is a play set in the 1790s, with flashbacks to the Revolutionary War.
It traces the commitment of the founding fathers to the larger cause of freedom, even
though they all recognize the costs—both personal and political—of such freedom.
Washington has to sacrifice his peace to return to public service; Jefferson’s family has
struggled in his long absences; and Jefferson and Hamilton argue bitterly about the role
of the common man in creating a new nation, until they reconcile over Jefferson’s words
about the power of the people to overcome tyrants: “Bonapartes may retard the epoch of
man’s deliverance, they may bathe the world in rivers of blood yet to flow, and still, still,
in the end they will face back exhausted in their own blood, leaving mankind to liberty
and self-government” (Kingsley 2005, 237).
Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) takes a much different tack than the
realistic or historical plays. It is an allegorical view of human history in which the war—
all war—is characterized as a battle against the evil that has existed since the beginning
of time. In such a framework, the political disappears into the human, so it is difficult
to look at Wilder’s work as political. Still, Wilder’s play hints at a shift that takes place
toward the end of the war, when the wartime political drama slides toward domestic
drama, though often dealing with significant social issues. For example, it is useful to see
Miller’s All My Sons, with its emphasis on the common good and the value of sacrifice, as
 AMERICAN POLITICAL DRAMA, 1910–45 293

a direct reflection both of the spirit of the labor plays of the 1930s and the more thought-
ful war plays.
As with any period, the political drama of the interwar period is a mixed pleasure.
There are plays, such as Machinal and Bury the Dead, that offer great power and beauty;
others like Waiting for Lefty or Cradle Will Rock offer insight into a specific political
moment and allow us to feel it as ours; and still others served the expedient purpose
of rousing audiences to action. What is clear is that the political drama of the period
still has a great deal to tell us about what America was—or wanted to be—and what it
is today.

References
Blitzstein, Mark. 1937. The Cradle Will Rock. New York: Tams-Witmark Music Library.
Brown, John Mason. 1970. The Ordeal of a Playwright: Robert E. Sherwood and the Challenge of
War. New York: Harper and Row.
Chambers, Jonathan L. 2006. Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism
and American Theatre, 1923–1937. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Clurman, Harold. 1945. The Fervent Years:  The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties.
New York: Hill and Wang.
Duffy, Susan. 1996. American Labor on Stage: Dramatic Interpretations of the Steel and Textile
Industries in the 1930s. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Engle, Ron, and Tice L. Miller, eds. 1993. The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from
the Colonial Period to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fearnow, Mark. 1997. The American Stage and the Great Depression: A Cultural History of the
Grotesque. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Flanagan, Hallie. 1940. Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre. New York: Benjamin Blom.
Goldstein, Malcolm. 1974. The Political Stage:  American Drama and Theatre of the Great
Depression. New York: Oxford University Press.
Houchin, John H. 2003. Censorship in the American Theatre. Cambridge:  Cambridge
University Press.
Hughes, Langston. 2000. The Political Plays of Langston Hughes. Edited by Susan Duffy.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Hyman, Colette A. 1997. Staging Strikes: Workers’ Theatre and the American Labor Movement.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997.
Jones, John Bush. 2003. Our Musicals, Ourselves:  A  Social History of the American Musical
Theatre. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press.
Kingsley, Sidney. 1995. Five Prizewinning Plays. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Levine, Ira A. 1985. Left Wing Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI
Research Press.
McConachie, Bruce A., and Daniel Friedman, eds. 1985. Theatre for Working Class Audiences in
the United States, 1830–1980. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Murphy, Brenda. 1987. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Odets, Clifford. 1939. Six Plays. New York: Methuen.
294 CHRISTOPHER J. HERR

Perkins, Kathy A., and Judith L. Stephens. 1998. Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American
Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rabkin, Gerald. 1964. Drama and Commitment: Politics in the American Theatre of the Thirties.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rice, Elmer. 1965. 3 Plays. New York: Hill and Wang.
Shaw, Irwin. 1936. Bury the Dead. New York: Random House.
Sherwood, Robert E. 1934. The Petrified Forest. New York: Dramatists Play Service.
Sklar, George, and Albert Maltz. 1934. Peace on Earth:  An Anti-War Play in 3 Acts.
New York: Samuel French.
Smith, Wendy. 1990. Real Life Drama:  The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940.
New York: Grove.
Wainscott, Ronald E. 1993. Commercialism Glorified and Vilified:  1920s Theatre and the
Business World. In The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period
to the Present, edited by Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller, 175–89. Cambridge:  Cambridge
University Press.
Wertheim, Albert. 2004. Staging the War:  American Drama and World War II.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wexley, John. 1934. They Shall Not Die. New York: Knopf.
 CHAPTER 19

T H E F E DE R A L T H E AT R E P R OJ E C T

BA R RY B .   W I T HA M

As congressional pressure to eliminate the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) accelerated

in the spring of 1939, defenders of the program undertook a ferocious counterattack.
Professional theatre luminaries—Lee Shubert, Helen Hayes, George Abbott, and oth-
ers—spoke out in favor of its continuance, and respected critics and reviewers, like
Brooks Atkinson, praised the accomplishments of Hallie Flanagan’s four-year foray into
a government-sponsored theatre. The flamboyant Tallulah Bankhead was unleashed to
lobby both her uncle, Senator John Bankhead, and her father, William Bankhead, the
Speaker of the House. And finally, Flanagan overcame the reluctance of the timid and
ultra-cautious Works Progress Administration (WPA) establishment and testified per-
sonally in defense of her program.
Much of the defense was directed at the frequent, and often exaggerated, charges of
un-American behavior and Communist propagandizing. And although Flanagan was
resolute in pointing out the breadth of their offerings—circus, vaudeville, pageants—
the result was that the serious, socially conscious drama that had been central to her
endeavor, and which was the focus of much of the congressional attack, was mini-
mized and downplayed. Fighting for the life of her theatre, Flanagan was thrust into
the awkward position of defending the intent and execution of her socially critical
plays while simultaneously undercutting the political agendas that drove and nour-
ished them. To her credit Flanagan never apologized for plays that propagandized for
social change or addressed controversial topics, but she had been forced occasionally
to retreat.

chairman dies: Do you think the theatre should be used for the purpose of
conveying ideas along social and economic lines?
hallie flanagan: I think that is one justifiable reason for the existence of a
theatre.
dies: Do you think that the Federal Theatre should be used for the purpose of
conveying ideas along social, economic, or political lines?
flanagan: I would hesitate on the political. (Flanagan 1940, 344)
296 BARRY B. WITHAM

Her constant line of defense was that the project did good plays, and that was the prin-
cipal criterion. If there were good and powerful plays, she argued, which advanced an
opposing or anti–New Deal point of view, of course, they should be done. However, the
reality was that the drama of the Federal Theatre Project was deeply political and had
been from the outset.
Two years earlier, in 1937, the journalist Willson Whitman, at Flanagan’s request, had
published the first “history” of the project (Bread and Circuses) even though the the-
atre was still in its infancy. And while I’m not suggesting that Whitman was Flanagan’s
spokesman, it is instructive to revisit this account of the original intent and impact of the
project, especially in light of the prominence Whitman places on propaganda for educa-
tion and social change.
Flush with the success of some early productions and the confidence of being there at
the “moment of creation,” Whitman’s evaluation of the Federal Theatre Project clearly
establishes it, in Flanagan’s phrase, as a true “people’s theatre” that will stand in sharp
contrast to current professional offerings. Whitman characterizes two distinct kinds
of theatrical enjoyment. The traditional she calls a kind of “miraculous dispensation”
in which the spectators are the beneficiaries of visits from players who are “supernatu-
ral beings from another sphere” (Whitman 1937, 66). In contrast, the Federal Theatre
offers enjoyment arising from “a feeling of kinship with the players and the production,
because the play says something the audience wants to say and the players are seen as
fellow creatures” (66). And how does the government function in this enterprise? For
Whitman, a determined New Deal journalist who also wrote about the Tennessee Valley
Authority (TVA) and Negro rights, the answer is education. A people’s theatre must
entertain and educate. The Living Newspapers and other productions have been aimed
at educating the citizenry. “They are concerned with the education of the voter which is
democracy’s sole defense against Plato and others who deride it” (165).
As to the charges of political propaganda, Whitman is unabashed. “Is propaganda
information? Certainly; there is no clearer information as to the ideas and aims of the
sources from which the propaganda comes. When the source is the party in power, duly
elected to administer the government, the propaganda becomes of paramount impor-
tance to every citizen” (1937, 166). And should taxpayer money be used for such things
as instructing taxpayers how to vote? Again, Whitman is clear: “It is the belief of this
writer that no better use for the taxpayers’ money could be found” (167). Furthermore,
and in case future generations did not understand the genuinely social thrust of the
theatre’s agenda, Whitman reminds us that in spite of a bewildering variety of plays,
“economic comment of some sort has been implicit in most of the Federal Theatre
productions” (80).
In assessing then, or perhaps reassessing, the drama of the Federal Theatre Project, it
is critical to situate that body of work in its historical context and to interrogate tradi-
tional narratives that have been constructed about its impact and importance. Because
Hallie Flanagan and others tended to minimize the avowedly leftist drama of the proj-
ect (“only 10 percent of the offerings”) in their genuine attempts to fight unsubstanti-
ated and sometimes hysterical charges of Communism, the thrust of the work has often
 THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT 297

been undervalued or ignored. And that rebuttal of Communism—along with a kind of

unquestioned critique that the Federal Theatre drained away the revolutionary fervor
of the Workers Theatre movement—continues to haunt the project. In this essay I argue
that much of that drama was avowedly propaganda for a progressive agenda and hence
participated in Popular Front culture, not by promoting Communism but by dramatiz-
ing the politics of unionization, social democracy, antifascism, and civil rights. It is this
menu of causes, embraced by Flanagan and many of her colleagues, that locates Federal
drama within an artistic renaissance that the cultural historian Michael Denning
describes as erupting in what he terms the “Age of the CIO” (1997, xviii).

Popular Front Drama

Class of ’29 (1936) is a case in point. Written by Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings and
staged initially by Edward Goodman’s Popular Price unit, the play follows the fortunes
of a group of Harvard graduates who have moved to New York City and into the teeth
of the Depression. Produced in the same year as S. N. Behrman’s End of Summer (1936),
Class of ’29 is an intriguing companion piece. Behrman’s young college graduates con-
front the economic malaise essentially offstage; their New York is reported in the sunny
retreat of Leonie’s Frothingham’s Maine cottage. But in Class of ’29 we are immersed
in that offstage world and the struggles of trying to find work, food, and self-respect.
Dismissed by Heyward Broun and others as Communist propaganda, the play still ran
a respectable fifty performances in the summer of 1936 and was reprised in Denver,
Omaha, Des Moines, Wilmington, and other cities.
Far from “Commie pleading,” the play is a stark and brutal look at America’s unem-
ployed trying to survive in a crumbling social system. Its critique of corrupted capital-
ism is withering. And unlike its better-known contemporaries, Clifford Odets’s Awake
and Sing (1935) or Elmer Rice’s We the People (1933), the play does not end with a call
to action and the fantasy that a younger generation will lead the revolution. Unable to
find work and guilty about betraying a friend, Ted, one of the central figures in the play,
hurls himself under a speeding subway train. And Ken, who has discovered that his job
is simply “make work” subsidized by his father, is devastated. His last line concludes the
play: “Dead! The lucky bastard!”
The cast of Class of ’29 does include one youngster who has embraced the Communist
promise, and there is considerable banter about Russia and full employment under the
five-year plan. But the thrust of the drama is to indict the current system and the way
that it rewards the prosperous and preserves the institutions and businesses that thrive
on the poor. Ken’s father is a bishop and a decent enough man but one who clearly is not
suffering in the downturn. It’s interesting that this critique of the church will return in
other Federal Theatre drama, most notably in One-Third of a Nation (1938) where the
church is exposed as one of the major landlords in America’s urban slums. The other
representatives of the privileged class are also unattractive:  a dowager who lavishes
298 BARRY B. WITHAM

undue money and affection on her dog, and a wealthy businessman who is withholding
capital from the housing market until he can be assured of no governmental competi-
tion. For him, all state programs are “socialism disguised as democracy.”
This critique of capitalism is further extended in the depiction of how integrity is
bought and sold. Kate, Vassar class of 1929, agrees to sleep with her boss in order to get
Ted a job running an elevator. And Laura, also Vassar ’29, embraces the lie of Ken’s job
so that they can marry and live the dream of upward social mobility. But the answer to
the corruption of capitalism in this telling is neither revolution nor welfare. In fact there
is a wonderful satirical cameo of a social worker interviewing Ted that highlights the
contradictions in welfare eligibility. The answer in Class of ’29 is very “American”: inge-
nuity and work. Tippy, the one Harvard grad who is succeeding and paying the rent,
has opened a dog-grooming business because he realizes that you can always find a way
to work within the system. It may offer slim solace to once proud grads, but the propa-
ganda of this “people’s theatre” enterprise—however dire the ending may seem—is that
initiative and imagination are real responses to distress, not romanticized Communist
revolutions.
In this way, Class of ’29 is emblematic of much Federal Theatre drama as well as the
constant struggle that Flanagan experienced in her attempts to unleash a progressive
agenda on her audiences without being hijacked by the Communist Party. Time and
again, as Willson Whitman so artfully records, Federal Theatre plays were about the
economics of the American political system, not with an eye to fomenting revolution
but educating an expectant and sometimes confused audience. Even one of their most
celebrated and “classic” productions, Murder in the Cathedral (1936), Whitman argues,
can best be understood in the context of the economic critique that was central to the
enterprise (1937, 79).
The danger in critiquing the system, of course, is that the critic has to be willing to
confront the charges of “disloyalty” that are always the first to be deployed. And it is to
the credit of the Federal Theatre that, in spite of the onslaught of “Communism,” many
of the plays undertook extensive social critique. A unique and often-produced play was
Chalk Dust (1936), which moved the indictment from Washington politics to public
high schools and American education but which was still about the dilemma of legiti-
matizing political dissent.
Chalk Dust, written by Harold Clarke and Maxwell Nurnberg, premiered in New York
in March 1936; over the next several months it was produced in a dozen American cities,
including Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Set in a public high school of
a large metropolitan community, the play focuses on the idealism and passion of a young
English teacher whose progressive ideas collide with the bureaucracy and inertia of the
conventional faculty and curriculum. Allen Rogers is “likable and fiery,” in the character
description and “thinks pupils ought to be alive to what’s going on in the world” (Clarke
and Nurnberg 1937, 9). He assigns Hemingway in his classes; sponsors a Discussion Club
where students debate the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the policies of the New
Deal; and has recently published an article in Harpers on politics and education.
Although the play seems rather quaint in some of its plot devising and stereotyping of
women teachers, it captured for many the sterility and conformity of a vast number of
 THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT 299

public schools as well as the threat of fascist ideology. At the outset the school is depicted
as a factory where everyone has to accomplish a task in order to turn out an acceptable
product. Dissent is not tolerated and loyalty to the firm is the greatest virtue. The school
newspaper is ruthlessly censored by the faculty advisor whose job depends on pleas-
ing a tyrannical principal. Jews and the poor are butts of sarcasm and neglect and are
suspected as “Reds” if they are unable to acclimate to the middle-class hegemony that
dominates the culture. And its success in a variety of Federal Theatres had to do with the
frontal assault the play launched on the notion of “loyalty,” especially loyalty to corrupt
or fascist institutions.
Rogers is a threat not because he is a “Red” or subversive but because he questions
authority and encourages students to think for themselves. This attitude is unaccept-
able in an institution where students are accused of disloyalty if they complain about
the cafeteria food or when teachers are hired because they are related to prominent
local politicians. The play functions, like many others in Whitman’s description of a
true people’s theatre, by exposing the problems that affect the lives of citizens and then
seeking solutions to them. Rogers ultimately confronts the tyrannical administration
and articulates, “By trying to stop me, you have shown how important it is for pupils to
learn the truth about the world they live in—to learn to think things through for them-
selves, so that when they go out into life they won’t be snapped up by the first demagogue
they hear on the radio, or listen to on the street corner” (Clarke and Nurnberg 1937, 82).
This was valedictory for Chalk Dust, certainly, but also for the New Deal propagandists
against Father Coughlin, Hughie Long, the Silver Shirts, and others threatening to capi-
talize on the country’s economic distress by appealing to a fascist mentality.
There are many other examples of Federal Theatre dramas that spoke to the people
and the people’s concerns. Battle Hymn (1936) by Michael Blankfort and Mike Gold was
produced by the New York Experimental unit and while its subject matter is the radical-
ization of John Brown and his futile attack on the fort at Harper’s Ferry, the play clearly
speaks to the ongoing legacy of lynching and slavery that continued to haunt America
in the 1930s. In the aftermath of Scottsboro and Roosevelt’s inability to pass antilynching
legislation, John Brown’s oratory is revelatory and prescient. “You want to live! I say, who
wants to die? Millions cry out for our help. Who dares answer them no? This is a mighty
conquest even though it be like the last victory of Samson. We are the chosen ones; we
are the soldiers of God. And, by the same God, we shall scourge the rotten whore of slav-
ery out of America” (Blankfort and Gold 1936, 99).
Of course, history lessons are a staple of “people’s” education and the invocation of
Harper’s Ferry is only one example of the way in which project plays sought to connect
to the concerns of their emerging audiences. Prologue to Glory (1938) by E. P. Conkle
was one of Flanagan’s proudest successes, and at one point she had hoped to mount a
nationwide tour of this story of young Abraham Lincoln as an example of some of her
theatre’s finest work. Lincoln had a fashionable renaissance in the 1930s driven by the
debates over war, a troubled economy, and a sense that the country was on the verge
of another revolution. The fascination with the sixteenth president was apparent in a
variety of plays and tributes as well as the appropriation of his name by the antifascist
brigades who were committed to fight for democracy in Spain.
300 BARRY B. WITHAM

Conkle’s play focuses on a year in the life of the young Lincoln before he became
a successful politician, and it deals with his political awakening and his love for the
doomed Ann Rutledge. Lincoln is smart and imaginative, but he is without ambi-
tion and seems content eking out a living in a New Salem general store. He is honest
and resourceful and very well read, but it is Ann who encourages him to have loftier
ambitions and speak out on local issues. With her encouragement he enters a debat-
ing contest and begins to appreciate the power of his oratory and homespun wisdom.
This Lincoln has not yet studied law and is naive about power politics, but his respect
for learning and his inherent trust in doing the right thing presage what is to follow. At
twenty-two he is queried about the issue of slavery. “I reckon no one’s got more sym-
pathy for the sore-oppressed than me. But we can’t afford to make up our minds till we
know the facts. Southerners would stand to lose millions if they were freed. Seems to
me whether slavery is or is not wrong depends on whether the slave is or is not a man”
(Conkle 1938, 70). And it is in Blackstone and study of the law that the issues of right
and wrong will be contested and resolved. The play concludes with Lincoln, reeling
from Ann’s sudden death, resolved to live as she would have wished and determined to
understand genuine right and wrong. Prologue to Glory was one of Flanagan’s favorite
productions, “a people’s Lincoln.”

Living Newspapers

Of all the attempts to create a true people’s theatre, however, none were as dramatic
or effective as the Living Newspapers. They were clearly among the most ambitious
and imaginative of the offerings and reflective of Flanagan’s core beliefs that theatre
should embrace the issues that are vital to the community. Her own theatrical work
was inspired by the notion of dramatizing immediate social concerns and both prior
to the FTP and after, her work betrays her fascination with the genre. Scholars have
noted the similarities between Flanagan’s adaptation of Whittaker Chambers’s Can
You Make Out Their Voices? at the Vassar Experimental Theatre and subsequent Living
Newspapers, but a close reading of the play—and its professional production at Jasper
Deeter’s Hedgerow Theatre—reveals numerous connections between its style and
structure and subsequent FTP Living Newspaper productions. Not only are the “facts”
documented to verify the authenticity of many of the events, but the open staging and
clear social critique are indicative of the work that would follow. Particularly notewor-
thy is the heart-tugging death of a baby in Can You Hear Their Voices? (1931), which
is reprised with similar heart tugs in both Power (1937) and One-Third of a Nation.
Following the demise of the FTP, Flanagan continued her fascination with the tech-
niques of the Living Newspaper in E=MC2, which examined the landscape of the post–
atom bomb world.
The Living Newspapers addressed the immediate concerns of a nation plunged into
a devastating depression. As the government, in the pursuit of a New Deal, sought ways
to alleviate suffering, it frequently clashed with a host of traditional values, conservative
 THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT 301

politicians, and capitalist home truths. Poverty, slums, disease, and apartheid showed
no signs of being “cured” by free market economics, and Roosevelt wanted massive gov-
ernment intervention to address the problems. Following the stunning market collapse
of 1937, however, opponents of the New Deal rallied against continued deficit spending
for wages, public health, or jobs. With his second inaugural address, Roosevelt signaled
that the battle would continue because fully one-third of the nation was “ill-housed,
ill-clothed and ill-fed.” Flanagan’s theatre responded by hijacking that memorable
phrase into one of its most successful productions.
The Living Newspaper unit of the FTP had been conceived by Flanagan and Morris
Watson as one of five producing units in New York City in the early, heady days of the
project. Though its initial venture, Ethiopia, was controversial and censored, the unit
subsequently created a half-dozen productions that ranked among the most widely pro-
duced FTP plays. If in Willson Whitman’s estimation, the goal of the Federal Theatre was
to produce work that shared the identities and concerns of the people, then the Living
Newspapers epitomized this focus. Consider the strategies in One-Third of a Nation, for
example, one of the most finished and widely produced works.
The “loudspeaker” is the most obvious technique that Arthur Arent and his team of
writers used in order to have a “voice” that would comment on and interrogate what
was happening onstage. The loudspeaker sometimes drives the narrative as in Power
(1937), where it locates the time and place of the action, or it comments editorially
on the events of the play, thereby reinforcing the idea that is being underlined for the
“people/spectators.” In One-Third of a Nation the loudspeaker interrupts the narrative
to raise questions that might occur to the audience had they the means to speak back
to the play. It also interrogates land speculators, announces court decisions, reads edi-
torials, and provides guided tours into previous historical eras. The device is both to
provide a narrative line that the audience can follow and to identify moments when
the “people’s” welfare is being exploited or suborned by venal political or business
interests.
In addition, the production introduces a character who is linked directly to the audi-
ence watching the play. “Mr. Buttonkooper” is first seen entering from the audience and
interrupting the action of the play.

little man: Hey! Give me some light!

(Little Man comes down the aisle of the theatre, left. Light follows him as he comes
up stairway from pit to stage. Scene played against black screen.)
loudspeaker: What is it?
little man: I’d like some information.
loudspeaker: What about?
little man: Housing.
loudspeaker: What are you doing up there in those clothes?
little man: What’s the matter with them?
loudspeaker: The matter with them? Why, they look like 1938. The scene we
just finished was 1845.
little man: Oh, that. Say, I’m no actor. I just came from down . . . (Pointing to
seat in orchestra.)
302 BARRY B. WITHAM

loudspeaker: Well, what do you want?

little man: Information. Every time something happens that I don’t understand
I’m going to stop the show and ask questions. (Arent 1938, 39)

And true to his word he sits on a corner of the stage and watches the action unfold,
commenting on the cholera epidemics, the landlord abuse, and the slum conditions. He
comes back hastily after intermission—having gone out for a beer—and eventually is
joined by his wife, who also gives up her orchestra seat for a place on the stage. Together
they raise the stakes and force the play to its climactic conclusion.

mrs. buttonkooper (interrupting): You know what we’re going to do—

you and me? We’re gonna holler. And we’re gonna keep on hollering until they
admit in Washington it’s just as important to keep a man alive as it is to kill him.
little man: Will that do any good?
mrs. buttonkooper: Sure it will. If we do it loud enough!
little man: You think they’ll hear us?
mrs. buttonkooper: They’ll hear us all right if we all do it together—you and
me and LaGuardia and Senator Wagner and the Housing Authorities and the
Tenant Leagues and everybody who lives in a place like that. (120)

Like the “Little Man” in Spirochete (1938) or the “consumer” in Power, the Buttonkoopers
represent the audience as an active presence in the play and implicate them directly in
understanding the problem and pursuing a solution. And just as Power plays out the
issues of the TVA at the same time that they are being deliberated in the courts and
Spirochete contests the notions of public health, One-Third of a Nation attacks the
excesses of slum landlordism and supports the notion of government-supported public
housing. The intent of the Federal Theatre Project as an advocate for the people is made
particularly vivid by thinking about One-Third of a Nation alongside Sidney Kingsley’s
sprawling Broadway success Dead End (1935). Both depict the despair of slums, disease,
poverty, and crime on the slum dwellers, but Kingsley’s polluters, the rich who have
befouled the environment, sail off on their yacht, apparently ignorant of their culpabil-
ity, while the kids remain behind on the corroded docks singing “If I Had The Wings
of an Angel” in a manner that Kingsley describes as “funereal.” One-Third of a Nation,
however, eschews this passive despair and concludes with a ringing endorsement of the
Wagner bill on public housing.

A Negro Theatre

The success of One-Third of a Nation inspired John Silvera and Abram Hill to compile a
new Living Newspaper based on race and racism in the United States. The story of their
efforts to write and then bring to the stage their epic retelling of African enslavement
 THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT 303

in America is as contested and confused as almost any aspect of the FTP, but Liberty
Deferred speaks to what was both grand and misguided about Hallie Flanagan’s insis-
tence that this people’s theatre should include all the people.
The decision to create a theatre that would be by, for, and about Negroes was not
an audacious choice in New York City where Harlem had emerged in the previous
decade as a focal point for Negro artists and entertainers. But the notion of creating
a nationwide federation of black theatres was audacious and imaginative. Of course,
the proposal was in keeping with the progressive leanings of the New Deal and was
supported by the president’s wife and a number of lobbying groups, including the
NAACP, the Harlem Theatre, and the American Communist Party. As Rena Fraden
and others have pointed out, however, Flanagan, while equipped with enormous lib-
eral sentiments, had very little experience with actual Negro people or organizations
(Fraden 1994, 45).
As a result, there was a tendency to universalize the “Negro experience” in both the
administration of the projects as well as the productions. From Harlem to Seattle the
Negro units had white supervisors, administrators, and directors. And while Flanagan
genuinely hoped that new black playwrights would emerge or be discovered in those
units, work that really problematized racial difference or prejudice within the Negro
community or was too outspoken about the apartheid conditions in the United States
was constantly mediated or censored. The paternalism of the white liberals in many
of the projects encouraged the singing/dancing performer as the authentic Negro and
created tensions that conflicted with the stated goal of airing the black “people’s” rage
against lynching, apartheid, and segregation. In Seattle a white director working with
one of the most successful Negro units taught the actors how to speak in a dialect that
would be read and understood as an authentic Negro voice. And in Chicago there was
fear that the exposure of racism within the black community would cause demonstra-
tions and riots among black audience members who attended Theodore Ward’s Big
White Fog (1938).
The sorry tale of Liberty Deferred is illustrative of the tensions that characterized
much of the work. Hill and Silvera traced the historical journey of the Negro through
white America, concluding with a rousing meeting of the National Negro Congress in
1936. Along the way they dramatized slavery, Civil War battles, unemployment, postwar
racial tension, and Harlem Renaissance nightlife. Emmet Lavery and other FTP offi-
cials encouraged them to continue developing the work, and Flanagan was enthusias-
tic about the subject and the project. But the play was delayed by cautious reviewers
at the National Service Bureau and at some point lost its momentum entirely. Lavery
ultimately did not recommend it for production and later—in 1976—had only a vague
recollection of it (Craig 1980, 64).
In retrospect, of course, it’s easy to link the deferral of the play to the extraordinary
“Lynchotopia” scene, which is one of the highlights of the script and which probably
earned it a permanent deferral. At a time when white liberals were pushing hard for anti-
lynching, and a specific bill by the indefatigable Robert Wagner was causing immense
304 BARRY B. WITHAM

debate in Congress, officials at the FTP were probably quite leery of stirring another
hornet’s nest in an already aggressive House and Senate. “Lynchotopia” is made vivid by
E. Quita Craig:

The scene opens with the wild ringing of bells, horns, and other New Year’s
paraphernalia. It is 1 January 1937. The “Keeper,” seated at his desk, inspects new
arrivals; compares yearly lynch figures; records what the various states did about
those lynchings, which is always nothing; and stages the yearly contest between the
old boys and the new for the best lynching experience. . . . A mike then announces
that a filibuster is in progress in the Senate, where the anti-lynching bill is being
discussed, and the victims, in holiday mood, line up single file and march to
Washington to the tune of Snow White’s Hi, ho! (1980, 68)

The scene then jumps to the Senate where the invisible victims, in a raucous mood,
munch on popcorn while watching the debate, interjecting their comments, and
calling out derisive cries and boos. It was probably too much even for the New Deal
supporters of the FTP. To invite the ire of a Congress, already thick with Communist
suspicions and a deep belief that the FTP was preaching both class and race hatred, may
have seemed foolhardy. The Dies committee had already grilled Flanagan about Power,
Triple-A Plowed Under (1936), and Revolt of the Beavers (1937), and the Appropriations
Committee was busy denouncing One-Third of a Nation. There was probably no need in
Lavery’s mind to poke another stick in their eyes.
But there were successes on the Negro units, and some of the brightest were from
black writers who struggled against the paternalism of the system and actually became
the playwrights that Flanagan had desperately wanted to create and discover in her
theatre.
In Newark a young writer named Hughes Allison spun a courtroom melodrama into
an intense and suspenseful deliberation on the hierarchy of skin color in the black com-
munity and the pitfalls of the justice system created and supervised by whites. The Trial
of Dr. Beck (1937) found a receptive audience and eventually moved into New York for a
three-week run. Hughes was commissioned by the FTP to write a trilogy on the African
experience in America after the success of Dr. Beck, but only one play was actually com-
pleted before the demise of the project. That play—Panyared—was not produced even
though Lavery and others supported it. Flanagan felt that its strengths could not over-
come its violent subject matter and improbable characters.
In Chicago another Negro playwright, Theodore Ward, crafted a provocative study
of black racism and the Marcus Garvey campaign into a domestic melodrama titled Big
White Fog, one of the most accomplished plays from the Negro units. Although Ward
drew his characters realistically, they represented a cross section of black types trying
to survive in a predatory capitalist system, and some people on the project thought
that audiences would object to their characterizations. In addition, the suggestion that
Communism was the solution for the oppression of Negroes, along with the blatant rac-
ism of some of the characters, caused the project to move it out of its midtown Loop the-
atre and into a South Side auditorium. Ostensibly closer to “its people,” the play suffered
 THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT 305

from lack of audience and closed. In 1996 it was successfully revived by the Guthrie
Theatre in Minneapolis and in 2007 at the Almeida in London.
In Seattle a thriving and gifted Negro unit produced Natural Man (1937) by Theodore
Browne, whose plays also included Go Down Moses and a censored version of Lysistrata
(1936) that played only one performance. Natural Man was based on the legend-
ary steel-driving man, John Henry, and it traced the troubled “brute negro” through
the chain gangs and bars of Memphis into his famous contest with a steam-powered
machine in a northern railroad tunnel. Browne’s John Henry was controversial because
he stood up to white oppression and racism, and even in death he displays a courage and
integrity that made him genuinely heroic in his generation and a model of black pride
for a later one. After its Seattle premiere, Natural Man was produced by the American
Negro Theatre in 1941.
There were others, like Gus Stone’s remarkable Turpentine (1936), the
company-created Dunbar (1938), and the wildly successful Swing, Mikado (1938), but
the energy of the black units dissipated in the aftermath of the project’s demise. Still
black theatre did not disappear in the interim years before the civil rights explosion in
the 1960s, and veterans of the Federal Theatre continued to put on performances by,
for, and about Negroes. Abram Hill founded the American Negro Theatre along with
Frederick O’Neal, where they produced Owen Dodson’s Garden of Time (1939), Hill’s
widely admired Stiver’s Row (1940), and the sensational Anna Lucasta (1944). They also
established a school and training program that featured Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Sidney
Poitier, and a new generation of black artists. Canada Lee starred in Orson Welles’s
stunning production of Native Son (1941) and the controversial On Whitman Avenue
(1950). But the rigid color barriers on Broadway and in Hollywood prevented many
alumni of the FTP from furthering their careers. And the blacklisters, stirred by the
Communist Party’s advocacy of civil rights dating back to the Scottsboro case, ulti-
mately banished Lee, Paul Robeson, and others who betrayed any sympathy with the
Soviet Union.
Theatre companies are remembered most vividly when they produce a playwright
who can articulate their vision or provide imaginative vehicles for their artists. Hallie
Flanagan wanted badly to “discover” new American writers. She even sponsored a
nationwide contest to uncover one in 1937. But the odds were against her. Federal plays
belonged to the government and lucrative royalties were not part of the standard con-
tract. Established writers like Shaw and O’Neill arranged for reduced royalties for
Federal production, but emerging writers were quick to understand the politics of creat-
ing for the “public domain.” As a result, the FTP is remembered most in the American
imagination for individual productions rather than a body of work. But the lack of a sin-
gle authorial voice should not blind us to the dramatic work that was produced out of
the nationwide project. That body of work represents many voices struggling to under-
stand the collapse of a way of life and imagining how it might be restored. And while its
legacy is deeply embroiled with charges of Communist collusion, it is more productive
to remember its plays as an attempt to create a genuine people’s theatre confronting rac-
ism, fascism, predatory capitalism, and the demand to be heard.
306 BARRY B. WITHAM

Further Reading
Buttitta, Tony, and Barry Witham. 1982. Uncle Sam Presents.Philadelphia:  University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Kazacoff, George. 1989. Dangerous Theatre. New York: Lang.
Lashin, Orrie, and Milo Hastings. 1937. Class of ’29. New York: Dramatists Play Service.
Matthews, Jane deHart. 1967. Federal Theatre, 1935–39. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
O’Connor, John, and Lorraine Brown. 1978. Free, Adult and Uncensored. Washington, DC: New
Republic.
Osborne, Elizabeth A. 2011. Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre
Project. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Quinn, Susan. 2008. Furious Improvisation. New York: Walker and Co.
Witham, Barry B. 2003. The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study. Cambridge:  Cambridge
University Press.

Works Cited
Arent, Arthur. 1938. One-Third of a Nation. New York: Random House.
Bentley, Joanne.1988 Hallie Flanagan. New York: Knopf.
Blankfort, Michael, and Michael Gold. 1936. Battle Hymn. New York: Samuel French.
Clarke, Harold A., and Maxwell Nurnberg. 1937. Chalk Dust. New York: Samuel French.
Conkle, E. P. 1938. Prologue to Glory. New York: Random House.
Craig, E. Quitta. 1980. Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era. Amherst, MA:  Amherst
University Press.
Denning, Michael. 1997. The Cultural Front. London: Verso.
Flanagan, Hallie. 1940. Arena. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
Fraden, Rena. 1994. Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre.Cambridge:  Cambridge
University Press.
Whitman, Willson. 1937. Bread and Circuses. New York: Oxford University Press.
 CHAPTER 20

A F R IC A N A M E R IC A N DR A M A ,
19 1 0 – 4 5

KAT H Y A . P E R K I N S

African American drama had a difficult birth. Since the nineteenth century African
Americans have struggled for a place in the American theatre that transcends the ste-
reotypical, demeaning roles they were forced to play in blackface minstrel shows. These
shows presented a dominant image of blacks as a singing, dancing, shiftless, oversexed,
exotic, and carefree race. Many of these images still exist today. African American
women were generally depicted as mammy figures, wenches, or “hot mamas.” Even after
the demise of the minstrel shows shortly after the turn of the last century, these images
survived in the Tom shows (dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin), “coon” shows (an early term for black musicals), and vaudeville/variety shows.
This essay highlights the role that several key individuals, organizations, and his-
torically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) played in promoting more posi-
tive images of African Americans in drama from 1910 to 1945. I focus on the African
American women who most influenced the development and growth of the American
theatre. Although their contributions are often overlooked, representing a substantial
loss to our theatre’s history, African American women have worked in every aspect of
the theatre: as actors, producers, designers, directors, choreographers, musical direc-
tors, critics, playwrights, managers, and craftspeople.
Unfortunately, their road to the professional stage was a long and difficult one. I begin
with the pioneer actress, singer, and dancer Aida Overton Walker, who was the wife of
the famed comedian George Walker and one of the most popular entertainers during
the late 1880s to the early 1900s. In 1905, protesting the limited roles available to African
Americans in the professional theatre (particularly in drama), Walker wrote “Colored
Men and Women on the Stage” for The Colored American, an early African American
magazine. Arguing that dramatic plays needed more black performers, Walker
pointed out that the stage could be used as a teaching tool to fight the color problem
because African American actors came into contact with more white people than did
African Americans in other professions. Walker also noted that the majority of African
308 KATHY A. PERKINS

Americans performed for the musical stage and needed instruction in the dramatic arts,
for “one of the greatest needs of the times is a good school in which colored actors and
actresses may be properly trained for good acting” (Walker 1905, 571–75). To provide
this training, in 1911 (after her husband died), Walker began producing acts with some
dramatic content. One of the many African American female performers who turned
to producing to counteract the restrictive roles available to them, Walker died in 1914
(at only thirty-four), missing the future contributions African Americans made to the
American theatre.
Other African American theatre practitioners—including the African Theatre (1821)
and the Chicago Pekin Players (1906)—attempted to form all-black dramatic compa-
nies. In each era, the social and economic climate of the day played a major role in the
demise of these companies. One notable exception was the Anita Bush Players, founded
in Harlem in 1915 by Anita Bush, another African American woman who attempted to
move beyond the roles imposed by whites. She opened doors for African American dra-
matic performers on Broadway as well as in the film industry.
Bush had been a chorus member with Williams and Walker, and she was a close friend
of Aida Walker’s. Often referred to as the “Mother of Negro Drama,” Bush wanted to dem-
onstrate the capabilities of African American performers by presenting them onstage in
genres other than the vaudeville and minstrel shows in which they usually appeared. To
her surprise, her all-black dramatic company, later called the Lafayette Players, existed for
a length of time unprecedented in the history of American theatre (from 1915 to 1932) and
employed an impressive roster of great African American actors:  Charles Gilpin,
Clarence Muse, Andrew Bishop, Dooley Wilson, Evelyn Preer, and Carlotta Freeman,
among others. This company would also open the doors for future African American
dramatists. Rose McClendon, a famous actor, benefited from this support. Hailed as “the
Negro first lady of the dramatic stage” in the American theatre, McClendon trained at
the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and created and performed numerous roles on
Broadway and Off Broadway. Some of her most memorable vehicles include Porgy (1928),
Black Souls (1932), Deep River (1926), In Abraham’s Bosom (1926), and Mulatto (1935).
During its existence, the Lafayette Players performed nearly 240 shows, primarily white
plays that had appeared on Broadway. Due to the scarcity of full-length plays by African
American authors, the Lafayette Players rarely performed such works, yet their produc-
tions of dramatic plays allowed audiences to see that African American actors had a depth
and range often obscured by the musicals and vaudeville shows in which they were usu-
ally cast. After Bush left the company in 1920 to pursue a film career, the Lafayette Players
continued until competition from the film industry and the economics of the Great
Depression destroyed it. The Lafayette Players’ success in Harlem influenced the creation
of other Lafayette Players troupes based in Chicago’s Grand Theatre and Washington,
DC’s Howard Theatre, as well as those located in Baltimore and Philadelphia. In addition,
Bush encouraged many female members of her troupe to form their own companies in
Harlem. Some of these members were Evelyn Ellis, who organized the All-Star Colored
Civic Repertory Company in 1927, and Ida B. Anderson, whose Ida Anderson Players
performed at the Lincoln Theater in 1928.
 AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1910–45 309

Another important African American female practitioner was Angelina Grimké.

In 1916 her drama Rachel—the first twentieth-century full-length play written, per-
formed, and produced by African Americans—appeared in Washington, DC. Billed as
a “race play” in three acts, it was presented by the Drama Committee of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at Myrtilla Miner
Normal School. In his anthology Plays of Negro Life (1927), Montgomery T. Gregory
remarked that Rachel merited attention because it was “apparently the first success-
ful drama written by a Negro and interpreted by Negro actors” (Gregory and Locke
1927, 414). A  protest play, Rachel explores lynching and its devastating psychologi-
cal effects on a young woman. The production playbill underscores the significance of
Rachel: “It is the first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten
the American people relative to the lamentable condition of ten million of colored citi-
zens in this free Republic.” But the presentation of Rachel caused a great deal of con-
troversy, especially among some of the NAACP members who had sponsored it. Many
felt the play was too political and criticized it as pure propaganda (perhaps the reason
that very few known reviews in the local newspapers were written at the time of the
production). Rachel fueled the Little Negro Theatre Movement, which was dedicated to
producing plays written by African Americans. Grimké was a huge inspiration to other
playwrights. Willis Richardson, her former student, decided to take up playwriting after
attending Rachel. A product of Dunbar High in Washington, DC, where Grimké taught
English, Richardson became the first African American dramatist on Broadway when
The Chip Woman’s Fortune, a one-act focusing on the simple life of African Americans,
was produced in 1923. He wrote nearly fifty plays, which were primarily performed at
HBCUs and small theatre companies. Committed to promoting the works of African
American dramatists, Richardson wrote an essay in 1919, “The Hope of the Negro
Drama,” for The Crisis, encouraging other black writers to write plays about the African
American experience. He also edited one of the first anthologies exclusively written by
African Americans: Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, published by Carter
G.  Woodson’s Associated Publishers in 1930. Five years later, Woodson encouraged
Richardson and May Miller to publish a second collection of plays, Negro History in
Thirteen Plays, which offered plays by Miller, Richardson, Georgia Douglas Johnson,
Helen Harris, and Randolph Edmonds. A historian, Woodson saw the plays as a won-
derful opportunity to teach young African Americans about their past.
Woodson, known as the “father of Negro History,” propelled the Little Negro Theatre
Movement along with Professors Montgomery T. Gregory and Alain Locke of Howard
University and W. E. B. Du Bois (one of the NAACP’s founders). These four men, all
Harvard graduates and based in Washington, except for Du Bois, offered African
Americans the opportunity to produce and publish their work. They particularly
encouraged their authors to write plays about the “Negro experience,” a genre known
as “Native drama.” Native drama was a response to the works of the white dramatists
in the 1920s who attempted to portray the African American experience. These writ-
ers, who all achieved fame for their plays about African American life, included Eugene
O’Neill (The Emperor Jones [1920] and All God’s Chillun Got Wings [1924]), Dorothy and
310 KATHY A. PERKINS

DuBose Heywood (Porgy [1927]), and Marc Connelly (Green Pasture [1930]). While
many African Americans sympathized with the efforts of white writers to portray blacks
onstage, they felt that these plays represented African American life superficially—
that they lacked the “true spirit and soul” of the Negro that Native drama captured
much more successfully. Native drama depicted a more realistic and richer spectrum
of the African American experience. This type of drama, which included dramas and
comedies, was divided into two distinct categories:  “race or propaganda plays” and
“folk plays.” Race plays dealt with issues of racial oppression experienced by African
Americans and were written primarily to effect social change. Folk plays, on the other
hand, depicted the African American experience without focusing on the oppressive
issues African Americans faced; they aimed to educate and entertain without offending
their audience. Practitioners of both types of drama sought to depict the race realisti-
cally. Du Bois noted that

today, as the renaissance of art comes among American Negroes, the theatre calls for
new birth. . . . The Negro is already in the theatre and has been there for a long time;
but his presence there is not yet thoroughly normal. His audience is mainly a white
audience and the Negro actor has, for a long time, been asked to entertain this more
or less alien group. The demands and ideals of the white group, and their conception
of Negroes, have set the norm for the black actor. He has been a minstrel, comedian,
singer and lay figure of all sorts. Only recently has he begun to emerge as an ordinary
human being with everyday actions.
And he is still handicapped and put forth with much hesitation, as in the case of
The Nigger, Lulu Belle and Emperor Jones. (Du Bois 1926)

Du Bois’s interest in African American drama and literature dates back to the early
part of the twentieth century. In 1910 he founded the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis,
which he edited for twenty-four years, using it as a platform to speak out against racial
injustices in America. In 1913, in New York City, he wrote, staged, and directed a pag-
eant, The Star of Ethiopia, that chronicled fifty years of African American history since
the Emancipation. The Star of Ethiopia inspired productions of historical pageants at
HBCUs and secondary schools. In 1915 the NAACP, disturbed that most dramatic works
featuring African American characters were written by whites, initiated the Drama
Committee in order to encourage African American playwrights.
In 1925 Du Bois, along with his rival editor, Charles S. Johnson of the National Urban
League’s Opportunity magazine, launched a literary contest: the best one-act plays sub-
mitted were published in The Crisis and Opportunity. Cash awards, also given to the best
short stories, essays, poems, and illustrations, were handed out to the winning entries
during a widely publicized ceremony, which provided writers with much-needed expo-
sure. The Crisis and Opportunity contests took place from 1925 to 1927.
According to Regina Andrews, who worked with Du Bois and was also the chief
librarian at the 135th Street Library in New York City for many years, the 1925 Crisis
contest received over 628 manuscripts submitted for all areas (Mitchell 1975, 70).
Opportunity attracted 732 competitors. Ironically, although the contests in drama
 AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1910–45 311

were open to African American men and women, female dramatists sent in more
submissions, and most of the winners were women. Of the seven winners of the 1925
Opportunity playwriting awards, four were women: Zora Neale Hurston (Colorstruck
and Spears), May Miller (The Bog Guide), and Eloise Bibb Thompson (Cooped Up). Two
years later, three of the four awards were given to women: Eulalie Spence for her two
plays, The Starter and The Hunch, and Georgia Douglas Johnson for Plumes. It is not
clear why more women than men submitted plays. Perhaps the reason, according to the
trends of the day, was that women were often voiceless in the public square, and the plays
provided them with a platform for voicing their concerns. Seizing this opportunity to
speak, women playwrights took advantage of it. In addition to the contests, Du Bois also
encouraged African American playwrights by founding the Krigwa Players (Krigwa
was the acronym for the Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists; the “C” was later changed to
“K”). The 1926 inaugural playbill for the Krigwa Players outlined Du Bois’s philosophy
of Negro theatre:

The movement which has begun this year in Harlem, New  York City, lays down
four fundamental principles. The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: One: About
us. That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as it is. Two: By us. That is,
they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual
association just what it means to be a Negro today. Three: For us. That is, the theatre
must cater primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by their
entertainment and approval. Fourth:  Near Us. The theatre must be in a Negro
neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.

However, Du Bois emphasized that “artists of all races” would be welcome. While
the Krigwa Players existed for only a short time, Du Bois successfully encouraged
the formation of other Krigwa groups around the country, including within Denver,
Baltimore, and Washington, DC. While Du Bois promoted “race” or “propaganda”
plays, Gregory and Locke encouraged productions of “folk plays” at Howard University.
In 1921 Gregory brought national attention to the Howard Players when he founded
the Department of Dramatic Arts in order to establish the first national Negro theatre
program in the United States. The department offered professional training in three
areas: acting, playwriting, and production. Prior to this period, very few institutions
provided professional theatre training for African Americans. Under Gregory, the
department became for decades the primary training ground for African Americans
in the theatre.
Through the Howard Players many African Americans, particularly women, received
their initial training in playwriting. The majority of plays housed in the Gregory and
Locke Collection at Howard University are written by women. Of the many famous
African American female dramatists—many of whom were also scholars and educa-
tors—a large percentage either studied under Gregory and Locke or were influenced by
the Howard community. They include Zora Neale Hurston, Mary P. Burrill, Angelina
Grimké, Thelma Duncan, May Miller, Helen Webb Harris, Georgia Douglas Johnson,
Myrtle Smith Livingston, and Eulalie Spence.
312 KATHY A. PERKINS

Shortly after the appearance of Rachel, many of these women became the driving
force behind the Little Negro Theatre Movement. The major female playwrights within
this movement were Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, Eulalie Spence, Shirley
Graham, Mary P. Burrill, Angelina Grimké, Marita Bonner, Zora Neale Hurston, and
Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Their plays depicted the socioeconomic realities and racial ten-
sions of the period in which they lived. Primarily written after 1918, these works gave
African American women—whose concerns had been rarely represented and were
often seen as unwelcome—a voice. Female playwrights wrote about lynching, poverty,
women’s rights, motherhood, disenfranchised war heroes, miscegenation, family loy-
alty, education, and the church. While plays by African American men focused primar-
ily on the workplace and issues outside of the home, women concentrated on familial
issues. For example, Dunbar-Nelson’s 1918 drama, Mine Eyes Have Seen, and Burrill’s
1919 Aftermath question the African American male’s wartime loyalty to a country that
deprives him of basic freedoms. Both plays look at how parents tried to reconcile their
sons going off to war and the impact it will have on the family. In 1919, the Birth Control
Review published Burrill’s They That Sit in Darkness. One of the first African American
feminist plays, it argues for women’s access to birth control.
The issue of lynching was another important topic. With an estimated 3,589 blacks,
including seventy-six women, lynched between 1882 and 1927 (White 1929, 229), both
African American and white playwrights wrote over sixty known plays before the end
of the 1940s on this subject. African American female dramatists, however, wrote the
majority of lynching plays; in addition, many engaged in political activism to stamp
out this heinous crime. Georgia Douglas Johnson, one of the most prolific and versa-
tile playwrights of the era, wrote several plays with lynching themes. A member of the
Anti-Lynch Crusade Organization (founded by African American women), she wrote
A Sunday Morning in the South (1925), Safe (1929?), and Blue-Eyed Black Boy (1930?).
In the last play, a mother prevents the lynching of her young son, accused of acciden-
tally brushing against a white girl. (The play’s ending reveals that the boy’s father is the
white governor, who halts the lynching to prevent a scandal.) Other female-authored
plays about lynching include, among others, Burrill’s Aftermath (mentioned above),
Andrews’s Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (1931), and Miller’s Nails and Thorns (1933). In recent
years, several of these plays have been published, many for the first time.
While many black women created “race” or “propaganda plays,” a large number also
wrote “folk plays.” Topics involving the church, class conflict, morality, and love rela-
tionships were prevalent. Hurston’s Color Struck (1925), for example, tackles the issue of
colorism in the African American community. Historical plays were also common, par-
ticularly among playwrights who were educators. Miller wrote Sojourner Truth (1935)
and Harriet Tubman (1935). Johnson, a practitioner of propaganda and folk plays, used
historical characters for William and Ellen Craft (1935) and Frederick Douglass (1935).
Other history plays, such as Shirley Graham’s It’s Morning (1940), explored the evils of
slavery.
In addition to the Little Negro Theatre Movement and the HBCUs, the Harlem
Renaissance—which took place primarily in the 1920s—provided African American
 AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1910–45 313

theatre practitioners with another important training ground and outlet in which
to practice their craft. During this era of the “New Negro,” the Harlem Renaissance
authors wrote an impressive number of plays, books, musical scores, and social writings
that are still popular today. One of the many factors that contributed to the rise of the
Harlem Renaissance and its outpouring of racial consciousness and creativity was the
great migration between 1919 and 1926 of African Americans to northern cities such as
Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC. Although Harlem is often called the birth-
place of the renaissance, other urban areas were instrumental in this movement, par-
ticularly DC. The Harlem Renaissance playwright May Miller described her experiences
growing up in DC during a 1988 interview:

Our parents had a renaissance of their own. They had a club called the
MuSoLit. . . . They met around in groups. I would know when my father was writing
a story. . . . He’d be preparing for the MuSoLit. There were musicians, those interested
in literature and social movements. . . . They were around way before the 1920s. They
always had literary and artistic movements here in D.C., so that was nothing new.
(Miller 1988)

The MuSoLit, an abbreviation for Music, Society, and Literature, was one of many
organizations formed by the Washington-educated black elite that spearheaded the
Harlem Renaissance. In addition to Du Bois’s Krigwa Players, other little theatres
also surfaced in Harlem, including Harlem Suitcase Theatre, the Negro Art Theatre,
and, in 1927, the Harlem Experimental Theatre Company (the playwright and librar-
ian Regina Andrews was one of its founders). Using the basement of the Schomburg
Library (where Andrews worked) as its theatre, this organization produced works by
Georgia Johnson and Ted Martin. (This library basement became the stage for many
Harlem theatre groups.) In the 1930s, McClendon, who directed for the Harlem
Experimental Theatre, formed the Negro People’s Theatre; unfortunately, she died in
1936. (In 1938, the actor Dick Campbell created the Rose McClendon Players in her
memory.) These Harlem-based companies influenced black theatre troupes through-
out the country, including the Gilpin Players (later Karamu) in Cleveland and the
Ira Aldridge Players in St. Louis. As the Little Negro Theatre Movement developed
among African American communities, a small number of African Americans
were achieving recognition in the commercial theatre as dramatists and actors. This
group of African American actors, including Charles Gilpin, Ethel Waters, Rose
McClendon, and Paul Robeson, performed dramatic roles on Broadway and in other
commercial New  York venues. Although the works of African American drama-
tists rarely appeared on Broadway, a few black male playwrights did manage to have
their native drama produced, including Richardson with The Chip Woman’s Fortune
in 1923 (a one-act mentioned earlier). Two years later, Garland Anderson, a bellhop
from San Francisco with no formal training in playwriting, became the first African
American to have a full-length play produced on Broadway with his Appearances, a
courtroom drama about an African American male falsely accused of a crime by a
white female.
314 KATHY A. PERKINS

Two other plays by African Americans appeared on Broadway before the end of the
decade. Frank Wilson’s social drama, Meek Mose, opened in 1928. A New York native,
Wilson was a former singer and actor who had worked in vaudeville and had appeared
with the Lafayette Players. After World War I, he studied at the American Academy of
Dramatic Arts; a decade later, he began to write plays for the Lincoln Players, a troupe
he organized in Harlem. Harlem: A Melodrama of Harlem Life, co-written by Wallace
Thurman with the white playwright William Rapp, premiered on Broadway in 1929.
Taken from Thurman’s short story “Cordelia the Crude, A  Harlem Sketch,” Harlem
tells the story of a newly transplanted southern family struggling to survive in Harlem.
Today, Thurman is primarily known for his critically acclaimed novel The Blacker the
Berry (1929), which focuses on colorism in the African American community. In the
1930s, Langston Hughes, one of the most prolific writers during and after the Harlem
Renaissance, took Broadway by storm with Mulatto (1935), which starred McClendon.
With 373 performances, it was one of the longest-running plays of its time. Mulatto was
one of the few plays about miscegenation written by a black author and told from the
black perspective.
Hughes, who was also a novelist (with more than thirty books), poet, and librettist,
worked extensively in the theatre. A playwright-in-residence at Karamu in Cleveland
during the 1930s, he cofounded the Harlem Suitcase Theatre in 1938. In 1937 he wrote
Don’t You Want to Be Free?, a musical pageant tracing the history of African Americans
from slavery to the 1930s. Hughes also coauthored the folk comedy Mule Bone (1930)
with Zora Neale Hurston, his fellow Harlem Renaissance writer. The play made its
Broadway debut in 1991. Unfortunately, most African American companies, such as the
Krigwa Players, Negro Art Theatre, and Harlem Experimental Theatre, that produced
plays focusing on native drama during the 1920s and 1930s were short-lived. Many fac-
tors led to their demise, including competition from professional shows such as Shuffle
Along, Black Birds, Green Pastures, and The Emperor Jones. African American audiences
also grew tired of the bleak subject matter. Living through an era of lynching, a world
war, and a major economic depression, many African Americans often avoided the the-
atre, reluctant to watch dramatizations of the trials and tribulations of the race problems
they encountered on a daily basis. Additionally, the quality of the performances was
often uneven. The majority of African American professionals in the theatre at the time
had been trained in musicals and comedy. Although the Little Negro Theatre Movement
was composed of committed individuals, many lacked backgrounds in directing and
dramatic acting; the most experienced eventually left the community for the profes-
sional stage. Many black theatre practitioners also lacked technical knowledge, and their
troupe’s shaky finances did not allow them to purchase sophisticated staging equipment.
The plays themselves also presented a problem as African Americans were still develop-
ing their skills as playwrights. When many of the little theatres folded in the 1920s and
1930s, the HBCUs became the major training grounds for burgeoning young black the-
atre artists.
Before 1945, due to racial segregation, few non-HBCU theatre programs admitted
African Americans. (Yale, the University of Iowa, and Columbia University were notable
 AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1910–45 315

exceptions.) Influenced by Howard University’s success, other HBCUs began offering

dramatic programs that were housed usually in English departments. These included
Tuskegee Institute, Virginia Union, Hampton, Lincoln University, Morgan College, and
North Carolina A&T, where the acclaimed actor Richard Harrison (De Lord in Green
Pastures [1930]) taught for nearly eight years. Believing that HBCUs needed to work
together to strengthen their theatre programs, Randolph (Shep) Edmonds of Morgan
College, often called the “dean of black theatre,” founded the Negro Intercollegiate
Dramatic Association in 1930. Edmonds was a playwright with degrees from Oberlin
and Columbia University, and he had also studied at Yale. Taking a position in 1936 at
Dillard University in New Orleans, Edmonds organized the Southern Association
of Dramatic and Speech Arts. Both organizations promoted plays written by African
Americans and encouraged college students to develop an appreciation for plays about
African American life. In addition to his administrative work, Edmonds wrote numer-
ous plays—primarily performed at college festivals—including Yellow Death (1935),
an indictment of the malaria experiments performed on African American soldiers
during the Spanish-American War, and Nat Turner (1934), based on the famous 1831
slave insurrection. Another major figure responsible for providing high-quality theatre
training for African Americans was Dr. Anne Cooke (Reid). During a period in which
very few African American artists could study professionally, Cooke devoted most
of her life to developing theatre departments at HBCUs. At one time she headed the
drama program at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Cooke received a bachelor’s
degree from Oberlin in 1928 and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
In 1944, she finished her Ph.D. in theatre at Yale, where she became the first African
American to receive a doctorate in theatre from that university. Through the Atlanta
University Summer Theatre, Cooke provided African American artists with one of their
few artistic venues, which she founded in 1934. Lasting for over a decade, the summer
theatre offered seasons that consisted of five productions that were performed over
six weeks. Most productions were European classics. However, Cooke produced one
African American play a season. Cooke, who also directed, brought in the most accom-
plished African Americans in all disciplines to participate in the festival. She brought
in the noted Yale graduates John Ross (lighting design/playwriting) and Owen Dodson
(playwriting). Among the other talented artists were Sterling Brown, Abbie Mitchell,
Baldwin Burroughs, and Raphael McIver. James Butcher came from the University of
Iowa to direct. The summer theatre program continued until the mid-1970s, making it
one of the longest running summer theatre programs in the country. Cooke’s expertise
as a producer and educator made her constantly sought after. In 1942 she left Atlanta
to become the director of communications at Hampton Institute, where she served
successfully until 1944. In a long and outstanding career, her greatest contribution to
African American theatre occurred at Howard University, where she headed the drama
department from 1944 to 1958. She turned it into the premiere US drama program for
African Americans.
The Great Depression of the 1930s severely diminished the strides that African
Americans had made in the theatre. Faced with record-high unemployment, African
316 KATHY A. PERKINS

Americans fared worse than many other ethnic groups, particularly those employed in
the arts. To give some relief to jobless citizens, President Franklin D. Roosevelt founded
the Works Progress Administration (WPA). One of the WPA’s projects was the Federal
Theatre Project (FTP), placed under the direction of Hallie Flanagan. From 1935 to 1939,
the government, for the first time in history, provided state-supported work for many
unemployed actors, playwrights, directors, stage managers, and designers. FTP prac-
titioners performed at little cost in theatres across the country for many populations
unaccustomed to seeing live theatre, particularly serious drama. McClendon, one of
the few African American advisors the FTP employed, recommended that the project
create segregated Negro and other ethnic theatre units. In a 1936 letter to the New York
Times drama editor, McClendon wrote:

Now what makes a Negro theater is not so much the use of Negroes as the selection
of plays that deal with Negroes, with Negro problems, with phases of Negro life,
faithfully presented and accurately delineated. Any other approach is doomed to
failure. (McClendon 1935)

McClendon encouraged Flanagan to allow different ethnic groups to present their

own plays. The FTP began with sixteen Negro units, most in urban areas with a signifi-
cant number of unemployed theatrical artists, such as New York, Seattle, and Chicago.
Soon, this number grew to twenty-three. In the early years of the project, many units
did not regularly produce plays by African American playwrights, with the reason
being that most available plays were one-acts rather than full-length material. Instead,
white plays were chosen and then altered for an all-black cast. Later, however, African
American authors got the opportunity to write for the FTP. One of the greatest con-
tributions the FTP made to the growth of African American drama was that it gave
black playwrights a professional forum for their work. Theodore Ward, Frank Wilson,
Theodore Brown, George Norford, Hughes Allison, and John Silvera were among
the Negro units’ resident dramatists. They were able to take advantage of the FTP’s
lengthy rehearsal time in order to polish their scripts. Unfortunately, plays by African
American women were often rejected, including scripts by Georgia Johnson and Zora
Neale Hurston. Johnson submitted several plays about lynching to the FTP. However,
she never saw them staged. Ultimately, the FTP produced very few (if any) plays by
African American women.
Only three of the FTP Negro units were directed by African Americans; because of
segregation, whites dominated the administrative and major artistic positions. In 1936
John Houseman, a white director, took over the New York Negro unit, because of the
untimely death of Rose McClendon, who was one of the three African Americans
assigned a directorship. Houseman created a classical drama unit within the New York
group, presenting African American adaptations of white dramas, most famously,
Macbeth, which became the legendary Voodoo Macbeth. Additionally, Houseman cre-
ated a section within the unit where African Americans could write and produce plays.
Wilson was able to revise his Meek Mose, presented under a new title, Brother Mose.
 AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1910–45 317

The actor and director Ralf Coleman headed the Boston Negro unit throughout its
entire run. He was the only African American to hold this position. Coleman began his
theatre career in Boston, where he worked with the African American music composer
and director Maude Cuney Hare within her theatre company, Allied Arts. Coleman suc-
cessfully produced folk plays as well as productions that originated in the larger Negro
units, such as Meek Mose and Tambourines to Glory.
In 1936 Shirley Graham, a trained musician, replaced Charles DeSheim as the direc-
tor of the Chicago unit. This made her the FTP’s third African American director.
Prior to Graham’s arrival, the Chicago unit was plagued with problems, including its
choice of productions, as well as the lack of African Americans in key positions. The
unit produced such musicals as Romey and Julie, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet. According to James Hatch in A History of African American Theatre, the next
three productions were unsuccessful. He quotes Richard Wright, then the publicist for
the FTP in Chicago, who lamented in his autobiography that

the FTP had run a series of ordinary plays, all of which had been revamped to “Negro
style,” with jungle scenes, spirituals and all. The skinny white woman who directed
it, an elderly missionary type, would take a play whose characters were white, whose
theme dealt with the Middle Ages [Everyman] and recast it in terms of Southern
Negro life with overtones of African backgrounds. Contemporary plays dealing
realistically with Negro life were spurned as being controversial. There were about
forty Negro actors and actresses in the theater, lolling about, yearning, disgruntled,
not knowing what to do with themselves. What a waste of talent. Here was an
opportunity for the production of a worthwhile Negro drama and no one was aware
of it. (Wright 1977, 166–77)

Although her first few months with the Chicago unit were challenging, Graham soon
elevated the quality of its output, and she brought it national recognition. Successful pro-
ductions included Theodore Ward’s drama Big White Fog (1937), which centered on an
African American family involved with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement
Association, and Mississippi Rainbow (1937), for which Graham wrote the theme song.
Graham’s biggest success was the musical The Swing Mikado (1938), based on Gilbert
and Sullivan’s musical The Mikado. This production was one of the FTP’s biggest hits.
Graham was no newcomer to the theatre. Prior to coming to Chicago, she had studied
at Howard University and at the Sorbonne in Paris. From 1929 to 1931, she headed the
music department at Morgan College. Realizing that a formal degree would improve her
opportunities in academia, she enrolled at Oberlin in 1931. In 1932, while working simul-
taneously on her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music, she wrote and produced the
first opera to be professionally produced and performed by African Americans in the
United States. Called Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro, the production played
in the Cleveland Stadium to more than twenty-five thousand people in just two per-
formances. The opera, which featured a cast of nearly five hundred, elaborate staging,
authentic African costumes and musical instruments, and live elephants, traced black
history from Africa to America. The opera established Graham as an expert in African
318 KATHY A. PERKINS

American music and theatre. After graduation she accepted a position as the head of
the fine arts department at Tennessee A & I State College in Nashville. Upon leaving the
Chicago FTP in 1938, Graham was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship in creative writing
to study playwriting at Yale. Between 1938 and 1940 she wrote five plays that explored
social and racial issues—Dust to Earth, I Got a Home, It’s Morning, Elijah’s Raven, and
Track Thirteen—and all were produced at the university. Graham later attempted to
get her plays produced professionally and to revive Tom-Tom for a New York stage, but
she was unsuccessful. Whatever remaining professional aspirations Graham had were
dashed when she married W. E. B. Du Bois in 1951: his political activities caught the
attention of anti-Communists, and both were soon unable to work.
Despite its limitations, the FTP aided black artists enormously: several black actors
performed professionally for the first time as FTP employees. African Americans who
worked behind the scenes also benefited from the FTP: black technicians and design-
ers, many still neophytes, got the opportunity to work with Broadway artists and the
latest technology. As a result of his training in the FTP, Perry Watkins, a costume and
scene designer, became the first African American to design scenery on Broadway (in
Mamba’s Daughter in 1939). After leaving the FTP, he continued to work in theatre as
well as film. Other designers who developed their craft while at the FTP include the
lighting designer Byron Webb and the costume designer Hilda Farnum, who headed
the costume shop for the New York unit. Access to training through the FTP was cru-
cial for many black artists. Because of racial discrimination, few African Americans
had enjoyed the opportunity to study theatre design and the technical crafts at major
universities. A  few HBCUs offered professional training in these areas. In addition
to these obstacles, the professional unions, such as the International Association for
Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), were blatantly segregated. Shortly after World
War I, the IATSE permitted African Americans to join, but only in auxiliary units
known as “A locals.” The members of such units, however, were barred from working on
Broadway and in major theatres; these segregated policies prevented blacks and whites
from working together and receiving equal salaries—a trend that continued as late as
1981. The designers’ union, United Scenic Artists (USA) did not admit its first African
American member (Watkins) until 1939. Even today, the USA’s African American
membership is minimal. Unfortunately, for African American theatrical artists and
the strides they made, the FTP was short-lived. The House Un-American Activities
Committee accused Flanagan and the FTP of producing plays with Communist over-
tones that were critical of the United States; on June 30, 1939, Congress voted to end
the FTP. The project’s abrupt end left more than eight hundred African Americans out
of work.
A year later, the playwright-director Abram Hill, a product of Lincoln University’s
theatre program and a former script reader for the FTP, asked a group of friends—
Austin Briggs-Hall, Frederick O’Neal, Claire Leyba, and Howard Augusta, among oth-
ers—to organize a black professional theatre company. Calling themselves the American
Negro Theatre (ANT), the troupe existed until 1951. Its ruling philosophy was that of Du
Bois’s: theatre by, about, for, and near African Americans. (Although the ANT produced
 AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1910–45 319

works by several African American authors such as Abram Hill, Owen Dodson, and
Theodore Brown, they also performed plays written by white authors.)
The ANT began its journey in the basement of the 135th Street Library in Harlem. It
produced some of the twentieth century’s most talented and prominent actors, play-
wrights, designers, and directors, including Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby
Dee, Ossie Davis, Fred O’Neal, Hilda Simms, Charles Sebree, Alice Childress, Alvin
Childress, Roger Furman, and Helen Martin. The ANT was acclaimed as one of the
most influential African American theatre companies since the Lafayette Players. The
group aspired to train Harlem’s theatrical practitioners and provide them with a per-
manent Negro company of actors, writers, directors, and designers. Members were
required to work in all areas of theatre, including backstage and in management. Classes
were taught by experienced artists who had worked for the FTP or in professional the-
atres. The Broadway designer Perry Watkins taught classes in design. Osceola Archer
(Adams), who trained at Howard and New York University, taught acting classes. She
toured the United States in 1935 in Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson. Archer is credited
with training an entire generation of outstanding African American actors. The ANT
opened its first season with Hill’s On Striver’s Row (1940), a comedy set in Harlem, which
ran for more than one hundred performances. Its longest-running show, however, was
Anna Lucasta. Written by the white playwright Phillip Yordan, the play tells the story of
a coal-mining Polish family in Pennsylvania. Hill adapted it for a black cast and turned
it into a comedic drama. Produced originally by the ANT in 1944 to rave reviews, the
white producer John Wildberg transferred the show to Broadway later that same year. Its
cast included an outstanding roster of ANT members: Hilda Simms, Fred O’Neal, Alvin
Childress, Canada Lee, Earle Hyman, and Alice Childress. Alice Childress received a
Tony nomination for her role as Blanche. The production ran for an unprecedented 957
performances—setting a record for an African American play—and produced two road
companies and two film adaptations. The production proved to be a blessing and a curse
for the ANT. The success of Anna Lucasta contributed to the demise of the company as
ANT members who appeared in the Broadway production left for more lucrative careers
in film and the commercial theatre; few returned to the theatre company that had
launched their careers. A new group of talent joined the ANT. Seeing it as their ticket to
the “big time,” the new members expected shows to have Broadway potential. However,
as the years went on, production costs escalated and the quality of ANT productions
declined. Cheated out of royalties, Hill was unable to use Anna Lucasta’s money to aid
the struggling theatre. He resigned in 1948, and the company struggled after his depar-
ture. After the ANT closed in 1951, it would take sixteen years for another major African
American theatre—the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1967—to fill its void. Like
the ANT, the NEC would devote itself to the professional training of African Americans
in all areas of theatre. The ANT was known not only for its excellent ensemble of artists,
but also for its reputation for agitating for the rights of African Americans. It had lob-
bied the theatrical unions to allow African Americans to join, fought for adequate pay,
and joined other political causes. These artists, who stood at the dawn of the civil rights
movement of the 1950s, set the stage for future generations. One of the ANT’s most
320 KATHY A. PERKINS

famous graduates is Alice Childress, an actress-turned-playwright who become the first

African American female to have her play produced Off Broadway: 1956’s Trouble in
Mind. She often said that the skills she had learned at the ANT proved crucial in her later
careers as a writer and director. She recalled the theatre with great fondness: “ANT folks
stayed because they loved it. There was no pay, and it was the lack of funds that caused its
demise. You can only expect people to work for free so long” (Childress 1972). The ANT,
which relied on grants to survive, paid its members very little. Hill firmly believed that
theatre in America could not sustain itself without funding from private foundations
and government support, but he noted that African American theatre, denied the eco-
nomic resources of white theatres, was increasingly forced to support itself: “As long as
we have inequities in our society, we, as an ethnic group, will have to rely more and more
upon ourselves and not anybody else” (Hill and Hatch 2003, 356).
Contemporary African American theatres confront many of the issues that were
faced in the twentieth century. They continue to suffer disproportionately from a lack of
monetary support, which often leads to their closing. While many of the large regional
theatres receive funding to develop plays by African American playwrights, African
American companies rarely receive funds to develop new works, and predominantly
white theatres seldom collaborate with African American theatres. Unfortunately,
major regional theatres diminish opportunities for a range of voices by only promoting
a handful of African American playwrights. The real challenge for all artists is to democ-
ratize the process, so that multiple voices can stretch the community of artists to reach
their highest potential. Abram Hill’s prophetic voice reminds us that African American
artists will have to depend on themselves for survival in the American theatre.

Works Cited
Abramson, Doris E. 1967. Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925–1959.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Childress, Alice. Interview by James V. Hatch. February 21, 1972. New York.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1926. Krigwa Players inaugural playbill. Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture (Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division), New York, NY.
Elam, Harry J., Jr., and David Krasner, eds. 2001. African American Performance and Theater
History: A Critical Reader. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gregory, Montgomery T., and Alain Locke. 1927. Plays of Negro Life. New York: Harper & Row.
Hamalian, Leo, and James V. Hatch. 1991. The Roots of African American Drama. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press.
Hill, Errol. 1980. The Theatre of Black Americans: The Presenters/The Participators. Volume II.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. 2003. A History of African American Theatre.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Locke, Alain. 1969. The New Negro. New York: Athenaeum.
McClendon, Rose. 1935. As to a New Negro Stage. New York Times, June 30.
Miller, May. 1988. Interview by Kathy Perkins. Washington, DC, February 24.
Mitchell, Loften. 1975. Voices of the Black Theatre. Clifton, NJ: James T. White.
 AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA, 1910–45 321

Perkins, Kathy A., ed. 1989. Black Female Playwrights:  An Anthology of Plays before 1950.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Perkins, Kathy A., and Judith L. Stephens, eds. 1998. Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American
Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sampson, Henry T. 1980. Blacks in Blackface: A Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
Walker, Aida Overton. 1905. Colored Men and Women on the Stage. The Colored American
8–9: 571–75.
White, Walter. 1929. Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch. New York: Knopf.
Woll, Allen, ed. 1980. Dictionary of the Black Theatre. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Wright, Richard. 1977. American Hunger. New York:  Harper and Row. (Originally published
in 1944).
 CHAPTER 21

A RT H U R M I L L E R :  A  R A DIC A L
P OL I T IC S O F T H E  S O U L

JEFFREY D .  MASON

Politics is too conscious a business to illuminate the dark cellar of the pub-
lic mind, where secret fears, unspeakable and vile, rule over cobwebbed
territories of betrayal and violent anger. (Miller 1987, 332)

Arthur Miller was more than a playwright and participating citizen; he was a pres-
ence in the American theatre, an exemplar of a certain aesthetic and practice, a sage
and champion of stage and letters, and a point of reference in the swirling, evolving dra-
matic art of his period. There were several facets of Arthur Miller: the author of widely
produced, well-regarded plays; the author of plays less well known; the American play-
wright admired more in Britain than in his own country; the essayist whose work most
frequently appeared in the New York Times; the artist admired for standing up against
the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC); the emblematic intellectual
who married the archetypal magical sex star; and the activist who lent his name to leftist
causes, served as an antiwar convention delegate, and advocated for freedom of speech.1
To understand his drama, and especially its political implications, we should seek to
understand the phenomenon.
Miller rose to prominence during the postwar years, what we might now regard as
a transition between two more clearly defined periods in the American stage, the
first during the Great Depression, most notably including the Group Theatre and the
Federal Theatre Project, and the second enjoying its heyday during the cultural and
counter-cultural challenges of the 1960s.2 Miller’s theatre was Broadway, but in his
time, as in ours, Broadway defied precise definition in spite of the commercial forces
that drove artistic choices. Finding a shape in any theatrical tradition provides a pro-
vocative, troublesome challenge for the theatre historian. Do we focus on the plays
that have survived? Or the entire repertory, no matter how durable? Do we count per-
formances? Total audience members? Revivals and tours? Gross receipts? Should we
attempt to group the material into categories—comedies, dramas, musical comedies,
 ARTHUR MILLER 323

and so on—and estimate the collective presence of each in the whole? Do we look for
those specific works that mark turning points in the whole? Should we analyze from the
perspective of the labor historian, seeking to understand not just the contributions of
the artists but also the influence and economic engagement of everyone employed in the
business? What can we learn from relating the theatre to other arts or to the culture as a
whole? Do we find our most valid perspective in the published commentaries, the work
of newspaper critics and university scholars? How can we assess and understand the
theatre in relation to the currents and events—social, political, economic, religious—of
that time and place? When we refer to the “Broadway” of Miller’s time, what complex of
events, venues and participants do we imagine?
As we look back, the late 1940s appear to be the time of Miller and Tennessee
Williams, of The Glass Menagerie (1945), All My Sons (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947), and Death of a Salesman (1949). Yet these are merely the few plays that have sur-
vived two generations, the ones we still read and stage, and those that continue to earn
respect from theatre scholars, but there were others that drew attention at the time.
When All My Sons opened on January 29, 1947, the long-running plays were Life with
Father (1939), The Voice of the Turtle (1943), Harvey (1944), State of the Union (1945), and
Born Yesterday (1946), along with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals Oklahoma!
(1943) and Carousel (1945). At the premiere of Death of a Salesman on February 10, 1949,
the well-established plays included A Streetcar Named Desire, Mister Roberts (1948), and
the durable Born Yesterday, with the musical comedies Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and
High Button Shoes (1947). When Death of a Salesman passed its first anniversary, Mister
Roberts was still running, and other commercially successful productions included
Where’s Charley? (1948), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Detective Story (1949), and South Pacific
(1949). These highlights, taken as a whole, suggest a Broadway composed of musical
comedies, light comedies, romance, and suspense.
Clearly, the work of Miller and Williams was not typical of their theatre but rather
exceptional, standing out with regard to literary skill, theatrical daring, and the will-
ingness, even the determination, to deal with substantive, serious issues and concerns.3
Indeed, two of the popular plays of the mid-1940s suggest a link, but actually clarify the
distinctions, between the more usual Broadway fare and Miller’s writing.
State of the Union is not political theatre but rather theatre about politics; Howard
Lindsay and Russel Crouse take the audience on a tour behind the scenes as party pro-
fessionals try to shape an independent-minded industrialist (an airplane manufacturer,
perhaps the one whose company bought Joe Keller’s cylinder heads in All My Sons) into
a presidential candidate; the play’s focus travels from the campaign milieu to the ques-
tion of the protagonist’s probity to the strain on his marriage. In spite of references to
reconversion (of industry from wartime production back to peacetime purposes), the
right of labor to strike, and campaign finance reform, the play is a comedy of manners
that exploits social issues for a sort of local color while depicting the hard-drinking pro-
fessional politicians in contrast with their putative nominee and his idealistic wife, who
resolve their differences to come together as he rejects politics because he has too much
faith in the American people and too much conviction that they must all work together
324 JEFFREY D. MASON

with the same commitment in peacetime as they demonstrated during the war. This
incongruously ingenuous hero is a triumph of personality and style rather than a man
characterized by his convictions, so State of the Union leaves the audience with the illu-
sion of serious thinking but takes no genuine positions and holds everyone harmless,
even the party hacks that amuse and endure in spite of their cheerful lack of principles.
Lindsay and Crouse put social issues onstage, but they make light of them while Miller,
in his work, builds from them as an intellectual foundation.
In Born Yesterday, Garson Kanin offers the problem of a junk man turned tycoon
who seeks federal legislation that will further his ambition to dominate the scrap
metal industry and to profit from collecting the war materiel abandoned on European
battlefields. Harry Brock is physically “gross,” he treats those near him with callous
disregard, and he measures everyone’s worth by weekly wages, so Kanin leaves the
audience scant cause for caring about him; even his hundred-thousand-dollar-a-
year attorney is a corrupt drunk who has compromised his potential.4 Brock’s weak-
ness is Billie Dawn, a former chorus girl and his mistress of several years, flagrantly
lower-class and uneducated in spite of her mink coats and her controlling interest in
most of his assets. Partly in an effort to get ahead in the Washington milieu, Brock
hires a New Republic reporter to serve as Billie’s Pygmalion. In two months, time
enough for her and the reporter to fall in love, she learns enough to understand the
public danger that Brock presents; she stymies her former master’s scheme, threatens
to expose him to criminal prosecution, and holds him hostage to her new standards
by proposing to relinquish control of his junkyards just one at a time, one per year.
The reporter and the chorus girl finish the play by promoting government as the con-
vocation and instrument of the people and by advocating boundaries to free enter-
prise so that men like Brock won’t be permitted to control wealth and power at the
expense of the populace.
Kanin’s play suggests rough parallels with All My Sons. Brock is the counterpart of Joe
Keller to the extent that both are men who rose from humble backgrounds to become
powerful and successful, and who chose to focus on their own interests rather than the
public good; of course, Brock is ruthless and greedy while Joe is a decent man who, faced
with the impossibility of meeting what he perceives as contradictory responsibilities (to
humanity, to his family, and to the survival of his business), loses his way. The reporter
evokes Chris Keller: they are bright young men who served in the war and have returned
to stand up for integrity. Both plays build on the patriotism and sense of community that
the war fostered. Yet Kanin concludes with a pat, idealistic, and somewhat naive civ-
ics lesson that leaves his villain intact, while Miller presses the action toward the moral
question that Joe Keller dies in order to answer.
I am attempting to locate Miller’s early success in a meaningful historical framework,
but especially with regard to the political implications of his plays, Broadway itself
was less significant than the greater American society. The scholarly consensus is that
Miller’s thought was influenced, to a large extent, by his personal experiences during
the Great Depression and World War II: his father’s financial difficulties led to the fam-
ily’s move from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn, Miller struggled to find a job working
 ARTHUR MILLER 325

in a parts warehouse, he chose to pursue his undergraduate studies at the University of

Michigan partly for financial reasons, he wrote for radio and television while trying to
develop his writing for the stage, he worked as a shipfitter’s helper at the Brooklyn Navy
Yard, he reported on army camp life in Situation Normal (1944), and he told a story of
wartime anti-Semitism in Focus (1945).
Powerful currents helped shape Miller’s work. He looked back at the Great Depression
as more than a financial cataclysm:

I knew that the Depression was only incidentally a matter of money. Rather, it was
a moral catastrophe, a violent revelation of the hypocrisies behind the facade of
American society. . . . When at the same time the order of society has also melted and
the old authority has shown its incompetence and hollowness, the way to maturity is
radicalism. (Miller 1987, 115)

As the new economic realities settled in, many declared the failure of capitalism and
embraced the socialist alternative, even the communist path, imagining radical social
reform if not outright revolution to remedy the systemic ills ostensibly consequent to
the operation of the free market and the profit imperative. Miller recalled the emotional
impact of the Crash and its effect on political sentiments:

The stock market . . . had carried for a great many middle-class people the prestige of
capitalism itself. . . . When the market collapsed practically overnight, with none of
the great leaders or institutions capable of stopping it or even understanding what
was happening, a panic deep in the spirit made questionable any and all belief in
everything official. . . . In this light the revolution in Russia, which had pulled the
czarist army out of the war and its mindless slaughter, made terrific sense; from a
distance it seemed a sublime instance of man’s intelligence. (1987, 85)

Indeed, one could promote a leftist strategy as a means of supporting democracy and
the republic, and the more progressive artists were so inclined; as Miller explained, “to
stand in the avant-garde meant espousing socialism; it meant being political” (2000b,
126). He explained that when applying a Marxist point of view, “to understand a political
phenomenon you had to look for the money. It also meant that you believed capitalism
was quite possibly doomed, but between 1929 and 1936 there were moments when not to
believe that would put you in a political minority” (Miller 2000a, 280).
In 1935, the seventh congress of the Comintern called for a “popular front” to bring
together all leftist and even sympathetic centrist groups against the common threat
of fascism, a move that legitimated cooperation, even if not formal or overt, between
such formerly antagonistic entities as the Communist Party USA and the Roosevelt
administration. In this environment, leftist politics and convictions were widespread,
especially among artists and intellectuals. Christopher Bigsby characterizes Miller as a
Marxist during his years at the University of Michigan (1934–38) and suggests that he
didn’t fully renounce his Communist sympathies until 1949 (Bigsby 2005, 6, 18, 145).
Bigsby analyzes the three plays Miller wrote at Michigan—No Villain, Honors at Dawn,
The Great Disobedience—to elucidate the playwright’s interest in class conflict and the
326 JEFFREY D. MASON

implications of ownership, the function and effects of a capitalist system, and the repres-
sion inherent in a society gone wrong (2005, 8–23). With regard to a revolutionary dec-
laration by a character based on Miller himself, Bigsby asserts, “This is hand-me-down
stuff. It is the rhetoric of Odets’s Waiting for Lefty and a dozen proletarian plays. It is
the rhetoric of the age” (2005, 16). Yet Bigsby also acknowledges these juvenile works as
leading to “a theatre in which private concerns move out into a public space” (2005, 23).
However, the American system found validation in the celebrated victory of World War
II and the prosperity that followed, and by the late 1940s, radical leftist positions were
suspect rather than patriotic. David Savran provides a nuanced analysis of Miller’s evo-
lution from Old Left intellectual to popular front Communist to Cold War liberal (1992,
22–26). Miller tried to explain his own change of perspective:

I had indeed at times believed with passionate moral certainty that in Marxism was
the hope of mankind and of the survival of reason itself, only to come up against
nagging demonstrations of human perversity, not least my own. . . . to be Red
was to embrace hope, the hope that lies in action. So it had seemed for a time. But
I have come to see an altogether different reality after traveling in the Soviet Union,
particularly, and in Eastern Europe and China. Deep within Marxism, ironically
enough, lies a despairing passivity before History, and indeed power is forbidden to
the individual and rightly belongs only to the collective. Thus the individual requires
no rights, in the sense of protection from the state, any more than a pious person
needs rights against the powers of his god. (1987, 407–8)

Such political change was not entirely a matter of deepening insight or personal experi-
ence; consider these statistical measures of the United States economy. Unemployment
reached a peak of 25  percent in 1933, recovered somewhat by 1936, but rose again
to 19 percent in 1939, while from 1947 through 1974, the figure floated near a modest
5 percent.5 In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act set the minimum wage at 25¢ per hour,
and—in constant dollars—the raise to 75¢ in 1950 constituted an increase of 76 percent,
while the dollar-an-hour standard of 1956 more than doubled the 1938 starting point.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average reached a peak several weeks before the Crash of
1929, lost 89 percent of its value by 1932, but rose again, returning to the 1929 high during
1954–55.6 The gross domestic product per capita passed the “full normal” level in 1941.
These economic indicators demonstrate that after the victories in Europe and Japan, the
United States emerged from the difficulties of the 1930s to enjoy comparative prosperity
and stability.
In these circumstances, the call for revolution that once galvanized American play-
houses lacked relevance and force. Miller himself created two characters, in particu-
lar, whom he might have handled quite differently had he imagined them during the
mid-1930s for a company like the Group Theatre.
Joe Keller starts out, as he puts it, “in a shop,” a man of no education who works his
way up to own his business. He is still close enough to his process that his solution to his
wartime problem is rooted in his machinist’s skills; in his first version of the key story,
he tells Chris that his partner “takes out his tools and he—covers over the cracks” in the
 ARTHUR MILLER 327

faulty cylinder heads (Miller 1957a, 82). Even in his moments of moral weakness, he is
no cliché capitalist who takes advantage of his workers, but a man who works with his
hands. A younger Joe Keller might well have been the kind of worker that Odets fea-
tures in Waiting for Lefty, a man struggling to support his family and earn a modicum
of respect in a system that beats him down. By the time Miller wrote All My Sons, such
worker-oriented issues were passé, left behind by the legitimation of union representa-
tion and a wartime economy that put everyone to work and placed public duty in the
forefront.
In A View from the Bridge, Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman, a man who earns a hard
living with his sweat and strength, whose chief values focus on protecting his family and
cultivating loyalty to his friends. As with Joe Keller, Miller’s interest in Eddie lies in the
choices he must make and how they reveal his spirit. Miller was well aware of the abuses
on the Brooklyn docks, but even as early as 1949, when he was working on the screen-
play for The Hook, those difficulties were located in the exploitation of workers not by
owners but by union bosses linked with organized crime.7 Yet the working conditions of
the docks appear in A View from the Bridge only as distant, faint echoes, and they have
nothing to do with the activist concerns that drove political plays in the 1930s.8 
Of all the characters in Miller’s major plays, Joe Keller and Eddie Carbone are the
most likely agents to urge workers’ concerns, but by the time Miller created them, such
issues were no longer current: union membership had become routine, workers’ rights
were protected by law, and wages had risen.9 Indeed, the social struggle had shifted, so
the victim of injustice was not the oppressed laborer but rather the beset, embattled citi-
zen who claimed the freedom to speak and to assemble but who became the unhappy
object of government investigation and scrutiny. Communists, fellow travelers, and
those who simply leaned to the Left were all suspect, all to be put down even at the cost
of truth and integrity.10 The Right insisted that any enemy assists one’s other enemies,
so anyone who opposed, impeded, or even failed to champion anti- Communism was
an ally of Communism if not actually a Party member. Miller traced the perception of
menace to the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949; there were Americans who
could not imagine that such a disaster would be possible without a seditious, subversive
conspiracy within the United States government itself (Miller 2000a, 275). Miller argued
that by 1956, there was “no trace of an American left anymore and nothing in reality to
be loyal or unfaithful to” (1987, 395). The political tide had shifted to move leftist senti-
ments from constituting a badge of progressive thinking to leaving a stain with little
constructive purpose.
Fear dominated Miller’s early 1950s. The House Committee on Un-American
Activities summoned a leading editor to explain why he had convened writers to mount
an ostensibly “anti-American campaign”; when Miller observed that commercial-
ism was corrupting Broadway, one of his lawyer’s colleagues dismissed his view as the
“Communist position”; citizens could be “branded traitors” and no one would defend
them; and when members of the Dramatists Guild proposed to support a production
of Sean O’Casey’s Cock-a-Doodle Dandy to counter American Legion opposition, one
author’s denunciation of this supposedly pro-Communist action left the rest “either
328 JEFFREY D. MASON

scared or bewildered how to act” (Miller 1987, 311, 312, 312, 322). Miller ties both fear and
paralysis to guilt: “Once it was conceded that absolutely any idea remotely similar to a
Marxist position was not only politically but morally illicit, the liberal, with his custom-
ary adaptations of Marxist theory and attitudes, was effectively paralyzed” (1987, 341).
Miller drew an analogy between politics and piety:

Generally it was guilt, in this historical instance, resulting from their awareness
that they were not as Rightist as people were supposed to be; that the tenor of public
pronouncements was alien to them and that they must be somehow discoverable as
enemies of the power overhead. There was a new religiosity in the air, not merely
the kind expressed by the spurt in church construction and church attendance, but
an official piety which my reading of American history could not reconcile with
the free-wheeling iconoclasm of the country’s past. I saw forming a kind of interior
mechanism of confession and forgiveness of sins which until now had not been
rightly categorized as sins. 1957d, 40)

While in the 1930s struggle was a matter of social class, in the 1950s attention shifted to
personal morality. The individual suffered intense scrutiny because the measure of one’s
political role began with moral presentation; everything came down to one’s character,
and actions were merely its manifestations, so one had to behave appropriately or risk
censure. Those who positioned themselves as America’s defenders regarded all others
with grave suspicion, taking upon themselves the right, even the mission, to peer into
their thoughts and desires, and damning hesitation and equivocation as evidence of the
decay that inevitably destroys, the rot that must be excised.

Resistance

Miller turned to the stage to challenge the repression of the 1950s. In The Crucible (1953),
he constructs the action as a metaphor for the investigations and defamations that led
to his own appearance before the Committee in 1956. In After the Fall (1964), he directly
addresses the damage the Committee wreaked, although he handles it in terms more
psychological than political. In Incident at Vichy (1964), he displaces the corrosion of
accusation and suspicion to Vichy France. In The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977), he again
displaces the action by exploring issues of surveillance and domestic espionage in the
context of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain.
The action of The Crucible leads the people of Salem to realize that their situation is
political and that their relationships are neither innocent nor forthright, but informed
and complicated by the assertion and exercise of power. The girls are the first to grasp
the reality of the operation of the village. In their anxious, hasty effort to protect them-
selves, Abigail, Mary and the others find the most vulnerable point in the adult world,
playing upon the fear not of evil itself but of being accused of intimacy with evil. They
accuse to evade accusation, and they provoke panic cloaked in piety. Once the girls
 ARTHUR MILLER 329

cry “Witch!” and supposedly responsible men like Parris and Hale take them seri-
ously, no one can turn back, and no one can hide. The theocracy must find evil or risk
denunciation.
A few of the men are already aware of the power structure and their places in it.
Parris claims the respect due the town minister, Putnam wields the influence of the
affluent property owner, and Danforth stands high in the colonial judicial system. They
have been playing these roles all along, but the crisis brings them into the foreground
and gives them new purpose. They seize the moment. Danforth, above all, cites law,
scripture, and his mission as God’s emissary to affirm his position as unassailable.
Proctor is slow to understand the truth of his circumstances, so he is horrified to find
himself at a disadvantage in relation to the girls and the mandarins. He believes that his
disapproval of Parris—conveyed through his dislike for the golden candlesticks, his poor
attendance at services, and his choice not to present his son for baptism—means no more
than what he intends, that he is exercising his free will and prerogative to make value judg-
ments regarding even the minister, and that there are no ramifications beyond the degen-
eration of an association that was problematic anyway. Worse, he fails to understand the
full consequences of his relationship with Abigail, a connection that’s more than a farmer
taking advantage of a servant girl in a barn or a liaison that threatens a marriage because of
the man’s guilty fascination and the girl’s possessive passion. He is naive, so he is vulnerable.
Proctor believes that a measure of truth will resolve uncertainty, but he learns that
only the entire truth will serve, the truth that will lay him naked, and even then, its
impact is a matter of how those in authority will use it and especially turn it to their
own benefit. Information, narrative, and history have neither fixed value nor absolute
meaning: they are no more and no less than what men like Danforth will make of them.
A statement does not stand on its own merits; its significance is a matter of its exploita-
tion. A text requires a reader.
Miller later referred to his investigation into Salem as a matter of seeking

a metaphor, an image that would spring out of the heart, all-inclusive, full of light,
a sonorous instrument whose reverberations would penetrate to the center of this
miasma. For if the current degeneration of discourse continued, as I  had every
reason to believe it would, we could no longer be a democracy, a system that requires
a certain basic trust in order to exist. (1987, 330)

The dynamic of Miller’s theatrical Salem mimics his own milieu in the early 1950s: the
fear of accusation, the elevation of some to positions of unimpeachable authority, and
the loss of innocence by those who cherished certain freedoms as inalienable. In both
situations, terror trumps all, and in both, an individual is not a paragon, but one ostra-
cized, a man exposed and alone.
In After the Fall, Miller takes the Committee’s obsession with personal culpability and
responds with psychoanalysis: if the individual is the focal point of political life and if
the nation’s politics are under siege, then the remedy must lie in the health of the indi-
vidual, while issues reside not in actions themselves but in the mind. The play explores
Quentin’s sense of guilt and the question of what each of us owes others, tracing his
330 JEFFREY D. MASON

journey through his personal and professional relationships, his interactions with oth-
ers as emblems of Miller’s troubled American society of the 1950s, and his striving to
find himself, all staged as self-revelation.
Although Quentin’s trial shapes the entire action, the events related to the operation
of the Committee appear explicitly in only a small portion of the play:

• Lou tells Quentin that his subpoena upset Elsie, that his position on the faculty is
tenuous, that he published lies in his book on Soviet law, that he lied for the Party,
and that he fears to publish his new book even though keeping it hidden would
constitute a kind of suicide. Quentin assures him that “a radical past is not leprosy.
We only turned Left because it seemed the truth was there” (Miller 1981a, 152).
• Mickey tells Quentin he’ll name names and that the firm will vote him out if he
refuses to testify. He tells Lou that respect for truth has been the foundation of
their friendship and now inspires his rejection of the Party as hypocritical and
deceitful. He invites Lou to return to the Committee so they can name names
together, but Lou declares that he’ll be ruined if Mickey names him, and he accuses
Mickey of seeking to protect his own prosperity. In turn, Mickey accuses Lou of
burning his honest book under pressure from Elsie.
• Lou jumps in front of a subway train and kills himself.
• As he strives with Maggie, Quentin remembers a moment when the deceit of the
Committee was clear to him.

The characters’ contentions turn on conceptions of truth. The Committee insists on

clear, definitive confirmation of information they already hold, but the men they sum-
mon grapple with their desire to be true to each other. Mickey tells the truth as a form
of confession, reaching for a sense of solidarity with old friends, placing their relation-
ships above old Communist Party loyalties, and insisting that only in complete honesty
can he be true to himself. Ironically, his intentions horrify Lou, who sees Mickey’s testi-
mony as a shameless attempt at self-preservation while assuring others’ destruction. The
past exacts a debt, and the present instance demands payment even if the individual has
moved on; Lou has discarded his former sentiments and affiliations, but they become
the handicap that leaves him vulnerable to the Committee. Miller develops the theme
of truth as the result of insight combined with integrity, so “truth” becomes a measure
of the individual’s acumen as well as his moral self. Quentin finds the agony, crying
out, “God, why is betrayal the only truth that sticks!” (Miller 1981a, 202). They are all
wounded, the tormented victims of the interaction of their choices with the values and
practices of those in power.
In Incident at Vichy, Miller presents circumcision as a metaphor for moral flaw. The
Committee looked for error, a form of civil sin, as the visible residue of past behavior
but also as a revealing sign of ongoing taint and corruption. To support the Communist
Party to any degree constituted not a specific choice, a decision subject to reconsidera-
tion, or an action distinct from the actor, but rather evidence of impurity in the indi-
vidual’s immutable essence, so to establish such support led directly to irrevocable
 ARTHUR MILLER 331

impeachment of character. The subject’s only option was confession: the burden of guilt
remained, but the recognition of one’s social betrayal mitigated sin enough to constitute
rehabilitation, however imperfect, and permit repatriation into the community.
In the Vichy waiting room, each detainee’s “guilt” is supposedly a matter of biologi-
cal fact: the officers will strip him to ascertain whether or not he’s circumcised, and that
evidence will establish whether or not he’s Jewish. The situation admits no uncertainty;
it’s all a matter of police procedure and the ostensibly scientific method of racial anthro-
pology. There will be a clear, firm answer to the question. Yet the men wait with anxi-
ety, enveloped in uncertainty and even blaming themselves for their predicament. Their
“guilt” should be a matter of empirical fact, but they delve into their actions and motives
in search of their own culpability, assuming that had they acted differently, they would
have been spared the calamity that looms. Lebeau is there because he gave into his
mother’s stubbornness over the furniture, Leduc because he couldn’t resist coming into
town, Bayard because he lacks confidence, Monceau because he stamped his name in
his books, and the waiter because he didn’t listen to Ferrand. Each articulates his weak-
ness, taking blame and shame onto himself, so, as in the proceedings of the Committee,
the victim is responsible for his own oppression. As Lebeau explains, “Maybe it’s that
they keep saying such terrible things about us, and you can’t answer. And after years and
years of it, you . . . I wouldn’t say you believe it, but . . . you do, a little” (1981b, 278). They
concede their oppressors’ definition of the terms of their existence.
More than in any of his other plays, Miller shapes the story and characters of The
Archbishop’s Ceiling in relation to a pervasive political circumstance. Because of the
threat of hidden microphones, there is no privacy, so indiscreet speech can lead to con-
sequences at the behest of unseen, unassailable powers, and everyone must assess the
impact of every moment and interaction. The surveillance creates habits, routines, and
attitudes that inform relationships, and it is just the most immediate of the realities that
Maya, Marcus, and Sigmund face each day:

• The writers must assume that government agents might be listening to their
conversations even if the ceiling is not bugged; the prospect trumps the inscrutable
actuality.
• Agents of the government might follow and observe them as they pursue even
ostensibly innocent pastimes, like going out to dinner.
• The government can deny any of them the freedom to travel, whether within the
country or abroad.
• The government can require any of them to work at a job that might be unsuitable,
demeaning, or actually debilitating.
• The tank brigades stationed outside the city could return to impose official will
with force.
• There is no assurance that the government will be accountable to its own people
or to the world outside.
• At any moment, the police could confiscate a manuscript in progress.
• At any moment, the police could arrest any one of them.
332 JEFFREY D. MASON

• Arrest can lead to incarceration without due process.

• Incarceration can mean complete isolation, even erasure.

Most of these circumstances have become routine, but the threat of total censorship
provokes the action of the play. Sigmund has published harsh criticism of the govern-
ment, and Marcus has returned from abroad in hopes of persuading him to defect
and save everyone strain and embarrassment. The apparent confiscation of Sigmund’s
manuscript, a major work of fiction five years in the writing, leads him to evaluates his
priorities and consider what risks he is willing to undertake. The potential impact of
Sigmund—of the author as the voice and imagination of his people—and his work leads
all to take positions even while leaving open as many options as possible, always cogni-
zant that the authoritarian regime can dominate them at any moment and render incon-
sequential their plans and intentions.
The Archbishop’s Ceiling rests closer to Miller’s experience than an innocent reading
might suggest. Referring to the failure, around 1950, of an informal group of leading
writers to publish anything against “the overwhelming propaganda of the right,” Miller
wrote, “One lived in an occupied country where anyone at all might be a spy for the
enemy” (1987, 310–11). On Elia Kazan’s decision to name names before the Committee,
Miller observed that “all relationships had become relationships of advantage or dis-
advantage” (1987, 333). Either statement could apply to The Archbishop’s Ceiling, for the
nation is occupied by a foreign power, even one’s intimate friends might be working
covertly for the government, and the comprehension of every connection must take into
account its effects. There is no trust, and everyone must be always on guard.
The operation of the Committee returns in the predicament that Marcus is trying to
manage. The hidden microphones create a dynamic and threaten to set certain events
in motion: because of the surveillance, the state would have the information necessary
to arrest a writer and demand that he admit to statements they knew he had made, but
if the matter comes to trial, as Marcus warns, the proceedings would become a care-
fully staged showpiece with certain effects in mind and certain consequences for des-
ignated people to suffer. All do what they must do: the state cannot ignore a writer like
Sigmund, a writer like Sigmund cannot silence himself, and writers like Marcus and
Maya will have to live with the results of the state making an example of their colleague.
Oppression robs everyone of agency; the police state places everyone under compul-
sion, even those who appear to exercise power.
Miller saw the Committee hearings as occasions to arrange public confessions of what
the authorities already knew to be true, making the process a validation of the state at the
expense of the individual’s autonomy and integrity. He saw his own subpoena as a means
to arrange “a public rite of contrition . . . for having had in the past certain thoughts,” and
he interpreted the process not as investigative but purgative (1987, 395):

in almost every case the Committee knew in advance what they wanted the
witness to give them: the names of his comrades in the Party. The FBI had long
since infiltrated the Party, and informers had long ago identified the participants
 ARTHUR MILLER 333

in various meetings. The main point of the hearings, precisely as in seventeenth-

century Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates
as well as his Devil master, and guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking
disgusting old vows—whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely
decent people. In other words, the same spiritual nugget lay folded within both
procedures—an act of contrition done not in solemn privacy but out in the
public air.
In effect, it came down to a governmental decree of moral guilt that could easily be
made to disappear by ritual speech: intoning names of fellow sinners and recanting
former beliefs. (1987, 331)

Marcus, in The Archbishop’s Ceiling, hopes to avoid the public reckoning that Proctor, in
The Crucible, so disastrously seeks. Miller found his insight confirmed by the handling
of Kazan’s testimony.

What we had now seemed a withering parody of what was being advertised as high
drama. When the Committee knew all the names beforehand, there was hardly a
conspiracy being unveiled but rather a symbolic display that would neither string
anybody up on a gallows nor cause him to be cut down. No material thing had been
moved one way or another by a single inch, only the air we all breathed had grown
somewhat thinner and the destruction of meaning seemed total when the sundering
of friendships was so often with people whom the witness had not ceased to love.
(1987, 339)

The writers must write themselves. Marcus, Sigmund, and especially Maya live with
the awareness that they must structure even their most casual comments in relation
to the surveillance and the possible consequences. In Marcus’s apartment, the writers
edit their conversations for eavesdropping ears, they go about their business without
actively working against the restrictions on travel and employment, and even an epi-
sode like Marcus’s years in a labor camp becomes something to leave in the past. In the
opening scene, Maya clearly seeks to present herself as inoffensively and innocuously
as possible, and she responds quickly to deemphasize Adrian’s indiscreet remark about
Sigmund’s unpublished novel. They live according to a script that they write and revise
from moment to moment, like actors engaged in an ongoing improvisation for a criti-
cal, antagonistic audience. What they cannot encode in speech, they convey in written
notes, gestures, and facial expressions. As Sigmund observes, their country is like a the-
atre where all is carefully staged.
Miller creates a liminal space, the hallway, where the characters may converse neither
in private nor in public. They stand not in the residence and not on the street, but in a
neutral, transitional zone, metaphorically offstage. If their country is that place where all
is heard, then this hallway is not even included within its boundaries. They may speak
freely there, but their discourse doesn’t have the impact that conversations in the room
claim. Indeed, the interactions in the hallway lead to arranging more official, signifi-
cant exchanges in the room, where the microphones can hear. Surveillance has become
a means of validation.
334 JEFFREY D. MASON

Perhaps the most telling episode in the play is a ten-minute section in Act 2 that con-
sists almost entirely of small talk (1989, 68–77). The playwright appears to have lost
focus entirely as story, character, relationship, and issues dissociate into fragments. The
conversation flits from one casual topic to another: the weather in London, mainte-
nance in Marcus’s apartment, Maya’s bird dying, Maya’s radio audience, Marcus’s service
in the American army, the magazine that Marcus edited, the mood of Sigmund’s wife,
Sigmund’s prospects in America, Marcus attending a writers’ congress in Algeria, Irina’s
beauty, Maya’s recollection of Sigmund’s first short story, Irina playing the piano while
Maya dances, the chronic problems with the telephones, and Marcus’s trip to America
and back at the time of the initial Communist takeover.11 The characters pick up the key
threads only at odd moments, as when Marcus urges Sigmund to make a decision and
asks Adrian why he returned. Yet Miller’s point is that the hidden microphones restrain
meaningful speech, so the writers offer innocuous conversation in its place. They stage
themselves as they believe the listeners will accept them, presenting a simulacrum of
who they might be and offering a protective strategy to deflect unwelcome attention.
The Archbishop’s Ceiling juxtaposes the American with the European sensibility.
Adrian, the American, carries the spirit of Willy and Happy Loman, of Joe Keller before
he acknowledges his guilt, of John Proctor’s hold on the integrity of his name, and of
Eddie Carbone before his fall from grace. The American, as Adrian evokes him, has no
cultural sense of sorrow, of remorse, or of history as a defining matrix. The American has
somehow shed the burden of Native American genocide, of race-based chattel slavery,
of the corrosion of a civil war, and of the slide from a nation beloved to a nation resented.
The American is innocent, born anew each bright morning, traveling on a wish and a
smile. The American takes success and contentment as his birthright, regarding each
setback as temporary, an incongruous ripple in the river. The European, on the other
hand, faces the chronic prospect of calamity. Adrian’s colleagues tolerate occupation
and oppression partly because they accept their possibility. They do not claim entitle-
ment to liberty and happiness; they know that the norm of existence is strain and strife,
with each episode unfolding from power relations while defining them. They know des-
peration not as a symptom of crisis but as a matter of habit.
Adrian is in part Miller’s wry comment on his own political education; the character
suggests what the playwright has learned to recognize as youthful idealism. As Maya
points out, Adrian is the only one she knows who thinks socialism is sensible, and he is
slow to see the flaws in Marxism that had long since become apparent to Miller:

. . . the occupation of Czechoslovakia was the physical proof that Marxism was but
one more self-delusionary attempt to avoid facing the real nature of power, the
primitive corruption by power of those who possess it. In a word, Marxism has
turned out to be a form of sentimentalism toward human nature, and this has its
funny side. (2000c, 170)

Adrian persists in believing that they can resolve uncertainty, as when he proposes that
they leave the building to find a secure place to talk, when he elaborately requests that
Marcus repeat his remark that he’s routinely warned his guests that the room might be
 ARTHUR MILLER 335

bugged, or when he suggests that they challenge the Ministry of the Interior directly
regarding the confiscated manuscript. He is unable to shed his tendency to impose
American values and claim American freedoms—here, First Amendment rights—
wherever he travels. In the context of the 1950s, he is the citizen who cannot fathom the
complexity and deceit that the more perceptive players recognize as the fabric of the
time, markers of the process that is itself more significant than the putative issues.
The others regard Adrian with intermittent suspicion (wondering if he’s there as a
journalist, collecting material for his novel or pursuing some even less acceptable pur-
pose), but the underlying question applies to each of them. No one can take anyone else’s
presence for granted; everyone’s place is contingent. The native writers have developed
a skill in deferral that eludes Adrian; when he asks Maya what she does, she replies that
she never does anything. She wants the hidden listeners, and perhaps Adrian as well, to
regard her as a cipher, someone who gives no reason for offense, one without form or
content that might provoke an antagonist. She was Marcus’s lover, but she returns to his
apartment, he brings her a gift of shoes, and she is quick to comply with his wish that she
shop for an impromptu party, so the true nature of the relationship remains obscure.
Marcus himself constitutes a puzzle, and because his affluent lifestyle and access to
information suggest a link with the ruling regime, the others cannot fully trust him. Yet
Adrian is more dangerous: because he is naive, they cannot anticipate his next move,
and he might blunder.
Marcus is the sophisticate of the four. He takes a pragmatic view of their circum-
stances: no one really knows whether or not the room is bugged, Sigmund’s idealism
could compel the government to put him on trial and so put all writers at risk, and calm
patience will serve better than provocation. He manages even his intimate relationships
with detachment: he treats Maya without resentment in spite of their recent breakup,
and his interest in Irina is casual. He is an enigma, the writer returned from forced labor
to live in Sigmund’s shadow, but so well regarded that he accepts invitations to appear at
conferences abroad, and sufficiently intimate with the government to live well and with-
out the strained contentiousness that informs Sigmund’s routine. Marcus negotiates his
life, and no single issue is worth sacrificing all else. Even his exasperation with Sigmund
has porous boundaries; he rejects his colleague’s implicit claim to “the power to bring
down everyone” (1989, 101), but he stops short of ending their relations entirely.
Yet Marcus drives the action. Although everything hangs on Sigmund—the confisca-
tion of his manuscript and the question of whether or not he’ll defect—Marcus returns
from London expressly to manage the situation. Until Sigmund’s adamant resistance in
the closing moments, there is little doubt that Marcus is capable of shaping the others’
actions; they look to him for guidance and assistance, and they don’t doubt that he could
have used—could be using—the government’s microphones to compromise even his
friends. When Sigmund demands to know to whom he is speaking, he surely wonders if
Marcus knows all, even when he’s not there.
More than the others, Marcus is sensitive to the complexity of their circumstances.
He gently dismisses Adrian’s simplistic assertion that the government violates their pri-
vacy by spying on them. Marcus sees that all are playing roles that the situation and the
336 JEFFREY D. MASON

relationships make necessary: the government is doing what it must, so its agents have
not necessarily violated a trust by planting the bugs, and in response, the writers will do
what they must, living in an ongoing state of truce. He invites Alexandra because not to
invite her simply defers an encounter that will take place anyway. He is the Hamlet of
Miller’s world, taking action only as events compel him.12 
Marcus is the broker, the one who arranges matters between the government and the
writers in order to reduce damage and achieve for all parties the largest available mea-
sure of success. He is a master of perception and compromise; at no time does he stand
on principle or insist on ideals, and in that respect, he and Sigmund diverge. Marcus
would rather accept an improving government than demand what the nation deserves,
while Sigmund cannot let an injustice go unremarked. Their conflict comes down to a
struggle for influence over whose voice others will hear, who will sacrifice for the good
of all, and whose version of their situation will prevail.

Defiance

While the leftist theatre of the 1930s and the activist theatre of the 1960s located
issues and discourse within the dynamic of class structures inflamed with radical-
ism, Miller’s political theatre, rooted in the psychology and chronic suspicion of the
postwar period, returns all questions to the heart and mind of the isolated individual.
Miller wrote, “If there were one concept that might stand for the Thirties avant-garde,
it was the solidarity of humanity, and if the Fifties had an emblem, it was loneliness”
(2000b, 127). Those who appreciate their position in a given class may stand together,
but the lonely man has nowhere to turn. Engagement becomes a matter of will, con-
science, and personal resolve, although its measure rests partly on the apprehensions
of others; indeed, Miller argued, with reference to the social climate of his time, that
“actions finally became completely irrelevant; in the end, the charge itself, suspicion
itself, all but became the evidence of disloyalty” (2000a, 288). In this framework, the
individual’s moral presentation defines him in others’ eyes; reputation and image
trump deeds and transactions.
Yet Miller recognizes the larger structure, so this struggle over the soul leads, per-
haps inevitably, back to Willy Loman, that sad, misguided devotee whose life spins into
the maelstrom in Death of a Salesman. He approaches each day with the desperate,
tenacious conviction that he is known and liked, that others take him into account,
and that he matters. When Biff insists that they are both “a dime a dozen,” Willy utterly
rejects the characterization as apostasy. He is unable to imagine himself as insignifi-
cant. He is the center of his world, so he cannot conceive that others might not grant
him his due.
In this, his signature play, Miller juxtaposes his conception of the individual spirit,
the lonely man of his time, with the obdurate political reality. Willy places his faith in
 ARTHUR MILLER 337

essence and so cannot see that he moves in a world where only actions and accom-
plishments count. In Willy’s mind, to exist is to succeed—to play is to win—so he fails
to understand that the power relations that vanquish him are the product of other
men’s choices, strengths, and conflicts. When Charley explains, “The only thing you
got in this world is what you can sell,” he evokes a complex, interactive network of
ownership, value, negotiation, and advantage, with men in contention, claiming place
and position as trophies of achievement (Miller 1957c, 192). Charley’s is a political
world, an unstable arena where no one can rest and no one can take his success for
granted, the field for a game that never ends but leaves a trail of glory and despair.
Willy persists in his certitude that a smile, a shoeshine, a joke, and sheer personality
will always carry the day. He mistakes appearance for substance, seeing the manner
and appurtenances of successful men as the causes of their triumph, not its results.
Through Willy, Miller presents a paradox: while those entangled in the chronic, dark
suspicion of the postwar period retreat to presentation and image in hopes of safety,
the Salesman follows them and finds only oblivion. In the end, the ruthless, material
mechanism of society prevails.
Miller’s vision raises the question of to what extent politics can be consonant with
a moral system. Ideals might drive a political agenda, but the political process itself is
impersonal, discouraging conscience and presenting power as its own reward and the
justification of any means. If a political vision leads to a wholly political strategy, then
the result is an amoral power struggle, no matter how socially responsible the issues and
positions, and if so, a consciousness of evil becomes incongruous. Yet Miller was unable
to blink at evil, unwilling to adopt detachment when he sensed malice. He asserted that
the central issue in All My Sons involved “the conscience of Joe Keller and its awakening
to the evil he has done” (1957d, 18). As he looked back at The Crucible, a drama whose
characters grapple explicitly with their perception of the devil, Miller regretted that he
had not made the evil of Danforth, the hanging judge, an open, central issue.13

I believe now, as I did not conceive then, that there are people dedicated to evil in
the world; that without their perverse example we should not know the good. Evil
is not a mistake but a fact in itself. . . . I believe merely that, from whatever cause, a
dedication to evil, not mistaking it for good, but knowing it as evil and loving it as
evil, is possible in human beings who appear agreeable and normal. I think now that
one of the hidden weaknesses of our whole approach to dramatic psychology is our
inability to face this fact—to conceive, in effect, of Iago. (\ 1957d, 43–44)

Miller’s cynical meditation on Danforth reveals his quest to find the agent behind the
apparently impersonal, invulnerable face of society. From his sense of evil, he builds a
political theatre that frames as personal all conflict and struggle but always embedded in
the matrix of the community. The writers in The Archbishop’s Ceiling know that they are
entangled in a system that threatens them, but they find the substance of their existence
in their personal relationships, in what each will do for another, to another, and in spite
of another. On his way to the gallows, John Proctor cries out not for revolution but for
338 JEFFREY D. MASON

his name. His is the agonized plea for recognition and respect in spite of the implacable
system that destroys him.

Notes
1. In Stone Tower, I argue that Miller’s testimony before the Committee was not as resistive as
some believe (Mason 2008, 38–39).
2. Miller worked for the Federal Theatre Project’s playwriting division for six months after he
graduated from Michigan, but his involvement didn’t lead specifically to any subsequent
opportunities.
3. Miller’s comments on Williams, with specific reference to A Streetcar Named Desire, in
Miller (1987), 180–82.
4. The attorney Ed Devery’s salary works out to about $1.27 million in 2012 dollars.
5. From 1947 through 1974, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported annual unemployment
rates ranging from 2.9 percent in 1953 to 6.8 percent in 1958, with a mean of 4.76 percent
(ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat1.txt).
6. The infamous run-up in the stock market began in mid-1924; from year’s close to year’s
close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 26 percent in 1924, 29 percent in 1925, just
1 percent in 1926, 29 percent in 1927, and 48 percent in 1928. The Roaring Twenties bull
market peaked at 381.17 on September 3, 1929 (27  percent above the 1928 close); the
post-Crash bear market hit bottom with 41.22 on July 8, 1932, a loss of 89 percent in less
than three years. If we mark the recovery by looking for a return to the 1929 peak, the date
is November 23, 1954, with the index at 382.74, but if we settle for a return to the levels that
prevailed in the early 1920s, with the index in the 80s and 90s, we might find satisfaction
in the market’s performance starting in summer 1933 with the index floating in the 90s
and 100s (with very few trading days as exceptions) through April 22, 1935, when the Dow
broke 110.
7. For Miller’s account of the politics of the longshoremen’s union, see Miller (1987), 146–56.
8. By contrast, Paul Peters and George Sklar’s Stevedore (1934), produced by the Theatre
Union, addressed the oppression of dockworkers by owners and supervisors, although
primarily in order to explore troubled race relations in New Orleans.
9. Waiting for Lefty is probably the best-known pro-labor play, but even by its opening in
1935, the weight of public sentiment and government protection had shifted in favor of
the unions. In 1932, the Norris-La Guardia Act outlawed yellow dog contracts (those
that made not joining a union a condition of employment), and the National Industrial
Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 granted workers the right to organize and enjoy the benefits
of collective bargaining. (The NIRA was declared unconstitutional, but the Wagner Act
re-affirmed its key provisions in 1935.) We might regard 1947 as a turning point because
the Taft-Hartley Act laid restrictions on unfair labor practices by the unions (e.g., certain
strikes, boycotts, and closed shops), therefore including them in the government control
earlier aimed only at employers. Ironically, although the Communists had helped to
lead workers during the early years of the Depression, in the late 1940s, Walter Reuther
purged Communists from both the United Auto Workers and the Congress of Industrial
Organizations.
10. For Miller’s account of the end of his work on The Hook, see Miller (1987), 304–8.
11. If we stipulate the location as Czechoslovakia, Marcus’s journey would have taken place in
February 1948.
 ARTHUR MILLER 339

12. Just before the royal party enters to stage the final duel, Hamlet assures Horatio that “the
readiness is all.”
13. See Miller (1957c), 43–44, and Gelb (1996), 210–11.

Bibliography
Bigsby, C. W.  E. 1984. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Vol.
2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bigsby, Christopher, ed. 1997. The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
———. 2005. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2008. Arthur Miller 1915–1962. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Brater, Enoch. 2005. Arthur Miller:  A  Playwright’s Life and Work. New  York:  Thames and
Hudson.
Gelb, Phillip. 1996. Morality and Modern Drama. In The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, edited
by Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola. Revised Edition, 195–214. New York: Da Capo.
(First published in Educational Theatre Journal 10 [1958]: 190–202)
Mason, Jeffrey D. 2008. Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Miller, Arthur. 1957a. All My Sons. In Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays. Vol. 1, 57–127.
New York: Viking.
———. 1957b. The Crucible. In Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays. Vol. 1, 222–330. New York: Viking.
———. 1957c. Death of a Salesman. In Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays.Vol. 1, 129–222.
New York: Viking.
———. 1957d. Introduction to the Collected Plays. In Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays. Vol. 1, 3–55.
New York: Viking.
———. 1957e. A View from the Bridge. In Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays. Vol. 1, 377–439.
New York: Viking.
———. 1981a. After the Fall. In Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays. Vol. 2, 125–242. New York: Viking.
———. 1981b. Incident at Vichy. In Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays. Vol. 2, 243–291.
New York: Viking.
———. 1987. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove.
———. 1989. The Archbishop’s Ceiling. In “The Archbishop’s Ceiling” and “The American
Clock”: Two Plays, 1–102. New York: Grove.
———. 2000a. The Crucible in History. In Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–
2000, edited by Steven R. Centola, 274–295. New York: Penguin.
———. 2000b. Miracles. In Echoes Down the Corridor:  Collected Essays, 1944–2000, edited
by Steven R. Centola, 126–138. New  York:  Penguin. (First published in Esquire 80
[1973]: 112–15, 202–4)
———. 2000c. The Sin of Power. In Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000,
edited by Steven R. Centola, 170–174. New  York:  Penguin. (First published in Index on
Censorship 7 [1978]: 3–6)
Murphy, Brenda. 1995. Miller: “Death of a Salesman.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roudané, Matthew C. 1995. Approaches to Teaching Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”
New York: Modern Language Association.
Savran, David. 1992. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work
of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 CHAPTER  22

T E N N E S SE E W I L L IA M S A N D T H E
W I N E M I L L E R I N H E R I TA N C E

STEPHEN B OT TOMS

[Streetcar] opened one specific door for me. Not the story or characters
or the direction, but the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer
in writing them, the radiant eloquence of its composition, moved me
more than all its pathos. . . . Tennessee had printed a license to speak at full
throat, and it helped to strengthen me as I turned to Willy Loman . . .
Arthur Miller (1987, 182)

If Arthur Miller was the American dramatist who, in the years immediately following
World War II, inherited and fulfilled the project of the socially oriented playwrights of
the 1930s, his contemporary Tennessee Williams had a somewhat different set of pri-
orities. Though his novice work of the 1930s includes various attempts to resonate with
the social agitations of the period, his real subject was always the struggle for expres-
sion of the misfit individual, rather than her responsibility to the collective. Williams
sought a stage poetry that might convey dimensions of human experience—its pas-
sion and its vulnerability—that “the straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire
and authentic ice cubes” could never approach (Williams 2000, n.p.). In this endeavor,
he employed not only the linguistic lyricism praised by Miller, but also a relentlessly
experimental approach to staging. As he commented in the production notes for his
breakthrough play The Glass Menagerie, “truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which
the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transforma-
tion, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in expe-
rience” (ibid.). Williams’s key innovation in Menagerie (New York premiere, 1945) and
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) was to “transform” the established Broadway conven-
tions of domestic realism by infusing them with a theatricality inspired by the expres-
sionist and epic theatre experiments of the 1920s and 1930s. The haunting interplay
that he created among reality, fantasy, and memory in these plays proved highly influ-
ential—not least for Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). The so-called poetic realism
 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 341

created by Williams and Miller, particularly through their collaborations with the
director Elia Kazan and the scenic designer Jo Mielziner, established what became
internationally recognized, in these postwar years, as “the American style” in theatre
(cf. Murphy 1992, 7–15).
Miller’s suggestion, however, that Williams’s work had encouraged him to “speak at
full throat” belies the fact that Williams himself was rarely—if ever—able to. Indeed,
his innovations stemmed not so much from a sense of “liberation” as from his ongo-
ing attempts to negotiate a workable rapprochement between the commercial Broadway
theatre of his day and his own expressive instincts. This essay will argue that Williams
not only changed Broadway in the process, but also—albeit unwittingly—provided
crucial inspiration for the emergence of both the Off and Off Off Broadway scenes of
the 1950s and 1960s. Restless with the aesthetic limitations and commercialism that
dominated Broadway’s “show business,” a new generation of artists took their cue from
Williams to innovate and express themselves by whatever means necessary—perma-
nently changing the shape of American theatre in the process.

Alma Winemiller

Williams’s troubled relationship with Broadway expectations was apparent as early

as 1940, when his first professionally produced play Battle of Angels closed during its
try-out run in Boston, before even reaching New York. The Glass Menagerie was in part
a response to that experience: the extravagant theatricality of Battle of Angels, heavy on
stage effects, gave way to a much quieter, subtler focus on a single family and their strug-
gles to survive during the Depression. Even with this play, however, an integral part of
Williams’s conception for its staging was disregarded by the original Broadway produc-
tion. His stage directions outlining the potential use of magic lantern projections, to
complement the scenes of this “memory play” with both evocative images and printed
legends, were treated by the director Eddie Dowling as an unnecessary affectation. With
hindsight, however, it is clear that the projections provide both a visual lyricism and a
contextualizing frame for the play’s action that are integral to its conception (cf. Bottoms
2000, lxviii–lxxii).
Williams’s difficulties in negotiating the mainstream arose not only from his experi-
ments with form, but also from his treatment of content—particularly sexual content.
When he followed up the relative innocence of Menagerie with the much darker tale of
Blanche DuBois, in Streetcar—a fragile woman who has come to rely on “the kindness
of strangers” for spiritual and sexual solace—the play’s steamy, Southern Gothic treat-
ment enabled it to become a massive hit. However, Williams’s next major play, Summer
and Smoke—which opened on Broadway in October 1948, with Streetcar still running
nearby—proved less palatable to commercial tastes and became Williams’s first box
office “failure.” Some of the responsibility here lay with the director Margo Jones, who
in the playwright’s estimation did “rather a mediocre job” (Windham 1996, 225). Yet it
342 STEPHEN BOTTOMS

was also the nature of the play—as an obliquely ironic treatment of its heroine’s life jour-
ney—that caused it to suffer by comparison with its more emotionally direct predeces-
sors: “it is less moving than The Glass Menagerie and lacks the sense of pity and horror of
A Streetcar Named Desire,” claimed the New York Post (Watts 1948).
Williams, though, was not trying to reproduce an established formula. A clue to his
intentions is apparent in his suggestion that Summer and Smoke’s stage design should
make visual reference to Giorgio di Chirico’s surrealist painting Conversation among
the Ruins. The fragmentary doorways and furniture in this image permit a sketched-in
sense of the domestic, while framing a wider landscape beyond—appropriate for a
play whose action takes place simultaneously in two juxtaposed households on either
side of a town square. There’s something also, though, in the cool confrontation of the
painting’s protagonists that speaks directly to this play. The male figure leans manfully,
smilingly, toward the woman, whose face we cannot see. She appears dominated by
him, and yet her chair faces toward an open doorway—a possible way out, an exit into
no-man’s-land.
This image, I  would argue, encapsulates something vital about the relationship
between Summer and Smoke’s protagonists—Alma Winemiller and her neighbor
John Buchanan. Alma, the daughter of the town’s pastor, is a figure whose true face
remains invisible for much of the play, and she most certainly is not able to speak at
“full throat.” Because her mother is mentally unstable, living in a giggling second child-
hood, Alma has been obliged—far too young—to exchange roles with her, functioning
as homemaker to her own father. This has inculcated in her, Williams notes, “an exces-
sive propriety and self-consciousness . . . her voice and gestures belong to years of church
entertainments, to the position of hostess in a rectory” (Williams 1964, 127). And yet her
“spinsterish” appearance, as John perceives, is an ill-fitting mask distorting her true,
as-yet-unrealized self: “you swallow air when you laugh or talk. It’s a little trick that hys-
terical women get into . . . what I think you have is a doppelganger! You have a doppel-
ganger and the doppelganger is badly irritated” (136).
John has the insight to see beyond Alma’s surface appearance because he, too, as
Williams’s stage directions tell us, is “brilliantly and restlessly alive in a stagnant soci-
ety” (124). Yet this energy and passion have been channeled or, in Alma’s case, stifled,
through the limited forms of gender expression available to them. In the play’s prologue,
we see John as a boy, rejecting young Alma’s gift of a handkerchief, because it seems
too laughably sissy. When we then re-encounter the couple in young adulthood, John is
seen earnestly trying out the stock poses of masculinity. “I hope that you have a strong
character,” Alma tells him, and he responds by lifting one foot manfully onto the end of
the bench she is sitting on: “Solid as a rock,” he replies (138). This, perhaps, is the attitude
of the man in di Chirico’s painting, attempting to impress or impose. It also becomes
clear that John has begun indulging in the time-honored bachelor pursuits of drinking
and womanizing. His father briefly throws him out of the family home for his misde-
meanors but then welcomes him back again with almost indecent haste: in Glorious
Hill, Mississippi, Williams suggests, male waywardness is more likely to be indulged
than punished.
 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 343

Alma, however, is well aware that double standards are at play here. If she is frozen
into middle-class respectability, her counterpart is Rosa Gonzales—who seems equally
frustrated by the sexual licentiousness she has grown up with, as daughter of the owner
of Moon Lake Casino. Rosa is the “whore” to Alma’s “virgin” and is the focus of John’s
libidinous attentions just as Alma challenges his intellect. When John destabilizes this
binarized sexual economy by inviting Alma out to Moon Lake, and then propositioning
her for sex—ostensibly in a bid to release her sensual side from its self-imposed captiv-
ity—she gently rebuffs his advances. Yet this rejection stems less from prudishness than
from an awareness that she—like Rosa—might be undervalued in such a casual, physi-
cal encounter. “Some people bring just their bodies,” she tells him. “But there are some
people, there are some women, John—who can bring their hearts into it, also—who can
bring their souls into it” (194).
The irony in what follows is that Alma eventually becomes persuaded of her own con-
viction. She comes to believe that women can, and should, enjoy sexuality as a form of
vital self-realization—a complement to the expression of spirit and intellect. Yet when
she eventually attempts to revisit John’s earlier proposition, he rebuffs her, insisting that
he has now been persuaded by her insistence on the sanctity of the body. Their reversal
of position means that, as Alma ruefully observes, they are “like two people exchanging
a call on each other at the same time, and each finding the other one gone out” (239).
Broadway’s critics declared themselves dissatisfied with what they perceived as a
too-neat switch between the respectable and unrespectable. The characters, argued the
Herald Tribune, “are manipulated like puppets to fit an idea which is neither dramatic,
theatrical, nor sensible” (Barnes 1948). Yet such responses, I  would argue, suggest a
failure—or perhaps refusal—to grasp the dynamics of Williams’s play. Far from repre-
senting a balanced role reversal, John’s and Alma’s changes of heart further underline
the cruel double standards of conventional gender roles. John gains his new sense of
perspective just in time to become a respectable member of the community, becoming
engaged not to Alma but to her music student Nellie, a flirtatious and yet unchalleng-
ing young woman who will likely submit to John’s every instruction, whether sexual or
domestic. He protests that he is too much in awe of Alma ever to have touched her, but
this could simply translate as fear—of being with a woman who is plainly his intellectual
equal, if not his superior.
Having been “left on the shelf ” by the only young man in Glorious Hill who has
ever seemed to understand anything about her, Alma realizes that her only hope for
sensual expression now lies in alternative forms of assignation. In the play’s final
scene, we thus see her pick up a traveling salesman and head off with him for “all
kinds of after-dark entertainment” at Moon Lake Casino (247). The play concludes
with Alma about to follow this young man offstage. She “raises her gloved hand in
a sort of valedictory salute,” the stage directions note. “Then she turns slowly about
toward the audience with her hand still raised in a gesture of wonder and finality
as . . . the curtain falls” (248). As she turns toward us, is Williams willing di Chirico’s
faceless protagonist, finally, to be seen? This is not Blanche DuBois being carted off to
the asylum: Blanche’s descent into madness enables an audience to pity her without
344 STEPHEN BOTTOMS

morally condoning her for her sexual waywardness. But Alma’s last stand is as a per-
fectly sane, autonomous woman, philosophically acknowledging the bittersweet
twists of fate that have brought her to this juncture. And it was this that seems to have
most infuriated the Broadway critics.
“This is a study in extreme and false standards,” frothed one reviewer. “Instead
of developing, these people seem to act against nature” (Hawkins 1948). Certainly,
Alma’s decision to seek an anonymous lover was regarded as the most “unnatu-
ral” element of the play: “It is, of course, not entirely impossible that a puritanical
woman might suddenly turn trollop,” George Jean Nathan wrote in the New  York
Journal-American, “but surely not such a one as Williams depicts” (1948). Apparently
unable to comprehend a sexually self-possessed woman as anything other than a
“trollop,” Nathan here ignores Williams’s careful characterization of Alma, through-
out the play, as generously open-minded rather than puritanical. As she remarks in
scene 1, when describing Nellie’s disreputable mother, “life is such a mysteriously
complicated thing that no one should really presume to judge and condemn the
behavior of anyone else!” (140). Alma’s eventual liberation from the mask of rectory
manners represents a fulfilment of that generosity within herself. Viewed with the
benefit of hindsight, this character’s evolution seems subtle, persuasive, and mov-
ing, but in 1948 Broadway’s male critics could comprehend only Alma’s spinsterish
appearance, not the “doppelganger” within, and so dismissed her as a psychoana-
lytical case study in sexual frustration:  a “neurotic . . . held back by her frigidity”
(Freedley), “prim, prissy, repressed and cloistered” (Dash). Williams’s response was a
simple question, expressed in a press interview: “what is frustrated about loving with
such white hot intensity that it alters the whole direction of your life?” (Christian
Science Monitor 1948).
As this comment surreptitiously acknowledged, Alma is on one level an autobio-
graphical portrait of Williams himself, who also grew up in a Mississippi rectory and
who also struggled for years with social proscription before accepting his homo-
sexuality. “Alma of Summer and Smoke is my favorite [character],” he explained in a
much later, 1973 interview, “because I came out so late and so did Alma, and she had
the greatest struggle, you know?” (qtd. in Clum 1996: 35). For all Williams’s obvious
concern with Alma as a woman, forbidden the sexual license granted to straight men
like John, she is also a surrogate for Williams’s own experience as a gay man grow-
ing up in a deeply homophobic culture. Indeed, when the salesman asks Alma about
the “character” of Moon Lake Casino, she describes it as “Gay, very gay, Mr. Kramer”
(248). Williams’s ability to find such puckish, coded humor in the play’s conclusion
suggests a playful “salute” of his own to those few in his audience who, in 1948, would
have understood that word’s double meaning. (So, too, do other references in the play
such as Alma’s earlier shock at learning that a quotation she has used is from the notori-
ous Mr. Oscar Wilde!) Anything more explicit would have been impossible, however,
in that postwar era of McCarthyite paranoia, when homosexuals were being looked on
as next door to Communists in terms of their potential for subversively “un-American
activities.”
 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 345

Alma #2

Summer and Smoke, then, was ahead of its time, in its gentle but forceful questioning
of conventional sex and gender roles. Its failure on Broadway proved difficult for the
constantly self-doubting Williams to accept, and in 1951 he substantially rewrote it
under a new title, Eccentricities of a Nightingale. This version, which remained unstaged
until 1964, unnecessarily backed down on the much-criticized role reversal of the origi-
nal—with John losing his aggressively masculine sexuality, and Alma becoming more
overtly eccentric (cf. Clum 1996). If Summer and Smoke needed redeeming, however,
that salvation came about less because of Williams’s rewrite than thanks to a 1952 revival
at the Circle-in-the-Square Theatre, in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village. In his
landmark account of the emergence of professional theatre Off Broadway in the 1950s,
Stuart W. Little identifies this production as “the first major theatrical success below
Forty-second Street in thirty years” (that is, since the 1920s demise of the Provincetown
Players). “In this moment,” Little adds, “the off-Broadway theatre was born” (1972,
14–15).
It had been three years earlier, in 1949, that the Actors’ Equity Association had made
the decision to allow members to work professionally in Off Broadway theatres for
lower pay rates than would be required uptown. Before this, Off Broadway had been an
essentially amateur enterprise. The newly professionalized scene had struggled to make
an impact prior to Summer and Smoke, largely because of a lack of press interest. On this
occasion, though, the revered New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson was drawn down-
town by the promised reappraisal of a play that he felt warranted a second look. He was
not disappointed:

Nothing has happened for quite a long time as admirable as the new production at
the Circle-in-the-Square. . . . When Summer and Smoke was put on at the Music Box
in 1948 it looked a little detached, perhaps because the production was too intricate
or because the theatre was too large. Circle-in-the-Square is an arena-style playhouse
for a small audience and a simple production, and Summer and Smoke comes alive
in that environment. . . . Although A Streetcar Named Desire has had a conspicuous
success in the theatre, you might fairly argue that Summer and Smoke is the finer
piece of literature. (Atkinson 1952)

Other critics, prompted to review by Atkinson’s lead, concurred that “there are facets of
the play revealed in this run which no one would have guessed from the original pro-
duction” (Hawkins 1952).
The Circle-in-the-Square, like many of the Village’s Off Broadway stages, was not
a purpose-built theatre. Formed from the knocking together of two adjacent brown-
stones, it had previously been a nightclub. The producers Ted Mann and Paul Libin con-
verted the space for theatrical use, by seating audiences around café-style tables looking
toward a central platform. It was this unusual intimacy that made the Circle ideal for a
play initially judged “a trifle quiet” for Broadway tastes (Freedley 1948). Summer and
346 STEPHEN BOTTOMS

Smoke’s oblique, nuanced development of character was freshly apparent here, thanks
not least to a career-defining performance by the young Geraldine Page, as Alma. “Not
only does her acting seem fresh and unrehearsed,” wrote one reviewer, “but her char-
acterization is painfully revealing. Variety of tone and tiny gestures held the audience
breathless with suspense over the gamble of her fate” (Hawkins 1952). Such comments
suggest that Alma’s inner doppelganger, and thus the play’s true stakes, could now be
clearly perceived.
The more sympathetic reception of the character in this production may also have
resulted, in part, from the altered geographical context. Greenwich Village in the 1950s
was a center for bohemian lifestyles—home to the New York School of abstract expres-
sionist painters, and to writers such as Norman Mailer, who cofounded the Village Voice
in 1955. Commercial concerns and middle-brow moral attitudes had far less purchase
here than in the Times Square entertainment district. Performances of Summer and
Smoke began later in the evening than for Broadway shows catering to commuter audi-
ences, and “sometimes,” Little reports, “the curtain did not come down until after mid-
night when Gerry Page practiced some of her longer acting pauses. . . . Director and cast
had no thought but to do the work” (1972, 19).
Summer and Smoke established the reputation not only of Page but also of the direc-
tor José Quintero, who went on to direct the Circle-in-the-Square’s similarly reve-
latory revival of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh in 1956. (Later that same year, O’Neill’s
widow Carlotta handed Quintero the reins of the posthumous Broadway premiere of
Long Day’s Journey Into Night.) The Circle’s successes meant that an increasing number
of theatrical producers began to scout out opportunities for Off Broadway production.
The attractions were obvious: smaller houses and lower pay rates meant less financial
risk and thus greater opportunity for alternative programming. Tennessee Williams,
too, saw the virtues:  in 1958, a double bill of his one-act plays, Something Unspoken
and Suddenly Last Summer, premiered Off Broadway at the York Playhouse, under the
title Garden District. Williams was aware that the outré subject matter of Suddenly Last
Summer—which included tales of pederasty, cannibalism, and the threat of a prefrontal
lobotomy—would make it a very hard “sell” on Broadway. The critics, as he had antic-
ipated, proved largely damning in their assessments, but the modest scale of Herbert
Machiz’s production enabled it to survive long enough to find a more discerning audi-
ence. “With its startling imagery and suppressed savageness,” Stuart Little recalls, “no
production was more memorable” that season (1972, 91). Today, of course, Suddenly Last
Summer is recognized as one of Williams’s major accomplishments.

Oliver Winemiller

Despite the liberating possibilities opened up by the emergence of professional pro-

duction Off Broadway, that scene quickly evolved into a slightly less cutthroat ver-
sion of Broadway—with its own, scaled-down aversion to risk. Lower-profile plays
 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 347

by established names like Williams and O’Neill might be staged, as were successful
imports from Europe—such as the plays of the so-called Theatre of the Absurd—but
new American playwrights still struggled to find a voice. Edward Albee’s Off Broadway
success with The Zoo Story in 1960 was the exception that proved the rule, since it was
itself a European import, having premiered in Germany the previous year. With oppor-
tunities so few on the ground, a third tier of American theatre—swiftly dubbed Off Off
Broadway—began to emerge in the unassuming, do-it-yourself contexts of Greenwich
Village’s coffeehouses, church halls, lofts, and basements.
The first significant Off Off Broadway venue, and the model for much of what fol-
lowed, was the Caffe Cino—a tiny, storefront coffeehouse tucked away on Cornelia
Street. Opened in 1959 by Joe Cino, a young Italian American whose dreams of becom-
ing a dancer had been thwarted by his struggles with weight, it started out by hosting
poetry readings, gallery displays, and impromptu dance recitals. It was the play read-
ings, however, mounted by both out-of-work professionals and enthusiastic amateurs,
that quickly became the Caffe’s central focus. Readings morphed into full performances,
given on a tiny, eight-foot-square stage that was initially constructed out of wooden
crates. There were no production budgets and no ticket sales—just short plays staged
with ingenuity and energy to whoever had turned up (a hat was usually passed around
after each show, for actors’ “tips”). Cino’s festooning of the café space with fairy lights,
and his habit of declaring “it’s magic time!” at the start of each performance, helped
take patrons into a playful, imaginative headspace where material insufficiencies were
unimportant. Since there was no commercial risk involved, here—finally—was a con-
text in which young American playwrights could experiment with theatrical form and
content and could find their own voices. Writers as diverse as Lanford Wilson, Sam
Shepard, John Guare, Doric Wilson, and Robert Patrick all had crucial early breaks at
the Caffe Cino.
During its first couple of years, however, before young writers regularly began pre-
senting their work to Joe Cino for possible staging, the Caffe’s theatrical activity was
driven primarily by actors and directors, who mined the back catalogues of estab-
lished playwrights for their script material—and it was Tennessee Williams they went
to more frequently than any other writer. His one-act play This Property Is Condemned
was the first Cino show to be advertised publicly in the Village Voice, in February 1960,
and that summer The Lady of Larkspur Lotion (another one-act drawn from Williams’s
1945 anthology 27 Wagons Full of Cotton) was the first Cino production for which a
set was assembled. In 1961, the Caffe staged at least nine Williams texts, some of them
surprisingly obscure—from one-act plays published only in periodicals (such as The
Enemy: Time, which had appeared in The Theatre in 1959) to original stage adaptations
of Williams’s poems and short stories. In March 1962, Joe Cino himself garnered his first
and only directorial credit with another Williams one act, Auto Da Fe (from 27 Wagons),
which was presented at the nearby Café Bizarre.
Why this devotion to Williams? Partly because he had written so many one-act
plays, a form more suited to the casual, intimate atmosphere of café productions than
longer works (cf. Bottoms 2004, 124–37), and partly because the rich lyricism of his
348 STEPHEN BOTTOMS

language enabled his work to overcome the physical and budgetary limitations of the
venue. “Williams was the poet who taught our stage to sing again,” comments Cino
regular Robert Patrick: “for many aspiring young American theatre artists he was the
wishing-star and touchstone for aesthetic excellence” (2010). There was also a clear
sense of affinity with Williams as a gay man whose sexual identity was expressed in vari-
ous, indirect ways through his writing. Cino and his regular circle of friends and theatri-
cal collaborators were almost all gay, and it is notable that so, too, were the writers whose
work they staged with greatest frequency in the early days (Inge, Coward, Wilde, Gide,
and Cocteau, as well as Williams). This is not to say that the Cino had any programmatic
“gay lib” approach (these were the years before the Stonewall Riots of 1969, and before an
“out” gay activist movement), but nor was there any attempt to hide the Caffe’s frankly
campy, often homoerotic atmosphere. It was therefore entirely in keeping with the envi-
ronment that, in July 1962, Andy Milligan pushed the envelope by staging an adaptation
of Williams’s short story “One Arm.”
First published by New Directions in 1948, the year that Summer and Smoke premiered
on Broadway, One Arm and Other Stories expressed a far more overt sense of homoeroti-
cism than was possible in Williams’s plays for the general public. The book’s publication
was deliberately low-profile, with an initial print run of just 1,500. Intriguingly, though,
the hero of the book’s title story—Oliver Winemiller—shares his surname with the her-
oine of Summer and Smoke. The characters are, in one sense, polar opposites—Alma, the
nervous spinster; Oliver, the champion boxer—but both undergo difficult journeys in
Williams’s narratives, before finally achieving a paradoxical self-realization in defeat. In
Oliver’s case, the loss of an arm in a car accident has meant the loss of not only his sport-
ing career but also his very sense of self: “with it had gone the center of his being. . . . Now
he looked like a broken statue of Apollo, and he had also the coolness and impassivity
of a stone figure” (Williams 1957, 7–9). Numbed and directionless, Oliver wanders into a
shadowy life as a male prostitute—a means by which to turn his good looks into a paying
wage—but he winds up murdering a wealthy client in a sudden act of rage. Condemned
to death by electric chair, it is in his death-row cell that Oliver finds a redemption of
sorts in the letters that he begins to receive from adoring male clients, confessing their
continuing love for him. “For three whole years I went all over the country stirring up
feelings without feeling nothing myself,” he tells the Lutheran minister who seeks to save
him. “Now that’s all changed and I have feelings too” (27). There is in this moment, per-
haps, an inverted mirror image of Alma’s discovery of her underlying desires. Suddenly
filled with passion for his absent lovers, Oliver offers himself to his visitor—suspecting
that he may be the one who really needs saving. The minister, however, whose own latent
homosexuality has previously manifested itself only in wet dreams, flees the scene, over-
whelmed by confusion and desire. “He didn’t come back,” Williams writes, “and then
Oliver died with all of his debts unpaid” (28).
This conclusion is poetically appropriate: in narrative terms, eroticism lies in deferral
of desire more than its consummation. In theatrical terms, however, having the priest
simply run out of the cell could seem an abrupt, unsatisfying conclusion. It is signifi-
cant, then, that in adapting One Arm for the Cino, Andy Milligan engineered a different
 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 349

ending. Robert Patrick, who at that time had not yet written his first play, recalls being
asked to write the script, in which the minister was to succumb to the prisoner’s entreaty
for sex and would be seen moaning with ecstasy at the play’s climax. This was, per-
haps, the radical, underground equivalent of Alma’s valedictory salute. Patrick refused
the commission, considering Milligan’s changes “gross and vulgar,” but he now admits
to greatly regretting his decision. Milligan went ahead and adapted the story his own
way—and his production was arguably given added authenticity by the casting of Cino
regular Dean Selmier as Oliver. “Dean was a not very good but very, very sexy actor,”
recalls the playwright Doric Wilson. “I am sure he would have admitted to hustling”
(2010).
As a director, Andy Milligan was a controversial figure who later acquired a cult reputa-
tion as a producer/director of gory, erotic “exploitation” films (cf. McDonough 2001). His
theatre work at the Cino pushed the boundaries of the acceptable even within this mani-
festly alternative, bohemian context, and the overt homosexuality of One Arm proved
something of a watershed. By 1964, the Cino’s homegrown playwrights were writing new
plays that explicitly and unapologetically depicted the difficult lives of gay male charac-
ters: Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright and Robert Patrick’s The Haunted Host
still stand as early, landmark examples of “out” gay playwriting. Both writers, moreover,
acknowledge their debt to Williams—a debt that Wilson repaid in part when, in 1971, he
furnished the libretto for Lee Hoiby’s operatic adaptation of Summer and Smoke.
The historical significance of One Arm is also apparent in the fact that, two weeks after
opening at the Cino, Milligan’s production was remounted as the very first performance
at Ellen Stewart’s Café La Mama, in the newly christened East Village. Today, La Mama
remains the sole, much-evolved survivor of the original Off Off Broadway movement
and still a touchstone for downtown experimentalism. But in the New York summer
of 1962, in the tiny, brick-walled basement room that was La Mama’s first performance
space, unsuspecting audiences must have felt literally imprisoned alongside hustler and
minister in One Arm’s sweltering, erotically charged prison cell.

Brick Pollitt

Williams, then, had an unintentional legacy as a pivotal figure in the emergence of both
Off and Off Off Broadway. As an established Broadway dramatist, he continued to see
that high-profile environment as a context in which boundaries could and should be
pushed. Yet by the mid-1950s, following sequential “failures” with Summer and Smoke,
The Rose Tattoo (1951) and the wildly experimental Camino Real (1953), he urgently
needed a “hit” to revive his flagging reputation. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof he came up
with just that—by resorting quite deliberately to a more conventionally naturalistic
form than he had ever used before (cf. Devlin 1997). Written in three acts, using a single,
domestic room as setting, and observing the dramatic unities so strictly that each act
plays in real time, picking up exactly where the last one left off, Cat is on one level almost
350 STEPHEN BOTTOMS

a parody of the dramatic “norms” of 1950s Broadway. But it also subverts those very
norms from the inside, in a manner so exemplary that subsequent writers adopted simi-
lar strategies. Edward Albee’s first Broadway venture, for example, following a series of
Off Broadway successes, was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)—another long play
occurring in real time across three acts, which uses a strict adherence to conventional
realism to question the very nature of the real.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is also, crucially, Williams’s own strategic adaptation of tropes
previously explored in “One Arm.” The play’s central male character, Brick Pollitt, is—
like Oliver Winemiller—a crippled former sports hero who now lives in a numbed
limbo. Indeed, Williams uses exactly the same phrase to describe both characters. They
exude “the charm of the defeated” (Williams 1957, 13; 1976, 26), a quality of oblivious
indifference that only seems to make them more alluring to those who desire them. In
Brick’s case, it is his wife, Maggie, who craves sex with him, and superficially she seems
to be his ideal partner—a sexually self-possessed, all-American beauty, the feline of the
play’s title. Yet Brick cannot abide her, and the source of his loathing is the suicide of his
best friend and teammate, Skipper. Maggie, he believes, is responsible for this tragedy
because she planted in Skipper’s head the intolerable idea that he bore homosexual feel-
ings for Brick: “One man has one great good true thing in his life,” he tells her angrily,
and “you are naming it dirty!” Maggie’s retorts, “I’m naming it so damn clean that it
killed poor Skipper!” (43). Cleanliness, it seems, is next to deathliness, and for Brick, the
very idea of same-sex relations is so filthy it is paralyzing him: as he spits out the word
“Fairies,” the stage direction tells us, we can hear “the wide and profound reach of the con-
ventional mores he got from the world” (79). If Williams could not affirm homosexuality
itself in a commercial drama of the mid-1950s, he could at least present an oblique cri-
tique of the destructiveness of what we would now call homophobia.
If Oliver Winemiller has a jail cell on death row, Brick’s prison is the opulent,
plantation-house bedroom in which the action takes place. (Cat, like Summer and
Smoke, is set in the fictional Mississippi community of Glorious Hill.) This room, we are
told, was once shared by the plantation’s founders Jack Straw and Peter Ochello—“that
ole pair of sisters,” as Brick contemptuously labels them (81). Yet the room is, for Brick
and Maggie, as much a “closet” of unspeakable secrets as it was for their gay predeces-
sors. Everyone in Brick’s family wants to know everyone else’s business—and the cou-
ple’s privacy is constantly compromised by prying eavesdroppers listening in through
walls, lurking at open doorways, or simply marching unannounced into the room.
In its own way, like Miller’s The Crucible, Cat was a response to the paranoid inqui-
sitions of the McCarthy era. The hypocritical moralizing and “mendacity” of his fam-
ily disgusts Brick—and one detects here, also, Williams’s own disgust at his voyeuristic
Broadway audience, titillated by the steamy sensationalism of a play such as A Streetcar
Named Desire but tutting with indignation if “conventional mores” are not eventually
seen to be reasserted. And yet Williams also needed this very audience to applaud his
play, and Cat plays the game by following the conventional mechanics of a naturalis-
tic drama with almost clockwork precision. Bit by bit, more and more of the “truth”
of the Pollitts’ situation is “revealed”; the story of the Brick/Skipper/Maggie triangle is
 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 351

gradually unveiled like a striptease, particularly in Brick’s long, painful confrontation

with his father in Act 2. But in the process of this unveiling, Williams also deftly refuses
to satisfy anyone’s curiosity as to one central question—is Brick himself “gay”? Is his
disgust with the world also a disgusted self-loathing at his own feelings for Skipper?
Williams’s “failure” to answer such central questions has led some critics to label Cat
a drama of evasion: “We never quite penetrate Brick’s own facade, know or share his
precise feelings,” Walter Kerr complained in his Herald-Tribune review of the premiere
(qtd. in Arnott 1985, 40). Decades later Christopher Bigsby continued to maintain that
there are ambiguities in the play that Williams “is not disposed to examine” (1992, 57).
Like Alma, Brick is a character whose true face we cannot quite see. Yet as Williams
remarks in a stage direction that becomes a kind of manifesto:

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal
of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even one’s own character to
himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as deeply as
he legitimately can: but it should steer him away from “pat” conclusions, facile definitions
that make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience. (76)

Or, put another way, a “realism” that seeks to explain everything is fundamentally unre-
alistic. If Brick himself cannot face or articulate the truth of his own desires, then how
can anyone looking in on him from the outside reasonably expect to “penetrate” them?
In his 1962 article “Which Theatre Is the Absurd One?” Edward Albee echoed
Williams’s point from another angle: “the supposed Realistic theatre—the term used
here to mean most of what is done on Broadway . . . panders to the public need for
self-congratulation and reassurance and presents a false picture of ourselves to our-
selves” (1965, 172). It is this theatre, Albee suggests, that is truly absurd, whereas the
so-called Theatre of the Absurd may prove surprisingly “realistic.” Certainly, Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a naturalistic drama strongly inflected by Albee’s debt to
Beckettian absurdism. Yet one might equally argue that Cat on Hot Tin Roof resembles
Waiting for Godot (which was first performed in English in the same year, 1955) in its
ultimately circular, rather than linear, dramatic form. This is a drama of stasis that, for
all its sound and fury, ultimately leaves its audience exactly where they came in—want-
ing to know if Brick and Maggie will ever make love again, and waiting for Big Daddy to
die. “Nothing is said,” Brick tells his father in Act 2, in a line that might be taken as a sly
description of the play as a whole, or indeed of Williams’s Broadway audience: “You sit
in a chair and gas about this and that and I look like I listen. I try to look like I listen, but
I don’t listen, not much. Communication is—awful hard between people” (62).

The Writer

The subtle destabilization of naturalism’s conventional mechanics, introduced to the

American theatre by Williams and Albee, came to full fruition by the 1970s. It was in
352 STEPHEN BOTTOMS

that decade that a “new realism,” as the critic William Demastes labels it, became widely
apparent in the work of playwrights as diverse as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, David
Rabe, and Marsha Norman (Demastes 1988). The cruel irony, however, is that by the
1970s both Williams and Albee had fallen into a sustained period of public disfavor.
Williams’s last significant Broadway success came in 1961, with Night of the Iguana. The
waning of his reputation was partly a result of his insistently experimental approach and
his refusal simply to replicate successful formulae: as Philip Kolin has noted, the work
of Williams’s last twenty years “remains largely undiscovered country, elusively difficult
to edit, classify and interpret” (2002, 1). Yet it is surely also significant to note that the
decline in Williams’s public reputation coincided with a newly inquisitorial attention
to the sex lives of American playwrights. In a 1963 New York Times article, for example,
chief drama critic Howard Taubman offered a list of “helpful hints” on how to spot dis-
guised homosexual influence within modern American plays:

Look out for the male character who is young, handsome, remote and lofty in a neutral
way. Note whether his very presence tends to make the women he encounters . . . so
twitchy that his glance or touch turns them instantly into Jezebels. . . . Beware the
woman who hasn’t been touched by her husband for years. . . . Be alert to scabrous
innuendo about the normal male-female sexual relationship, particularly if the
writer is not a filthy-minded hack but one of demonstrated talent. (Taubman 1963, 1)

Williams was clearly the central target here, along with Albee. Taubman’s successor
at the Times—Stanley Kauffmann—followed up in 1966 with an article insisting that
“three of the most successful American playwrights of the last twenty years are (reputed)
homosexuals” (the third would have been William Inge), and that “we have all had very
much more than enough of [their] viciousness towards women, the lurid violence that
seems a sublimation of social hatreds, the transvestite sexual exhibitionism” (1966, 1). It
is perhaps not surprising that Williams, having become the personal target of such pub-
licly homophobic disgust, struggled to find ways to articulate himself in this new climate
of “openness.” As David Savran has argued persuasively of the stuttering, unfinished
sentences that dominate plays such as In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Williams him-
self found it hard to know how to respond dramatically in an era of emergent “gay lib-
eration”: “Suddenly allowed to discourse about all that had been forbidden, Williams’s
much-praised ‘eloquence’ ground to a halt. . . . He had to invent a new language of ‘obscu-
rity or indirection,’ a new discourse of concealment and disclosure” (1992, 137).
What Savran’s analysis does not acknowledge is that in the last few years before his
untimely death in 1983, Williams finally found a way to write directly and movingly
about homosexual experience by dramatizing memories of his youth, in plays such as
Vieux Carré (1977) and Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981). The former deals
with memories of the 1930s and Williams’s days living in a seedy rooming house in New
Orleans’ French Quarter; the latter takes place in Provincetown in the summer just
before Battle of Angels became his first professionally produced play. Thus, although
the author’s private life had been made the focus of smear and innuendo, Williams
responded by making this personal history the subject for transformative art. In Vieux
 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 353

Carré, the Williams character is called simply “the Writer”—and indeed we see him,
meta-textually, in the process of writing the play itself. Both these pieces occur simul-
taneously both in the past of memory and in the present moment of the author’s rec-
ollections, thereby creating a haunting sense of “double exposure” in the drama—with
the young writer overlaid by his older, if not necessarily wiser, doppelganger. Indeed,
in both plays, Williams deployed his troubled eye condition—one eye sees clearly, the
other is clouded by cataracts—as a metaphor for the mysteriously alternating clarity and
vagueness of long-distance memory.
Something Cloudy, Something Clear centers on the fleeting relationship between the
Williams character, August, and a beautiful, terminally ill young man named Kip (to
whose memory One Arm and Other Stories had been dedicated almost four decades ear-
lier). It premiered at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Company, a small, Off Off Broadway
outfit, directed by Eve Adamson, with whom Williams collaborated on several occa-
sions in his final years. Here, in this unassuming, small-scale context, he found sympa-
thetic collaborators and some safety from the brutal attentions of the Broadway critics
who had savaged Vieux Carré—and so many of his other plays of the 1960s and 1970s—
forcing it to close within days.
Vieux Carré documents the personal sexual awakening of the Writer, much as Summer
and Smoke documents Alma Winemiller’s. At the outset, he is a relative innocent among
the troubled characters in Mrs. Wire’s rooming house, and he nervously rebuffs the
predatory advances of his next-door neighbor, the painter Nightingale. Having acquired
new confidence and worldliness, however, he eventually leaves the house for westward
adventure with a young man named Sky. The surprisingly direct treatment of gay char-
acters and encounters in Vieux Carré no doubt contributed to the opprobrium with
which it was greeted by reviewers, but it also seems to have been pivotal in attracting
the attentions of Elizabeth LeCompte’s Wooster Group—New York’s most celebrated
avant-garde theatre ensemble—who mounted a striking new production of the play in
2010. Well known for their ironic deconstructions of canonical American plays such as
The Crucible and Our Town (cf. Savran 1988), the Wooster Group proved surprisingly
reverent to the text of this little-known Williams drama, even while filtering it through
the company’s characteristically high-tech staging approach.
The visual iconography deployed by the production’s use of costume, set, and videog-
raphy—as well as its oddly spaced-out, slowed-down pacing—recalled a whole tradi-
tion of downtown experimentation in queer performance and film. Its evocation of the
work of such figures as Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and Paul Morrissey was apparently
inspired by Williams’s comment in his Memoirs that “Morrissey strikes me as some-
one very special. I would like him to make a film of one of my short stories” (qtd. in
Wooster Group 2010). It is tempting to speculate what a Morrissey-directed version of
“One Arm” might have looked like (with Joe Dallesandro as Oliver?), but one suspects
that Williams would also have appreciated LeCompte’s version of Vieux Carré. He had
always sought a “plastic theatre” composed of light, sound, images, and movement, as
well as spoken dialogue, and that is exactly what the Wooster Group presented. The lay-
ered sound score, through which the actors’ miked voices were fed at various volumes
354 STEPHEN BOTTOMS

and distortions, create a disorienting sense of the rooming house’s inhabitants being
heard through walls, or down corridors. Beyond that, even, the rich, soupy, sonic atmo-
sphere made this New Orleans–set performance feel almost as if it were taking place
underwater. Meanwhile a complex use of moving platforms and video screens set up a
kind of shifting, cubist choreography of rooms and windows—and a disturbing sense
for the audience of peering in, voyeuristically, on fumbled sexual encounters.
The Wooster Group’s Vieux Carré succeeded in retrieving and reinvigorating this late,
neglected Williams piece as a genuinely unsettling piece of experimental performance.
In so doing, it served as a powerful reminder that Williams’s work had always pushed at
the accepted boundaries of both form and content—and that in so doing it was catalytic
in bringing into being the various alternative strata of American theatre in the postwar
period. There may yet be many more surprises to be unearthed from the still only par-
tially explored mine of Williams’s rich, extensive oeuvre.

References
Albee, Edward. 1965. Which Theatre Is the Absurd One? In American Playwrights on Drama,
ed. Horst Frenz, 168–74. New York: Hill and Wang.
Arnott, Catherine M., ed. 1985. File on Tennessee Williams. London: Methuen.
Atkinson, Brooks. 1948. At the Theatre. New York Times, October 7.
———. 1952. At the Theatre. New York Times, April 25.
Barnes, Howard. 1948. The Theaters. New York Herald Tribune, October 7.
Bigsby, Christopher. 1992. Modern American Drama, 1945–1990.Cambridge:  Cambridge
University Press.
Bottoms, Stephen J. 2000. Introduction to the Methuen Student Edition of The Glass Menagerie,
by Tennessee Williams, xiii–xcv. London: Methuen.
———. 2004. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Christian Science Monitor. 1948. Untitled, unattributed press clipping, October 16.
Clum, John M. 1996. From Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities of a Nightingale: The Evolution
of the Queer Alma. Modern Drama 39.1: 31–50.
Dash, Thomas R. 1948. Summer and Smoke. Women’s Wear Daily, October 7.
Demastes, William W. 1988. Beyond Naturalism: A New Realism in American Theatre. Westport,
CT: Greenwood.
Devlin, Albert J. 1997. Writing in “A Place of Stone”: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In The Cambridge
Companion to Tennessee Williams, ed. Matthew C. Roudané, 95–113. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Freedley, George. 1948. Tennessee Williams at His Best in Summer and Smoke. Morning
Telegraph (New York), October 8.
Hawkins, William. 1948. Tennessee Smoke Smothers Its Fire. New  York World-Telegram,
October 7.
———. 1952. Tennessee’s Play a Hit in the Village. New York World- Telegram and Sun, May 7.
Kauffmann, Stanley. 1966. Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises. New York Times, January 23,
Section 2, p. 1.
 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 355

Kolin, Philip C., ed. 2002. The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams.
New York: Peter Lang.
Little, Stuart W. 1972. Off-Broadway: The Prophetic Theater. New York: Coward, McCann and
Geoghegan.
McDonough, Jimmy. 2001. The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy
Milligan. Chicago: A Cappella.
Miller, Arthur. 1987. Timebends: A Life. London: Methuen.
Murphy, Brenda. 1992. Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan:  A  Collaboration in the Theatre.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nathan, George Jean. 1948. Theater Week: The Menagerie Still Rides on the Streetcar. New York
Journal-American, October 18.
Patrick, Robert. 2010. Email correspondence with Stephen Bottoms, June 8 and August 2.
Savran, David. 1988. The Wooster Group:  Breaking the Rules. New  York:  Theatre
Communications Group.
———. 1992. Communists, Cowboys and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur
Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Taubman, Howard. 1963. Modern Primer:  Helpful Hints to Tell Appearances vs. Truth.
New York Times, April 28, Section 2, p. 1.
Watts, Richard. 1948. A Rather Gloomy Report on Summer and Smoke. New York Post, October 7.
Williams, Tennessee. 1945. 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays. New York: New Directions.
———. 1957. One Arm and Other Stories. New York: New Directions.
———. 1964. The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Summer and Smoke. New York: New Directions.
———. 1976. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
———. 1992. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume 8: Vieux Carré, A Lovely Sunday for Creve
Coeur, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, The Red Devil Battery Sign. New York: New Directions.
———. 2000. The Glass Menagerie. Methuen Student Edition, ed. Stephen J. Bottoms.
London: Methuen.
Wilson, Doric. 2010. Email correspondence with Stephen Bottoms, August 6.
Windham, Donald, ed. 1996. Tennessee Williams’s Letters to Donald Windham, 1940–1965.
Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Wooster Group. 2010. Program notes for Vieux Carré, Edinburgh International Festival,
August 21–24.
 CHAPTER 23

E X P E R I M E N TA L T H E AT R E :
B E YON D I L LU SION

T H E OD OR E   SHA N K

During the second half of the twentieth century, many unique small theatre companies
came into being. These companies have two characteristics that originated in the 1950s,
flourished in the 1960 and 1970s, and have continued into the present. First, the produc-
tions are experimental. Second, the performances tend to break through illusion: that is,
spectators are made to focus on the performance itself or on performers and the circum-
stances of performance instead of, or in addition to, a fictional illusion of people living
in a separate time and place.
The term “experimental” has been used in a number of ways, but basically I mean the
same thing that the Webster’s New World Dictionary means when it gives the first defini-
tion as “of or based on experience rather than on theory or authority.” By experimental
theatre I mean theatre that is based on experience and not on conventions or imitations
of existing forms. In other words, an experimental artist is one who attempts to create
new forms to express his or her experience of living in the world at a certain time and
place. These unique expressive forms and techniques are often seen as confrontational
because they shatter the expectations of spectators who are accustomed to conventional
artistic means.
Creating new forms to express contemporary experience is quite different from mak-
ing works according to conventions. Conventional forms express the emotive experi-
ences of another place and time. Such conventions, of course, originated in the past as
expressive new forms and techniques. In fact they were sometimes so expressive of the
time that they were repeated. An example is the box set, which was introduced in the
nineteenth century when increased interest in the biological and psychological sciences
implied that organisms, including humans, should be studied in their environments.
With repetition, this use of a box set became a convention that some subsequent artists
simply accepted as the correct way to make theatre even after it had ceased to be expres-
sive of the artists’ contemporary world.
 EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE: BEYOND ILLUSION 357

figure 23.1 Bread and Puppet Theatre. Anti-Bicentennial Pageant. Deer representing Native
Americans are surrounded by butchers representing American colonialists. Photo: Theodore
Shank

So experimental theatre artists create new forms to express the emotive ideas of the
time. And some of these productions are created from inceptive idea to performance
by the same artists rather than by separate artists serving the functions of playwright,
director, designer, and so on. In the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s these
artists were usually part of a counterculture made mostly of young people who rejected
the values of their middle-class parents and the government. These young people rallied
around a number of political and social causes, but above all else they rejected the US
involvement in the Vietnam War. Such theatres include the San Francisco Mime Troupe,
El Teatro Campesino, Open Theatre, Bread and Puppet Theatre, and Snake Theatre. The
counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s no longer exists, but there are still experimen-
tal theatres and more continue to be created not only in the United States, but also in
Western Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere.
I will discuss briefly the circumstances that shaped these theatres in the United States
and the obstacles they faced, and I will describe a few of the works that caused political
problems for them.

The Living Theatre

Beginning in 1951 the earliest of these theatres was formed in New  York by Julian
Beck and Judith Malina. Beck, who was an anarchist-pacifist, wanted to bring about a
358 THEODORE SHANK

revolution in the theatre similar to those that had already taken place in the visual arts
with surrealism and abstract expressionism. At first, however, instead of creating plays
of their own, they produced nonrealistic plays written by playwrights such as Brecht,
Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Jarry, Cocteau, and Auden. In 1963 the Internal Revenue Service
closed Beck and Malina’s New York City theatre for failing to pay federal excise and pay-
roll taxes, and soon after they fled to Europe. It was in Paris that they began creating
their own unique productions. The first of these, Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, was made
up of exercises and improvisations presented without a story or a fictional illusion. The
production did not attempt to present a time or place other than the actual performance
space. The performers did not play characters, but instead they performed tasks. For
example, in one section four large boxes are set up with openings facing the audience.
The lights flash, and a performer in each box is frozen in a pose. The lights flash again
and other performers appear in their improvised pose. Each team of four performers
creates ten to twenty tableaux. It was a clear demonstration of what Julian Beck had
come to believe: life and art should coincide.
The antigovernment stance of the Living Theatre, exacerbated by their experience
with the IRS and their opposition to the Vietnam War, influenced their work in the late
1960s and 1970s. But they came to believe that by performing in theatres in First World
countries they were serving the Establishment. So in 1970 they went to Brazil to perform
for and with the poor in the slums of the country.
The Living Theatre was not alone in performing outdoors. The San Francisco Mime
Troupe, beginning in 1962, performed for free in the parks of their city. However, they
did not become a collective until 1970 when the founding director left the company and
they became politically focused, antiauthoritarian, and antigovernment.
The typical structure of the alternative theatres of the late 1960s and the 1970s was
a collective. Their works were created collaboratively by groups who were socially
and politically engaged. By contrast, the companies of the 1980s, during the Reagan
era and beyond, tended to be politically disengaged. A different structure emerged, a
structure reflecting a focus on the individual artist instead of the group. These compa-
nies typically were formed around a single dominant director who guided the creative
process, a function previously performed by the group. While some of these groups
began making productions earlier, this structure is typified by Richard Foreman’s
Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, Elizabeth LeCompte’s Wooster Group, Chris Hardman’s
Antenna Theatre, the Builders Association directed by Marianne Weems, Ping Chong
& Company, Double Edge Theatre directed by Stacy Klein, Gómez-Peña’s Pocha
Nostra, and Mabou Mines where each project has its own artistic director. Although
directed by an individual, the works of these companies continue to be created in one
process rather than separately by individual artists such as a playwright, a director, a
designer, and performers.
Today most of these theatre artists are part of the cultural mainstream, though some
still espouse alternative causes. They struggle for survival but exist within the dominant
economic structure of the country. They solicit money from many sources, even from
the government and corporations that the counterculture had rejected. Now they are
 EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE: BEYOND ILLUSION 359

figure 23.2 San Francisco Mime Troupe. False Promises:  Nos Engañaron. Photo: Theodore
Shank

eager to receive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (the NEA), which is
the only federal government agency that awards money to theatres.
In the 1980s there was also an increase in the number of solo performers. There were
several reasons for this. Along with the emphasis on individual self-reliance, the con-
servative government and its supporters believed that the arts, like corporations, should
be financially self-sufficient. They believed if audiences like a product they would and
should pay for it. Public money for the arts decreased, and it was cheaper for theatres to
produce or present solo works.
Solo work also became more plentiful because some performers, like Karen Finley,
came from a visual arts tradition of creating works of art by oneself alone.

“Indecency” and the National

Endowment for the Arts

Several of these solo performers found themselves in confrontation with the political
establishment. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan urged Congress to abolish the NEA, but
he changed his mind when conservative friends persuaded him to abandon the attempt.
360 THEODORE SHANK

Still, some members of the Congress who believed that the government should not sup-
port art had attempted to eliminate the budget of the NEA.
In 1990 a panel of the NEA chose eighteen performing artists to receive grants. But
the National Council on the Arts, the oversight organization for the NEA, voted against
funding four of the artists. These four, Karen Finley, Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, and John
Fleck, became known as the NEA Four. The performances of these solo artists involved
sexual politics. They were sympathetic to the gay movement and they talked about AIDS,
homophobia, and sex. They talked about the abuse of women in a male-dominated cul-
ture, and nudity was often a part of their performances.
Some members of Congress considered their works to be obscene. Some also consid-
ered it an outrage that tax money was awarded to performers who had what they called
“deviant” sexual orientations (Hughes is an acknowledged lesbian and Fleck and Miller
are gay). Finley, although a heterosexual feminist, was not spared. Her politics was like
the others, and she was considered obscene because her language was irreverent, scato-
logical, and sexual. And in her performances she was sometimes naked and sometimes
smeared with food of some sort.
The four artists sued the NEA. They claimed that denial of the grants infringed
upon their free speech and therefore was against the Constitution. Eventually the case
reached the Supreme Court and by an 8–1 decision the Court determined that the policy
of the NEA did not violate artists’ free-speech rights and that the NEA could consider
“decency” in deciding who should receive public money. The House of Representatives
was still not happy and voted to abolish the NEA. The organization was saved in a com-
promise with the Senate after a similar attempt to eliminate the NEA was defeated there.
The NEA decided that the safest course was to stop giving grants to individual artists
and to award grants to organizations only, thus guarding against a repeat of the prob-
lems caused by the NEA Four.
There were further repercussions. Congress slashed away at the NEA budget and by
1998 had reduced it by 44 percent to $98 million (NEA Appropriations History). In 2001
the budget began creeping up again and by 2009 it had increased to $155 million. To
compare this figure to that of neighboring Canada, the annual per capita contribution of
the NEA was about 50 cents while the Canadian Council for the Arts contribution was
$4.65 (CCA Report 2008–9). Despite inflation the NEA budget was still below the high
figure of $176 million that was approved in 1992 before the reductions in reaction to the
NEA Four (NEA Appropriations History).
To make matters worse, many private grant-giving foundations shifted their giving
to other “safer” areas less likely to create bad publicity. And as the economy suffered,
so did their contributions to the arts. As a result arts organizations were drained finan-
cially and emotionally by having to defend their programs and artists from audits, pub-
lic attack, and harassment by city officials and police. There is no telling to what extent
this constant pressure has resulted in self- censorship by artists and unspoken, perhaps
unconscious, censorship by NEA selection panels in the belief that they are helping to
preserve the NEA. The NEA followed a politically safer course by awarding most of its
 EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE: BEYOND ILLUSION 361

money to large, established, more conservative organizations. Some large grants were
earmarked for organizations touring plays by Shakespeare.
Karen Finley, one of the NEA Four who had been a target of the right wing, decried
the impact of this conservatism on the spirit of the country at large. She said, “We’ve
lost sight of what made America so innovative—we were daring, original and not afraid
of offending the old guard. We have lost our inventiveness for the sake of appearance”
(Finley 1996). Her lament, of course, had no effect.

The Shock of Nakedness

In the 1960s Living Theatre performers had shocked their spectators by removing their
clothes during performances. Nakedness was unusual onstage and the shock broke
through the usual aesthetic frame. It diminished the distance between art and life and
presented the self, one’s body, one’s experience—emotive, cognitive, and perceptual.
Nakedness, by breaking down the barriers of aesthetic distance, created a more direct
relationship with the audience and allowed for a direct political impact without illu-
sion. Some artists continue today to use this technique of nakedness, though the shock
among experienced theatre spectators is less. They present themselves naked but with-
out the gloss of eroticism. Some expose their body mutilations, alterations, and tattoos.
Many of the resulting highly personal works are of necessity performed by the creators
themselves.

Outrageous Performance:
Karen Finley

Karen Finley’s solo performances offer a raw critique of US society. Her works deal with
homophobia, the desecration of women, the sexuality of men and women, and hidden
desires. She is also concerned with commercialism, which sets standards of appearance
and behavior for women based on the desires of men. She expresses the emotionality of
these subjects in poetic images and language and, in some performances, by smearing
food on her body as an expression of female degradation. Her aim is political, but she
insists that it is not negative. She says she tries to fix things (Gussow 1997) by stirring
people to be responsible for what they do in their personal relationships. And she tries
to interweave this into the whole of society’s corruption. She thinks people find this very
disturbing (Schechner 1987).
At twenty-one, while she was home for Christmas vacation, her father went into their
garage and shot himself. In an interview several years later she said the event
362 THEODORE SHANK

put an effect on me that reality is stronger than art. And it makes me interested in
real time. When I’m performing, real time is stronger for me than theatre pretend-
time. . . . In some ways, it actually freed me. (Schechner 1987)

She always strives to make what happens in performance actual rather than illusory.
Even though in her performances she speaks of some events that she has fantasized
or observed, she does not pretend to be another person or character. Though she may
speak from the perspective of a fantasized character, she insists that the performance
presents her actual feeling self rather than an illusion. Some of her techniques, such as
nakedness without eroticism, lack of rehearsal (which increases the risk), and breaking
into her monologue to comment on what is actually happening in the theatre, result
from her striving for an actual presence.
She talks about events she has seen, experienced, or fantasized, and often they involve
abuse. She says, “We’re really scared of our own sexuality which is no longer a sexuality
of love but a sexuality of violence” (Schechner 1987, 153). Speaking in the first person, in
her performance called The Constant State of Desire, she describes having been sexu-
ally abused as a child. She seems to be relating a personal experience even though she
says she did not suffer abuse. So it is probably a fantasy, and fantasies, of course, are real
(Finley 1987).
While her language, images, and politics were found offensive by some, it was not
until her performances of We Keep Our Victims Ready, which premiered in 1989, that the
campaign against her and the NEA took shape. The syndicated conservative columnists
Rowland Evans and Robert Novak derided her as a “nude, chocolate-smeared young
woman” whose outrageous style was endangering the entire NEA. In the production
Finley strips to her underwear and puts gelatin in her brassiere. Then, after discarding
the brassiere, she smears her body with chocolate frosting and sprinkles herself with
glitter.
Few artists are as courageous as Karen Finley. She makes herself vulnerable by reveal-
ing herself and her body without the cover of eroticism, as well as fantasies and experi-
ences that other people would want to keep secret. And she expresses openly her fears,
anger, and desires in a language that is uncensored. She has also defied the right-wing
elements in the United States—religious, governmental, and judicial—at the risk of
financial penalty. Some venues that were more timid than she was would no longer
engage her.

Annie Sprinkle: Post-Post-Porn
Modernist

While most of the “outrageous” performers deal with the darker side of sex and its
abuses, Annie Sprinkle seems to think sex is taken too seriously. It is fun, a source of
 EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE: BEYOND ILLUSION 363

entertainment, satisfying. While she acknowledges that darker aspects exist, they sim-
ply are not the main focus of her work. Instead, her performances seem to spoof sex and
those who are obsessive about it. So there is a serious message behind the fun.
At her performance of Post-Post-Porn Modernist colorful condoms are handed out
with the programs. The performance consists of Annie Sprinkle, in various stages of
nakedness, telling the audience about her life and experiences and presenting some
demonstrations. She tells of having been born Ellen Steinberg and then becoming Annie
Sprinkle. Ellen was unattractive and very shy, but Annie was sexy and very popular with
the boys. The transition in her life, she says, came when she began selling soiled panties
by mail. She didn’t think many people would be interested, but business was so brisk she
couldn’t keep up—she figured she had to wear a pair for two or three days. So she got her
friends to wear some for her.
“For over twenty years,” she says, “I’ve been passionately researching and exploring
the subject of sex.”

This has led me into all sorts of interesting adventures. For example, I  made
over 200 porno movies. . . . I also worked as a nude model for all of the major sex
magazines. . . . [and] I  worked as a prostitute, off and on, for many, many years.
(Sprinkle 1993)

While Post-Post-Porn Modernist is a solo performance, spectators can participate.

In the last section before intermission she offers to let spectators see her cervix.
“You may be wondering,” she says, “why I’m going to show you my cervix. . . . Reason
number one: a cervix is such a beautiful thing and most people go through their
whole lives and never get to see one” (Sprinkle 1993). She sits on a chair at the front
of the stage with legs spread. She inserts a speculum and invites spectators to line up
to have a look at her cervix. Her assistant holds a flashlight so the viewers can see
better. At the performance I attended in San Francisco, approximately a hundred
people, men and women, lined up and filed past. Some had cameras to capture the
cervix on film.
During intermission Sprinkle raises money for her new movie by charging interested
spectators five dollars each for a photograph of themselves with her bare breasts draped
over their shoulders. In a way she is having a bit of fun with those who line up to view the
cervix or have their photos taken, but it is not vicious. And the performance is not erotic
or pornographic. It is fun rather than titillating. Her wit and irony demystify sex; it is the
opposite of pornography, which mystifies sex by way of being erotic.
Annie Sprinkle says she has successfully made the transition from the sex industry to
being an artist.

The difference between the art world and the porn world [she says] is that now I can
really tell the truth without prostituting myself. It’s being able to express what I really
feel instead of worrying about what “they” want. . . . The only place that is open
enough for someone like me is the art world. (Sprinkle 1993)
364 THEODORE SHANK

Body Mutilation and Performance

Some forms of body mutilation have been traditional in American culture, for example,
ear piercing, facelifts, and circumcision. While other forms of modification have been
rare, by the early 1990s tattoos and body piercing had become fashionable in the main-
stream culture. Body piercing studios sprang up in most large cities and they were kept
busy piercing navels, noses, tongues, lips, eyebrows, nipples, genitals, and other parts of
clients’ bodies. For a few artists, body modification and mutilation came to be used in
theatrical performances. The motivation for performers engaging in such alterations is
usually more than mere decoration or entertainment or sensationalism. For them it is
a form of self-expression. Some are practitioners in the so-called primitive movement.
For some it is an ecstatic experience. For others the pain may provide the kind of atone-
ment that comes from flagellation. Some, for whatever psychological or aesthetic or
political reason, feel the need to explore their bodies in this manner.
In 1994, while Congress was considering the NEA budget for the following year, the
religious and political right found another kicking boy to parade before lawmakers and
the public in an attempt to eliminate the endowment. The new weapon was Ron Athey,
whose performances draw from his turbulent life. Trained in childhood as a Pentecostal
minister, he became a heroin addict, he is HIV positive, he is a member of the “modern
primitive movement,” and he has a fascination for pain, tattooing, scarification, body
piercing, and blood-letting. The brouhaha resulted from a performance of 4 Scenes in
a Harsh Life presented under the sponsorship of the respected Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis. It has been estimated that the portion of the Walker’s NEA grant that was
used for Athey’s fee was less than $150. Nonetheless, that was enough to cause an uproar
and again put the NEA in jeopardy.
In the opening scene Athey, dressed as a nineteenth-century holy woman, stands at a
pulpit. Beside him is a naked woman who, like St. Sebastian, has a dozen or so “arrows”
(actually barbecue skewers) inserted through the flesh of her sides, arms, and legs.
Athey, reading from a text, tells of being taken as a child to the Mojave Desert to see
a woman with stigmata and being disappointed that it did not occur—the blood did
not come.
It was a section of the performance called “The Human Printing Press,” which caught
the attention of the religious right and the US Congress. In it Athey, using a knife, carves
an African scarification pattern into the back of an African American drag queen.
He blots the bloody pattern with paper towels and then attaches the paper towels to a
clothesline rigged on pulleys. The “printed” paper towels are then pulled out above the
aisles over the audience (Athey 1994). In subsequent scenes the performers engage in
other sadomasochistic activities. Athey says, “I think there’s something inherently spiri-
tual in what I do that makes it a ritual. It’s like a public sacrifice, I think. It is really paral-
lel to doing penance” (Athey 1995, 66).
Shortly after the Minneapolis performance, complaints were made to the Health
Department about the “Human Printing Press” scene. A  report went out over the
 EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE: BEYOND ILLUSION 365

figure 23.3 Ron Athey. 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life. Photo:  Jim McHugh Artist Archives

Associated Press wire and the performance received national attention. The Christian
Action Network issued a “declaration of war” against the NEA. In the imagination, the
idea of homosexual blood (most reports said it was “AIDS-infected blood”) passing over
the heads of spectators was a volatile image. Athey believes it played upon people’s “dis-
ease phobia” as well as their “body phobia,” which he sees as the root of homophobia.
Again, some members of Congress wanted to eliminate the NEA altogether. When the
1995 budget was finally passed, the NEA funds were cut nearly 5 percent.

Actuality vs. Theatrical Illusion

Nakedness and body mutilation are only two of the most obvious means used by theatre
artists to disrupt the theatrical illusion and put focus on actuality, the performer, the
present moment, or the here and now. This is one of the most pervasive characteristics
of experimental alternative theatre since the 1960s. In exploring the unique possibili-
ties of live theatre, several means have been employed to take advantage of the fact that
performers and spectators share the same time and space. By contrast, the conventional
theatre usually separates the performers and the audience by lighting, proscenium
arches, and especially by creating an impenetrable illusion of a time and a place different
from that of the spectators. In addition, the conventional theatre, rather than putting
366 THEODORE SHANK

the focus on the performers, creates an illusion of people—that is, characters—living

in a separate world from those in the audience. In the alternative theatre the artists let
actuality be the performance or share focus simultaneously with whatever transparent
illusion may be presented. The principal means used by the conventional theatre to keep
the focus on the fictional illusion has been a linear plot creating suspense. For the most
part, in the alternative theatre, it is the performance (not the illusion) that is of greatest
importance. It is this characteristic more than any other that makes a performance by
one of these companies such a different experience than a conventional theatre perfor-
mance or movie or television drama. The performances are uniquely alive.

Social Commitment

It is very important that those theatre artists who hope to bring about social change
speak directly to their audience without obscuring their objective in a fictional illusion.
After all they are concerned with creating a community of like-minded people, so rather
than putting the audience in a semitrance where they vicariously live the lives of people
in another time and place, it is important for these artists to make the spectators focus
on the here and now.
In the late 1960s and the 1970s there were many alternative theatres advocating social
change. They were driven especially by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.
By contrast, in the 1980s the principal energy of the alternative theatres came to be more
focused on individual expression and subjective artistic visions. In the 1990s the pendu-
lum swung back somewhat toward a greater concern for social issues, and there was a
resurgence of small companies and solo performers dedicated to changing society or at
least pleading their cause. Marginalized groups including African Americans, Latinos,
Chicanos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Jews, gays, lesbians, and the homeless
increasingly used theatre to present their concerns and create communities. For the first
time some of these groups began to make use of inexpensive electronic communica-
tions—email, websites, and list servers—to extend their constituencies and develop
communities at geographical distances.
The border shared by Mexico and the United States has motivated the work of several
theatre companies. In the 1960s and 1970s the productions of Luis Valdez’s El Teatro
Campesino were in support of the farmworkers who migrated legally and illegally from
Mexico to the United States in order to work in the fields. Cesar Chavez organized the
workers into a union to defend their rights against the large agricultural industry. At
first the Teatro performed in the fields for the workers and later they toured, presenting
their productions in Chicano communities around the country promoting the cause of
the farmworker immigrants.
At first the immigrant workers had been welcomed by their employers as cheap labor
so long as they did not unionize. But antagonisms arose. The children of these work-
ers attended state schools and universities, used other social services, and competed
 EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE: BEYOND ILLUSION 367

figure 23.4 El Teatro Campesino. The Two Faces of the Boss. The Farmworker (Daniel Valdez)
tells the Boss (Luis Valdez) what a wonderful life he has as a worker. He is so convincing that
the Boss changes places with him. When the Boss learns the truth, the Farmworker refuses to
trade back. Photo: Theodore  Shank

for jobs wanted by the white population. Some politicians seized on the opportunity
to play upon the anxieties of the white population resulting in various anti-immigrant
measures.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his company, Poch Nostra, responded to this more
threatening view of immigrants and of Mexico itself. “The anti-immigrant political
rhetoric,” he says, “portrays Mexicans as invaders. Mexico is seen as filled with corrupt
politicians, drug dealers, terrorists” (Schibsted 1996). Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico,
came to the United States in his early twenties, and has continued to travel back and
forth to Mexico. His earliest works in the United States were solo performance instal-
lations. In one of these he sat on a toilet in a public restroom. For twenty-four hours he
read an epic poem from a toilet paper roll describing his journey to the United States.
Whoever happened to come into the restroom experienced the work.
To celebrate Columbus’s so-called discovery of America, Gómez-Peña and a female
collaborator exhibited themselves in a cage as “undiscovered AmerIndians.” These cul-
tural hybrids were hand-fed and taken to the restroom on leashes by fake museum staff.
Signs describing their costumes and physical characteristics were displayed next to the
cage. At the Whitney Museum in New  York City, Gómez-Peña offered an additional
attraction: “for $5.00, a spectator could ‘see the genitals of the male specimen’.”( 1996, 97).
368 THEODORE SHANK

figure 23.5. El Teatro Campesino. La Carpa de los Rasquachis. A  worker is brought to the
United States by La Muerte to work in the fields. A rope is put around his neck, and he wears
it for the rest of his life. Photo:  Theodore  Shank

The Mexterminator (1998) is one of his most expansive works. A  large warehouse
space has been arranged to resemble a natural history museum with tableaux of bizarre
living ethnographic specimens placed on platforms in front of diorama-like back-
grounds. This interactive installation plays upon the fear of the Mexican immigrant. It
is set in the future after the Mexterminator has led an invading army and has recon-
quered the United States in a Second U.S./Mexico War. The former United States is now
loosely controlled by a multiracial junta and is governed by a Chicano prime minister.
Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish and English, is the official language. This exhibition, we
are told, is an example of the new “official hybrid culture.”
The specimens, ethno-cyborgs, are identified by placards. There is Gómez-Peña him-
self as the Mexterminator. His habitat, we are told, is the American Borderlands. He is
an indestructible, illegal border crosser, and he may abduct innocent Anglo children.
Sometimes he wears a headdress of feathers, sometimes a cowboy hat. Other speci-
mens include elements of several cultures: ancient Aztec, inner city urban Latino, gay,
US Caucasian middle class, Mexican revolutionary, and transsexual. And there are
science-fiction-like cyborgs that combine humans with technology such as a Cyborg
Cellist. These and other specimens are in continuous motion accompanied by hybrid
Mexican-rock-disco music. The premise of the work, according to Gómez-Peña, is “to
 EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE: BEYOND ILLUSION 369

figure 23.6 Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco as AmerIndians, specimens being
exhibited by the museum curator. Photo:  Peter  Baker

adopt a fictional center, and push the dominant Anglo culture to the margins, treating it
as exotic and unfamiliar.”
Spectators are free to wander from exhibit to exhibit and are encouraged to interact
with the specimens. They can feed the specimens, touch them, smell them, and attempt
to engage them in conversation. Occasionally spectators are invited to take the place of
specimens on their platforms and enact their own fantasies.
The Mexterminator is part of a long-term project that Gómez-Peña says is “to make
relentlessly experimental yet accessible art; to work in politically and emotionally
charged sites, and for diverse audiences; and to collaborate across racial, gender, and
age boundaries as a gesture of citizen-diplomacy” (press materials). The cross-cultural
interaction involves bringing together spectators of various ethnicities; as we spectators
observe the freaks on display, we seem by contrast to have much more in common with
each other despite our differences.
Gómez-Peña uses his website as an important source of information on what people
are thinking with respect to Mexicans and others. Those logging in can express their
views and confess their racist behavior anonymously as they respond to Gómez-Peña’s
provocative questions:

Where do Mexicans belong? In Mexico or everywhere?

What do you think of the fact that Mexican immigration is increasing dramatically
and irreversibly?
370 THEODORE SHANK

figure 23.7 Guillermo Gómez-Peña. San Pocho Aztlaneca on his throne in The Temple of
Confessions. Photo:  Detroit Institute  of  Art

The views of respondents, abstracted and shaped by the artists, are incorporated into
the bizarre ethno-cyborgs on display. It is through these specimens that Gómez-Peña
expresses his view of the country. He says,

America is living with an incredible paradox. It’s the most multicultural society on
earth,—that is its utopian strength—but it’s also riddled with fear of otherness and
change. I want to make that visible through the creation of these Ethno-cyborgs.
Hopefully people will see their own inner savages—which are in all of us—and deal
with them. We’re saying, Hey we’re not that different. (Press materials)

Like Gómez-Peña, the Chinese American director Ping Chong is also concerned with
the immigrant as outsider. He grew up in New York’s Chinatown speaking Chinese as
his first language, and this feeling of estrangement permeates all of his work. Even in
his most abstract works the characters seem to be strangers in their environments. He
has said that his frequent use of languages other than English helps to put the English
speaker in the position of the outsider. He says, “I want the audience to understand the
other side of the fence, what it feels like not to comprehend” (Kolkebeck 1986).
In his series of productions under the collective title Undesirable Elements, which is
also called Secret History, he puts onstage people who consider themselves outsiders.
 EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE: BEYOND ILLUSION 371

They are immigrants in the communities where the works are being performed. In
each locale six to eight local residents, none of them performers, are selected to be the
participants. They are of different ethnicities: each is bilingual and each is bicultural.
For example, in Secret History/New York the six were from Uganda, Tonga, Japan, the
Philippines, and Lebanon. Chong says his intention is to explore “the effects of history,
culture and ethnicity on the lives of individuals who vary in many ways but share the
common experience of having been born in one culture and are now part of another”
(company brochure).
In the performance the participants sit in a semicircle and speak into microphones.
Behind them are projected maps of their countries of origin. First the participants intro-
duce themselves in their native languages. The text that follows is made up of their own
material that Chong has edited, woven together, and arranged chronologically. They
take turns singing songs, reciting poems, and demonstrating dances from their culture.
They tell stories and anecdotes of their ancestors, their immigration to the United States,
their experience as outsiders, and of discovering, rejecting, and embracing the culture of
their ancestors. These language sections are interspersed with formal elements such as
unison gestures, walking, and clapping.
At the same time that he is creating performances of Undesirable Elements in vari-
ous parts of the United States, Chong is also making more elaborate productions. These
works, created with skilled performers, use scenery, film, slide projections, music, and
language. Typically, the scripts are collectively developed during the course of rehears-
als, and Chong functions as the director and designer.
For Deshima Chong collaborated with a writer as he set out to explore East-West
relations. The Mickery Workshop in Holland had commissioned Chong to make a
work commemorating the centennial of Vincent van Gogh’s death. Deshima was the
result. A few years earlier, a Japanese insurance company had bought van Gogh’s
painting, Sunflowers, for approximately $40 million dollars and shipped it to Japan.
This treatment of the painting as a mere commodity led Chong to view van Gogh as
an outcast controlled by foreign economic forces, and he saw a parallel with a 1641
event when the Japanese ordered Dutch traders and missionaries to be quarantined
on Deshima, an island off the coast of Nagasaki. The production contrasts Western
and Asian cultures and was described as a “meditation on the effects of politics,
trade, religion, art, and racism on the formation of the modern world.” Although
incorporating historical material and figures, the structure of Deshima is nonlin-
ear and multi layered, allowing for ironic contrasts. For example, in one scene van
Gogh is a poor street person selling postcards of his paintings; he walks through the
cornfield of his painting Crows in the Cornfield, where there is a group of Japanese
schoolgirls.
All of Ping Chong’s work tends toward a cinematic structure. His images are
influenced by his Asian experience, and he uses various means, including projec-
tions, sound, music, dance and dancelike gestures, fluid expressive lighting, and
whatever other means, help to create his unique worlds. It is a fascinating and effec-
tive use of media.
372 THEODORE SHANK

The Wooster Group

Like Ping Chong, the Wooster Group uses sophisticated technology and complex tech-
niques for combining live action with live and prerecorded video. But their productions
are actually and metaphorically related to the psyches of the company and of the director
Elizabeth LeCompte. She uses modern classical texts as springboards to the company’s
distinctive, disjunctive productions. But the performances do not permit the spectators
to become passively absorbed in a fictional world. The techniques demand that specta-
tors focus actively on the present moment of the live performance. This active mental
participation allows memories of the classical text sources to collide and resonate with
what one sees onstage.
In Brace Up! LeCompte drew on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, but she emphasizes that the
production is not an interpretation or an adaptation of Chekhov (Mee 1992). The three
sisters of Chekhov’s play and Narrator, Kate Valk, are onstage throughout while the men
are relegated to tables at the back of the stage and come forward only for certain scenes.
Most often they are seen on video monitors.

figure 23.8 Wooster Group. Brace Up! Irina (Beatrice Roth), Tusenbach (Jeff Webster on
a monitor), Vershinin (Paul Lazar), Olga (Peyton Smith), Chebutykin (Paul Schmidt on a
monitor), Narrator (Kate Valk). Photo:  João  Tuna
 EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE: BEYOND ILLUSION 373

Kate Valk as Narrator introduces actors; sets up props; signals lights, sound, and video;
and makes so-called corrections. Peyton Smith as Olga is often seen on a TV monitor.
Irina, the youngest sister, is played in a wheelchair by Beatrice Roth, who is in her seven-
ties. Anfisa, the old nurse, is seen only via a black and white video. The Narrator explains
to the audience that she is played by a ninety-five-year-old performer who can’t be there.
As in other Wooster Group productions, sound dislocation and disruption are two
of the techniques working against a cohesive narrative. Performers on video monitors
carry on dialogues with live performers, and performers offstage speak over micro-
phones for characters on video. There are “mistakes” and “adjustments” during the per-
formance. At one point, Willem Dafoe as Andrei sobs at great length until the Narrator
taps him on the shoulder and he suddenly stops, drops character, and calmly leaves
the stage.
LeCompte is interested in presenting actual events onstage rather than fictional ones
that could result in a compelling narrative and psychological acting. One of the tech-
niques for accomplishing this and keeping the audience focused on the actual present is
task performance. In rehearsal, she says, “I try to deal mostly with tasks.”

I say to the actors, “You have information to present to the audience, and you are
responsible for a clear imparting of this information.” That’s giving them a mental
task, so they can get through the persona thing without coloring it emotionally.
(Mee 1992)

Wooster Group productions present no overt political or social comments; nonetheless

they embody a point of view directly expressive of our culture, which is made up of frag-
mented and contradictory ideas, events, and images that exist side by side, layer upon
layer. That fact is often intentionally ignored by artists who make use of conventional
structures created to express how it felt to live in a simpler world that no longer exists.
Experimental artists, including the Wooster Group, express how it feels to live in their
world in the present, and that requires the creation of unique forms. As experimental
theatre artists, the Wooster Group feels on the edge, determined not to conform. Such a
position is risky because financial support is frequently from foundations whose boards
and administrators have conventional artistic interests or wish to avoid controversy by
supporting work that is generally acceptable. Nonetheless, as in the past, the Wooster
Group and other experimental companies are stimulated and energized by their pre-
carious positions.
Art is capable of expressing a certain kind of knowledge that can be conveyed only
through art. If artists are sensitive to their world and how it feels to be alive now and if
they create forms to express that feeling, they are able to communicate that knowledge
to others. This is what it means to be an experimental artist: to experience our times,
to know feelingly who and where we are, and to communicate this knowledge. It is
one of the ways of crossing borders and giving strangers an emotive understanding of
our world.
374 THEODORE SHANK

Works Cited
(Unless otherwise noted, information is from my experiences attending the works discussed
and my conversations with the artists. Some of this information is included in my book,
Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2002].)
Athey, Ron. 1994. 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life. Live performance seen by the author at the Institute
of Contemporary Arts, London, July 15.
———. 1995. Spanner in the Works. Theatre Forum TF6 (Winter/Spring), 66–68. Panel
discussion at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
CCA Report. 2008–9. http://www.canadacouncil.ca/aboutus/organization/annualreports/52A
nnualReport2008–09/yc128661343077029828.htm.
Finley, Karen. 1987. The Constant State of Desire. Live performance seen by the author at
Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, November 7.
———. 1996. The Art of Offending. New York Times, November 14.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. 1996. The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loquera for the
End of the Century. San Francisco: City Lights.
Gussow, Mel. 1997. The Other Life of Karen Finley. New York Times, September 22.
Kolkebeck, Craig. 1986. Ping Chong’s Mythic Theatre: Descent of Man. Elenco. University of
Texas, Fall.
Mee, Susie. 1992. Chekhov’s Three Sisters and the Wooster Group’s Brace Up! [Interview with
Elizabeth LeCompte]. Drama Review (Winter).
NEA Appropriations History.http://www.arts.gov/about/Budget/AppropriationsHistory.html.
Schechner, Richard. 1987. A Constant State of Becoming. The Drama Review (Spring): 152–58.
Schibsted, Evanteia. 1996. Interview with Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Wired, January.
Sprinkle, Annie. http://www.anniesprinkle.org/. (This is her home page that leads to information
about her: bios, videos, photos, writings, etc.)
———. 1993. Post-Post-Porn Modernist. Live performance seen by the author at Cowell Theatre,
San Francisco, October 2.
 CHAPTER 24

P O S T– WOR L D WA R I I A F R IC A N
A M E R IC A N T H E AT R E

HA R RY J . E L A M ,  J R .

Because of the particular social circumstances of blacks in the United States from slav-
ery to freedom, and even at the time of the election of the first black president, Barack
Obama, in 2008, there has been an inherent and often explicit connection between
African American theatre and the political and cultural lives of African Americans. The
theatre has been a place for African American playwrights to contest social wrongs, to
advocate for change, and to posit alternative images of blackness in contrast to those the
dominant culture offered. As the conditions of black life have changed, so too have the
aspirations and assertions of black theatre. The theatre has served as a space to propa-
gandize, as well as to protest against propaganda, to promote homogeneous black iden-
tities, and to reflect on the diversity of black experiences. Within this changing historical
dynamic, constantly at issue have been the questions “What constitutes a black play—
not simply in content but in form?” and “What obligations does the black playwright
have to the African American masses at large for the images that he or she creates?”
In the post–World War II period, black theatre practitioners have addressed these
questions in complex and even contradictory fashion. One particular and repeated
method for investigating these issues in black theatre has been through representations
of the black family. In the period from World War II to the new millennium, black play-
wrights have used the domestic setting as a microcosm of the social and cultural con-
cerns impacting African American life. Within such black family dramas, the personal
lives of the family have been most evidently political. Accordingly, charting a historical
course for African American theatre informs our understanding of how the theatre has
continually operated as both an affective and effective arena for negotiating matters of
black identity in the United States. Yet such an emphasis on the family speaks not only
to the content of black theatre but also to the evolving experimentations in form, and
how concerns around form within black theatre can reach beyond the aesthetic. In addi-
tion, conditions of production for these black family plays—who staged these shows,
where and how were they mounted, what was the critical response—reveal much about
376 HARRY J. ELAM, JR.

the often contested relationship between black theatre and the American commercial
mainstream, and they also comment on the continued significance of race within the
American social order.

Representing the Black Family

in the 1930s and 1940s

On the eve of the United States’ entry into World War II and in the throes of the Great
Depression, Theodore Ward’s 1938 drama, Big White Fog, offered an insightful perspec-
tive on the intersections of race and politics in America. The Chicago Negro Unit of
the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) first produced the play. Under the direction of Hallie
Flanagan and the auspices of President Franklin D. Roosevelt—as Barry Witham dis-
cusses in his essay in this volume—the FTP sought to put American theatre artists back
to work. Flanagan set up sixteen Negro theatre units in cities with significant black pop-
ulations and theatrical histories such as Boston, New York, Seattle, and Chicago. In Big
White Fog, tensions within an inner-city Chicago black family correlate directly with
the politics of race and the pressures of racism. At the center of the play, Ward situates
Victor Mason, a devout follower of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born black leader
determined to restore black pride and achieve black self-determination by founding a
new home for black Americans in Africa. Ward contrasts the position of Victor with
that of his brother-in-law Danny Rogers, a black capitalist determined to achieve black
wealth and the American dream through real estate. Significantly, Ward uses the histori-
cal realities of the times to critique the political ideologies of both men. The Depression
curtails Rogers’s plans of economic success, while the arrest, prosecution, and ultimate
deportation of Marcus Garvey limit the agenda of the Garveyite movement and pre-
vent any hope of his Black Star Line returning black diasporic souls back to Africa. Still,
Victor clings to his belief in Garvey and continues to invest his financial and emotional
resources in the movement at the expense of his relationship with his wife, Ella, and at
the cost of any fiscal security for his family to weather the Depression. While Victor
proclaims his blackness, his live-in mother-in-law, Martha Brooks, celebrates her white
ancestry and her difference from the black masses. At the same time, Victor’s son Lester,
who is bound for college on a merit scholarship, loses the award when its administra-
tors discover he is black. Meanwhile, Wanda, Lester’s sister, turns to compromising her-
self and her morality for the sake of the family’s welfare in these trying economic times.
Internally damaged and conflicted, the family stands on the brink of eviction from their
home. Politics, economics, and race all collide in the network of the family.
Significantly, it is political allegiance and activism that ultimately save the family.
On the verge of eviction, the son Lester and white comrades from the local unit of the
Communist Party arrive to hold back the governmental forces and protect the Mason
family home. With this intervention, Victor now understands that the practice of social
 POST–WORLD WAR II AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE 377

oppression is not inherent within white people, but rather it is institutionalized through
prejudicial ideology. Thus, the “big white fog” of the title is race- and class-based preju-
dice that can be defeated only through socialist awareness and collective class strug-
gle. With the ultimate victory of socialism over both pan-Africanism and capitalism,
the social message of Ward’s Big White Fog purposefully reflects the social debates cir-
cling in black Depression-era politics. With the demise of the short-lived FTP—the
Congress shut it down after only four years—Ward joined with Paul Robeson, Langston
Hughes, and others to form the Negro Playwrights Theatre. One of the first productions
of this new little theatre, staged in 1940 at the Lincoln Theatre in New York City, was
another production of Big White Fog. In one of the more significant black theatre pieces
of the 1940s, Richard Wright and Paul Green’s Native Son, the drama of a black family,
remained an allegorical site for political desire. Like Ward’s Big White Fog, Native Son
critiqued American capitalism through the predicament of a black family in Chicago.
Based on Wright’s critically acclaimed and best-selling novel of the same name, Native
Son came to the Broadway stage produced by John Houseman and directed by Orson
Welles (both men had been involved with the New York Negro unit of the FTP). Wright
had searched for a partner to adapt his novel for the stage, and he selected the white
southern playwright Paul Green over a fellow black writer, Ward. Wright admired
Green’s treatment of his mulatto protagonist in his Pulitzer Prize–winning play of 1927,
In Abraham’s Bosom. Still, the collaboration between the two men was troubled from
the outset. While Wright believed the blame for the tragic demise and ultimate execu-
tion of his protagonist Bigger Thomas rested with a bankrupt political system, Green
on the other hand insisted on the need to depict Bigger’s own culpability. Houseman
has claimed that the version of the play that opened on Broadway was not Green’s adap-
tation, but rather a version that Houseman wrote in collaboration with a disgruntled
Wright. Still, no evidence of this script is extant, and the published version is that
of Green.
Yet even in the Green adaption, the critique of an inherently unequal class system
is evident. Green’s version suggests that that system not only leads to the oppression
of blacks but also fosters the suppression of class struggle. Wright’s profound opening
scene from the novel, where the unemployed Bigger zealously tracks down, battles, and
kills a rat in the family’s dilapidated, Chicago South Side housing project, remains in the
Green text. Graphically, this moment in the play conveys the Thomas family’s poverty
as well as Bigger’s frustration with a social order that provides him no possibility for
upward mobility. In his introduction to the novel, “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright notes
that Bigger “is a product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited
man; he is all of this, and he lives amid the greatest plenty on earth and he is looking and
feeling for a way out” (1940, xx). Only after Bigger’s accidental murder of the millionaire
heiress, Mary Dalton, does he feel any sense of empowerment and self- determination.
As his lawyer, Max, explains in his long closing argument monologue, Bigger’s actions
constitute a misguided attempt to strike out against a restrictive capitalist hegemony.
The violent, brutish black figure of Bigger Thomas, played powerfully on Broadway
by the boxer-turned actor Canada Lee, was not without controversy. Calling for more
378 HARRY J. ELAM, JR.

positive images of black masculinity, the Urban League picketed the opening of the play
in 1941. Nonetheless, the play received positive reviews and had a successful run.

Integrationist Politics in the 1950s

The interest in countering dominant conceptions of blackness became an increas-

ing concern within black theatre productions during the 1950s. The war ended with
the utopic dream of global democracy. On their return to the United States, however,
African American soldiers and patriots found institutionalized systems of racism—such
as Jim Crow segregation, restrictive housing, and educational covenants—still in place.
The United States for black Americans at this historic juncture did not offer liberty and
equal access, but second-class citizenship. In his 1951 play, A Medal for Willie, William
Branch addressed these concerns through the lens of the black family. In a small south-
ern town, an award ceremony is being planned for a deceased corporal, Willie Jackson,
who died nobly in the war. The white town leaders, who have arranged and orches-
trated the proceedings, expect Willie’s mother to deliver a speech they have written for
her on this occasion. Yet, in the play’s climactic moment, Mrs. Jackson ruins the plans
that have been laid out for her and throws away her prescribed address. Instead, she
harangues the gathered white leadership of the town for perpetuating a racist system
that prevented her son Willie from enjoying at home the liberties he fought for in the
war abroad. Branch presents Mrs. Jackson as a woman who must follow her conscience
and prevent misrepresentations of her son and his memory. In her decision to speak
out against racial injustice, Mrs. Jackson foregrounds her love of family and her son.
Through Mrs. Jackson’s reluctant activism, Branch foregrounds the potential linkages
between advocating for one’s family and promoting social justice. A Medal for Willie was
Branch’s first play, and it ran for four months in Harlem, New York, at the Club Baron. It
was produced by the Committee on Negro Arts (CNA), a unique conjunction of black
musicians, visual artists, and performers in New York City that included Sidney Poitier,
Harry Belafonte, and Alice Childress. Founded in 1947 and in existence to 1953, the CNA
dedicated itself to the promotion of the integration of the Negro in all aspects of the arts
in the United States.
In 1953, Louis Peterson’s Broadway-bound African American family drama, Take a
Giant Step, addressed the issue of integration through Peterson’s autobiographical rep-
resentation of a middle-class black teen, Spencer Scott. Take a Giant Step ran briefly
on Broadway for seventy-six performances, but three years later it emerged in an Off
Broadway revival that ran for more than two hundred and fifty performances. It featured
a young Louis Gossett, Jr., in the role of Spencer. A coming of age story, the play details
Spencer’s journey into manhood. Peterson effectively conjoins the masculine rite of pas-
sage with Spencer’s growing awareness of racial difference. As the play begins, Spencer,
who is the only black kid in his American history class, finds himself suspended from
school for “defending his race” and correcting the misinformed teacher on the role that
 POST–WORLD WAR II AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE 379

blacks played in the Civil War. In addition, over the course of the play, Spencer’s bur-
geoning sexual desire serves to racialize him further and separate him from his white
classmates. Spencer is a middle-class black boy growing up in the suburbs, and his child-
hood friends are white boys of his age with whom he engages in various sports. When
the games change with the advent of puberty, Spencer’s white counterparts no longer
seek him out but rather engage in social encounters with white girls that purposefully
do not include him. His consciousness of his exclusion raises his racial awareness, and
Spencer sets out for a humorous, yet informative encounter with a black prostitute in the
“colored section” of the city. The final scene of the play features Spencer bonding with his
mother over his coming into his own as a young black adult. Here, as in the earlier Medal
for Willie, the mother’s love for her son reinforces the play’s racial messages.
With the appearance of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play A Raisin in the Sun in
1959, the representation of the black family as a locus for racial discourse reached a
watershed moment. Critically acclaimed and commercially successful, Raisin became
the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. As well, it was the
first Broadway play directed by an African American, Lloyd Richards. Among its many
honors and awards, Raisin won the New York Drama Circle Critics Award. Its powerful
cast featured Diana Sands, Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, and Claudia McNeil. It became
a film with this same cast in 1961. A musical version, simply entitled Raisin!, won the
Tony Award for best musical in 1973. The play was revived on Broadway in 2004 starring
Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Phylicia Rashad. This production became a television play
with the same cast in 2008. In 2010, moreover, Raisin served as the inspiration for the
white playwright Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Clybourne Park. Clybourne
Park is the community into which the black Younger family intends to move at the end
of Raisin, despite the protest and disdain of their future white neighbors. Following
the historic Supreme Court ruling in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education, that declared
“separate but equal” unconstitutional, Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun argues in timely
and timeless fashion that the American dream of equity and access has salience for all
people. More than championing the virtues of integration, Hansberry’s play preaches a
lesson of profound humanism. In the face of loss, fragmentation, and despair, the family
reaffirms its inner resolve and resilience. Like both the earlier Big White Fog and Native
Son, Hansberry sets Raisin in the black enclaves of the South Side of Chicago. Yet, while
the Masons in Big White Fog stand on the verge of eviction, the Youngers will move on
their own free accord. And although Native Son depicts the Thomas family in urban
squalor, Raisin reveals the Younger family transcending their circumstances with pride
and dignity.
One of Raisin’s central figures, Mama Younger, contests stereotypical representa-
tions of the black matriarch. The infamous Moynihan Report about the condition
of race in America, issued in 1965, six years after the opening of Raisin, declared that
one of the major causes for the decline of the black family was the debilitating effect
of single-headed households governed by black mothers whose pertinacity emascu-
lated black men. In contrast, Hansberry in Raisin presents Mama Younger as a proud
and powerful woman, yet one open to change. Mama allows her daughter, Beneatha,
380 HARRY J. ELAM, JR.

the freedom to dream of becoming a doctor. It is Mama’s ability to let go and listen that
enables her son, Walter Lee, to grow into his manhood. His ascension to manhood
occurs in the play’s climactic moment as he stands before his family and the emissary
for the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, Mr. Lindner. Walter Lee decides to
move his family into Clybourne Park despite the dangers and threats the Youngers will
face. By doing so, he affirms the value of his family’s history and heritage. Central to
this play, and its message of family and racial pride, is the question of legacy and what
one makes of that legacy. The very tangible legacy in Raisin is the $10,000 life insurance
check bequeathed to Mama as a result of the death of Big Walter Younger. This check
and the question of legacy are the catalysts for the family’s eventual move to Clybourne
Park, as well as its ultimate assertion of self-esteem and pride.

The Black Theatre Movement

of the 1960s and 1970s

With its discussion of African independence, its depiction of Beneatha in an Afro

hairdo, and its focus on a black family’s struggle for self-determination, Raisin served as
a precursor to the more militant black revolutionary dramas of the 1960s and 1970s. In
fact, an early draft of the play ended with the Younger family in their new house, huddled
together in the dark with guns waiting for their white neighbors to attack. Hansberry
ultimately scrapped this ending, but such threats of violence became commonplace in
dramas of the following decade. Alongside the rising tide of black unrest, the poignant
real-life drama of the civil rights movement, and the angry theatrics of the black power
movement, a new black theatre movement arose. Across the country in the mid- to late
1960s black theatre institutions sprung up, from the more moderate Negro Ensemble
Theater in New York to the radical Black Arts/West Theater in San Francisco. Out of the
New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, the playwright Ed Bullins published the magazine
Black Theatre from 1968 to 1972. Play anthologies collected by William Branch, William
Couch, Woodie King, and others all found publishers during this period. This flowering
interest in black theatre influenced, and was in turn influenced by, the urgent cultural
and social demands within contemporaneous African American politics. The theatre
functioned as an answer to and further articulation of such declarations as “Black is
Beautiful” and “Black Power!” In 1964, the leading exponent of the Black Revolutionary
Theatre Movement, the then LeRoi Jones—soon to become Imamu Amiri Baraka—
wrote in his famous manifesto “The Revolutionary Theatre” that “the Revolutionary
Theatre should force change, it should be change” (1966, 210). In this statement he called
for black theatre not only to function as a weapon in the cause of black liberation but
also to serve as an expression of a particularly black aesthetic, that is, a black way of
creating. This period witnessed attempts and experiments in form as well as content, all
aimed at redefining blackness in the American consciousness.
 POST–WORLD WAR II AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE 381

Perhaps because of the social and cultural exigencies of the times, black family dra-
mas were not prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, class dynamics figured promi-
nently as dramas celebrated the political awakening of the black masses and critiqued
the purported apathy of the black bourgeoisie. LeRoi Jones’s experimental one-act play,
Dutchman, which opened in 1964, pitted the black college-aged and middle-class pro-
tagonist, Clay, in an allegorical conflict with a white temptress, Lula. She seduces him,
goads him, and eventually murders him. Borrowing his title from the name of a slave
ship, as well as the legend of the Flying Dutchman in which a doomed captain must sail
endlessly around the Cape of Good Hope, Jones presents the political inertia of the black
middle class as an inevitably bankrupt politics. While Clay proclaims that violent racial
revolution is the one critical step needed to cure his “people’s madness,” he refuses to
act. Instead, he simply wants to be left alone. Lula, however, kills him even with, or per-
haps because of, his expressed indifference. His death serves to warn other blacks of the
grave costs of such middle-class complacency. Moreover, in Clay’s long, searing mono-
logue, Dutchman makes a powerful pronouncement on the social utility of black art. As
Clay discusses the jazz of John Coltrane and the blues of Bessie Smith, he argues that
their music functioned as a crucial method of controlling their anger against whites,
their “racial madness.” Black art, according to Clay, functions as a conduit for channel-
ing black rage, and it contains coded messages of black resistance. The questions raised
in this play as to the role of black art within revolutionary struggle remained a subject of
great debate within the Black Theatre Movement of the period.
While Clay resists acting against racial madness and finds himself murdered,
Sarah, the protagonist in Adrienne Kennedy’s 1964 Obie Award–winning one-act play
Funnyhouse of a Negro, commits suicide because of her inability to reconcile the racial
contradictions in her life. Kennedy takes the audience inside the “funnyhouse” of Sarah’s
mind, with its surreal and conflicting images of black and white. Sarah, a light-skinned
or mulatto young woman, who, like Clay, is a product of the black middle class, cannot
resolve the tension around blackness and whiteness in her racial heritage. She is caught
between her white or very light-skinned mother and her dark black father and how they
signify. Here, then, the dynamics of family are notable in their fragmentation. Historical
figures, such as the Duchess of Hapsburg, also serve as manifestations of Sarah’s divided
consciousness; these inner selves visit her and exacerbate her psychic unrest. For Sarah,
her racial psychosis is both psychological and physical, as her hair continues to fall
out. Kennedy’s absurdist narrative style that repeats and revises, circles back on itself
throughout the play, significantly influenced later playwrights including Suzan-Lori
Parks and her dramaturgy of the 1990s. In addition, the question of the value of white-
ness and blackness within the American social order has continued to resonate in the
decades to follow.
Douglas Turner Ward’s A Day of Absence in 1965 approached the issue of racial value
satirically. Ward’s play muses what would happen to a small southern town if all the black
people went away for the day. The town humorously implodes without its black workers
who perform the most menial tasks, and the mayor makes a desperate, last-minute tele-
vised plea for the blacks to return. In 2004, Sergio Arau created the satirical film, A Day
382 HARRY J. ELAM, JR.

without Mexicans, set in Southern California. This piece follows a storyline very similar
to that of A Day of Absence, instead with Mexicans as the missing laborers. Notably, A
Day of Absence functions as a reverse minstrel show as all the actors are black but per-
form in whiteface. The use of whiteface foregrounds the constructed nature of race and
comments on the power and politics of racial representation. Whereas the early history
of the American stage featured white actors in blackface roles, a history that profoundly
contributed to the perpetuation of derogatory racial stereotypes, Ward turns this con-
vention on its head. This play ran successfully Off Broadway with a companion piece
also written by Ward, Happy Ending. Combined with an editorial piece written by Ward
in the New York Times (August 14, 1966) explicitly citing the need for black theatre, A
Day of Absence helped to spawn the birth of the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC). The
piece attracted the attention of the Ford Foundation and, with a foundation grant of over
$400,000 Ward and his partner, Robert Hooks, established the NEC at the St. Marks
Playhouse at 133 Second Avenue in New York City in 1967. Dedicated to creating works
of the highest professional standards, the NEC did not focus on polemics or on using the
theatre to agitate for social action.
Other black theatre companies that emerged during this period imagined a very dif-
ferent role for the theatre to play in concurrent social struggles. Following the success of
Dutchman, Jones moved to Harlem, and along with other like-minded artists and activ-
ists, he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School (BARTS). With BARTS, Jones
and his cohort intended for art to function as a weapon in the battle for social change. In
1967, Jones, now Baraka, moved to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey, where he began
the Spirit House, an arts and cultural center. There he formed an acting troupe, the Spirit
House Movers, aimed at moving people’s souls. In terms of theatrical practice, Baraka
and the Spirit House produced works such as Baraka’s own Slave Ship (1967). With these
activist protest plays, they sought to reorient the relationship between audience and per-
formers. The theatre attempted to be explicitly participatory, with the objective of gen-
erating outrage and emotion in the theatre that could translate into activism beyond its
walls in the real world. In 1968, Barbara Ann Teer, a former actor with the NEC, founded
the National Black Theatre with a similar desire to create performances that raised black
consciousness. Her practice reasserted African American connections to Africa and
compelled audience interaction. Rather than call them actors, Teer termed her perform-
ers “liberators,” a nomination that emphasized how she expected them to interact with
audiences. Her original dramaturgy operated ritualistically with attention to conjoining
mind, spirit, and racial identity. At this same time, the playwright Ed Bullins and the
producer Robert Macbeth at the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem—which also ben-
efited from a large Ford Foundation grant—produced theatre that, in form as well as
content, attempted to speak particularly to black experiences. In May 1968, recognizing
the groundswell of interest in black theatre, practitioner and scholar Richard Schechner,
editor of The Drama Review (TDR), the leading journal of avant-garde and cutting-edge
theatre, abdicated the editorship to Ed Bullins for one special issue. With its inclusion of
essays and play texts, the seminal Black Theatre Issue became a critical manifesto of the
Black Theatre Movement. The special issue, as well as the theatres of the Black Theatre
 POST–WORLD WAR II AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE 383

Movement it supported, sought to connect black art directly to the social upheaval and
urgencies of the times.
Emanating from those politically anxious times, the black plays written at the end of
the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s that did center on the black family presented it as in
crisis, most particularly around generational issues. Ron Milner’s The Warning: A Theme
for Linda, directed in 1969 by Woodie King at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s
Chelsea Street Theatre Center, focuses on Linda, a seventeen-year-old black girl, who
determines to chart a different course for her life, one distinct from that of either her
grandmother or mother. Both her grandmother and mother have suffered abusive rela-
tionships with black men, and they warn Linda against pursuing love blindly. But she
resists them and finds in Donald a match for her own resolve. Another play that depicts
the black family as one in unrest is Richard Wesley’s The Past Is Past. Wesley’s text cen-
ters on the confrontation of a father and son more than twenty years after the father
abandoned his family, before his son was even born. Joseph Walker’s The River Niger,
produced by the NEC and winner of the Drama Desk Award in 1972, also centers on a
tumultuous father-son relationship. The play became a film in 1976 starring James Earl
Jones and Cicely Tyson as the parents of Jeff, played by Glynn Turman. At issue in the
play is how an African American father can, when caught within the tensions of a rac-
ist world, function as the head of the household. The prodigal son, Jeff, returns home to
Harlem after service in the Air Force and finds himself involved with a group of young
black militants. Ultimately, his father sacrifices his own life to prevent Jeff from being
implicated in a violent crime plot. In the case of each of these plays, generational conflict
in the African American family became the space in which to assert black difference in
these new times. Within the dynamics of father and son or mother and daughter, these
works reveal how the emerging generation of African Americans imagined themselves
and their racial identities in distinction to those of their ancestors.
Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, the
most important African American play of this period, was not a family drama but spoke
to both changes in generational understandings of blackness and the need for recogniz-
ing the intersections of gender and race. In a joint production between Joe Papp’s Public
Theater and Woodie King’s New Federal Theatre, for colored girls came to Broadway in
1975 and achieved national acclaim. In keeping with the tenets of the concurrent wom-
en’s movement, the play addressed the conjunction of the personal and political in black
women’s experiences. for colored girls dramatizes how the most intimate of encounters
in a black woman’s life—abortion, violent and troubled relationships, and rape—have
profound social meanings and consequences. In content as well as in form, for colored
girls opened up new possibilities for black women. Consequently, Shange’s play critiques
restrictive gender roles; it also unearths the structural limitations of domestic realism
often found in African American family dramas. Shange terms the play a “choreopoem”
because of its focus on poetry and movement: essentially, it consists of a series of poems
delivered by seven women who perform on a stark stage that allows them the freedom
to move. The absence/presence of men, who appear only from the perspectives of these
women in their stories as husband and lovers, enables Shange to put black women totally
384 HARRY J. ELAM, JR.

at the center of this play. Accordingly, for colored girls offers a journey for black women
from the edge of despair to a new place of self-definition, communion, and agency. In
the play’s emotionally charged moment of resolution, the women sing together of find-
ing god within themselves and loving her fiercely. With this notion of a personal and
feminized god, Shange advocates for black women to embrace self-love, new directions,
and self-determination by asserting and channeling the god within.

Drama of History and Memory,

1980–2000

In 1986, George C. Wolfe’s provocative The Colored Museum satirically challenged the
legacy of for colored girls as well as that of A Raisin in the Sun and the history of black
family dramas, all the while carving a new space for African American drama. In a scene
entitled “The Last Mama on the Couch Play,” Wolfe parodies both of these significant
plays from the African American canon. In so doing, Wolfe probes what constitutes a
black play and eschews the formulas of the past for representing blackness. The play
irreverently exposes icons of black history, like Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, as
targets of ridicule and critique. Wolfe’s point is not to denigrate the black past but to
interrogate its meanings in the present. Wolfe finds the form of black family drama too
limiting. To be sure, his The Colored Museum benefits from the fact that there is a history
of black theatre that the playwright can point to and satirize. At the same time, Wolfe
argues that this very history imposes constraints on black artistic creation, constraints
that he intends to undermine.
Through biting humor, Wolfe ponders whether today’s African Americans must
carry with them the pain and struggle that are part of the heritage of blacks in America.
The museum serves as the setting and context for this question. Riffing on the notion
of “colored,” its associations with blackness, and on our cultural understanding of
museums, Wolfe questions what should be venerated inside a “colored museum.” In a
series of exhibits, the play explodes episodically onto the stage. Yet far from conven-
tional museum exhibits, some of Wolfe’s artifacts—a black drag queen, a pregnant
African American teenager sitting on a large egg—might at first seem more appropri-
ately located in a funny house. This is exactly Wolfe’s objective: to unsettle the status quo
and upend racial expectations. In various ways, Wolfe’s figures attempt to escape from
the weight, the madness of blackness. In the insightful exhibit “Symbiosis,” a character
called “The Man” confesses that “being black is too emotionally taxing; therefore I will
be black only on weekends and holidays” (1992, 30). The solution the play offers, how-
ever, is not to elude the complications of blackness, but rather to embrace them. Wolfe
asserts that the power of blackness lies in its complexities and contradictions. Revising
the concept of racial madness found in the black plays of the 1960s, such as Kennedy’s
Funnyhouse and Jones’s Dutchman, Wolfe’s exhibits sing “there’s a madness in me and
 POST–WORLD WAR II AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE 385

the madness sets me free” (1992, 43). Rather than it being a problem, Wolfe posits the
madness of race as the critical component of African American identities and a critical
element in African Americans’ continued survival.
In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, other black artists, like Wolfe, engaged the sub-
ject of the weight of African American history. Award-winning novelists such as Toni
Morrison in Beloved (1987) and Charles Johnson in Middle Passage (1990) examined the
subject of slavery. The visual artist Glenn Ligon’s instillation “To Disembark” (1993) also
took up the subject of slavery, but from the perspective of a contemporary queer black
man, wondering what impact the legacy of slavery had on his current identity position.
In each of these cases, using different methodologies, these artists explored the question
of how the past impacts the present. These artistic explorations occurred in the Reagan/
Bush era, a period when economic stratification increased, as did black crime rates,
black-on-black violence, and racial segregation in urban cities. Thus, the questions these
works raise about unfinished business with the African American past found resonance
in this period of racial entrenchment. Significantly, these artists sought to reexamine
history, to excavate legacies of suffering and survival, and even to construct new histori-
cal narratives as modes of cultural intervention in their current moment.
Certainly, the most prominent African American playwright engaged with represent-
ing the black past in order to understand the present was August Wilson. The winner
of two Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other accolades, Wilson was the most produced
playwright of the 1990s in the United States. He put the matter of history at the center of
his dramaturgy. Wilson’s self-determined theatrical mission consisted of writing a play
for each decade of the twentieth century, reviewing black lives and the past choices that
African Americans have made. Wilson did not write the cycle in chronological order
but, in the order of their construction, tells a story of his own process of historic dis-
covery. All the plays, save one, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), take place in Wilson’s
childhood home of the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Ma Rainey is set in
Chicago, Illinois.) The plays are at once personal and political, “a 400 year old autobi-
ography that is the African American experience” says Wilson (Shannon 1996, 179–80).
Setting these plays at key historical junctures, Wilson explores the pain, dignity, and
perseverance of ordinary black people and, through their stories, constructs an alter-
native view of African American history. Often the central characters in Wilson’s his-
tory cycle find themselves alienated and separated from their roots, in need of spiritual
and psychological regeneration. Wilson answers their predicament by suggesting that
in order to go forward, one must first go back to connect with the past, with one’s heri-
tage. For his figures, embracing the past informs present circumstances. Wilson died
on October 2, 2005, after completing the last play in the cycle, Radio Golf (2005). Some
fifteen days later, on October 17, 2005, the Virginia Theater at 245 West 52nd Street in
New  York City was renamed the August Wilson Theater, making Wilson the first
African American to have a Broadway theatre named in his or her honor.
For Wilson, the African American family constitutes the critical site for spiritual,
cultural, and historical reconnection. Not surprisingly, his two Pulitzer Prize–win-
ning plays, Fences (1986) and The Piano Lesson (1990), are family dramas. With Fences,
386 HARRY J. ELAM, JR.

Wilson constructs the larger-than-life figure Troy Maxson, a problematic American

patriarch, and uses this figure to consider how the sins of the father are in turn passed on
to his sons. Setting the action of the play in 1957, Wilson comments on how individual
experiences, such as Troy’s stubbornness, his adultery, and his single-minded sense of
responsibility, produce destructive reverberations for his family. The action also reveals
the social implications of Troy’s historically rooted situation, as he struggles to lead his
family in a world that denies him certain options because he is black.
Set in post-Depression Pittsburgh in 1936, The Piano Lesson questions the value of
legacy and what a family makes of it. Carved by the family’s grandfather who was a
slave on the Sutter plantation, and made in defiance of his master’s command, a piano
engraved with images of the family’s ancestor functions as a tangible symbol of their
heritage. Wilson puts brother, Boy Willie, and sister, Berniece, on opposite sides of a
struggle over the fate of this heirloom. While Boy Willie wants to sell the piano in order
to buy the land on which his father once sharecropped and his grandfathers toiled as
slaves, Berniece wants to keep the piano because of what it represents; her relatives liter-
ally died protecting this piano. Thus, the piano serves as an altar to the memory of the
ancestors as well as a synecdoche for the traumatic history African Americans endured
during slavery. Eventually, the action of the play reaffirms Berniece’ s perspective on
the piano, and it correspondingly confirms the need to pay proper homage to African
American survival of, and resistance to, the peculiar institution and its legacy.
In The Piano Lesson as well as in Fences, Wilson resolves the dramatic crisis through
ritualistic acts that expand the realistic canvas of the plays and tie the families back to
their African American, and even African, pasts. In Fences, after the death of his brother
Troy, Gabriel, who suffered a head wound in World War II and now believes himself to
be the Archangel Gabriel, literally opens the Gates of Heaven so that Troy can enter. He
does so through an atavistic dance that somehow reaches the African roots of African
American experience and reconciles Troy back within the bosom of the family. During
the climax of The Piano Lesson, the ghost of the former slave master Sutter returns to
haunt the Sutter family house and piano. Boy Willie determines to fight the ghost physi-
cally. Psychically and corporeally gathering her spirits, Berniece goes to the piano and
improvises a song that summons their ancestors for assistance. With their help, she exor-
cises the ghost and saves her brother. A concern for uncovering the African in African
American experiences as well as an interest in exploring metaphysical action became
increasingly important to Wilson as he negotiated his twentieth-century cycle. In the
process, his articulation of family continued to play a prominent role in his drama-
turgy. The character Aunt Ester, who “appears” offstage in his play about the 1960s, Two
Trains Running, and who dies of grief offstage in his play about the 1980s, King Hedley II,
becomes for Wilson the most significant figure in his plays; she knits them all together.
As the “ancestor,” she is as old as the African American experience in America, having
survived the Middle Passage onboard one of the first slave ships. With his last two plays,
Wilson provides the bookends for the cycle and further encircles the notion of family
and history. The characters in his last play, Radio Golf (2005), are the descendants of
 POST–WORLD WAR II AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE 387

characters in Gem of the Ocean (2003). Although Gem of the Ocean was the next-to-last
play Wilson wrote, in the series it is chronologically the first and takes place in 1904.
Suzan-Lori Parks, the other most prominent African American playwright of the
contemporary period, has also explored the dynamics of history through family in her
dramaturgy of the 1990s and 2000s. Yet, in contrast to Wilson, Parks employs a much
more avant-garde style to represent the black family and to complicate and problema-
tize history. When she burst onto the American theatre scene, critics hailed her as “the-
atre’s vibrant new voice”(Kelly 1992, 30), an “indigenous theatrical talent,” and, in 1990,
“the most promising playwright of the year” (Gussow 1990, 28). These predictions of
her promise have proved prescient, as in 2000 she was awarded a John T. MacArthur
Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. In 2001, Parks became the first African American
woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama with her play Topdog/Underdog (1999, 2001).
Stylistically, she has proven to be a decidedly eclectic playwright. Her early plays are
nonlinear, jazzlike in structure with language that expands the rhythms and sounds
of black vernacular. Some of her later plays, however, such as In the Blood (1999) and
Topdog/Underdog, follow a much more naturalistic formula. Nonetheless, even as her
style continues to change, Parks remains profoundly interested in experimenting with
the form of family drama, a form she uses repeatedly in different permutations to con-
sider questions of African American identity and history.
In her critically acclaimed play, Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World
(1989–92), Parks presents, on a very basic level, the story of a husband and wife in crisis.
The wife, Black Woman with Fried Drumstick, attempts to comprehend the return of
her husband, Black Man with Watermelon, whom she believes to be dead. At the same
time, the play confronts historical events, questions stereotypes, and debunks cultural
myths. Parks posits history as a site of contemporary resistance, as she appropriates and
critiques historical narratives not only to challenge and rewrite history but also to right
history.
With The America Play (1990–93), one of Parks’s most intellectually provocative and
stylistically challenging works to date, Parks considers questions of the father’s legacy as
did Hansberry in Raisin in the Sun and Wilson in Piano Lesson, but in a decidedly differ-
ent structure. In The America Play, which premiered at the New York Public Theater in
1994 and was directed by the famed avant-garde theatre artist Richard Foreman, Parks
sets the first act of the play, a monologue delivered by an African American character
called the Foundling Father, in what she calls “a great hole. In the middle of nowhere.
The hole is an exact replica of the Great Hole of History” (Parks 1995a). The Foundling
Father bears a striking resemblance to the great American president Abraham Lincoln.
In fact, he was told he “played Lincoln so well that he ought to be shot” (164). The second
act concerns his wife, Lucy, and son, Brazil, as they for search him, the now-deceased
father and Lincoln impersonator. To the extent that the liberation of the black slaves is
wholly identified with Lincoln, African Americans have been marginalized in their own
story. The perpetuation of the Lincoln myth has created real scars for African Americans
and this play takes on this subject.
388 HARRY J. ELAM, JR.

In her Pulitzer Prize–winning Topdog/Underdog, Parks continues the idea of a black

Lincoln impersonator, and she furthers themes of legacy and history within the black fam-
ily. In Topdog/Underdog, though, she works in a more realistic form, one that is perhaps
more accessible and commercially viable. In marked contrast to her earlier pieces, its plot
flows in causal linearity. Parks herself acknowledges the affinity that this play has to the
work of the Pulitzer Prize–winning American playwright Sam Shepard. Like Shepard’s
True West, the play centers on two brothers whose hyperreal conflict uncovers painful fam-
ily secrets and long-festering fraternal jealousies. Even their names represent a source of
conflict and concealment; they also evidence their destiny. For the two African American
brothers in Topdog, Lincoln and Booth, their inexorable fates are already evident in their
names. In addition to the naming, the residue of their relationships with both father and
mother has had a profound impact on the brothers. Through retrospective structure in
the play, the brothers reveal that both parents left them while they were children, first the
mother, then two years later, the father. When leaving, the mother gave Booth a stocking
containing five hundred dollars, his “inheritance,” and told him to tell no one about the
money but to take care of, in her absence, his older brother, Lincoln. Similarly, the father,
as he departed, handed Lincoln five hundred dollars wrapped up in a handkerchief.
Symbolically and materially, then, this packaged cash is their legacy, that which was handed
down from their family. At issue for them in this play is what they make of that legacy, that
is, how they interpret the meaning of family and heritage within their own lives.
The differences in their strategies for managing their inheritance reflect the brothers’
divergent perspectives and engagements with history that play out in this drama. The
end is a tragic loss for both brothers, even as it is inevitable. Neither of them is able to
win in a game, in a world, where the odds have been overwhelmingly stacked against
them. Topdog marks both a change and further evolution in Parks’s dramaturgy and yet
questions of history and family heritage remain most certainly front and center. As Alisa
Solomon notes, “History screams and bleeds in this work of Parks’s as intensely as ever”
(2001). Even as Parks has begun to work in a more realistic vein, her playwriting digs
below the surface to express a power that is not simply literal, and she continues to probe
questions that have previously found expression in her work.

Postblack Drama

Parks’s dramaturgy provides an important segue into the more recent African American
drama of the new millennium, 2004–10. These works might be classified under the
label of “postblack” drama. The term “postblack,” coined by Thelma Golden, refers to
an emerging trend within black arts to find new and multiple expressions of blackness
unburdened by the social and cultural expectations of the past. The postblack does not
entail moving past any connection to race or racialized meanings, but rather travel-
ing beyond past definitions of blackness that delimit creation or that necessitate cer-
tain artistic expectations. As a result, the postblack artist putatively experiences a new
 POST–WORLD WAR II AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE 389

creative license, previously not possible in black artistic production. Marked by the elec-
tion of the first black president of the United States in 2008, these plays signal a new
moment in black cultural production. Parks’s latest play Book of Grace (2010) might eas-
ily fit this label, but it is again a family drama. Perhaps equally significant, her essay “An
Equation for Black People Onstage” might be a manifesto for this new movement:

There are many ways of defining Blackness and there are many ways of presenting
Blackness onstage. The Klan does not have to be outside the door for black people
to have lives worthy of dramatic literature. . . . And what happens when we choose
a concern other than race to focus on? What kind of drama do we get? Let’s
do the math:  . . . BLACK PEOPLE + x ‘NEW DRAMATIC CONFLICT (NEW
TERRITORY). (1995b, 20)

As evidenced by the quote above, Parks’s creative interests lie in developing “new terri-
tory” beyond the conventional binary of black and white. The same can be said of the
new postblack practitioners. The new movement consists primarily of young, emerging
African American playwrights, such as Tarell McCraney, Marcus Gardley, and Eisa Davis
who have come to artistic prominence in the “Age of Obama.” Each of these playwrights
has constructed family dramas experimenting with and expanding the form as well as
content. Davis’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated Bulrusher (2005) examines issues of coming of
age, same-sex desire, and mixed-race identity. McCraney, the most celebrated of these new
postblack practitioners, has created a trilogy, The Brothers Size, that is at once intimate and
epic in proportion. The Brothers Size premiered at the Public Theater in New York and
has had productions at regional theatres across the country, including the Studio Theatre
in Washington, DC, and the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. It has also played
at the Royal Court in London. The language in The Brothers Size is lyrical and vernacu-
lar with figures drawn from Yoruban cosmology and the Southern Bayou of his youth.
Using the trilogy format to explore histories over time, McCraney considers the family ties
that bind, the pressures and possibilities of coming out as a gay black man, the commu-
nity as extended family. If earlier efforts to depict the black family, such as those by Ward,
Hansberry, and Wilson, served particular political aims, the employment of the black
family trope within postblack drama similarly suggests a different utility for new political
claims. The conventionality of black family drama does not preclude its being progressive
and open to the explorations of the intersections of race, class, and sexuality.
Interestingly, these postblack works by these new black playwrights have premiered
at theatres that are not predominantly black, with productions not directed by black
directors. This suggests a shift in black theatre. Yet it is not clear as to how this tran-
sition might translate into opportunities for black artists within the American main-
stream. Will black directors now be called on to direct shows by nonblack playwrights in
regional theatres? Will black community theatres such as the St. Louis Black Repertory
Theatre or Penumbra in St. Paul, Minnesota, or Karamu in Cleveland still survive? The
relationship of a black theatre that is at once near, by, and for black people, as W. E. B. Du
Bois demanded in 1926, and yet at the same time open to cross-cultural audiences will
continue to play out in the new millennium.
390 HARRY J. ELAM, JR.

Bibliography
Baraka, Amiri. 1966. The Revolutionary Theatre. In Home: Social Essays, edited by Baraka,
Amiri, 210–15. New York: William Morrow.
Bean, Annemarie. 1999. A Sourcebook on African-American Performance:  Plays, People,
Movements. New York: Routledge.
Benston, Kimberly W. 1976. Baraka:  The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven, CT:  Yale
University Press.
———. 2000. Performing Blackness:  Enactments of African-American Modernism. London:
Routledge.
Carter, Steven R. 1991. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment amid Complexity. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. 2001. The Melancholy of Race. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Collins, Lisa Gail, and Margo Natalie Crawford. 2006. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement.
New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press.
Dickerson, Glenda. 2008. African American Theater:  A  Cultural Companion. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Elam, Harry Justin, and David Krasner. 2001. African American Performance and Theater
History: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Elam, Harry J. 2004. The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Fabre, Geneviève. 1983. Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor:  Contemporary Afro-American
Theatre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Geis, Deborah R. 2008. Suzan-Lori Parks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Gussow, Mel. 1990. Dangers of Becoming a Lost Culture. New York Times, September 25.
Hay, Samuel A. 1994. African American Theatre:  An Historical and Critical Analysis.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hill, Errol. 1984. Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press.
———. 1987. The Theater of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Applause.
Hill, Errol, and James Vernon Hatch. 2003. A History of African American Theatre. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, E. Patrick. 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kelly, Kevin. 1992. The Astonishing Power of “Last Black Man.” Boston Globe, February 14.
Kolin, Philip C. 2005. Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. Columbia:  University of South
Carolina Press.
Lester, Neal A. 1995. Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays. New York: Garland.
———. 2007. Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A  Casebook. London:
Routledge.
Olaniyan, Tejumola. 1995. Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance:  The Invention of Cultural
Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama. New  York:  Oxford
University Press.
Parks, Suzan-Lori. 1995a. The America Play. In The America Play and Other Works, 157–99.
New York: Theatre Communications Group.
———. 1995b. Equation for Black People Onstage. In The America Play and Other Works, 19–22.
New York: Theatre Communications Group.
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Sell, Mike. 2005. Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living
Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement. Ann Arbor:  University of
Michigan Press.
Shannon, Sandra Shannon. 1996. August Wilson’s Autobiography. In Memory and Cultural
Politics, edited by Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. and Robert E. Hogan, 175–93.
Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Solomon, Alisa. 2001. Quoted on the back cover Topdog/Underdog. New  York:  Theatre
Communications Group.
Williams, Mance. 1985. Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s: A Historical-Critical Analysis of the
Movement. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Wolfe, George C. 1992. The Colored Museum. In Black Thunder: An Anthology of Contemporary
African American Drama, edited by William B. Branch, 1–44. New York: Penguin..
Woll, Allen L. 1989. Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press.
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New York: Harper and Row.
 CHAPTER 25

T H E P O ST WA R M U SIC A L

M IC H E L L E DVO SK I N

Throughout US musical theatre history, critics and scholars have expended signifi-
cant energy and ink trying to decide if the musical is dead or at least in the process of
dying. The discussion of musical theatre’s apparently eternally imminent demise typi-
cally revolves around two concerns. First, some scholars worry about dwindling audi-
ences and musicals’ resultant loss of cultural relevance. While this brings up interesting
questions about how we define musical theatre audiences—are they located solely on
Broadway, or do they include the innumerable people who attend musicals at regional
theatres, community theatres, dinner theatres, colleges, and high schools?—this
thread of the conversation is not the focus of this essay. Rather, I am interested in the
second area of concern, which seems even more prevalent in scholarly writing on the
topic: musicals’ perceived decline in quality over time.
Writers concerned that musical theatre suffers from artistic illness or death often offer
a fairly common narrative: musicals began as commercial, inconsequential entertain-
ment with no real artistic merit, then entered a “golden age” when musicals were both
commercially and artistically successful, then, rapidly or slowly, fell back into pure com-
mercialism and lost all claim to art. For example, this basic argument forms the prem-
ise of Mark Grant’s The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical, which claims that “the
American musical peaked as an art form during a forty-year golden age on Broadway
that ended almost forty years ago” (2004, 5).1 The “golden age” generally dates from
1943, when Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! premiered, although some writers,
including Grant, push the beginning back to Hammerstein’s collaboration with Jerome
Kern on Showboat (1927). The era ends somewhere in the mid-1960s, with Fiddler on the
Roof (1964) serving as one popular stopping point.
While anxiety over the health of musical theatre began even before Oklahoma!—as
early as the mid-1930s, musicals were seen as “floundering” and “threatened with extinc-
tion” (Most 2004, 71)—since just after the end of the “golden age” there have been regu-
lar recurrences of criticism, ranging from mournful to venomous, that see no future for
musical theatre as an art form. For example, by the late 1960s, as Jessica Sternfeld notes,
“Critics declared Broadway dead or dying, a cry which, although voiced throughout the
 THE POSTWAR MUSICAL 393

history of the institution, seemed quite justified at the time” (2006, 10–11). While most
writers who argue that musicals are a dying art use the “golden age” as their primary
point of comparison, the ongoing nature of the debate usually requires that a writer’s
current moment represent the worst case. After all, if musicals actually died in the late
1960s, critics in the 1980s or 2000s would have little to complain about—either the form
would have been resurrected, in which case things would have improved, or the form
would still be dead, which wouldn’t be a very interesting topic. As Gerald Mast com-
ments, “Broadway has been dying for so long that even the last decade’s flops look good”
(1987, 348). While Mast believes that musical theatre will never completely disappear,
in large part because of its economic value to New York City, he agrees that its quality
has steadily declined. Even those who see contemporary musical theatre as artistically
viable seem trapped within the terms of this debate. Scott Miller, for example, notes that
the 1980s “brought . . . some of the most mediocre musicals to hit Broadway in years,”
before proclaiming that “it seemed to many that the musical was dead.” While Miller
immediately disagrees with this assessment, his choice to use the language of “death”—
and to set it apart as a one-sentence paragraph—highlights the dominance of this trope
(2007, 156).
It is no accident that most arguments for the imminent demise of musical theatre as
an art, rather than entertainment, form are based on the “golden age” model of musical
theatre history. This model is problematic for several reasons. First, simply calling 1943–
64 the “golden age of musical theatre” creates an inherent value judgment: that was the
best time, and everything else, by definition, must be less than—not simply different, but
worse, silver or plastic to midcentury’s gold. As Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth Wollman
point out, “The phrase ‘After the Golden Age’ is inherently negative: it implies that any
musical to have opened in recent decades is . . . somehow less artistically important or
culturally relevant” (2011, 111). The term’s conflation of this time period with the type of
musical that flourished then, the integrated, or book, musical, also reifies this subgenre,
making it the model for artistic achievement in musical theatre. This restriction as to
dramatic type limits innovation, as well as critics’ ability to respond fairly to work that
chooses a focus other than story (for example, a musical like Cats [1982] that privileges
theatricality over plot and characterization). Finally, these assumptions leave us unable
to fully engage with contemporary musical theatre, as most criteria for assessment and
analysis derive from the musicals of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Raymond Knapp has
noted that “those among Broadway’s composers and critics . . . clinging to what remains
of Broadway’s ‘golden age’ ” tend to “see the achievements of this era falling victim to key
aspects of a changing theatrical world,” including changes in sound, subject matter, and
even sexuality, with musicals overtly addressing gay and lesbian characters (2006, 350).
In this essay, I argue that “clinging” to the “golden age” as the prevailing model of
musical theatre history limits our ability to hold meaningful conversations about musi-
cals that came later; the myth of musical theatre’s imminent demise can be seen, in fact,
as a product of the “golden age” narrative. First, I will discuss the “golden age” and book
musicals, examining what those things are, how they are discussed within the field, and
why they retain such currency today. I then look to two other types of musical theatre,
394 MICHELLE DVOSKIN

concept musicals and megamusicals, and consider how their reception within scholarly
and critical circles relates to discussions of the “golden age.” I will conclude by offering
some thoughts on how discussions of musical theatre might begin to move beyond the
rhetoric of decline and death.

Book Musicals and the “Golden Age”

As a time period, the “golden age” of musical theatre typically refers to the years
between 1943 and the mid-1960s, when musicals were a vital, popular art form in the
United States. Stacy Wolf describes this period as a time when “Broadway musicals like
Carousel, Guys and Dolls, and Damn Yankees served as mainstream culture, both reflect-
ing and shaping the concerns and fascinations of the United States” (2002, 8). She notes
that Broadway musicals were never precisely mass culture, because seeing the shows
required purchasing relatively expensive tickets and, for anyone outside the greater
New York area, substantial travel expense and time. Yet cast albums and, increasingly,
the medium of television, which often presented Broadway performers and musical
numbers, made musical theatre accessible to a national audience. Like “The Mickey
Mouse Club, jazz, and commercials for Timex watches and General Electric ovens,
musical theater was a part of mid-twentieth-century American culture” (12).
In most versions of musical theatre history, the “golden age” not only represents per-
haps the height of musical theatre’s cultural relevance but also musicals’ highest level
of artistic achievement. Steven Suskin opens his introduction to Opening Night on
Broadway, an overview of critical responses to musicals from this period, by invoking
numerous classic shows as “titles that . . . conjure up a world of enchanted evenings”
and declaring that “so golden is this era” that “magical” shows like these were regular
occurrences (1990, 3). Richard Kislan describes the “golden age” as having “sustained
a sequence of shows the best of which represent the most enduring work of the mature
musical theater” (1995, 152). Structurally, these shows have a great deal in common;
as Wolf points out, in most discourse “the ‘Golden Age’ of musicals refers as much
to a set of formal and aesthetic conventions as it does to a time period. Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! opened the era with the first ‘integrated’ musical, and virtu-
ally all of the musicals of the later 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s followed their structural
innovations” (2002, 26).
Integrated, or book, musicals share a number of recognizable conventions. Most
important, as the name suggests, in this type of musical the book—the story and char-
acters—is primary. The various elements that compose a musical, including speech,
song, movement, and design, work together as a (relatively) unified whole, and the
whole serves the book. Kislan, for example, argues that the mark of a successful book
musical is “the successfully coordinated ability of all elements of a musical show to push
the story forward out of proportion to the individual weight of each element. Not only
does every element fit perfectly into an integrated show, each functions dramatically to
 THE POSTWAR MUSICAL 395

propel the book forward” (1995, 147). The language of “integration” and the perceived
value of bringing the various elements into a seamless, unified whole have been central
to discourses around musicals’ artistic effectiveness.
While “integration” has been central to defining the book musical (and in many ways
musical theatre more broadly), a number of scholars have persuasively argued that the
musical actually succeeds more via difference than unity. Wolf argues that “in spite of
the received history of musical theater, the form is hardly ‘integrated’ at all. . . . However
much dialogue blends elegantly and ‘naturally’ into song and however much compos-
ers and lyricists strive to have characters sing like they speak, musicals operate in two
aural modes, speech and song” (2002, 32). This tension between dialogue and song, in
fact, represents a key element of the book musical. Mark Grant, for example, claims that
“the mixture of spoken dialogue and song is what gave the traditional Broadway musi-
cal a flexibility both to evoke . . . emotional power and to involve the brain and the criti-
cal faculty. That mixture was the quintessence of the strength of the genre” (2004, 81).
Raymond Knapp also notes the importance of the distinction between dialogue and
song, arguing that the addition of a song to a generally realistic scene has the effect of
“adding a dimension of artificiality at the same time that it often also strives to tap into a
deeper kind of reality” through the music. He suggests that this results in expanded per-
ception on the part of the audience, who are “almost forced into this mode of dual atten-
tion” (12). Scott McMillin’s The Musical as Drama, one of the first studies of the musical’s
aesthetic features and conventions, is premised on this idea of difference, rather than
integration, as central to understanding musical theatre. McMillin’s central argument
is that the “incongruity between book and number,” between spoken dialogue and song
and dance, defines the musical (2006, x). He explains the disjuncture between book and
number as follows: “The musical’s complexity comes in part from the tension between
two orders of time, one for the book and one for the numbers. The book represents the
plot or the action” and moves in “progressive time, in the sense that the ending is differ-
ent from the beginning,” while “the second order of time, which interrupts book time
in the form of songs and dances” follows a more “repetitive, lyric form” (6–7). Rather
than numbers furthering the plot, as most discussions of book musicals assume they
should, he suggests that they actually suspend it in some ways, giving time for the audi-
ence to engage with the story and characters outside the “reality” of the book’s progres-
sive time (7–9).
Although experiments with relating the elements of musical theatre to the book
stretch back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century, most musical theatre his-
torians focus on the work of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, particularly
their first collaboration Oklahoma!, in order to define the book musical. According to
Kislan, for example, it is through the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein that “the book
became an all-inclusive aesthetic umbrella under which” all other elements of musi-
cal theatre were gathered (1995, 149). Jackson Bryer and Richard Davison claim that
Rodgers and Hammerstein created “a series of shows that transformed the American
musical . . . into a serious art form,” a transformation based on the idea that, through
their work, “integration and interrelationship of the various elements of the musical
396 MICHELLE DVOSKIN

have become virtually a necessity for success” (2005, ix). While “integration” has begun
to be usefully reevaluated, the artists most associated with that ideology, Rodgers and
Hammerstein, the “kings of the Golden Era,” have remained utterly central to discus-
sions of musical theatre history (Sternfeld 2006, 10). Thomas Hischak, in his reference
guide The Oxford Companion to the American Musical, asserts in his entry on Oklahoma!
that “the history of the Broadway musical can accurately be divided into what came
before Oklahoma! and what came after it” (2008, 545). While acknowledging that the
“Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution” didn’t come out of nowhere and, in fact, drew
on a range of previous explorations in the form, John Bush Jones agrees that “it is no
exaggeration to call 1943 to 1959 ‘The Rodgers and Hammerstein Years.’ Six of their nine
shows became hits . . . and their musicals also influenced other librettists, lyricists, and
composers by establishing both a model and a standard for a new kind of musical play”
(2003, 140–41).
In part because of his work on Showboat prior to his partnership with Rodgers,
Hammerstein is often the more valorized of the two. Grant claims that “Hammerstein
was truly the maverick prime mover in the book-driven musical, an even more impor-
tant person in our theater than he is usually credited to have been” (2004, 63). Given the
degree of precedence accorded to Hammerstein within most musical theatre histories,
it is hard to imagine how this could be possible; Gerald Mast correctly noted in 1987 that
“Hammerstein dominates every history of American musical theater published over
the last three decades,” and his claim still rings true as of this writing, two decades later
(203). Despite mixed feelings about some of the changes he holds Hammerstein respon-
sible for, Mast goes so far as to assert that “if, in Jerome Kern’s words, Irving Berlin is
American popular music, then Oscar Hammerstein II is the American musical. . . . After
his forty years in the theater, Hammerstein had not only demonstrated a theory but
forced everyone else to adopt it” (201). Even those scholars, like Mast, who are some-
what critical of the valorization of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the book musical
acknowledge their pervasiveness within the prevailing narrative of musical theatre his-
tory. Andrea Most, for example, notes that “the claim that Rodgers and Hammerstein
introduced a more mature, advanced, and sophisticated era in the musical theater is
largely undisputed by historians of theater” (2004, 30).2 She goes on to point out that
the glorification of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and particularly the common use of
Oklahoma! as “a sharp dividing line” in musical theatre history, does a disservice both
to their work and to musical theatre history more broadly, “obscur[ing] the dynamics
that make Oklahoma! such a powerful musical” while minimizing the important con-
tributions made by earlier musicals, which are positioned by this prevailing model as
“immature” (102–4).
Certainly, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals helped establish the conventions
associated with the book musical. Structurally, musicals in this mold have two acts, the
first of which is longer and contains more music. The songs, written to support the char-
acters and the plot and intended to sound plausible for the character(s) singing them,
tend to be relatively straightforward musically, with “hummable” melodies. Stylistically,
book musicals typically depend on a certain degree of realism, particularly in their book
 THE POSTWAR MUSICAL 397

scenes, and uphold the general idea of the fourth wall. While a performer in a book
musical may implicitly acknowledge the audience, a character in a book musical does
not explicitly acknowledge that audience. The investment in realism also requires cer-
tain things in terms of plot, including linearity and fundamental believability. We must
be able to imagine that the events of the plot could have happened the way the show
presents them. The basic narrative tends to be a heterosexual romance; as Wolf argues,
“celebration of heterosexuality is the raison d’être of the musical” (2002, 30). The male
and female characters within the main romantic couple are typically opposites in some
way—the farm girl Laurie and the cowboy Curly in Oklahoma!, for example—whose
romantic unification also symbolizes a larger bringing together of community (Knapp
2004, 130–32; Wolf 2002, 31). While the emphasis on heterosexual couples might sug-
gest that men and women draw equal focus within a book musical, in most cases the
female role is the more important. As Wolf points out, “most of the shows” from the
“golden age” “focus on women, and they tend to be the stars” (2002, 16). Finally, while
the plots of these musicals are love stories, they are not necessarily “light.” In fact, a key
element of the Rodgers and Hammerstein model was the use of serious, socially engaged
plots: spousal abuse in Carousel (1945), for example, or racism in South Pacific (1949). As
John Bush Jones argues, “Rodgers and Hammerstein demonstrated that musicals could
be ‘idea-bearing,’ socially conscious, and socially responsible, yet still entertain audi-
ences and make money” (2003, 141). While not all book musicals take up “socially con-
scious” or serious subject matter, Rodgers and Hammerstein made it seem viable to do
so, and a substantial portion of the genre followed suit.
There are a number of plausible reasons why the “golden age” book musical has
become so heavily privileged. First, our experiences shape our tastes. Contrasting his
preference for the original Broadway leads’ performances in Kiss Me Kate (1948) with his
students’ admiration for the stars of the 1999 revival, Bruce Kirle says, “I was raised . . . on
different musical theatre conventions and an older style of musical theatre performance.
My students were raised on MTV and a different performance aesthetic. Which is pref-
erable? It depends on the conventions one is used to” (2005, 12). This holds true not only
for performance choices, but for other conventions as well. Many critics and scholars
of musical theatre came of age during the “golden age,” and even those born afterward
likely grew up seeing many of these musicals, either in commercial revivals or in local
venues where they are regularly performed by community and educational groups.
Therefore, book musicals from this period, and their conventions, have set the frame for
most of those who write about it.
A clear-cut frame is helpful given the difficulties inherent in studying musical the-
atre. Because musicals use so many theatrical languages, analyzing them (and their his-
tory) requires a particularly broad skill set. Additionally, as David Savran points out,
studying musical theatre can be challenging because of “the lack of a stable text” (2009,
228). Scripts and scores may or may not be published. Even if they are, they—like the
cast albums we often use as evidence—may differ from what actually occurred onstage.
As Kirle argues, “Musicals are read by their audiences in theatres. . . . The text by itself is
incomplete” (2005, xvii). Perhaps the urge to valorize the book musical and see it as the
398 MICHELLE DVOSKIN

most artistically valuable subgenre—and therefore the most worthy of critical and schol-
arly attention—comes in part from the desire for an, if not completely stable, at least
seemingly established text. After all, because the book is primary, it seems reasonable
to assume that the texts of book musicals will be particularly accessible and “readable.”
When narrative is key, actually seeing the show feels less crucial. To a certain extent, this
is true. Reading and listening to a book musical offers a great deal of information and
material for analysis, particularly compared to musicals that are more spectacle-driven.
The inclusion of stage directions in published scripts and scores, a practice Rodgers
and Hammerstein helped codify as they attempted to ensure that all productions of
their musicals were true to the original stagings, also encourages a privileging of the
text (Kirle 2005, 8). Kirle’s argument that the field’s focus on certain questions, partic-
ularly “the . . . question of integration,” derives in part from historians’ overreliance on
the printed texts makes sense in this light. Since book musicals are the most textually
accessible, integration and its importance to musical theatre history therefore become
central concerns. Unfortunately, as Kirle notes, this emphasis fails to account for the
importance of performance and the absolute instability of the text in stagings of musical
theatre, regardless of subgenre (xviii).

Other Forms: Concept Musicals

and Megamusicals

If book musicals have been the privileged subgenre, the “gold” standard, critics and
scholars have received other major subgenres that came into prominence following the
mid-1960s with varying degrees of warmth. The first major subgenre to appear follow-
ing the “golden age” was the concept musical, which rose to prominence in the late 1960s
and 1970s with musicals like Cabaret (1966), Company (1970), Chicago (1975), and A
Chorus Line (1975). Like book musicals, concept musicals privilege “integration” of their
elements, but in service of an idea or theme rather than a traditional narrative. Ethan
Mordden describes the concept musical as “a presentational rather than strictly narra-
tive work that employs out-of-story elements to comment upon and at times take part
in the action, utilizing avant-garde techniques to defy unities of time, place and action”
(2003, 127). As this definition suggests, concept musicals rely less on the modified real-
ism that characterizes most book musicals, instead using a range of more experimental
and presentational techniques. Characters in concept musicals can sing directly to the
audience, for example; what narrative there is can operate outside of chronology and
other realistic rules; there are often characters whose role is more metaphorical than
literal. Bruce Kirle notes that concept musicals are often “the work of an auteur-director,
[have] a definite physical look or design, and, with [a] recurring ‘theme song,’ [are] often
circular in structure” before suggesting that “perhaps the best definition” of a concept
musical “is a musical that confronts the audience with ideas it usually goes to musicals to
 THE POSTWAR MUSICAL 399

escape” (2005, 111). While, as I have already noted, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals
helped establish the idea that musical theatre could tackle complex, challenging social
issues, midcentury book musicals tended to end happily and reinforce basically norma-
tive ideas. Concept musicals, in contrast, tend to be much less interested in clear-cut,
comfortable resolutions.
An excellent example of the concept musical is Stephen Sondheim and John
Weidman’s Assassins, originally produced Off Broadway in 1991 and on Broadway, in
a slightly revised version, in 2004. Based on substantial historical research, Assassins
tells the story of the men and women who have killed, or tried to kill, a US president
in order to explore the show’s central idea:  the underside of the American dream.
Throughout the show we see each assassin’s attempt—successful or not—as well as
interactions between them. The assassinations do not occur in chronological order, and
in fact chronology as a whole is largely discarded in Assassins. As a concept musical,
Assassins can abandon linear narrative in service of episodic storytelling, bouncing for-
ward and backward through time with each scene. Moreover, time is extraordinarily
flexible in Assassins, as characters regularly interact without regard for their respective
historical moments. This interaction between time periods, which enables Sondheim
and Weidman to highlight key ideas and themes and to challenge traditional ideas about
history, illustrates the productively flexible nature of concept musicals’ relationship to
“reality.” Assassins also exemplifies the use of “out-of-story” characters within concept
musicals, particularly through the character of the Balladeer. Described in the script as
“a 20th-century folk singer,” the Balladeer, who primarily assists in telling the stories of
the three successful assassins, is difficult to define in terms of chronology or character.
Not precisely a narrator and not a psychologically realistic character, he both interacts
with and comments on the assassins from a sort of vaguely defined “future.” For exam-
ple, even though he sings in dialogue with John Wilkes Booth during “The Ballad of
Booth,” he also announces to the audience at the beginning of the number that the assas-
sin will be dying shortly.
While the popular response to concept musicals has been mixed, most have been rea-
sonably well received by musical theatre scholars. The relative critical comfort with con-
cept musicals may stem, in part, from the fact that they treat “integration” in much the
same manner as book musicals; speech and song are distinct, but they work together
in service of something larger—in the case of concept musicals, an idea rather than the
book. It also has to do, I suspect, with the man sometimes credited with creating this
subgenre in 1970 with Company, the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. While
the concept musical label has been applied to work by a variety of composers, lyricists,
writers, and directors, Sondheim remains the individual most often associated with this
form. Richard Kislan, for example, takes the time to discuss concept musicals specifi-
cally in relation to Sondheim, saying that “when the label ‘concept musical’ is applied to
a Sondheim show, it means” that all the elements of musical theatre are brought together
“to support a thought. That thought dictates everything” (1995, 158).
Sondheim holds a special place within the study of musical theatre; there is a quar-
terly magazine dedicated to his work (The Sondheim Review) and he is the subject of an
400 MICHELLE DVOSKIN

array of books.3 Even to a Sondheim fan like myself, statements about his importance
can begin to seem a bit overwrought, not unlike some of the rhetoric around Rodgers
and Hammerstein. Jackson Bryer and Richard Davison, for example, declare that
Sondheim is “certainly the most dominant figure of the last forty years in the American
musical—and perhaps the most influential in the history of the form” (2005, xi). They
go on to claim that he “has altered the nature of the musical forever and set a standard
for all future practitioners” (xii). Of course, this level of acclaim is certainly not uni-
versal; Sondheim has detractors as well as fans.4 Those who dislike Sondheim tend to
focus their criticism on the idea that his work is elitist and lacks sufficient emotional
connection to audiences. It’s important, however, that this very criticism implies that
his work is art—the critique is that it isn’t popular enough, not welcoming enough to a
broad audience (while being too popular, and therefore not “art,” is precisely what the
next subgenre I will discuss, megamusicals, is most often accused of). Even though most
of Sondheim’s musicals aren’t commercial successes, they are widely studied and dis-
cussed, and even for his detractors he remains central to the narrative of musical theatre.
Part of Sondheim’s importance, and the respect often accorded to him—and con-
cept musicals along with him—likely comes from his association with Hammerstein,
who was his mentor, a fact reiterated in many histories of musical theatre. For exam-
ple, the connection to Hammerstein is a recurring theme in Sondheim’s interview in
Bryer and Davison’s volume, with both Sondheim and the interviewer returning repeat-
edly to the topic. Gerald Mast also emphasizes the relationship between the men and
relates it directly to their styles, stating that “[Hammerstein’s] concepts lead directly to
Sondheim’s concepts: figuratively, because Sondheim merely shifts Hammerstein’s con-
ceptual emphasis; literally, because Sondheim was not only a Hammerstein admirer but
his pupil and protégé” (1987, 203). The assumption that a Sondheim musical is “art” also
likely comes from the ways in which he tends to experiment theatrically; Joanne Gordon
notes that “Sondheim’s structures are closer to the freewheeling patterns of avant-garde
nonmusical theater” (1992, 8). This connection to nonmusical theatre may well give his
work additional artistic credibility among scholars.
The megamusical, another major subgenre of musical theatre, developed largely in
the 1980s and remains influential as of this writing. Paul Prece and William A. Everett
define megamusicals as “sung-through musicals where set design, choreography and
special effects are at least as important as the music . . . overtly romantic and sentimental
in nature, meant to create strong emotional reactions from the audience” (2008, 250).
Jessica Sternfeld also points to the sung-through aspect of megamusicals in her work-
ing definition of the form, as well as “an epic, historically situated, but timeless plot
staged on a fancy set” and their status as “cultural events marketed with unprecedented
force” that are “generally not loved by critics,” despite enormous popularity with audi-
ences (2006, 3–4). Megamusicals are also distinctly less “American” than other types of
musical theatre, as the individuals most associated with the form are the British com-
poser Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, the producer Cameron Mackintosh, and the French
composer-lyricist team of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg. As Sternfeld
notes, the megamusical represents “the first time in modern American musical theater”
 THE POSTWAR MUSICAL 401

that “a dominant style emerged that was not American” (1). Nonetheless, megamusi-
cals are central to US musical theatre because they are enormously successful imports—
Webber’s Cats and Phantom of the Opera (1988) are the longest running musicals in
Broadway history, while Boublil and Schönberg’s Les Misérables (1987) is arguably “the
most successful musical of all time” (Sternfeld 2006, 175)—and because various pop-
ular musicals developed in the United States, including the Disney-produced Beauty
and the Beast (1994) and The Lion King (1997), also make use of key elements of the
megamusical style.
Prece and Everett, like Sternfeld, take megamusicals seriously as artistic works; how-
ever, as Sternfeld’s definition points out—and as she discusses extensively throughout
The Megamusical—this is not necessarily typical of musical theatre critics and schol-
ars. John Bush Jones, for example, is strikingly dismissive of megamusicals, referring
to them as “entertainments” rather than musicals and describing them as “shows that
owed their longevity largely to awestruck viewers oohing and aahing at elaborate and
seemingly miraculous technical effects.” He declares that he prefers to call them “tech-
nomusicals,” claiming that that term is “more fully descriptive of a show that relies upon
theatre technology rather than real content. In technomusicals, it’s spectacle, not sub-
stance, that brings in the bucks” (2003, 322). Similarly unimpressed, Mark Steyn claims
that “the age of the technomusical spectacle diminished music and lyrics in general and
wit in particular” (2000, 231).
As these comments suggest, megamusicals’ emphasis on spectacle has been a chief
source of hostility. Phantom of the Opera, for example, is well known for its elaborate
sets and its falling chandelier; Cats’ imposing design scheme and elaborately made-up
and costumed dancing cats are far more memorable than its barely-there plot. A sig-
nificant element of the critical opposition to this kind of spectacle is its perceived irrel-
evance to any sort of narrative. Mark Grant claims, for example, that “today’s musical
has experienced a retrograde evolution, perversely reverting to its nineteenth century
beginnings in spectacle and rejecting the power of words and music,” the elements that
usually (sometimes along with dance) have the primary responsibility for communi-
cating story, character, or theme (2004, 214). Jones offers a rather doomsday vision of
what the emphasis on spectacle in contemporary musicals might indicate should the
“technos . . . of the ’80s and ’90s” cease to be supplemented with the “numerous musicals
of rich and varied social content” he also found during those decades. Offering a “his-
torical note to keep things in perspective,” Jones states that “it is demonstrable that from
the late days of Attic Greece (fourth century B.C.) at least to the late 1920s in America,
whenever theatre, musical or otherwise, featured spectacle and style over genuine sub-
stance, there was a corresponding decadence and decay of values in that culture” (2003,
330). This perspective somewhat problematically rejects the idea that spectacle—the-
atricality—can also be “genuine substance” and in fact might also be a way of commu-
nicating ideas about social issues and themes. Discussing pre–“golden age” musicals,
Andrea Most argues that “the language with which today’s theater historians dismiss the
highly theatrical musicals of the 1920s and ’30s in favor of the ‘revolution’ of Oklahoma!
402 MICHELLE DVOSKIN

is startling in its unselfconscious triumphalism and antitheatrical bias,” and I see a simi-
lar antitheatricality at work in many of the dismissals of megamusicals (2004, 103).
While much criticism of megamusicals objects to what is judged to be insufficiently
integrated spectacle, another common critique is the form’s supposedly excessive inte-
gration: most megamusicals are sung through, with little to no spoken dialogue. Steyn
complains that “the major pleasure of the musical play” is the transition between modes
of expression, between song and dialogue, and that pleasure has, in (what he sees as)
the age of mainly sung-through shows, been “all but forgotten today” (2000, 103). As
I discussed earlier, “integration” in the “golden age” model actually refers more to shared
purpose and commonality among the elements than to actual integration:  song and
speech remain quite distinct. Megamusicals move closer to the full integration of opera,
a choice that alienates many musical theatre aficionados. Given that, as Raymond Knapp
argues, musical theatre critics and scholars have often had a bit of an “inferiority com-
plex” in relation to opera, it seems somewhat ironic that “shows that bring operatic sen-
sibilities to the musical stage—quite often as part of the so-called British invasion—have
contributed to a wide-spread belief that the heyday of the American musical is over (or,
perhaps, ‘over for good,’ for those who believe Broadway’s ‘Golden Age’ ended long ago,
in the mid-1960s)” (2006, 313). This degree of integration, with speech entirely united
with music, is seen not as an extension of the “golden age” model but as a (problematic)
departure.
A final major area of concern is, perhaps counterintuitively, the immense popular-
ity and commercial success of megamusicals (although, of course, suspicion of com-
mercialism is hardly unique to musical theatre). As Sternfeld argues, “Our culture
tends to separate forms of musical theater into two categories: high art intended to be
intellectually and creatively fulfilling, and popular shows intended to entertain” (2006,
75). She rightly critiques this false binary, which I would suggest tends to be applied
primarily to post–“golden age” musicals; that is, most musical theatre scholarship
assumes that shows from Oklahoma! to the mid-1960s are at least potentially both com-
mercially and artistically valuable, while later musicals are usually presumed to be one
or the other. Of course, musicals have always been a commercial enterprise.5 After all,
“musical theatre . . . has always been a bastard art, the illegitimate offspring of,” among
other things, “art and commerce” (Savran 2009, 230).6 As just one example, the highly
regarded “golden age” book musical Gypsy (1959) was not the brainchild of book writer
Arthur Laurents, or of composer Jules Styne or lyricist Stephen Sondheim, or even of the
director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, but of the producer David Merrick. Merrick
purchased the sought-after rights to the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir, then assem-
bled an artistic team to create the musical. This does not in any way take away from
Gypsy’s artistic success; it merely highlights the fact that even a classic “golden age” musi-
cal was an inherently commercial property.
The anxiety around commercialism has also manifested around questions of adap-
tation in contemporary musical theatre, particularly with regards to jukebox musi-
cals and “movicals.” The former term signifies shows built around a preexisting music
catalogue, such as Mamma Mia! (2001, based on the music of the pop group ABBA).
 THE POSTWAR MUSICAL 403

The latter are shows adapted from (typically nonmusical) popular films, including
The Producers (2001), Hairspray (2002), and Legally Blonde (2007). Much like mega-
musicals, these subgenres, which are defined by their adaptation of popular culture
properties, tend to be seen as a danger to the artistic health and well-being of musi-
cal theatre. Elizabeth Wollman, for example, notes, in a discussion of the economics of
contemporary musical theatre, that as musicals become ever more expensive and risky
investments, increasingly made by corporations rather than individuals, “an increasing
number of theater producers are . . . finding it safer to invest in familiar titles than to take
chances on unknown material” (2006, 145). Wollman offers a nuanced discussion of the
long-standing tensions between commerce and art in musical theatre, but she does seem
generally regretful about this “fetishizing [of] the familiar,” which she argues “can work
to the disadvantage of new creations, which become increasingly marginalized” (152).
Certainly, making a musical solely to capitalize on a familiar title is unlikely to produce
particularly interesting work, and an overreliance on familiar titles to ensure marketing
success may limit opportunities for entirely original works.
Yet over the history of musical theatre, “original” works have hardly been the norm.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most successful musicals, including Oklahoma!, The King
and I (1951), South Pacific, and Carousel, are all adaptations of works by other authors.
West Side Story (1957) is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Gypsy, as I mentioned earlier,
is an adaptation of Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir. Adaptation was in fact incredibly com-
mon during the “golden age” and was seen as perfectly legitimate; as Mast points out,
“It became a given that musicals would adapt novels, plays, and by the mid-1950s, even
films that had already been deemed worthy of cultural attention” (1987, 213). Yet adapta-
tions from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries seem inherently suspect.
In part, this likely stems from the assumption I  discussed above, whereby post–
“golden age” shows are (with some individual exceptions) assumed to be either commer-
cial or artistic. Therefore, contemporary shows derived from popular source material
automatically have one strike against any claim to art.7 This relates to a second issue: the
type of material being adapted. As Rebecca Rugg notes, adaptation is a long-standing
practice, but “while film musicals used to be made out of Broadway hits . . . now adap-
tations often run the other direction” (2002, 51). Midcentury musicals were typically
adapted from more “literary” sources and then turned into popular films; now musicals
are created from films with no pretensions to “literary” status. Mark Grant, while not
altogether troubled by the mid-century adaptations, finds them problematic in that they
somehow “licensed vulgar and unenlightened producers to option properties and use
poor artistic judgment in turning them into mediocre musicals written by indifferent
talent for the sake of commodifying a sellable show. This is essentially what has hap-
pened on the Broadway of the last twenty years” (2004, 80). His objections become even
clearer when he objects explicitly to adaptations of “subliterary” material like “a dramat-
ically vacuous movie or television show” (81). In other words, adaptations of suitably
“artistic” sources are acceptable, while those of popular sources are not—a view that,
once again, stems from a distrust of commercialism and popular culture. Finally, I sus-
pect that some of the recent wariness around adaptations is a product of, rather than
404 MICHELLE DVOSKIN

evidence for, the narrative of death and decline; musicals that come after the “golden
age” are perceived as suspect in terms of their artistic quality—no matter what.

Conclusions

Musical theatre is neither dead nor dying, and it is time to move beyond that debate in
our discussions of the form. As I have argued throughout this essay, the “golden age”
narrative of musical theatre history makes this difficult, if not impossible. I believe that
in order to fully engage with musical theatre in all its richness, variety, and nuance, we
must find a way to move past this narrative and, even more specifically, this term. As
Scott Miller says, “Some of the ‘experts’ will tell you [musical theatre’s] dying or dead,
merely because it’s not what it used to be. But the world has changed so much since
George M. Cohan, even since Rodgers and Hammerstein, how could anyone expect a
living art form to remain stagnant when the world is changing around it?” (2007, 238).
We look forward, too often, by looking back, as when John Bush Jones concludes his
book by writing that he “would like to believe that Urinetown,” the satirical 2001 musi-
cal, “is heralding a return to those kinds of shows from past decades in which ‘serious
musical’ and ‘entertaining musical’ were not contradictions in terms” (2003, 358). It’s
difficult not to read this as a somewhat nostalgic longing for the “golden age,” a longing
shared by so many scholars and critics of musical theatre that nonetheless colors his
assessment of Urinetown and his ability to imagine a future for musical theatre.
Moving forward, I hope we can begin to find ways of engaging with musical theatre
that depend less on this prescripted narrative. This is challenging, given the degree to
which this particular story, and its language, has shaped the structure of musical the-
atre history to date. Bruce Kirle notes that “histories of musical theatre abound with
prioritization and privileging of categories. On the one hand, categories and terms
must be acknowledged; on the other hand, they often raise more questions than they
answer” (2005, 18).8 This need to acknowledge the categories—to reiterate the “golden
age” ideology through the use of the terminology, even if we go on to raise necessary
questions—is real and structural; we are limited by the language available to us. Yet
perhaps we can begin to shift the balance more in favor of the questions. For example,
we can embrace one of the challenges David Savran enumerates regarding musical the-
atre historiography and the desire to create coherent narratives and lineages: the way
in which generic and subgeneric classification “is further complicated by the fact that
because all shows fit more than one subgenre, genealogical networks are nearly endless.
Moreover, because genres are defined both formally and historically, which axis are we
to privilege?” (2009, 225). We can work to privilege neither and to draw insight from
the ways in which musicals don’t line up with our assumptions. We can ask whether a
musical is greater “than the sum of the elements,” without assuming we know what that
whole should look like or which element should reign supreme. I share with Sternfeld
 THE POSTWAR MUSICAL 405

and Wollman a “hope that the tendency toward simplistic comparisons of the ‘golden’
past with the tarnished present will fall away” as musical theatre studies continues to
develop as a field (2011, 123).
None of this is to suggest that we should stop discussing the musicals of the
mid-twentieth century, their innovations, or their particular role in US culture. All of
these are crucial topics for musical theatre studies. But it’s time to stop letting them run
the show. Jessica Sternfeld astutely notes that the “hostility” toward megamusicals on
the part of many critics comes, at least in part, “from a resentment of any change in the
style of musical theater,” with many critics simply refusing, consciously or not, to accept
anything outside their experience. Those critics who “have happily (or even unhappily)
kept in touch with the changes,” however, “can evaluate with more discrimination each
megamusical on its own terms” (2006, 81). Her statement rings true for not only mega-
musicals but also musical theatre more broadly; clinging to the past makes us less able to
fairly assess the work of the present. It may well be true that, as Savran provocatively sug-
gests, “no form is as haunted by its golden age” as musical theatre (2009, 224). Musicals
draw on the past; they are connected to one another, from the conventions they use—or
reject—to outright visual or textual citations. But while musicals may converse across
time, they still deserve to be judged “on [their] own terms.” It is my hope that those of us
who study musicals will continue working to lay some of these ghosts to rest.

Notes
1. See also Kislan (1995, 269), Steyn (2000), and Mordden (2004).
2. Her concern is largely driven by her argument that “integration” privileged a more
essentialist view of identity within musical theatre, while earlier musicals’ more theatrical
style encouraged a more performative understanding.
3. See, for example, Banfield (1993), Gordon (1992, 1997), and Swayne (2005).
4. Mark Steyn, to offer one example, is quite critical in Broadway Babies Say Goodnight
(2000).
5. For an excellent discussion of how anxieties around commercialism and cultural status
have traditionally—and problematically—limited scholarship within the field of musical
theatre more broadly, see Savran (2004).
6. For extended discussions about the relationship between art and commerce in musical
theatre, see Rosenberg and Harburg (1993) and Adler (2004).
7. I should note that I don’t believe most scholars consciously make this judgment or would
say they believe in this binary—but because of the ways it has come to structure the
discourses within the field, almost all of us will fall prey to it at some point.
8. Kirle goes on to argue that “the privileging of the serious, integrated musical has skewed
the study of the musical and its relationship to American culture. I am not denigrating the
accomplishments of the integrated musical. I am denigrating the tendency to prioritize
different genres of musical theatre” (2005, 23). While he is primarily focused on earlier
twentieth-century musicals versus the midcentury musicals, his statement rings true for
later musicals as well.
406 MICHELLE DVOSKIN

References
Adler, Steven. 2004. On Broadway:  Art and Commerce on the Great White Way.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Banfield, Stephen. 1993. Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals. Ann Arbor:  University of
Michigan Press.
Bryer, Jackson R., and Richard A. Davison, eds. 2005. The Art of the American
Musical: Conversations with the Creators. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Gordon, Joanne. 1992. Art Isn’t Easy:  The Theater of Stephen Sondheim. Updated Edition.
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———, ed. 1997. Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook. New York: Garland.
Grant, Mark. 2004. The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical. Boston:  Northeastern
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Hischak, Thomas H. 2008. The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and
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Jones, John Bush. 2003. Our Musicals, Ourselves:  A  Social History of the American Musical
Theatre. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press.
Kirle, Bruce. 2005. Unfinished Show Business:  Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Progress.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Kislan, Richard. 1995. The Musical: A Look at the American Musical Theater. Revised Edition.
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Knapp, Raymond. 2004. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity.
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———. 2006. The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton,
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McMillin, Scott. 2006. The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions behind
Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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NH: Heinemann.
Mordden, Ethan. 2003. One More Kiss: The Broadway Musical in the 1970s. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003.
———. 2004. The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway
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Prece, Paul, and William A. Everett. 2008. The Megamusical: The Creation, Internationalisation,
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Everett and Paul R. Laird. Second edition, 250–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Savran, David. 2004. Toward a Historiography of the Popular. Theatre Survey 45, no. 2: 211–17.
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———. 2009. The Do-Re-Mi of Musical Theatre Historiography. In Changing the

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Sternfeld, Jessica. 2006. The Megamusical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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 CHAPTER 26

P O ST WA R P R O T E ST  P L AYS

S . E .  W I L M E R

Protest theatre in the United States is particularly associated with the 1960s, but it
started much earlier and its manifestations continue today. Protest theatre has been
presented in a variety of forms and venues and on numerous topics. Perhaps the most
common type has been street theatre associated with a demonstration or other forms
of social activism, but there have also been agit-prop (agitation and propaganda),
Brechtian, or commedia dell’arte performances, installations, and puppet shows, as well
as fourth-wall naturalist plays in conventional theatres. The topics have ranged from
antimilitarism to feminist anger, from ethnic outrage to gay pride, from environmental
concerns to consumer revolts.
The women’s suffrage movement and the workers’ movement produced many protest
theatre performances at the beginning of the twentieth century. Suffragists organized
pageants and street parades as well as evening entertainments with readings, short per-
formances, and even full-length plays. Both American and British suffragist plays, such
as Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women and Cicely Hamilton’s How the Vote Was Won,
were performed in the United States, in which performers protested against the inferior
status of women in society and demanded the right to vote.
The workers’ movement also fostered plays about poor working conditions, inade-
quate pay, and other grievances. Two of the most noteworthy were the Paterson Strike
Pageant in 1913 and Waiting for Lefty in 1935. The Paterson Strike Pageant involved over
a thousand workers from silk factories in Paterson, New Jersey, marching up Fifth
Avenue and staging the history of their ongoing strike in front of a massive audience
of fifteen thousand spectators in Madison Square Garden. Clifford Odets’s Waiting
for Lefty, which portrayed the plight of workers in various industries at the height of
the Depression and their decision to go on strike, was staged by the Group Theatre in
New York to a rapturous response. Harold Clurman, its director, called it “the birth cry
of the thirties” (1946, 147).
 POSTWAR PROTEST PLAYS 409

The Living Theatre

In the 1960s the social upheaval due to the civil rights movement, the free speech move-
ment, and the demonstrations against the Vietnam War created the climate for the-
atre to become an important vehicle for protest. Such groups as the Living Theatre, El
Teatro Campesino, Bread and Puppet, Spirit House, and San Francisco Mime Troupe
confronted audiences with a wide range of issues. The Living Theatre had been formed
in 1947 by Judith Malina and Julian Beck as an experimental company influenced by
Antonin Artaud’s concept of Theatre of Cruelty as well as the work of Piscator, Brecht,
and Meyerhold, but by the early 1960s their political concerns became paramount as
they staged various productions critiquing the US government and social institutions
and conventions. As anarcho-pacifists, they were jailed in the late 1950s for protest-
ing against the danger posed by the nuclear arms race. Their first major successes were
with Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959), which won awards when it toured to Paris,
and Kenneth Brown’s The Brig (1963). The Connection used improvisation and audience
interaction in a production about jazz musicians and drug addiction. Actors, claiming
that they were real addicts, approached audience members during the interval, asking
for money to buy drugs. The Brig was a fourth-wall production set in a Navy prison, in
which the military officers relentlessly abused the prisoners both physically and psycho-
logically. Presented as a kind of documentary theatre, it raised serious questions about
military procedure. While staging The Brig, the Living Theatre was closed down by fed-
eral authorities for failure to pay back taxes, and the company went abroad where its
members lived a nomadic communal existence before returning to the United States
in 1968.
The period abroad was pivotal in shaping their working methods and political devel-
opment; they produced Frankenstein, with an extraordinary design of a multistory head
of a monster on which the actors performed, and an adaption of the Brecht/Holderlin
Antigone, updated to the Vietnam War. This European phase culminated in Paradise
Now, which fully exploited the techniques of audience interaction and improvisation
developed in The Connection. Based optimistically on the assumption that the perfor-
mance would lead to a social revolution, the cast invaded the auditorium in the first act
and aggressively approached individual spectators to whom they repeated various social
prohibitions such as “I am not allowed to travel without a passport,” “I don’t know how
to stop the wars,” “You can’t live if you don’t have money,” “I’m not allowed to smoke
marijuana,” and “I’m not allowed to take my clothes off.” The whole piece, consisting
of eight acts, or “rungs,” was designed as a protest against social conventions and legal
restrictions, and its flexible structure allowed the performance to be altered from night
to night, often leading to debate among the audience members, which could bring the
performance to a halt and/or lead to political activism, such as parading the audience
out of the theatre to “liberate” the streets.
When the Living Theatre returned to the United States with Paradise Now in 1968,
they discovered that their audiences had changed, having been radicalized by the
410 S. E. WILMER

antiwar movement, student unrest, and black nationalism. The more radical specta-
tors tended to dismiss the theatre’s political activism as too tame compared with the
political urgency of the moment and were offended by the coercive tactics of the per-
formance. Having intended to make their home again in the States, the Living Theatre
altered course and returned to Europe and later separated into four cells in four different
countries to continue their work. Judith Malina and Julian Beck brought their cell to
Brazil, where they developed a play about social oppression and sadomasochism called
Legacy of Cain, to be performed in a favela, but they were imprisoned and returned to
the United States. After Julian Beck died in 1985, Judith Malina continued to run the
company, alternating between the United States, Italy, and being on tour.
The Living Theatre was one of the most controversial theatre companies of its day,
devising new techniques for audience interaction and provocation, creating extraordi-
nary stage images such as in Frankenstein, testing the boundaries of theatre censorship,
and maintaining a communal and nomadic lifestyle around the world. Much of their
work occurred in the streets, where they led demonstrations against prisons and other
institutions and where they frequently protested capital punishment with a play called
Not in My Name.

The San Francisco Mime Troupe

and Bread and Puppet

The San Francisco Mime Troupe was founded in 1959 by Ronnie Davis, and it quickly
developed into one of the best-known activist theatre companies in the United States.
Davis, who had trained as a mime artist and worked at the San Francisco Actor’s Studio,
first called the company the R. G. Davis Mime Studio and Troupe and experimented
with mime techniques. But in 1962, troupe members began to perform outdoors in
San Francisco parks and developed a commedia dell’arte style to appeal to a popular
audience. By 1965 they were challenging the right of the Park Commission to vet their
material. After Davis’s arrest following an infringement, they gained added public-
ity and broad public support. They allied themselves with the free speech movement,
which had been developing on the Berkeley campus from the early 1960s, and presented
plays linked to the civil rights movement (such as The Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a
Cracker Barrel, 1965) and antiwar movement (Joan Holden’s L’Amant Militaire, 1967). In
the 1970s, after Davis departed and Joan Holden took a leading role in the company, the
San Francisco Mime Troupe continued to address a number of national issues, such as
feminism (The Independent Female, or A Man Has His Pride, 1970), class (Frozen Wages,
1972), ethnicity (Frijoles or Beans to You, 1975), and the growing influence of right-wing
values (Factwino Meets the Moral Majority, 1981).
In the 1970s and 1980s their style developed from commedia dell’arte to satirical melo-
drama, addressing current issues in a comic manner, with frequent direct address to
 POSTWAR PROTEST PLAYS 411

the audience. The personnel of the company became more multicultural, and they also
experimented with casting against ethnicity as well as representing a variety of ethnici-
ties in their plays. In 1987 the San Francisco Mime Troupe received a Tony Award for
Regional Theatre as recognition of the high quality of their work. They continued to
stage plays about current issues in San Francisco parks, such as the right-wing poli-
tics of President George W. Bush (1600 Transylvania Avenue, 2001; Mr. Smith Goes to
Obscuristan, 2002).
The Bread and Puppet Theatre, founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann (who had emi-
grated to the United States from Silesia a few years earlier), used puppets made of cheap,
disposable materials to express a wide variety of social concerns. Noted for its giant pup-
pets, which towered over demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the company per-
formed in the streets and in theatres and later on Schumann’s own farm in Vermont. Its
annual Domestic Resurrection Circus (with Schumann baking and giving away home-
made bread as well as stilt-walking and playing the violin) benefited from the voluntary
participation of makers and puppeteers, who camped in tents on the farm for up to a
month before the event, preparing the materials for a collective performance as well as
many side shows. The Domestic Resurrection Circus attracted larger and larger crowds,
numbering up to fifty thousand in the 1990s, until the violent death of an audience
member in 1998. After this tragedy, Schumann cut back on the scale and organized more
manageable weekly events during the summer.
While it was particularly known for its opposition to the Vietnam War (A Man Says
Goodbye to his Mother, 1968; Johnny Comes Marching Home, 1968), the Bread and
Puppet Theatre maintained its opposition to the US government’s heavy-handed for-
eign policy after the war ended, especially its manipulation and exploitation of coun-
tries in Latin America. The company visited and supported leftist regimes in Nicaragua,
Venezuela, and Cuba. It also protested against the 2003 American and British invasion
of Iraq (How to Turn Distress into Success: A Parable of War and Its Making, 2003) and
the Israeli oppression of Palestinians (Daughter Courage, 2006, about Rachel Corrie, an
American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza), as well as environmental issues
and social inequalities.
The membership of the Bread and Puppet Theatre Company was very flex-
ible and varied considerably over the years, from a few performers to a company of
over twenty, with the only permanent fixture being Schumann himself. Often when
Schumann toured abroad, he took a minimum of people and materials with him, col-
lecting performers and making puppets and props in the host venue with local assis-
tants, yet advertising the performance as that of his company. He developed different
kinds of performances for indoor and outdoor audiences. The outdoor events tended
to be short, easily interpreted skits while the indoor performances were longer, more
enigmatic, and thought-provoking pieces with a more complex narrative. Both forms
featured puppets, sculptures, and masked actors, relying more on visual action and
music than dialogue. Schumann placed the emphasis on cheap ephemeral artistic
materials, such as white or dyed cotton sheets, painted papier-mâché masks, and recy-
cled artifacts that could be reused or thrown away. Many examples of their artwork
412 S. E. WILMER

from earlier productions are displayed in their museum on their farm in Glover,
Vermont.

African American Protest Theatre

African Americans used theatre to advocate concerns about racism and inequality, espe-
cially from the 1960s. Earlier forms date back to the 1920s, when plays about Jim Crow
laws and lynchings were written and performed, and when W. E. B. Du Bois, a leading
figure in the Harlem Renaissance, formulated a policy of presenting African American
plays “about . . . by . . . for . . . [and] near” their community.1 Two of the notable African
American protest theatres in the 1960s were the Free Southern Theatre and Spirit House.
The Free Southern Theatre began in 1963, at the height of the civil rights movement
and the voter registration drive in the southern states designed to enfranchise African
Americans. Formed by the African American actors John O’Neal (who remained
with the company off and on for much of its twenty years), Doris Derby, and Gilbert
Moses, and assisted by Richard Schechner, who was teaching at Tulane University in
New Orleans, its initial goal was to promote racial integration through theatre perfor-
mances, workshops, and discussions. Its first production, In White America by Martin
Duberman, was a documentary drama about the history of black and white relations in
America from colonial days to the 1960s. Relying on donations for support, the cast of
three black and three white actors performed the play for free to integrated and all-black
audiences in the deep South when racial integration was being fiercely opposed by
white racists in those areas. The play was updated to take into account current events,
such as the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, and the singing
of freedom songs was added. As racial tension mounted both in the company and in
the country, the Free Southern Theatre became progressively more militant and moved
toward becoming an all-black theatre company, producing Dutchman and The Slave by
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, both of which culminate in racial murders (blacks by whites
in Dutchman and whites by blacks in The Slave). The Free Southern Theatre continued
to perform into the 1970s with John O’Neal returning to the company after a conscien-
tious objector stint, and it began producing forms of community theatre, leading O’Neal
eventually to go off on his own in the late 1970s as a one-man storytelling theatre com-
pany called Junebug Jabbo Jones.
The Free Southern Theatre was an important voice of protest in the early 1960s when
no other theatre company was touring the southern states with plays urging integration.
It performed with mixed-race casts and simple sets for free to mainly all-black audi-
ences in Mississippi at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was highly influential. The cast
suffered intimidation and arrest but nevertheless persevered with their work, running
workshops on creative writing and black history and fostering ethnic pride. When black
nationalism upstaged the civil rights movement, the company developed a more mili-
tant voice and went through many changes of leadership and orientation. After a few
 POSTWAR PROTEST PLAYS 413

years of infrequent activity, a ritualized funeral was held for Free Southern Theatre in
New Orleans in 1985.
LeRoi Jones, after achieving major success with an Off Broadway production of
Dutchman in 1964, was deeply affected by the Harlem riots of 1964 and the increasing
militancy of black nationalism. He changed his name to Amiri Baraka and, criticizing
his own previous work as being too conservative, he advocated a black revolutionary
theatre that would be a “theatre of assault.” He formed the Black Art Repertory Theatre/
School in Harlem with government funding from the antipoverty program, and when
the money ran out, he moved to Newark, New Jersey, to establish a second black arts
center called Spirit House. These two institutions, which organized various types of
classes and events promoting African American culture, presented plays advocating
black nationalism and the overthrow of white hegemony. Charles Patterson’s Black Ice,
which was staged on the streets of Harlem as well as indoors in 1965, portrayed the kid-
napping of a white congressman by four black revolutionaries. When the ransom bid to
free one of their jailed comrades goes awry, the play ends with the congressman being
killed by a female comrade in order to precipitate the revolution. Spirit House also pre-
sented plays of racial violence, including Baraka’s Slave Ship and Black Mass, as well as
the more lighthearted Prayer Meeting; or, The First Militant Preacher by Ben Caldwell.
Black revolutionary theatre reflected an increasingly violent dimension in African
American rhetoric and politics in the mid-1960s. It influenced numerous writers
and artists such as Ed Bullins, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, and August Wilson.
Amiri Baraka later renounced his violent black supremacist stance, adopting a more
Marxist-Leninist position and writing such plays as The Motion of History in 1976 that
advocated class struggle rather than racial violence.

Chicano/a and Native American

Protest Theatre

El Teatro Campesino was founded by Luiz Valdez in 1965 as an agit-prop theatre com-
pany to mobilize the grape pickers during the United Farmworkers (UFW) strike in
California. Valdez, whose parents were migrant farmworkers, wrote his first play (The
Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa) while studying at San Jose State College, and he joined
the San Francisco Mime Troupe as an actor after graduating. When the UFW launched a
strike in 1965, Valdez left the Mime Troupe and, with the agreement of the union leaders,
formed a theatre company that would provide politicized entertainment for the farm-
workers in order to strengthen the strike effort. From serving as the cultural wing of the
UFW, El Teatro Campesino progressed into an independent theatre company, exploring
and expressing Chicano/a cultural identity.
Initially, El Teatro Campesino presented comic bilingual skits that reflected important
issues in the strike. Developed through improvisation, these skits were accompanied by
414 S. E. WILMER

live music and used strong visual images and a very physical and presentational style of
acting. They often took their shows directly into the fields on a flatbed truck, entertain-
ing the farmworkers where they worked and encouraging them to support the strike.
Los Dos Caras del Patroncito (1965), which showed a farmworker swapping roles with
his employer, was a lighthearted piece about the conditions of the Mexican American
farmworker. The boss, who has been exploiting the farmworker, wears a pig’s mask and
complains about the responsibilities of his wealthy lifestyle. When he suggests chang-
ing places with his employee, the farmworker hesitates but then reluctantly agrees. The
farmworker, now wearing the pig’s mask, begins to enjoy his power and exploits the
boss. When the boss wants to change back to his former status, the farmworker refuses.
In exasperation, the boss seeks help from the other farmworkers and the union and ends
up finally calling for a strike.
Although less militant than black revolutionary theatre, El Teatro Campesino
stressed the need for urgent social change. Valdez argued, “There are millions more
where we came from, across the thousand miles of common border between Mexico
and the United States. . . . Listen to these people, and you will hear the first murmur-
ings of revolution” (1971, 100). By the time of the culmination of the UFW action
with its 280-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, El Teatro Campesino had built
up a repertoire of short plays to entertain UFW supporters in some twenty towns
along the way. In 1967 they became increasingly prolific and professional, and they
launched their first national tour, receiving an Obie Award “for creating a worker’s
theatre to demonstrate the politics of survival” (Broyles-Gonzales 1994, 242). In the
same year they separated from the UFW to create a cultural center, first in Del Ray,
California, and later in San Juan Bautista. As they became nationally known, they
spawned a host of other Chicano theatre companies around the country that were
mainly student-based, such as Teatro de la Esperanza formed in 1969 and Teatro de la
Gente in 1970. In 1971 the various teatros founded an organization called TENAZ, El
Teatro Nacional de Aztlán, to coordinate the activities of the different groups in both
the United States and Mexico and to facilitate communication and organize annual
events. As El Teatro Campesino progressed toward being an independent profes-
sional theatre company, their work developed in scope, with longer, more complex
plays. Rather than focusing on the immediate problems of the strike, they produced
plays about Chicano/a identity and a wide variety of grievances. Valdez argued for an
anti-assimilationist approach:

After years of isolation in the barrios of Great Valley slum towns like Delano, after
years of living in labor camps and ranches at the mercy and caprice of growers
and contractors, the Mexican American farmworker is developing his own ideas
about living in the United States. He wants to be equal with all the working men
of the nation, and he does not mean by the standard middle-class route. We are
repelled by the human disintegration of peoples and cultures as they fall apart in
this Great Gringo Melting Pot, and determined that this will not happen to us.
(1971, 99–100)
 POSTWAR PROTEST PLAYS 415

One of their best-known plays against assimilation was Los Vendidos (1967), which par-
odied the US government policy of assimilation. Set in a store selling Mexican American
stereotypes, the salesman displays his wares to Miss Jimenez, who, denying her ethnic
identity, wants to buy a safe type of Mexican American for the governor who needs “a
brown face in the crowd” at his luncheon. The salesman shows her various products
such as the farmworker, the revolutionary, and the pachuco (gangster), all of which
she rejects until he demonstrates his assimilationist model Eric, who can “function on
boards.” She is persuaded to buy him after hearing him make a patriotic speech. As she
hands over the money to the salesman, the models show their true colors and attack her,
and, after chasing her out of the shop, they split the proceeds.
In addition to plays about assimilation, El Teatro Campesino portrayed grievances
with the Vietnam War such as Vietnam Campesino, which implied that the Chicano/a
farmworkers had more in common with the Vietnam peasantry than with the American
government, and Soldado Razo. The US military conscription policies were shown to
discriminate against the poor and the minorities with many thousands of Chicanos
dying in battle. After moving to San Juan Bautista in the 1970s, the theatre company
continued to produce plays that explored Chicano/a identity, such as La Carpa de los
Rasquachis and Fin del Mundo, and often investigated links with Aztec and Mayan spiri-
tuality. After 2000, the three sons of Luiz Valdez took an increasingly active role in the
company, with Luiz Valdez updating old productions and writing new plays, such as
Mummified Deer (2002).
Native Americans also used theatre to call attention to their grievances over bro-
ken treaties, land rights, and racism. Such plays as Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian
and William S. Yellow Robe’s The Independence of Eddie Rose and performances by
the Spiderwoman and Coatlicue theatre companies focused on the difficult circum-
stances in which Native Americans live. Monique Mohica’s play Princess Pocahontas
and the Blue Spots provided a parodic history of the stereotyping of Native women
in North America since the arrival of Columbus. Mohica, a Kuna/Rappahannock
writer and actor, was born in New York, the daughter of one of the founders of the
Spiderwoman theatre company. Later she moved to Toronto, where she founded
Native Earth Performing Arts. Her play consists of short scenes with two actors (origi-
nally performed by Mohica and Alejandra Nuñez) playing twenty-three characters,
both historical and fictional, including Princess Buttered-on-Both-Sides, Malinche,
a trickster figure, and the historical Pocahontas. Lampooning the stereotypical fig-
ures of Indian maidens in American films, the trickster figure announces, “For the
talent segment of the Miss North American Indian Beauty Pageant, I shall dance for
you, in savage splendor, the ‘Dance of the Sacrificial Corn Maiden’, and proceed to
hurl myself over the precipice, all for the loss of my one true love, CAPTAIN JOHN
WHITEMAN.” The plight of historical characters such as Pocahontas and Malinche
and the Métis are revealed in tragic detail, as well as the ongoing struggle of Native
women to survive as individuals rather than as someone else’s stereotype, summed up
in the Cheyenne saying, “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are
on the ground.”
416 S. E. WILMER

Antiwar Theatre

During the Vietnam War, many other groups and playwrights lent their opposition to the
war. One of the most influential plays was Daniel Berrigan’s The Trial of the Catonsville
Nine (1970), a documentary drama set in a courtroom about a group of individuals who
took direct action to protest against military conscription by destroying draft cards.
Berrigan, who was a Roman Catholic priest, makes an impassioned plea from the dock
to defend his actions to prevent young men from being sent to war. David Rabe also
contributed hard-hitting plays about the consequences of the war, such as Sticks and
Bones (1969), about the disastrous effects on a normal middle-class family when their
son comes home as a disabled veteran, as well as The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel
(1971) and Streamers (1976). Megan Terry wrote Viet Rock (1966), a full-length play with
rock music critiquing the war that was staged by Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre, an experi-
mental theatre group that did not normally engage in political theatre. MacBird! (1967)
by Barbara Garson used parodies of Shakespearean characters and plots to critique the
Lyndon Johnson administration and the assassination of Kennedy.
Many street actions, protest marches, and demonstrations verged into performance
during this period. Guerrilla theatre groups were formed to present street theatre.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippie movement encouraged a crowd of one
hundred thousand antiwar protestors at the Lincoln Memorial in October 1967 to try
to levitate the Pentagon. One of the most surprising organizations was the Vietnam
Veterans against the War (VVAW), who staged antiwar street theatre such as Operation
Rapid American Withdrawal (1970), “a four day search-and-destroy operation.” The
VVAW in their performances created an alternative vision of the American war hero.
Rather than representing the clean-cut soldier fighting for a moral cause, the VVAW
showed the brutal tactics of American soldiers in their victimization of innocent civil-
ians. Likewise, they themselves played a new role in society: that of the antiwar soldier.
William Crandell, one of the VVAW members who participated in the four-day protest
march, described their form of street theatre: “Along the route, while veterans of other
wars denounced our long hair and our message, we staged typical Vietnam War inci-
dents with members of the Philadelphia Guerrilla Theater and Nurses for Peace. They
played civilians whom we roughed up, rounded up, and took away” (1992, 144).
The VVAW filmed the proceedings and interviewed the veterans en route from
Morristown to Valley Forge. One of the VVAW members explained their work: “What
we’re doing with these incidents is we’re trying to let these people know what it feels like
to be Vietnamese trying to show them by not playing with yellow people, [but] play-
ing with white middle American people, let them know what it’s like to have no politi-
cal freedom and have someone come and impose their will on you” (Ofield 1971). The
New York Times reported,

While passing through this rural Somerset County [of New Jersey] community, the
marchers attempted to dramatize what they said it was actually like when American
 POSTWAR PROTEST PLAYS 417

soldiers passed through a South Vietnamese village. In a series of staged incidents,

the marchers seized a private home just north of here and in a mock enactment
of a combat operation, terrorized its occupants, all of whom had agreed earlier to
participate in the demonstration. Less than an hour later, a “search-and-destroy
patrol” moved ahead of the main column into the downtown section here [in
Bernardsville, NJ]. While a state police helicopter whirred overhead and dozens of
townspeople looked on, the patrol seized a young woman who had been planted
there earlier by the marchers and dragged her away, shouting obscenities and abuse
at her. (New York Times 1970)

The scenes were realistic not only for the spectators but also for the soldiers-turned-
actors. Occasionally they evoked psychological flashbacks for the ex-soldiers. William
Crandell recalled,

During one frightening moment we realized that an ex-marine who was using his old
K-Bar knife to simulate torturing a prisoner had lost control and was not simulating
any more. His brother vets calmed him down before he harmed anyone. Some of the
“detainees” in our staged incidents were treated more roughly than we intended, and
I remember very clearly my shock at how concerted an effort I had to make to keep
my finger off the trigger of my dummy submachine gun. (1992, 144)

Feminist and Gay Theatre

In the late 1960s, the feminist movement and the gay and lesbian rights movements
became more visible. As women grew more aware of their disadvantaged position
in society, they used theatre to agitate for a variety of social improvements: advance-
ment in employment, equal wages for equal work, childcare facilities, measures to
curb violence against women, the right to abortion, and so forth. Theatre had been a
male-dominated medium, with male directors and writers and gravitating toward
male themes, and women had played stereotypical roles such as the seducing, corrupt-
ing, or enslaving woman who limits the male’s freedom. From the late 1960s a surge of
feminist-inspired theatrical activity resulted. According to Linda Walsh Jenkins, writing
in 1987, “Approximately 150 feminist groups . . . produced theatre events in the US since
the 60’s, and in the mid-80’s more than 30 were still active, with new groups forming
as older ones closed” (Chinoy and Jenkins 1987, 287). While many of these groups did
not last long (only Spiderwoman, Split Britches, and Horizons: Theatre from a Woman’s
Perspective survived into the 1990s), they provided a strong critique of male dominance,
creating radical new forms of theatre. Many feminists adopted the technique of using a
collective female protagonist (rather than a central male protagonist), such as in Ntozake
Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1977) or
Cherríe Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost (1986). Another technique was to abandon the lin-
ear narrative form and produce something more arbitrary or circular. Common themes
418 S. E. WILMER

included matriarchy (The Daughters Cycle by the Women’s Experimental Theatre) and
mourning (Letters Home by Rose Leiman Goldemberg, based on the letters of Sylvia
Plath), violence against women (At the Foot of the Mountain’s Raped: A Woman’s Look
at Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule, 1976, and Carolyn Levy’s Until Someone
Wakes Up, 1992), and strong women from the past (Megan Terry’s Approaching Simone,
about the French political activist Simone Weil, and Little Flags’ production of Emma
about Emma Goldman).
Some performers, such as Carolee Schneeman and Karen Finley, used their naked
bodies to defantasize the female form and reclaim it as their own. Schneeman, in Interior
Scroll (1975), read from a minutely folded scroll that she pulled from her vagina, listing
grievances against the male-dominated film profession and her dismissal by a fellow film
artist whom she quoted as saying to her, “We think of you as a dancer” (Schneeman 1979,
239). Karen Finley disrupted the erotic image of her nude body (which she smeared with
chocolate or honey or other substances) in such performances as The Constant State
of Desire (1986), with a text replete with scatological description and invective against
men. Rather than acting like a stripper who meekly offers herself to the male viewer,
Finley attacked male oppression and highlighted themes of female degradation, sexual
abuse, and incest in her stage persona of an “unsocialized woman” or “banshee.”
When she visited Britain to perform, Finley was told that she and the ICA theatre pre-
senting her show might be prosecuted. She commented,

I was outraged by the fact that Britain’s major newspapers publish photos of
half-naked women every day, but here was everyone saying that it was illegal for me
to take off my clothes in the course of an art piece. In other words, if a woman was
passive and showed her naked body for the pleasure of men, that was OK. But if she
took control of her own nudity, used it to expose abuse and exploitation, then she
was subject to arrest. (2000, 40)

Both Schneeman and Finley, as well as other performers, used deconstructive strategies
to challenge the normative image of the female body and disrupt the male gaze. Martha
Rosler had her body carefully measured by two males in Vital Statistics (1973), after
which she and other women listed forms of female degradation and then proceeded to
purify their bodies. According to Jeanie Forte, “Countless others perform in the nude,
not as actresses providing anonymous titillation for an audience, but actual women
simultaneously revealing their vulnerability and their sexuality. They literally expose the
female body as a sign while also reclaiming it as their own, in defiance of the oppressive
system of representation and patriarchal encoding” (Chinoy and Jenkins 1987, 379).
Public rituals and demonstrations such as “Take Back the Night” were organized by
women to call attention to danger from rapists and pornography. Split Britches (with
Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw) produced satirical sketches and plays based on known
scripts where they played with and inverted gender roles. Weaver explained, “We just
tried to tell our stories the best way we could and . . . we wanted to reclaim a lot of roles
that had been denied us—to be fat if we wanted to be fat, and to be a country west-
ern singer even if we couldn’t sing, and to be Juliet if we were sixty.” In particular, Split
 POSTWAR PROTEST PLAYS 419

Britches presented lesbian actors on stage parodying heterosexual roles and dressing in
gender-stereotyped costumes, which they would inhabit and alienate.
One of the best-known pieces of feminist protest theatre, which has been produced
worldwide, was Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues (1996). Based on interviews that she
had conducted with more than two hundred women about their vaginas and using only
a high stool, a microphone, and index cards as an aide-memoire and set against a back-
ground of delicate red drapes subtly reminiscent of labia, Ensler recounted personal
stories of denial, discovery, exploration, masturbation, physical abnormalities, medical
examinations, heterosexual and lesbian sex, orgasms, genital mutilation, rape, and birth.
Between the stories, she supplied facts both about the virtues of female genitalia and
their violent abuse. Beginning with the acknowledgment that many women have been
made to feel ashamed about their vaginas, the piece proceeds to emphasize the organ’s
extraordinary structure and attributes. On one level, the piece serves as upbeat sexual
education, celebrating the various features of the vagina. As such, it acts as a riposte
to Sigmund Freud’s notion of “penis envy,” countering it with “vagina envy” and pro-
viding the females in the audience with feelings of recognition, relief, satisfaction, and
solidarity. On another level, the piece provides valuable insight into the violence that is
commonly perpetrated against women. Despite the graphic explicitness of some of the
material, The Vagina Monologues maintains audience empathy by conveying its message
mainly through the personal and poignant experiences of the various women that Ensler
interviewed. Initially performed by Ensler as a one-woman show, it became a vehicle
for star-studded casts (including, among others, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, and Lily
Tomlin) to reclaim female sexuality and call attention to violence against women.
Gay protest theatre came into prominence at roughly the same time as feminist the-
atre. The gay liberation movement used theatre to challenge heterosexual norms with
drag acts, camp theatre (such as Charles Ludlum’s the Ridiculous Theatrical Company
and Ronald Tavel’s the Playhouse of the Ridiculous), as well as realistic plays like
Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979), about gay prisoners in a German concentration camp,
and Harvey Fierstein’s Tony Award–winning Torch Song Trilogy (1982), consisting of
three one-act plays about gay lifestyles, and musicals such as Fierstein and Herman’s La
Cage Aux Folles (1983). The AIDS crisis in the early 1980s produced a host of new plays
and performances, such as The AIDS Show (1984), which started life at the Rhinoceros
Theatre in San Francisco and then toured the country, and Larry Kramer’s The Normal
Heart (1985), which accused the New  York City government of failing to acknowl-
edge the crisis and implied that Mayor Koch was a closet homosexual and feared risk-
ing exposure if he acted. As Is by William Hoffman (1985), Tony Kushner’s Angels in
America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Part One in 1991 and Part Two in 1992),
and Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent (1996) all depicted tragic gay love stories affected by
the crisis.
More recently, gay protest theatre has dealt with other issues such as homophobic hate
crimes, as in The Laramie Project (2000), written by Moisés Kaufman and the members
of Tectonic Theater Project. The Laramie Project was a documentary drama based on
hundreds of interviews conducted by members of the theatre company concerning the
420 S. E. WILMER

murder of Matthew Shepard, a young, gay student. The play investigates the prevailing
norms of Laramie, Wyoming, and the circumstances that led to such a hate crime being
committed.
Tim Miller, who was victimized as one of the four theatre artists (along with Karen
Finley, Holly Hughes, and John Fleck) whose NEA grants were vetoed by the chairman
of the NEA in 1990 because their work was considered too controversial, toured the
United States for thirty years with one-man shows on gay-related issues, such as homo-
phobic violence and same-sex marriage. For example, in his autobiographical play The
Glory Box (1999), Miller discusses personal experiences such as gay sex, homophobic
violence, his relationship with his Australian partner, and his frustrating campaign for
gay marriage.

Post- 9/11 Protest Theatre

The attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent US-led inva-
sion of Afghanistan and the introduction by the US government of the Patriot Act and
other repressive security measures, led to a reaction among leftist groups in the United
States. The planning of the US and British invasion of Iraq in March 2003 provoked
a national protest. Concerned groups such as Not in Our Name and Theatres against
War (THAW) organized protest events, readings, and performances. Tony Kushner’s
Homebody/Kabul (2001), which had been written before the invasion of Afghanistan,
and The Bomb (2002) by the International WOW Company both focused attention
on the impending invasion, as did Harold Pinter’s speech at Turin University, which
described

the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and

belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging
war against the rest of the world. . . . It is obvious, however, that the United States is
bursting at the seams to attack Iraq. I believe that it will do this—not just to take
control of Iraqi oil—but because the US administration is now a bloodthirsty wild
animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. (Pinter 2002)

THAW organized what Marvin Carlson has called

the most extensive and coordinated political statement by theatre artists that
New York had ever seen. Hundreds of theatre artists were involved and over 120
separate theatre organizations participated. These ranged from groups long
involved with political action, like the Living Theatre, to newly emerged groups
like International WOW, from well-known Off-Broadway theatres like the Classic
Stage Company to small but significant venues for performance art like Dixon
Place, feminist theatres like the Women’s Project, the New Georges, or WOW
Café and ethnic theatres like the Pregones, the Thalia Spanish Theatre, InTar, the
 POSTWAR PROTEST PLAYS 421

Kazbah Project, or the Slant Performance Group. On 2 March, performances,

demonstrations, and readings opposing the projected war in Iraq were held
throughout the day and night in all five boroughs in New  York and in theatres
from large Broadway houses to the smallest Off-Off Broadway theatres (Carlson
2004, 10).
Simultaneously, Kathryn Blume, a New York actor and playwright, and Sharron Bower,
a casting director, organized a coordinated action on March 3, 2003, by theatre artists in
fifty-two countries across the world with more than one thousand readings and perfor-
mances of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.
Echoing the VVAW, a new generation of ex-soldiers, Iraq Veterans against the War,
adopted guerrilla theatre as a tactic to protest against the ongoing military occupa-
tion of Iraq from 2004 on. Members of the IVAW created a performance event called
“Operation First Casualty,” in which they brought the war home to Americans by invad-
ing city streets wearing army fatigues and reenacting raids on Iraqi citizens in such cities
as New York, Denver, Boston, and San Francisco.
The Bush/Cheney presidency prompted a host of comic artists and satirists pro-
testing against the reactionary measures introduced by the US government between
2001 and 2008. Comedians adopted subversive overidentification as a tactic for ridi-
culing the administration, such as Stephen Colbert’s impersonation of a right-wing
commentator sympathetic to President George W. Bush at the 2006 Washington press
corps dinner where he proceeded to praise the president for not listening to criticism.
Similar tactics have been employed in the impersonations of corporate businessmen
by the Yes Men. In 2004, they fooled BBC News by pretending that they were repre-
sentatives of Dow Chemical and were interviewed live, accepting responsibility for
the Bhopal disaster (in which thousands of people in India were killed or injured)
and indicating that they were going to fully compensate the victims. During the 2004
presidential election, the Yes Men also encouraged Bush supporters to sign a “Patriot
Pledge,” agreeing to keep nuclear waste in their gardens and send their children off
to war. Billionaires for Bush (or Gore), who dressed up in corporate suits and were
especially active during the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004, also adopted
the tactic of subversive affirmation, defending tax breaks for the rich and encouraging
more wars. What seems unusually powerful about this tactic is that it does not seem
dependent on a particular activist theatre group. Anyone in the United States could
start a group of Billionaires for Bush and stage street theatre. The theme of Billionaires
for Bush could spread rhizomatically, with groups across the country reading about it
and imitating it, with the media recording outrageous local events that increased their
power. Andrew Boyd, the creator of Billionaires for Bush, explained this new form of
“meme warfare”:

The Billionaires virus was virulent partly because it was a carrier on the mega-virus
of the President campaign itself. It was designed to appeal to the media: it was timely,
visual, funny, and accessible. It was familiar yet different: a new and provocative way
to say what everybody already secretly thought. The virus attached easily to a range
422 S. E. WILMER

of physical and semantic “carriers”—logo, posters, slogans, fake radio ads, street
actions, email. Buzz, laughter, media story, etc.—and we introduced it into the media
stream in a manner calculated to maximize its propagation. Content and humor
were tightly meshed. Not only did the humor help carry the content (in the way that
laughter makes it easier to bear the truth), but if the media wanted the humor (and
they did), they had to take the content too. The materials were catchy and accessible
and the action model was easy to DIY. Thus the meme “spread, replicated, and
mutated.” (Boyd 2002, 373)

Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse have explained that the tactic of subversive affirmation is an
artistic/political tactic that allows artists/activists to take part in certain social, political,
or economic discourses and to affirm, appropriate, or consume them while simultane-
ously undermining them. It is characterized precisely by the fact that with affirmation
there simultaneously occurs a distancing from, or revelation of, what is being affirmed.
In subversive affirmation there is always a surplus that destabilizes affirmation and turns
it into its opposite (2006, 6).
Another subversive anti-Bush administration performance was the Waterboard Thrill
Ride in Coney Island that highlighted the US interrogation techniques of suspected ter-
rorists. In this installation, designed by Steve Powers in a disused storefront at the Coney
Island amusement park in 2008, patrons could put a dollar in a slot and peer through a
small window with prison bars to watch a simulated water torture with life-sized ani-
mated figures. One figure in an orange jumpsuit lies strapped to the floor with his eyes
covered by a towel while another leans over him and pours water into his mouth and
nose while he convulses for fifteen seconds. According to the New York Times, “In inter-
rupting a day at the beach with scenes of the United States government’s rougher prac-
tices, Mr. Powers is being deliberately provocative. ‘What’s more obscene,’ he asks, ‘the
official position that waterboarding is not torture, or our official position that it’s a thrill
ride?’ ”2
Many other artists have used forms of protest theatre to address current social issues
such as environmental questions, immigration, and capitalism. Reverend Billy (William
Talen) of the Church of Stop Shopping adopted the role of an evangelical preacher
in street theatre and interventions in major shopping centers to denounce the con-
sumer practices of America as the work of the devil, asking, “what would Jesus buy?”
Guillermo Gómez-Peña has created outlandish costumes and installations consisting
of stereotypical artifacts from different cultures to call attention to the condition of
Mexican Americans who live in a psychological borderland between two countries. In
his Artifact Piece (1987), James Luna placed himself in an exhibition case in a museum to
call attention to the treatment of Native Americans as curiosities. These artists and many
others used theatre and performance practices to challenge the status quo and work for
social change.
Postwar protest theatre in the United States took on many guises and forms,
addressing various issues and concerns. While it has been said that the best play-
wrights in theatre history have been subversive of social norms, much theatre tends
 POSTWAR PROTEST PLAYS 423

to maintain the status quo, to entertain and occasionally to educate. Protest theatre
is different in that it campaigns for social change. Its strategies for achieving social
change are extensive, such as a direct address to the audience about specific social
problems, documentary drama revealing injustice, metatheatrical entertainment
that parodies social practices and values, and performance art and installations that
cause surprise and revelation. One of the more recent developments has been the
increasing use of the tactic of subversive affirmation. Groups like the Yes Men and
Billionaires for Bush and comics like Stephen Colbert overidentify with the opposi-
tion to undermine their authority and call their values into question in an entertain-
ing but, at the same time, disturbing manner. Their tactics are media-friendly and
can proliferate into the public sphere, undermining the authority of the establish-
ment and empowering the marginalized. It will be interesting to see how their inspi-
ration spreads in the future.3

Notes
1. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre
Movement,” in James Hatch and Leo Hamalian, eds., Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance
1920–1940 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 447.
2. Ariel Kaminer, “Coney Island Sideshow Has Guantánamo Theme,” New York Times, August
5, 2008. See also “ ‘It Don’t Gitmo Better’: Scenes from the Coney Island Waterboarding
Thrill Ride,” TDR: The Drama Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 139–45.
3. Some sentences in this essay appeared earlier in Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging
American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Works Cited
Arns, Inke, and Sylvia Sasse. 2006. Subversive Affirmation:  On Mimesis as a Strategy of
Resistance. Maska 21, no. 3–4, 5–21.
Boyd, Andrew. 2002. Truth Is a Virus: Meme Warfare and the Billionaires for Bush (or Gore). In
Cultural Resistance Reader, edited by Stephen Duncombe, 369–378. New York: Verso.
Broyles-Gonzales, Yolanda. 1994. El Teatro Campesino:  Theater in the Chicano Movement.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Carlson, Marvin. May 2004. 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq: The Response of the New York Theatre.
Theatre Survey 45, no. 1, 3–17.
Chinoy, Helen, and Linda Jenkins, eds. 1987. Women in American Theatre. Revised Edition.
New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Clurman, Harold. 1946. The Fervent Years:  The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties.
London: Dennis Dobson.
Crandell, William F. 1992. They Moved the Town: Organizing Vietnam Veterans against the
War. In Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Anti-War Movement, edited by Melvin Small and
William Hoover, 141–54. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
424 S. E. WILMER

Finley, Karen. 2000. A Different Kind of Intimacy. New York: Thunder Mouth’s Press.

New York Times. September 5, 1970.
Ofield, Jack, dir. 1971. Different Sons. Bowling Green Films.
Pinter, Harold. 2002. Honorary doctorate speech given at Turin University, November 27. www.
haroldpinter.org/home/turinunispeech.html.
Schneeman, Carolee. 1979. Interior Scroll. In Carolee Schneeman, More Than Meat
Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings, edited by Bruce McPherson. New
Paltz, NY: Documentext.
Valdez, Luis. 1971. The Tale of La Raza. In The Chicanos: Mexican American Voices, edited by Ed
Ludwig and James Santibanez, 95–100. Baltimore, MD: Penguin.
 CHAPTER 27

F E M I N I S T  DR A M A

D OROT H Y C HA N SK Y

A.

In 2009, an alliance of feminist theatre activists created a project called “50/50 in 2020.”
Its major goal is gender parity for professional women theatre artists by the end of the
century’s second decade. Also in 2009, Emily Glassberg Sands made news with research
showing that not only was the work of women playwrights less likely to be produced
than that of their male counterparts, but that female artistic directors were the worst
perpetrators of the unequal treatment. Sands’s Princeton honors thesis (in econom-
ics) used exhaustive quantitative methods as well as a study in which the same plays
were sent to numerous artistic directors of American theatres sometimes under a
man’s name and sometimes under a woman’s (Cohen 2009; Sands 2009). Qualitative
analysis revealed that, despite an increase in the number and visibility of women in the
professional theatre, work by men was read as “universal,” while women’s plays were
perceived as particular, not of broad appeal, and ultimately not as important. These
responses echoed those of a 2002 study sponsored by the New York State Council on
the Arts, whose findings also included sobering statistics about the paucity of women in
high-paying theatre positions and of women’s plays either on Broadway or in regional
theatres. Women support theatre presumably more than men do (at least as audience
members) but are chary of work by other women, whether or not this work is coded as
feminist (Jonas and Bennett 2002).

B.

In 2009, the Pulitzer Prize for drama was awarded to Lynn Nottage for Ruined, her
pull-no-punches play about the ubiquity of rape, sexism, and trafficking in women in
Congo’s civil war. Nottage was the second woman in less than a decade to win a national
426 DOROTHY CHANSKY

award for a play that dealt with politics, history, and the raced body. Suzan-Lori Parks
won the Tony—Broadway’s highest award—in 2002 for Topdog/Underdog, which treats
the lingering effects of racism coupled with a kind of rancid American Dream in the
United States. If these plays seem somehow outside an imagined mainstream, or per-
haps minoritarian in focus or interest, one would do well to think of them alongside
Julie Taymor’s 1997 Tony for directing The Lion King (the first woman to win this award
for directing a musical), Garry Hynes’s 1998 Tony for directing Translations (the first
woman to win for directing a play), the 2013 double header of women winners of Tonys
both for direction of a play (Pam MacKinnon for the revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf) and for direction of a musical (Diane Paulus for the revival of Pippin), and Wendy
Wasserstein’s 1989 Tony and Pulitzer for The Heidi Chronicles, arguably the best-known
play of the last fifty years to address feminism head-on. Women have cracked the high-
est of glass ceilings in the competitive realm of New York theatre, and the work for which
they have won awards for writing and directing is edgy, original, and frequently decid-
edly feminist.

C.

In 2005, the scholar Erin Striff noted that Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues had
earned over $25 million for women’s causes over a period of seven years. The play, a
series of monologues based on interviews Ensler conducted with more than two hun-
dred woman of many ages, ethnic groups, nations, and classes, presents feelings rang-
ing from shame to curiosity to pleasure to outrage concerning female genitalia and it
does so in the voices of numerous characters that can be embodied by one or a few or
dozens of actresses. Its overarching theme is that women should not experience shame
or punishment because of their bodies. Since opening in 1996, The Vagina Monologues
has been presented in thousands of community venues, including college campuses,
as a fund-raiser in the movement to stop violence against women. Feminist critics in
the academy have repeatedly expressed dismay at this work that, “universal” and “real”
(read testimonial and personal) though it may seem in its appeal, reduces women to
their anatomy, maintaining its popularity because it manages to assuage and titillate at
the same time. Yet, as Striff argues, a partially compromised feminist message is prefer-
able to no feminist message at all when the play “attracts non-traditional theatre audi-
ences, as well as inspiring them to care about women’s issues” (85).

In a concession to the obvious, this essay proper begins with an introduction com-
prising one from column A, one from column B, and one from column C above.
Entrenched ideas about gender continue in the twenty-first century to block egalitari-
anism in the United States in a kind of self-policing, overridden-best-intentions uni-
verse that is clearly manifest in the theatre industry (A). Awareness about sexism has
generated extraordinary dramatic work that has been recognized, honored, and even
 FEMINIST DRAMA 427

canonized (B). Theorists in the academy see, with frustration, that mainstream aware-
ness lags behind insights available to the long-schooled (C). The work that feminist
theatre continues to do, however, is neither of a single stripe nor completed. Cultural
analysts know that feminism is often eschewed, especially by younger women. Those
born after 1970 may take for granted the rights earned and enacted as law in the last half
century and may also assume that weighing the merits of having a career against those
of staying at home is a balanced “choice” they can make with no potential loss of respect,
buying power, or available options if they take the stay-at-home option. As Laura Kipnis
notes, however, “Femininity assumes that the world isn’t going to change and endeav-
ors to secure advantages for women on that basis. . . . Feminism assumes that things can
change—even men—and bets the bankroll on gender progress” (2006, 6).
American feminist theatre of the last sixty-plus years has bet the bankroll on gender
progress, whether or not all feminists have agreed that every practitioner has wagered
for high enough stakes. This essay aims to foreground the most recognizable categories
of feminist dramatic work undertaken since shortly after World War II and to offer a
framework for understanding and contextualizing its major playwrights and theorists.
It focuses on work that is accessible (largely in print) to readers, although work that was
never published as well as ephemeral performance pieces were also crucial to the field.
Key concerns here are to clarify what made and makes these playwrights’ and theorists’
work major even though as a corpus the work is not always congruent. In nearly every
case, the artists whose output is presented have or have had detractors as well as champi-
ons; in some instances the detractors are not or were not critics or scholars but rather an
indifferent public that votes with its feet regarding avant-garde theatre. The use of made/
makes; have/have had; and are/were is not mere waffling. One of the pleasures of exam-
ining sixty-plus years of work from its far side rather than merely assessing a moment
in medias res is that the long view affords a look at evolving opinion and resilient plays.
(See Collins 2009.)
In the fifteen years before and just as the women’s movement gathered steam with
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) to rock the world of inequality in every-
thing from basic property and medical rights to a harassment-free workplace and girls’
sports programs in public schools, a handful of women playwrights, working largely
in the realm of realism, penned dramas that opened in New York and depicted female
characters refusing to capitulate to the gender status quo. These were precursors to the
so-called Second Wave of American feminism. “Second Wave” acknowledges that the
surge of activism in the 1960s revitalized concerns articulated at the 1848 Seneca Falls
convention, which focused on suffrage and equal rights. This first “wave” crested and
then faded after women won the vote, but not many other rights, in 1920. Fay Kanin’s
Goodbye, My Fancy (1949), which exceeded four hundred performances on Broadway
and was selected as one of the ten best plays of the year for the Best Plays series by its
then-editor, John Chapman, depicts a congresswoman, Agatha Reed, returning to her
alma mater and challenging its president on his capitulation to a wealthy donor who
would ban a graphic war film in order to shield female students from the political reali-
ties of their world. Agatha’s bond with the president’s idealistic daughter, a graduating
428 DOROTHY CHANSKY

senior, foregrounds the importance of women’s education being more than prepping
for wealthy wifedom. Kanin was an unabashedly commercial writer; the play is also
unabashedly feminist, even if its principles work best for the privileged and educated
woman who will not lose her livelihood or children for standing up for what she believes.
Alice Childress, a South Carolina native who began her theatre career with Harlem’s
American Negro Theatre in 1941, penned several plays in response to “her powerless-
ness to dismantle stock female roles and to construct the type of roles she wanted to
see performed,” situating “the various social positions of the black woman as discrete
issues within her feminist ideology” (Jennings 1995, 4, x). In Florence (1949), an African
American woman prepares to travel north to bring home her daughter, an actress frus-
trated by being cast as only maids. The mother changes her mind when she realizes that
the white woman with theatre connections who offers to help would hire the daughter
as an actual maid. The mother decides to support her daughter’s dream, upbraids the
white liberal, and turns around for home. Childress’s Trouble in Mind (1955) depicts an
African American actress, Wiletta, who challenges an arrogant white director unwilling
to see her point about the stupidity and racism behind the role in which she has been
cast. The director cannot deal with (black and) female anger, but in the end, the mul-
tiracial cast backs Wiletta, supporting her idea of female subjectivity, voice, and activ-
ism. Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness (1966) features a savvy but uneducated African
American woman, Tommy, who stands up to the black painter and liberals (including
a black social worker) who would use her as a model for a debased, “messed-up” black
womanhood in need of recuperation to a kind of Madison Avenue pan-Africanism.
By speaking up for herself, Tommy educates both the play’s social worker and painter
characters as well as the audience about class- and race-based sexism. Jane Bowles, a
lesbian New Yorker best known as a novelist and the wife of the writer and composer
Paul Bowles, wrote In the Summer House, which opened on Broadway at the end of
1953. With its sometimes lyrical language and its focus on women who could be vio-
lent, capricious, and intensely loving, the play puzzled many. But the focus on female
familial relations was unusual, and both Tennessee Williams and Brooks Atkinson were
fans of Bowles’s poetic, subjective style, the latter calling her play Chekhovian. Louis
Kronenberger included Summer House as one of the ten best plays in the 1953–54 vol-
ume of the Best Plays series. A later critic called one Summer House speech “an aria that
really turns this play towards feminism, stressing the stifling patriarchy that shaped . . . a
sour woman [who] recounts a dream in which her father’s legacy to her . . . was a ‘hollow
shell’ of a sweet macaroon, ‘filled with dust” (Rosen 1993, 35). The play also suggests that
“husbands are mainly useful to support women who cannot support themselves” and it
zeroes in on female familial bonds even as it presents a “radically unsentimental view of
maternity” (Barlow 1994, xxii).
In the 1960s a new kind of feminist work took root as the emergent world of Off
Off Broadway provided a welcoming community for writers wholly outside of any
notion of mainstream theatre. Two of the most significant of these feminist play-
wrights are Adrienne Kennedy and Maria Irene Fornes. Each won an a Obie Award
(Off Broadway’s equivalent of a Tony or Oscar) in the mid-1960s; each was honored in
 FEMINIST DRAMA 429

the 1990s with a season at New York’s Signature Theatre (which presents the works of a
single playwright for a full season each year, in these two cases including new world pre-
mieres); each largely eschews realism.
Kennedy’s work is unapologetically autobiographical, her earliest plays featur-
ing frightening portraits of tormented young black women whose lives are nonlinear
nightmares unfolding in shifting locales and whose identities are fractured due to the
collision of images from movies, legacies of interracial rape, and the values inculcated
by higher education on a white, Eurocentric model. Kennedy’s exposing, by means of
theatre, “taboo subjects . . . [including] female oppression years before they were freely
staged elsewhere” (Kolin 2005, 26) is evident in Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964, for which
she won the Obie), a play in which the tormented Sarah goes crazy because her black
ancestry collides with her white education. Her alter egos include Patrice Lumumba
and Queen Victoria. The 1965 The Owl Answers also features a young woman, Clara,
torn apart by her mixed-race/mixed-message identity. Unable to reconcile her anglo-
philia, the white father who disowns her because of her blackness, and the raped domes-
tic mother who guarantees that she will always be punished for her femaleness, Clara
becomes an owl. A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976) again features a pro-
tagonist named Clara, a writer, who projects her (black) identity through (white) iconic
film stars, pointing out, among other things, how talented black women were consis-
tently overshadowed by their white counterparts in the midcentury media.
Fornes, a native of Cuba who moved to the United States in 1945 at age fifteen, has
written and staged about forty plays and has won eight Obies, five of them for playwrit-
ing. She directs much of her own work, has mentored numerous playwrights through
the Hispanic Playwrights Lab at New York’s INTAR Theatre, and is known for working
in a variety of styles. While her playfulness and sometimes oblique approach to power
inequities has sometimes frustrated critics, Assunta Kent values the “contrariness” that
underpins Fornes’s “unique contribution to feminist theatre” (1996, 6). Four of her plays
are feminist classics, all characterized by the “starkness of [her] prose, where charac-
ters rarely hide their emotional lives” (Alker 2009, 214). The 1977 Fefu and Her Friends
embraces a fractured realism and a complexity about women’s actual lives that made
it popular in regional theatres and much studied. Fefu features eight women, friends
from college, who gather in 1935 at the country home of one to plan a fund-raising event.
The eight are plagued by alcoholism, internalized misogyny, hallucinations, dismissive
husbands, and the effects of a privileged education that nonetheless pathologized or
suppressed any student resistance or exuberance outside prescriptive norms. The 1983
Mud is set in an impoverished domicile where illiterate Mae turns from sexually impo-
tent Lloyd to potent and literate Henry. The latter helps Mae with her studies but turns
out to be stingy and dishonest. When Mae finally leaves the house, Lloyd shoots her.
The setting is literally a hill of mud and Fornes’s focus is an uneducated woman’s “com-
ing to consciousness” (Kent 1996, 164). In 1984, Abingdon Square showed the effects of
an upper-middle-class marriage on a young orphan wed to a man thirty-five years her
senior. Unsurprisingly she seeks romance elsewhere, but the husband’s brutal treatment
of her when he learns of her affair and her own guilt suggest the power of law and custom
430 DOROTHY CHANSKY

to discipline women in the convenient absence of legal standing, much less egalitarian
social ideas. Conduct of Life (1985) suggests ties between repressive military regimes and
male brutality. The abusive Orlando, an officer in an unnamed Latin American country,
ignores and bullies his wife while abducting and hiding a twelve-year-old waif, Nena,
in his basement. Nena is frail, innocent, and ill; Orlando repeatedly rapes her. As his
wife and the household domestic servant figure out the entire situation, the wife, pushed
to the edge by being physically hurt, shoots Orlando but then places the gun in Nena’s
hand. Fefu, Mud, and Conduct all end with gunshots and ambiguity about guilt; all three
also show that sexism is intertwined with classism and that any idea of simple “solidar-
ity” among women is complicated by class structure and grasping for power wherever it
is (often minimally) available.
By the end of the 1960s, a new feminist theatre phenomenon took hold:  the
full-fledged feminist theatre company, which, as the feminist theatre historian Charlotte
Canning notes in her study of these entities (she lists forty-four in her index), was often
a collective. Feminist theatre companies of the 1970s and 1980s privileged lived experi-
ence in much of the work they generated, embracing the idea that the “personal is politi-
cal.” Because the political (exposing injustice, seeking visibility, building solidarity) was
often more important to participants than were aesthetics or careerism, many of the
companies created work that was of little interest (at the time, at least) to mainstream
critics or even traditional theatre supporters, although it was very important to each
group’s nucleus of participants and audiences. Group names such as It’s All Right to Be
Woman Theatre and Lilith suggest the gynocentric and sometimes mythical or spiri-
tual focus of some of the work. A number of groups used “consciousness-raising” tech-
niques (borrowed directly from the mainstream feminist movement) to enable women
to recognize the immediate effects of culturewide inequities and injustice by means of
articulating their own feelings and experiences. Most of the companies were gone by the
mid-1980s, the result of burnout on the part of the administratively committed, other
options for some of the politically driven, and careerism for some motivated by profes-
sional theatre goals. Among the most frequently addressed topics in plays created by
these companies were the mother/daughter relationship and violence against women.
Several of the most influential artists in these feminist companies came from the Open
Theatre, a truly experimental New York group started in the 1960s and led by Joseph
Chaikin. Numerous women left the Open when they could no longer abide the failure of
the male members of the group to grasp that the discriminatory practices they deplored
outside their company were alive and well within it. One disgruntled feminist Open
Theatre alumna was the playwright Megan Terry, called by one critic the “mother of
American feminist drama” (Keyssar 1984, 53). Terry, a Seattle native, is known for devis-
ing scripts drawn from actors’ “transformation” exercises, which used quick changes
from one physical and vocal state to another to shift actors (and audiences) from one
moment, milieu, or mood to another. Terry’s play Calm Down Mother uses transforma-
tions as part of its written text as a means for three actresses to transition from realistic
to symbolic to satirical roles in a series of short sketches that collectively depict how
ordinary women are burdened by limiting family expectations, family responsibilities,
 FEMINIST DRAMA 431

and cultural norms that see them as most valuable for their reproductive capabilities.
Terry’s Approaching Simone, which dramatizes the life of the French Jewish philoso-
pher and antifascist activist Simone Weil, is an unabashedly feminist move to show that
women need not follow male models and to make clear that heroic women “can think in
a womanly way” (Terry 1973, 12). The play won a Best Play Obie for 1969– 70 and Terry
left New York in 1970 to become the resident playwright at Omaha’s Magic Theatre,
founded by the Open Theatre alumna Jo Ann Schmidman in 1968. (The company is still
very much alive.) Another disgruntled feminist who left the Open Theatre to do femi-
nist work was the director Roberta Sklar, who cofounded the Women’s Experimental
Theatre (WET) (1977–86), joining forces with the playwright Clare Coss and the
actress/activist Sondra Segal. The three cowrote The Daughters Cycle: Daughters, Sister/
Sister, Electra Speaks, which the company presented between 1976 and 1980. The cycle
(three individual but thematically linked plays) used Greek myths to investigate and
expose women’s activities and values that are absent from our culture’s foundational sto-
ries. The piece was embraced by many as liberating and unifying but vilified by some for
its putative reduction of women to having a natural, inevitable place as mothers and for
attempting to recruit audience members to validate their memories of their mothers,
given that some mothers are abusive, absent, or not admirable (Dolan 1991, 89–91). Coss
left WET to pursue work as an independent playwright; Segal and Sklar crafted a trilogy
about women’s relation to food and eating and presented the plays, collectively called
Woman’s Body and Other Natural Resources, between 1980 and 1985. Finally, the Open
Theatre performer Muriel Miguel founded Spiderwoman Theatre with her two sisters,
Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo, natives of Brooklyn who all shared an interest in serious
theatremaking but who were also motivated by the pressure and erasure they experi-
enced as Native Americans. The company is named after the Hopi goddess who wove
men and women into being and then taught them to weave. Spiderwoman’s aesthetic
has always been eclectic, not necessarily polished, and collaborative. The company’s
first production (1976) explored women and violence. Later pieces looked at lesbianism,
family, and racism.
Women’s collectives were not the only venues that began to welcome feminist work
based on personal experience in the 1970s. Playwrights pursuing professional careers
found Broadway and universities newly welcoming of their themes. Arguably the most
successful feminist career playwright—at least in commercial terms—who emerged in
the 1970s was Wendy Wasserstein. Wasserstein achieved, before her unexpected death
at age fifty-five in 2006, a visibility and popularity perhaps only previously associated
with Lillian Hellman and Rachel Crothers on Broadway. Uncommon Women and Others
(1977), which began as Wasserstein’s MFA thesis at the Yale School of Drama, would set
the pattern for her later plays in that it treats the struggles of women (several of her plays
focus on more than one woman rather than just a single female protagonist) who are
very comfortably upper middle class, the products of eastern privilege, and who find
themselves caught between what their educations have promised and what they encoun-
ter precisely because of their sex. Uncommon Women looks at five close friends during
their senior year at what is recognizably Mt. Holyoke College (Wasserstein’s alma mater
432 DOROTHY CHANSKY

and one of the elite Sister Schools, which also include Wellesley and Smith) and also at a
reunion six years later. In each setting, their intelligence, curiosity, and wit are offset by
their uncertainties and the pervasive sexism they must negotiate. As one Wasserstein
scholar puts it, the “characters in all her plays . . . experience a psychological and emo-
tional sense of kinesis generated by inner conflicts that stem directly from the changing
climate associated with the women’s movement” (Ciociola 1998, 14). Over the course of
Wasserstein’s career, her female protagonists would be roughly the same age she was,
thereby speaking rather directly and even mimetically to a generation of baby boom
feminists who could see their emerging and evolving concerns in these witty, attractive,
but never completely fulfilled characters.
The same year that Uncommon Women opened Off Broadway, one of the earli-
est plays to speak across race, color, and class lines about experiences shared by many
young African American women opened on Broadway after a seven-year gestation
period. Ntozake Shange’s (née Paulette Williams) for colored girls who have considered
suicide when the rainbow is enuf originated in 1970 at a series of poetry readings in the
San Francisco area. By the middle of the decade it had been reshaped as a theatre piece
(Shange called it a “choreopoem”), workshopped at Woody King’s New Federal Theatre,
opened at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre, and moved to Broadway, where it ran for 747
performances. for colored girls features seven women identified by the color of their
dresses who embody young girls, teens, young mothers, prostitutes, historic figures,
mythic characters, and single working women, all subject to racism (although little is
said directly about whites). Movement and dance were key parts of the original produc-
tion. Mostly, it is patriarchal attitudes (on the part of parents, lovers, husbands, and boy-
friends) that force the women to know and stand up for themselves. Michele Wallace,
in her Village Voice review of the original production, found the “love yourself ” con-
clusion simplistic but wrote unambiguously that “very few have ever written with such
clarity and honesty about the black woman’s vulnerability, and no one has ever brought
Shange’s brand of tough humor and realism to it. Shange tells it like it really is: The black
woman is not a superwoman. She wants to be loved and to be recognized just like any-
body else. Pain hurts her just like it hurts anybody else.” for colored girls was recrafted for
television in 1982 and has been frequently revived in theatres.
By the 1980s, plays addressing women’s concerns about unfair treatment, men who
prefer nonthreatening mates, burnout from balancing motherhood with career, or sim-
ple unhappiness in a patriarchal world were recognized with numerous productions
and major awards, although their métier—realism—would shortly come under attack
by academic feminists. In 1981, Beth Henley won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and a
Tony nomination for best play for Crimes of the Heart, a dark comedy about three sis-
ters in the American South that played on Broadway for 535 performances. While the
youngest sister’s attempt to kill her husband is presented in an almost wacky manner,
all three women struggle with demons stemming from a failed career, infertility, and a
family history of depression; all three are also rebels. Henley’s later plays are less rooted
in southern realism but the 1990 Abundance follows two adventuresome women into
Wyoming in the 1860s and depicts their identity construction in the face of loveless
 FEMINIST DRAMA 433

marriage, abduction, betrayal, and commercial success (see Andreach 2006). Marsha
Norman’s 1983 ’night, Mother opened on Broadway and won that year’s Pulitzer Prize
for drama. Norman’s play features an unhappy woman in her late thirties or early for-
ties who lives in a very ordinary middle-class house in a small town with her mother, is
unable to work because of her epilepsy, and is estranged from her indifferent husband
and petty criminal son. The play, which takes place in real time, covers the last ninety
minutes of her life, as she goes about setting her house in order before killing herself.
Praised for its austere dramaturgy, ’night, Mother suggested that Arthur Miller’s famous
notion of “tragedy and the common man” could apply to the common woman. Also
opening in 1983, Wasserstein’s Isn’t It Romantic? shows a young, well-educated woman
starting a career as a writer in New York and balancing independence, the need to con-
form, and the desire for a mate. Wasserstein made her Broadway debut in 1988 with The
Heidi Chronicles, which garnered both the Pulitzer and the Tony for best play of 1989.
Heidi’s eponymous protagonist is a smart, compassionate art historian, whose emer-
gence as a feminist the play traces from her high school years through her burgeoning
career. Heidi realizes, though, that there is neither solidarity among women nor the pos-
sibility of love and partnership from her male cohort, who are either gay or who prefer
women less “threatening” than Heidi. At the end of the play Heidi changes her life by
adopting a baby girl. Jill Dolan calls Heidi the “fulcrum work in [Wasserstein’s] oeuvre,
in which her character serves as the mouthpiece for her own ambivalence about how
feminist activism has and hasn’t served women” (2008). Subsequent Wasserstein hero-
ines are cast in a different mold.
Other successful, visible feminist playwrights of the 1980s who achieved longevity in
their careers include Tina Howe and Paula Vogel. Howe mined her privileged, White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant, New England heritage to explore the strictures, uncertainties,
and fears that plague even monied and well-traveled women who are held “in place”
because of their sex. Two such plays, Painting Churches (1984) and Pride’s Crossing (1997),
were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. In the 1995 introduction to a collection of the three
plays that “got me into trouble,” Howe states outright that what the trio have in common
is that they are “about the dailies of women’s lives—marriage, child raising, housekeep-
ing and entertaining—subjects that many consider unworthy of the stage” (Howe ix).
Embracing her love for absurdism, Howe depicted children as demanding monsters and
keeping family life going as an endeavor that falls to women as men remain tone-deaf to
its nuances. She also addressed women’s problems with food and the danger of fetishiz-
ing childbirth (Hart 1989, 41–60). Vogel’s plays unflinchingly look at tough topics such
as domestic abuse, pedophilia, sibling rivalry, and AIDS. Her 1997 How I Learned to
Drive won a 1997 Obie for playwriting as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1998. The
play offers a balanced picture of a young woman who is sexually molested by her uncle
and of the uncle, who is the only person in the family to take the girl seriously. Vogel’s
work exposes, explores, and complicates the discussion of misogyny, embedding that
examination in larger discussions of prejudice and inequality.
The 1980s also saw the advent of women playwrights whose race and ethnicity left
them feeling outside the reflections and optics of playwrights such as Wasserstein,
434 DOROTHY CHANSKY

Norman, Henley, Howe, and Vogel. Among the best known and most influential are
African Americans Pearl Cleage, Kia Corthron, Lynn Nottage, and Suzan-Lori Parks
and Latina Cherríe Moraga. Lisa M. Anderson observes that “because black feminism is
constituted differently and manifests differently, the feminism inherent in the works of
black women is sometimes missed” in their plays (2008, 13). In other words, race often
trumps gender as a critical focus when assessing plays by black writers, which can result
in readers or audiences missing the specific issues surrounding images of black women
in the popular imagination as well as those abuses to which actual black women are prey,
such as lack of access to affordable health care and birth control. In keeping with their
age cohort (these playwrights were born between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s),
commercial success was a goal. These playwrights developed their craft in the 1980s and
achieved widespread recognition in the succeeding two decades.
Pearl Cleage’s Flyin’ West (1992) depicts an African American settlement in Kansas
in 1898. Its female protagonists are independent, savvy planners, but when one is the
victim of domestic violence, another takes the law into her own hands despite the abus-
er’s educated, cultured status, although partly because of it, as his anglophilic education
and light skin make him racially as well as sexually abusive. Kia Corthron’s Come Down
Burning (1995) depicts two young, impoverished, rural African American sisters and
asks whether abortion is not the sane response to unplanned pregnancy when there will
not be enough food or space for a baby, even as the play exposes that when the answer
is “yes,” issues of access and affordability can yield disaster. Corthron’s Breath Boom
(2001) is an unsentimental look at teenage girl gangs through the eyes of one character
who is smarter, although no more advantaged therefore than her violent, short-sighted
cohort. The odds that the group members face because of class, race, and gender are
sobering. Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel (2003) is the story of an African American
seamstress seeking work and success in 1905 in New York City. It won the 2004 Outer
Critics Circle prize (New York) for Outstanding Off Broadway Play. Nottage’s Ruined
(2009) was inspired by Brecht’s Mother Courage, and its central character, the owner of a
bar in Congo, learns that serving both sides in a corrupt war is preventing her from hav-
ing dignity and love in her own life. She cannot stop the war but she can assert a woman’s
right to protest and resist abuse and to assert the value of looking beyond profit making.
While Suzan-Lori Parks’s primary concern is the erasure of African Americans from
American history (most biographical sources quote her saying that the message black
Americans get from official history is “once upon a time, you weren’t there”), several
of her plays are passionately feminist (see Geis 2008). The 1996 Venus used Brechtian
techniques (direct audience address and quotes from documentary sources) to depict
the objectification of an actual nineteenth-century African woman who was taken to
England and displayed as an oddity because of her large buttocks. Not only is Saartje
Baartman commodified in the play by overt profiteers, but the doctor who is depicted
as her lover also seeks to make a reputation by writing about her and dissecting her after
her death. Parks additionally wrote two plays loosely inspired by The Scarlet Letter. In
the Blood (1999) features an illiterate, homeless mother of five children who fights val-
iantly to maintain her dignity and feed her children. She is abused and lied to by a series
 FEMINIST DRAMA 435

of lovers, including a social worker, another homeless woman, and a preacher. A doctor
and the protagonist’s first boyfriend expect her to let them off the hook with regard to
any responsibility for the children they father or the faulty medical advice they provide.
Cherríe Moraga, a Latina, like several woman associated with the 1960s activist com-
pany El Teatro Campesino, resented and resisted the images and treatment of actual
women in the Chicano (politicized Mexican American) theatre movement. Female
characters in activist skits and full-length plays were nearly always virgins, whores, or
long-suffering mothers (Hart 1989, 109–238). Moraga, light-skinned and lesbian, saw
both a gender and a color hierarchy among Mexican Americans. In 1981 she coed-
ited an anthology of essays that challenged white feminists’ view that sisterhood and
solidarity could forge a strong movement. The experiences of women of color are so
inflected by history, culture, and everyday prejudice that entire stories go untold if not
told from a separate perspective (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1984). Moraga’s The Hungry
Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001) uses the Medea myth to imagine a Mexican woman
disowned by her husband and her country for her combined lesbianism and indigenous
(i.e., Indian more than Spanish) heritage and appearance. The play is set in an imagined,
postapocalyptic future and events reach a climax when Jason, the estranged husband,
wants his son so that he can inherit land available to him only via a blood connection
(the son) to Medea, the native. In addition to the Greek source material, Moraga drew
on Mexican legends and rituals, and she wrote the play to be performed with a cast made
up entirely of women, except for the boy playing the son.
The specter of feminists negatively criticizing feminist theatre also emerged in the
1980s, as feminist theatre theory and scholarship gained a solid footing in academia and
realism became suspect among many feminist academics. Arguably the most influential
book to emerge from the traction gained by feminist theatre scholars in the 1980s was Jill
Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Dolan stated outright that her book, although
an “introduction,” demands “at least a cursory familiarity with post-structuralism,
deconstruction, and semiotics” (1991, x). She proposed that most performance natural-
izes dominant ideology, presenting a patriarchal status quo as timeless and inevitable.
Feminist theatre, like feminism itself, must, therefore, be “a critique of prevailing social
conditions that formulate women’s position as outside of dominant male discourse,” and
it must proceed with the idea that inequity can both be exposed and dismantled (3).
Dolan summarizes the then-major feminist work from literature, anthropology, and
film studies—all of which formulated a scholarly discourse before theatre did—and
presents three primary categories of feminist theatre work. These categories guide the
case studies in the book; they would also guide the priorities in most published feminist
theatre scholarship for two decades. The first category, liberal feminism, seeks parity for
women within a humanist status quo. It is comfortable with realism and uses such ideas
as role models and “strong women” as literary desiderata. Virtually all of the Tony- and
Pulitzer Prize–winning and “Best” plays discussed above as well as the “50/50 in 2020”
project fit under the liberal feminist rubric. Dolan’s complaint—taken up by her fellow
travelers—was that liberal feminism invites backsliding, since it can enable successful
women playwrights “to acquiesce to their erasure as women . . . because the universal to
436 DOROTHY CHANSKY

which they write is still based on the male model” (5). The second feminism, cultural
feminism, is a rubric that covers what was also called radical feminism, and it posits
that men and women occupy separate, biologically determined spheres, with the female
sphere rooted in a connection to nature, and primarily about motherhood. Most of the
Women’s Experimental Theatre met with Dolan’s disapproval, as, like cultural feminism
in general, it offered “no attempt . . . to critique women’s culturally determined domestic-
ity” (89). Dolan privileged materialist feminism, praiseworthy and efficacious because
“it deconstructs the mythic subject Woman to look at women as a class oppressed by
material conditions and social relations” (10). Despite that claim, the writers, perform-
ers, and companies that met with materialist approval were largely (although not exclu-
sively) lesbian and had little interest in realism. Extolling Brecht as an early exemplar,
Dolan’s materialist heroines consider gender as something separate from sex—thereby
creating the possibility of representing, via performance, the gap between the two (117).
Pride of place among the most widely recognized and studied materialist writers
and practitioners went to the companies Split Britches and The Five Lesbian Brothers,
with critical praise also lavished on the performance artists/writers Holly Hughes and
Karen Finley. These four were front and center in 1990s feminist writing and contro-
versy. Two of Split Britches’ three founders, Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, performed
with Spiderwoman before striking out on their own with Deb Margolin to create their
own lesbian-inflected work in 1981. (Margolin, who is not a lesbian, later left to pursue a
successful solo career.) Arguably the duo’s best-known work is the 1991 Belle Reprieve, a
campy and nonlinear deconstruction of the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire in
which Stanley was first played by Shaw and Blanche was played by a man, Bette Bourne
of the gay British duo Bloolips. The piece won a 1991 Obie. Its climax refuses the romance
of Stanley’s assault on Blanche (unseen in the original play or movie) as the actors break
character to discuss how realism does not serve them. The woman in the play is raped
and goes crazy; perpetuating this image and “identifying with” it (the realist actor’s
preferred approach) is refused. Sue-Ellen Case, in her introduction to an anthology of
Split Britches plays, lauds the troupe for work in that “unique post-modern style that
served to embed feminist and lesbian issues of the times, economic debates, national
agendas, personal relationships, and sex-radical role playing in spectacular and humor-
ous deconstructions of canonical texts, vaudeville shtick, cabaret forms, lip-synching
satire, lyrical love scenes, and dark frightening explorations of class and gender vio-
lence” (1996, 1). The Five Lesbian Brothers—Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique
Dibbell, Peg Healy, and Lisa Kron—became stars of New  York’s East Village theatre
scene in the late 1980s. Their métier is comedy. Holly Hughes notes that their work has
the look of “real theatre,” although it was devised “using methods and techniques that
came out of second-wave feminism rather than an MFA program. [Their best-known
plays] work both as well-made plays and as critiques of everything implied in that
innocuous phrase” (Five Lesbian Brothers 2000, xi). The 1992 Brave Smiles . . . Another
Lesbian Tragedy parodies lesbian representation (much of it covert or coded) in mov-
ies and plays from Maedchen in Uniform to Cabaret via The Children’s Hour, all with an
eye to subverting and making fun of the inculcated expectation that a lesbian must die
 FEMINIST DRAMA 437

to serve drama’s needs. The Secretaries, which premiered at New York’s lesbian/femi-

nist WOW (Women’s One World) Café in 1993, subsequently moved to the more main-
stream New York Theatre Workshop and also enjoyed productions in San Francisco, Los
Angeles, Seattle, and Houston. The play imagines five secretaries so obligated to their
employer, a lumber company, that any interest in dating, socializing, or even eating out-
side of the routines and regimens policed by the head secretary is squelched upon threat
of being fired. The women are bribed with lingerie and slumber parties; once a month
they menstruate in sync and once a month they murder a male employee. Here the focus
is not on lesbianism, but on women policing themselves and each other in the guise of
a solidarity that fails to recognize its profound distaste for women’s actual desires (dat-
ing) or needs (food other than Slimfast). Sara Warner notes the importance of this play
for feminist scholarship, since it works with the idea that “greater economic opportu-
nity has not ameliorated women’s anger, but has, on the contrary, exacerbated it” (2008,
26). Just as traditional labor exploits workers’ (often male) bodies, turning them into
wage slaves, the exploitation of emotions in gendered service positions turns women
into “rage slaves.”
Solo performers Karen Finley and Holly Hughes were working in clubs and “alter-
native” venues in the 1980s; both achieved notoriety as two of the “NEA Four,” perfor-
mance artists whose promised grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were
revoked in the name of “decency.” Finley’s “territory was abuse, desire, rage—their
conflation . . . she would address is without euphemism”; she embraced the language of
pornography (arguably pulling the rug out from under the usual male perpetrator by
being more disgusting on her own than he could ever make her and thereby disarming
and disempowering him), saying “My feminist message is a lot more threatening than a
straight man’s message” (Hart 1989, 153, 155). Hughes variously uses autobiography, lyri-
cism, and humor with a focus on how female expression of sexuality is seen as threaten-
ing (Champagne 1990, 6). Both Finley and Hughes, like many of the performance artists
with whom they are often classified (people who perform in spaces not thought of as
theatres and who are not solely interested in writing texts), hold degrees in art. (Maria
Irene Fornes also studied art before turning to playwriting.)
Mainstream feminist writers got recognition and mileage out of realism throughout
the 1990s and into the 2000s, despite some feminist scholars’ preference for decon-
structive work that eschewed realism. For example, Wendy Wasserstein’s An American
Daughter (1997), about an upright woman whose nomination for surgeon general is
sabotaged by journalistic opportunism, a cheating husband, a postfeminist careerist,
and free-floating antifeminism, showed that even as women were finding their way into
the Supreme Court, the double standard remained stubbornly in place (Balakian 2010,
142–43). Jill Dolan calls Wasserstein’s later plays “The Sisters Rosensweig, An American
Daughter, and Third... third-wave or post-feminist plays in which women characters
reject second-wave strictures and evince comfort with their status inside dominant cul-
ture” (2008, 444). Such an assessment depends on a particular idea of feminism and
the idea that postfeminist and third-wave are the same thing and that the third wave is
incompatible with the second wave. Briefly, the so-called third wave of feminism, which
438 DOROTHY CHANSKY

emerged in the early 1990s, may be more fragmented than the second wave appeared
to be, but the broad legal issues of the 1960s have neither been fully solved nor affect
all American women in the same way. As a result, recent feminism (and feminist the-
atre) can seem fragmented and even selfish (“lifestyle feminism”) to anyone wanting
a singular, clear-cut agenda (Chansky 2008). Indeed, a number of fairly recent femi-
nist plays take up decidedly recognizable questions about women’s issues. These include
undergoing painful and dangerous bodily modification for the sake of fulfilling cultural
norms and holding on to men (Lisa Loomer’s 1998 The Waiting Room); the absence of
a national childcare policy creating gross inequity between the privileged women who
can afford it and the (often undocumented) poor women who provide it while unable
to manage adequate care for their own offspring (Loomer’s 2003 Living Out); the com-
plete arithmetical impossibility of escaping an uninsured, perpetually poor, underclass
life if one works in a pink-collar sector for minimum wage (Nickel and Dimed by Joan
Holden, based on Barbara Ehrenreich’s book); and the fact that black women have still
not escaped the stereotyped legacy of the “mammy” (Michelle Matlock’s The Mammy
Project, originated in 2001).
In 2008, Dolan admitted that liberal feminism could indeed yield purposeful femi-
nist theatre and that she regretted in some ways her earlier harsh assessment of Wendy
Wasserstein’s work. This statement from one of the most influential of feminist theatre
scholars yielded a combination of shrugs (from those who had never worried about the
power of realism to do feminist work), resentment (from some who had felt silenced
by the power wielded for two decades by materialist feminist scholars as determiners
of what would pass muster in published scholarship and as credible feminist peda-
gogy), and mild surprise on the part of a new generation of students young enough to
look beyond the turf battle among three feminisms and to embrace it all. In 2009, The
Women’s Project, a feminist theatre company (but not a collective) started in New York
in 1978, presented a world premiere of Freshwater—Virginia Woolf ’s only play. If recu-
peration had for a long time been regarded as an outdated project of 1970s feminism and
no longer sufficient for activism, this endeavor embraced the idea that it remains worth-
while and unfinished.
In 2010 Muriel Miguel presented a dance theatre piece, Red Mother. Publicity blurbs
explain that the main character explodes stereotypes of Native American women as
“earth mothers,” sabotaging that patronizing image and speaking for the struggling,
sometimes drug-addicted women whose lives on the margins deserve attention and fly
in the face of the coercive and fictional archetype. If “identity politics” is old hat in some
circles, Miguel’s show makes a different assertion. Lest it seem that a “postfeminist” era
might be able to support only one women’s theatre company, New Georges joined the
Women’s Project in 1992 as “a play and artist development organization providing essen-
tial resources to a community of venturesome artists (who are also women)” (www.new-
georges.org). Among other productions, New Georges has offered Carson Kreitzer’s
Self Defense: or Death of Some Salesmen, a raucous reconsideration of Aileen Wuornos,
the prostitute who killed several men in Florida, claiming they had raped her, and made
headlines in 1990; Angela’s Mixtape, a coming-of-age memoir written and performed by
 FEMINIST DRAMA 439

Eisa Davis (Angela Davis’s niece); and the artistic director Susan Bernfield’s Stretch (a
Fantasia), a play based on the life of Rose Marie Woods, who was Richard Nixon’s long-
time secretary. No single style or genre dominates New Georges’s work, and the empha-
sis on women artists suggests the folly of trying to pin down a single feminist “message”
or “agenda” other than inclusion and equal access for pro-woman voices. New Georges
received a $90,000 three-year grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, suggesting
that feminist theatre is of public interest and importance. Pro-woman inclusiveness also
undergirds the mission of groups from the League of Professional Theatre Women
(founded in 1982 and industry focused) to the GAN-e-meed Theatre Project, started
in 2009 in Lowell, Massachusetts, and offering a summer education program for young
actresses ages 15–20, culminating in the company’s first year in an all-female produc-
tion of As You Like It. If the all-female work seems like a throwback to 1970s cultural
feminist theatre and its essentialism, some activists beg to differ and may perhaps have
in the back of their minds that both Wendy Wasserstein and Suzan-Lori Parks are Mt.
Holyoke alumnae: products of women-focused, women-centered education that fosters
strength, activism, feminism, and individual achievement.
Neither parity nor celebration nor insistence on radical theory is adequate on its own
to the collective goals that American feminist theatre has staked out. Playwrights, theo-
rists, critics, directors, and historians continue to work on all fronts to generate work
asserting that women are people.

Works Cited
Alker, Gwendolyn. 2009. Teaching Fornes:  Preserving Fornesian Techniques in Critical
Context. Theatre Topics 19, no. 2: 207–19.
Andreach, Robert J. 2006. Understanding Beth Henley. Columbia:  University of South
Carolina Press.
Atkinson, Brooks. 1953. Review of In the Summer House. New York Times, December 30.
Balakian, Jan. 2010. Reading the Plays of Wendy Wasserstein. New York: Applause.
Barlow, Judith. 1994. Plays by American Women, 1930–1960. New York: Applause.
Canning, Charlotte. 1996. Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A. New York: Routledge.
Case, Sue-Ellen, ed. 1996. Split Britches. London: Routledge.
———. 2008. Feminism and Theatre. Reissued Edition with a Foreword by Elaine Aston.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Champagne, Lenora, ed. 1990. Out from Under:  Texts by Women Performance Artists.
New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Chansky, Dorothy. 2008. Usable Performance Feminism for Our Time: Reconsidering Betty
Friedan. Theatre Journal 60, no. 3: 341–64.
Ciociola, Gail. 1998. Wendy Wasserstein:  Dramatizing Women, Their Choices and Their
Boundaries. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Cohen, Patricia. 2009. Rethinking Gender Bias in Theater. New York Times, June 24. http://
www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/theater/24play.html.
Collins, Gail. 2009. When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from
1960 to the Present. New York: Little, Brown.
440 DOROTHY CHANSKY

Dolan, Jill. 1991. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
———. 2008. Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein.
Theatre Journal 60, no. 3 (October): 433–57.
The Five Lesbian Brothers. 2000. Five Lesbian Brothers:  Four Plays. New  York:  Theatre
Communications Group.
Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell.
Geis, Deborah. 2008. Suzan-Lori Parks. Michigan Modern Dramatists Series. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hart, Lynda. 1989. Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Jennings, La Vinia Delois. 1995. Alice Childress. New York: Twayne.
Jonas, Susan, and Suzanne Bennett. 2002. New York State Council on the Arts Theatre Program
Report on The Status of Women: A Limited Engagement? Executive Summary. http://www.
lmda.org/_attachments/3324041/StatusofWomen-2002-Summary.pdf.
Kent, Assunta Bartolomucci. 1996. Maria Irene Fornes and Her Critics. Westport, CT:
Greenwood.
Keyssar, Helene. 1984. Feminist Theatre. New York: St. Martin’s.
Kipnis, Laura. 2006. The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability. New York: Pantheon.
Kolin, Philip C. 2005. Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. Columbia:  University of South
Carolina Press.
Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa. 1984. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color.
Rosen, Carol. 1993. Review of In the Summer House. TheaterWeek, August 23: 32–35.
Sands, Emily Glassberg. 2009. Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender:  An Integrated
Economic Analysis of Discrimination in American Theater. Honors thesis, Princeton
University. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/theater/Openingthecurtain.pdf.
Striff, Erin. 2005. Realism and Realpolitik in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. Journal of
American Drama and Theatre 17, no. 2 (Spring): 71–85.
Terry, Megan. 1973. Approaching Simone. New York: Feminist Press.
Wallace, Michele. 1976. For Colored Girls, the Rainbow Is Not Enough. Village Voice, August 16.
Warner, Sara. 2008. Rage Slaves: The Commodification of Affect in The Five Lesbian Brothers’
The Secretaries. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 23, no. 1. 21–45.
www.newgeorges.org.
www.theatrewomen.org/5050-in-2020-parity-for-women-theatre-artists.
 CHAPTER 28

P O S T WA R D R A M A A N D
T E C H N OL O G Y

RO G E R B E C H T E L

“I believe in the future of television!” announces Jim O’Connor, the gentleman caller of
Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (78). While the line may evoke a wry smile
today, in 1945, when the play opened on Broadway, television was still in its infancy, its
potential as both a communications medium and a commercial enterprise uncertain.
To audience members of the day, depending on their individual perspectives, Jim’s fer-
vent belief in television’s future must have seemed either forward-thinking or foolhardy.
Television, however, would soon become the beneficiary of advances in wartime mili-
tary technology, propelling it from an impractical curiosity to a consumer craze. Three
million television sets were sold in 1950, thirty-two million in 1955, and by the end of
the decade, 90 percent of American households were equipped with televisions (Pursell
2007, 114). Fresh from night school, with classes in radio engineering and public speak-
ing under his belt, Jim seems poised to ride the bandwagon—or gravy train—of this new
medium to certain riches, leaving the hapless Laura and dreamy Tom behind.
In terms of technological savvy and foresight, Jim certainly seems far ahead of
Howard Wagner, Willy Loman’s boss in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949),
although they do share the same enthusiasm. Howard is so consumed with a simple
wire recorder that he “was up all night with it,” and he continues his obsessive tinkering
the next day at the office (152). Of course, as inheritor of the company that makes what-
ever it is Willie sells, Howard can afford to enjoy technology as a hobby, even though
the wire recorder was ostensibly purchased for dictation. But whatever surface differ-
ences Howard and Jim exhibit in social status or mechanical competency, they share
a similar dramaturgical function: both are young, ambitious foils who effect a histori-
cal displacement of their play’s older protagonists, Amanda and Willy, and technol-
ogy is their common and distinctive metonym. Conversely, Amanda and Willy find
themselves disassociated from technology. For Willy, modern technology is endlessly
vexing: whipped cheese is both marvelous and offensive, the Hastings refrigerator “con-
sumes belts like a goddamn maniac,” and the Studebaker—which he will use to hurl
442 ROGER BECHTEL

himself to his death—has recently undergone a “motor job” (148–49). Willie may always
have felt “kind of temporary” about himself, but it is only in the course of the play that,
like the Hastings and the Studebaker, he reaches true obsolescence and in precisely the
moment that Howard takes him literally off the road. Although more indirect, Amanda,
too, suffers a similar, and similarly humiliating, displacement. When the lights go out
just after dinner with their gentlemen caller, Amanda asks him to check the fuse box, for
it is beyond her feminine capacity and “Tom is a total loss when it comes to mechanics”
(67). The fuses are fine—Tom has deliberately “neglected” to pay the electricity bill—but
the power outage allows Amanda the opportunity to add candlelight to what is already a
romantic regression to her southern belle youth, replete with the dress in which she “led
the cotillion” (56). Almost seduced by gauzy romanticism and a nostalgic sense of chiv-
alry, Jim ultimately turns his eyes back to the future—and his fiancée, Betty. When he
leaves, then, he leaves Amanda not only in the dark, but in the past, with Laura crouched
beside another outdated piece of technology, the silent Victrola.
Of course, it’s not the case that Williams and Miller are celebrating modern tech-
nology in their plays, nor the young men with whom it is associated. Despite his Dale
Carnegie attitude, Jim seems just capable of staving off his own melancholy, protesting
his belief in television and the power of love a bit too much. Howard, on the other hand,
is fully secure in the conviction that “business is business” and in using this dubious
ethic as a justification for firing Willy (155). Indeed, what matters most to both Howard
and Jim is selling, whether a product or oneself. Jim believes in television to the extent
that it will fulfill his ambition: “Knowledge—Zzzzzp! Money—Zzzzzzp! Power! That’s
the cycle that democracy is built on!” (78). During this speech, as Williams indicates,
“his eyes are starry,” for, of course, Jim is fantasizing not about the wondrous symbiosis
between democratic freedom and the free market, but about his knowledge, his money,
and his power. The entire speech, spoken to Laura, is itself a pitch, with Jim touting him-
self as a futures commodity.
The speech is also reminiscent, in its fervor and expression, of such earlier plays as
Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923) and Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (1928), the
titles of which alone gesture to the alienation wrought by the combination of capital and
technology. In fact, with technology literally and symbolically implicated in the nexus
of capitalism, ethics, and identity, Glass Menagerie and Salesman belong squarely in the
same genealogy as their 1920s predecessors. More importantly for the purposes of this
essay, one can find in Glass Menagerie and Salesman, at times fully formed and at times
only nascent, the themes and questions concerning technology that American drama
will explore throughout the rest of the century and into the twenty-first. As in Salesman
and Menagerie, the tandem of technology and capitalism will continue to appear in
numerous plays. While characters like Jim O’Connor and Howard Wagner remain
upbeat about the future in the immediate aftermath of the war, both plays nonetheless
betray a generalized anxiety about the rapid change that was taking place in American
social life. Nuclear technology and the proliferation of weapons stockpiles during the
cold war would soon add to this angst, as would the technological and historical sea
change that ushered in the information age later in the century. Like Willy, characters
 POSTWAR DRAMA AND TECHNOLOGY 443

in the American drama would continue to struggle with their identity, and as the world
became more accessible through both real and virtual modes of travel, as the screen and
its accelerating economy of images became a cultural dominant, the very nature of sub-
jectivity would increasingly become the subject of the drama, resulting in radical exper-
imentation in both content and form.
Experiments in form can also be attributed to advances in stage technology and,
importantly, the inclusion of electronic media—most often television monitors and
video projections—into the mise-en-scène. If Jim O’Connor was prescient in plac-
ing his bet on television, so, too, was Glass Menagerie ahead of its time in calling for
the incorporation of a projection screen and slides into its set. Williams included two
paragraphs on the use of a “screen device” in the published manuscript, onto which
would be projected “magic lantern slides” of titles and images. When the play was pro-
duced on Broadway, they chose to forfeit this device, but still, in its call to mix live
performance with electronic media, Glass Menagerie registers the faint tremors of what
would become the widespread use of multimedia onstage today. This essay, then, will
examine two encompassing facets of technology and American drama since 1945: tech-
nology in its appearance as a thematic in the drama of that period, and the formal
accommodations some drama has made to the technological pressures and opportuni-
ties of its time.

Technology and Capital

Technology, it should be noted, is not commensurate with science, even if the relation-
ship between the two is highly interdependent. To tease them apart, it is best to think
of science as a method for probing and explaining the natural world, while technol-
ogy harnesses the phenomena of that world, often through the application of knowl-
edge uncovered by science, through the creation of apparatuses that allow humans to
exploit or intervene in natural processes. Willy’s Studebaker, then, is a complex capture
and arrangement of natural phenomena—from the interplay of gravity and the wheel to
the combustibility of certain elements—used to allow Willy to exceed the naturally slow
pace of travel by foot. Although indebted to the scientific method, the car itself isn’t a
science—it is a technology. This is admittedly a brief and simplistic differentiation of the
terms but one important to make, for it helps distinguish those dramas concerned with
technology from those concerned with science. The latter are many fewer in number,
but those that exist are marked by their explicit engagement not with the tools of science
(i.e., technology) but its method. To take just one example, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus
(1996) is, at one level, a critique of the use of scientific/medical discourse to draw spuri-
ous conclusions about racial attributes. The reason that technology-themed dramas far
outnumber those grappling with science is evident: technology is material and omni-
present; it makes itself felt daily, in all of our lives, at both the micro and the macro levels.
Whether we are making toast or playing the market, we rely on technology. “More than
444 ROGER BECHTEL

anything else,” the economist W. Brian Arthur claims, “technology creates our world. It
creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being” (2009, 10).
It is the inextricability of business and technology that makes dramatic examinations
of capitalism, almost of necessity, implicate capital’s technological means. One funda-
mental problem with technology, or rather with machines, is that they inevitably break
down, like both Willy’s car and his refrigerator. Mechanical failure in its own right may
not make compelling drama, but how people deal with that failure, especially in terms
of ethical choices, often does. There is no better example of this scenario in the early
postwar period than Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947). The story centers on Joe Keller,
a manufacturer of airplane engines, who in the midst of the wartime boom, delivered
to the Air Force 120 cylinder heads with deliberately obscured cracks. After twenty-one
planes crash because of the defective engines, Joe and his partner are arrested and
indicted. Joe, however, pins the blame on his partner and walks free, at least legally.
In tidy Aristotelian fashion, All My Sons depicts the day of Joe’s reckoning, when
he must confront the past and atone for it. He resists at first, relying on the idea of
“business” as a kind of talisman against all blame: “I’m in business, a man is in busi-
ness; a hundred and twenty cracked, you’re out of business. . . .You lay forty years into
a business and they knock you out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take forty
years, let them take my life away?” (76). That business is life, and that protecting one’s
business amounts to protecting one’s life is a powerful argument but one that is as ethi-
cally flawed as the cracked engines that Joe peddled. What power it has comes not from
its reasoning but from Joe’s character. Like Willy Loman, Joe wants to give something
to his wife and sons, but unlike Willy he has succeeded at business and is actually in
a position to do so until the defective engines imperil his livelihood and his dreams.
Ethically, we cannot condone Joe’s choice, but we can understand it, and in that under-
standing lies Miller’s implicit critique of an economic system that can so readily tempt
someone of otherwise sound principles into a decision based on what we would today
call “risk assessment.” “I never thought they’d install them,” Joe pleads, “I swear to God.
I thought they’d stop ’em before anybody took off ” (76). Clearly, a fractured cylinder
head has more material reality than a financial derivative or a junk bond, but in the
world of capital, it, too, operates on a level of abstraction that makes risk taking all
too easy.
In the years since 1947, the growth of technology has been exponential, and with it
has come a profound shift in the nature of capital. The advent of the computer and its
parlay into a global network of “information technology” have been largely responsible
for enabling a global economy, and in a dizzying display of symbiosis, they have contin-
ued to feed that market with ever-newer products and means of production. The seeds
of this transition to global capitalism, however, had been planted in the 1940s, with the
advent of machine production of electronic devices. In terms of “business,” what occurs
in the period from the 1940s to the end of the century is the rapid growth in the power
and dominance of the corporation—including its multinational incarnation—and
a concomitant and inverse decline in small business. In 1947, economies of scale still
allowed for a Joe Keller to start and run a relatively modest manufacturing enterprise,
 POSTWAR DRAMA AND TECHNOLOGY 445

but by 1977, when David Mamet wrote The Water Engine, small shops like Joe’s had
largely given way to corporate leviathans. This historical dynamic is itself fraught with
conflict, and it is precisely the displacement of the individual entrepreneur by the corpo-
rate entity that Mamet addresses in his play.
Set in Chicago in 1934, The Water Engine is the story of Charles Lang, a young inventor
who has devised an engine that runs on only distilled water. Lang’s trip to Morton Gross,
a patent lawyer, soon turns into a Hitchcockean intrigue when mysterious corporate
“interests,” represented by Gross and another lawyer, Oberman, attempt to coerce Lang
to give up the device. When Lang’s private lab is vandalized, he confronts Gross and
Oberman, and like so many of Arthur Miller’s characters before him, he invokes “busi-
ness” as an inviolable ethic: “And I came here to do business with you. We decided to do
business” (37). Oberman, however, the real businessman, understands something very
different by the term: “Mr. Lang, you’re very lucky. You have no idea . . . business com-
munities, who knows, that girl out there at the desk, some cab driver, perhaps . . . there
are many ways” (39). Business is a community, Oberman implies, where common ethics
don’t apply—and, indeed, what follows is the kidnapping of Lang’s sister and an attempt
to arrest Lang himself for the crime. Lang’s attempt to go public with the scandal is
blocked by Oberman—as the Nietzschean name implies, the human stand-in for the
omnipotent power of the corporation—who derails a meeting Lang had scheduled with
the press. Lang, of course, cannot win, and in the end, he and his sister are tortured and
killed.
While a plot synopsis may make the play sound like a simple thriller, Mamet’s contex-
tualization of the action allows his more trenchant themes to emerge. In 1934, Chicago
hosted the World’s Fair, which featured the famous “Century of Progress Exposition.”
“Science, yes, the greatest force for Good and Evil we possess,” intones Barker, an
Exposition tour guide, “the Concrete Poetry of Humankind. Our thoughts, our dreams,
our aspirations rendered into practical and useful forms” (53). It is an ironic commen-
tary on the play’s action, for what Oberman and his “interests” want is not the wealth
that could surely be generated by the water engine but to prevent the manufacture of the
engine altogether. This is the power of capital being used to halt technological progress
for the purpose of profit—a prescient warning of such actual later events as the automo-
bile industry’s “killing” of the electric car. And in that warning lies another irony: sci-
ence—and technology—is only as progressive as the “interests” that control it. “Much
is known and much will yet be known, and much will not be known,” mourns Barker at
the end of the play. “Technological and Ethical masterpieces decay into folktales. Who
knows what is true? All people are connected” (70).
All people may be connected, but technology is changing the nature of that connec-
tion, as Mamet cunningly implies by turning his story into a play within a play. “The
Water Engine” is, in fact, a radio play being broadcast in a studio in 1934, placed onstage
for a theatre audience in The Water Engine. This framing device provides an unmistak-
able formal way to foreground the intersection of the technological and the human and
to show the impact of that intersection on human “connection.” Yet Mamet’s conceit
provides more than just a frame, and his dramaturgy itself becomes a kind of machine
446 ROGER BECHTEL

that admits no “outside.” The play is, from beginning to end, the broadcast of “The Water
Engine”: no character ever steps out of character to reveal him- or herself as a radio actor
or anything more. If they were to do so, the audience would be consoled by the com-
mon play-within-a-play convention in which we see both the “onstage” and “offstage”
personas of the characters. But The Water Engine is relentless in its theatrical alienation
of character and thereby in its insistence on the social alienation wrought by the com-
bination of modern technology and corporate capitalism. Just as the characters onstage
exist only and inescapably within the technological medium of radio, the play seems to
say, so we, too, exist inescapably within our own techno-culture. The story of “The Water
Engine” is, in the end, a melodrama played out by two-dimensional characters in which,
surprisingly, the good guys lose. The death of Lang and his sister may prompt the play’s
mournful ending, as does the death of the water engine—a device that would finally
reconcile nature and technology—but the real resonance for an audience likely comes
from less explicit losses: the descent of radio, the decline of theatre, and the waning of
the imagination in an age in which the media provide all of our images for us.
Mamet’s historical allegory may have been effective in drawing our attention to
corporate and technological culture in 1977, but representing that culture today,
in the full flush of its global expansion, is more challenging. According to Fredric
Jameson (1992), the vastness and complexity of these networks of capital and tech-
nology make them inapprehensible to the human mind and incommensurable with
any attempt to represent them. Jameson, however, does observe indirect reflections
of the structure of feeling they generate in pop culture’s current obsession with epic
conspiracies and monstrous information matrixes, an obsession clearly evident
in Tracy Letts’s Bug (2006). Set in a contemporary motel room on the outskirts of
Oklahoma City, Bug is the story of Agnes White, a forty-ish woman who lives in the
motel, and Peter Evans, a twenty-seven-year-old apparent drifter who moves in with
her. From the beginning, there is something odd about Peter, and early on he gives
Agnes a cryptic warning: “We’ll never really be safe again. We can’t be, not with all the
technology, and the chemicals, and the information” (30). Eventually, he confesses
that he served in the first Iraq war and then became a guinea pig at a military hospital
where he was experimented on for four years. Of course, it isn’t the military itself
that is behind this, but “a consortium of bankers, industrialists, corporate CEOs, and
politicians . . . [who] devised a plan to manipulate technology, economics, the media,
population control, world religion, to keep things the way they are” (82–83). The par-
allel with The Water Engine is clear, the difference being that we are not sure if Peter’s
claims are true or simply the product of paranoid delusion. The ending answers the
question with the surprising revelation that technology has grown so powerful that
it has effectively achieved dominion over nature. Peter and Agnes, we learn, have
been implanted not with electronic “biochips” to monitor and control their behavior,
but with a self-replicating, organic version of the same technology—in other words,
with bugs.
One other play that deserves mention here is Switch Triptych (2005) by Adriano
Shaplin, an American playwright whose work is published and most often performed
 POSTWAR DRAMA AND TECHNOLOGY 447

in Britain. Although anachronistic in texture, the story is set in 1919 in a telephone

switchboard exchange in New York City. It was a time when callers had to subscribe to
a switchboard service, and they knew the women operating the board by name. A new
girl arrives the day the action takes place, and although she seems naive, she’s actually
come to unionize her sisters. The climax comes when Lucille, a brilliant, bilious, and
drunken operator of Italian descent, enters into a contest with the Strowger, an auto-
mated switchboard to see who—or what—can place the most calls in a set time. Despite
the fever-pitch yammer of Lucille making her connections, the Strowger is destined to
win until Lucille throws her drink on it, short-circuiting the machine and putting it out
of commission. But the die has been cast, and the women will soon be replaced by auto-
mated switching. Shaplin, however, is careful not to sentimentalize his story, and in the
end we are struck less by the plight of the women than the loss of traffic between this set
of working-class immigrants and the industrial elite who are their patrons. Yet there is
another point here as well. Historically, automated switchboards were developed years
before they were widely adopted by exchange services. Only when operators threatened
to unionize did such businesses replace them with machines. It is important, Switch
Triptych reminds us, no matter how indivisible they seem, to drive the wedge between
capital and technology, so that we can remind ourselves which is the tool and which is
the master.

Nuclear Technology and the Cold War

The collective, free-floating angst Jameson associates with global capitalism is also
implicated in Cold War anxiety over nuclear technology and its proliferation. At the end
of the war, the United States had only one undetonated nuclear warhead, a number that
was to grow into the dozens by 1949, and by the late 1980s to eighty thousand (Pursell
2007, 61). Not surprisingly, the issue was taken up by numerous American dramatists.
Several postapocalyptic dramas were written in response to the bombing of Hiroshima,
the most notable of which are Upton Sinclair’s A Giant’s Strength (1948), Arch Oboler’s
Night of the Auk (1956), and Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use Are Flowers? (1962). The
approach of these plays varies widely, with Sinclair taking a realistic approach to the
aftermath of an attack on New York, Oboler setting his play in a futuristic spaceship, and
Hansberry writing a parable of an old hermit in a cave.
More immediate at the time was the issue of a nuclear test-ban treaty, addressed by
Dore Schary in The Highest Tree (1960). Schary tells the story of Dr. Aaron Cornish,
a widowed physicist who has contracted leukemia due to his involvement in
hydrogen-bomb testing. Cornish has been given six months to live, and the action of
the drama largely consists of his eleventh-hour conversion to an antitesting stance.
Insofar as it wears this political message on its sleeve, the play is resolutely polemi-
cal. However, set in Cornish’s house on the Upper East Side of New York, and peopled
with New Yorkers of great privilege and prejudice, the play also sends the sentimental
448 ROGER BECHTEL

message that, with the atom bomb hanging over all our heads, we should find more
compassion for our fellow humans regardless of their class or race.
The last of the significant antinuclear proliferation plays before Soviet perestroika in
1987 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was Arthur Kopit’s comedy The End of the
World (1984). Less a play than a metatheatrical satire, the playwright/detective Michael
Trent, a thinly disguised Kopit, goes in search of the rationale behind our national arms
policy, only to find that no one really believes that nuclear deterrence is anything more
than a short-term deferral of nuclear catastrophe. Kopit based the play on personal
interviews with a variety of named and unnamed Washington sources, which he turned
into the comic hijinks of policy wonks and generals. The ending, however, shifts sur-
prisingly and chillingly from the preceding farce to two dramatic monologues that pen-
etrate deeply into what can only be called, to borrow from Freud, our unconscious death
drive. In an earlier scene, one of the characters tells Trent that the only hope for avert-
ing disaster is a “discontinuity” on the scale of an “extraterrestrial” or “Jesus Christ”—
something as unlikely and unforeseeable to Kopit and his interviewees as the collapse of
Communism (66).

The Technological Subject

The nature of the self has long been a theme in the American drama, but it has played out
with particular urgency in the postwar period. Existential crisis grips many of the peri-
od’s dramatic protagonists, and often the crisis is directly or indirectly linked to technol-
ogy. One of the first of these dramas was Thornton Wilder’s one-act The Wreck on the
Five-Twenty-Five (1957). Herbert Hawkins is the subject of the play, and the catalyst of
the action is his call to Mrs. Hawkins to inform her that he won’t make his usual 5:25 PM
commuter train home. Mrs. Hawkins and their daughter, Minnie, sit in the living room
waiting for him, and from their conversation we learn that Herbert is an odd fellow,
one with a dark sense of humor and a distanced manner. One example they note is his
response to a recent church sermon on nuclear devastation: “Fine sermon, Joe. I enjoyed
it. But have you ever thought of this. . . . Suppose the atom bomb didn’t fall, what would
we do then?” (510). Mrs. Hawkins and Minnie’s desultory chat is soon interrupted by a
call from a neighbor informing them of a Peeping Tom outside their window, who, of
course, turns out to be Herbert. Although Wilder includes the atom bomb reference,
the title of the play gives the most resounding clue to the cause of Herbert’s existen-
tial crisis: the mechanized, routinized life that leaves him feeling as though he perpetu-
ally looks at the world through glass. Wilder’s discreet but poignant ending implies that
Herbert was bent on suicide until he took the time to look through a real window at his
own life.
Another powerful one-act that enmeshes technology and subjectivity is Adrienne
Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976). Although it is peopled
with a variety of characters ranging from “the mother” to Marlon Brando, the play is a
 POSTWAR DRAMA AND TECHNOLOGY 449

monodrama that occurs in the mind of Clara, a young African American woman suf-
fering a plague of memories. Time and place are fluid, and the setting shifts seamlessly
between 1955 New York, where Clara has miscarried a child and questions her marriage
to Eddie, to 1963 Ohio, where her brother lies in a coma. The feeling of oneiric psychic
interiority is enhanced by the palpable presence of characters from three of Clara’s most
beloved movies: Now, Voyager; Viva Zapata; and A Place in the Sun. Only the women—
Bette Davis, Jean Peters, and Shelley Winters—from these films speak, and when they
do, they are surrogates for Clara’s thoughts. This conceit is established at the top of the
play, when the “Columbia Pictures Lady” addresses the audience, saying, among other
things, “Lately I think often of killing myself ” (81).
Most immediately, Clara wants to be a writer, but this occupation—and, importantly,
this identity—is all but foreclosed to a black woman during this period. “Ever since I was
twelve I have secretly dreamed of being a writer,” she muses. “Everyone says it’s unreal-
istic for a Negro to want to write” (99). Chaffing against the roles she finds herself in—
wife and mother—she finds dubious solace at the movies. “Eddie says . . . that my diaries
consume me and that my diaries make me a spectator watching my life like watching a
black and white movie” (99). The metaphor here is telling: the movies are in black and
white, but just as white America will not employ a black woman writer, neither will it let
that woman participate freely in the cinematic fantasy life of its culture. Both dynamics
are psychically debilitating, but it is important to tease apart the two economies at work
here: finances and material opportunity, and media technology and the screen. Personal
identity is, of course, potentiated by a subject’s culture, but it nonetheless remains an
ongoing negotiation with that culture, however conscious or subconscious, complicit
or refractory. Subjectivity, however, is the ground of that potential, the primal intersec-
tion of psychic functioning and cultural experience. Clara, then, is groundless: when it
looks to the movie screen, her “I/eye” sees only white, as we see only white movie stars
onstage in this play, improbably and absurdly mouthing Clara’s memories and desires.
The movies may be in black and white, but when blacks appear nowhere on the screen or
on the page, Clara’s subjectivity is destined to float untethered from any cultural moor-
ing. Her cherished movies may channel her desire, but psychologically they render her a
bit player in her own life.
Media technology returns in Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio (1987), and while it explicitly
addresses radio as a commercial enterprise, it is ultimately more concerned with its ecol-
ogy than its economy. What little story there is consists in a single, compressed, on-air
evening with a popular Cleveland talk-jock, Barry Champlain, whose show is scheduled
to begin national syndication the following night. In the course of the evening, under the
pressure of new corporate sponsors listening, Barry suffers a critical bout of introspec-
tion. Bogosian allows each of Barry’s staff at the station—Barry’s producer, operator, and
assistant—direct-address monologues that allow us glimpses into Barry’s history and
personality. The most damning comes from Dan Woodruff, the producer, who peels
back the public-service veneer of talk radio to reveal the pure profit motive underneath.
Barry, in fact, was Dan’s creation: he changed his name from Paleologus to Champlain,
turned Barry’s six-month stint at Fort Dix into Vietnam vet status, and, among other
450 ROGER BECHTEL

things, gave him a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. “Barry Champlain” is pure
media creation, and, cynically, Dan knows there’s a price to pay:  “This is a great
job. . . .You get into trouble when you forget it’s a job. When you start to think you’re
doing something more. . . . It’ll fuck you up every time. Every time. That’s Barry’s prob-
lem, not mine” (61). On this evening, that problem becomes Barry’s crisis. When a lying
teenager shows up at the studio and out-Barrys Barry, the existential embrace of his
personal identity and his talk radio personality becomes frighteningly clear. “And that’s
where I come in, isn’t it?” he rants on-air. “I’m here to lead you by the hand through the
dark forest of your own hatred and anger and humiliation. . . . Tomorrow night, millions
of people are going to be listening to this show, and you have nothing to talk about!” (74).
People may indeed be connected through the democratic medium of talk radio, but the
electronic ground they share is a wasteland, and Barry occupies it alone.
Michael Majeski, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso (1999), is in many ways a
late twentieth-century version, in extremis, of Thornton Wilder’s Herbert Hawkins. The
most obvious link is business travel. But while Hawkins’s mode is the daily commuter
train, Majeski’s is the airplane, and the play takes place in the aftermath of a routine trip
to Valparaiso, Indiana, from which Majeski gets re-routed to Valparaiso, Florida, and
finally to Valparaiso, Chile. At first Majeski chalks up the error to a wildly unlikely set of
happenstance occurrences, but we later learn that the trajectory of his travel was actu-
ally one of desperate, irrational escape—and not the only one he attempted that day. The
play begins with a short, cryptic video projection of a man in an unidentifiable but con-
fined space, an opaque plastic bag drawn tightly over his head. Only later do we learn
that, on the long flight from Florida to Chile, this was Majeski’s unsuccessful attempt at
suicide in the plane’s lavatory.
Majeski’s airline misadventure would seem to offer a drama in its own right, but
DeLillo is more interested in the celebrity this bestows on Majeski. The play proper
begins with Majeski’s first interview in the aftermath of the event, and it continues
with the endless interviews that make up the action. Eventually Majeski quits his job
to devote himself full-time to being interviewed; as if in a Borges story, his life becomes
the perpetual telling of his life. And not simply the Valparaiso story, but the details of
his wife’s affair, the DUI charge that caused his son to be taken from him, the suicide
attempt. “[The interview] was underway when you got on the wrong plane and went to
the wrong place,” explains one interviewer. “The interview started before that. How far
back do you want to go? The interview started basically when your father fucked your
mother on a rainy night in May” (26).
The play ends when Delfina Treadwell, a kind of deranged Oprah Winfrey, decides to
take her interview with Majeski to its logical conclusion: his death. In an act as erotic as
it is homicidal, she forces a hand microphone down his throat until he slumps lifelessly
forward. “We live in the air as well as the skin,” Delfina announces in her last lines. “And
there is something in these grids of information that strikes the common heart as magic”
(109). If, as many cultural theorists would have it, mass media and its “grids of informa-
tion” may be conceived as creating a vast, virtual space, Valparaiso reminds us that the
pleasure of traveling may be irresistible, but the risk is the inability to find one’s way back.
 POSTWAR DRAMA AND TECHNOLOGY 451

Majeski’s wayward detour to Valparaiso may have covered thousands of miles, but it
operates here as a metaphor for a dislocation that can happen in one’s own living room.
Richard Maxwell’s Flight Courier Service (1997) also invokes air travel as a metaphor
for alienation and disorientation, but it offers a distinct formal contrast to DeLillo’s play.
Short and episodic, Flight Courier Service tells the story of Rene, an inarticulate young
man who lands a job as courier for a business that delivers packages worldwide. His first
assignment is to Kuala Lumpur, where he is to deposit a parcel with a Mr. Feldman. The
feckless Rene, however, opens the package to impress a stewardess on the flight over,
which results in Feldman and his henchman hunting Rene through the streets of the
city. He meets the Stewardess, who rescues and seduces him, but just when she is about
to smuggle him onto a flight home to New York, he receives a call from the flight courier
service and takes a job delivering a package to Seoul.
If the plot sounds improbable, it is. And while it might be classified as a comedy, it
achieves its effect not through the usual comedic conventions, but precisely because
of the convincing probability of its improbability. Although the events of the story
are played out by its characters, Rene’s trip to Kuala Lumpur achieves the feeling of
first-person narration even if that device is only sparingly deployed. “I’m in my apart-
ment,” Rene tells us in the first line, “I found a pamphlet. This looks interesting. ‘Have
you ever thought about becoming a flight courier?’ . . . Hello? I called to learn about what
it takes to become a flight courier” (29). Rene’s delivery here—the only lines of narra-
tion in the play—is affectless, and so is Rene. If the characters of Valparaiso are trans-
ported from the realm of realism to a kind of hyperrealism, it is in large part due to their
language—repetitive, dense, discursive, at times broadcast-lyrical, and always a speech
act intended to instantiate the self. More than persons, their language makes them alle-
gories of persons, endlessly performing their own mediation. The characters of Flight
Courier Service, on the other hand, with their flat, affectless language and presence, are
all too human. Lack of affect, the play seems to say, is the only credible response to the
barrage of “random” events in a hyperaccelerated, globalized world, and its reflection in
all the characters is precisely what makes Flight Courier Service so perversely believable.

Technology Onstage

Although Tennessee Williams believed that adding slide projections to The Glass Menagerie
would “strengthen the effect of what is merely allusion in the writing” as well as provide
“a definite emotional appeal,” in retrospect, it was probably to the advantage of the drama
that this theatrical interpolation was excluded during performance (10). Williams’s script
suggests, for example, the use of such literal images as “Blue Roses” (83), and “Gentleman
caller waving goodbye—gaily” (85), which would seem to subvert the mood and tone of the
play through their literality and pathos. But just as subversive, in 1945 at least, would have
been the stage technology itself. In a play meant to evoke the quality of a memory, slide pro-
jections would likely have been too real; whatever the content of the image or graphic, the
452 ROGER BECHTEL

presence of the technology would have drawn attention to itself in precisely the defamiliar-
izing way theorized and practiced by Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht.
Today, however, the use of electronic media of all kinds—projections, video moni-
tors, and so on—has become as ubiquitous in the theatre as it is in American culture
generally, and this, along with advances in traditional stage technology, has inevita-
bly asserted its presence in the creation of the drama. Big-budget musicals may be the
most evident examples of this: it would be difficult to imagine Miss Saigon without the
entrance of the helicopter. There are, of course, economies of scale at work in this exam-
ple, and one could even argue that in the case of the Broadway musical technological
spectacle has succeeded in creating the demand for more technological spectacle, to the
point that technological spectacle is almost synonymous with commercial profitability.
The real point here, though, is that the American drama to some extent reflects the tech-
nological and economic means of production available to it. Tony Kushner, for example,
can call for an angel to fly down from the heavens in Angels in America without having to
pause to consider the viability of this demand, just as Don DeLillo can write into the text
of Valparaiso a video projection that must be created exclusively for every production of
the play.
The assumption made thus far is that the theatre exists strictly as a means of produc-
tion for the dramatic text. This assumption, however, has been aggressively challenged
over the past five decades, and in what Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006) calls “postdramatic
theatre,” producing plays per se has given over to the creation of performance events
in which text—if there is a text—is just one unprivileged element among the many
that compose the event. When text is generated as part of the event, it is very often not
referred to as a “play” but as a “text for performance” or something similar and for good
reason. Following postmodern theories of the decentered subject, the unreliability of
narrative, and the mediatization of social space, the creators of performance texts have
correspondingly eschewed the traditional dramaturgical conventions of character,
plot, and setting. And when practitioners of postdramatic theatre stage a conventional
dramatic text, they most often “deconstruct” it so as to subvert realistic coherency of
character or plot, as when the Wooster Group casts a white woman as the Emperor
Jones, and she plays the role in blackface and a kimono. In these kinds of productions—
especially those of the Wooster Group—video technology and live camera feeds often
become essential elements of the deconstruction: their real-time, electronic representa-
tion of the stage images shift attention away from dramatic action and reflexively onto
the performance itself.
The question here, however, is not what happens to an extant drama when it is sub-
ject to a multimedia production, but whether postdramatic theatre, and specifically
its multimedia variation, ever generates something that we might call a drama, and if
so, how the presence of multimedia in its performance realization affects its dramatic
form. To answer these questions one might immediately refer to a production like the
Builder’s Association’s well-known Alladeen (2005), which was awash in video tech-
nology of all kinds. Yet despite the sophistication of its media environment, Alladeen
was essentially conventional drama, a collage of more-or-less narrative scenes about
 POSTWAR DRAMA AND TECHNOLOGY 453

personal accommodation to global information technology. The Alladeen example is

typical: texts created for multimedia production most often retain a traditional dramatic
form, with the media used simply as scenography or an alternative means of convey-
ing narrative. One striking exception to this, however, are the “media texts” of John
Jesurun, which come much closer to combining media technology and dramatic text at
a genetic level.
While Jesurun’s Snow (2000) utilizes a fairly conventional narrative form, its multi-
media mise-en-scène is all but conventional. However seemingly convoluted, the plot
revolves around two Hollywood producers, an actress, a screenwriter, and an intern,
and it is propelled by their various attempts to control the script of a television drama.
The setting, however, places the audience in a closed room completely separated from
the action, which is transmitted to them from four external playing spaces via live
cameras and four projection screens. The only view of the “live” performance comes
through two small windows in the doors to the audience room, which actors occasion-
ally have to pass by as they move between performance spaces. One actor, however, is
never seen: the intern consists of a motorized video camera attached to a track that runs
around the outside of the audience room, while the voice of the intern is relayed by an
actor on an unseen microphone. In short, the setting, to echo Marshall McLuhan, is the
message, for the setting becomes the medium—and, importantly, it encloses the audi-
ence entirely. While the characters of the drama indulge in endless power plays to take
control of the narrative (within the narrative), what Snow ultimately implies is that nar-
rative is nothing more than snow—televisual static—and that, like the weather, media
culture has become environmental.
Jesurun’s more recent Firefall (2009) incorporates video technology largely as a means
to address the technology that is its primary concern: the Internet. In true postdramatic
style, it is the website generated by Jesurun and his cohorts, and not the live performance
that is the event, because it is only through the website that every aspect of the event is
accessible: “All material connected to the project is added and stored on this Website.
This includes the project’s entire text, as well as clips, links, trivia, etc. . . . Other than live
internet streams, all pre-recorded material used during the performance is accessed live
through this constantly changing Website” (167). Each of the performers is assigned a
computer during live performances, each is logged on to the website, and each computer
is attached to a live video projector. While there is a prescripted text that the perform-
ers must move through, individually they are encouraged to interrupt that text through
projections channeled from the Internet. This might seem to attenuate the importance
of the text, but the text, in fact, becomes the foundation of this elaborate game. Although
densely elliptical and nonnarrative, the text nonetheless assigns each performer a kind
of ersatz character, and each character adopts what amounts to a strategy or an ethical
position that will inform their improvisatory web surfing. At the same time, these ethi-
cal positions—which emerge in the text in the repetition of words like “being,” “feeling,”
“mind,” “comfort,” and, most important, “belief ”—cohere into a poignant question: how
do we write our social narrative in an age that has lost its belief in belief and has shifted it
instead to technology?
454 ROGER BECHTEL

What is extraordinary about these two works is the recursivity Jesurun achieves
between text and media. The term “media text” is cunningly apt—the media is in the
text, the text is in the media. Although reading Snow and Firefall provides certain plea-
sures in its own right, performing them without their technological “interface” (for
lack of a better term) would undoubtedly be futile. Yet in confronting the complex and
vexing questions of a media age, the necessity of these texts’ reliance on technology is
self-evident, their recursivity their greatest attribute, and their status as a form of drama
unquestionable.

Works Cited
Arthur, W. Brian. 2009. The Nature of Technology. New York: Free Press.
Bogosian, Eric. 1994. The Essential Bogosian. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
DeLillo, Don. 1999. Valparaiso. New York: Scribner.
Hansberry, Lorraine. 1972. Les Blancs. New York: Random House.
Jameson, Fredric. 1992. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Jesurun, John. 2009. Shatterhand Massacree and Other Media Texts. New York: PAJ Publications.
Kennedy, Adrienne. 1988. Adrienne Kennedy in One Act. Minneapolis:  University of
Minnesota Press.
Kopit, Arthur. 1984. End of the World. New York: Hill and Wang.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby.
New York: Routledge.
Letts, Tracy. Bug. 2006. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Mamet, David. 1977. The Water Engine. New York: Grove.
Maxwell, Richard. 2004. Plays, 1996-2000. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Miller, Arthur. 1981. Eight Plays. Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday.
Oboler, Arch. 1958. Night of the Auk. New York: Horizon.
Pursell, Carroll. 2007. Technology in Postwar America:  A  History. New  York:  Columbia
University Press.
Schary, Dore. 1960. The Highest Tree. New York: Random House.
Shaplin, Adriano. 2005. Switch Triptych. London: Oberon.
Sinclair, Upton. 1948. A Giant’s Strength. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius.
Wilder, Thornton. 2007. Collected Plays and Writings on Theater. New York: Library of America.
Williams, Tennessee. 1979. Eight Plays. Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday.
 CHAPTER 29

D R A M A A N D T H E N EW SE X UA L I T I E S

J OR DA N S C H I L D C ROU T

While new understandings of sexual identity emerged in the years following World
War II, it would be a mistake to imagine queer sexuality as new in contrast to an ancient
and unchanging heterosexuality. Many theorists, particularly those in the field known
as queer studies, have asserted that all sexuality is constructed by social and ideological
forces that can vary widely across time and place. The very existence of sexual identity as
a category emerges in nineteenth-century Europe with the rise of medical and psycho-
logical taxonomies, shifting the dominant paradigm for understanding same-sex rela-
tionships from an emphasis on deviant acts, which any person might commit, to deviant
persons who constitute a distinct minority. Such deviants then serve the useful func-
tion of a sexual “other” against whom heterosexuality can be normalized and valorized.
Therefore, while lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities may be understood as
new sexualities within American culture in the post–World War II era, it is important
to recognize the ways in which all sexuality is continuously reexamined and redefined.
Contemporary theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick have famously
argued that gender and sexuality are not essentialized identities but performative
identities that exist through doing rather than simply being. The theatre, then, with its
emphasis on live bodies in performance, has served as a rich field in which to explore
various constructions and expressions of human sexuality, and theatre scholarship has
shed light on some of the key tensions evident in the representation of LGBT people
over the past century. Since homosexuality was so thoroughly stigmatized and cen-
sored, famously labeled as “the love that dare not speak its name,” the initial struggle was
simply between visibility and invisibility. Once LGBT characters gained some foothold
in the theatre, an additional tension was between “positive” and “negative” representa-
tions, the latter mostly consisting of sinister villains, pathetic neurotics, and ridiculous
clowns. In more recent years, theatre critics have taken up a debate reflecting a division
within the larger gay rights movement: do plays participate in an agenda of assimilation,
normalizing LGBT people as practitioners of white, middle-class values who should
be welcomed into the heteronormative circle of privilege, or do plays further a radi-
cal agenda that emphasizes the queerness of LGBT people and insists that society must
456 JORDAN SCHILDCROUT

change to accommodate identities, values, and lifestyles that resist the norm? These ten-
sions over the representation of LGBT people in the American theatre reflect the ten-
sions over the status of LGBT people in American society, and over the past century,
plays and performances have often played an important role in forming new under-
standings of queer identities, relationships, and communities.
To appreciate the history of LGBT representation in the American theatre, it is help-
ful to understand a few key paradigms that emerged in the decades leading up to World
War II. While drag and “pansy” performers were popular in nightclubs in Greenwich
Village and Harlem in the 1920s, the so-called legitimate stage was under stricter scru-
tiny when it came to queer representation (Chauncey 1994). In the 1926–27 Broadway
season, critics lauded Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive, a sophisticated French import
about a young woman whose marriage is ruined by her enchantment with an older
woman. That woman, one Madame d’Aiguines, is never seen onstage, and the conven-
tion of the offstage homosexual would come to dominate American postwar drama. In
contrast, that same season, Mae West, who was a successful playwright before becoming
a Hollywood sex symbol, was much more forthright in presenting a variety of homo-
sexual characters in her play, The Drag (1927). West’s play offers a surprisingly diverse
set of homosexual types: a duplicitous husband leading a secret gay life; his heartbro-
ken lover who, while driven to murder and madness, makes a plea for the acceptance of
homosexual love; and a bevy of drag performers who sing and dance together in a sensa-
tional party scene that drew the wrath of moral watchdogs. In condemning the sinister
homosexual, encouraging sympathy for the sick homosexual, and taking pleasure in the
flamboyant homosexual, West encapsulated many of the attitudes that would inform the
representation of gay characters over the next few decades.
In what many historians interpret as a strategy to prevent West from bringing The
Drag to Broadway, the authorities raided her concurrently running hit play Sex (1926),
along with The Captive and a sex farce entitled The Virgin Man. The Broadway raids of
1927 are significant not just because they successfully stopped The Drag and The Captive,
but because they resulted in legislation known as the Wales Padlock Law, which explic-
itly prohibited plays “depicting or dealing with the subject of sex degeneracy, or sex per-
version.” As the theatre historian Kaier Curtin notes, this law made lesbians and gay men
“the only citizens of the United States adjudged too loathsome and morally infectious to
be seen even in fictitious characterizations in legitimate theater productions” (1987, 102).
Some queer representation escaped this censorship, as long as the play presented
homosexuality with the appropriate moral indignation, such as Mordaunt Shairp’s
British import The Green Bay Tree (1933), or with tragic gravitas, such as Lillian
Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934). Shairp’s play ends with the murder of a predatory
older man who would corrupt a handsome youth. In Hellman’s play, a child accuses
two female teachers of being lovers, and after three acts of denial, one of the teach-
ers finally acknowledges her lesbian desire. But she is distraught by her “sickness” and
almost immediately commits suicide, so there is effectively an openly lesbian character
onstage for one page of dramatic text. While both plays were censored in certain cities,
they played on Broadway because they were seen as serious, critically lauded dramas
 DRAMA AND THE NEW SEXUALITIES 457

that showed homosexuality as a moral problem and concluded with the death of the
homosexual. With villainous queer characters justifiably murdered, and with sympa-
thetic queer characters tragically taking their own lives, queer corpses littered the stage.

Deviance and the Dominant Culture

World War II caused radical shifts in American life and American culture, and the his-
torian Allan Bérubé (1990) has described how the war played an important part in cre-
ating contemporary sexual identities. Military mobilization put millions of men and
women, including gays and lesbians from across the country, in largely homosocial
environments that also allowed for the creation of homosexual networks, making com-
munities out of people who had previously felt isolated in their sexual difference. For
women in particular, the war brought many out of the seclusion of the domestic sphere
and into the military and the industrial workforce, creating greater opportunities for
independence and the fostering of same-sex relationships.
The dominant culture of the postwar era produced the return of strictly defined gen-
der roles and the valorization of the suburban middle-class family unit. But the drama
of the era often probed the anxieties underlying this “normalcy” (Savran 1992), and the
most acclaimed playwright to deal directly with issues of sexual desire and difference
was Tennessee Williams. Unlike the previous American playwrights who had dared to
write about homosexuality, Williams was himself homosexual, even though he was not
publicly known as such until later in his career. After the success of his first Broadway
play, The Glass Menagerie (1945), Williams had even greater commercial and critical
success with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), both
of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Both plays refer to explicitly homosexual
characters, although they never appear onstage since they are dead before the curtain
rises. Williams pushes against the closet door, simultaneously presenting and hiding,
acknowledging and disavowing, the existence of the homosexual.
It is perhaps most productive to consider how these absences and erasures function
within the plays, rather than faulting Williams for simply perpetuating or capitulating to
the censorship and homophobia of his times. In Streetcar, Blanche tells her suitor Mitch
the story of the events leading up to the suicide of her homosexual husband. However,
after describing his gruesome death, Blanche backtracks and confesses her own role in
prompting the death: “It was because—on the dance floor—unable to stop myself—I’d
suddenly said—‘I saw! I know! You disgust me’ ” (Williams 1979, 159). Similarly, when
Cat’s Brick tells Big Daddy the story of his best friend Skipper’s death, he describes the
events that led Skipper to believe he was homosexual, concluding that “Skipper broke
in two like a rotten stick—nobody ever turned so fast to a lush—or died of it so quick”
(478). But, at Big Daddy’s insistence, Brick must also backtrack and confess his own role
in Skipper’s downfall: when Skipper called Brick to confess his love for him, Brick hung
up on his friend and never spoke to him again. Big Daddy forces Brick to confront the
458 JORDAN SCHILDCROUT

fact that Brick “dug the grave of [his] friend and kicked him into it!” (479) rather than
accept his homosexuality. In both plays, the highlighted action is not the death of the
absent homosexual, but rather the speaker’s own act of intolerance and rejection that
caused the death. Williams critiques the disgust shared by Blanche and Brick, which
later would be termed homophobia, and blames it—rather than the homosexual’s own
moral or medical condition—for the death of the homosexual. Furthermore, Blanche
and Brick are both tormented by guilt over their acts of rejection, and thus the plays
implicitly construct pleas for tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality in an intoler-
ant and hostile era.
In other plays of the 1950s, homosexuality was both presented and hidden through
yet another strategy:  the unjust accusation. In Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy
(1953) and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955), young men who are not suf-
ficiently masculine are accused of being queer. In both cases, the playwrights raise the
stigma of homosexuality, examining what motivates the accuser and how it affects the
accused, without having to represent an actual homosexual. As in The Children’s Hour,
which was revived on Broadway in 1952, the accusers hope to empower themselves and
deflect attention from their own shameful feelings or actions, ruining innocent lives
in the process. Perhaps the drama of the falsely accused gained popularity in the 1950s
because of the fear and anger created by the House Un-American Activities Committee,
which sought to root out Communists and homosexuals from government, academia,
and the entertainment industry. In the same decade, many states passed “sexual psy-
chopath” laws, giving the government the authority to arrest, imprison, or force repara-
tive therapy (including hormone injections and shock treatments) on “deviants.” The
homosexual, then, serves the same function in these plays as witches do in the decade’s
most enduring play about unjust accusations, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953). They
represent a sinister other that must be rooted out of the community—but they (homo-
sexuals and witches) do not actually exist on the stage. Therefore, the plays can avoid
having to condone or condemn the monstrous other, focusing instead on the innocent
who are wrongly accused of being other. Nevertheless, these plays also expose the ethi-
cal corruption of those who would accuse anyone of homosexuality, so an audience may
choose to extend sympathy to actual homosexuals who are victimized by such people.
While the aim of HUAC, the sexual psychopath laws, and other social forces in the
postwar era may have been the eradication of homosexuals, one by-product of these
public displays of homophobia was a diminishment of the silence surrounding the sub-
ject of homosexuality. The burgeoning discourse on homosexuality also included medi-
cal and psychological perspectives that argued against the condemnation of the sexual
other. Particularly influential on the culture at large was the biologist Alfred Kinsey,
whose Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female (1953) became best-sellers and argued that deviations from monogamous het-
erosexuality were much more prevalent than previously acknowledged. Also broaden-
ing the discourse were social and political organizations created by gay men and lesbians
themselves to fight their oppression. Through publications and public demonstrations,
what were known as homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society (1950) and
 DRAMA AND THE NEW SEXUALITIES 459

the Daughters of Bilitis (1955) fought the silence and condemnation that dominated
the 1950s.
This mixture of persecution and resistance, of recognition and invisibility, created
a strange effect within the theatre world. Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, the
sexual identities of some theatre artists became open secrets, known to insiders but not
discussed publicly. Critics began to question the authenticity of plays written by homo-
sexual playwrights, including Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Edward Albee
(Clum 2000). How could homosexual playwrights, they argued, write truthfully about
women and heterosexual marriage in their plays? Such plays were, in their eyes, insidi-
ous shams, presenting homosexual characters and relationships in the guise of “normal”
characters and relationships. While some critics who made this argument were explic-
itly homophobic, other more progressive critics made the same argument, but with the
desire to eradicate the legal restrictions and social prejudices that forced homosexual
playwrights to comply with this “deception.” When, they asked, would the American
theatre be able to represent homosexuality honestly?
During this era, many of the depictions of explicitly gay and lesbian characters found
their way to the American stage via European plays (de Jongh 1992; Sinfield 1999). No
Exit (1946) by Jean-Paul Sartre, The Immoralist (1954) by André Gide, A Taste of Honey
(1958) by Shelagh Delaney, The Hostage (1960) by Brendan Behan, A Patriot for Me (1965)
by John Osborne, The Killing of Sister George (1966) by Frank Marcus, Staircase (1966) by
Charles Dyer, and Loot (1968) by Joe Orton came to Broadway from France or England
and were, for the most part, well received by American critics and audiences. Although
these queer characters were to varying degrees weak, neurotic, or sadistic, they were, if
nothing else, forthrightly queer, and most were still alive by the final curtain.
Along with looking abroad for such representations, Americans could also begin to
find gay and lesbian characters if they looked beyond Broadway to the emerging Off
Broadway and Off Off Broadway theatre scenes. With smaller theatres and smaller bud-
gets, producers could afford to take greater risks in terms of theatrical style and subject
matter, since such plays could successfully appeal to a more selective niche audience.
Interestingly, Tennessee Williams played a crucial role in this development, since José
Quintero’s production of Summer and Smoke at Circle in the Square in 1952 is credited
as the first Off Broadway hit. In 1958, Williams had another Off Broadway success with
Garden Party, which included the one-act play Suddenly Last Summer. Once again,
Williams gave his audience a homosexual character who is dead before the curtain rises.
Sebastian Venable’s cousin Catharine tells the story of how he used her to seduce poor
boys in foreign lands for him and how these boys finally killed Sebastian by eating him
alive. While it may be difficult to locate a plea for tolerance in this macabre play, Suddenly
Last Summer is ultimately about opening the closet door and facing the truth—even if it
is an unpleasant truth. By the time Edward Albee’s subtly homoerotic pas de deux drama
The Zoo Story played at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1960, Off Broadway had solidi-
fied its reputation as the proving ground for the most exciting new American plays.
Often cited as the first Off Off Broadway theatre, the Caffe Cino was a Greenwich
Village coffeehouse, opened by the impresario Joe Cino in 1958, with a small stage that
460 JORDAN SCHILDCROUT

became home to playwrights creating work outside of the mainstream. Greenwich

Village had long been celebrated as a haven for bohemians, artists, and radicals, as well
as an enclave for gays and lesbians, so it is not surprising that small fringe theatres that
welcomed queer artists and audiences arose in this neighborhood. Gay playwrights
such as Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick, and William Hoffman all staged plays with gay
characters at the Caffe Cino. Most notable among these was The Madness of Lady Bright
(1964) by Lanford Wilson, which explored the emotional breakdown of a “screaming
queen” and became one of the Cino’s most popular productions. LaMaMa Experimental
Theatre Club, founded by Ellen Stewart in 1961, also served as a center for the Off Off
Broadway movement and is now the longest surviving Off Off Broadway theatre, regu-
larly presenting new theatrical works on LGBT themes.
Around this same time, drag performance, which had a long history in various theat-
rical traditions, found new expression in subversive performances by Jack Smith, John
Vaccaro, and Ronald Tavel and later in troupes like the Cockettes and Hot Peaches.
The aesthetic of this work is often categorized as camp, a performance style that mixes
high-brow and low-brow genres, the sublime and the vulgar, and an ironic sensibil-
ity that simultaneously satirizes and celebrates the artificiality of the theatre, with
cross-dressing as a common convention. This aesthetic became one of the first subjects
of critical inquiry into a specifically queer style of theatricality, explored by Susan Sontag
in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” and later by Stefan Brecht in his book Queer Theater
(Brecht 1986; Sontag 1966). Later critics also noted the political function of camp, using
outrageous humor as a weapon against the repression of the closet and subverting the
values of the dominant culture. The most acclaimed practitioner of this flamboyant
theatricality was Charles Ludlam, who formed his Ridiculous Theatrical Company in
1967, and wrote, directed, and starred in dozens of plays, most notably Bluebeard (1970),
Camille (1973), and The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984). Often considered the inheritor of
Ludlam’s mantle, Charles Busch has written and starred as the heroine in a variety of
camp film parodies ranging from the long-running Off Broadway hit Vampire Lesbians
of Sodom (1985) and Psycho Beach Party (1987) to Die Mommie Die! (2007) and The
Divine Sister (2010).
It is no accident that the mid- to late 1960s saw the rise of these alternative queer the-
atre spaces and styles, functioning outside of, and frequently in direct opposition to,
the commercial theatre. They coincided with the rise of other cultural movements—
including Black, Chicano, and feminist—that sought to legitimize identities, ideological
perspectives, and aesthetics not represented in the dominant culture (Elam 1997). The
concerns of these different movements occasionally overlapped, and gay and lesbian
characters were central to at least two major plays from the Black Arts Movement of the
civil rights era. The Toilet (1964) by LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) shocked
audiences with its vulgar language and violence, but the play is most remarkable for
representing desire between two teenage boys, one black and one white. When the lat-
ter is beaten for his indiscretion, the former must wrestle with his allegiances across
racial and sexual divisions. Clara’s Ole Man (1965) by Ed Bullins combines urban realism
with Pinteresque menace to depict the come-uppance of a young man who flirts with
 DRAMA AND THE NEW SEXUALITIES 461

beautiful Clara, only to discover that her “ole man” is in fact an imposing “bull dyke.”
This depiction of African American lesbians in a butch/femme relationship may have
surprised audiences as much as it surprises the young man in the play, who learns the
dangers of assuming universal heterosexuality.

Gay Plays, Gay Theatres, and

Gay Liberation

The decline of censorship laws and the growing strength of the Off Broadway move-
ment fostered the success of the play often considered the landmark of gay theatre. Mart
Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), featuring an ensemble of gay characters gathered
for a birthday party that implodes in a swirl of alcohol, verbal attacks, and manipulative
games, ran for one thousand performances Off Broadway and later generated a success-
ful film version with the original cast (1970) and numerous regional productions and
revivals. While some gay activists decried the play as a horror show of gay self-loathing,
others praised it for its uncloseted depiction of gay male relationships and community.
The play even acknowledges its own position within the history of theatrical representa-
tion, with the drunken host Michael declaring, “It’s not always the way it is in plays. Not
all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the story!” (Crowley 1996, 81). If The Boys in
the Band originally served as a sort of primer on gay culture, it is now often viewed as a
time capsule of that culture, challenging audiences to consider how much has (or hasn’t)
changed for gay people since 1968. Perhaps most significantly in terms of theatrical pro-
duction, the success of The Boys in the Band with a broad audience proved that plays
with gay characters and gay concerns could be commercially viable in the American
theatre.
During the run of The Boys in the Band, New York City witnessed the Stonewall Riots
of 1969, a highly publicized protest of queer people against police harassment, often
given credit for energizing the modern gay rights movement. The following year, gay
and lesbian organizations mounted the first Gay Pride March to mark the anniversary
of the event, creating a form of street theatre and political activism that placed great
importance on claiming a public identity. “Coming out of the closet” was a central strat-
egy of gay liberation, necessary for personal self-acceptance as well as to combat social
and political oppression. In 1974, former Caffe Cino playwright Doric Wilson, who par-
ticipated in the Stonewall Riots, merged the community activism of the gay liberation
movement with the production ethos of Off Broadway theatre to create The Other Side
of Silence (TOSOS), acknowledged as the first gay theatre company. Creating a “purple
circuit” of specifically gay theatres, TOSOS and other companies—such as the Theatre
Rhinoceros (San Francisco), Celebration Theatre (Los Angeles), Diversionary Theatre
(San Diego), That Uppity Theatre Company (St. Louis), About Face Theatre (Chicago),
and Triangle Players (Richmond)—adapted the criteria that W.  E. B.  Du Bois had
462 JORDAN SCHILDCROUT

established decades earlier for the Black Theatre Movement: the theatre must be “for us,
by us, about us, and near us.”
Plays such as T-Shirts (1978) by Robert Patrick and A Perfect Relationship (1982) by
Doric Wilson became staples of the purple circuit, and publishers met the growing audi-
ence for gay and lesbian plays by creating collections of these new works (Hoffman 1979;
McDermott 1985; Shewey 1988). The most successful lesbian play to emerge out of this
movement was Jane Chambers’s Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980), a comic drama
about a group of seven lesbian friends who regularly vacation together, only to find their
summer enclave invaded by Eva, an insecure straight woman fleeing her husband. In
due course, Eva falls in love with the confident and charismatic Lil, and although Lil dies
at the end of the play, she has passed on to Eva her strength and self-assurance. Much as
The Boys in the Band was hailed as a landmark play for presenting a variety of gay char-
acters and addressing common gay issues, so Last Summer at Bluefish Cove addresses
relationships, the closet, career, and family within the context of a lesbian community.
The feminist scholar Jill Dolan has critiqued the play for its adherence to the conven-
tions of realism which, as in The Children’s Hour before it, necessitate the death of the
problematic lesbian (Dolan 1993); nevertheless, gay and feminist theatre companies
around the country regularly revive the play.
Feminist playwrights created plays that included lesbian characters and themes,
such as Fefu and Her Friends (1977) by Maria Irene Fornes and Cloud 9 (1979) by Caryl
Churchill, which have been widely produced by professional, amateur, and university
theatres in America. But the desire for a specifically lesbian theatre led to the creation of
companies in the 1970s such as the Lavender Cellar in Minneapolis and the Red Dyke
Theatre in Atlanta (Sisley 1996). Like their feminist forbearers, such companies tended
to operate as collectives, valuing process over product and community over commer-
cial success. A highly influential and long-standing lesbian theatre is New York’s WOW
(Women’s One World) Café, founded in 1980 by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw (Davy
2011). Along with Deb Margolin, they also formed the celebrated performance group
Split Britches, known for exploring lesbian relationships, iconography, and butch/
femme aesthetics in performances such as Dress Suits to Hire (1987) and Lesbians Who
Kill (1992) (Case 1996). In one of their most acclaimed pieces, Split Britches joined with
the British gay male duo Bloolips to create Belle Reprieve (1991), a queer deconstruc-
tion of gender roles, sexuality, and violence in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire
(Dolan 2010).
Holly Hughes’s dark and sexy comedies The Well of Horniness (1983) and The Lady
Dick (1985) became early cult hits at WOW and popularized what some critics described
as the “dyke noir” aesthetic. WOW also nurtured the writing and performance col-
lective the Five Lesbian Brothers, whose plays, including the gleefully macabre The
Secretaries (1994) and a modern revision of Sophocles in Oedipus at Palm Springs
(2005), pushed the boundaries of lesbian representation in both queer and mainstream
theatres (Warner 2012). One of the Brothers, Lisa Kron, has won acclaim as a solo per-
former and playwright, particularly with the Tony-nominated Broadway production of
 DRAMA AND THE NEW SEXUALITIES 463

her autobiographical play Well (2006) and her drama about the intersection of romantic
and political ethics, In the Wake (2010).
While gay- and lesbian-identified theatres grew in the late 1970s and early 1980s, gay
characters also appeared more regularly in the commercial theatre. Indeed, the two lon-
gest running Broadway plays of the era, while not usually considered gay plays, centered
on gay or bisexual characters: Albert Innaurato’s coming-of-age comedy Gemini (1977)
and Ira Levin’s comedy thriller Deathtrap (1978). Even hit musicals featured queer char-
acters, such as the prison matron Mama Morton who secures “favors” from her wards in
Chicago (1975) and Paul, the Puerto Rican dancer in A Chorus Line (1975) who wrestles
with his shame about being effeminate and performing in drag. Perhaps more boldly,
Martin Sherman’s Tony-nominated Bent (1979) asked audiences to acknowledge gay
lives and gay oppression often erased from history, unflinchingly presenting the brutal
victimization and murder of homosexuals in a Nazi concentration camp. Although not
as commercially successful, Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
by Ed Graczyk featured a male-to-female transsexual (played by Karen Black) as a digni-
fied character who brings truth and healing to a reunion of friends in a small Texas town.
While many of these plays presented LGBT characters within the traditional conven-
tions of comic neurotics, tragic victims, or sinister threats, at least some reflect a grow-
ing understanding of the social and emotional forces that shape queer lives, addressing
issues of the closet and same-sex relationships more sympathetically than before.
A few queer theatre artists working in fringe venues broke through to mainstream
commercial success, most notably Harvey Fierstein, whose one-act plays about a
gravel-voiced Jewish drag queen looking for love were originally developed in down-
town venues like LaMaMa. The Glines, a production company geared specifically to
gay and lesbian theatre, produced the plays on Broadway as Torch Song Trilogy (1982),
which won Fierstein dual Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actor and ran a stunning
1,222 performances. While celebrating gay wit and camp, Torch Song Trilogy effectively
“normalized” gay people through romance and domestic comedy, a strategy also used in
Fierstein’s Tony-winning book for the Jerry Herman musical La Cage aux Folles (1983).
Yet even within these crowd-pleasing works, characters proclaim a gay liberation con-
sciousness that would not have been possible two decades earlier, including Herman’s
lyric for the defiant song “I Am What I Am,” which became a gay anthem. Both of these
hits offer the fantasy of a same-sex couple living happily ever after, critiqued by some as
heteronormative, but offering a representation of gay romance to a larger audience than
ever before.
The theatre community was devastated by the emergence of the AIDS crisis in the
early 1980s. The disease disproportionately affected gay men, and the stigma and shame
of the closet were exacerbated by the response of condemnation or silence from the gov-
ernment and news media. Theatre artists, however, were often on the front lines of the
crisis, not only dramatizing stories of loss and survival, but also using performance to
dispense information and organize political action within their communities (Romàn
1998). In 1985, two plays in particular reached wide audiences, each playing for nearly
three hundred performances in New York and then going on to productions around
464 JORDAN SCHILDCROUT

the country: The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer and As Is by William Hoffman. These
plays changed the national conversation around AIDS by combating horror and hys-
teria with more complex and dignified portraits of lovers, families, and communities
struggling with a fatal disease. While these early productions often functioned as a sort
of reportage, in the following decade, some of the most prominent gay and lesbian play-
wrights created plays about the impact of AIDS, ranging from Paul Rudnick’s sexy com-
edy Jeffrey (1993) and Paula Vogel’s farcical fantasy The Baltimore Waltz (1992) to the
existential nightmares of Nicky Silver’s Pterodactyls (1993) and Craig Lucas’s The Dying
Gaul (1998). On Broadway, William Finn’s chamber musical Falsettos (1992) showed a
middle-class Jewish family struggling with the death of the father’s lover, and Jonathan
Larson’s rock musical Rent (1996) depicted AIDS among East Village bohemians of vari-
ous ethnicities and sexualities.

Queering Contemporary Drama

The 1980s and 1990s saw a sharp decline in the number of new American plays on
Broadway, with spectacular musicals, revivals, and British imports turning more reli-
able profits for commercial producers. Not-for-profit Off Broadway and regional the-
atres—sustained by season ticket holders, patrons, and corporate donors—became the
primary venues for new plays and artistic homes to playwrights who regularly addressed
LGBT issues. Although his early career included The Ritz (1975), a Broadway farce about
a straight man hiding in a gay bathhouse filled with stereotypical characters, Terrence
McNally has premiered most of his plays at Off Broadway venues like Manhattan
Theatre Club. The Lisbon Traviata (1985, revised in 1989) examines the romantic travails
of two gay opera fanatics, with a comic first act and a tragic second act. Nathan Lane
won acclaim as the flamboyant and witty opera queen Mendy; he later appeared in other
McNally plays, and—as an out gay actor who plays both gay and straight roles in plays
and musicals—has become one of Broadway’s most bankable stars. Many of McNally’s
plays and musicals feature gay characters, and one of his most successful and awarded
plays is Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), which follows the friendships and romantic
entanglements of a group of gay men over three holiday weekends. With its cast of eight
gay characters, the play might be comparable to The Boys in the Band, wrestling with
some similar issues like aging and infidelity, sometimes in the comic vein, at other times
more brutal. Created before the advent of protease inhibitors, the play’s characters are
haunted by mortality, but McNally ultimately creates a more gentle, even lyrical, depic-
tion of a gay male community, complete with nude swimming in the moonlight.
McNally is not the only gay playwright to find an artistic home in the not-for-profit
theatre. Indeed, it has now become rare that a season does not include a play with queer
content by the likes of Jon Robin Baitz, Douglas Carter Beane, Christopher Durang,
Richard Greenberg, David Greenspan, Craig Lucas, Paul Rudnick, Nicky Silver, or
Jonathan Tolins. As this list indicates, playwriting in America is still dominated by white
 DRAMA AND THE NEW SEXUALITIES 465

men, although not-for-profit theatres occasionally produce work by lesbian playwrights

like Claudia Allen, Sarah Schulman, and Lucy Thurber. Perhaps the most esteemed les-
bian playwright in America is Paula Vogel, who won the Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned
To Drive (1997). Unlike McNally, Vogel’s plays have never been seen on Broadway or
adapted for film, and her playwriting career is balanced with her position as a university
professor who has taught playwrights such as Nilo Cruz, Lynn Nottage, and Sarah Ruhl.
Vogel does not always write on queer themes, and her plays do not fall into one particu-
lar style, although memory and imagination are prevalent in her work. The Baltimore
Waltz (1992) is a farcical fantasy about a sister who imagines herself with a fatal illness
in order to avoid confronting her brother’s AIDS. And Baby Makes Seven (1993) fol-
lows a lesbian couple who are having a baby with a gay man, learning to become better
parents by engaging in childish playacting. In their Off Broadway productions, both of
these plays starred Cherry Jones, an openly lesbian actress who has become one of the
American theatre’s most acclaimed performers, with numerous Tony, Obie, and Drama
Desk awards. One of Vogel’s most theatrically ambitious plays, The Long Christmas Ride
Home (2004), combines elements of Thornton Wilder with bunraku puppetry to pres-
ent the childhood memories of a lesbian and her gay brother. While Vogel, as a female
playwright, may not be on equal footing with her male counterparts, her plays are regu-
larly produced at not-for-profit and university theatres, and she is one of the few play-
wrights to have an entire season of her plays presented by New York’s Signature Theatre.
Along with the rise of gay and lesbian playwrights in the not-for-profit theatres, solo
performance grew more prominent in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, with per-
formers creating artistic homes in venues such as P.S. 122 in New York and Highways
Performance Space in Los Angeles (Romàn and Hughes 1998). Writer-performers who
used autobiography to create narratives of identity could operate with more artistic
autonomy and often were instrumental in expressing marginalized voices—including
African American, Latino, transgender, and politically radical perspectives—not usu-
ally heard in the mainstream theatre. This growing diversity and visibility, however, cre-
ated a backlash. In 1990, conservative politicians pressured the National Endowment for
the Arts to rescind funding for the queer performance artists John Fleck, Holly Hughes,
and Tim Miller who, along with Karen Finley, became known as the NEA Four. This
battle in the so-called culture wars set in place the rhetoric that is often still used by
those attempting to silence LGBT plays and performances. Antigay forces condemn the
expression or representation of LGBT people as obscene, and they argue that American
citizens should not have to support such obscenity with their taxes. This rhetoric does
more than simply censor a performance; it effectively places LGBT people outside the
sphere of American citizens who pay taxes and are entitled to the same rights and ben-
efits as others when it comes to public institutions and civic discourse.
This question of citizenship is central to one of the most critically acclaimed plays
of the late twentieth century, Angels in America (1993) by Tony Kushner. Set during
the years of the Reagan administration, Kushner’s two-part “gay fantasia on national
themes” follows the journeys of two couples: Jewish intellectual Louis leaves his lover,
Prior, because he is terrified of Prior’s AIDS-related illness, and Mormon lawyer Joe
466 JORDAN SCHILDCROUT

leaves his wife, Harper, because of his closeted homosexuality and her addiction to pills.
Incorporating intimate realism with flamboyant theatricality, Kushner creates a comic
drama in which the romantic, the sexual, the political, and the spiritual are fully inter-
twined. The result is a play with gay characters—including the African American nurse
Belize and the Republican lawyer Roy Cohn—of great depth and complexity who are
imagined as emblematic of the spiritual and political journey of America. Indeed, in the
play’s benediction, Prior addresses the audience: “We are not going away. We won’t die
secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has
come” (Kushner 1993, 146). Yet protests against regional and amateur productions of
Angels in America show that such inclusion is still threatening to antigay forces, who are
occasionally successful in shutting down performances of this and other gay plays. Two
other frequently protested plays specifically address the issue of inclusion by depicting
gay martyrs: Corpus Christi (1998) by Terrence McNally uses the Christian passion play
as the model for telling the fictional story of a gay man murdered in Texas, while The
Laramie Project (2000) by Moisés Kaufman is a documentary play about the real mur-
der of a gay college student named Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. In the clash between
theatre artists and antigay protesters, the struggle over silence and citizenship continues.
While plays with queer characters and themes have become increasingly prominent,
they are not necessarily increasingly diverse, and the experiences of LGBT people of
color have appeared only sporadically in mainstream theatre. Often queer characters of
color stand alone within a larger white ensemble, such as Bernard (African American)
in The Boys in the Band or Ramon (Latino) in Love! Valour! Compassion! When straight
playwrights of color became more widely produced in major theatres, audiences saw
queer characters of color in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982), David
Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988), and Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die
(1988). Some white gay playwrights have also shown a more complex understand-
ing of the intersection of racial and sexual difference. Take Me Out (2002), Richard
Greenberg’s widely produced and awarded play, creates an allegory about the tensions
in multicultural American society by depicting how the coming out of a gay African
American baseball star impacts his teammates.
Self-representation by queer theatre artists of color often has had a stronger voice in
the work of performance artists such as Luis Alfaro, Marga Gomez, Carmelita Tropicana,
and the Pomo Afro Homos (Muñoz 1999). The playwright and director Chay Yew fea-
tures queer Asian and Asian American characters in his award-winning plays Porcelain
(1992) and A Language of Their Own (1995). Cherríe Moraga, an influential theorist of
race and feminism, explores lesbian/Chicana identity in plays such as Heroes and Saints
(1992) and The Hungry Woman:  A  Mexican Medea (1995). Recently, emerging play-
wrights like Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Tarell Alvin McCraney have been nurtured
by not-for-profit theatres, and in 2010 both of the GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance
Against Defamation) New York theatre awards went to new plays by and about people
of color. Coleman Domingo’s autobiographical solo Off Broadway play A Boy and His
Soul chronicles his coming of age and coming out in Philadelphia in the 1970s. Chisa
Hutchinson’s Off Off Broadway drama She Like Girls follows the romantic relationship
 DRAMA AND THE NEW SEXUALITIES 467

between two teenage girls, one African American and one Latina, whose love is threat-
ened by homophobic violence. These plays highlight the ways that class and race inform
the construction of all sexual identities, even though these factors are often overlooked
in plays featuring primarily well-to-do white gay and lesbian characters.
The inclusion of “transgender” in the LGBT confederation has proven problem-
atic to those who would like to clearly separate sexual orientation from gender iden-
tity, but transgender people have been an integral, if often underrepresented, part of
“gay” history and culture. Distinct from drag queens and drag kings who view their
cross-dressing strictly as theatrical performance, transgender and transsexual theatre
artists have claimed an identity as people who transition from one gender to another,
and in some cases they elude the gender binary altogether. Through her plays, per-
formances, and theoretical writings, Kate Bornstein has played an important role
not only in illuminating transgender identity, but in dramatizing how gender is con-
structed through performance. Bornstein’s play Hidden: A Gender, which premiered
at the Theatre Rhinoceros in 1991, interweaves autobiographical elements with the fac-
tual story of a nineteenth-century French intersex person, Herculine Barbin—origi-
nally played by Justin Vivian Bond, who later gained acclaim as the feminine half of the
queer cabaret duo Kiki & Herb (Wilson 2008). While transgender performers such as
S. Bear Bergman and Scott Turner Schofield write and perform in one-person shows,
transgender representation has also reached a wide audience in plays created by gay
men. A vignette in George C. Wolfe’s groundbreaking play The Colored Museum (1986)
features a “black snap queen” named Miss Roj who imagines herself as a space alien
with supernatural wisdom and powers. John Cameron Mitchell wrote and starred in
the glam rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998), about a transsexual German
singer who struggles to survive in middle America. Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife,
which won a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize in 2004, is a one-person play based on the
real Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transgender German who eluded the oppression of the
Nazi and Soviet regimes.
The history of LGBT representation in the theatre does not advance in any linear
fashion; instead it allows for an accumulation of various styles and tropes that con-
tinue to function both in revivals and in new works. The history of LGBT people, so
often excluded from historical narratives, has itself become a popular subject in perfor-
mance. Douglas Carter Beane’s The Nance (2013) stages the downfall of a “pansy” bur-
lesque performer in the 1930s, the musical Yank! (2010) by David Zellnik and Joseph
Zellnik dramatizes the experiences of gay men and lesbians serving in World War II, The
Temperamentals (2010) by Jon Marans focuses on the men who founded the Mattachine
Society in the postwar era, and The Beebo Brinker Chronicles (2008) by Linda Chapman
and Kate Moira Ryan puts onstage Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp novels from the late 1950s
and early 1960s. Almost a century after the drag queens of Mae West’s The Drag caused
scandal and censorship, the drag queens of Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper’s musi-
cal Kinky Boots (2013) earn cheers and awards. Theatre artists also look to the future, and
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s apocalyptic comedy Boom (2008), one of the most-produced new
plays of recent years, imagines a gay biologist facing his responsibility as the last man
468 JORDAN SCHILDCROUT

on earth. In addition to the new plays seen every season in mainstream theatres, LGBT
theatre festivals—and, in recent years, a proliferation of queer youth theatre groups—
continue to produce a wide range of original work in different communities around the
country.
The plays and performances of LGBT theatre artists and the representation of queer
lives now occur in so many venues and in so many theatrical forms that they have
become impossible to pigeonhole, and the concept of a “gay play” may seem more
reductive than productive to a new generation. But it is precisely because of this rich
and varied history of queer theatrical work that LGBT artists and audiences continue
to find the theatre such a fertile realm for creating and witnessing new work. While gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people have made great advances in civil rights in the
decades since the Stonewall Riots, political and cultural battles continue to rage around
the status and rights of people whose sexual identities do not neatly align with dominant
cultural expectations. Just as the theatre played a crucial role in reflecting and shaping
new understandings of sexual identity in the postwar era, so it will continue to chal-
lenge, expand, and deepen those understandings—and possibly create new ones—in
the future.

Works Cited
Bérubé, Allan. 1990. Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World
War II. New York: Free Press.
Brecht, Stefan. 1986. Queer Theatre. New York: Methuen.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge.
Case, Sue-Ellen, ed. 1996. Split Britches:  Lesbian Performance/Feminist Performance.
London: Routledge.
Chauncey, George. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
World 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books.
Clum, John M. 2000. Still Acting Gay. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Crowley, Mart. 1996. Three Plays by Mart Crowley. Los Angeles: Alyson.
Curtin, Kaier. 1987. “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians”: The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay
Men on the American Stage. Boston: Alyson.
Davy, Kate. 2011. Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café
Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
De Jongh, Nicholas. 1992. Not in Front of the Audience:  Homosexuality on Stage.
London: Routledge.
Dolan, Jill. 1993. Presence and Desire:  Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
———. 2010. Theatre and Sexuality. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Elam, Harry. 1997. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri
Baraka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hoffman, William. 1979. Gay Plays: The First Collection. New York: Avon.
Kushner, Tony. 1993. Angels in America: Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
 DRAMA AND THE NEW SEXUALITIES 469

McDermott, Kate. 1985. Places, Please: The First Anthology of Lesbian Plays. Iowa City, IA: Aunt
Lute Books.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Román, David. 1998. Acts of Intervention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Román, David, and Holly Hughes, eds. 1998. O Solo Homo:  The New Queer Performance.
New York: Grove.
Savran, David. 1992. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work
of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley :  University of
California Press.
Shewey, Don. 1988. Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays. New York: Grove.
Sinfield, Alan. 1999. Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sisley, Emily L. 1996. Notes on Lesbian Theatre. In A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and
Performance, edited by Carol Martin, 52–60. New York: Routledge.
Solomon, Alisa, and Framji Minwalla, eds. 2002. The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay
Theatre. New York: New York University Press.
Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New  York:  Farrar, Straus, &
Giroux.
Warner, Sara. 2012. Acts of Gaiety:  LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Williams, Tennessee. 1979. Eight Plays. New York: Doubleday.
Wilson, James. 2008. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, People Die’: The Uncomfortable Performances
of Kiki and Herb. In “We Will Be Citizens”: New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Theatre, edited by
James Fisher, 194–212. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
 CHAPTER 30

P OL I T IC A L  DR A M A

STEPHEN   WAT T

Seven Jewish Children isn’t art, it’s straitjacketed political orthodoxy.

No surprises, no challenges, no risks. Only the enclosed, fetid, smug,
self-congratulating and entirely irrelevant little world of contemporary
political theatre.
Christopher Hart, The Sunday Times, February 15, 2009

“[Arthur Miller’s] finest moment . . . was his vigorous defense of the

political character of all artistic production. He insisted that writing is a
form of political practice and that the writer who is forbidden to take a
political stand cannot function as an artist.”
David Savran, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers (1992, 20)

The thrust of these epigraphs suggests two of the several ways in which political drama
is typically construed. In the first excerpt, Christopher Hart eviscerates the British
playwright Caryl Churchill’s short text, Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, which
opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre in February 2009 before moving to the United
States, Australia, and elsewhere a few weeks later. Motivated by Israel’s 2008 mili-
tary campaign against Palestinians living on the Gaza Strip, Churchill’s play elicited
strong, wildly divergent responses. Such influential reviewers as Michael Billington of
The Guardian applauded Churchill’s critique of Israeli excess, while others, including
the Board of Deputies of British Jews, condemned Seven Jewish Children as a hostile
anti-Israel text that transgressed the civilities of reasonable political discourse. Still other
commentators, including Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, while conceding that the
play is “disturbing” and “provocative,” defended Churchill and lamented the tendency in
some ideological quarters to “misread a multivocal, dialectical drama as a single-voiced
political tract” (Kushner and Solomon 2009, 12). More important for the purpose of
this essay, in his response to Churchill’s play, Hart disparages all political drama—or,
more specifically, political theatre—as hermetic and enervated. From this perspec-
tive, political drama resides in the rarified domain of “smug” and “self-congratulating”
 POLITICAL DRAMA 471

intellectuals; as such, it is an artistic form of negligible consequence—a vestige of a

bygone era of theatrical activism that is no longer effectual in the twenty-first century.
In the latter epigraph, David Savran endorses Arthur Miller’s contention in his 1956
testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities that all “artistic pro-
duction” is political—that writing itself is a political practice—and he thus articulates
a position almost diametrically opposite from Hart’s (Savran 1992, 20). From this point
of view, far from amounting to a historical relic, “political drama” describes almost all
writing for the theatre; as such, the phrase is hopelessly redundant. As this argument
runs, all drama—from Aeschylus’s The Persians (472 BC) to Churchill’s controversial
text—resonates with “political” implications, even the most popular Broadway musicals
and bedroom farces. The history of American drama supports this thesis. In antebellum
America, for example, a melodrama like Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) could
be interpreted by some audiences as an indictment of slavery and by others as a repre-
sentation of a relatively tranquil life in the American South being disrupted by northern
interlopers. Even a commercial vehicle of limited intellectual or critical ambition, then,
a play whose very popularity depends in part on its ability to reside on both or all sides of
an issue, can be read as political drama.
Located between these poles, other more theoretical discourses about political drama
consider its form, methods, and social targets; not surprisingly, here is where matters
get more complicated. The commonplace notion, for example, that Arthur Miller’s early
plays advance a critique of capitalism is hardly an unproblematic one, as Savran implies
when describing Miller’s politics as “ambiguous” and “enmeshed in a particular histori-
cal moment” (1992, 22). America’s preeminent social dramatist and a tireless advocate
on behalf of such organizations as International PEN, Miller nonetheless is not always
hailed as a political dramatist of penetrating depth or vision. The British playwright
Edward Bond, although acknowledging Miller’s criticism of capitalism implicated in
the tragic falls of liberal humanist subjects—Willy Loman, Joe Keller, John Proctor—
is skeptical that he achieves more than a simple description of these protagonists’ sub-
jection and eventual fates. This verdict emerges in his sheepish admission of a “painful
thing” to the director David Thacker in 1994 that he didn’t “like” Miller’s “latest plays”:

The line I  remember from Miller is the one which says attention, attention must
finally be paid to Willie [sic] Loman. But I noticed . . . that he didn’t say what form the
attention should take or should lead to. . . . Perhaps in America that’s all writers can
do?—or kick against the boundaries of obscenity and outrage—useful, but shouldn’t
be confused with doing more. (Stuart 1996, 15)

For Bond and Bertolt Brecht before him, “doing more” means attempting greater cul-
tural work than decrying injustice or revealing the limitations of capitalism. Political
drama does more, as Bond implies, by specifying where attention might lead and care-
fully considering the form such analysis might take onstage.
Indeed, both the form of political drama and the spectatorial dynamics it produces
have occupied writers for some time, especially during the last century with the attacks
of Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bond, and others on the commercial theatre. Most agree
472 STEPHEN WATT

that the “dramatic” theatre, the “bourgeois” theatre, or—in Peter Brook’s famous denun-
ciation—the “deadly” theatre is designed largely to entertain as it rationalizes, hence
supports, social orthodoxy. For Brecht, in an influential essay “The Modern Theatre Is
the Epic Theatre” (1930), the dramatic theatre implicates the spectator emotionally in a
“stage situation,” eventually wearing down his or her “capacity for action” (Willett 1957,
37). In his essay “The Literarization of the Theatre” (1931), Brecht launched an even more
specific indictment of the plot or action of this kind of drama:

But this way of subordinating everything to a single idea, this passion for propelling
the spectator along a single track where he can look neither right nor left, up nor
down, is something that the new school of play-writing must reject. (Willett 1957, 44)

Favoring an “exercise in complex seeing,” a dramatic trajectory in which analytical rea-

soning supersedes emotional engagement, Brecht advocated for the use of screens and
other means such as a revised acting style to produce more aware theatregoers. In this
new theatre, the spectator stands “outside” the action in a more critical pose as each
scene is constructed “for itself.” not merely as a means to convey audiences to an emo-
tionally satisfying end (Willett 1957, 37). For his part, Sartre argued that the bourgeoisie,
the people who pay for the best seats, “control the theatre” and “set the rules—with-
out realizing it, of course” (Sartre 1976, 91–92). The result? Producers offer plays that
“impose” the image of the bourgeoisie onstage and “conform to its own ideology,” rather
than those that might challenge bourgeois values. This latter objective, he observes,
is what motivated Brecht to create his “epic theatre.” For Sartre the epic theatre, in its
reaction to expressionism and the “petit bourgeois intellectuals” who championed it,
presented “individual conflicts in which the whole of society is engulfed” (Sartre 1976,
99). In so doing, it confronted what Sartre termed the “real problem”: “how real con-
tradictions and a real dialectic of object and act and man can be properly created in the
theatre” (104).
As I have suggested, Edward Bond considers these very issues as central to a mate-
rialist political theatre. Regarding bourgeois art as mostly “lies,” Bond argues for
a Marxist art in which “aesthetic forms actually become part of the substance which
they explore” (Stuart 1996, 5). As a consequence, while he embraces many of the formal
revisions advocated by Brecht, he also refines them in an effort to show how “history
moves through human subjectivity” and how “objective forces in history create subjec-
tive forms” (3). Like Brecht, Bond regards conventional drama and the emotion it cul-
tivates as antithetical to the goals of a political theatre; to illustrate this, he points to the
subtitle of Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (1973), a play that speculates about William
Shakespeare’s retirement in Stratford-upon-Avon as an intimation of the importance of
narrative open-endedness: “I want to get away from the well-made play, and to do that
I called Bingo ‘scenes of something.’ These scenes of something don’t just tell a story.”
And, as his actors rehearsed the final scene of The Fool (1974), Bond advised, “Don’t play
the scene in such a way that you try to make the audience realize the truth by making
them cry at it; play it so that they cannot cry and are forced to realize the truth” (Hay and
 POLITICAL DRAMA 473

Roberts 1980, 198, 215). To lead audiences to this social or economic truth, Bond often
constructs dual centers of dramatic action, particularly when violence erupts onstage,
as it often does in his plays. So, in Bingo while a young woman suffers on a gibbet in
public view for breaking a local law, Shakespeare, whose land dealings have been com-
plicit in the cause of her punishment, is seen downstage. As Malcolm Hay and Philip
Roberts explain, the “two centres are visually set apart, but the link between them is
unavoidable” (Hay and Roberts 1980, 190). Because Bond demonstrates the economic
logic that connects these “centres”—and because this scene is a coherent narrative unit,
not merely a means to a well-made conclusion—his analysis of the socioeconomic cause
of this injustice becomes more legible to his audience.
Many contemporary American dramatists tacitly endorse Brecht and Bond’s thesis
that the term “political drama” may not be so much irrelevant or pleonastic, but oxymo-
ronic. That is to say, like Brecht who juxtaposed his epic theatre to a dramatic theatre of
Aristotelian unity, emotional engagement, and bourgeois values, many politically com-
mitted writers have launched similarly iconoclastic theatrical projects. In other words,
more than political “commitment” defines most of the plays to be considered here: from
those concerned with issues of race, gender, or sexuality to plays protesting the Vietnam
War; from plays directed at governmental and public apathy to the AIDS epidemic to
criticism of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Most playwrights also share a
marked antipathy to both the well-made play and realism: in short, to popular drama.
Recalling Sam Shepard’s disdain for narrative closure, a convention common to these
forms—“the temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems
to be a terrible trap,” Shepard once claimed—Martin Meisel notes that this “formal
demand grates on some modern sensibilities, nurtured in a climate of counter-cultural
resistance” (qtd. in Meisel 2007, 131). For Ntozake Shange, even the terms “playwright”
and “play” connote an “artificial aesthetic,” as she outlines in her foreword to Three Pieces
(1981). Preferring the terms “poet” and “writer” to “playwright,” Shange also disparages
“ ‘the perfect play’ ” as irreducibly European, hence ill-suited “for those of us from this
hemisphere” (1981, ix). Formal “demands” and countercultural politics seldom reside
comfortably in contemporary drama.
The term “political drama” thus encompasses a wide variety of works for the con-
temporary theatre. Some dramatists deploy the alienating devices fashioned by Brecht
and Bond, while others regard twenty-first-century realities as not expressed well by
conventions of the epic theatre and instead develop hybrid dramatic forms appropri-
ated from a variety of cultural modes and genres. Others, the performance artist Anna
Deavere Smith, for example, write documentary-style history plays or performance
texts based on contemporary events and featuring real historical personages. And,
as the evidence of twenty-first-century dramatic responses to the increasingly tense
relationship between Israel and Palestine—and to the American presence in Iraq dur-
ing the presidency of George W. Bush—indicates, another kind of aesthetic has been
refashioned to represent the often brutally absurd political moment in which we live.
Recalling the writing of “absurdist” dramatists Samuel Beckett or Eugène Ionesco
more than that of Brecht, some political plays are grotesquely comic or hauntingly
474 STEPHEN WATT

minimalist texts that stretch common understanding of the terms “play” or “drama.”
The discussion that follows concerns these developments in the post–World War II
theatre, developments that refute the accusation that political theatre is “entirely irrele-
vant” today or that drama “may have lost its ability to promote social change” (Colleran
and Spencer 1998, 2).

From the Great Depression to the

Cold War

It took only a few years after World War II ended for prominent Depression-era writers,
including the most politically active dramatists, to dominate the headlines. Beginning
in 1947 and continuing in the 1950s, actors, writers, and directors were called to tes-
tify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), as did figures
such as Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and screenwriters and directors later blacklisted
as the Hollywood Ten, including John Howard Lawson. Lawson’s Processional: A Jazz
Symphony of American Life in Four Acts, first produced by the Theatre Guild in 1925, pro-
vides a representative instance of political drama’s tendency to borrow methods from
other cultural forms, in this case an African American culture that included jazz and
the variety stage.1 In his “preface,” Lawson indulges in the “dangerous luxury of theo-
retical explanation,” which includes his deprecations of the commercial theatre, expres-
sionism, and realism. “Color and movement are weeded out in the interests of a realism
which has nothing remotely to do with reality,” he observes, and the always popular
“drawing-room play” has descended to a “point of absolute nullity”; therefore, Lawson
turned to a quintessential American form—vaudeville—to depict tensions between
striking coal miners in West Virginia and owners during a labor dispute. This redaction
of a “native technique” instantiates a “new vision in directing, acting, and scenic design,”
and Lawson regarded Processional as laying the “foundation” for just such a project
(Lawson 1925, v–ix).
Some of the most politically effective plays of the 1930s were built on this foundation.
Clifford Odets’s agitprop play Waiting for Lefty (1935) and Langston Hughes’s Don’t You
Want to Be Free? (1937) employ devices and structures similar to those in Processional.
Both begin on essentially bare stages, while Lawson’s play employs a self-consciously
“crude” drop curtain with a painted town scene on it. For its entrance, Lawson’s multi-
ethnic band of jazz miners marches through the audience to the stage, and at the con-
clusion of Don’t You Want to Be Free? audience members step forward to join hands
with the characters in a display of unity. All three plays collapse barriers between arena
and stage, and none makes a concerted effort to conceal its theatricality or develop
emotional engagement other than the utopian conclusions of Odets’s and Hughes’s
plays in which workers and audience members join either to yell “STRIKE” or form, in
the latter case, “one great unity” that proclaims “no more black or white” (Hughes 1937,
 POLITICAL DRAMA 475

277). Hughes’s play begins with a young man’s address to the audience announcing its
nontheatricality:

Listen, folks! I’m one of the members of this group, and I want to tell you about our
theater. This is it right here! We haven’t got any scenery, or painted curtains, because
we haven’t got any money to buy them. (263)

Both Hughes’s play and Waiting for Lefty juxtapose the poverty of workers to the privi-
lege of the ruling class. In Don’t You Want to Be Free? such inequity originates in a racism
represented by an overseer and slave auction; in Odets’s play, the poverty of the working
class is represented by a bare space that used to be a cab driver’s apartment with fur-
niture, by his wife’s desperation, and by young lovers’ inability to marry because their
respective families depend on their meager incomes to survive. This sense of repressive-
ness is intensified in Waiting for Lefty by anti-Semitism and a ruthless class bias that has
infiltrated such institutions as hospitals and research laboratories.
That the American Communist Party would attract writers and theatrical artisans
during the years of the Depression is hardly surprising, and determining the extent
of this membership in the artistic community, particularly that associated with the
Hollywood film industry, was one of HUAC’s stated ambitions. Called to testify
before the committee, which he deprecated in his autobiography Timebends (1987)
as a “tawdry tribune of moralistic vote-snatchers,” Miller recalled that almost no one
accused of Communist activity in 1950 or 1951 had maintained any questionable polit-
ical connections since the 1930s (1987, 329). And even though artisans working in the
film industry had been targeted far more deliberately than their counterparts in the
New York theatre, he also remembered the rumors of “weird” political games “rock-
ing the theatre community” and the “depressing spectacle” of artists forced to testify
(328). One result of his visceral response is arguably the most famous political allegory
of the American stage, The Crucible (1953), a play, according to Miller, that attempts
to capture the “profoundly and even avowedly ritualistic” quality of the congressio-
nal hearings in which the accused was induced to make a public confession of guilt,
implicate friends, and “guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting
old vows” (331).
As essentially courtroom dramas, The Crucible and Jerome Lawrence and Robert
E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind (1955) both present counterexamples to the thesis that political
drama is recognizable by its aesthetic innovation and aversion to dominant dramatic
forms. It is also true, however, that several stage directions in Act 1 (“An Overture”)
of The Crucible, particularly those that introduce Proctor and Reverend Hale, read
like political/philosophical tracts in which Miller outlines the dialectical relationship
between good and evil, analogies between Salem witch hunts and HUAC interrogations,
and the ideological linkage of sin and sex, among other matters. Nonetheless, how-
ever prosaic the forms of these plays, both seem to have accrued new relevance in the
twenty-first century, particularly Inherit the Wind. In a prefatory note, Lawrence and
Lee emphasize that although the famous “Monkey Trial” they depict occurred in 1925,
476 STEPHEN WATT

the setting of their play is really more universal: “The stage directions set the time as ‘Not
too long ago.’ It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow” (Lawrence and Lee
1955, n.p.).
In a twenty-first-century America marked by an emergent neoconservatism, tomor-
row is today, making numerous exchanges in Inherit the Wind resonate with an uncanny
timeliness. Henry Drummond’s passionate insistence that every citizen possesses the
right to think as she pleases, for instance, acquires a new urgency when he rebuts the
suggestion that he wants to undermine belief in the Bible: “You know that’s not true. I’m
trying to stop you bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United
States” (Lawrence and Lee 1955, 98). Today, these words ring more ominously than even
Lawrence and Lee might have predicted.

From Civil Rights and the Vietnam

War to the AIDS Crisis

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed some of the most radical experiments in American
political drama with the emergence of the Black Arts Movement, a vital and lively
Chicano/a theatre, and a myriad of performance texts responding to America’s
involvement in Vietnam (including the founding of the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble
Theater Company and its productions in Los Angeles and New  York in the early
1980s). Following the example of Lawson’s Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American
Life, many of these plays signal their aesthetic revolution through their subtitles: for
example, Megan Terry’s Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie (1966). First produced by the
Open Theatre in New York, Viet Rock is constituted of quickly evolving “transforma-
tions,” not “interrelated units” telling a unified story. As Richard Schechner theo-
rizes this construction, the relationship between “beats” or scenes in Viet Rock are
“para-logical” or “pre-logical,” resembling the Freudian model of “free association”
more than a unified action in which scenes are linked by probability or necessity.
In such a structure, an audience no longer identifies actors with specific characters,
and, “stripped of its usual actor-character identification,” is better able to scrutinize
the text’s violence, song, and movement (Schechner 1967, 14, 16). As in David Rabe’s
“Vietnam Trilogy”—The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), Sticks and Bones
(1972), and Streamers (1976)—the masculinity of young GIs is foregrounded in Viet
Rock by a drill sergeant who excoriates “commies,” labeling them “punks.” “War is
hell,” he shouts, and requires “a hell of a man” (Terry 1966, 47, 49). Sergeant Tower in
Pavlo Hummel underscores this hypermasculinity early in basic training by remind-
ing his charges that they have “BALLS BETWEEN YOU [sic] LEGS! YOU HAVE
BALLS! NO SLITS! BUT BALLS!” (Rabe 1973, 15). The directness of Terry’s and Rabe’s
language—its coarseness and profanity—and both plays’ portrayals of violence match
the extremity of the war.
 POLITICAL DRAMA 477

Although perhaps not so radical in form as Terry’s play, both Pavlo Hummel and
Sticks and Bones contain their own reactions against dramatic realism and well-made
plots. In fact, the grenade explosion that ultimately claims Pavlo’s life occurs in the play’s
opening moments, though we learn in the final scene that it took him more than four
days to die from his wounds (which include a literal castration, as the grenade goes off in
his lap). A ghostly double who haunts the play, a black soldier named Ardell, calls Pavlo
to attention in the opening scene even as a “body detail” arrives to carry away corpses.
Immediately, the audience is alienated from the action as it knows how the play will end,
and Ardell’s presence signals a rejection of the “literary theatre” Brecht reviled. Rabe
attempts a similar kind of dismantling of realism in Sticks and Bones, in this case by
shattering stereotypes of the all-American family conveyed by the long-running televi-
sion series, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. In Rabe’s nightmarish sitcom, Ozzie
and Harriet’s middle-class, suburban neighborhood is invaded by a convoy of trucks,
which, as an army officer explains, carries wounded soldiers whose “backs been broken,
their brains jellied, their insides turned into garbage. One-legged boys and no-legged
boys” (Rabe 1973, 131). One of these casualties of war is Ozzie’s elder son, David, who
has been both blinded and traumatized, and who immediately feels estranged from his
former home. Worse than his physical wounds from his parents’ point of view, David fell
in love with and abandoned Zung, a Vietnamese woman who haunts him and appears
as a ghost in several scenes. Ozzie’s revulsion at the thought of his son’s intimacy with
an Asian woman—and at the possibility of “LITTLE BITTY CHINKY KIDS” being his
grandchildren (174)—betrays the intense racism roiling just below the surface of bour-
geois America. So, in the play’s final moments, Ozzie, the all-American father, strangles
Zung and lends David his razor so that he might slit his own wrists. The family then
gathers to assist David, the son who has become foreign and incapable of reassimilation
into American life, as the lights slowly fade.
Rabe’s Ardell and Zung are just two of the ghosts, specters, and angels who inhabit
some of later twentieth-century America’s most important political plays. The AIDS
epidemic in 1980s and 1990s United States, for example, prompted distinguished plays
by Larry Kramer, Terrence McNally, and Tony Kushner, whose two-part landmark work
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991–92) moved the representa-
tion of America’s collective denial of the crisis from the Brechtian, agit-prop qualities
of Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) to a different kind of aesthetic in which histori-
cal figures like Roy Cohn coexist with both fictional characters and spirits.2 Existing
on a decidedly different spiritual plane is Lula, the specter who hunts young African
American men in LeRoi Jones’s (Amiri Baraka’s) Dutchman (1964). Set in “the flying
underbelly of the city” on a subway “heaped in modern myth,” the action of Dutchman
follows Lula as she stalks her prey: young black men of intelligence and aspiration who,
as she expresses it, are examples of a “well-known type” (Jones 1964, 3, 12). Tempting
him sexually and taunting him with stereotypes, she eventually murders him and enlists
the assistance of other passengers in disposing of his body. Then, much like the profes-
sor in Ionesco’s The Lesson (1951), after making a brief note and composing herself, she
awaits another victim, who arrives with books under his arm accompanied by a low
478 STEPHEN WATT

comic black conductor who dances down the aisle of the subway car and pauses at Lula’s
seat to doff his cap.
Playwrights associated with the Black Arts Movement—Jones, Ed Bullins, Charles
Patterson, Ron Milner, and others—embarked upon a project that, in several respects,
was similar to the work of Chicano/a playwrights in California. Both movements were
born in the 1960s: the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School was founded in Harlem
in 1964, while El Teatro Campesino was born a year later in support of the United
Farmworkers. Both were concerned with overturning injustices and derogatory stereo-
types; both hoped to foster a nationalism based on their respective cultural heritages.
More vociferously than its Chicano counterparts, however, the Black Arts Movement,
as represented by Jones’s controversial poem “Black Art” (1969), advocated for an
authentically African American aesthetic that necessitated “setting fire and death/
to whities [sic] ass” or, as Larry Neal describes it, “the destruction of the white thing”
(1971, 259). This “thing” included ideas, aesthetic forms, and worldviews that must be
dismantled before a “separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology” could
be created (257). The violence of Baraka/Jones’s black revolutionary plays—Experimen-
tal Death Unit #1 (1964), A Black Mass (1966), and others—depict the decolonizing pro-
cess that must be undertaken before any separate culture and nationalism can be born.
Similarly, Chicano/a theatre in the United States, from the later 1960s and Luis
Valdez’s founding of El Teatro Campesino through the 1990s, was concerned with
“recovering the history of Aztlán—what is now the southwestern United States and
northern Mexico” (Worthen 1997, 101). Consistent with my thesis, W. B. Worthen argues
that “the politics of Chicano/a historical drama are inscribed in its forms and means
of representation,” which are inherently and deeply “hybridized”: from the actos per-
formed for farmworkers on flatbed trucks to the conventions associated with Catholic
ritual and popular carpa shows (Worthen 1997, 101). The work of important dramatists
(and performance artists) associated with Latino/a theatre support this assertion: the
documentary form of Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit (1978) is inspired by both the conven-
tions of actos and those of Living Newspapers in the 1930s;3 Bandido! (1982) combines
nineteenth-century melodrama with the song and narration of a corrido; his play I
Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges! (1986), much like Carlos Morton’s Rancho
Hollywood (1979), borrows prevalent stereotypes of people of color from television and
film to parody them. For the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, cultural and
aesthetic hybridity defines not only Chicano/a theatre but also the future of America:
I see a whole generation
Freefalling toward a borderless future
Incredible mixtures beyond science fiction
Cholo-punks, pachuco krishnas,
Irish concheros, butoh rappers, cyber-Aztecs
Gringofarians, Hopi-rockers. (1996, 1)

“Hybridity,” he asserts, is “no longer up for discussion. It is a demographic, racial, social,

and cultural fact” (70). The forms of Gómez-Peña’s performance texts often echo this
 POLITICAL DRAMA 479

claim, constructed as they are from such mass cultural phenomena as television news-
casts and professional wrestling.
The notion of a play’s politics being “inscribed in its form” describes not only con-
temporary Chicano/a drama, but much feminist writing as well. Part of this critical
discourse pertains to Chicano theatre and El Teatro Campesino, as some feminist writ-
ers regard history in general and theatre history in particular as too often “reduced
to a chronology of the doings of great men” (Broyles-Gonzalez 1989, 212). Moreover,
Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez believes this male-dominated theatre has reduced women’s
roles to several predictable types—mother, grandmother, sister, wife, or girlfriend—
and subordinated women as mere accessories to more significant male characters
(214). For this reason, writers like Cherríe Moraga create plays in which women and, at
times, their sexuality are afforded a centrality they have heretofore been denied. Such
is the case with Giving Up the Ghost: A Stage Play in Three Portraits (1986/1989) and,
albeit in a different context, Shadow of a Man (1990), a Chicana redaction of Miller’s
Death of a Salesman, complete with the destruction of a family patriarch, the deflation
of his American dream, and the ghostly presence of a successful foil against whom the
protagonist’s failures are juxtaposed and tragically heightened. Giving Up the Ghost,
like Moraga’s activist play Heroes and Saints (1992), is the more formally adventurous,
composed mostly of monologues on a simple set complete with a musical score to cre-
ate the rhythms of contemporary urban life. This life is both enriched and complicated
in Giving Up the Ghost by the protagonist’s lesbianism, which is represented by two
incarnations of her character: one, a woman in her late twenties; the other, her teenage
“double” struggling through an adolescence that includes a brutal sexual assault when
she was twelve years old.
Moraga’s poetic monologues and sensual mise-en-scènes of color, music, and simple
stage properties constitute a departure from the realism that, following Brecht, many
deprecate as incompatible with political intervention. For this reason, feminist critics
have questioned the politics of such highly successful and largely realist dramatists as
Beth Henley and Marsha Norman who, along with Wendy Wasserstein, all won Pulitzer
Prizes in the 1980s. Lynda Hart, for instance, regards the “constitutive dramatic aes-
thetic, the ‘mirror held up to nature,’ ” as a “pernicious concept for the feminist critic
of the theatre” and adduces as further examples Henley’s and Norman’s “conventional
ways” of using stage space (Hart 1989, 3). Like the form of Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost,
alternatives like the “Butch-Femme Aesthetic” of the performance group Split Britches
create a rival theatrical space of greater imagination and irony than a realist aesthetic
will allow.4 
Long after Brecht’s critique of a narrative theatre that propels spectators down a “sin-
gle track” of emotional engagement, then, American political drama in the later twen-
tieth century devised a variety of forms to intervene forcefully in cultural discourses
concerning the Vietnam war, race, gender, the AIDS epidemic, and sexuality. This same
aesthetic calculus of intervention and theatrical innovation underlies much political
drama of the twenty-first century and the new, if in some cases sadly familiar, objects of
its attention.
480 STEPHEN WATT

Political Drama in the Twenty-First

Century: From Gaza and Baghdad to
the Congo

The first decade of the new millennium has witnessed a renaissance of political drama
with some of the contemporary theatre’s most celebrated dramatists addressing the
Israeli-Palestine conflict, the war in Iraq, atrocities in the Democratic Republic of
Congo, and the rise of an often unprincipled electronic media. This emergence is evi-
dent on both sides of the Atlantic, as the earlier allusion to Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish
Children suggests. Prior to its production of Churchill’s play, London’s Royal Court
Theatre staged My Name Is Rachel Corrie in 2005, a text compiled from the writing of a
young American activist killed in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003. Churchill’s play
provoked an almost immediate rejoinder by the American playwright Israel Horovitz,
What Strong Fences Make (2009); parrying Churchill’s stipulation that a collection in
support of Medical Aid for Palestinians be taken after each performance, Horovitz
allows his play to be produced without royalties if donations are made to the ONE
Family Fund, which aids children wounded in attacks on Israel. These same texts also
exert pressure on traditional understandings of the terms “play” or “political drama.”
Seven Jewish Children, in fact, contains no developed or even named characters; “char-
acters” are really adult speakers who may divide the lines in any ways they choose. My
Name Is Rachel Corrie, which consists of monologues by an actress playing Rachel, spe-
cifically addresses the issue of dramatic action in a sardonic aspersion of realist conven-
tions and Aristotelian dramatic theory:

If you are concerned with the logic and sequence of things and the crescendo of
suspense up to a good shocker of an ending, you best be getting back to your video
game and your amassing wealth. (Rickman and Viner 2005, 5)

True to her word, Rachel appears in the last scene not to play the victim of Israeli mili-
tary excess, but to deliver a monologue to her mother that includes such topics as the
economic devastation of Gaza and her conviction that Palestinians braving constant
gunfire to “go about their business” represent “the epitome of non-violent resistance”
(Rickman and Viner 2005, 49).
The George W. Bush–Tony Blair partnership and the invasion of Iraq are given an
almost documentary, albeit ironic, treatment in British playwright David Hare’s Stuff
Happens (2004) and an elliptical, absurdist representation in Sam Shepard’s Kicking
a Dead Horse (2007), which premiered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre before moving to
New York. Hare claims in an introductory note that his play is essentially a historical
drama, with lines of dialogue gleaned from the public comments of such figures as Bush,
Blair, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld (after whose
 POLITICAL DRAMA 481

coarse dismissal of questions about looting in Baghdad the play is named). Occasionally,
Hare employs Cheney as a sinister comic figure with one-liners like “I never met a weap-
ons system I didn’t vote for” and, in reference to his five student deferments to avoid ser-
vice in Vietnam, “I had other priorities in the sixties than military service” (Hare 2004,
6, 5). But the most salient one-liner in Stuff Happens concerns Tony Blair’s attempt to
reconcile a “unilateral” attack on Iraq with the concept of a “progressive war” (i.e., a
preemptive conflict fought to achieve peace or international stability). The only things
that “progress” by the play’s conclusion are Bush’s decision to let Israel implement its
own plan for Palestine and the growing number of dead in Iraq, as an anonymous Iraqi
delineates in a closing monologue.
The form of Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse constitutes an almost diametrically
opposite, absurdly comic view of American imperialism. Instead of drawing on a ros-
ter of well-known politicians, quoting from their own public commentary and outlin-
ing the disastrous consequences of their actions, Shepard creates only one character,
Hobart Struther, a hybrid of a would-be cowboy and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp from
Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). A wealthy dealer in Western art, Struther had decided to
ride a horse, one that has died moments before the play begins, across a vast expanse
of desert in a failed quest for “authenticity.” The play is actually a long monologue
by Struther interrupted by the appearance of a naked woman who arises from the
grave he has dug to bury the animal and then into which she just as quickly—and
silently—descends. Shepard’s stage directions emphasize Struther’s initial appearance
as resembling that of a “classic circus clown” not unlike Krapp, who stares vacuously
at the audience at the beginning of Beckett’s play with a banana stuck in his mouth.
Like Krapp, Struther employs several voices and, like Krapp, he often appears foolish.
Indeed, the play might be regarded as bearing little or no relationship to politics at all
were it not for Struther’s monologue near the end about a rapacious, megalomania-
cal America that has created an “ocean of bones from sea to shining sea,” “destroyed
education,” and “invaded sovereign nations,” among other inglorious episodes in
its history (Shepard 2007, 42). It is thus difficult not to regard Struther as a kind of
“knockabout” comedian, the kind Beckett so admired in the work of his country-
man Sean O’Casey; more particularly, Shepard’s protagonist is a knockabout version
of President Bush, an East Coast cowboy kicking dead horses in the desert of Iraq.
Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues (2002), in which a South American despot brokers
a deal with an American producer to televise the crucifixion of a dissident believed to
be the son of God, provides yet another example of this absurdist critique of American
politics and decadence.
Perhaps the most celebrated political drama of the new millennium is Lynn Nottage’s
Ruined (2007), in part the result of a trip she and the director Kate Whoriskey made
to Uganda to witness the devastatingly gendered effects of civil war. “Ruined” refers
literally to young women abused sexually, even mutilated, by soldiers on both sides
of the dispute. At one time, Nottage had contemplated the project as an adaptation of
Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, and similarities between the two plays are
482 STEPHEN WATT

numerous: an indomitable mother figure struggling to earn a living, her concern for an
expanded number of “children,” their entrapment between warring forces, the use of
song, and more. Both Nottage and Whoriskey, however, abandoned the idea of an adap-
tation, in part because Nottage rejects the epic theatre’s privileging of emotional distanc-
ing and instead argues for the efficacy of engaging people emotionally. Ruined achieves
this, creating riveting proof of Mother Courage’s contention that, in war, “both defeat
and victory are a costly business” for the poor and the innocent, women and children
in particular (Brecht 1955, 52). The published text of the play lists fourteen websites and
relief organizations to which readers can refer and donate to help victims of this seem-
ingly unending violence. And after its opening Off Broadway in 2009, it was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize.

Coda

If, as Jeanne Colleran and Jenny Spencer posit, political drama “self-consciously oper-
ates at the level of interrogation, critique and intervention unable to stand outside the
very institutions and attitudes it seeks to change” (1998, 1), then the examples provided
here add credence to their assertion. All of these plays, that is, are in some ways delim-
ited by the demands of theatrical production, their audiences’ means and expectations,
and by history itself. Perhaps for this reason, political drama seems always in search of
an effective dramatic form, one responsive to and illuminative of the moment in which
it is enveloped, as it intervenes in the most intractable, at times grotesque, impasses
that rage just outside the walls of the theatre. But if these at times radical or resistant
forms catalyze a more thoughtful analysis of wars and injustices on another side of the
world—or of social inequality right down the street—or if, more modestly, they moti-
vate the donation of badly needed funds and supplies for people in need, then con-
temporary political drama can hardly be accused of occupying an “entirely irrelevant”
little world.

Notes
1. For a discussion of this borrowing in Processional, see Julia Walker (2005), 191–206.
2. See David Román (1998), especially 88–115, for responses to a call for a theatre “that extends
beyond the classical realist tragedies that characterize the majority of plays about AIDS
produced by gay men” (88).
3. For a discussion of this blending of formal elements, see Jorge Huerta, Introduction, in
Zoot Suit and Other Plays by Luis Valdez (1992), 7–20.
4. For a larger discussion of this aesthetics, see Sue-Ellen Case, “Toward a Butch-Femme
Aesthetic,” in Hart (1989), 282–99.
 POLITICAL DRAMA 483

References
Brecht, Bertolt. 1957. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Trans John Willett.
New York: Hill & Wang.
———. 1955. Mother Courage and Her Children. Trans. Eric Bentley. New York: Grove.
Broyles-Gonzalez, Yolanda. 1989. Toward a Re-Vision of Chicano Theatre History: The Women
of El Teatro Campesino. In Making a Spectacle: Feminist essays on Contemporary Women’s
Theatre, edited by Lynda Hart, 209–38. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Case, Sue-Ellen. 1989. Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic. In Making a Spectacle: Feminist essays
on Contemporary Women’s Theatre, edited by Lynda Hart, 282–99. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Colleran, Jeanne, and Jenny S. Spencer, eds. 1998. Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. 1996. The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems and Loqueras for the
End of the Century. San Francisco: City Lights.
Hare, David. 2004. Stuff Happens. London: Faber and Faber, 2004.
Hart, Lynda, ed. 1989. Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hay, Malcolm, and Philip Roberts. 1980. Bond: A Study of His Plays. London: Eyre Methuen.
Hughes, Langston. Don’t You Want to Be Free?.1974. In Black Theater U.S.A:  Forty-Five
Plays by Black American 1847–1974, edited by James V. Hatch, 262–277. New York:  The
Free Press.
Jones, LeRoi. Dutchman and The Slave. 1964. New York: William Morrow.
Kushner, Tony, and Alisa Solomon. 2009. Tell Her the Truth. The Nation 288: 10–16.
Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee. 2007. Inherit the Wind. 1955. New York:  Ballantine
Books.
Lawson, John Howard. 1925. Processional:  A  Jazz Symphony of American Life in Four Acts.
New York: Thomas Seltzer.
Meisel, Martin. 2007. How Plays Work:  Reading and Performance. New  York:  Oxford
University Press.
Miller, Arthur. 1987. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press.
Moraga, Cherríe. Heroes and Saints & Other Plays. 1994. Albuquerque: West End Press.
Nottage, Lynn. Ruined. 2009. New York: Theatre Performance Group.
Rabe, David. 1973. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones. New York:
Penguin.
Rickman, Alan, and Katharine Viner, eds. 2005. My Name Is Rachel Corrie. London:  Nick
Hern Books.
Román, David. 1998. Acts of Intervention:  Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1976. Sartre on Theater. Trans. Frank Jellinek. New York: Random House.
Savran, David. 1992. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the
Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota
Press.
Schechner, Richard. 1967. Introduction: The Playwright as Wrighter. In Viet Rock, etc. by Megan
Terry, 1–20.
Shange, Ntozake. 1981. Three Pieces. New York: St. Martin’s.
Shepard, Sam. 2007. Kicking a Dead Horse. London: Faber and Faber.
484 STEPHEN WATT

Stuart, Ian, ed. 1996. Edward Bond Letters: III. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Terry, Megan. 1967. Viet Rock, Comings and Goings, Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place, The
Gloaming Oh My Darling: Four Plays. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Valdez, Luis. 1992. Zoot Suit and Other Plays. Houston: Arte Publico.
Walker, Julia A. 2005. Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices,
Words. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Worthen, W.B. 1997. Staging América: The Subject of History in Chicano/a Theatre. Theatre
Journal 49.2: 101–20.
 CHAPTER 31

E T H N IC I T Y A N D P O ST WA R  D R A M A

JON D . RO S SI N I

Toward a Different Model of Ethnicity

The understanding of ethnicity in drama and the role of ethnic theater in the United
States changes after the end of World War II as the subject matter, purpose, and most vis-
ible audiences for such work shifts from European-derived “white” ethnics to racialized
ethnic groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinas/os, and Native Americans
most prominently. Given the breadth of its task, this essay is necessarily incomplete,
both in the range of ethnic traditions addressed and the absence of many contributions
of individuals and groups, but it attempts to chart the historical and aesthetic parallels in
the history of these emerging traditions, insisting on the importance of shifting analyti-
cal frameworks to help negotiate the proliferation of academic work on ethnicity in US
drama and theater since the 1990s.
For the most part, ethnic theater during the period from 1945 to 1964 was a contin-
uation of regional entertainment for specific audiences that was articulated without a
strong sense of political valence or explicit racial content, such as the Asian American
vaudeville known as the “chop suey circuit.” While there was a brief resurgence of the-
atrical activity among Eastern European ethnic groups due to an immigration spike in
the late 1940s and 1950s, by the mid-1960s much of this activity had lost momentum,
replaced by the creative energy of “new ethnicities” as well as a different understanding
of theater as a site for the articulation and negotiation of identity, where political and
civil rights became central.
The postwar economic boom along with federal judicial rulings and legislation that
granted broader access to education, civil rights legislation, and immigration reform
helped foster this shift in understanding. Mendéz v. Westminster (1946), a precedent
for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), set the stage for the end of school segregation,
while the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964 outlawed discrimination more broadly in
public employment, public spaces, voting rights, and education. The Immigration and
Nationality Acts of 1952 (McCarran-Walter) and 1965 (Hart-Celler) removed racial
486 JON D. ROSSINI

exclusions and eliminated national origin restrictions respectively, vastly expanding the
opportunities for Asian and Latin American immigrants. These judicial and legislative
changes, along with other projects of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society and War on
Poverty initiatives, created a legislative framework for countering historical and present
discrimination. Catalyzed by the black civil rights movement, these changes also served
as a productive response to Gunner Myrdal’s 1944 study An American Dilemma, which
argued that discrimination and unequal access to societal benefits were the grounds for
black/white difference (Petersen 1982, 13–14).
Nevertheless, the gap between the utopian promise of this legislation and the real
lived conditions of minorities experiencing continued discrimination in education
and labor fostered a broadening of civil rights activism into Asian American, Chicano,
Puerto Rican, and Native American communities, many adopting the militant asser-
tiveness of the Black Power movement in various forms of Yellow, Brown, and Red
Power. These gaps provided space for meaningfully contesting white hegemony, as well
as for rethinking in action the academic models of ethnicity that insisted on assimilation
as the teleological end of immigration and ethnic difference.
Within the social sciences, older models of primordial ethnicity, emerging directly
from one’s biological ancestry and occasionally even articulated in essential terms,
were replaced with instrumental models, where ethnicity was deployed as a “means of
political mobilization for advancing group interests” (Yang 2000, 46), as well as by more
broadly social constructionist accounts that emphasized ethnicity’s flexibility and shift-
ing nature in order to understand the political and social transformations of the 1960s
and early 1970s. While contemporary scholars such as Philip Q. Yang attempt to combine
various elements of these approaches in narrating the presence, persistence, and deploy-
ment of ethnicity as a form of identity, it is also important to note that these changes
occur simultaneously with an acceptance of postmodern identity as fragmented, partial,
plural, and constructed through performance. This confluence of identity reconceptual-
ization and social change, along with the broad shift in focus toward identity as explicit
subject matter in a range of drama and performance in the early 1970s provides much of
the context for the changing status of ethnicity within drama.
Perhaps the last gasp of an older concept of ethnicity in performance is represented
by the 1974 Charles Scribner’s Sons anthology Eight American Ethnic Plays (Griffith &
Mersand 1974). This anthology is a rare moment in which Irish, Scandinavian, Jewish,
and Italian American plays are placed in proximity to Puerto Rican, black, and Mexican
American plays. While the first grouping of plays presents various scenarios in ethnic
context and provides an opportunity to learn about these communities (both through
the plays themselves and the historical introduction), the second group of plays explic-
itly shifts to the exploration of discriminatory experience. The relative absence of play-
wrights able to meaningfully reflect the contemporary experience of white ethnicity
in the early 1970s (Paddy Chayefsky being a notable exception) is symptomatic of a
shift in the cultural and critical understanding of ethnicity at that time toward a more
racialized (“of color”) understanding. Apart from Theodore Apstein’s Wetback Run
(1961) about Mexican immigration, the black and Puerto Rican works in the anthology
 ETHNICITY AND POSTWAR DRAMA 487

are canonical: Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (1958), about the Younger fam-
ily’s experience of discrimination in housing and employment, and Douglas Turner
Ward’s Day of Absence (1965), about the disappearance of blacks in a community, are
both widely studied and anthologized elsewhere. René Marqués’s The Oxcart (1950), an
account of a difficult and troubled migration from Puerto Rico to New York, is con-
sidered the founding piece of Puerto Rican theater in English and the Puerto Rican
Travelling Theatre (PRTT) performed it throughout New York City in 1967 (Antush
1994). Ethnic drama is still broadly accepted as a descriptive term to mark any drama
whose content focuses on ethnicity, or is written by someone whose biography makes
visible an experiential relationship to this identity (and in fact can include much more
than this, but the terms of engagement and discussion become increasingly contested).
However, the majority of developing work during this period was articulated and dis-
seminated by racialized ethnic groups.
It is important to remember that while various “white” European ethnic groups,
such as Italians, Irish, and Polish, have a record of diminishing racialization, the
groups under discussion here have not participated in this process. African Americans,
Asian Americans, and Chicanas/os were most prominently granted opportunities to
address historical discrimination through the civil rights and immigration legislation
of the 1950s and 1960s, while Native Americans and Puerto Ricans were developing an
increasing sense of ethnic consciousness and of potential for radical change in a cultural
moment open to the possibility of radical critique. But they have yet to be deracialized
despite claims of a postracial society. Indeed, the primary mode for understanding dis-
crimination and cultural difference in the United States continues to be a black/white
binary sustained by racist legacies of slavery and categories of citizenship articulated
in reductive terms. Thus it makes sense that the particular history of African American
drama merits its own separate essay in this collection. But beginning in the 1960s, the
specifically politicized emergence of Asian American, Latina/o, and Native American
drama in their various forms of English and bilingual code switching represent an ini-
tial and sustained investment in consciousness raising about the existence, history, and
meaningful importance of groups subject to marginalization and discrimination in the
white cultural imaginary.

Investments in Ethnic Drama:

1960s and 1970s

The traditional account of the progress of these groups has been understood as operat-
ing in a series of decadal periods. There is some variation, but most accounts present
a master narrative that establishes a period of radical resistance; notes a general shift
toward increased professional practice and mainstream acceptance; describes a pro-
liferation of increasingly diverse expressions of ethnic experience, including specific
488 JON D. ROSSINI

attention to gender and sexuality, as well as increased specificity of experiences within

pan-ethnic labels; and ends with a serious question about the meaning of ethnicity as an
aesthetic marker for dramatic practice.
There are a number of clear parallels between the trajectory of Chicano, Puerto
Rican, and Asian American theater innovation in the mid- to late-1960s through the
early 1970s. While Hispanic theater has had a place in the current geography of the
United States since the late sixteenth century, Chicano theater, most notably El Teatro
Campesino (ETC) in 1965, emerged in parallel with militant black aesthetics and other
politically inflected theatrical movements of the 1960s. Initially using the theater to edu-
cate workers and generate support for fair labor practices in solidarity with the United
Farmworkers and the activism of Cesar Chavez in California, collaboratively created
actos were staged in the fields on the back of flatbed trucks and at workers’ halls for farm-
worker audiences. These short works, often reflecting a high level of cultural analysis,
political acumen, and popular humor, were conceived as topical and local interventions.
However, the political traction of this spectacular activity led to the emergence of a
broader teatro movement in the early 1970s; collective groups established in and around
universities, community centers, and other spaces. Groups like Teatro de la Esperanza
in Santa Barbara, California, Teatro Desengaño del Pueblo in Gary, Indiana, and Teatro
Chicano de Austin, many of whose works are available on the Alexander Street Press
databases, developed theater to effectively articulate the lived conditions of their com-
munities and educate their audiences in structures not bound to the expectations of psy-
chological realism. The operative assumption for these collectives was that their stories
were shared by the ethnic community—the conditions of oppression were not visibly
distinguished based on gender or sexuality, and working-class status was presumptive
for Chicano identification. The work was conceived primarily in community-based
terms and focused on the pedagogical and aesthetic needs of the specific ethnic commu-
nity, deliberately operating outside of the constraints of professional theater, and envi-
sioning artists as organic intellectuals doing work by, for, and about their community
(Huerta 1982).
While there had obviously been a long history of performance by Asians in the United
States on the West Coast as well as in Hawaii stretching far back into the nineteenth
century, the formation of the East West Players (EWP) in 1965 is typically articulated as
a founding moment of Asian American theater, since the concept of Asian American
itself was developed as an instrumental identity formation in response to government
categorization. From its inception, the EWP was deeply invested in meaningful roles in
the theater for Asian American actors and playing outside of the space of stereotype, at
times paralleling other ethnic theaters in producing work directly confronting stereo-
typed notions of history. Started as a means of showcasing Asian American acting talent
in Los Angeles, the mission gradually broadened into training, community-based work,
and production and development of new plays by Asian American writers. Unlike ETC,
which did not accept government funding until the mid-1970s, the EWP received a Ford
Foundation grant in 1968 to support their season and help develop new original plays
as well as a consistent grant from the Rockefeller Foundation from 1973 to 1980 for a
 ETHNICITY AND POSTWAR DRAMA 489

playwright in residence, which helped them foster the development of Asian American
playwriting. Other than the PRTT and the Institute of American Indian Arts Native the-
ater program (1969), the next theaters to emerge were collaboratively supported proj-
ects driven by playwrights: Frank Chin’s Asian American Theater Company (1973) and
Hanay Geiogamah’s (Kiowa/Delaware) Native American Theater Ensemble (NATE,
founded in 1972 with the support of Ellen Stewart from La MaMa, who also assisted in
the development of the Pan Asian Repertory Theater).
At the center of much of this early work was a pedagogical project recuperating eth-
nic history and, more prominently, critiquing the misuse of power, stereotypical rep-
resentation, and forms of cultural discrimination that perpetuated the valuation of
assimilationist logics. In this drama the issue of the stereotype goes beyond the lingering
historical inequities that enable discriminatory representational practice and the use of
ethnic “types” in functional comedic roles that was a mainstay of nineteenth-century
drama. Instead, the ambivalent problem of the stereotype involves both an exploration
of the specific power dynamics and historical legacies of the stereotype, while recog-
nizing the implications of engaging in a theatrical tradition whose dominant mode of
expression is a form of psychological realism in which the understanding of character
reflects the racial formation of a hegemonic culture. For this reason, a great deal of eth-
nic theater has not participated in a realist aesthetic, but the work that does enters a
structure of reception in which racially marked individuals are viewed in primordialist
terms if they are deemed to bear aesthetic and social significance vis-à-vis their ethnic-
ity. In this problematic though persistent construction, supported by the ostensible logic
of theatrical semiotics in which the individual object can readily be understood to sig-
nify a larger category, ethnic actors of color are seen as performing not just as individuals
but also as representations of their ethnicities. The need to move beyond the stereotype
becomes a form of corrective to continued misrepresentation in the dominant culture
from the group perspective, while for the individual it is an opportunity to fully embrace
the ideology of self-transformation inherent in the logic of psychologically realistic act-
ing. The remarkable irony is that in the heightened visibility of a racialized culture, the
marked body is always seen as performing and yet in the space of the theater, there is
an implicit assumption that the visual equivalence of racialized ethnicity suggests that
the ethnic actor is being, not acting. This assumption locates the representation of cul-
ture in the world of experience marked on the actor’s body rather than the world of fic-
tion. There is a complex difficulty in negotiating this presumptive reception because the
politics of identity and the concomitant aesthetic forms of ethnic drama are also making
specific claims about the importance of experience as a means of authorizing and vali-
dating truth claims about alternative political visions, opening up the potential critical
misreading generated in parallel with neoconservative practices of free-market ideol-
ogy that authorize these accounts as solely individual experiences as opposed to signs
of a sustained and continued systemic racism. Thus, many early plays engaging with
stereotypes, such as Edward Sakamoto’s Yellow Is My Favorite Color (1972), Luis Valdez’s
Los Vendidos (1967), and Hanay Geiogamah’s Foghorn (1973), work to undercut any pre-
sumption of individual psychological realism.
490 JON D. ROSSINI

There is also a clear parallel in thematic and stylistic investments of intra-ethnic cri-
tique in relation to the tension between ethnic connectivity and external pressures in
works such as Geiogamah’s Body Indian (1972), Frank Chin’s Year of the Dragon (1974),
and Miguel Piñero’s Short Eyes (1974). These plays explore the structural problems gen-
erated by external racism but also critique the choices of members of their own ethnic
group. Year of the Dragon, first produced at the American Place Theater and later pro-
duced by the EWP, argues against assimilation and takes a conflicted stance in rela-
tionship to the formation of Chinatown as an ethnic ghetto, presenting it as both the
product of white racism and the best space for maintaining traditional Chinese culture
(Kurahashi 1999, 73). Yuko Kurahashi tells a fascinating story about Chin’s frustration
with an actor’s refusal to portray anger while playing the role of Fred, demonstrating a
shifting notion of the body politic in which an accommodationist determined not to
deliberately question white expectations feels viscerally out of sync with the righteous
anger of Chin’s character (77). Piñero’s Short Eyes, which did not emerge from a spe-
cifically Puerto Rican theatrical space, explores a day in prison life in which the fate of
a white pederast is negotiated by Puerto Rican, black, and white inmates, themselves
manipulated by racist institutional structures. Geiogamah’s Body Indian, which was the
first production of the NATE, stages a condemnation of the self-interested manipula-
tion of ostensible friends and relations who literally pull apart the body (removing the
prosthetic leg) of a character in the pursuit of funding their addiction to alcohol. This
representation of cyclical and repetitive violence is framed within a larger economic
structure of minimal resources within a Native American context of land leases and
permissions.
While it is useful to connect these plays as shared responses to a cultural moment,
it is also crucial to reiterate that the acknowledgment of structural violence and sys-
temic racism is not the same as presenting ethnic subjects as capitulated victims,
despite a critical tendency to pathologize difference. It is equally important to recog-
nize the basis of these works in specific methodological and theoretical perspectives
that emerge from the metaphorical implications of material and historical conditions
of the specific ethnicities represented. Karen Shimakawa, for example, goes back to
the sustained history of exclusion, a specific legislative practice unique to the Asian
immigrant experience, to ground her use of the concept of abjection as a point of
engagement with Chin’s play and with Asian American performance more broadly.
Piñero’s play makes visible systemic racism both by simple illustration of a prison
population and by the overt manipulation carried out by a specific structure and sys-
tem in an attempt to wright (write, right, and bring into being) a new possibility for
ethnicity (Rossini 2008).
To carry this further, we can look in detail at the general contours of a Native
American epistemology. Christy Stanlake might refer to the work of Body Indian in
terms of Gerald Vizenor’s term survivance, a combination of survival and resistance.
Stanlake defines Native American drama as produced by indigenous inhabitants for
a secular and intertribal audience. In order to separate this production from other
understandings of Native American performance and tribal ritual, she argues that one
 ETHNICITY AND POSTWAR DRAMA 491

must explore Native epistemologies and experiences of history that structure repre-
sentation and methodology in terms of “place, speech and movement” (2009, 17, 25).
Stanlake’s argument gains a material basis when we think of sovereignty as one of the
primary issues of Native American identity, given a genealogy of conquest and geno-
cide, manipulation of tribal resources through greed and government paternalism,
continuous attempts at physical displacement and historical erasure through misrep-
resentation and even active social engineering—such as the boarding school program
in the United States and Canada that separated Native children from their families
and made it unacceptable for them to think or speak as members of their indigenous
communities (Stanlake 2009, 21, 22). It is crucial in approaching Body Indian to think
carefully about the ways that Native aesthetics and methodology can create differently
on the space of the stage, and Geiogamah himself calls for “an Indian state of mind”
(D’Aponte 1999, 8) in the stage directions. This is one real power of ethnic theater—the
possibility of mapping the world otherwise through different relationships between
self and community, self and power. In the recuperative logic of identity movements
the fact of marginalization develops the possibility of a different consciousness that
offers alternatives to the traditional thinking of culture. While one might argue about
critical differences between groups based on the specific histories of migration and
immigration as opposed to conquest, it is worth questioning the extent to which some
Pacific Islanders are understood within the framework of indigenous identity as well
as Asian American identity, in addition to remembering the Chicano understanding
of living in a conquered homeland after 1848 and the Puerto Rican subjection to US
empire after 1898.
A sense of place and placement, of home, migration, and movement, haunts a
great deal of ethnic theater as it moves through the 1970s and into the early 1980s
and begins to expand in scope. Richard Nixon’s initial tripling of support for National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funding through 1971 and 1972 led to the diminish-
ment of some local sources of arts support as federal support continued to increase
throughout the 1970s. The rapid growth of NEA appropriations from 1977 to 1979 may
have helped accelerate the emergence of new groups such as the Pan Asian Repertory
Theater (1977) and Pregones (1978) as well as INTAR’s (International Arts Relations,
Inc.) new commitment to English-language production and a Hispanic aesthetic in
the late 1970s. However, this proliferation unfortunately coincides with the flower-
ing of the effects of neoliberal economic conditions, protecting the free market and
the rights of individuals and corporations (viewed as individuals) while decreasing
government regulation and social welfare, and the adjusted dollar value of the NEA
appropriation never returned to its 1979 high. Despite the radical opposition to the
degradations of global capital contained within many of the ethnic civil rights move-
ments, the neoliberal focus on individual freedom is not incompatible with the notion
of individual cultural expression of identity. This is manifest in the increasingly cel-
ebratory accounts of multiculturalism, an ostensible victory for the forces demand-
ing respect for diverse viewpoints, but in actuality a strategy of managing potentially
radical possibilities.
492 JON D. ROSSINI

Negotiating the Tensions of Mainstream

Multiculturalism

This mainstreaming of multiculturalism in the national imaginary, privileging ethnic-

ity as culture and not alternative politics, led to a broadening of foundation and federal
investment in ethnic theaters as well as support to members of the League of Resident
Theatres (LORT) for commissioning, supporting, and developing playwrights, and to
institutions like the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights Lab (1981) run by Maria Irene Fornes
and the PRTT Playwrights Unit. While the funding was used to develop spaces in which
the production of ethnic theater was organizationally generated and to support col-
laborations, the individual playwright’s voice was increasingly placed in the service of
documenting the multicultural reality of US history and contemporary culture. To the
extent to which individual artists were compelled by the project of recuperating history,
these projects could be wildly successful, such as the collaboration between Gordon
Davidson of the Mark Taper Forum and Luis Valdez, which led to the production of
Zoot Suit (1978), the most successful Chicano play in history, which in addition to a stint
on Broadway in 1979 and translation into film, was produced by the National Theater of
Mexico in Spanish translation during 2010.
However, while the foundation support (primarily from Rockefeller and Ford) that
spread out among the regional theater movement helped open up the audience and cul-
tural support for different voices, it also fell into the trap of the broader movement of
new play development in which, in a loose parallel to the economic forms of neoliberal
development in nation building in so-called developing or third world countries, plays
were sometimes shaped to homogeneous expectations emerging from outside of the
space of development, or simply developed and not produced. In theatrical terms the
expectations to satisfy an existing audience base’s desire for multicultural fare meant an
expectation of explicit focus on the stories and history of the represented group staged
in a predictable psychological realism interspersed with an acceptable level of bilingual
code switching, a suitably “foreign” or “culturally other” location, and/or a generic or
aesthetic vocabulary connected to the national origins of the writer’s ethnicity in the
broadest sense: Noh, Kyogen, Chinese Opera for Asian American playwrights, dance
ceremonies and tribal rituals for Native American playwrights, and magical realism
for Latina/o and Chicana/o playwrights. At the same time, aesthetic innovation and
attention to cultural difference were at the heart of many of these artists’ work:  the
Puerto Rican playwright José Rivera’s choice to employ Spanish beyond his fluency
level in Cloud Tectonics (1995); patterns of storytelling and weaving structuring Native
American dramas; the EWP’s training in and presentation of Japanese forms; and differ-
ent relationships to spirituality and to lived experience or political oppression that result
in events inexplicable to forms of causal logic. As part of coming into consciousness
about the geography of their ethnicity, playwrights carried on research into new and tra-
ditional mythologies and histories. The danger, however, was that to some extent these
 ETHNICITY AND POSTWAR DRAMA 493

new forms also became a kind of aesthetic stereotype designed to mark the consumable
difference of the ethnic writer, as Sandoval-Sánchez reminds us in his excellent over-
view chapter on Latina/o Theater in José, Can You See? (1999). This ambivalent tension
repeats in critical discourse where the changing use of aesthetic and forms by emerging
ethnic playwrights is too often read in terms of their relationship to the politics of eth-
nicity rather than their exploration of form and content, paralleling the careers of many
canonized Euro-American dramatists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Another playwriting development that accompanied broadening regional support
was increased attention to the concepts of hybridity, multiplicity, and mestizaje, vari-
ous means of understanding a logic of both/and in terms of their own placement in
the world and the aesthetic strategies of their work. This second-generation work,
increasingly developed in formal training spaces, began to at times reveal a double
agenda. Various theoretical models serve to explain the ways in which playwrights
found themselves as representative translators of a relatively predetermined model
of ethnicity that would not disturb the easy consumption of multicultural theater by
a white audience while also allowing alternative possibilities to emerge. I have used
the term “wrighting” to label this practice, and other scholars have used terms such
as double coding (Bial 2005). A variant on this concept, which is less about satisfy-
ing the demands of an audience but still about negotiating both resistance and the
potential representation of difference, would involve strategies such as disidentifica-
tion (Muñoz 1999), and for Sandoval-Sánchez and Sternbach (2001), Fernando Ortiz’s
concept of transculturation.
One model of this self-consciousness is illustrated in Philip Kan Gotanda’s oft-studied
Yankee Dawg You Die (1986), which stages an intergenerational conversation between
two Asian American actors (the older Japanese American and the younger Chinese
American), in order to explore the pragmatic limits of the representational practice
of Asian bodies and the possibilities and realities of countering stereotypes. Gotanda,
aware of the extended history of Asians in America and the continued racist inability
to see beyond the cultural stereotypes manifest politically through the initial exclusion
acts and later enforced by the internment of Japanese Americans, nonetheless settles
for a plea for an audience to recognize new possibilities for representation. At the same
time, he acknowledges that the only space in which it is possible to play an authentic
three-dimensional role is in the “alternative” spaces of Asian American theater produc-
tion in which the means and modes of production are controlled by individuals sharing
an investment in the politics of representation. James Moy (1993) sees this play, along
with Hwang’s Tony Award–winning M. Butterfly (1988) as part of “a new representa-
tional strategy, one in which the words offer a clear indictment of the cultural hegemony
of the West, while the characters empowered to represent and speak on behalf of the
Chinese or Asianness are laughable and grossly disfigured” (125) while Josephine Lee
(1997) argues that “the play optimistically suggests that performing the stereotype can
reveal the vulnerability of the system that produces it” (106). Critical contestation of
the efficacy of deconstructing and distorting stereotypes continues, but the strategy still
holds to have broad appeal.
494 JON D. ROSSINI

Gotanda’s concerns in Yankee are contemporaneously echoed in Luis Valdez’s play

I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges! (1986), in which the upper-middle-class
son of two Hollywood bit players insists on the need to become a director to rectify the
representational politics of Hollywood that have pushed his parents into acting the roles
of silent stereotypes. Both invoking the language of film within the theater, these two
plays were first produced in the same year as the Immigration Reform and Control Act,
which provided potential amnesty to undocumented immigrants who could demon-
strate proof of extended residency in the United States while increasing other forms of
immigration control. They also emerged at the beginning of a “white backlash” (Brewer
2005, 144) that articulated ethnic claims for equity as “special interests” given a puta-
tive level playing field in free-market capitalism. This context highlights the continued
controversies over immigration as well as the need to expand the sites in which dis-
criminatory labor practices are contested through theatrical representation. Though
both Valdez and Gotanda offer pragmatic but potentially hopeful accounts of represen-
tational transformation, the continued deployment of this subject matter in plays like
Leanne Howe and Roxy Gordon’s (Choctaw) Indian Radio Days (1988/1993) reflects an
ongoing contestation through playing with stereotypes, this time through invoking the
genre of a radio show to tell stories of a range of historical moments in a process Howe
calls “tribalography” (D’Aponte 1999, 104). The political shift in their efficacious deploy-
ment is also visible in Gotanda’s companion piece to Yankee, entitled White Manifesto
and Other Perfumed Tales of Self-Entitlement or, Got Rice? (2001), which “explores issues
of racial and gender entitlement” through a white man’s fascination with Asian women
(Gotanda 2005, xiv–xix).

Shifting the Terms of Ethnicity

and Drama

While the “canonical” groups marked for critical attention since the 1970s continue to
be Latinas/os, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, the relative presence of vari-
ous groups in the space of dramatic production and dissemination shifts to some extent
in relation to US foreign and domestic investment in economic and political projects,
with increased attention to South Asian experience in the 1980s and to the experience
of Middle Eastern subjects in the 1990s and 2000s accompanying shifting immigration
and educational patterns as well as global politics. To a large extent, the sustained atten-
tion to these issues is practiced by middle-class artists who are often second-generation
immigrants or educated professional first-generation immigrants, but the focus on
particular subjects is influenced by US cultural and military investments such as the
conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and previously in Vietnam, the Asian reparation move-
ment during the 1980s, continuing shifts in immigration policy and border policing,
and popular investment in democratic and neoimperial interventions. In Latina/o
 ETHNICITY AND POSTWAR DRAMA 495

drama, the colonial relation to Puerto Rico and tensive relationships of migratory cir-
culation serves as a continued subject for Puerto Rican and Nuyorican playwrights
(such as Carmen Rivera and José Rivera); the anxiety around Castro’s Cuba sustains the
practice of Cuban American playwrights (such as Eduardo Machado, Rogelio Martinez,
and Nilo Cruz); the concerns about border crossing and the economic displacements of
NAFTA sustain investments by Chicana/o playwrights (such as Octavio Solis and Sylvia
Gonzalez S.); at the same time there is a broader base of experiences from the growing
Dominican Republic immigrant population in New York (such as Josefina Baez) and
writers with historical roots in a broader array of South and Central American countries
(such as Guillermo Reyes). Writers from each of these groups shift to articulating larger
“Latino” issues in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. A similar pat-
tern can be articulated with regards to Asian American playwrights, where one interest-
ing moment of cultural crossover emerges in Filipino American Jeannie Barroga’s play
Walls (1989), which engages a multiethnic cast in an exploration of the Vietnam War
Memorial designed by the Chinese American artist Maya Lin.
The 1990s witnessed a massive proliferation of the publication and dissemination of
ethnic drama and its secondary materials along with an increasing recognition of the
complexity of identity in terms of gender and sexuality, especially queer identities (Svich
and Marrero 2000; Huerta 2000). María Teresa Marrero’s article “Out of the Fringe?
Out of the Closet” (2000) argues for the proliferation of attention to Latina/o sexual-
ity in performance, suggesting that “now we are beginning to allow ourselves to be,
not as imagined homogenous, heterosexual communities, but as multiple:  deceased
and healthy, homophobic, gay, lesbian, queer, hetero-, bi-, and even asexual” (138), the
impetus coming “despite, or perhaps because of politically conservative times” (136). In
addition to articulating a history of teatropoesia as an aesthetic mode that has histori-
cally welcomed sexual identities more broadly than traditional Latina/o theater spaces
(of which Cherríe Moraga’s early version of Giving up the Ghost [1984] is perhaps the
best-known example), and documenting the creative efforts of Chicanas and Latinas,
Marrero articulates the continued resistance to homosexual themes in playwright
development, using Edwin Sanchez’s Trafficking in Broken Hearts (1994) as an example.
This insistence on opening up the critical conversations was built on the germinal
theoretical text This Bridge Called My Back (1981/1983), edited by the Chicana lesbian
feminists Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as the groundbreaking work of
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (1986) and Yolanda Broyles-González (1994), and whose dis-
cussions of the roles of women in Chicano theater addressed the critical contributions of
women that were often overlooked previously. A proliferation of studies in the late 1990s
and early 2000s focused on Latinas; these included Alicia Arrizón’s Latina Performance
(1999), Arrizón and Lillian Manzor’s Latinas on Stage (2000), Sandoval-Sánchez and
Sternbach’s Stages of Life (2001), and their companion anthology Puro Teatro (2000).
These works documented the substantial contributions of Latina playwrights and effec-
tively argued for the inclusion of artists such as Migdalia Cruz, Caridad Svich, and
Dolores Prida into the critical conversation. This same gesture has been made within
Asian American drama studies with Roberta Uno and Velina Hasu Houston’s work
496 JON D. ROSSINI

focusing on Asian American women playwrights and more broadly with Uno and Kathy
Perkins’s groundbreaking collection Contemporary Plays by Women of Color (1996). The
project of anthologizing and creating bio-bibliographical sourcebooks also continued
in the late 1990s as the increasing implicit canonization of important works continued
(Peterson and Bennett 1997).
While gender discrimination certainly produced some of these initial elisions, what
is crucial to understand is that the contributions of women playwrights often compli-
cate the decadal history so prized by historiographers. For example, a conversation on
Chicana sexuality had already begun with Estela Portillo-Trambley’s Day of the Swallows
(1971); Wakako Yamauchi’s And the Soul Shall Dance (1977), one of the first highly suc-
cessful plays for the EWP, already addressed the experience of a Japanese immigrant;
and Maria Irene Fornes had been writing plays, albeit not recognizably ethnic in a sim-
ple fashion, since the 1960s.
The process of historiography is also central to the production of ethnic drama. As
W. B. Worthen (1997) suggests in discussing history as a privileged subject, “Chicano/a
history plays seem to question the relationship between history and representation, and
the uses of history in the fashioning of a Chicana/o subject” (108–9), an argument that
can be extended to other forms of ethnic drama. Importantly, although there are sev-
eral accounts of Mexican revolutionary history and some accounts of early Asian migra-
tion in relation to work on the railroads, as well as extended trajectories of historical
(mis)representation that work to counter the process of colonization and representa-
tional practices generated by (and justifying) violent conquest, many of the history plays
and period pieces from the 1980s and 1990s deal with the cultural moment of World
War II and after. This focus can be argued as an implicit acknowledgment of the shift
into a different possibility of articulating consciousness about ethnicity and rights.
This notion of history is recently situated, within the broadest understanding of what
might be labeled the postmodern, or the economic effects of global capitalism during
and after World War II. While it is true that many of the writers foreground issues of
historical discrimination, much of that is framed in the traditional US narrative of the
individual liberal subject as a means of recuperating that history as “our history,” using
a character-centered model of realistic drama to tell the political story of the past. This
focus on recent history suggests a form of self-awareness about a different thinking of
ethnicity that emerges from the postwar period. It is not merely that the majority of
the diverse playwrights are products of the baby boom and the half generation before,
it is that their notion of ethnicity is imagined most often as a relational necessity that
exists contingent on, but informed by, a sense of history. Unlike previous formations
of ethnic theater in which theater’s role was to create community for new immigrants
while implicitly accepting the dominant US cultural narrative of assimilation for white
ethnicities (Seller 1983), the “new ethnic social movements” were predicated on a form
of consciousness that acknowledged potential social liberation. Thus the subject of
immigration is placed in the foreground, but always within the dynamics of power and
material structural conditions. For example, in 1981 the EWP offered a season of plays
on Japanese internment in parallel with the political calls for reparations: Yamauchi’s
 ETHNICITY AND POSTWAR DRAMA 497

12-1-A, Mako/Dom Magwili’s Christmas in Camp, Edward Sakamoto’s Pilgrimage, and

Richard France’s Station J. From a different perspective, Oliver Mayer’s Conjunto (2003;
Mayer 2007) explores the multiethnic impact of the internment as two brothers forced
to leave for an internment camp place their farm (and the oldest brother’s wife) in the
care of the Mexican foreman. Conjunto, which is also a style of music, means group or
joined, drawing attention to the play’s conclusion in which overtures are made across
ethnic lines, an increasing element of ethnic drama in the 2000s. This trend is also con-
tinued in Caridad Svich’s innovative attempt to reassert control over the means of pro-
duction for ethnic playwrights through her collective NoPassport Press.
Although anthologies and single author collections had been published as early as
1971, and there was scholarship in article form and a few collections and books including
groundbreaking work by Jorge Huerta in Chicano theater (Huerta 1982), among oth-
ers, the mid- to late 1990s and the 2000s saw a massive proliferation of publication of
both anthologies and critical books on Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American
drama. Along with this proliferation of published work is a broadening relationship
between scholars and artists that has both helped generate productive investigation of
the shifting possibilities of the conceptual framework of ethnicity and increased under-
standing of ethnic drama as theoretical work on the subject of ethnicity. This is espe-
cially important given the strong performative turn in cultural studies in which theater,
with its established history and aesthetic conventions, can provide a productive site for
investigation. Given the heightened materiality of the ethnic body under the gaze of an
audience, the space of drama becomes an increasingly useful space from which to exam-
ine the conditions of bodies in culture in a controlled environment outside of the real.
The complex dynamics of identity can be fruitfully studied within this work, ranging
from the complex negotiations in and around nontraditional casting, to William Sun’s
(2000) thought-provoking claim about the potential contemporary fictionality of the
visually homogeneous nuclear family, to Angela Pao’s (2004) insistence on thinking the
ways that the materiality of ethnicity is understood through the voice, and to Esther
Kim Lee’s (2006) foundational history of Asian American theater.
Third- and fourth-generation playwrights have taken this task upon themselves, cre-
ating filiations and telling different kinds of histories in which the presence of characters
read as ethnic are taken for granted rather than necessarily being placed in the service
of a specific ideological or cultural position directly related to their ethnicity. This is not
to suggest the cessation of works directly invested in exploring the historical and con-
temporary experiences of specific groups; rather, it reminds us that the understanding
of ethnicity as a mode through which cultural production is articulated must continue
to shift.
This recognition of a continuing shift in the understanding of ethnicity suggests that
ethnicity itself could be considered an evolving conceptual framework that highlights
process and perspective rather than serving to define category or culture. If ethnicity is
understood as a methodology for art making, for charting the relation between self and
other, or perhaps a geography—cultural, political, and human—that begins to map the
cartography of ethical and aesthetic engagements through drama in specific historical
498 JON D. ROSSINI

and material moments, then ethnic drama is not just an assertion of identity. Instead,
ethnicity also becomes a way of thinking about drama. What this reasserts for the study
of drama then is less about the specific content, which is still vital, but about the ethical
efficacy of drama. In this mode, formal innovations—such as new modes of mapping
character and relations of causality, history, temporality, and memory—are not just aes-
thetic innovations but are also necessary responses to the systemic material conditions
of historical and contemporary life.

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Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto. 1999. José Can You See? Latinos On and Off Broadway.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, eds. 2000. Puro Teatro: A Latina
Anthology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
———. 2001. Stages of Life:  Transcultural Performance and Identity in U.S. Latina Theater.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Seller, Maxine Schwartz, ed. 1983. Ethnic Theatre in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Shimakawa, Karen. 2002. National Abjection:  The Asian American Body Onstage. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Stanlake, Christy. 2009. Native American Drama: A Critical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sun, William H. 2000. Power and Performance across Ethnic Lines: An Alternative Approach
to Non-Traditional Casting. TDR 44, no. 4: 86–95.
Svich, Caridad, and María Teresa Marrero, eds. 2000. Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/
Latino Theatre and Performance. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Uno, Roberta, and Kathy Perkins, eds. 1996. Contemporary Plays by Women of Color.
New York: Routledge.
Worthen, W. B. 1997. Staging América: The Subject of History in Chicano/a Theatre. Theatre
Journal 49, no. 2: 101–20.
Yang, Philip Q. 2000. Ethnic Studies:  Issues and Approaches. Albany :  State University of
New York Press.
Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. 1986. The Female Subject in Chicano Theatre: Sexuality, “Race,” and
Class. Theatre Journal 38, no. 4: 389–407.
 CHAPTER 32

RU N N I N G L I N E S :  NA R R AT I V E S
OF T W E N T Y- F I R ST- C E N T U RY
A M E R IC A N T H E AT R E

MARC ROBINSON

“The story will tell,” I took upon myself to reply.

“Oh, I can’t wait for the story!”
“The story won’t tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal, vulgar way.”
“More’s the pity then. That’s the only way I ever understand.”
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

Two women sit facing one another at a plain table, their hands resting on its surface,
their heads in profile, the rest of their bodies gathered in an alert, unstrained poise.
Before we can take this decorum for granted, it collapses, quietly, as the woman on our
right leans over the table to shine a light into the other woman’s mouth. Music begins;
the woman on the left begins to sing, and the projected image of her lips opening and
closing, viewed from the inside, fills a massive upstage screen. It’s now clear that she
is holding a tiny video camera in her mouth. As she voices the syllables “ah,” “oh,” and
“ma,” we’re able to locate their source, the anatomical origins of the fundamental parts
of speech. Her vocal line soon acquires its visual continuo. Across the table, her partner
takes a charcoal pencil to the end of a roll of butcher-block paper. As the roll unspools,
seemingly on its own, the mark becomes a line—one we now see on the screen, filmed
by another small camera. The line is bold, continuous, and undulating, and is accompa-
nied by the abrasive sound of the pencil cutting a channel, etching an endless page. Just
as speech had recovered its definition as mouthed sound, now writing returns to its own
basic and nonreferential identity: simple sequential marking.
The singer is Meredith Monk; the writer is Ann Hamilton, an installation artist who
often explores how time affects perception. Their duet is the opening of mercy, a 2002
collaboration that develops these fundamental gestures of expression into an elabo-
rate meditation on narrative. That subject isn’t the one suggested by the piece’s title.
 RUNNING LINES 501

Subsequent scenes depict figures bowed down by illness, privation, or alienation, as well
as others who try (and often fail) to help them. Moreover, narrative is not a mode of
dramatic structure in which Monk has previously had much interest. Her earlier works,
like this one, favor tableaux and sequences of nonillustrative movement. Yet the running
line formed by Hamilton’s pencil hovers, literally, over the stage to guide our thoughts
about mercy’s ostensibly nonlinear action. The piece may not have a plot, but Monk
and Hamilton do ponder how stories—or, more precisely, the telling of them—serve
elemental needs and tap hidden reserves of empathy. Figures in mercy feel the pull of
narrative, or seem to reach for its clarifying services, when confronted with the work’s
many taunting fragments, diffident figures, or opaque, impenetrable landscapes.
In one sequence, Hamilton’s camera scans a photograph of an anonymous group of
people, raking its surface as if hoping to turn up clues beneath the subjects’ unremark-
able appearance. As we look at the image on the screen, a voiceover asks, “Who is he
speaking to?” “Were they going somewhere?” “What are they pointing at?” “Are they
angry?”—questions that a potential narrator of this photographed scene would want
answered. In a later episode, a doctor flips through his notebook before addressing his
waiting patient directly, as if hoping the narrative about her case will prepare him for the
less organized spectacle of its vulnerable subject. A related, if darker, transaction occurs
when a solitary prisoner accepts his silent jailer’s unexpectedly sympathetic offer of pen-
cil and paper. After he writes his text and hands it back, the jailer tears it in half. In the
wake of this refusal to read, the prisoner paces the perimeter of his cell, a square of white
light that matches—and recovers?—his lost square of white paper.
The vulnerability of the page, and of the telling it contains, is also the implicit subject
of two final sequences. The first is among Monk’s and Hamilton’s most beautiful. A pair
of performers delicately pull apart two wires stretching the height of the stage and coated
with a soapy liquid. As they do so, they reveal a huge transparent membrane—the mak-
ings of a soap bubble—against which the singers project their voices. The surface swells
and subsides to the rhythms of breath—visual evidence of the performers’ song. The
legibility of one’s telling, here, depends on how carefully one manages the pressure one
brings to the page. Too emphatic or impatient, and the membrane tears—the “text” can-
not be “read.” Such is the fate of an entire narrative archive in the next scene. Dozens
of actual pages fall from the flies, blanketing the stage floor. They are unmarked, or, if
marked, unread—testimony only of indifference, this text’s perishable significance con-
firmed when it lands as mere litter.
After writing suffers all these insults, it is striking that Monk and Hamilton would
close mercy by engaging text directly—a page from a book filmed by Hamilton and
projected on a massive scale on the upstage screen. As she did with the photograph,
Hamilton scans this page aggressively, hoping to excavate the secrets beneath its surface.
Her close-ups don’t let us see more than one word or phrase at a time, plucked from their
context, but it helps to know that their source is Marina Warner’s No Go the Bogeyman,
a study, in part, of fairy tales designed to elicit and then manage fear—a narrative, in
other words, about narrative. The page Hamilton has filmed underscores this reflexivity.
The camera alights on such words as “myth,” “tales,” “narrator,” “fantasies,” and “pretext.”
502 MARC ROBINSON

The challenge facing a narrative writer grows more and more daunting as Hamilton
singles out other words:  “giants,” “scaremonger,” “ogres,” “lusting,” “excess,” “babies,”
“crocodiles,” “meat.” If one traces these fragments back to their source in Warner’s book,
one reads a tale of gruesome consumption. Her chapter entitled “Now . . . We Can Begin
to Feed” tells of animals, parents, and monsters devouring children and other helpless
creatures (Warner 1998, 136–59). In the context of mercy, the orality figured in these tales
has a pedestrian but no less violent correlative. Telling itself is an act of oral aggression—
at least it can seem so when a tale told too forcefully can tear a soapy filament, or one
told glibly can wound a patient awaiting more honest speech, or one told naively can end
up reinforcing the prison around its teller. Warner acknowledges how fairy tales have
typically served benevolent purposes—allaying free-floating fear by giving it palpable
and thus pleasurable form; restoring the sick to good health. These scenarios can be
read behind those that feature the sick and the terrified in mercy—if only because Monk
and Hamilton choose not to realize the expected narrative of deliverance. The alienated
remain alone; the sick remain afraid; the fear persists. As we pick out Warner’s words of
eating, we’re left thinking back, perhaps, to mercy’s first image: Monk’s mouth, opening
and closing on a massive scale on the screen that dwarfs her. The instrument of telling is
frightening now, in memory, to a degree it hadn’t been earlier, its every potential narra-
tive lacking the mercy that Monk’s title enshrines.
In the variety and inventiveness with which Monk engages the drive toward narra-
tive, one may sense the belated enthusiasm of a onetime skeptic. Or perhaps it’s more
accurate to say that the skeptic endures, inspiring her to devise a kind of sequence that is
free of coercive means and sentimentalizing ends. When Hamilton’s beautifully chiseled
pencil makes contact with the moving page, the line that results establishes the structure
of narrative but eschews the particular anecdotes that slow or threaten to end its move-
ment. What is particular is the materiality and experience of making this line. J. Hillis
Miller could be supplying the caption for Monk’s and Hamilton’s scene with his own
elemental definition of narrative in Ariadne’s Thread: “If writing is initially a form of
scratching or engraving, the cutting of a line,” he writes, “it may also, after the inven-
tion of pencils and pens, be thought of as the pouring out on a flat surface of a long
line or filament.”1 The effort such action requires, in mercy, can be gauged in the magni-
fied sights and sounds accompanying it. This is perhaps the only kind of narrative that
doesn’t reach its audiences already diminished by familiarity, inevitability, and a narrow
frame of reference.2 
The same concerns preoccupy Virginia Woolf in The Waves (1931). “In order to make
you understand, to give you my life,” Bernard famously complains, “I must tell you a
story—and there are so many, and so many . . . and none of them are true. . . . How tired
I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their
feet on the ground! . . . I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, bro-
ken words, inarticulate words, like the shifting of feet on the pavement” (Woolf 1974,
204). The terms of Bernard’s impatience are remarkably similar to those Gertrude Stein
would employ four years later in her lecture “Plays” (1935), where she explains why her
play What Happened, for all the eventfulness suggested by its title, will disappoint those
 RUNNING LINES 503

expecting a plot. “What is the use of telling a story,” she asks, “since there are so many
and everybody knows so many and tells so many. . . . There is always a story going on”
(1995, xliv).
Stein’s many disciples in the vanguard American theater have silently assented to
her commonsensical disdain for narrative—so much so that nonlinearity now risks
the same predictability that earlier limited the appeal of plot. More than fifty years after
Stein’s most devoted reader, John Cage, inspired theater artists to join him in “get[ting]
rid of the glue” between images, sounds, utterances, and stage actions—and as ever nim-
bler spectators have learned to leap among them unaided by a map marking beginnings,
middles, and ends—the greater challenge comes from those artists willing to accom-
modate the persistence of the narrative sensibility (Cage 1961, 71). Even Gertrude Stein,
writing in a later series of lectures, Narration, acknowledged that “it is a well known fact
that no human being can really stand not being able to tell some one something” (1969,
56). The reader or spectator who bears this in mind turns up so many ways to fabricate
and follow narrative—to respond to the ineradicable drive toward sequence—that, by
the end of a given piece, the story of storytelling has none of the inertia that corrupted
earlier plots.
A number of recent American theater artists are sensitive to these compulsive and at
times even somatic aspects of narrative. For them and for their surrogate selves onstage,
telling is never automatic but rather halting, or driven, or ecstatic—a performance prone
to performance’s accidents. A story, in their work, is the evidence of a speaker’s visible
exertions, of his or her attempt to push a relentless present into the knowable past. Such
a character can’t bear to leave experience unplotted. The theater is the ideal arena for
studying this practice. A narrating character on a stage moves through an as yet unhis-
toricized zone of experience and sensation—an intermediate space, neither our real life
nor the life envisioned in a dramatist’s fiction, ready to be shaped by story. In this regard,
the stage platform is a version of what Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending memo-
rably calls a “tract of time unpunctuated by meaning derived from the end”; it is an envi-
ronment where figures are “stranded in the middle” (Kermode 2000, 162, 190). This is
the same zone that Edward Said imagines in Beginnings as “a fillable space or time” that
“stretch[es] from start to finish” (1985, 48). The phrases capture exactly the stage’s imma-
nence, the steadiness with which it radiates a promise of eventfulness. Said isn’t thinking
about the theater, but he permits the theater-minded reader to take him literally—to
imagine the stage as one that the narrating character “authorizes” by turning mere dura-
tion into continuity. (Peter Brooks’s own terms for narrative space in Reading for the
Plot—a “bounded,” “demarcat[ed]” “field of force”—also satisfy the materialist needs of
the theater viewer, and give a sense of the high stakes involved in any passage across a
stage—or through a narrative [1984, 12, 47].)
Of course, there is no shortage of earlier American playwrights who enclose scenes
of narrating within their narratives.3 In the canonical examples, their protagonists stake
strong claims to their tales and clarify their identities in the telling. Some speakers are
neutral, maintaining the humility of a messenger; others are self-possessed masters of
their subjects, historical, oracular; still others are besieged by memory or dread. But
504 MARC ROBINSON

even when most disoriented by their stories, they observe a kind of narrative decorum.
If they fail to assume a sufficiently detached vantage point on their subjects, they none-
theless uphold the precedent of the memory play or the confession, stopping short of the
more radically disorienting merger of reported and embodied action accomplished in
some recent plays.
“I’ve got to tell you! . . . Only I’ve got to start way back at the beginning or you won’t
understand,” says a guilt-ridden Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946).
He is undeterred from pursuing his story to its cathartic end (“I killed her”) even when
Hope, speaking for the others in the saloon, interrupts him to say, “get it over, you
long-winded bastard!” (O’Neill 1999, 173, 176, 182). In Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly
Last Summer (1958), Catherine’s need to unburden herself of her narrative, and to do so
completely, is no less prominent, at least as important as the lurid story itself. Echoing
Hickey’s obsession with beginnings, Catherine initially wants to open her narrative with
Sebastian’s birth, until Doctor Venable gently suggests she “start later than that.” “About
last summer: how did it begin?” he asks, urging her to “tell the true story . . . the abso-
lutely true story . . . everything told, exactly” (Williams 2000, 136, 134). Jerry, in Edward
Albee’s The Zoo Story (1959), also wants to tell “everything” and he ornaments his nar-
rative with a title, “The Story of Jerry and the Dog,” in order to grant it the appropriate
magnitude. (If he didn’t call it “the” story, and didn’t refer to himself here in the third
person, we might hear it as mere personal anecdote [Albee 1997, 30].) It stands like a
monument in Albee’s park, a fictional object set apart from—and in ambiguous rela-
tionship to—the playwright’s dramatic writing. The self-effacement of Jerry’s ostensibly
self-revealing speech recalls the otherwise wholly dissimilar Jamie Tyrone in O’Neill’s A
Moon for the Misbegotten (1952), whose own epic act of narrating doesn’t proceed until
its protagonist has transformed himself into an anonymous reporter. Here, too, begin-
nings are fraught. As O’Neill puts it in a crucial stage direction: “He closes his eyes. It is
as if he had to hide from sight before he can begin. He makes his face expressionless. His
voice becomes impersonal and objective, as though what he told concerned some man
he had known, but had nothing to do with him. This is the only way he can start telling
the story” (1974, 94). Explicitly here—but no less so in the case of the possessed Hickey,
the drugged Catherine, and the self-mythologizing Jerry—the act of narrating promises
to exonerate the narrators of responsibility for the experiences they describe. Now wit-
nesses rather than actors, they steer their testimony toward a resolution denied them in
the living of it.
The present-day inheritors of this tradition defer, if not wholly deny, all these satis-
factions. In place of the inevitable rolling rhythms or the single-mindedness of certain
previous narrators, the act of telling in some early twenty-first-century drama remains
marked by distrust. The speaker listens to himself or herself while talking and fails to
be transported, or even convinced. It’s as if the hesitant impulses survive their apparent
vanquishing, persistently tempting the storyteller to rescind his or her every offering,
an ambivalence that stimulates stronger interventions. Some fire up narrative engines
but fail to launch, or revise their trajectories midflight, or overwhelm their subject with
questions of method, the characters reluctant to stop self-correcting, unwilling to sur-
render to narrative momentum. Their stories are lapidary, or they double back before
 RUNNING LINES 505

leaping forward, or, at their most ascetic, they bore into a single spot. These latter nar-
rators address themselves to a small quadrant of experience so thoroughly, and with the
perfectionist’s inability to feel satisfied, that they never move beyond it. This is linear-
ity on a microscopic level. When telling does collapse outright, the stage opens onto a
spectacle of energetic self-inquiry and reflection. The protagonists, surrogates for their
creators, resist the urge to flee a scene unsusceptible to narrative blandishments. Instead
they stubbornly linger at the site of their frustration in the hope that new styles of rep-
resenting their subject—telling it—will present themselves. In the most severe condi-
tions—on stages that mimic a dispersed, centrifugal idea of social order—these artists
seize the vacant center and offer their own perspectives as focusing aids. Their goal is
to counter rather than merely concede the strength of an impersonal environment and
arbitrary history.
As we saw in Meredith Monk’s engagement with lines, textual surfaces, and gestures
of marking, this neonarrative turn is most striking in ostensibly nonnarrative theater.
Perhaps the most surprising moment in Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein on
the Beach (1976) is its concluding pivot away from images: “The day with its cares and
perplexities is ended and night is now upon us,” says the bus driver in the opera’s last
speech. “We have need of a soothing story to banish the disturbing thoughts of the
day . . . a familiar story” (Glass 1987, 78). A more recent generation of experimentalists
(as Paige McGinley and Elinor Fuchs have observed) is even more persistently seeking
a rapprochement with story.4 Not simply by telling one: plots, for them, are not enclo-
sures of action, invisible structures deferring to the attractions they contain. Instead, they
are attractions in their own right, separable from the rest of the production or, if absent,
eagerly pursued. The storytellers in these works invite us to think of narratives as objects
they manipulate, prizes they hope to win, ideal renderings or distillations of experience
against which they measure their own imperfect offerings. In The Method Gun, a 2009
production by the Austin-based company Rude Mechanicals, the characters (a group of
actors attempting to produce A Streetcar Named Desire without its four main characters)
interrupt their rehearsals to read aloud a plot summary of Williams’s play: only a synopsis
can provide the illusion of wholeness. In Whatever, Heaven Allows (2010), an enthusiasti-
cally vulgar riff by the New York–based company Radiohole on Douglas Sirk’s 1955 film
All That Heaven Allows, an actress narrates the movie’s climactic scene of Rock Hudson
falling from a cliff—the only time the production refrains from staging the atavistic drives
the Sirk film purposefully represses. A plot summary surfacing in this crude and chaotic
landscape emphasizes how hard any narrative must work to overcome incoherence.
Incoherence of another, less toxic kind is a productive threat in the work of Elevator
Repair Service. The New York company’s celebrated experiments with narrative—espe-
cially Gatz (2005–10), a six-hour theatricalized reading, read-aloud theatricalization of
the entirety of The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury: April Seventh, 1928 (2008),
a version of the first chapter of Faulkner’s novel—give pride of place to the texts them-
selves. Plots become props when the actors in both productions carry the paperbacks
onstage, reciting diegetic passages along with dialogue. Every audible “said Daisy” or
“Dilsey said” assures us that an organizing intelligence is monitoring the often hallucina-
tory events. The dog-eared, obviously much-read editions serve as anchors, their recited
506 MARC ROBINSON

narrative lines as guide-ropes, and the reading lamps and chairs as safe havens amid an
engulfing sea of sensations. When texts fail—as the paperback Great Gatsby once did
during a performance of Gatz, its pages coming loose from their binding—the actors
tape them back together, thereby reinforcing narrative’s own adhesive.5 In this, Elevator
Repair Service seems to take its cue from Fitzgerald’s and Faulkner’s own awareness of
a linear story’s reassurances. “If he could once return to a certain starting place and go
over it all slowly,” Fitzgerald famously observes of Gatsby’s sense of loss, “he could find
out what that thing was” (1992, 117). “How will they know it’s Dilsey, when it’s long forgot,
Dilsey,” Caddy asks her family’s cook, wondering about the permanence of identity. “It’ll
be in the Book, honey, Dilsey said. Writ out. . . . They’ll read it for me” (Faulkner 1954, 71).
For a vision of what life would be like without such a stabilizing plot, or the ability
to make one, one need only view a performance by Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the
New York–based company that begins much of its work with the idea that “everybody’s
so obsessed with stories” (as a character says in the company’s No Dice [2007]), then
asks, “but can you actually . . . tell [one]?” (Nature Theater of Oklahoma 2007, 32). In
Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet (2008), the company provides its clear-
est answer, as two characters struggle to recount—not enact—the plot of Shakespeare’s
play. (All their lines are taken verbatim from phone conversations with friends.) Their
summaries consist of misremembered fragments and wild surmises, interspersed
with (and often overwhelmed by) questions, admissions of incompetence, and attacks
of self-doubt—all followed, invariably, by shows of spectacular bravado. “Am I close
to it?” “So you want it from the beginning?” “I don’t remember the scenes at all.” “DO
YOU KNOW THE STORY?” “Uhhh” (Nature Theater of Oklahoma 2010, 75–113).
Taken together, these and other lines illustrate better than any intact narrative Romeo’s
self-diagnosis: “I know not how to tell thee who I am” (2: ii: 54).
Despite their stylistic differences, the creators of all these productions accommodate
other artists as shadow presences: Williams, Sirk, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Shakespeare
figure here as embodiments of narrative mastery, repositories of privileged knowledge
of stories. The characters onstage seek to crack their codes. As they do so, they prepare
us to recognize the same energies in other, playwright-generated work. In a number of
twenty-first-century plays, the writer approaches his or her plot (and the idea of plot)
as if some other, unreliable or insufficiently expressive playwright composed it—as if it
were fracturing or not quite coalescing on its own, beyond the writer’s control. Alienated
from their own texts, these playwrights invite their characters to meditate on the mak-
ing of them, and on narratology in general, until even the simplest dramatic actions
seem the uncertain result of strenuous, often treacherous effort.

A pair of defiant lines from two well-known, otherwise unrelated plays could serve as
captions for the narrative anxieties in much of this recent drama. “I won’t let you change
 RUNNING LINES 507

my story!” says Ivy in Tracy Letts’s August:  Osage County (2008, 134). The opposite
demand is heard in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, when Ouisa reflects on her
just-concluded misadventure with Paul: “I will not turn him into an anecdote!” (1990,
117). Insisting on story, resisting story: perhaps because both women know that their
desires are futile—and that, as a result, the intensity of experience is bound to fade—
they incite a fresh, compensatory drama in the fight for control over representation.
This is a conflict larger than those in typical narratives (their own, or those that others
want to foist upon them) and thus perhaps more lasting. The playwrights who elabo-
rate on these themes and stoke these same anxieties—Will Eno, Annie Baker, Wallace
Shawn, David Greenspan, and Tarell Alvin McCraney, among many others—share
a sober understanding of narrative intoxication.6 Beneath the wide variety of tones in
their work—desperation in Eno, drollery in Greenspan, sincerity working to defeat
cynicism in Baker, ruminative self-mockery in Shawn, and self-aware detachment in
some (but not all) McCraney—these writers seem to start from a common interrogatory
impulse. They ask how the primal instinct for telling has been able to survive a sophis-
ticated understanding of the tale’s inadequacy. Other questions pile up around stories
that failed to deliver or that delivered too simplistically. In them these writers hear a
challenge. They are drawn to the very moments of experience that less elastic narratives
can’t assimilate. They return to the recognitions other playwrights have voiced—about
the violence done to subtlety by linearity, about the narrator’s hubris or idealism—and
linger over them, reluctant to call the matter settled. They do concede that the most ded-
icated efforts to impose narrative order upon experience may never subdue the eruptive
instinct for disorder. And they honestly measure the magnetism of scenes that the nar-
rative mind wants to subordinate to sequence or hierarchy. But they find that episodes in
which characters openly grapple with such difficulty can clarify what’s at stake in all tell-
ing. The ever-present possibility of failure shows why narrative matters. As their plays’
storytellers find ways around obstacles to expression, or simply push against them stub-
bornly, they admit to desires that the spellbinding raconteur represses. They want not
merely to report experience but to wrest it from history and thus mark it with their sin-
gular ways of seeing. They track a tale to its end not to prove their conscientiousness but
to put to rest a tormenting obsession. They hope that, in an act of dedicated narration,
they can resist the contingency of theater (and of the world it represents) and briefly
enjoy the fiction writer’s sovereignty over space and exemption from time. They yearn to
step out of a scene of changeable doing into one shaped only by what’s done—and thus
know more.
“Is there a responsive person somewhere? Someone who could tell me a little story?”
(Eno 2008c, 103). The two questions posed by Frank, a TV news anchorman trying to
understand a natural disaster unfolding in Will Eno’s Tragedy: A Tragedy (2001), cap-
ture the simultaneous recognition of abandonment and yearning for consolation that
lie at the heart of much of this theater. The two questions also anticipate a formula that
Eno, best known for Thom Pain (based on nothing) (2004), has offered to describe his
ideal actor’s “relation to language”: “a good balance of fear and need . . . a kind of quaver-
ing, with authority” (Sola 2008, 40). The contradiction suggests how undeterred is Eno’s
508 MARC ROBINSON

faith in narration:  for him, meaningful, “authoritative” description remains possible

even in (or especially in) abjection. At first glance, such an achievement seems unlikely.
His characters, deposited in disorienting environments, usually can’t find their way
back to explanatory beginnings. “You know that old phrase—I used to . . . My first . . . ,”
says a woman in a collection of linked short plays, Oh, the Humanity and other good
intentions (2007), before she trails off in silent acknowledgment that she is no longer
capable of the historical thinking signified by such narrative shards (Eno 2008b, 22). She
and other Eno characters are equally unable to reach beyond their circumstances to a
panoramic conclusion, a place where they can enjoy the sense-making privilege of ret-
rospection. An onstage spectator in Middletown (2010), Eno’s most accomplished work
to date, articulates his fellow characters’ predicament and our own possible thinking at
this halfway point in the play: “since you don’t know the end, you’re not sure what you’re
in the middle of ” (Eno 2010, 38).
Maybe not, but in the absence of the wisdom available only from wholeness, Eno’s
characters probe those middles with a scientist’s commitment to molecular detail,
emerging to report—authoritatively—the stories embedded in separate phrases and
even in single words. A policeman in Middletown, one of the many archetypal char-
acters who populate this Wilderian play, concedes that the narrative habit endures—“I
guess we all have a story. . . . Once upon a time, and so on, The End” (17)—but he’s more
interested in redirecting these chronicling energies toward smaller spans of experi-
ence: “Forget about before and after. I mean now” (8). A Middletown doctor echoes this
fidelity to the present. Speaking to a patient preoccupied with birth and death, she says,
“Those are just two events. There’s a lot in between” (55). It doesn’t take much to hear an
admonition to narratologists overly preoccupied by Saidian beginnings and Kermodian
ends. For Eno, to be onstage is to be “in between,” which in turn is to be granted the
opportunity to practice an acute responsiveness to ever more discrete slices of expe-
rience—a sensitivity so fine it distinguishes separate sensations not only from one
another but also from the language used to denote them. “I’m bleeding,” says a reporter
in Tragedy: A Tragedy, and then quotes himself: “ ‘I’m bleeding’ ” (102). In doing so, he
marvels at what changes along the route from a lived event to its narrative record, from
sustaining an injury to acknowledging it—stanching it with a sentence. Eno leaves open
the question of whether any story, even a more elaborate one, is adequate to the task of
bridging the gulf between sensation and consciousness. Indeed, narrative gestures do
sometimes fall flat. One Middletown character enclosed by the narrative middle is also
stuck “in the thick of [a] word” (53). “You don’t have to make sentences,” the anchorman
in Tragedy tells a reporter. “You could just give us a list. Just some nouns” (104).
Yet even the most generous list wouldn’t satisfy the particular need addressed only
by sequence—and no matter how eclectic the list, or how strict the sanction on hier-
archy, the listener would still seek the hidden logic ordering it. A character in Oh, the
Humanity responds to this imperative when trying to describe an old photograph from
the Spanish-American War, its mysterious image like one of the unlinked nouns on
the reporter’s list. She is struck by “the precision regarding the actual moment” photo-
graphed, but she knows that if she is to fully appreciate it, she must tolerate the “confusion
regarding the context. Or, regarding the two moments on either side” (Eno 2008a, 43).
 RUNNING LINES 509

The value of the trade-off is ambiguous. In this world, one can acquire more comprehen-
sive, panoramic understanding of a situation—or, by extension, of an emotional tremor
or intellectual epiphany—but it will always result in diminished intensity of perception.
Here, in literal terms, one sacrifices the power of an image for the broader knowledge of
a story.
This double-bind goes a long way to explaining the peculiar affect of Eno’s characters.
They are often remote or distracted, wary or coolly quizzical. At other times they go to
the opposite extreme. Some are touchy or unnervingly intimate, or they erupt in unmo-
tivated violence. Such inscrutability should make us look elsewhere for the sources of
this theater’s pathos, which is in fact considerable. It springs not from any sentiment but
from the work of inquiry, as his characters chart the spasms and storms they suffer. One
finds characters experiencing a similar perplexity in the face of strong feeling—the same
difficulty naming and classifying it—in the work of Annie Baker. Her protagonists are
either impatient for a catharsis—as in Circle Mirror Transformation (2009), set in an act-
ing class—or they are ostensibly neutral, impatient for nothing, as in Aliens (2010), the
title inviting us to catalogue varieties of dislocation. In both plays, momentous experi-
ences and “meaningful” revelations fail to trigger purposeful actions. Instead, characters
assume less rehearsed, less habitual attitudes—and sound deeper depths of feeling—
when addressing themselves to a seemingly more superficial matter: the structure rather
than the content of their personal stories. Wary, perhaps, of self-indulgence (especially
when the setting is an acting class!), Baker pulls back to scrutinize styles of disclosure
and evasion, and she brings her characters with her. They are at their most vulnerable,
curiously, when the stories they tell are not their own, or when the stories lack any cor-
relative in lived experience. Catharsis, here, is a reward for narrative discipline, not mere
receptiveness. It is a feature of a mechanical, not a psychological, process:

Lauren: One.
Silence.
James: Two.
Silence.
Lauren: Three.
Silence.
Theresa: Four.
James: Five.
A long silence.
Schultz: Six.
Silence.
James: Seven.
Theresa: Eight.
Marty: Nine.
A very, very long silence.
Lauren: Ten. (Baker 2012b, 186–87)

A counting exercise in Circle Mirror Transformation, each character responsible for say-
ing a number spontaneously without stepping on someone else’s line, breaks down sev-
eral times before finally succeeding in this, one of the play’s last scenes. This barebones
510 MARC ROBINSON

sequence is the skeleton of every story—narrative stripped of distracting incident and

revealed as a line, a feat of continuity and coordination, attention sustained from one
compelling utterance to the next. The “story” is one of stamina and patience, of courtesy
toward one another. In this, Baker’s line of numbers resembles Meredith Monk’s line of
charcoal. It represents a narrative urge that can dilate one’s awareness, or bring one to
the edge of speechlessness, just as often as it can capture a subject.
No less important than the minimalist structure of this “story”—and just as bracing
a corrective to sentimentality—are the conditions of its telling. Here and throughout
her play, Baker insists that narrative be collaborative. In another acting exercise, the
participants independently compose a series of sentences, then coordinate their reci-
tation to make an episode. Several classes begin with students reciting one another’s
autobiographies in a fraudulent first-person. In some sessions, speakers rescue one
another’s broken or incomplete narratives, or they revise those that swerved off-course
into incoherence or offensiveness. These moments of crisis, when a story is about to be
fatally derailed, reveal more than any effortless disclosure. As silence spreads inexorably,
unbanked by speech—and sometimes runs to awkward, brutal lengths, as we saw in the
counting game—characters negotiate for the right to control the means of representa-
tion. They seek ownership of a story, or readjust after losing one they thought was theirs
alone. All these voiced and unvoiced dramas of authority and disenfranchisement stand
in for other narratives of power. “Maybe next week we’ll try to make it a little more like
a real story,” their teacher says after one undistinguished attempt at collaborative telling
(100). But Baker hopes we will look critically at definitions of “real.” Ordinary storytell-
ing must falter before repressed narratives and undervalued ideas of narrative authority
become available.
That equation is even more explicit in Aliens, “at least a third” of which, Baker writes,
“is silence”—a ratio befitting three characters unsure not only of what to say but what to
do as they pass the time in the backyard of a Vermont coffeeshop (Baker 2012a, 3). One
of the play’s idling protagonists, Jasper, is a would-be novelist, and his work-in-progress
aspires to the linear direction that his life seems to lack. In one scene, Jasper recites a long
passage from his draft, conveying neither virtuosity nor wholly laughable incompetence
but rather patient, undaunted expectation—the teller hoping that expository dedication
alone will bring about an experience of change. Ideally, this work-in-progress would be
a work of progress. That the recited passage describes a road trip up the California coast
confirms the desire for movement: the geographical line matches the narrative line, and
both hold out the possibility of continuity against the reality of an atomizing present.
In this play, as in Circle Mirror Transformation, Baker hides sources of readymade dra-
matic interest. We hear that Jasper killed himself between the play’s two acts, but such
a sensational development is compelling only for how it fails to interrupt the surviving
characters’ mundane work of assembling sequences of their own. They still hope that a
successful narrative will lead to revelation.
This play’s version of catharsis resides in sentences, words, and even letters, not in the
tales of suffering they often form. Jasper’s friend KJ describes his onetime passion for
mathematics, recalling how fascinated he was by such simple equations as “if P then Q”
 RUNNING LINES 511

(61). The momentum he imagines carrying a logician—or any reader—from one letter
to the next may remind spectators of Mr. Antrobus’s opposite project in The Skin of Our
Teeth: Wilder’s character feels triumphant when he “separated M from N” (1985, 125).
Is it too much to argue that the difference between Wilder’s and Baker’s visions of the
alphabet corresponds to the change in the theater culture from skepticism to renewed
faith in linearity? Later, KJ demonstrates how, as a five-year-old boy, he could overcome
his fear of sleep only by repeating a single word, “ladder,” while his tolerant mother held
his hand, both waiting for anxiety to drain away. In its uncomfortably long recitation in
performance, the block of 117 “ladders” that sits stolidly on Baker’s page becomes a mov-
ing line. Finally, the third character in Aliens, Evan, pursues his own “if, then” trajectory
when he belts out a famous Pete Seeger song as the play ends. “If I had a hammer, I’d
hammer in the morning,” he sings, cherishing the transformative possibilities of simple
sequence in geographical terms as well, as he imagines his song carrying “all over this
land” in imitative tribute, perhaps, to the line of travel in Jasper’s unfinished novel.
Of course, few of these chronicles get beyond their initial installments—the syllo-
gist’s “if,” the novelist’s first pages, the child’s repeated word, the itinerant’s trip envi-
sioned but never taken. But neither do they dampen their subjects’ enthusiasm for linear
form. Narrative may never permanently transport one beyond the anxieties or other
impedimenta of everyday life, but knowing that is no protection against a storyteller’s
seductiveness. This is one lesson of Wallace Shawn’s theater. Of his many languid but
nonetheless relentlessly inquisitive protagonists, none understands this more than “the
Memoirist,” Ben, who presides over Grasses of a Thousand Colors (2009). The fact that
he wears an elegant robe, pajamas, and slippers, as if pausing onstage on his way to bed,
yet begins by addressing us from behind a lectern suggests this simultaneous resigna-
tion and defiance in the face of narrative breakdown. The play may go to extremes of
graphic content and fantasy (among other things, it recounts the narrator’s affairs with
three women, and it renders the interspecies kinship in the famous Marie-Catherine
d’Aulnoy fairy tale “The White Cat” as a fourth, sexually violent union), but Shawn
ensures that the work of managing such material—telling it—remains in the forefront.
Literally so: in the Royal Court Theatre premiere, the lectern stayed onstage throughout,
forcing titillated or aghast spectators to block it out if they were to lose themselves in the
action. (In that production, Shawn further underscored the act of writing by playing the
role of Ben himself.)
The work of transforming overheated behavior into cool prose is, as Shawn renders
it, always taxing. Grasses of a Thousand Colors begins by surrendering to every writer’s
anxiety over beginnings: “What should I say, to start things off ?” Ben asks, promising
to read aloud from his memoir. After a few moments, he says, “I’ll just discard these
introductory remarks” and tosses a whole section of his manuscript—which is bound
in a book so huge it looks like something out of a fairy tale—into a nearby wastebasket
(Shawn 2009, 7–8). (The wastebasket is no less prominent than the lectern, the former
continually threatening to revoke the latter’s offerings.) Subsequent attempts to impose
written order on memory are self-conscious and tentative—“in the first chapters . . . I do
try to define myself a bit”; “I do a little tracing of some of the very simple pathways of
512 MARC ROBINSON

luck” (9–10)—but one always hears undertones of worry, like a rumbling doubt that
resolves into a definitive loss of faith before the first act ends. “I’m going to tell this in
a slightly different way,” he announces and then trashes the remainder of his draft (20).
The Memoirist’s line helps clarify how this and other recent plays differ from works
similarly marked by their creators’ distrust of plot. Here, the alternative to exhausted
narrative is more narrative. The “slightly different way” of telling that Ben chooses is
lavish with description and open about its enchantments. Writing turns out to be just
as erotically charged as the protagonist’s eyebrow-raising conduct—and often more
so. Indeed, the overtly X-rated parts of Grasses of a Thousand Colors quickly lose their
shock value. When the subject is sex, the plot turns aren’t merely routine but redun-
dant. In this memoir, a sexual encounter is never the climax to a narrative segment but
one of many identical, arbitrary events, all of which have the same minimal importance.
There’s nothing ultimate about these notably unecstatic unions; their dailiness is delib-
erate. They are unsusceptible to narrative’s hierarchies, its imposition of “dramatic”
meaning. So, too, with that other climactic event, death. It’s a nice joke that a prominent
figure in Ben’s story is a cat. Her nine lives foil a narrator’s desire for a definitive end to
his story. Blanche (as the cat is called) persuades the Memoirist that death is a “trivial
process”: she “had been through it a number of times, and it was literally nothing” (88).
In a play where sex is habitual and death is “nothing,” space opens up for another kind
of narrative drama. The Memoirist who cavalierly mentions his erections and orgasms
gives his most loving attention to unprepossessing phenomena: a face that “had the clar-
ity of water at dusk”; rain “falling fast through a thick carpet of pine needles”; the sound
of a button falling to the street (32–33). He is especially alluring when he traces the pat-
terns of everyday sociability, the trajectories of people moving toward or among one
another. In all these passages, Shawn fetishizes surfaces with sentences, maneuvers and
cajoles experience into paragraphs. He savors the protracted approach that precedes an
encounter with an object, place, or person. (The phrase “and then” recurs like a metro-
nome.) Reading these passages, one can imagine how irresistible was the temptation to
ornament nouns with adjectives and to recast events with metaphors—anything to delay
the disappearance of ephemera with slow telling. One may fail to do so, as one may fail
to meet any narrative challenge, but that in itself is revealing. When narrative is seen as a
variable event, not a given, it is prone to all the outcomes of individual action. The rela-
tionship, here, between writer and subject is just that—an ongoing engagement compli-
cated by the narrator’s desire and his subject’s receptiveness or resistance. (One might
imagine a similar drama unfolding between spectator and writer—the former hungry
for disclosures; the latter only partially granting them, or withholding them altogether.)
Narrative, Shawn implies, is never neutral—one can sense its alternating ardor and ten-
tativeness, and the continuous hope for a happy consummation in the telling. The play’s
many merely “scandalous” encounters pale in comparison.
Spectators who know the fairy tale Shawn consulted may bring to the play a memory
of this same ambition and enchantment. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (and John Ashbery,
who provides the elegant translation Shawn cites) tacitly encourage us to note the pace
of writing, the care taken to modulate the rhythm of incident, as we follow the narrator
 RUNNING LINES 513

down the many paths and passageways that striate the tale. In one typical sequence,
d’Aulnoy’s narrator is “guided by [a] light” to a castle gate, through a door behind which
“a dozen hands . . . floated in the air, each holding a torch,” across the threshold “in trepi-
dation,” through “a vestibule all encrusted with porphyry and lapis,” “pushed towards an
enormous gate of coral,” and down through sixty “chambers variously decorated . . . rich
with paintings and precious stones,” until finally, he is “led . . . into a salon” hung with
painted “histories of the most famous Cats” (d’Aulnoy 1994, 21–23). The appearance of
history painting at the end of his journey may prompt us to regard the long line he trav-
els as an image of the narrative line. As we read “The White Cat,” we, too, are always
conscious of surveying its world for the first time, feeling surprised by what we see, and
wondering what’s next—even at moments of intense pleasure in the present. The story’s
power over us is due in large part to sheer consecutiveness. We also remain aware that
we have put ourselves in the care of the describing voice, that we have consented to be
pulled, hospitably, down its paths of linked sentences. These are, of course, heightened
versions of experiences common to narrative fiction in general. Fairy tales affirm the
contract underpinning all reading, and this, more than any “magical” event, may have
drawn Shawn to the form. Indeed, he implies that the reader’s experience of engaged
surrender to a book has consequences even after one finishes reading it. In the dedica-
tion printed in the text of Grasses, Shawn remembers how particular “folk tales, fairy
tales, . . . myths, [and] conjurers’ tales” had the ability to “lead” him to his romantic part-
ner, to “send” him to friends and artistic colleagues (i). Enchanting narratives, it seems,
make things happen—things that we can’t do, or bring about, unaided—not just on the
page but also in life.
Shawn’s dedication closes with the playwright thanking his partner for rousing
him from a sort of perceptual slumber: “I would have slept through everything. If you
had just walked by.” As his first pajama-clad appearance makes clear, the pull of sleep
is ever-present in the play itself—as inexorable as the pull of narrative, and at least as
prominent as sex. We are always hearing of characters who were more catlike than
human in their circadian rhythms. They “snored loudly,” “fell back asleep,” “grew dizzy,”
“began to faint,” “blacked out,” went “to bed early,” “pretended to sleep,” lay “quite still,”
“drifted off,” and sat “in pajamas in bed . . . for hours at a time.” In the play’s last moments,
the Memoirist recalls feeling the “sun on [his] face” and “desperately want[ing] to . . . curl
up pleasantly in a comfortable position” (88)—a sequel to an episode described by the
fictional Count D’Aurore, author of his memoir’s epigraph, which Ben quotes at the start
of the play: “When I finally awakened after a long, long sleep . . . I looked across the vast
expanse of the plain on which I lay, and it seemed that I could see grasses of a thou-
sand colors” (8). In the interval between the opening image of waking up and the clos-
ing scene of falling back asleep—an interval comprised of Shawn’s play, wedged in the
theater between lights up and lights out—Ben wages a constant struggle against uncon-
sciousness, against the dulling of the senses upon which his status as observant memoir-
ist depends. By implication, so do we. In a play about attention, the writer-protagonist
mirrors his readers and spectators. Indeed, the play establishes the link in Ben himself.
For all his avowed duties as narrator, he is also a reader—a reader-aloud—of his own
514 MARC ROBINSON

work: one who acts reading. That comically oversized book he pages through at the lec-
tern ensures that he will have to shoulder the burden of the text along with us. The sub-
versiveness of Grasses of a Thousand Colors ultimately has more to do with this subtle
and seemingly innocuous shift in focus than with bestiality or unchecked obscenity. The
vulgar sensation seeker onstage is us.
The disruption to our expectations in this shift reminds us that Shawn’s frequent sub-
ject, here and in other plays, has been surprise—an experience that has value beyond
that of mere variety or pleasurable stimulation. For Shawn, it guarantees readiness, a
sudden intensification of awareness with moral and ethical applications. This kind of
surprise is supple. It doesn’t upset patterns of perception and thought only to insist on
others. Instead, it prolongs the state of heightened attentiveness before judgment—a
kind of aroused anticipation and open-minded inquiry that greets the emergence of cer-
tainty as a let-down. In the last moments of Grasses of a Thousand Colors, the Memoirist
tells us that a friend of the White Cat presented him with a “cute little red notebook” that
contained his biography, and as the Memoirist read it he discovered that “all my guesses
about everything having to do with my own life had fallen so comically far from the
mark. I’d been wrong about people, about why things had happened, even about facts
that had seemed completely indisputable” (86). As we’ve seen in other writers’ plays,
failure can be salutary, if it precedes a reawakening of a self sedated by habit, a renewal of
energy—a return to the desk. His attempts at memoir collapse definitively—happily—in
the face of this rival text; one might even say his own identity as Memoirist begins to
dissolve.
In their place appears an idea of narrative delicately balanced between what can be
told and what can’t—equidistant between lectern and wastebasket, or between wakeful-
ness and sleep. Shawn places his ideal spectators in a similar space—on the border, vis-
ible in these closing moments of his production, between the illumination of the stage
and the imminent blackout. His readers, too, are between mastery and doubt. If Ben’s
memoir is wrong, who’s to say the “little red notebook” is any more reliable; and if they’re
in danger of being discredited, then why wouldn’t the script we hold be just as vulner-
able? After all, the play occupies inherently unstable ground—between autobiography
and fairy tale, and between prose and drama. We’re always reminded, as we consider
these shifting relationships between genre and subject, that there are other ways to tell
the same story.

“I was trying to get it right, trying to tell the story clearly,” David Greenspan once said,
explaining the ambition behind his early Steinian and autobiographical plays (2012c,
265). Tarell Alvin McCraney, an otherwise dissimilar writer (more Garcia Lorca
than Gertrude Stein), implicitly admits to the same desire in Marcus; Or the Secret of
Sweet, one of his three Brother/Sister Plays (2009). Marcus is speaking of his late father
 RUNNING LINES 515

Elegba’s true sexuality, a subject no one in the family openly discusses. “All I got are
these Dreams and Memories. The Dream of a man who / I think . . . well I know . . . but
how to tell that part?” (McCraney 2010, 350). McCraney’s question and Greenspan’s
confession echo throughout their works, and together these two playwrights make
explicit a recognition toward which all neonarrative drama has been leaning. A play’s
story may end as the curtain falls, but the story of storytelling does not. Questions of
“how to tell” resist every answer. Speakers “trying to tell” are dissatisfied with every
solution.
The persistence of this dissatisfaction in Greenspan and McCraney may account
for their emphatic formal choices. They favor the epic and the series, the tour de force
one-man show and the multigenerational saga, the baroque spectacle and the meta-
theatrical essay—all structures that betray an appetite for narratives that overflow
“properly” proportioned forms. Greenspan subtitles The Myopia (2010) “an epic bur-
lesque of tragic proportion.” (It is “performed as a solo—in the ‘story-telling’ tradition”
[Greenspan 2012d,  218].) The three interlocking full-length works that compose The
Brother/Sister Plays aim to synthesize Yoruban mythology (its gods provide McCraney’s
character names) with family drama and a coming-of-age story. Yet the sense one gets
that these playwrights have purposefully (and fruitfully) welcomed a crisis over expres-
sive means derives from more than just their plays’ hybrid styles and structures. Even in
smaller Greenspan works, or in single plays from McCraney’s trilogy, the authors expose
themselves at their most avid—figures determined to account for everything that tran-
spires in their fictive world, letting nothing be tacit or given—so as not to have to regret,
with the character Passalus from Greenspan’s Go Back to Where You Are (2011a), the
“many days not transcribed” (39).
Fullness, as Passalus implies, isn’t defined by the number of things the writers depict
but rather by their scrupulousness. The Myopia and The Brother/Sister Plays are rich in
diegetic speech, actors speaking for the playwrights as they supplement the dialogue
with descriptions of blocking, style, landscape, unstaged events, and character moti-
vation. (In the first productions of Greenspan’s work, the main actor often is the play-
wright.) In these audible stage directions, McCraney and Greenspan situate rather than
merely accommodate characters on their stages. They cue the speeches and give line
readings rather than let conversations unfold with deceptive spontaneity. They aim
to influence our own interpretations rather than allowing us to think for ourselves.
McCraney’s actors often simply tell us what their characters are simultaneously doing,
as if they doubt we’d notice these things on our own or assign them the right amount of
importance. “Nia hums,” says the actress playing Nia, and then an actual stage direc-
tion tells us “Nia hums” (95). “Oya interrupting,” Oya says, interrupting (92). When
Ogun Size tells us “Ogun Size leaves his heart behind,” we’re left in no doubt about the
manner of his exit (116). One may hear these lines as mere accessories to the story, as
cushions, platforms, or amplifiers for plot-advancing speech. Yet the persistence with
which McCraney notes a speaker’s temperament or motive (some not obvious from the
dialogue) also suggests a statement of principles. It’s as if the playwright objects to the
suppression of speech about some matters (not just Elegba’s secret, but those of several
516 MARC ROBINSON

others struggling to accommodate their own taboo desires) by insisting on full disclo-
sure about all behavior.
Greenspan is less psychologically inclined but equally fastidious. “The chair is directed
upstage right at an angle of (say) 45 degrees, facing an open window, blind down,” says
the character in The Myopia known as the Raconteur. “Now and again, a faint breeze
rocks the blind. Light cuts in at the edges of the blind—more so as the blind is rocked”
(221). We don’t see any of these things in this, the play’s first scene—the Raconteur is
the play’s only character; the stage is (and will remain) empty save for a chair—but then
we don’t need to. Narration here arrests our attention and allows it no relief. The plot of
The Myopia is often outrageous, full of reckless, corrupt, or priapic characters (includ-
ing Warren G.  Harding, Carol Channing, a giantess, and a talking eyeball), but the
Raconteur, impersonating them all, is unhurried and equable, faithful to the imagined
scene. He recites his stage directions with an earnest, at times emphatic, conscientious-
ness we rarely have allowed ourselves to notice in conventional examples of the form.
As a result, he achieves a degree of immediacy—“something actually happening,” as he
himself calls it—unavailable from mere stage pictures, imitative actions, or embodied
stories. “Telling is the essence of what happens,” another character says, in a conscious
nod to Stein and one of the play’s frequent digressions on its own methods (245).
Characters in McCraney’s and Greenspan’s theater help sustain this idea of action
by voicing an ongoing series of prompts, making audible the unrelieved pressure upon
the writers to translate perception into narration. “Tell me a story,” says a character
in Go Back to Where You Are. “Tell me this story,” he says moments later, “but tell it
differently.” And later still: “Keep going” (35–36). Others echo him in other contexts,
to other storytellers. “What happens in this piece?” asks a self-reflexive character in
The HOME Show Pieces (1988), and she then says to her partner, “Why don’t you tell
them?” (Greenspan 2012b, 42). “She told you?” a man says in 2 Samuel 11, Etc. (1989)
(Greenspan 1990b, 2–15). “Let me / tell you,” says a speaker in Jack (1987), cuing his
own story (Greenspan 1990a, 146). The characters in The Brother/Sister Plays are just
as importunate. Here, too, the verb “tell” recurs frequently, its every appearance an
attempt to puncture decorum and unseal a range of thoughts subject to shame or mere
self-consciousness. “Tell me, I love women’s secrets!” says a family gossip (84). “They
will tell you all / the news you wanna know,” says Oya as she tries, halfheartedly, to
rebuff an alarmingly seductive suitor (83). “You tell me something,” that man says to
her, undeterred, in a later scene (91). “I’m supposed to be telling!” says another woman,
declaring her rights before exercising them (95). Many of these same characters are also
attentive to moments when they are reluctant to tell. “Nothing more to say,” says one
man. “Weary of saying,” says another (228).
In these moments of stalled speech, when McCraney’s narrators have exhausted
all their resources, and even in those when Greenspan’s characters urge a storyteller
to “keep going,” the appearance of mastery cracks. The omnivorous and omniscient
diegetic speakers cannot account for everything; there’s always more they could
describe. They are exposed in their ardor, made vulnerable by their openness to other
people’s histories. Greenspan’s protagonists are particularly industrious in the face
 RUNNING LINES 517

of a chronic narrative breakdown. A story often peters out before it even gets under
way, as the playwright stages his own version of the uncertainty about beginnings
that Edward Said theorized and that Wallace Shawn theatricalized. “This was the
beginning,” says one speaker in Jack, but another interjects: “No; wait . . . this was not
the / what (?)” (140). The hesitation hasn’t matured into confidence many years and
many plays later. “Is what I imagine a story or a play? Is it meant to be spoken or
meant to be read?” says the sole speaker in Jonas (Greenspan 2011b, 3). “I get a bit
nervous at the beginning of a play. It’s hard to know where to begin. . . . I guess I just
want to get things off on the right foot” (4). Thus admits Bernard in Go Back to Where
You Are, his name perhaps reminding us of the Bernard in The Waves who complains
how “tired” he is of stories, even as he concedes he “must tell” one. In Greenspan’s
play, another character comes to the rescue, adapting the first line of Three Sisters—
“Father died a year ago today”—for use by a group of friends gathered for a tense
summer weekend on Long Island: “Mark died a year ago today” (4). Perhaps only a
playwright who himself elegantly avoided predictable storytelling can help Bernard
(and Greenspan) shake off the anxiety of what another character calls “looking for a
form” (35).
As the Chekhov allusion suggests, Greenspan’s protagonists, often surrogates for
the playwright, come to life amid the fracturing of wholes. That fracturing is both
thematic (a family sundered by death or dissension) and formal (a family story resis-
tant to telling). Greenspan’s characters don’t greet such disarray as a worldly modern-
ist might—assenting to or tolerating it. Instead they optimistically pursue linearity in
their roles as “rhapsodes” (as Greenspan calls himself) and refuse to cede authority
to centrifugal force. The moral of such a scenario is easily detected. When a character
in Greenspan’s She Stoops to Comedy (2003), finding herself in a sexually fraught situ-
ation, says, “state concisely the successive events” (and when another speaker stresses
their plot’s similarity to one by Isaac Bashevis Singer) 187; or when a character in
2 Samuel 11, Etc. says, “I’ve got to find a way to get this down on paper” as he listens
to an elaborate pornographic fantasy; or when two figures in one of his earliest, most
Steinian plays, Principia (1987), note that “the script has certainly changed . . . it’s
become . . . increasingly narrative,” (29) they are all siding with order over disorder,
rationality over randomness, the argument (the title of another Greenspan play) over
the outburst. Even those who get lost on “Exposition Boulevard,” as the characters
in Dead Mother (1991) do, agree to “pretend the plot works fine” (Greenspan 2012a,
132). “They start here, they go there,” Claire says in Go Back to Where You Are, speak-
ing of Bernard’s plays. “You practically need a map to follow them” (21). But if we
take the hint and apply this judgment to Greenspan’s own work, we risk overlooking
their central action. The very desire to draw that map—as simply as possible without
violating the complexity of his characters’ affective lives—traces the boldest trajec-
tory in his work. The fact that such a desire is unfulfilled ensures its vibrancy: it keeps
going. “The play, how it’s proceeding,” Bernard says after someone asks him what
he’s thinking about (32): “how it’s proceeding,” not “what it’s about”—moving, not
meaning or persuading, not even showing and telling. By limiting his obsession to
518 MARC ROBINSON

kinetics—the line he draws in the “thinking” about his play—he’s able at least to keep
pace with histories that will always be too vast for drama.
McCraney is also sensitive to the compensatory services of narration. Some characters
in The Brother/Sister Plays narrate their way through anticipation as a way to bear it, as
when Oya says, “Shun and Nia enter to give me more bad news” (118). They describe the
signs of devastation or confusion in order to organize what would otherwise overwhelm
them. “Oya takes a breath,” Oya says, buying time before she must speak to the man who
just said, “I adore you” (46). Other characters narrate an episode after it’s over, reexpe-
riencing its pleasures or revising its pattern, or acquiring insight about an event denied
them in the living of it. In The Brothers Size, the second of The Brother/Sister Plays, Ogun
describes events we may have already seen in the first, In the Red and Brown Water, as if
a plot, in this world, doesn’t count until it is recounted. Narration also allows characters
to manufacture and then relish intimacy, or to rebuff it, or simply to slow its inevitable
dissolution. In all cases, they seize power over situations that could easily render them
passive. In chronicling the history of their emotions, they invoke rather than merely feel
them; another kind of play would render the same emotions as natural, an inherent and
thus unalterable part of identity. More important, these scenes of self-narrating do away
with the privacy of feeling, along with its mystifications and sentimentality. Even reces-
sive characters gain public stature. Indeed, in the most telling scenes of narration, actors
share responsibility for historicizing and annotating an individual’s private experience,
linking themselves to one another as they link episodes in a story.
There’s nothing oracular in even the most panoramic of these chronicles, noth-
ing smug in even the most self-possessed oral diarists. Rather, McCraney invites us to
imagine the tenacity that a commanding narrative requires. Every utterance must pass
through an atmosphere dense with inhibition. Audible thought contends with stifling
propriety, denial, and all their gradations of squeamishness, prudishness, guilt, and fear.
“Elegba offers his hand to Oshoosi,” Elegba says, pacing his confrontation with sexual
anxiety, and Oshoosi says, “Oshoosi takes it” (159). By captioning their unauthorized
behavior, they briefly step out of it, describing away the threat of shame. But for every
scene in which a brave narrative voice moves in to rationalize instinct or fill what would
be a terrifyingly unremarked blankness, there are others where both dialogue and dieg-
esis fall back, vanquished. At these moments, McCraney tests the legibility of neonarra-
tive drama in general. It’s not just narrative competence that proves doubtful for these
speakers. Orality itself degrades, leaving them mercilessly exposed. McCraney brings
his characters to a point beyond Greenspan’s still optimistic “trying to get it right” and
beyond Shawn’s measured plan to “tell it a slightly different way.” They are stripped of
the broken eloquence of those Eno characters signaling from the “thick of a word” or
middle of a list of nouns. They can’t match the strength of Baker’s characters holding on
to a single letter or number.
A beautifully modulated scene near the end of The Brothers Size illustrates how keenly
McCraney understands each stage on the descent from a mutually anchoring conversa-
tion through self-questioning solitude to, finally, an alienation from both self and oth-
ers, and from both speech and muteness—this last state a radical suspension on a stage
 RUNNING LINES 519

unsettled by any of the narrative forms useful in other crises. The night before the two
title characters part ways for good, Ogun says, “Okay man . . . Good night,” to Oshoosi,
then narrates his own status: “Ogun Size stands alone in the night. / Staring.” (234–35).
He idles in a space marked on McCraney’s page by neither transitive nor intransitive
speech. Six character prefixes—“Ogun Size”—are followed by six blank lines (the format
is an homage, perhaps, to Suzan-Lori Parks’s famous “spells”). Both writers imply that,
in certain scenes, characters seize rather than surrender to silence: an absence becomes
a presence, a malleable substance, something to deploy. McCraney’s dense silence will
also recall the prominent lacunae in Annie Baker’s plays—moments in which characters
tune in to frequencies below the level of conversation. Yet for all McCraney’s skill in
managing these instances of strong abstention or purposeful waiting, he also attempts
a riskier experiment: one that puts himself, not just his characters, in the position of
expressive inadequacy. The eruption of a “spell,” here, signifies a writer’s impasse as
much as a speaker’s hiatus. Here, McCraney seems to run right up against the limits of
telling. Positioned on the imperceptible border between a character prefix and the adja-
cent white space, the former his cue to mark the latter, he teeters on the edge of narrative
security.
The Brother/Sister Plays is everywhere surviving the hazards of its own writing, of
writing so close to not-writing. The playwright seems always to be relieved at finally
breaking through his suffocating resistance to expression. That’s one way to read the
“Ah!” (a “sharp breath out”) with which Oya opens and closes In the Red and Brown
Water—the exhalation standing in, perhaps, for the expression that comes at last after
holding back—holding one’s breath—too long. Ogun Size has an even more obvious
impediment to narration: he stammers. “What you want to say . . . halts up,” says a sym-
pathetic friend. “The words get stuck in your chest”; they’re “half-out words” (31–32).
If we pause over the visual and kinetic analogue of those phrases—words as moving
things—narration becomes a fully gestural, choreographic spectacle in its own right, not
just the caption to one. Words enter the space just as actors do, even if they only make it
“half-out.” The intimate relation, envisioned here, between bodies and texts lends added
significance to a passing reference to one notably garrulous character as “Mouth” and,
especially, to the shocking conclusion to In the Red and Brown Water, in which Oya cuts
off an ear as a sacrificial offering to a onetime lover. She means only to give him an object
for his continued touch, but to us her gesture may also imply the end of listening.
The trilogy as a whole resists its ending, and in this McCraney makes his strongest
protest against the idealization of narrative. He also offers a definitive correction to easy
assumptions about neonarrative drama. Up to its final scenes, telling has seemed the
surest route to knowledge: if one could just say what has long gone without saying—the
true sexual narrative of this family—then one would not be subjugated by it. But now,
at the very moment one expects to profit from that lesson, McCraney retreats. Marcus’s
last line before a brief epilogue is “Or remembered a . . .”—the verb a familiar prompt to
narrative, here instigating only a tongue-tied ellipsis. In the argument with himself that
it contains, McCraney can be imagined moving from the compulsion to speak to the
conviction that no text will do justice to his subject. Stories reassert their separateness
520 MARC ROBINSON

from acts of storytelling here. Only thus can they survive uncorrupted by both telling
and listening. It could be McCraney counseling himself when, a scene earlier, Marcus
admits, “You can’t just wake up one morning / A Dream on your mind, [and] spend that
day . . . running round / Telling everybody bout it” (349). That’s a writer’s desire and a
writer’s error. Marcus “running” and Marcus “telling” both respond to the appeal of con-
tinuity, of the line. But as McCraney traces his most expressive images of persistence—
an ellipsis, a prolonged stammer, a bending into silence in the futile hope of reaching a
word—he suggests that one can unearth an even more valuable trove of knowledge by
staying put.

Notes
1. Miller (1992), 6–7. The historian John Demos associates modernity with “the rise of
linearity” (and the decline of the circular patterns associated with earlier eras), even as
he acknowledges that “the life-lines we are following [in modernity] were never entirely
straight.” “The point is that somehow, in the end, they did add up. . .did follow a ‘course,’
however ragged its specific parts.” (2004), 67, 71.
2. Those who remember Laurence Sterne’s drawings of six plotlines from Tristram Shandy—
literal lines full of dips, bumps, curlicues, and jagged peaks—may see a kindred image in
Hamilton’s own drawing. See Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman (1759–67) (New York: Random House, 2004), 377–78.
3. European precedents also exist for the narrating character’s challenge to stable categories
of dramatic action. Julie Stone Peters has chronicled the anguish among Renaissance genre
theorists when faced with plays that “overlay . . . ‘telling’ on what should be showing.” These
works were regarded by many as “misshapen hybrids, amphibians belonging neither on
stage or off.” See Peters’s Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in
Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 166. And Martin Puchner has identified
“a large class of diegetic characters populating the modern stage”—“characters who
become their own observers” and “interrupt” “mimetic space” with narration. See Stage
Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2002), 27.
4. Elinor Fuchs discusses how several contemporary American theater artists resist
Hans-Thies Lehmann’s elegy for the “fictive cosmos” in his Postdramatic Theatre (London:
Routledge, 2006; originally published in German in 1999); her examples include Elevator
Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, among others. See Fuchs, “Postdramatic
Theatre and the Persistence of the ‘Fictive Cosmos’: A View from America,” unpublished
paper delivered at “Dramatic and Postdramatic Theater:  Ten Years After” conference,
University of the Arts, Belgrade, September 2009. Paige McGinley surveys an even newer
generation of theater companies for whom “storytelling is back in” in “Next Up Downtown”
in TDR: The Drama Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 11–38.
5. See Richard Maxwell, “Scott Shepherd” (interview), Bomb, no.  116 (Summer 2011):  58.
Shepherd notes that the pages were inadvertently rebound in the wrong order.
6. A generative predecessor of many of these writers is Spalding Gray (1941–2004), whose
solo performances encouraged spectators to follow both a story and the sometimes
fraught process of telling it. Many of those monologues concerned his attempts to tell the
 RUNNING LINES 521

same stories on other occasions, to perform other playwrights’ narratives, to survive the
exhausting experience of writing fiction, and to fit a sprawling life into the concise and
legible form of biography. “I think it all began,” he says at the start of one such monologue,
Gray’s Anatomy, “when I  was doing a storytelling workshop in upstate New  York.”
(New York: Vintage, 1993, 3) This life begins at the birth of a narrative..

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Baker, Annie. 2012a. Aliens (2010). In The Vermont Plays. New  York:  Theatre
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———. 2008b. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rain. In Oh the Humanity and other good intentions.
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———. 2010. Middletown. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
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Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1992. The Great Gatsby. New York: Collier. (Originally published in 1925).
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Greenspan, David. 1987. Principia. Unpublished manuscript.
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———. 2011a. Go Back to Where You Are. Unpublished manuscript.
———. 2011b. Jonas. Unpublished manuscript.
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———. 2012c. Interview with David Greenspan. In The Myopia and Other Plays, edited by Marc
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———. 2012d. The Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportion. In The Myopia and Other Plays,
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 Index
2 Samuel 11, Etc. (Greenspan), 516–517
4 Scenes in a Harsh Life (Athey), 364–365
10–20-30 theatre circuit, 159, 163–168
12–1-A (Yamauchi), 497
27 Wagons Full of Cotton (Williams), 347
50/50 in 2020 (feminist drama initiative),
425, 435
1600 Transylvania Avenue, 411
1931- (Sifton and Sifton), 286
Abbey Players, 239
Abbott, George, 184, 295
Abingdon Square (Fornés), 429–430
Abolition Day (July 5), 85
abolitionism
in antebellum American culture, 132–133
in antebellum American theatre, 6, 68, 79,
94, 121
About Face Theatre (Chicago), 461
abstract expressionism, 358
absurd, theatre of the, 261, 347, 351, 473–474
Abundance (Henley), 432–433
Accelerated Grimace (Valgemae), 272–273
Actors’ Equity Association, 345
Actresses’ Franchise League, 210–211
Adams, Abigail, 34
Adams, John Quincy, 100
Adamson, Eve, 353
The Adding Machine (Rice), 14, 271–273,
285, 442
Addison, Joseph, 19, 28, 33
Adonis, 193
Adrift: a Temperance Drama in Three Acts, 138
The Adulateur (Warren), 34–35
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
(television show), 477
Aeschylus, 181, 471
Afghanistan War, theatre in opposition to,
13, 420
African American drama. See also African
American dramatic characters
African American identity formation and,
219, 227–232, 375, 378–381, 383, 386, 449
antebellum period and, 8, 218–228, 230
anti-lynching themes in, 309, 312, 412
ballad opera and, 226
at black colleges and universities (HCBUS),
11, 307, 309–310, 314–315, 318
black community theatres and, 389
blackface minstrelsy and, 8, 220, 223–224,
226, 228, 230, 307
Black Theatre Movement and, 380–383
on Broadway, 313–314, 377–379, 383, 385
civil rights movement and, 380, 412–413,
460
class and capitalism themes in, 377, 381
experimentalism in, 12, 219–220
family themes in, 12, 312, 375–381,
383–389, 487
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and, 10,
302–305, 315–317, 376
feminist themes in, 383–384, 428–429, 432,
434–435, 438, 448–449
folk plays and, 310–312
Great Depression themes in, 376–377, 386
in Harlem, 308, 311–314, 319, 378, 380,
382–383, 413, 478
history and memory themes in, 381,
385–388
insurrection themes in, 220–222, 230–231,
315
integrationist politics and, 378–380
LGBT characters and themes in, 389,
460–461, 466–467
literary competitions and, 310–311
Little Negro Theatre Movement and, 10,
309, 312–314
524 INDEX
African American drama (Cont.)
masculinity themes and, 378–380, 383
melodrama and, 223, 227
moral mission of, 227
musical drama and, 224–226, 228–229
Native American characters and themes
in, 221
“Native drama” and, 309–311
New Negro drama and, 282–283
Off Broadway and, 320, 382
“postblack” drama and, 12, 388–389
in post-World War II period, 375–389
protest drama and, 13, 382, 412–413
race or propaganda plays and, 310–312, 375
racial prejudice themes and discrimination
in, 376–381, 385, 412, 487
segregation and, 10–11, 318
self-satire and, 12, 384–385
slavery and emancipation themes in,
222–224, 227–230, 312, 385, 387
whiteface actors and, 382
women’s contributions to, 307–309,
311–312, 316, 383–384
African American dramatic characters. See
also African American drama; blackface
minstrelsy
in American Revolutionary era, 39
in early republican era drama (1789–1820),
56, 61–62, 64
African Theatre (New York), 8, 308
Aftermath (Burrill), 312
“After the Ball,” 194
After the Fall (Miller), 329–330
Age of Arousal (Griffiths), 213–214
agit-prop (agitational-propaganda theatre),
287, 408, 413, 474, 477
Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto, 466
Ah, Wilderness! (O’Neill), 255, 261
AIDS, dramatic responses to, 360, 419,
463–465, 473, 477
The AIDS Show, 419
Aiken, George L., Uncle Tom’s Cabin theatrical
adaptation by, 79, 88–91, 130, 139–140,
223
Ain’t Misbehavin’, 201
Albee, Edward
absurdism and, 351
decline in popularity of, 352
experimentalism of, 347, 350
homosexuality of, 459
homosexuality themes and, 459
narrative technique and, 504
Alcott, Louisa May, 134, 146
Alexander, William (Lord Stirling), 38
Alfaro, Luis, 466
Aliens (Annie Baker), 509–511
Alladeen (Builder’s Association production),
452–453
Allegro, 201
Allen, Claudia, 465
Allen, Ethan, 39–40
All God’s Chillun Got Wings (O’Neill), 246, 253
Allison, Hughes, 304, 316
All My Sons (Miller)
and Born Yesterday, 324
capitalism themes in, 444
emphasis on common good and, 292–293
Joe Keller character in, 324, 326–327, 334,
337, 444
technology theme in, 444
All That Heaven Allows, 505
Altorf (Wright), 58
The American Claimant (Howells and Twain),
177
American Communist Party, 303, 475
The American Company
Douglass and, 4, 21, 24–30
early republican era productions of, 47,
56, 61
establishment of, 4, 24
positive reviews of, 26
Revolutionary Era politics and, 25, 28–30,
34, 45
touring by, 25
Warren and, 34–35
An American Daughter (Wasserstein), 437
An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 486
American Landscape (Irwin Shaw), 291
American Legion, 327
American Negro Theatre (ANT), 10, 305,
318–320, 428
American Revolutionary era (1765–1789)
African American dramatic characters in,
39

amateur theatricals during, 44–45
battles of, 37–42, 62, 104
British loyalism during, 36–38, 43–44
British theatrical influences during, 33–39,
45–47
comedic theatre during, 41–44
Committees of Safety during, 42–43
Congressional ban on plays during, 32
Continental Congress and, 28–30, 32, 43
“local color” in theatrical production
during, 43
military theatre during, 44
national unity themes in, 45
Native American dramatic characters in, 39
propaganda plays during, 4, 32–36
republican dramatic themes during, 47
satirical dialogues and, 36–38
tragic theatre during, 38–41
university theatre during, 32–33, 41–42, 44
American Temperance Society (ATS), 135
American Temperance Union (ATU),
135–136
The America Play (Parks), 387
Amerindians. See Native Americans
Ames, A.D., 138
And Baby Makes Seven (Vogel), 465
Anderson, Garland, 313
Anderson, Ida, 308
Anderson, Lisa, 434
Anderson, Maxwell, 284, 289–290, 292
Anderson, Robert, 458
André (Dunlap), 55, 99
Andreach, Robert, 264
André Charlot’s Revue, 197
Andrews, Regina, 310, 312–313
And the Soul Shall Dance (Yamauchi), 496
Angela’s Mixtape (Elisa Davis), 438–439
Angelos, Moe, 436
Angels in America (Kushner), 14, 419, 452,
465–466, 477
Anita Bush Players, 308
Anna Christie (O’Neill), 185, 251–252, 261
Anna Lucasta (Yordan), 319
Annapolis (Maryland), 21, 24–26
Annie Get Your Gun, 201, 323
Annie Sprinkle, 12, 362–363
antebellum era drama (1820–1860). See also
blackface minstrelsy
INDEX 525
abolitionist themes in, 6, 68, 79, 94, 121
adaptation and, 133–134
African American characters in, 126
African American drama and, 8, 218–228,
230
classical antiquity elements in, 68, 71–76
comedy in, 126–127
economic challenges facing, 69, 77
ethnic characters and themes in, 6, 68–69,
97–98, 100–110
frontier themes and, 6, 149–153, 157
German (“Dutchman”) characters and
themes in, 109
historical versus romantic dramatic settings
in, 127–128
Irish characters and themes in, 5, 101,
105–106, 108, 166
Jewish characters and themes in, 5,
103–105, 111nn2–3
melodrama and, 5, 67–72, 75, 78–79, 115,
122–124, 130–131
music in, 3
Native American characters and themes in,
5–6, 68, 78, 101–103, 119, 126, 149–153,
157, 221, 230–232
patriotic themes in, 70–73, 104
reform themes in, 6, 130–134, 138–146
Second Party System and, 70, 77–79,
106–107
Shakespearean productions and, 76
slavery and, 73–76, 79, 120–121, 218, 471
temperance themes in, 6, 68–69, 78–79,
130–131, 138–146
theatre expansion and, 100, 115
tragedy and, 123–125
urban themes in, 6, 68, 133, 149, 153–157
women playwrights and, 5–6, 114–128
women’s powerlessness themes in, 6,
121–124
women’s power themes in, 124–127
Yankee characters and, 77–78, 94, 101,
107–108, 138–139, 142, 150
Antenna Theatre, 358
anti-Communism
Great Depression era and, 11, 295–298,
304–305, 318
McCarthy era and, 11, 318, 330, 344, 350
Antigone (Brecht/Holderlin), 409
526 INDEX
The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs
for Anti-Slavery Meetings, 223
anti-theatricality, 46
Antoine, André, 268–269
The Anxiety of Influence (Bloom), 181
Anything Goes (Porter), 199
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 495
Appearances (Garland Anderson), 313
Appiah, Kwame, 98
The Apple (Bensusan), 211
Approaching Simone (Terry), 418, 431
Apstein, Theodore, 486
Arau, Sergio, 381–382
Archbishop’s Ceiling (Miller)
Adrian character in, 334–335
American versus European contrast in, 334
Marcus character in, 331–336
Maya character in, 331–335
Sigmund character in, 331–336
surveillance themes and elements in, 328,
331–336
Archer, Osceola, 319
Archer, William, 174
Arch Street Theatre (Philadelphia), 102, 104,
119
The Arena (magazine), 177, 180
Arent, Arthur, 301–302
Aria da Capo (Millay), 9, 238, 242, 283–284
Ariadne’s Thread (J. Hillis Miller), 502
Aristocracy, A Musical Drama in Three Acts
(Hopkins), 225
Armand; or, The Peer and the Peasant
(Mowatt), 117, 126–127
The Armory Show, 275
Arnold, Benedict, 52
Arns, Inke, 422
Around the World in Eighty Days (musical),
191
Arrizón, Alicia, 495
Artaud, Antonin, 409
ARTEF (Yiddish Workers’ Theater), 284
“Art for Truth’s Sake” (slogan), 180
“Art for Truth’s Sake in the Drama” (Herne),
180–181
Arthur, T. S., 69, 79, 136, 141
Arthur, W. Bryan, 443–444
Artifact Piece (Luna), 422
The Art Theatre, 234, 235, 275
Asbridge, Elizabeth, 17
Ashbery, John, 512
Ashwell, Lena, 208–209
Asian American drama
Asian American theatre companies and,
489, 491
“chop suey circuit” and, 485
deconstructing stereotypes and, 493
ethnic identity themes in, 15, 370, 488–489,
493
experimental theatre and, 370–371
intra-ethnic critique and, 490
LGBT characters and themes in, 466
Asian American Theater Company, 489
As Is (Hoffman), 419, 464
Assassins (Sondheim and Weidman), 399
Astaire, Fred and Adele, 199
As Thousands Cheer, 199
Aston, Tony, 17
Astor Place Riot (New York, 1849), 70–71, 83
Athey, Ron, 12, 364–365
At Home Abroad (Dietz), 199
Atkinson, Brooks, 295, 345, 428
Atlanta University Summer Theatre, 315
Atlantic Monthly, 176–177
At the Foot of the Mountain, 418
Auden, W.H., 358
Augusta (Georgia), 78
Augusta, Howard, 318
August: Osage County (Letts), 506–507
Awake and Sing! (Odets), 176, 287, 297
Babes in Arms, 199–200
Babes in Toyland (Herbert), 194
“The Babies in Our Block,” 191
Bacon, Delia Salter, 120, 123–124, 127
Baez, Josefina, 495
Baitz, Jon Robin, 464
Baker, Annie, 507, 509–511, 518–519
Baker, Benjamin, 6, 110, 154–155
Baker, George Pierce, 184
Bakst, Léon, 241
ballad opera, 226
Ballets Russes, 275
Baltimore (Maryland), 26
The Baltimore Waltz (Vogel), 464–465
 INDEX 527

Bandido! (Valdez), 478 Beane, Douglas Carter, 464, 467

The Band Wagon (Kaufman & Dietz), 199–200
Bank, Rosemarie, 6
Bankhead, Tallulah, 295
The Bank Monster; or, Specie and Shinplaster,
77
Bannon, Ann, 467
Baraka, Amiri
Black Arts Movement and, 477–478
Black Arts Repertory Theatre School
(BARTS) and, 382, 413, 478
black nationalism and, 413
Black Revolutionary Theatre Movement
and, 380–381
class themes and, 381
ghost characters and, 477–478
homosexual romance themes and, 460
Barker, James Nelson, 59
Barnes, Djuna, 238, 243
Barnes Conner, Charlotte, 115–116, 123–124
Barnett, Charles Zachary, 104–105
Barnum, P.T.
The Drunkard and, 130–132, 146
promotion of theatre by, 130–132, 134,
144, 146
Uncle Tom’s Cabin dramas and, 88
Barnum’s American Museum (New York
City), 88, 118, 130–131, 146
Barroga, Jeannie, 495
Barry, Philip, 184, 284, 286
Barry, S., 109
Barstow, Susan Torrey, 205
Barzun, Jacques, 175–176
The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (Rabe),
416, 476–477
Bateman, Sidney Cowell, 116, 125, 155
Battle Hymn (Blankfort and Gold), 299
Battle of Angels (Williams), 341, 352
Battle of Breed’s (Bunker) Hill, 37–40, 42, 62
Battle of Brooklyn, 38
The Battle of Bunkers-Hill (Brackenridge), 40
Battle of Concord, 37, 39, 62, 104
Battle of Lexington, 37, 39, 62, 104
Battle of Long Island, 38
Battle of Quebec, 39–41
The Battle of the Eutaw Springs (Ioor), 63
Baym, Nina, 125
Beauty and the Beast (musical), 189, 401
Bechtel, Roger, 13–14
Beck, Julian, 357–358, 409–410
Beckett, Samuel, 261, 473, 481
The Beebo Brinker Chronicles (Chapman and
Ryan), 467
Beete, John, 62–63
Before Sunrise (Hauptmann), 174
The Beggar’s Opera (Gay), 27, 37
Behan, Brendan, 459
Behrman, S.N., 184, 292, 297
Bein, Albert, 288
Belafonte, Harry, 319, 378
Belasco, David, 166, 168–170, 178, 184, 236
Belle Reprieve (Weaver and Shaw), 436, 462
Bellini, Vincenzo, 83
The Benevolent Lawyers (Clarke), 122
Benn Michaels, Walter, 268
Bensusan, Inez, 211
Bent (Sherman), 419, 463
Bentley, Eric, 163
Bergman, S. Bear, 181, 467
Berlin, Irving, 196, 199, 396
Berlin, Normand, 253–255, 261
Bernfield, Susan, 439
Berrigan, Daniel, 416
Bérubé, Allan, 457
Best Foot Forward, 200
The Better Sort; or, The Girl of Spirit (William
Hill Brown), 53
Beyond the Gibson Girl (Patterson), 212
Beyond the Horizon (O’Neill), 251–252
Bial, Henry, 103–104
Bidwell, Barnabas, 46
Big Boy, 198
“Big Brother,” 200
Bigsby, Christopher, 325–326, 351
Big White Fog (Theodore Ward), 10, 12, 303,
317, 376–377, 379
Billington, Michael, 470
Billionaires for Bush (or Gore), 421–423
Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (Bond),
472–473
Bird, Robert Montgomery, 68, 70, 73–75,
116, 125
Bishop, Andrew, 308
528 INDEX
Black, Stephen, 249, 256
“Black Art” (Baraka), 478
Black Arts Movement, 460, 476, 478
Black Arts Repertory Theatre School
(BARTS), 382, 413, 478
Black Arts/West Theater (San Francisco), 380
black colleges and universities (HCBUS), 11,
307, 309–310, 314–315, 318
The Black Crook (musical), 7, 190, 192–193,
196
The Blacker the Berry (Thurman), 314
blackface minstrelsy
abolitionism and, 85, 93–94, 223–224
African American drama and, 8, 220,
223–224, 226, 228, 230, 307
African American performers and, 81–82,
223–224
audiences of, 81
burlesque and, 82–83
caricature and parody in, 84, 86–87,
90–91, 93
criticisms of, 81
in Cuba, 83–84
“Ethiopian delineation” and, 81–83, 88
in Great Britain, 83, 85–86
impact on other art forms by, 5, 86–87,
89–94
Irish immigrants and, 82, 225
Jewish immigrants and, 82
Jim Crow character and, 81, 85–86, 89–90,
92, 224
masculinity and, 82, 223
in New York City, 81
origins of, 2, 81–82
racial meanings in, 5, 82–85, 223
realism and, 83–84, 87, 90
slavery and, 84–86
Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows and, 87–91, 223,
307
Black Hawk (Makataimeshekiakiah), 152
Black Ice (Patterson), 413
Black Mass (Baraka), 413, 478
Black Pit (Maltz), 287–288
Black Revolutionary Theatre Movement, 380,
413, 478
Black Souls, 308
Black Theatre (magazine), 380
Black Theatre Issue, 382–383
Blair, Tony, 480–481
Blankfort, Michael, 299
Blitzstein, Mark, 288–289, 293
The Blockheads (ballad opera), 44
The Blockheads; or, Fortunate Contractor, 43
The Blockheads; or, The Affrighted Officers, 4,
37–38, 41
Bloolips, 436, 462
Bloom, Harold, 181–182
Bloom, Steven, 9
Bloomer Girl, 200
Blossom, Henry, 194–195, 197
Blossom Time, 197
Bluebeard (Ludlum), 460
The Blue Paradise (Romberg), 195
The Blue Sphere (Dreiser), 273–274
Blume, Kathryn, 421
Bodenheim, Maxwell, 243
Body Indian (Geiogamah), 415, 490–491
body mutilation, 12, 364–365
Bogard, Travis, 251
Bogosian, Eric, 449–450
Boker, George H., 6
Bolton, Guy, 195
The Bomb (International WOW Company),
420
Bombo, 198
Bond, Edward, 471–473
Bond, Justin Vivian, 467
Bonner, Marita, 312
book musical. See under musical drama
Book of Grace (Parks), 12, 389
Boone, Daniel, 150
Booth, Edwin, 119
Bornstein, Kate, 467
Born Yesterday (Kanin), 323–324
The Boss (Sheldon), 185
Boston (Massachusetts)
African American theatre in, 224–225,
317, 376
American Revolutionary era in, 35–39,
42–44
antebellum era theatre in, 130, 134
Boston Tea Party in, 36
colonial era theatre in, 18, 28
dramatic realism productions in, 178–179

Federal Theatre Project in, 317
Little Theatre Movement in, 234
Uncle Tom’s Cabin adaptation performances
in, 88–89
Both Your Houses (Anderson), 289
Bottoms, Stephen, 11
Boublil, Alain, 400–401
Boucicault, Dion, 79, 94, 155, 165–166, 471
Bound East for Cardiff (O’Neill), 238, 248, 250
Bourdet, Edouard, 456
Bower, Sharron, 421
Bowers, Elizabeth Crocker, 6, 117–118
“The Bowery” (song), 194
The Bowery (New York City)
compared to Broadway, 161
melodrama and, 162–165, 169–170
Bowery B’hoy (Mose) character, 110, 150,
154–155, 157
Bowery G’hal (Lize) character, 154–155, 157
Bowery Theatre (New York)
Forrest and, 70
“Indian Plays” at, 102, 152
women playwrights’ productions at,
116–118
Bowles, Jane, 428
box set, 356
A Boy and His Soul (Domingo), 466
Boyce, Neith, 234, 237, 239–241
Boyd, Andrew, 421–422
The Boys From Syracuse, 199–200
The Boys in the Band (Crowley), 461–462,
464, 466
Brace Up! (Wooster Group), 372–373
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 32, 40–41, 52
Bradford, Joseph, 219, 224–229
Bradley, Sculley, 160, 170
Braham, David, 191
Branch, William, 378, 380
The Branded Hand (Robbins Little), 121, 127
Brave Smiles . . . Another Lesbian Tragedy (The
Five Lesbian Brothers), 436
Bread and Circuses (Whitman), 296
Bread and Puppet Theatre, 357, 409, 411–412
Breath Boom (Corthron), 434
Brecht, Bertolt
on “culinary theatre,” 183
defamiliarization techniques and, 452
INDEX 529
epic theatre and, 472–473
experimental theatre and, 358, 409
influence on later generations by, 434, 436,
479, 481–482
political drama and, 471–473
protest drama and, 409
Brecht, Stefan, 460
Brice, Fanny, 196
The Bride of Fort Edward (Bacon), 120,
123–124, 126–127
The Brig (Kenneth Brown), 409
Brigadoon (Lerner), 201
Briggs-Hall, Austin, 318
Broadway (New York City)
African Americans and, 283, 309, 313–314,
318–319, 377–379, 383, 385, 432
color barriers on, 305
compared to The Bowery, 161
feminist drama and, 430–433
as hallmark of American theatre, 196
LGBT identity and representation on, 456,
458–459, 462–463
musical drama and, 12–13, 189–201,
392–405, 452
political drama and, 282, 287
Raids of 1927, 456
theatres’ relocation to Times Square and, 196
women’s presence on, 425–426
Broadway Theatre (New York), 117, 119
Broderick, Helen, 199
The Broker of Bogota (Bird), 70
The Brook, 192–193
Brooks, Daphne, 219, 227
Brooks, Peter, 67, 115, 136, 163, 472, 503
Brother Mose (Frank Wilson), 316
Brother/Sister Plays (McCraney), 514–516,
518–520
The Brothers Size (McCraney), 389, 518–519
Brougham, John, 59, 103, 108–109
Broun, Heyward, 297
Brower, Frank, 88
Brown, John, 299
Brown, Kenneth, 409
Brown, Sterling, 315
Brown, T. Allston, 17, 108
Brown, William, 8, 218–222, 225, 227,
230–232
530 INDEX

Brown, William Wells, 8, 89, 92–94, 219,
222–225, 227–230
Browne, Maurice, 234, 236
Browne, Porter Emerson, 162–164
Browne, Theodore, 10, 305, 316, 319
Browning, Edna, 165
“Brown October Ale,” 193–194
Brown v. Board of Education, 379, 485
Broyles-González, Yolanda, 479, 495
Bryant, Louise, 237, 241
Bryer, Jackson, 395–396, 400
“Buffalo Gals,” 92
Bug (Letts), 446
Builders Association, 358
The Builder’s Association, 452–453
Bullins, Ed, 380, 382–383, 413, 460–461, 478
Bulrusher (Eisa Davis), 389
Bunker-Hill; or, The Death of General Warren
(Burk), 62
Buntline, Ned, 70, 109
Burgoyne, John, 37–38
Burk, John Daly, 62
Burke, Edmund, 16
burlesque, 193, 467
Burrill, Mary, 11, 311–312
Burroughs, Baldwin, 315
Bury the Dead (Irwin Shaw), 291, 293
Busch, Charles, 460
Bush, Anita, 308
Bush, George W., 421, 480–481
Butcher, James, 315
The Butchers, 268
Butler, Judith, 455
Butler, Samuel, 36
By Way of Obit (O’Neill), 259–260
Cabaret, 398, 436
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene), 275
Cabin in the Sky, 200
Café La Mama, 349
Caffe Cino, 347–349, 459–460, 462
Cage, John, 503
Caird, Mona, 212
Caius Marius (Richard Penn Smith), 71–73, 75
Caldwell, Ben, 413
Caldwell’s Theatre (New Orleans), 119
Callender’s Georgia Minstrels, 225–226
Calm Down Mother (Terry), 430–431
Camille (Keene), 117
Camille (Ludlum), 460
Camillus; or, The Self-Exiled Patriot (Phillips),
104
Camino Real (Williams), 349
Campbell, Dick, 313
Canadian Council for the Arts, 360
The Candidates (Munford), 42
Candles to the Sun (Williams), 277
Canning, Charlotte, 430
Cantor, Eddie, 198
Can You Hear Their Voices?, 300
Cape Carnival (South Africa), 83
capitalism themes in American drama
African American drama and, 377, 381
ethnic theatre companies and, 494, 496
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and, 297–
298, 304
feminist drama and, 430, 434, 436–438
O’Neill and, 252–253, 256, 281, 285–286
political drama and, 280–281, 284–286,
288–289, 297–298, 304, 475
protest drama and, 13, 421–422
technology themes and, 442–447, 449
The Captive, 456
Carabasset (Deering), 60
Caribs (indigenous population), 221, 231–232
Carlson, Marvin, 265, 268, 420–421
Carmen Jones, 200
Carousel (Rodgers & Hammerstein), 200, 323,
394, 397, 403
Carr, Mary, 63–64
Carr Clarke, Mary, 118, 122, 127, 134
Carroll, Earl, 196
Carter, Huntley, 275
Case, Sue-Ellen, 436
The Case of Clyde Griffiths (Piscator), 286
The Cat and the Fiddle, 199
Cato (Addison), 19, 28, 33
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams)
Brick Pollitt character and, 350–351,
457–458
Broadway conventions and, 349–350
homosexuality theme in, 11, 14, 350–351,
457–458
stage direction for, 351

Cats (Webber), 393, 401
Celebration Theatre (Los Angeles), 461
censorship
of LGBT characters and themes, 456–457,
461, 467
NEA and, 360
protest drama and, 410
Chaikin, Joe, 416, 430
Chalk Dust (Clarke and Nurnberg), 298–299
Chambers, Jane, 462
Chambers, Jonathan, 276
Chambers, Whittaker, 300
Chanfrau, Frank, 110, 118, 154. See also
Bowery B’hoy; Mose
Chansky, Dorothy, 13
Chapman, Linda, 467
Charleston (South Carolina), 18, 22, 24–26, 28
Chase, Samuel, 30
Chatoyer, Chief Joseph (King Shotaway),
230–232
Chavez, Cesar, 366, 488
Chayefsky, Paddy, 486
Chekhov, Anton, 173–174, 372, 517
Chelsea Street Theatre (New York), 383
Cheney, Dick, 480–481
Cheney, Sheldon, 170, 275
Cherokees, 151
Chicago (Illinois)
African American drama and theatre in,
308, 317–318, 376–377, 379
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and, 10,
303–304, 316–318, 376
Little Theatre Movement in, 234–236
World’s Fair of 1934 and, 445
Chicago (musical), 398, 463
Chicago Little Theatre, 234–236
Chicago Pekin Players, 308
Chicano/Chicana drama
agit-prop and, 413
on Anglo culture, 368–369
Aztec figures and themes in, 368, 370, 415
on Broadway, 492
experimental theatre and, 366–370
feminist theatrical critiques of, 435, 479
hybrid identity and, 478–479
immigration and ethnicity themes in, 366–
368, 410, 415, 478, 488, 495–496
INDEX 531
labor themes in, 413–414, 478, 488
LGBT characters and themes in, 466, 495
Mayan themes in, 415
protest drama and, 413–415
on relationship between history and
representation, 496
The Children’s Hour (Hellman), 436, 456, 458,
462
Childress, Alice, 319–320, 378, 428
Childress, Alvin, 319
Chin, Frank, 489–490
Chin-Chin, 195
The Chip Women’s Fortune (Richardson), 309,
313
The Chocolate Soldier, 195
Choi, Hyaeweol, 213
Chong, Ping, 358, 370–371
choreopoem, 383, 432
A Chorus Line, 201, 398, 463
The Christian Slave (Stowe), 89–91
Christman in Camp (Mako and Magwili), 497
Christy, Edwin P., 87, 223
Christy and Woods Minstrel Hall (New York
City), 87
Churchill, Caryl, 14, 462, 470–471, 480
Church of Stop Shopping, 422
Cino, Joe, 347–349, 459
Circle-in-the-Square Theater (Greenwich
Village), 257, 345–346, 459
Circle Mirror Transformation (Annie Baker),
509–510
The City (Fitch), 7, 182–183
civil rights movement
African American drama and, 380,
412–413, 460
protest drama and, 13, 410, 412–413
Civil War, theatrical depictions of, 166–167
Clara’s Ole Man (Bullins), 460–461
Clarke, Corson, 139
Clarke, Harold, 298–299
Class of ‘29 (Lashin and Hastings), 10,
297–298
Clay, Henry, 69, 100
Cleage, Pearl, 434
Clotel (William Wells Brown), 92, 222
Cloud 9 (Churchill), 462
Cloud Tectonics (Rivera), 492
532 INDEX
Clurman, Harold, 284, 408
Clybourne Park (Norris), 379
Coatlicue Theatre Company, 415
Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (O’Casey), 327–328
The Cockettes, 460
The Cocoanuts, 197
Cocteau, Jean, 348, 358
Cohan, George M., 194–195, 197, 404
Colbert, Stephen, 421, 423
Cole, Bob, 229
Coleman, Ralf, 317
Colleran, Jeanne, 482
Collins, Tracy, 213
colonial American theatre (1607–1765). See
also The American Company
British identity and, 16–17
economic obstacles to, 19, 24, 26, 29
English performers and, 16–19, 25
indentured servants and, 18
military theatre and, 27–28
opposition to, 2, 17–18, 22, 24, 26–28
at universities, 27–28
“Colored Men and Women on the Stage”
(Overton Walker), 307–308
The Colored Museum (Wolfe), 3, 12, 384, 467
Columbia and Britannia (Peck), 52
Combs, Sean “P. Diddy,” 379
Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean,
Jimmy Dean (Graczyk), 463
Come Down Burning (Corthron), 434
Comintern, 325
commedia dell’arte, 189, 243
Committee on Negro Arts (CNA), 378
Committees of Safety (American
Revolutionary War), 42–43
Communist Party USA, 325
Company (Sondheim), 398–399
Compromise of 1850, 82
Comte, Auguste, 265
Conduct of Life (Fornés), 430
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO),
287, 297
Conjunto (Mayer), 497
Conkle, E.P., 299–300
Connecticut, colonial era theatre in, 27–28
A Connecticut Yankee, 197
The Connection (Gelber), 409
Connelly, Marc, 310
Conner, E.S., 116
Conrad, Robert T., 76
Constancy (Boyce), 236
The Constant State of Desire (Finley), 362, 418
Constitution of the United States, 47, 360
Continental Congress, 28–30, 32, 43
The Contrast (Tyler)
The American Company production of, 47
“ethnic spectacle” and, 99
Native American characters in, 59
protestations of European influence in, 175
staging dynamics of, 7
success of, 54
Yankee character in, 64, 101
Conversation among the Ruins (painting by di
Chirico), 342
Conway, H.J., 88–91
Cook, George Cram, 234, 236–238, 243, 248
Cook, William Marion, 229
Cooke Reid, Anne, 315
Cooper, James Fenimore, 153
Corbin, John, 184
Corpus Christi (McNally), 466
Corthron, Kia, 434
Corwin, Jane Hudson, 120
Coss, Clare, 431
Couch, William, 380
Coughlin, Father Charles, 299
counter-public spheres, 220
The Count of Monte Cristo, 249, 251
Covent Garden Theatre (London)., 220
Coward, Noel, 348
The Cradle Will Rock (Blitzstein), 288–289,
293
Craig, E. Quita, 304
Crandell, William, 416
Crane, Stephen, 164
Creahan, John, 117
Crimes of the Heart (Henley), 432
Crisis magazine, 309–310
Crockett, Davy, 150–151
Crothers, Rachel
commercial success of, 431
New Woman drama and, 8, 205–209, 282
realism and, 7, 174, 185–187, 205, 208, 239
Crouse, Russel, 323–324

Crowley, Mart, 461–462, 464, 466
Crows in the Cornfield (van Gogh), 371
The Crucible (Miller)
Danforth character in, 329, 337
John Proctor character in, 329, 333–334,
337–338, 475
McCarthy Era parallels and, 11, 329, 333,
350, 458, 475
oppression themes in, 328
Wooster Group production and, 353
Cruikshank, George, 138
Cruz, Migdalia, 495
Cruz, Nilo, 465, 495
Cuba, 83–84, 495
cultural feminism. See under feminist drama
A Cure for the Spleen (Sewall), 37
Curry, S.S., 275
Curtin, Kaier, 456
Cushing, Eliza Lanesford, 120
Cushman, Charlotte, 204
Custis, George Washington Parke, 151
The Custom of the County (Wharton), 212
Czechoslovakia, occupation of, 334
Dafoe, Willem, 373
Dale, Allen, 165
Daly, Augustin, 166
Damn Yankees, 189, 394
“Dandy Jim,” 92, 228
Darby’s Return (Dunlap), 55
Darwin, Charles, 265
Daughter Courage (Bread and Puppet
Theatre), 411
The Daughters Cycle (Women’s Experimental
Theatre), 418, 431
Daughters of Bilitis, 459
d’Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine, 511–513
Davidson, Gordon, 492
Davies, Mary Caroline, 243
Davis, Angela, 439
Davis, Eisa, 389, 439
Davis, Ossie, 305, 319
Davis, Owen, 159–160, 162, 164–165
Davis, Rebecca Harding, 142
Davis, Ronnie, 410
Davis, Tracy, 204
Davison, Richard, 395–396, 400
INDEX 533
Davy, Babs, 436, 462
A Day of Absence (Turner Ward), 381–382,
487
Day of the Swallows (Porto-Trambley), 496
Days to Come (Hellman), 288
A Day without Mexicans (Arau), 381–382
Dead End (Kingsley), 302
Dead Mother (Greenspan), 517
Dean, Julia, 117
Dearest Enemy, 197
“Dearest Mae,” 92–93
Death of a Salesman (Miller)
appearance versus substance theme in, 337
Broadway premiere of, 323
Howard Wagner character in, 441–442
technology themes in, 441–442, 444
Willy Loman character in, 334, 336–337,
340, 441–442, 444, 471
The Death of General Montgomery, In Storming
the City of Quebec (Brackenridge), 40–42
Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole
Entire World (Parks), 387
Deathtrap (Levin), 463
Debates at the Robin-Hood Society, 36–37
Declaration of Independence, 33–34
Dee, Ruby, 305, 319, 379
Deep River, 308
Deering, Nathaniel, 60
Deeter, Jasper, 300
The Defeat (Warren), 35
De Koven, Reginald, 193–194
Delaney, Shelagh, 459
Delano, Alonzo, 152
De Lara; or, The Moorish Bride (Hentz), 119,
123
DeLillo, Don, 450–452
Dell, Floyd, 234–238
Demastes, William, 143, 264, 352
Democracy in America (Tocqueville). See
Tocqueville, Alexis de
Democratic Party, antebellum theatre and, 70
Demos, John, 520n1
Demuth, Charles, 235, 241
Denning, Michael, 297
Derby, Doris, 412
Desert Song, 197
Deshima (Chong), 371
534 INDEX
Desire Under the Elms (O’Neill), 253–254, 256
Detective Story, 323
Detsi-Diamanti, Zoë, 125
“deviant” sexual orientations, 360, 455, 458
Diaghilev, Sergei, 241, 275
A Dialogue, Between a Southern Delegate,
and His Spouse, on His Return from
the Grand Continental Congress
(“Mary V.V.”), 36
A Dialogue Between Mrs. Native and Mrs.
Foreigner on Literary Subjects (Corwin),
120, 126
Diana of Dobson’s (Hamilton), 208–209
Dibbell, Dominique, 436
Di Chirico, Giorigo, 342–343
Dickens, Charles, 87
Die Mommie Die! (Busch), 460
Dies, Martin, 295, 304
Dietz, Howard, 199
Dionysus, 189
Diversionary Theatre (San Diego), 461
The Divine Sister (Busch), 460
Dixey, Henry E., 193
Dixon, George Washington, 154, 420
Dodge, Mabel, 235
Dodson, Owen, 305, 315, 319
Dolan, Jill, 13, 433, 435–438, 462
A Doll’s House (Ibsen), 174, 182, 238
Domestic Resurrection Circus (Bread and
Puppet Theatre), 411
Domingo, Coleman, 466
Dominican playwrights and theatre, 495
Don’t You Want to be Free? (Langston
Hughes), 314
The Double Conspiracy, 46
Double Edge Theatre, 358
Douglass, David
American Company and, 4, 21, 24–30
Caribbean theatre performances and, 23, 29
political connections of, 24–25, 30
as printer, 29
theatre construction by, 24, 28
Douglass, Frederick, 89, 222, 224
Dowling, Eddie, 341
Downer, Alan, 160–161
The Drag (West), 456, 467
drag performance, 419, 456, 460, 463, 467
The Drama of King Shotaway (William
Brown), 8, 218–221, 230
Dramatic Technique (Baker), 184
Dramatists Guild, 327
Dreiser, Theodore
expressionism and, 274
naturalism and, 9, 266, 270, 273–274
Provincetown Players and, 238
Dress Suits to Hire (Split Britches), 462
Drifting Apart (Herne and Belasco), 178
The Drunkard, or, the Fallen Saved (W.H.
Smith)
at Barnum’s Museum, 130–132, 134–135,
146
culture of sentiment and, 142
delirium tremens in, 139
plot elements of, 79, 127
regenerative themes in, 132, 138–140
temperance movement and, 144
Drury Lane Theatre (London), 117, 220
DuBarry Was a Lady, 199
Duberman, Martin, 412
Du Bois, W.E.B., 309–311, 313, 318, 389, 412,
461–462
Dudden, Faye, 117
Duffy, Susan, 281
Dumas, Alexandre fils, 265
Dunbar, 305
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 312
Duncan, Thelma, 311
Dunlap, William, 22–23, 32, 54–56, 62, 99
Dunmore, Lord (John Murray), 39
Dunmore’s regiment, 39
Durang, Christopher, 464
Dutchman (Baraka), 381–382, 384, 412–413,
477–478
“Dutchman” Plays of antebellum era, 109
Dvoskin, Michelle, 12
Dyer, Charles, 459
The Dying Gaul (Craig Lucas), 464
Dymkowski, Christine, 208
Dynamo (O’Neill), 253
Dyskolos (Meander), 181
early republican era drama (1789–1820)
African American characters in, 56,
61–62, 64

British influences on, 53–55, 60, 64, 70
economic obstacles to, 54
ethnicity themes in, 99–100
interest in “exotic” in, 56–60
Irish characters in, 61–62, 99
Native American characters and themes in,
58–60
republican themes in, 50–58, 60–64, 99
War of 1812 and, 63–64, 100
women characters in, 51, 57, 59
Yankee characters in, 64
East Lynne, 189
Eastman, Max, 234–236
East West Players (EWP), 15, 488–490, 492,
496
Eccentricities of a Nightingale (Williams)
Alma Winemiller character in, 345
John Buchanan character in, 345
Edmonds, Randolph, 309, 315
Edna, the Pretty Typewriter (Owen Davis),
164–165
Edwards, Justin, 135
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 438
Eight American Ethnic Plays (1974
compilation), 486–487
Einstein on the Beach (Glass), 505
Elam Jr., Harry, 12
El Capitan (Sousa), 194
election of 1840, 106–107
Elevator Repair Service (theatre company), 15,
505–506
Eliot, George, 87
Ellet, Elizabeth, 118–120, 123
Elliott, Maxine, 208
Ellis, Evelyn, 308
El Teatro Campesino (ETC)
anti-war plays of, 415
feminist theatrical critiques of, 435, 479
immigration and ethnicity themes of,
366–370, 415
interactive elements and, 369–370
museum-style presentations by, 367–369
Obie Award and, 414
United Farm Workers and, 413–414, 478,
488
El Teatro Nacional de Aztlán (TENAZ), 414
E=MC2 (Flanagan), 300
INDEX 535
Emma (Little Flags production), 418
Emmet, Joseph K., 190–191, 303
“Emmet’s Lullaby,” 190
The Emperor Jones (O’Neill)
commercial success of, 238, 246
experimentalism of, 251–252
expressionism and, 272–273
modernism and, 244–245
Provincetown Players and, 8, 238, 244, 246
racial themes in, 252, 309–310
Wooster Group production of, 452
End of Summer (Behrman), 297
The End of the World (Kopit), 14, 448
An Enemy of the People (Ibsen), 174, 182
The Enemy: Time (Williams), 347
England
blackface minstrelsy in, 83, 85–86
colonial-era actors from, 2, 16–19, 25
influence on American Revolutionary era
theatre from, 33–39, 45–47
influence on early republic era drama by,
53–55, 60, 64, 70
New Woman in, 204–210, 212, 215
Eno, Will, 507–509, 518
Ensler, Eve, 419, 426
Ernest Maltravers (Medina), 116, 123–125
The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom (William
Wells Brown), 8, 92–94, 219, 222–225,
227–229
The Eternal Quadrangle (Reed), 237
Ethiopia (Federal Theatre Project production),
301, 310
Ethiopian Delineation. See under blackface
minstrelsy
ethnicity, definitions of, 486
ethnicity themes in American drama. See also
specific ethnic groups
in antebellum era drama (1820–1860), 5–6,
68–69, 97–98, 100–110
anthologies and, 497
assimilation and, 103–104, 489–490
class and, 98
early republican era and (1789–1820),
99–100
early republican era drama (1789–1820)
and, 99–100
electoral politics and, 106–107
536 INDEX
ethnicity themes in American drama (Cont.)
experimental theatre and, 12, 366–371
historiography of, 496
hybridity and mutability, 98, 493, 497–498
impact of changing demographics on,
485–486, 494–495
internment and, 496–497
intra-ethnic critique and, 490–491
multiculturalism and, 492–494
protest drama and, 3, 410–411
religion and, 109
systemic racism and, 490
transcending stereotypes and, 489, 493–494
Evangeline (musical), 191–192
Evans, Rowland, 362
The Eve of St. Mark (Maxwell Anderson), 292
Everett, William, 400–401
Exorcism (O’Neill), 262n2
Experimental Death Unit #3 (Baraka), 478
experimental theatre
aesthetic distance and, 361
anarchist and pacifist influence on, 357–358
Asian American drama and, 370–371
body mutilation and, 12, 364–365
breaking illusion emphasis of, 356, 362,
365–366, 373
Chicano/Chicana drama and, 366–370
collective management and, 358
contrasted with conventional theatre and
expression, 356, 365–366
counterculture’s impact on, 357–358
creation of new forms and, 356–358
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and, 299–300
homosexuality themes and, 360
immigration and ethnicity themes in, 12,
366–371
“indecency” debates and, 359–360, 437
nakedness in performance and, 360–363,
365
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
and, 359–362, 420
Native American characters and themes in,
357, 367–369
origins of realism in drama and, 175
outdoor performance and, 358
performance artists and, 360, 437
political opponents of, 364–365
post-porn satire and, 12, 362–363
sex and sexuality themes in, 12, 360,
362–363
socially marginalized groups and, 366–371
solo performances and, 359, 361–364, 367
technology use in, 372–373
Experimental Theatre, Inc. (ETI), 246
expressionism
abstract expressionism and, 358
abstraction and, 272
antiheroes and, 276
bourgeois aesthetics and, 276
criticisms of, 275–276
cultural fears of technology and, 274–275
Delsartean aesthetics and, 275
German practitioners of, 244, 272–273, 275
modernity and, 274–275
O’Neill and, 244–245, 252, 272–273
primitivism and, 272
psychological and emotional forces in, 264,
271, 273, 276
radical aesthetics and, 276–277
realism and, 264
scenic detail and, 271–272
“schrei” style and, 272
stylization and, 264, 271
symbolism and, 271–272
Face the Music, 199
Factwino Meets the Moral Majority, 410
The Fair Americans (Carr), 63–64, 122
Fair Labor Standards Act, 326
The Fall of British Tyranny; or, American
Liberty Triumphant (Leacock), 38–39
Falsettos (Finn), 464
Farnum, Hilda, 318
Farquhar, George, 42
Farrison, William Edward, 222–223, 227
Fashion (Mowatt), 6, 107, 115, 117, 125–127,
175
The Father (Strindberg), 174, 179–180
Faulkner, William, 506
Fay, Frank, 198
Fearnow, Mark, 7
Federal Theatre Project (FTP)
African American drama and, 10, 302–305,
315–317, 376

anti-capitalist themes and, 297–298, 304
anti-fascist dramas and, 290–291
charges of Communism against, 295–298,
304–305, 318
The Cradle Will Rock and, 288
educational goals of, 296, 298
Experimental Unit of, 299–300
Great Depression themes and, 297–298,
300–301
House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC) and, 318
labor-themed drama and, 288
Living Newspapers, 10, 296, 300–301, 478
loudspeaker technique and, 301–302
Negro Units of, 10, 316, 376
as “people’s theatre,” 296, 298, 302
political dramas and, 10, 295–302
Popular Front drama and, 297–300
propaganda questions regarding, 296
racial justice issues and, 303–304
Fefu and Her Friends (Fornés), 429–430, 462
The Female Enthusiast (Pogson), 57–58
The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 427
feminist drama
“50/50 in 2020” initiative and, 425, 435
African American playwrights and themes
in, 383–384, 428–429, 432, 434–435, 438,
448–449
baby boom generation and, 431–432
Broadway productions of, 430–433
challenges to gender status quo from,
427–428, 431–433, 435–437
class and capitalism themes in, 430, 434,
436–438
comedy and, 436–437
commercial successes of, 431
consciousness-raising and, 430
cultural feminism and, 436, 439
female family relations and, 428, 430–431,
433
female objectification and, 418–419, 425–426
feminist theatre companies and, 430
gynocentric emphasis in, 430
increasing presence of women in theatre
and, 425–426
Latina playwrights and themes in, 429–430,
435, 479
INDEX 537
lesbian playwrights and themes in,
435–437, 462
liberal feminism and, 13, 435–436, 438
materialist feminism and, 436
Native American playwrights and themes
in, 431, 438
Obie awards for, 428–429, 431, 433, 436
Off and Off-Off-Broadway productions of,
428–429, 431
“personal is political” and, 430
political drama genre and, 282, 479,
481–482
protest drama and, 408, 410, 417–419
Pulitzer Prizes for, 432–433, 479, 482
racial themes in, 425–426, 428–429,
432, 434
radical feminism and, 13, 436
realism and, 427, 432, 435–438, 479
Second Wave of Feminism and, 427,
436, 437
self-critique and, 13, 435, 437
Third Wave of feminism and, 437–438
Tony Awards for, 433
violence themes in, 425, 430, 433–434, 436,
438, 481–482
The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Dolan), 435
Fences (August Wilson), 385–386
Ferber, Edna, 238
Fiddler on the Roof, 392
Fierstein, Harvey, 419, 463, 467
Fifteen years of a drunkard’s life: A melodrama
in three acts (Jerrold), 138
Fin del Mundo, 415
Finian’s Rainbow, 201
Finley, Karen
critical praise for, 436
family history of, 361–362
NEA funding controversy and, 360, 420,
465
performance style of, 361–362, 418, 437
visual arts background of, 359, 437
Finn, William, 464
Firefall (Jesurun), 453–454
The Firefly (Friml), 195
Fiske, Harrison Grey, 239
Fitch, Clyde, 7, 174, 182–183
Fitzgerald, Eleanor, 246
538 INDEX
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 506
The Five Lesbian Brothers, 436, 462
Flanagan, Hallie, 295–301, 303–305, 316,
318, 376
Fleck, John, 360, 420, 465
Fletcher, Anne, 275
Flight Courier Service (Maxwell), 451
Flight to America, 94n1
Florence (Childress), 428
Flower, Benjamin O., 177–180
Flying Colors, 199
Flying High, 199
Flyin’ West (Cleage), 434
Focus (Miller), 325
Fog (O’Neill), 261–262
Foghorn (Geiogamah), 489
Follies of 1907 (Ziegfeld), 196
Follow the Girls, 200
The Fool (Bond), 472
Foote, Stephanie, 267
for colored girls who have considered suicide
when the rainbow is enuf (Shange),
383–384, 417
Ford Foundation, 382, 488, 492
Foreman, Richard, 288, 358, 387
The Forest Princess (Barnes Conner), 116,
124–127
The Forest Rose (Woodworth), 64, 101
Fornes, Maria Irene, 428–429, 437, 462,
492, 496
Forrest, Edwin
Bowery Theatre and, 70
British tour of, 70
melodrama and, 69
as Metamora, 69, 72, 78, 102, 151
patriotic themes and, 70–72
playwriting contests of, 5, 60,
69–71, 102
as Spartacus, 69, 73–75
The Fortune Teller (Herbert), 194
Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, 194
Foster, Stephen, 226, 229
The Fountain (O’Neill), 246, 253
Fox, G. L., 190
Fraden, Rena, 303
France, Richard, 497
Francesca da Rimini (Boker), 6
Frankenstein (Living Theatre production),
409–410
Freedom (Reed), 237
Freeman, Carlotta, 308
Free Southern Theatre, 412
Free Speech Movement (Berkeley), 13, 410
French Revolution, 57–58, 67
Freneau, Philip, 40
Freshwater (Woolf), 438
Freud, Sigmund, 419, 476
Frick, John, 131, 138
Friedan, Betty, 427
Frijoles or Beans to You, 410
Friml, Rudolf, 194–195, 197–198
Fritz, Our Cousin German, 190–192
From Morn to Midnight (Kaiser), 244
frontier dramas, 6, 149–153
Front Street Theatre (Baltimore), 152
Frozen Wages, 410
Fuchs, Elinor, 505, 520n4
Fugitive Slave Law, 86
Funny Face, 197
Funnyhouse of a Negro (Kennedy), 381, 429
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum, 192
Furman, Roger, 319
Furness, R.S., 272
Gage, Thomas, 35
Gale, Zona, 282
The Game (Bryant), 237, 241–242
GAN-e-meed Theatre Project, 439
Garden of Time (Dodson), 305
Garden Party (Williams), 459
Gardiner, Thomas, 40–41
Gardley, Marcus, 389
Gardner, Eric, 93
Garland, Hamlin, 177–178, 239, 313
Garrick, David, 42, 53
The Garrick Gaieties, 197
Garrison, William Lloyd, 75
Garson, Barbara, 416
Garvey, Marcus, 304, 317, 376
Gassner, John, 255, 265, 271, 273
Gates Jr. Henry Louis, 149
Gatz (Elevator Repair Service production),
505–506

Gaunt, Percy, 194
Gay, John, 27, 37
Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
(GLAAD), 466
Gay Divorce, 199
gay liberation drama, 419–420, 461–464. See
also LGBT drama
Geiogamah, Hanay, 415, 489–491
Gelb, Barbara and Arthur, 252, 257–259, 261
Gelber, Jack, 409
Gemini (Innaurato), 463
Gem of the Ocean (August Wilson), 387
Generall Historie of Virginia (John Smith), 151
The Gentle Furniture Shop (Bodenheim), 243
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 201
The Gentle People (Irwin Shaw), 291
Gentlewoman (Lawson), 286
George Barnwell, or the London Merchant, 22
Georgia, Indian removal policy in, 78
The Georgia Spec (Tyler), 54
German Expressionism, 244, 272–273, 275
German immigrants in antebellum era,
107, 109
German (“Dutch”) plays in the antebellum
era, 109
Germon, G.C., 89
Gershwin, George, 195–196, 283, 289
Gershwin, Ira, 195, 289
Gerstenberg, Alice, 273–274, 276
Gest, Morris, 275
The Ghost of Yankee Doodle (Sidney Howard),
291
Ghosts (Ibsen), 174, 179–180, 182, 205, 238
A Giant’s Strength (Sinclair), 447
Gide, Andre, 348, 459
Gilbert and Sullivan, 192–193, 317
Gillette, William Hooker, 7, 161, 166–170
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 210
Gilmore, Paul, 92, 223–224
Gilpin, Charles, 308, 313
Gilpin Players, 313
Girl Crazy, 199
The Girl From Utah, 195
The Girl in the Coffin (Dreiser), 270, 273
The Girl of the Golden West (Belasco), 168–169
Gissing, George, 213
Giving Up the Ghost (Moraga), 417, 479
INDEX 539
GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation), 466
The Gladiator (Bird), 5, 68, 70, 73–76, 125
A Glance at New York (Benjamin Baker), 6,
110, 154–155
Glaspell, Susan
antiwar themes and, 283–284
feminism and, 245–246
modernism and, 244–245
naturalism and, 266, 270
New Woman drama and, 205, 282
on Paterson Strike Pageant, 236
Provincetown Players and, 8–9, 234,
238–241, 243, 245–246, 248,
282–284
realism and, 240–241, 245
Washington Square Players and, 237
Glass, Phillip, 505
The Glass Menagerie (Williams)
Amanda character in, 441–442
Broadway production of, 341
commercial success of, 11, 457
poetic imagination and, 340
reviews of, 342
technology themes in, 14, 441–443, 451
Tom character in, 441–442
The Glines, 463
The Glory Box (Tim Miller), 420
The Glory of Columbia, Her Yeomanry!
(Dunlap), 55–56, 62, 99
Go Back to Where You Are (Greenspan),
516–517
Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book (magazine),
118
Go Down Moses (Theodore Browne), 305
Gods of the Lightning (Maxwell Anderson),
290
Gold, Mike (Itzok Isaac Granich), 238, 299
Goldemberg, Rose Leiman, 418
Golden, Thelma, 388
“golden age” of musical theater, 8, 12, 189–190,
196–201, 392–398, 402–405
Golden Boy (Odets), 287
Goldman, Emma, 235, 418
The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism
(Benn Michaels), 268
Gomez, Marga, 466
540 INDEX
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo
on cultural hybridity, 478–479
experimental style of, 367–370, 478–479
immigration and ethnicity themes of,
367–370, 422
Pocha Nostra group and, 358, 367
The Gondoliers (Gilbert and Sullivan), 192
Gonzalez S., Sylvia, 495
Goodbye, My Fancy (Kanin), 427–428
Goodman, Edward, 297
Good News!, 197
Goodwin, J. Cheever, 191, 193
Gordon, Joanne, 400
Gordon, Mel, 272, 277n2
Gordon, Roxy, 494
Gorelik, Mordecai, 275, 286
Gossett Jr., Louis, 378
Gotanda, Philip Kan, 466, 493–494
Gotham and the Gothamites (Judah), 104
Gottlieb, Lois, 206–207
Graczyk, Ed, 463
Graham, Shirley, 312, 317–318
Grand, Sarah, 203, 212
Grand Theatre (Chicago), 308
Grant, Mark, 392, 395–396, 401, 403
Grasses of a Thousand Colors (Shawn),
511–514
Gray, Spalding, 520n6
Great Depression
African American drama and, 376–377, 386
Federal Theatre Project’s dramatic
representations of, 297–298, 300–301
Miller and, 324–326
The Great Disobedience (Miller), 325
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 505
The Great God Brown (O’Neill), 246, 253–254
The Great Moral Drama: Underground
Railroad (Hopkins), 225–226
Great Society initiatives, 486
Green, Martin, 236
Green, Paul, 283, 286, 291, 377
The Green Bay Tree (Shairp), 456
Greenberg, Richard, 464, 466
Green Mountain Boys, 101
Green Pastures (Connelly), 310, 314–315
Greenspan, David, 464, 507, 514–518
Greenwich Village
Bohemian lifestyles in, 346, 460
Circle-in-the-Square Theater in, 257,
345–346, 459
drag performers in, 456
Little Renaissance and, 235–236, 245
Little Theatre Movement and, 234–235
Off- and Off-Off-Broadway productions in,
345–347, 459–460
Provincetown Players and, 234–237, 243
Gregory, Lady, 239
Gregory, Montgomery T., 239, 309, 311
Griffiths, Linda, 213–214
Grimké, Angela Weld, 10, 12, 210, 283, 309,
311–312
Grimsted, David, 77, 133, 154
Grose, Burl D., 150
The Group (Warren), 35–36
Group Theatre, 284, 322, 326, 408
Grove, William Hugh, 18
Grundy, Sidney, 209
Guare, John, 347, 507
Guys and Dolls, 394
Gypsy, 402–403
Hackett, James H., 77–78, 101, 150
Hairspray, 194, 403
The Hairy Ape (O’Neill)
African American characters and themes
in, 245
class and capitalism themes in, 252, 281
commercial success of, 238, 246, 251
experimentalism of, 251–252
expressionism and, 272
modernism and, 244–245
Provincetown Players and, 238, 244, 246
realism in, 245
Yank character and, 10, 244–245, 252–253,
281
Hale, Sarah Josepha, 118, 125, 127
Halifax (Nova Scotia), 19
Hall, Louisa Jane Park, 120
Hall, Radclyffe, 214
Hallam, Nancy, 25
Hallam, Thomas, 19
Hallam, William, 19, 23
Hallam Company, 20–23, 26
Hallam Jr., Lewis, 19, 22–24, 28–30, 45–46

Halttunen, Karen, 127
Hamalian, Leo, 223, 227–230
Hamblin, Thomas, 116
Hamilton, Alexander, 30, 292
Hamilton, Ann, 500–502, 520n2
Hamilton, Cicely, 207–209, 408
Hamilton, Clayton, 162–163
Hammerstein II, Oscar, 197–199, 400. See also
Rodgers and Hammerstein
Hansberry, Lorraine
African American family themes and, 12,
379–380, 387, 389, 487
nuclear technology themes and, 447
Hapgood, Hutchins, 234–237
Hapgood, Norman, 167–169
Happy Ending (Turner Ward), 382
Harburg, E.Y., 199
Hardman, Chris, 358
Hare, David, 480–481
Hare, Maude Cuney, 317
Harlem (New York City)
African American drama in, 308, 311–314,
319, 378, 380, 382–383, 413, 478
drag performers in, 456
Harlem Renaissance and, 203–204, 282,
303, 312–314, 412
riots (1964) in, 413
Harlem: A Melodrama of Harlem Life, 314
Harlem Experimental Theatre Company,
313–314
Harlem Suitcase Theatre, 313–314
Harper’s Ferry, 117, 299
Harper’s Magazine, 176–177, 239
Harrigan, Edward, 191–192
Harris, Charles K., 194
Harris, Helen, 309, 311, 318
Harrison, Richard, 315
Hart, Christopher, 14, 470–471
Hart, Lorenz, 195, 197, 199–200
Hart, Lynda, 479
Hart, Moss, 289
Hart, Tony, 191–192
Hart-Cellar Act, 485–486
Hartley, Marsden, 235
Harvey, 323
Hastings, Milo, 297
Hatch, James, 223, 227–230, 317
INDEX 541
Hatton, Anne Kemble, 59
The Haunted Host (Patrick), 349
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 173–174, 176
Hay, Malcolm, 472–473
Hay, Samuel, 221, 230–231
Hayes, Helen, 295
Hayward, Dorothy and Dubose, 283, 309–310
Haywood, William “Big Bill,” 235
A Hazard of New Fortunes (Howells), 177
Heady, Thomas, 17
Healy, Peg, 436
He and She (Crothers), 185–186, 207, 282
The Heart of Maryland (Belasco), 166
Heath, James Ewell, 107
Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 174, 183, 205
Hedgerow Theatre, 300
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Mitchell), 467
The Heidi Chronicles (Wasserstein), 426, 433
Heilmann, Ann, 212
Hellman, Lillian, 173, 175, 288, 291, 431, 456,
474
Hello, Dolly!, 194
Hellzapoppin’, 199
Henderson, Helene, 197, 266, 268
Henley, Beth, 432, 434, 479
Henry, John, 27, 30, 45, 47
Henson, Josiah, 91
Hentz, Caroline Lee Whiting, 119, 123,
125–126
Herbert, Victor, 193–195, 197–198
Herene, Katharine Corcocan, 178
Herman, Jerry, 419, 463
Her Naked Skin (Lenkiewicz), 214
Herne, James A., 7, 165, 174, 176–178,
180–181, 184, 238
Heroes and Saints (Moraga), 466, 479
Heron, Matilda, 117, 119
Herr, Christopher, 9–10
Hewitt, Barnard, 149
Hewlett, James, 222
Hidden: A Gender (Bornstein), 467
High Button Shoes, 323
The Highest Tree (Schary), 447–448
Highways Performance Space (Los Angeles),
465
Hill, Abram, 302–303, 305, 318–320
Hill, Errol, 231–232
542 INDEX
Hill, George Handel, 77, 101
Hischak, Thomas, 7–8, 396
historically black colleges and universities
(HBCUs). See black colleges and
universities
Hit the Deck!, 197
H. M. S. Pinafore (Gilbert and Sullivan), 192
Hodin, Mark, 7
Hoffman, Abbie, 416
Hoffman, William, 460, 464
Hogarth, William, 37
Hohman, Valleri, 275
Hoiby, Lee, 349
Holden, Joan, 410, 438
Hold Everything!, 197
Holiday (Barry), 286
Holt, Henry, 17–18
Holt, Michael, 100, 106–107
Homebody/Kabul (Kushner), 420
The HOME Show Pieces (Greenspan), 516
homophobia. See homosexuality, cultural
antagonism toward
homosexuality. See also lesbian drama; LGBT
drama; sexuality themes in American
drama
Caffe Cino theatre and, 348–349
cultural antagonism toward, 344, 350,
352, 360–361, 365, 419–420, 455–459,
466–468
Williams’ dramatic treatment of, 11, 14,
348, 350–351, 353, 457–459
Honors at Dawn (Miller), 325
The Hook (Miller), 327
Hooks, Robert, 382
“The Hope of the Negro Drama” (Richardson),
309
Hopkins, Pauline, 8, 219, 224–230
Hopkins Colored Troubadours (Boston), 225
Hopkinson, Francis, 44–45
Hopper, DeWolf, 193
Horizons: Theatre from a Woman’s Perspective,
417
Horovitz, Israel, 480
The Hostage (Behan), 459
Hot Peaches, 460
House Committee on Un-American Activities
(HUAC)
anti-Communist aims of, 330, 332–333, 475
Federal Theatre Project and, 318
Kazan and, 332–333
Miller and, 322, 327, 330–333, 471, 474–475
targeting of homosexuals by, 458
Houseman, John, 288, 316, 377
Houston, Velina Hasu, 495–496
Howard, Bronson, 166
Howard, Cordelia, 140–141
Howard, Sidney, 184, 291
Howard Players, 311
Howard Theatre (Washington, DC), 308
Howard University, 315. See also black colleges
and universities
Howe, Julia Ward, 119–120, 123–124,
127–128
Howe, Leanne, 494
Howe, Tina, 433–434
Howe, William, 28, 37–38, 41
Howells, William Dean
plays of, 176–177
realism and, 7, 161–162, 167, 175–178, 180,
239, 266
How I Learned to Drive (Vogel), 433, 465
How The Vote Was Won, 408
How to Turn Distress into Success: A Parable of
War and Its Making (Bread and Puppet
Theatre), 411
Hoyt, Charles H., 194
Hudibras (Butler), 36
Hudson, Rock, 505
Huerta, Jorge, 495, 497
Hughes, Holly, 360, 420, 436–437, 462, 465
Hughes, Langston, 283, 290, 314, 377,
474–475
Hughie (O’Neill), 256, 259–261
Humphreys, David, 56–57, 64
Humpty Dumpty (musical), 190–191,
194, 196
The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea
(Moraga), 435, 466
Hurston, Zora Neale, 11, 311–312, 314, 316
Hutchinson, Chisa, 466–467
Hutchinson, Thomas, 34–35, 37
Hwang, David Henry, 466, 493
Hyers, Anna Madah and Emma Louise, 8, 219,
224–226, 229

Hyman, Earle, 319
Hynes, Garry, 426
Hyppolytus (Howe), 119–120
I Am My Own Wife (Doug Wright), 467
Ibsen, Henrik
Bloom on, 181
early translations and productions of,
174–175
female characters of, 204–206, 211
realism and, 7–9, 173–176, 179–183, 185,
238
The Iceman Cometh (O’Neill)
alcoholism in, 257
camraderie theme in, 258–259, 261
criticisms of, 257
human condition themes in, 9, 257–258
narrative technique in, 504
Off-Broadway production of, 346
“pipe dream” and illusions theme in,
257–258
repetition in, 257
Idiot’s Delight (Sherwood), 290–291
I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!
(Valdez), 478, 494
I’d Rather be Right, 289
I Married an Angel, 199
Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986),
494
The Immoralist (Gide), 459
In Abraham’s Bosom (Green), 283, 308, 377
Incident at Vichy (Miller), 328, 330–331
“indecency” debates, 359–361, 437, 465
Independence (Ioor), 63
The Independence of Eddie Rose (Yellow Robe),
415
The Independent Female, Or A Man Has His
Pride, 410
The Indian Princess (Barker), 59, 101, 105
The Indian Prophecy (Custis), 151
Indian Radio Days (Howe and Gordon), 494
Indian Removal Policy. See under Native
Americans
Indians. See Native Americans
Inge, William, 348, 352, 459
Ingomar the Barbarian (Lovell), 117, 125–127
Ingraham, J.H., 116
INDEX 543
Inheritors (Glaspell), 283–284
Inherit the Wind (Lawrence and Lee), 475–476
Injunction Granted, 288
Innaurato, Albert, 463
INTAR Theatre (New York), 429, 491–492
integrated musicals. See under musical drama
The Intellectual Regale (magazine), 118
The Intellectual Regale, or, Lady’s Tea Tray, 358
Interior Scroll (Schneeman), 418
The International (Lawson), 285
International Association for Theatrical Stage
Employees (IATSE), 318
International Ladies Garment Workers Union
(ILGWU), 288
International WOW Company, 420
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (Williams), 352
In the Blood (Parks), 387, 434–435
In the Red and Brown Water (McCraney),
518–519
In the Summer House (Bowles), 428
In the Wake (Kron), 463
Intimate Apparel (Nottage), 214, 434
In White America (Duberman), 412
Ionesco, Eugène, 473, 477
Ioor, William, 63
Ira Aldridge Players, 313
Iraq War
Iraq Veterans Against the War, 421
theatre in opposition to, 13, 411, 420–422,
473, 480–481
Ireland, Joseph, 118
Irene, 197
Irish characters and themes in antebellum era
drama, 5, 101, 105–106, 108, 166
Irish immigrants
in American theatre, 103, 105–106, 108–109
blackface minstrelsy and, 82, 225
Irish Famine and, 98
O’Neill on, 256
urban concentrations of, 107
violence against, 108–109
The Irish Shield (newspaper), 105
Irving, Washington, 109
Isham, John W., 229
Isn’t It Romantic? (Wasserstein), 433
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, theatrical
representations of, 411, 470–471, 480
544 INDEX

It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis), 290–291 Jolson, Al, 197–198

It’s All Right to Be Woman Theatre, 430 Jonas (Greenspan), 517
Ivanhoe (Scott), 103, 111n3 Jonathan in England, 82, 101
Ives, Alice, 210 Jones, Cherry, 465
Jones, Hugh, 18
Jack (Greenspan), 516–517 Jones, James Early, 383
Jack, Sam T., 229 Jones, John Bush, 396–397, 401, 404
Jack Cade, or, The Captain of the Commons, 77 Jones, J(oseph). S(tevens)., 153, 154
Jackson, Andrew Jones, J.S., 153–154
Black Hawk War and, 152 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri
Indian Removal policies of, 102 Jones, Margo, 341
melodramatic style and, 69 Jones, Robert Edmond, 235–236, 246
populist campaigning style of, 100–101 José, Can You See? (Sandoval-Sánchez), 493
Jamaica journeyman (house) playwrights, 153–154,
colonial era theatre in, 2, 23, 27, 29–30 156
Slave Revolt of 1831 in, 121 Jubilee, 199
James, Henry, 175–178, 266, 500 Judah, Samuel B.H., 104
Jameson, Fredric, 446–447 The Judge; or, A Drama of American Life
Jamestown (Virginia), 2, 59 (Hale), 118, 125, 127
Janis, Elise, 198 Judgment Day (Elmer Rice), 291
Jarry, Alfred, 358 Judson, E. Z. C., 70, 109
Jean Cocteau Repertory Company, 353 Jullien, Jean, 268
Jefferson, Thomas, 25–26, 30, 292 Jumbo, 199
Jeffrey (Rudnick), 464 Jusová, Iveta, 212
Jenkins, Linda Walsh, 417
Jerrold, Douglass, 138, 160 Kahn, Otto, 275
Jesurun, John, 14, 453–454 Kairisah; or, The Warrior or Wanachtithi
Jewish characters in antebellum drama, 5, (Medina), 102
103–105, 111nn2–3 Kaiser, Georg, 244
Jewish immigrants Kanin, Fay, 427–428
in American theatre, 100, 103–104, 110 Kanin, Garson, 324
anti-Semitism and, 103 Kate Valk (Brace Up! character), 372–373
blackface minstrelsy and, 82 Kauffmann, Stanley, 352
Jim Crow character (blackface minstrelsy), 81, Kaufman, George S., 289
85–86, 89–90, 92, 154, 224 Kaufman, Moisés, 419, 466
Joanna of Naples (Hall), 120, 127 Kazan, Elia, 332–333, 341
Johnny Comes Marching Home (Bread and Kean, Thomas, 19–21
Puppet Theatre), 411 Keene, Laura, 116–117, 204
Johnny Johnson (Green), 199, 286, 291 Kelly, Gene, 200
Johnson, Charles (author of The Middle Kelly, Katherine, 8
Passage), 385 Kennedy, Adrienne, 381, 384, 428–429, 448–449
Johnson, Charles S. (National Urban League), Kent, Assunta, 429
310 Kenton, Edna, 237, 244, 246
Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 11, 309, 311–313, Kermode, Frank, 503, 508
316 Kern, Jerome, 195, 197–199, 392, 396
Johnson, Lyndon B., 486 Kerr, Walter, 351
Johnson, Odai, 3–4 Keteltas, Caroline, 120
Johnson, Samuel M., qq Key Largo (Maxwell Anderson), 292

Kicking A Dead Horse (Shepard),
480–481
The Killing of Sister George (Marcus), 459
Kimball, Moses, 130, 144
King, Woodie, 380, 383, 432
The King and I (Rodgers and Hammerstein),
189, 193–194, 403
King Hedley II (August Wilson), 386
King Lear (Shakespeare), 76
Kingsley, Sidney, 286, 292, 302
Kinky Boots (Fierstein and Lauper), 467
Kinsey, Alfred, 458
Kipnis, Laura, 427
Kirle, Bruce, 397–399, 404
Kislan, Richard, 394, 399
Kiss Me, Kate, 201, 323, 397
Klein, Charles, 165
Klein, Stacy, 358
Knapp, Raymond, 393, 395, 402
Kneass, Nelson, 87
Knot Holes (Bodenheim), 243
Know Nothing Party, 107–109, 114
Kolin, Philip C., 352
Kopit, Arthur, 14, 448
Kornfeld, Paul, 273
Kramer, Larry, 419, 464, 477
Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett), 481
Kreitzer, Carson, 438
Kreymborg, Alfred, 242–243
Krigwa Players, 311, 313–314
Kritzer, Amelia, 5–6, 63
Kron, Lisa, 436, 462–463
Krutch, Joseph Wood, 160
Kuhns, David, 272
Ku Klux Klan, 412
Kurahashi, Yuko, 490
Kushner, Tony
Afghanistan themes and, 420
LGBT and AIDS themes of, 419,
465–466, 477
on O’Neill, 261–262
on political drama, 470
labor movement, violence against, 287, 289.
See also political drama, labor movement
themes in
La Cage aux Folles (Fierstein and Herman),
419, 463
INDEX 545
La Carpa de los Rasquachis (El Teatro
Campesino), 368, 415
Ladies of Castile (Warren), 51
Lady, Be Good!, 197
The Lady Dick (Holly Hughes), 462
Lady in the Dark, 200
The Lady of Larkspur Lotion (Williams), 347
Lafayette Players, 10, 308, 314
La Fitte; or, The Pirate of the Gulf (Barnes
Conner), 116
LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club, 460,
463, 489
L’Amant Militaire (Holden), 410
Lamorah; or, The Western Wild (Hentz), 119,
125–127
Lane, Jill, 83–84
Lane, Nathan, 464
Langner, Lawrence, 236–237, 258
A Language of Their Own (Yew), 466
L’aprés-midi d’un faune (Diaghilev), 241
The Laramie Project (Kaufman),
419–420, 466
Larson, Jonathan, 419, 464
Lashin, Orrie, 297
La Sonnambula (Bellini), 83
The Last Days of Pompeii (Medina), 116, 125
The Last of the Plantaganets (Ketltas), 120
Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (Chambers), 462
Latino drama, 478, 495. See also Chicano/
Chicana drama; Puerto Rican drama
Laughing Gas (Dreiser), 273–274
Laurents, Arthur, 402
“Laurey Makes Up Her Mind,” 200
Lavender Cellar (theatre company), 462
Lavery, Emmet, 303–304
Lawrence, Jerome, 475–476
Lawson, John Howard
anti-capitalist themes of, 284–287
expressionism and, 272–273, 276
labor movement themes and, 286–287
leftist politics of, 10, 286
radical aesthetics and, 276, 474
screenwriting career of, 276
Lazarus Laughed (O’Neill), 253–254
Lea, Marion, 205
Leacock, John, 38–40, 52
League of Professional Theatre Women, 439
League of Resident Theatres (LORT), 492
546 INDEX
Leave It to Jane, 195
Leave It to Me!, 199
LeCompte, Elizabeth, 353, 358, 372–373
lectern readings, 89, 91, 511–514
Lecture on Heads (Stevens), 27
Lee, Canada, 305, 319, 377
Lee, Charles, 40
Lee, Esther Kim, 497
Lee, Gypsy Rose, 402–403
Lee, Josephine, 493
Lee, Robert E., 475–476
Legacy of Cain (Living Theatre production),
410
Legally Blonde (musical), 403
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 452, 520n4
Leisler’s Revolt, 123
Lemierre, Antoine-Marin, 56
Lenkiewicz, Rebecca, 214
Leonora or The World’s Own (Howe), 119,
123–124, 127
Lepore, Jill, 102
Lerner, Gerda, 121
lesbian drama. See also LGBT theatre;
sexuality themes in American drama
comedy and, 436–437, 462–463
critiques of, 462
feminist drama and, 435–437, 462
heterosexual parodies and, 419, 436, 462
lesbian theatre companies and, 462
Off- and Off-Off-Broadway productions
of, 465
Lesbians Who Kill (Split Britches), 462
Les Misérables (Boublil and Schönberg), 401
The Lesson (Ionesco), 477
Let Freedom Ring (Bein), 288
Let’s Face It!, 200
Letters Home (Goldemberg), 418
Letts, Tracy, 446, 506–507
Levin, Ira, 463
Levine, Lawrence, 76
Levingston, William, 17–18
Levy, Carolyn, 418
Lewis, Eliza Gabriella, 120, 125
Lewis, Sinclair, 290–291
Leyba, Claire, 318
LGBT drama. See also homosexuality; lesbian
drama
African American playwrights and themes
in, 460–461, 466–467
AIDS themes and, 463–464
assimilation versus queer identity in,
455–456
Black Arts movement and, 460
camp genre and, 460, 463
censorship against, 456–457, 461, 467
Chicano/Chicana themes and characters in,
466, 495
commercial viability of, 461–463
drag performance and, 419, 456, 460, 463,
467
gay liberation themes and, 461–464
mainstreaming of, 464–468
Off- and Off-Off-Broadway productions of,
459–461, 464–466
racial and ethnic minority characters in,
466–467
realism and, 465–466
Stonewall riots and, 14, 461
transgender characters and themes, 467
transsexual characters and themes in, 368,
463
Lhamon, Jr., W.T., 82–85, 154
Liberal Club (Greenwich Village), 234–236
Liberty Deferred (Silvera and Hill), 303–304
The Liberty Tree or Boston Boys, 101
Libin, Paul, 345
Licensing Act of 1737 (England), 19, 219–220
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
(Sterne), 520n2
Life Begins at 8:40, 199
Life in America (Rede), 5, 85–86
Life in the Iron Mills (Davis), 142
Life with Father, 323
Light, James, 243, 246
Ligon, Glenn, 385
Lilith, 430
Lima Beans (Kreymborg), 242–243
Lin, Maya, 495
Lincoln, Abraham, 110, 299–300, 387–388
Lincoln Players, 314
Lincoln Theatre (New York), 377
Lindsay, Howard, 323–324
Linonian Society, 27–28
The Lion and Mouse (Klein), 165
 INDEX 547

The Lion King (musical), 401, 426 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 358, 514
The Lion of the West; or, The Kentuckian Los Dos Caras del Patroncito (El Teatro
(Paulding), 150–152 Campesino), 414
The Lisbon Traviata (McNally), 464 Lost!, or, The Fruits of the Glass: A Temperance
Little, Sophia Robbins, 121, 127 Drama in Three Acts, 138
Little, Stuart, 345–346 Lost in the Stars, 201
Little Eyolf (Ibsen), 180 Los Vendidos (Valdez), 415, 489
Little Flags, 418 Lott, Eric, 82
Little Johnny Jones, 194 Loud Speaker (Lawson), 285
Little Katy, The Hot Corn Girl, 154 Louisiana Purchase, 200
Little Negro Theatre Movement, 10, 309, Love and Friendship or Yankee Notions, 101
312–314 Love Life, 201
Little Nellie Kelly, 197 Lovell, Maria, 117
Little Renaissance, 235–236, 245 Love! Valour! Compassion! (McNally), 464,
The Little Show, 197 466
Little Theatre Movement, 178, 234–236, 282 Low, Samuel, 53
A Live Woman in the Mines (Delano), 152 Loy, Mina, 242
Living Newspapers. See under Federal Theatre Lucas, Craig, 464
Project (FTP) Lucas, Sam, 219, 224–226, 229
Living Out (Loomer), 438 “Lucy Neal,” 83
Livingston, Myrtle Smith, 311 Ludlam, Charles, 460
Living Theatre, 12–13, 357–358, 361, 409–410 Ludlow, Noah, 101
local color Ludlum, Charles, 419
in American Revolutionary Era Lukács, Georg, 271
productions, 43 Luna, James, 422
frontier drama and, 150 “Lynchotopia” (Liberty Deferred scene),
naturalism and, 184, 267, 276–277 303–304
Locke, Alain, 282, 309, 311 Lysistrata (Aristophanes), 305, 421
Loman, Willy. See under Death of a Salesman
(Miller) Mabou Mines, 358
The London Merchant (Lillo), 46 Macaulay, Catherine, 44
Long, Huey, 299 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 316
The Long Christmas Ride Home (Vogel), 465 Macbeth, Robert, 382
Long Day’s Journey Into Night (O’Neill) MacBird! (Garson), 416
addiction themes in, 258–259 Macgowan, Kenneth, 246, 275
autobiographical aspects of, 249–250, 258 Machado, Eduardo, 495
Broadway debut of, 346 Machinal (Treadwell), 14, 273, 285, 442
hopelessness and victimhood themes in, Machiz, Herbert, 346
258–259 Mackaye, Percy, 236
modern drama versus melodrama MacKinnon, Pam, 426
arguments regarding, 161 Mackintosh, Cameron, 400
O’Neill’s wishes regarding production of, Macklin, Charles, 19
262n1 Macready, William Charles, 70–71
Tyrone family characters in, 258–259 Madame Sherry, 195
Long Voyage Home (O’Neill), 250–251 The Madness of Lady Bright (Lanford Wilson),
Loomer, Lisa, 438 349, 460
Loot (Orton), 459 Maedchen in Uniform, 436
548 INDEX

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 164 Martinez, Rogelio, 495

“Maggie Murphy’s Home,” 191 Marx, Karl, 265
Magic Theatre (Omaha), 431 Marx Brothers, 254
Magwili, Dom, 497 Marxism, 236, 286, 326, 334
Mahar, William, 83–84 Maryland
Mailer, Norman, 346 colonial era theatre in, 21, 24–26
Maine Law (1851), 79 Revolutionary era theatre in, 45
Major Jack Downing (antebellum character), masculinity
77–78 African American drama and, 378–380, 383
Mako, 497 blackface minstrelsy and, 82, 223
Malina, Judith, 357–358, 409–410 racial identity and, 98
Malone, Patrick, 22–23 in temperance dramas, 6, 132, 144–146
Malthus, Thomas, 265 Vietnam War dramas and, 476
Maltz, Albert, 287–288, 291 Mason, Jeffrey, 11, 141–142
Mamet, David Masonic Hall (New York), 152
new realism and, 352 Massachusetts
technology themes and, 14, 445–446 colonial era theatre in, 2, 18, 28
Mamma Mia! (musical), 402–403 Revolutionary era theatre in, 41–43
The Mammy Project (Matlock), 438 The Massachusetts Spy (newspaper), 34
Manhattan Theatre Club, 464 The Masses (newspaper), 234–236, 286
Mann, Ted, 345 Mast, Gerald, 393, 396, 400
The Man of the Times; or, A Scarcity of Cash The Master Builder (Ibsen), 182
(Beete), 62–63 Matlock, Michelle, 438
A Man Says Goodbye to his Mother (Bread and Mattachine Society, 458–459, 467
Puppet Theatre), 411 Maxwell, Richard, 451
A Man’s World (Crothers), 7–8, 186–187, 282 May-Day in Town (Tyler), 54
Manzor, Lillian, 495 Mayer, Oliver, 497
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (August Wilson), Mayo, Lisa, 431
385, 466 M. Butterfly (Hwang), 466, 493
Marans, Jon, 467 McAllister, Marvin, 8
Marble, Danforth, 77, 101 McCarran-Walter Act, 485–486
Marching Song (Lawson), 285–287 McCarthy, Mary, 257
Marco Millions (O’Neill), 253, 256, 285–286 McCarthyism, 344, 350
Marcus, Frank, 459 McClendon, Rose, 308, 313–314, 316
Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet (McCraney), McConachie, Bruce A., 140, 165–166
514–515, 519–520 McCord, Louisa, 121
Margaret Fleming (Herne) McCraney, Tarell Alvin, 389, 466, 507,
commercial failure of, 177–178 514–516, 518–520
realism and, 7, 178–179, 181, 238 McGinley, Paige, 505, 520n4
Margolin, Deb, 436, 462 McIver, Raphael, 315
Marin, John, 235 McLuhan, Marshall, 453
Markoe, Peter, 46 McMillin, Scott, 395
Marrero, Maria Teresa, 495 McNally, Terrence, 464–466, 477
Marriott, Sarah, 61 McNeil, Claudia, 379
Martin, Helen, 319 A Medal for Willie (Branch), 12, 378
Martin, Scott, 5, 144–145 Medina, Louisa, 102–103, 115–116, 123–124,
Martin, Ted, 313 152–153

Meek Mose (Frank Wilson), 313, 316
Meer, Sarah, 5
melodrama
“10–20-30” theatre circuit and, 159,
163–168
in the antebellum period, 5, 67–72, 75,
78–79, 115, 122–124, 130–131
“Bowery excess” and, 162–165, 169–170
“Broadway reserve” and, 162, 165–170
criticisms of, 132, 143, 159–160, 162–164
culture of sentiment and, 132,
141–143, 145
detached spectatorship and, 164
in England, 220
escapist themes in, 80, 165
family relationship themes in, 127
middle-class identity formation and,
165–166
naturalism and, 163
New Woman theatre and, 211, 213
patriotic themes and, 71–73
performance techniques and, 167–170
popularity of, 143
realism and, 7, 144, 161, 163, 166–168, 170,
175–176, 180, 182–183, 185
rhetoric of, 159–162
self-control themes in, 140
social reform themes and, 6, 80
temperance themes and, 78–79, 136,
138–141, 144–146
threats to bodily integrity in, 139
urban themes and, 127, 133, 162–166
virtues of, 162
women’s powerlessness motif in, 122–124,
133
as worldview and mode of cultural
discourse, 69, 131–132, 136–137, 141
Yankee characters in, 138–139, 142
Memoirs (Williams), 353
Menander, 181
Mendéz v. Westminster, 485
Men in White (Kingsley), 286
The Mercenary Match (Bidwell), 46
mercy (Monk and Hamilton), 500–502
Merrick, David, 402
The Merry Widow, 193, 195
Meserve, Walter J., 150, 154, 156
INDEX 549
Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags
(John Augustus Stone)
commercial success of, 102
Forrest and, 5, 60, 69–70, 72, 102, 151
negative audience reaction to, 78
The Method Gun (Rude Mechanicals), 505
Mexican Hayride, 200
Mexicans. See Chicano drama
The Mexterminator (Gómez-Peña), 368–369
M’Henry, Dr., 102–103
Mickery Workshop (Netherlands), 371
Middletown (Eno), 508
Mielziner, Jo, 341
Miesel, Martin, 473
Miguel, Gloria, 431
Miguel, Muriel, 13, 431, 438
The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), 192–193,
201, 305, 317
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 9, 238, 242–243, 283
Miller, Arthur. See also specific works
Broadway and, 322–324, 327
class and capitalism themes of, 325–327,
444, 471
“common good” themes of, 292–293
criticisms of, 471
on evil, 337
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and, 11,
338n2
government in plays of, 327, 331–333,
335–336
Great Depression and, 324–326
guilt in plays of, 329–331
homosexuality themes and, 458
HUAC and, 322, 330–333, 471, 474–475
individuality themes in plays of, 11, 328,
329–330, 336–337
leftist politics and, 11, 322, 325–326, 328,
330–334
moral questions in plays of, 325, 328–329,
337
oppression themes in plays of, 327–328
poetic realism and, 341
political drama and, 14, 322, 324–325,
336–337, 470–471, 481
on stock market crash of 1929, 325
subjective realism and, 264
technology themes and, 441–442, 444
550 INDEX

Miller, Arthur. (Cont.) A Moon for the Misbegotten (O’Neill), 9, 249,

on Tennessee Williams, 340–341 259–261, 504
at University of Michigan, 325–326 The Moon of the Caribbees (O’Neill), 238, 251
World War II and, 325–326, 328 Moos, Herman M., 105
Miller, J. Hillis, 502 Moraga, Cherrie, 417, 434–435, 466, 479, 495
Miller, May, 309, 311–313 Mordden, Ethan, 398
Miller, Scott, 393, 404 More Stately Mansions (O’Neill), 262n3
Miller, Tice L., 102 Morgan, Frank, 199
Miller, Tim, 360, 420, 465 Morrison, Toni, 385
Milligan, Andy, 348–349 Morrissey, Paul, 353
Mills, Mister, 27 Morse, Wolson, 193
Milner, Ron, 383, 478 Mortara; or, The Pope and His Inquisitors
Mine Eyes Have Seen (Dunbar-Nelson), 312 (Moos), 105
The Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Morton, Carlos, 118, 478
Barrel, 410 Mose (“Bowery B’hoy”), 6, 110, 118, 154–155
minstrelsy. See blackface minstrelsy Moses, Gilbert, 412
Mississippi Rainbow, 317 Moses, Montrose, 161–163, 168
Miss Julie (Strindberg), 238 Most, Andrea, 396, 401–402
Miss Lulu Bett (Gale), 282, 310 Mother Courage (Brecht), 434, 481–482
Miss Saigon, 452 The Motion of History (Baraka), 413
Mister Roberts, 323 The Motley Assembly, 43–44
Mitchell, Abbie, 315 Mourning Becomes Electra (O’Neill), 253–255
Mitchell, John Cameron, 467 A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White
Mlle. Modiste (Herbert and Blossom), (Kennedy), 429, 448–449
194–195 Mowatt, Anna Cora, 6, 107, 115, 117, 125–127
modernism Moy, James, 493
naturalism and, 265, 276 Moynihan Report, 379
Provincetown Players and, 8, 235, 241–246 Mr. Smith Goes to Obscuristan, 411
realism and, 242 Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Shaw), 175, 238
sexuality and, 242–243 Mud (Fornés), 429–430
World War I and, 243 Mulatto (Langston Hughes), 283, 308, 314
modernity Mule Bone (Huston and Hughes), 314
expressionism and, 274–275 Mullen, Mark, 6, 69
realism and, 174–175 Mulligan, John, 88
“The Modern Theatre Is The Epic Theatre” Mulligan Guard Musicals, 191–192
(Brecht), 472 The Mulligan Guard’s Picnic, 191
Moffitt, John C., 290 The Mummified Deer (Valdez), 415
Mohica, Monique, 415 Münch-Bellinghausen, Baron von, 117
Moise, Nina, 238 Munford, Robert, 32, 42–44
Molière, 181 Murder in the Cathedral, 298
Monk, Meredith, 500–502, 505, 510 Murdock, John, 61–62, 218
Monroe, James, 151 Murphy, Brenda, 8–9, 176–177, 266
Monterrey, Carlotta, 262n1 Murray, John (Lord Dunmore), 39
Montgomery, David, 194–195 Murray, Judith Sargent, 51, 61, 121
Montgomery, Richard, 39–42 Murray, Walter, 19–21
Moody, Jane, 220 Murray-Kean Company, 19–21
Moody, John, 23 Muse, Clarence, 308

musical drama
African American characters and themes
in, 200, 224–226, 228–229
anxiety regarding viability of,
392–393, 404
audiences for, 191, 201
ballad opera and, 226
book musicals and, 12, 198, 394–398, 402
Broadway and, 12–13, 189–201, 392–405,
452
comedy and, 194–195, 197
commercial success and, 392, 402–403
concept musicals and, 201, 398–400
earliest forms of, 190–191
“golden age” of, 8, 12, 189–190, 196–201,
392–398, 402–405
importance of female characters
in, 397
integrated musicals and, 8, 12, 394–396,
398–399, 402, 412
jukebox musicals and, 402–403
mass culture and, 394
megamusicals and, 400–402, 405
movicals and, 402–403
musical plays and, 198
musical revues and, 196–199
narrative structure in, 397
Off-Broadway productions and, 399
opera and, 402
operettas and, 192–195, 200
post-World War II period and, 392–405
realism in, 396–398
socially conscious plots in, 397, 399
spectacle and, 191, 194, 398, 401–402, 452
stage directions and, 398
use of technology in, 401, 452
vaudeville and, 191–192
Music Box Revues, 198
Music in the Air, 199
MuSoLit (Washington, DC), 313
My Name Is Rachel Corrie, 480
The Myopia (Greenspan), 515–516
Myrdal, Gunner, 486
Myself Bettina (Crothers), 208
Mysteries and Smaller Pieces (Living Theatre),
358
The Mystery of Irma Vep (Ludlum), 460
INDEX 551
NAACP (National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People), 283,
303, 309–310
Nachtrieb, Peter Sinn, 467
nakedness in performance, 360–363, 365, 418
The Nance (Beane), 467
Narration (Stein), 503
The Narrative of William W. Brown, 222
Nathan, George Jean, 344
Nathans, Heather, 3
Nation, Carrie, 131, 145–146
National Black Theatre, 382
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
budget battles regarding, 360, 364–365, 465
censorship and, 360
ethnic theatre groups and, 491
experimental theatre and, 359–362, 420
“NEA Four” and, 360–361, 420, 437, 465
Nixon’s funding for, 491
Supreme Court case regarding, 360
National Era (magazine), 86
National Negro Congress, 303
National Service Bureau, 303
National Theatre (Boston), 153
National Theatre (New York), 88, 116, 140
National Theatre (Washington), 151
National Urban League, 310, 378
Native American drama. See also Native
American dramatic characters
feminist drama and, 431, 438
intra-ethic critique and, 490–491
Native American epistemology and, 490–491
Native American theatre companies
and, 489
protest drama and, 13, 415, 422
Native American dramatic characters. See also
Native American drama
in American Revolutionary era, 39
in antebellum era drama, 5–6, 68, 78,
101–103, 119, 126, 149–153, 157, 221,
230–232
as “doomed savages,” 59
in early republican era drama, 58–60
in experimental theatre, 357, 367–369
experimental theatre’s depiction of, 357,
367–369
as “noble savages,” 59, 78, 102
552 INDEX
Native Americans
antebellum performances by, 151–152
Indian Removal Policy and, 5–6, 78, 102,
151–153
Native American Theater Ensemble (NATE),
15, 489–490
native dramatic art, 248
Native Son (novel by Richard Wright), 377
Native Son (play based on Richard Wright
novel), 283, 305, 377, 379
Nat Turner (Edmonds), 315
naturalism
antiheroes and, 266, 269–270, 276
bourgeois aesthetics and, 269, 276
cultural turn in, 268
Darwinian thought and, 269
destabilization of, 351–352
double representation function and,
267–268
Dreiser and, 9, 266, 270, 273–274
European origins of, 265–266
expressionism and, 9, 271
local color and, 184, 267, 276–277
melodrama and, 163
modernism and, 265, 276
the novel and, 266, 268
O’Neill and, 7, 9, 250, 256, 268
radical aesthetics and, 271, 277
realism and, 9, 264–270
rejection of Enlightenment thought and,
265, 267
scenic detail and, 264–265, 267–270
“slice of life” and, 268, 270, 276
sociological forces’ impact on human
agency and, 264–266, 269–271, 273–274,
276
working-class characters and, 9, 267, 270
Naturalism in the Theatre (Zola), 265
Natural Man (Theodore Browne), 10, 305
Nature Theater of Oklahoma, 15, 506
Naughty Marietta (Herbert), 195
“NEA Four,” 360–361, 420, 437, 465
Neal, John, 77–78
Neal, Larry, 478
Negro Art Theatre, 313–314
Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), 319, 380,
382–383
Negro History in Thirteen Plays, 309
Negro Intercollegiate Dramatic Association,
315
Negro Playwrights Theatre (New York), 377
Negro Units. See under Federal Theatre
Project (FTP)
Neighbor Jackwood (Trowbridge), 94, 108
New American Company, 27
“The New Aspect of the Woman Question”
(Grand), 203
New Georges (theatre company), 420,
438–439
New Hampshire, colonial era theatre in, 27
New Lafayette Theatre (Harlem), 380, 382
New London (Connecticut), 249
The New Moon, 197
New Negro drama (interwar period), 282–283
New Negro Man, 204
New Negro Woman. See under New Woman
drama
Newport (Rhode Island), 25
new realism. See under realism
New Woman
afterlife and legacy of, 213–214
“American Girl” and, 203
in China, 213
class identity issues and, 203–204
as dramatic author, 206–208
dramatic depictions of, 204–208, 211, 214,
282
and Empire, 212
in England, 204–210, 212, 215
feminism and, 207, 212–215
“Gibson Girl” and, 203
Ibsenite version of, 204–206, 211
independent-minded characters and,
8, 206
in Korea, 213
“marriage trade” and, 207–209, 211
melodrama and, 211, 213
New Negro Woman and, 204, 210, 212, 214
notions of women’s service and, 203, 211
Punch magazine illustrations and, 213
realist drama and, 205, 208
recent scholarly approaches to, 212–213
sexuality and, 212–213, 215
stage parody and, 209

as suffragist/suffragette, 203, 209–211,
213–215
as theatre producer and director, 205,
208–209
as theatre spectator, 204–205, 209
versus “Victorian True Woman,” 203, 212
women’s appearance and, 203
The New Woman (Grundy), 209
The New Woman and the Empire (Jusová),
212
New Woman Strategies (Heilmann), 212
The New World (Read), 118, 123
New York City. See also The Bowery;
Broadway; Greenwich Village; Harlem
Astor Place Riot (1849) in, 70–71, 83
colonial era theatre in, 17–20, 22, 24–26,
28–29
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in, 316
revolutionary era theatre in, 45, 47
The New Yorkers, 199
Nichols, Harold J., 149
Nickel and Dimed (Holden), 438
Nick of the Woods; or, Telie, the Renegade’s
Daughter (Medina), 116, 125, 152
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 245, 265
The Nigger (Sheldon), 185, 310
‘night, Mother (Norman), 433
Night of the Auk (Oboler), 447
Nixon, Richard, 491
No, No, Nanette, 197, 201
Noah, Mordecai, 100–101, 104
No Dice (Nature Theater of Oklahoma), 506
No Exit (Sartre), 459
No Go the Bogeyman (Marina Warner), 501
NoPassport Press, 497
Nordfeldt, Brör, 235, 237–238, 241
Nordfeldt, Margaret, 237–238
Norford, George, 316
The Normal Heart (Kramer), 419, 464, 477
Norman, Marsha, 13, 352, 433–434, 479
Norris, Bruce, 379
Norris, Frank, 266
Norris-La Guardia Act, 338n9
North Carolina, colonial era theatre in, 27
No Time for Comedy (Behrman), 292
Not in My Name (Living Theatre), 410
Not in Our Name, 420
INDEX 553
Nottage, Lynn, 14, 214, 425–426, 434, 465,
481–482
Novak, Robert, 362
No Villain (Miller), 325
Nuñez, Alejandra, 415
Nurnberg, Maxwell, 298–299
Nuyorican playwrights, 495
Oakland Gardens (Boston), 225
Obama, Barack, 375, 389
Obi, 85
Oboler, Arch, 447
O’Brien, Joe, 235
O’Casey, Seán, 327–328, 481
Octavia Bragaldi (Barnes Conner), 116, 123,
125, 127
The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana
(Boucicault)
blackface minstrelsy elements in, 94
pro- and anti-slavery readings of, 79, 471
Yankee character in, 108
The Odd Women (Gissing), 213
Odell, George C.D., 117–119, 150, 152
Odets, Clifford
agitational-propaganda dramatic elements
and, 287, 474
anti-capitalism themes of, 297
Communist Party and, 286
labor themes of, 11, 287, 293, 326–327, 408,
474–475
on political drama, 280
realism and, 173, 175–176
Oedipus at Palm Springs (WOW), 462
Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theatre
African American drama and, 320, 382
anti-war mobilization and, 420–421
feminist drama and, 428–429, 431
in Greenwich Village, 345–347, 459–460
of LGBT drama, 459–461, 464–466
musical drama and, 201
O’Neill and, 346–347
Theatre of the Absurd and, 347
Williams and, 11, 341, 345, 347–349, 353,
459
Offenbach, Jacques, 191–192
Of Thee I Sing (George & Ira Gershwin), 193,
199–200
554 INDEX
Oh, Boy!, 195
Oh, Kay!, 197
Oh, Lady! Lady!!, 195
Oh, the Humanity and other good intentions
(Eno), 508
“Oh, Promise Me,” 194
O’Hara, John, 200
Oh Hush! or, The Virginny Cupids!, 84
O’Keefe, John, 55
Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein)
commercial success of, 323, 402
seminal influence of, 198, 200–201, 392,
394–397
The Old American Company. See The
American Company
“Old Kentucky Home,” 226, 229
Old New York; or, Democracy in 1689
(Elizabeth Oakes Smith), 119, 123–125
Oliver, Peter, 35
Oliver Winemiller (Williams character in
“One Arm”), 347–350
O’Neal, Frederick, 305, 318–319
O’Neal, John, 412
“One Arm” (Williams), 348–350, 353
O’Neill, Eugene. See also specific works
African American characters and themes
of, 245, 309
alcoholism themes and, 9, 256–257
“A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed”
(play cycle), 256
autobiographically oriented dramas of,
249–250, 255–256, 258
Baker and, 184
Broadway productions of, 346
capitalism and class themes of, 252–253,
256, 281, 285–286
commercial success of, 9, 238, 246, 251–252
destiny themes and, 251–252
drama of souls and, 253
European realists and, 173, 238–239, 261
experimentalism of, 9, 251–254, 259
Experimental Theatre, Inc. (ETI) and, 246
expressionism and, 244–245, 252, 272–273
family themes and, 250–251, 253, 255–256,
258–261
Freudian unconscious and, 254
Greek tragedy and, 253–254
“hopeless hope” and, 248–249, 255, 258
on human condition, 252–253, 256–258
humor and comedy of, 255, 260
imaginative theatre and, 253
Irish themes and, 256
ironic fate and, 250–251, 260
Kushner on, 261–262
“life lie” theme and, 257–258
masks and, 253–254
narrative technique and, 504
naturalism and, 7, 9, 250, 256, 268
Nobel Prize and, 255
Off-Broadway productions of, 346–347
one-act plays of, 250–251
Provincetown Players and, 8–9, 237–238,
244, 246, 248
Pulitzer Prizes and, 249, 252, 254
racial themes and, 252–253, 283
realism and, 7, 9, 160, 173–174, 184–185,
239, 241, 249–253, 255–256, 258
realism versus melodrama debates
regarding, 161–162
suicide attempt of, 249–250
Tao House and, 255–257
Theatre of the Absurd and, 261
tuberculosis and, 9, 173, 249–250
O’Neill, James, 251, 256
O’Neill, Jamie, 260
One-Third of a Nation, 297, 300–302, 304
One Touch of Venus, 200
On Striver’s Row (Abram Hill), 305, 319
On The Town, 200
Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, 358
On Whitman Avenue, 305
On Your Toes, 199–200
Open Theatre, 357, 416, 430
opera, 402, 492
“Operation First Casualty” (Iraq Veterans
against the War), 421
Operation Rapid American Withdrawal
(Vietnam Veterans Against War),
416–417
Opportunity magazine, 310–311
Ordway’s Aeolians (Boston), 88
The Oresteia (Aeschylus), 181, 254
Original Georgia Minstrels, 225
Ormond Grosvenor (Hale), 118

Ortiz, Fernando, 493
Orton, Joe, 459
Osborne, John, 459
Ossawatomie Brown; or, The Insurrection at
Harper’s Ferry (Swayze), 117, 127
Othello (Shakespeare), 46, 82
Others (magazine), 242
The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS), 461
Otis, James Jr., 34–35
Otis, James Sr., 34
Ourselves (Crothers), 209
Our Town (Wilder), 276, 353
The Outlaw (Eliza Gabriella Lewis), 120, 125
Out of Bondage (Bradford), 8, 219, 224–227,
229
Overtones (Gerstenberg), 273–274, 276
The Owl Answers (Kennedy), 429
The Oxcart (Marqués), 487
Paca, William, 30
The Padlock, 82
Page, Geraldine, 346
Paine, Thomas, 41
Painting Churches (Howe), 433
Pal Joey (O’Hara, Rodgers, and Hart), 200
Panama Hattie, 200
Pan Asian Repertory Theater, 489, 491
Panyared (Allison), 304
Pao, Angela, 497
Papp, Joe, 383, 432
Parade, 288
Paradise Lost (Odets), 287
Paradise Now (Living Theatre), 409
Parke, John, 45
Parks, Suzan-Lori
African American family themes and, 12,
387–388
feminist drama and, 13, 434–435, 439
Kennedy’s influence on, 381
medical discourse themes and, 426, 443
“post-black drama” and, 389
Park Theatre (New York), 117, 119
The Passing Show, 192–193, 196
The Past Is Past (Wesley), 383
Paterson Strike Pageant, 235–236, 408
Patrick, Robert, 347–349, 460, 462
The Patriot, 101
INDEX 555
Patriot Chief (Markoe), 46
A Patriot for Me (Osborne), 459
The Patriots (Kingsley), 292
The Patriots (Munford), 42–43
Patterson, Charles, 413, 478
Patterson, Martha, 212
Patterson, Michael, 271–273
Paulding, James Kirke, 150–151
Paulus, Diane, 426
Payne, John Howard, qq
Peace on Earth (Sklar and Maltz), 291
Peale, Charles Wilson, 25, 30
Peale’s Museum (New York), 152
Peck, Jabez, 52
Peculiar Sam; or the Underground Railroad
(Pauline Hopkins), 8, 219, 225,
227–230
Pederson, Jay, 266, 268
Pelby, William, 119
Pencak, William, 103
Pennsylvania, colonial era theatre in, 18, 22,
24–26, 28
The People’s Lawyer, or Solon Shingle (Jones),
101, 153–154
Pepper, George, 105–106
A Perfect Relationship (Doric Wilson), 462
Perkins, Kathy, 10–11, 496
The Persians (Aeschylus), 471
Peters, Julie Stone, 520n3
Peters, Paul, 283, 288, 338n8
“Peter’s Journey,” 200
Peterson, Louis, 378
Petrified Forest (Sherwood), 290
Phantom of the Opera (Webber), 190, 201, 401
Philadelphia (Pennsylvania)
colonial era theatre in, 18, 22, 24–26, 28
early Republic era theatre in, 57
Revolutionary era theatre in, 44–45
Phillips, Jonas B., 104
The Piano Lesson (August Wilson), 12,
385–387
Pilgrimage (Sakamoto), 497
Piñero, Miguel, 490
Ping Chong & Company, 358, 370–371
The Pink Lady, 195
Pins and Needles, 199, 288
Pinter, Harold, 420
556 INDEX
The Pirates of Penzance (Gilbert and Sullivan),
192
Piscator, Erwin, 286, 409, 452
Pitt, William the Elder, 39
Pizarro (Sheridan), 230
Pizer, Donald, 266, 268
Playhouse of the Ridiculous, 419
“Plays” (Gertrude Stein lecture), 502–503
Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro,
309
Plays of Negro Life, 309
Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural
(Dreiser), 273
Pocahontas, dramatic depictions of, 59, 116,
126, 151–152
Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia (Custis),
101, 151–152, 415
Pocha Nostra, 358, 367
Poe, Edgar Allen, 117
Pogson, Sarah, 57–58, 121
Poitier, Sidney, 305, 319, 378–379
political drama. See also protest drama
absurdism and, 473–474, 481
African Americans and, 282–283, 290
agit-prop and, 408, 413, 474, 477
American international intervention
themes in, 281, 283–284, 292
American political system themes and, 289
anticapitalist themes in, 280–281, 284–286,
288–289, 297–298, 304, 475
anti-Communism themes in, 284
antifascist themes in, 280–281, 290–293
anti-mechanization themes in, 285
antiwar themes in, 280–281, 283–284,
290–291, 476–477, 480–481
Brecht and, 471–473
Broadway’s limitations on, 282
Communist ideological influences in, 286
criticisms of, 14, 470–471, 474
epideictic rhetoric and, 281
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and, 10,
295–302
feminist and women’s issues in, 282, 479,
481–482
intended effects of, 281, 284, 472
labor movement themes and, 10–11,
281, 283, 286–289, 293, 326–327, 408,
474–475
Little Theatre movement and, 282
Marxism and, 286
materialist political theatre and, 472
Miller and, 14, 322, 324–325, 336–337,
470–471, 481
New Woman dramas and, 282
questions of form and, 14, 471–482
race and racial justice themes in, 282–283,
290, 303–304, 475
social justice themes in, 281
vaudeville and, 474
World War I and, 283
World War II and, 292
The Politician Out-Witted (Low), 53
The Politicians (Matthews), 106–107
The Politicians (Murdock), 62
Pomo Afro Homos, 466
The Poor of New York (Boucicault), 155–156,
166
Popular Front, 286, 290, 297–300, 325
Porcelain (Yew), 466
Porgy (Hayward & Hayward), 283, 308, 310
Porgy and Bess (Gershwin), 199–200, 283
pornography, 363, 418, 437
Porter, Cole, 195, 197, 199
Porter, Susan, 3
Portillo-Trambley, Estela, 496
Portsmouth (New Hampshire), 27
postdramatic theatre, 452–453
Postlewait, Thomas, 161
postmodern theory, 452
post-porn satire, 363
Post-Post-Porn Modernist (Annie Sprinkle),
363
Power, 300–301, 302, 304
Power, Tyrone, 106
Powers, Steve, 422
Pratt, William W., 79, 132, 139–144
Prayer Meeting; or, The First Militant Preacher
(Caldwell), 413
Prece, Paul, 400–401
Preer, Evelyn, 308
Pregones, 420, 491
Prida, Dolores, 495
Pride’s Crossing (Howe), 433
Prince Ananias (Herbert), 194
The Princess Marries the Page (Millay), 243
Princess Musicals, 195, 197

Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots
(Mohica), 415
Principia (Greenspan), 517
Processional (Lawson), 285
Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American
Life in Four Acts (Lawson), 474, 476
Proctor, Joseph, 152
The Producers, 192, 403
Prolet-Bühne, 284
Prologue to Glory (Conkle), 299–300
protest drama. See also political drama
African-American drama and, 13, 382,
412–413
anti-capitalist themes in, 13, 421–422
anti-war themes in, 13, 409–411, 416–417
censorship and, 410
Chicano/Chicana drama and, 413–415
civil rights movement and, 13, 410,
412–413
commedia dell’arte style and, 408, 410
counterculture’s influence on, 408, 409–410,
416
ethnicity themes in, 13, 410–411
feminist themes in, 408, 410, 417–419
fourth-wall productions and, 409
gay liberation themes in, 419–420
labor movement themes and, 408
nakedness in performance and, 418
Native American drama and, 13, 415, 422
outdoor performance and, 411
outrageous performances practices and, 13
post-9/11 period and, 420–423
post-World War II period and, 408–423
puppets and, 411
regarding right-wing politics, 410–411
satirical melodrama and, 410–411
social change aspirations of, 423
street theatre and, 408, 410, 416–417, 421
subversive affirmation and, 421–423
women’s suffrage and, 408
Provincetown Players
anarchist and socialist members of, 234
anti-commercial emphasis of, 237
decline of, 246, 345
democratic aspirations of, 237
Glaspell and, 8–9, 234, 238–241, 243, 245–
246, 248, 282–284
INDEX 557
Little Theatre movement and, 234, 236
modernism and, 8, 235, 241–246
naturalism and, 265
O’Neill and, 8–9, 237–238, 244,
246, 248
Paterson Strike Pageant and, 236
realism and, 8, 175, 238–241, 265
Provincetown Playhouse, 235, 284, 459
P.S. 122 (New York City), 465
Psycho Beach Party (Busch), 460
Pterodactyls (Silver), 464
Puchner, Martin, 275, 520n3
Puerto Rican drama, 15, 487, 495
Puerto Rican Travelling Theatre (PRTT), 487,
492
puppets, 411
Purdy, A.H., 88
Putnam, Israel, 38, 40
Putnam, Mary Lowell, 120
queer theory, 455
Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 159–160, 170
Quintero, José, 257, 346, 459
The Quintessence of Ibsenism (Shaw), 239
Rabe, David
new realism and, 352
Vietnam War themes and, 14, 416,
476–477
Rachel (Grimké), 10, 12, 210, 283, 309
Radio Golf (August Wilson), 385–387
Radiohole (theatre company), 505
Rainey, Lawrence, 165, 466
Raisin! (musical), 379
Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry), 12, 379–380,
384, 387, 487
Rancho Hollywood (Morton), 478
Randolph, Peyton, 29–30
Raped: A Woman’s Look at Bertolt Brecht’s The
Exception and the Rule, 418
Rapp, William, 314
Rasch, Albertina, 199
Rashad, Phylicia, 379
Rauh, Ida, 235–238
Read, Henriette Fanning, 118, 123
Reading for the Plot (Brooks), 503
Reagan, Ronald, 359
558 INDEX
realism
versus “art for art’s stake,” 180–181
Bernard Shaw and, 173, 175–176, 238–239
blackface minstrelsy and, 83–84, 87, 90
compared to Theatre of the Absurd, 351
Crothers and, 7, 174, 185–187, 205, 208, 239
definitions of, 174–176
early commercial failure of, 177–178
early proponents of, 176–178
European origins of, 173–175, 238
experimental theatres and, 175
feminist drama and, 427, 432, 435–438, 479
gender themes and, 185–187, 240
Howells and, 7, 161–162, 167, 175–178, 180,
239, 266
Ibsen and, 7–9, 173–176, 179–183, 185, 238
literature and, 176–177
melodrama and, 7, 144, 161, 163, 166–168,
170, 175–176, 180, 182–183, 185
middle-class characters and, 267
modernism and, 242
modernity and, 174–175
morality and, 176–177, 179–180, 182–183,
185–187
musical drama and, 396–398
naturalism and, 9, 264–270
“new realism” and, 352
O’Neill and, 7, 9, 160, 173–174, 184–185,
239, 241, 249–253, 255–256, 258
political drama’s antipathy toward,
473–474, 477
Provincetown Players and, 8, 175, 238–241,
265
romanticism and, 177
socialist realism and, 176
Stowe and, 87–88
Strindberg and, 173–174, 176, 179–180, 238
transcendental realism and, 164
urban themes and, 182–185
Williams and, 264, 340–341, 351
Rebellato, Dan, 265, 269
Reconstruction, 79
Red, Hot, and Blue, 199
Redding, J. Saunders, 227
Red Dyke Theatre (Atlanta), 462
Rede, William Leman, 5, 85
Red Jacket (Sagoyewatha), 152
The Red Mill (Herbert), 195, 198
Red Mother (Muriel Miguel), 438
Redpath Lyceum Bureau (Boston), 224, 226
Reed, John, 234–237, 242
Reeder, Louise, 118
Reinhardt, Max, 275
Rent (Larson), 419, 464
The Responsibilities of the Novelist (Norris),
266
Resurrection Blues (Miller), 481
“Reuben and Cynthia,” 194
Reuther, Walter, 338n9
Reverend Billy, 422
Revolt of the Beavers, 304
Reyes, Guillermo, 495
Rhinoceros Theatre (San Francisco), 419, 461,
467
Rhode Island, colonial era theatre in, 25
Rice, Edward E., 191
Rice, Elmer
anti-capitalist themes and, 284–285, 297,
442
anti-fascist themes and, 291
expressionism and, 271–273
Rice, T.D., 81, 84–85, 88, 154, 224
Richard III (Shakespeare), 120, 221
Richards, Jeffrey, 133, 250
Richards, Lloyd, 379
Richardson, Gary, 167
Richardson, Willis, 309
Richmond Hill Theatre (New York), 118
Ricord, Elizabeth Stryker, 120–121, 127
Ridiculous Theatrical Company, 419, 460
Rinear, David, 154
Rio Rita, 197
Rip Van Winkle (Irving), 109
The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical
(Grant), 392
The Rise of Silas Lapham (Howells), 177
The Rising Glory of America (Brackenridge
and Freneau), 40
The Ritz (McNally), 464
Rivera, Carmen, 495
Rivera, José, 492, 495
The River Niger (Joseph Walker), 383
The Road to Rome (Sherwood), 284
Robbins, Jerome, 121, 402
 INDEX 559

Roberta, 199 Rubin, Jerry, 416

Roberts, Philip, 473 Rude Mechanicals (theatre company), 505
Robeson, Paul, 305, 313, 319, 377 Rudnick, Paul, 464
Robin, Claude, 32–33, 41–42 Rugg, Rebecca, 403
Robin Hood (romantic operetta), 193–194 Ruhl, Sarah, 465
Robins, Elizabeth, 205, 211, 213, 408 Ruined (Nottage), 14, 425–426, 434, 481–482
Robinson, J., 56 Rumsfeld, Donald, 480–481
Robinson, Marc, 15, 170 Rutledge, Ann, 300
Rockefeller Foundation, 488, 492 Ryan, Kate Moira, 467
Rodgers, Richard, 195, 197, 199, 289. See also Ryley, Madeleine Lucette, 204
Rodgers and Hammerstein Ryskind, Morrie, 289
Rodgers and Hammerstein
book musicals and, 395–396 Sacco, Nicola, 280, 290
“golden age” of Broadway musicals and, The Sack of Rome (Warren), 51
323, 392, 394, 396 Said, Edward, 503, 508, 517
seminal influence of, 8, 12, 190, 200, 395– Saint Mark’s Playhouse (New York), 382
396, 398–400, 403–404 Saint Vincent (Caribbean island), 9, 221,
socially conscious plots and, 397 230–231
stage directions and, 398 Sakamoto, Edward, 489, 497
Roediger, David, 82 Salvation Nell (Sheldon), 7, 184–185
Roger Bloomer (Lawson), 273, 285 Sam’s Courtship, 84
Rogin, Michael P., 82 Sanchez, Edwin, 495
Romano, John, 87 Sanchez, Sonia, 413
romanticism, 177, 265 Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto, 493, 495
The Roman Tribute; or, Attila the Hun Sands, Diane, 379
(Elizabeth Oakes Smith), 119, 123, 127 Sands, Emily Glassberg, 425
Romberg, Sigmund, 194–195, 197–198 Sanford, Sam, 87
Romeo and Juliet (Nature Theatre of San Francisco Mime Troupe, 357–359,
Oklahoma production), 506 409–411, 413
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 299, 301, 316, 376 Sans Souci, 43
The Rope (O’Neill), 251 Sara Maria Cornell; or, The Fall River Murder
Rorabaugh, William, 135 (Carr Clarke), 118, 122, 127, 134
Rose-Marie, 197 Sardou, Victorien, 265
The Rose Tattoo (Williams), 349 Saroyan, William, 291
Rosina Meadows, The Village Maid (novel by Sartre, Jean-Paul, 459, 471–472
English), 133 Sasse, Slyvia, 422
Rosina Meadows, The Village Maid (play by Saunders, Charles, 133, 154
Saunders), 133, 154 Savran, David, 326, 352–353, 397, 402, 404,
Rosler, Martha, 418 470–471
Ross, John (African American theatre Saxton, Alexander, 82
professional), 315 Sayler, Oliver, 275
Ross, John (Cherokee Indian advocate), 151 Sayre, Gordon M., 60
Rossini, John, 15 Scandals (White), 196
Roth, Beatrice, 372–373 Schary, Dore, 447–448
Rourke, Constance, 82, 149 Schechner, Richard, 382, 412, 476
Rowson, Susanna Haswell, 57, 59, 121 Schildcrout, Jordan, 14
Royal Court Theatre (London), 470, 480, 511 Schmidman, Jo Ann, 431
560 INDEX
Schneeman, Carolee, 418
Schofield, Scott Turner, 467
Schönberg, Claude-Michel, 400–401
Schopenhauer, Friedrich, 265
Schreiner, Olive, 212
“schrei” style, 272
Schulman, Sarah, 465
Schumann, Peter, 411
Schwartz, Arthur, 199
Scottsboro, Limited (Langston Hughes), 290
Scottsboro trials, 280, 290, 299, 305
Scribe, Eugène, 265
The Seagull (Chekhov), 174
Seattle (Washington), Federal Theatre Project
(FTP) in, 10, 303, 305, 316, 376
Sebree, Charles, 319
Second Great Awakening, 114
Second Party System (antebellum era), 70,
77–79, 100, 106
The Secretaries, 437, 462
Secret History (Chong), 370–371
Secret Service (Gillette), 166–168, 170
Sedgwick, Eve, 455
Segal, Sondra, 431
Seitler, Dana, 269
Selden, Almira, 106
Self (Bateman), 116, 125–126, 155
Self Defense: or Death of Some Salesmen
(Kreitzer), 438
Selmier, Dean, 349
Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, 114,
427
The Sense of an Ending (Kermode), 503
sentiment, culture of, 132, 141–143, 145
Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza
(Churchill), 14, 470, 480
Sewall, Jonathan Mitchell, 37
Sex (1920s Broadway play), 456
sexuality themes in American drama
censorship and, 456
“deviance” themes and, 455–461
drag performers and, 456
experimental theatre and, 12, 360,
362–363
gay liberation and, 461–464
LGBT identities and representation, 14,
455–468
Off- and Off-Off-Broadway productions
and, 464–465
queer theory and, 455
Wales Padlock Law and, 456
Shadow of a Man (Moraga), 479
Shaffer, Jason, 3–4, 54
Shairp, Mordaunt, 456
Shakespeare, William
African American performances of, 220–
221, 230, 316–317
antebellum American performances of, 76
Bloom on, 181
burlesque performances of, 190
colonial American performances of, 2,
21–22, 28, 33
dramatic depictions of, 472–473
Nature Theatre of Oklahoma production
of, 506
Shange, Ntozake, 383–384, 413, 417, 432, 473
Shank, Theodore, 11–12
Shaplin, Adriano, 446–447
Shaw, George Bernard
dialectical dramatic elements and, 186
female characters of, 204
realism and, 173, 175–176, 238–239
Robins and, 205
Shaw, Irwin, 291–292
Shaw, Mary, 205, 210
Shaw, Peggy, 418, 436, 462
Shawn, Wallace, 507, 511–514, 517–518
Shays Rebellion, 47
Sheaffer, Louis, 252
Sheldon, Edward, 7, 174, 184–185, 239
She Like Girls (Hutchison), 466–467
Shenandoah (Howard), 166
Shepard, Matthew, 420, 466
Shepard, Sam
disdain for narrative closure and, 473
family themes and, 388
Iraq War themes and, 480–481
new realism and, 352
Off-Off Broadway and, 347
Sheridan, Richard, 47, 53, 230–231
Sherlock Holmes (Gilette), 161, 168
Sherman, Martin, 419, 463
Sherwood, Robert E., 284, 290–292
She Stoops to Comedy (Greenspan), 517
 INDEX 561

“She-tragedies” (Rowe), 46 Smith, Capitan John, 59–60, 151

She Would Be a Soldier or, The Plains of Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 119, 123–124,
Chippewa (Noah), 100–101 127–128
Shimakawa, Karen, 490 Smith, Henry James, 164
Shore Acres (Herne), 165, 178, 184 Smith, Jack, 353, 460
Short, Hassard, 199 Smith, John, 44
Short Eyes (Piñero), 490 Smith, Peyton, 372–373
Shotaway. See Chatoyer, Chief Joseph Smith, Richard Penn, 71–73, 75
Shotaway; or the insurrection of the Caribs of Smith, Seba, 77
St. Domingo, 221–222, 230–231 Smith, Susan, 220
Shoulder to Shoulder (Mackenzie), 214 Smith, Susan Harris, 275
Show Boat (Kern and Hammerstein), 190, 198, Smith, Wendy, 284
200, 392, 396 Smith, William Henry. See The Drunkard, or,
The Show Is On, 199 the Fallen Saved (W.H. Smith)
Shreiner, Olive, 205 Smokey Joe’s Café, 189
The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (Valdez), Snake Theatre, 357
413 Snow (Jesurun), 453–454
Shubert, Lee, 295 socialist realism, 176
Shubert Brothers, 196, 239 Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the
Shuffle Along, 314 Jews, 103
Sifton, Claire and Paul, 286 “The Sociology of Modern Drama” (Lukács),
Signature Theatre (New York), 429, 465 271
Sigourney, Lydia, 69 Soldado Razo (El Teatro Campesino), 415
Silver, Nicky, 464 Solis, Octavio, 495
Silvera, John, 302–303, 316 Solomon, Alisa, 388, 470
Silver Shirts, 299 solo performance, 359, 361–364, 367, 465
Simms, Hilda, 319 Something Cloudy, Something Clear
Simms, William Gilmore, 101 (Williams), 353
Sinclair, Upton, 290, 447 Something for the Boys, 200
Singer, Ben, 164 Something Unspoken (Williams), 346
Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 517 Sondheim, Stephen, 201, 399–400, 402
Singleton, John, 23 “Song of Freedom,” 223, 228
Sirk, Douglas, 505–506 Song of Norway, 200
The Sisters Rosensweig (Wasserstein), 437 Sontag, Susan, 460
Situation Normal (Miller), 325 Soul Gone Home (Langston Hughes), 283
Six Degrees of Separation (Guare), 507 Sousa, John Philip, 194
The Skin of Our Teeth (Wilder), 292, 511 South Africa, 83
Sklar, George, 283, 288, 291, 338n9 South Carolina
Sklar, Roberta, 431 colonial era theatre in, 18, 22, 24–26, 28
Slaughter City (Wallace), 276 early republican era drama and, 62–63
The Slave (Baraka), 412 Southern, Eileen, 226–228
Slave’s Escape; or, The Underground Railroad Southern Association of Dramatic and Speech
(Hopkins), 225 Arts (SADSA), 315
Slave Ship (Baraka), 382, 413 South Pacific (Rodgers and Hammerstein),
Slaves in Algiers (Rowson), 57, 99 201, 323, 397, 403
The Slave with Two Faces (Davies), 243 Spence, Eulalie, 311–312
Smith, Anna Deavere, 473 Spencer, Jenny, 482
562 INDEX
Spiderwoman Theatre Company, 415, 417,
431, 436
Spiller, Robert E., 150
Spirit House (Newark), 382, 409, 412–413
Spirochete, 302
Split Britches, 13, 417–419, 436, 462, 479
Sprague, Z.W., 225
Stage Yankee, qq
Stagg, Charles and Mary, 17–18
Staircase (Dyer), 459
Stairs to the Roof (Williams), 277
Stallings, Laurence, 284
Stamp Act, 25
Stanlake, Christy, 490–491
The Star of Ethiopia (Du Bois), 310
State of the Union (Lindsay and Crouse),
323–324
Station J (Richard France), 497
Stearns, Charles, 52
Steel (Wexley), 288–289
Steele, Wilbur Daniel, 42, 235
Stein, Gertrude, 358, 502–503, 514, 516
Steinberg, Ellen, 363
Sternbach, Nancy Saporta, 493, 495
Sterne, Laurence, 520n2
Sternfeld, Jessica, 392–393, 400–402, 404–405
Stevedore (Peters and Sklar), 283, 288, 338n8
Stevens, George Alexander, 27
Stevens, Sarah, 213
Stevens, Wallace, 238, 243
Stewart, Ellen, 349, 460, 489
Steyn, Mark, 401–402
Sticks and Bones (Rabe), 416, 476–477
Stieglitz, Alfred, 235
Stiver’s Row (Abram Hill), 305
stock market crash (1929), 325, 338n6
Stone, Fred, 194–195
Stone, Gus, 305
Stone, John Augustus, 60, 70, 78, 102–103,
125, 151
Stonewall riots, 14, 348, 461
Stothart, Herbert, 197
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. See Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Strange Interlude (O’Neill), 253–254
Streamers (Rabe), 416, 476
A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams)
Belle Reprieve and, 436, 462
Blanche DuBois character in, 341, 343–344,
457–458
commercial success of, 11, 323, 345, 457
Miller on, 340
narrative technique in, 505
reviews of, 342
sexual themes in, 341, 350, 457–458
Stretch (Bernfield), 439
Striff, Erin, 426
Strike! (Odets), 11
Strike Up the Band, 199
Strindberg, August
expressionism and, 271
realism and, 173–174, 176, 179–180, 238
Stuart, Ian, 471–472
Stuart, John (Earl of Bute), 39
The Student Prince, 197
Stuff Happens (Hare), 480–481
Styne, Jules, 402
subversive affirmation, 421–423
The Subway (Elmer Rice), 273
Success Story (Lawson), 285–286
Suddenly Last Summer (Williams), 346, 459,
504
Suffolk Resolves, 36
suffrage movement, 210–211, 214
Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), 212
Summer and Smoke (Williams)
Alma Winemiller character in, 11, 342–344,
346, 348, 353
commercial failure of, 341, 345, 349
Eccentricities of a Nightingale and, 345
gender themes in, 342–344
John Buchanan character in, 342–343
Off-Broadway production of, 345–346, 459
reviews of, 342–346
Rosa Gonzales character in, 343
sexual themes in, 343–344
stage directions for, 342–343
Sun, William, 497
Sunflowers (van Gogh), 371
Sunny (Kern and Hammerstein), 198
Sun-Up (Vollmer), 267, 270
Suppressed Desires (Cook and Glaspell), 236
surrealism, 358
survivance, 490
Suskin, Steven, 394

Susman, Warren, 166
Svich, Caridad, 495, 497
Swayze, Kate Edwards, 117, 127
Sweeney Todd (Sondheim), 201
Sweethearts (Herbert), 195
The Swing Mikado, 317
Switch Triptych (Shaplin), 446–447
Synge, John Millington, 239
Taft-Hartley Act, 338n9
Taine, Hippolyte, 265
Take a Giant Step (Peterson), 12, 378–379
“Take Back the Night,” 418
Take Me Out (Greenberg), 466
Talen, William, 422
A Tale of Lexington (Judah), 104
“A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed,” 256
Talk Radio (Bogosian), 449–450
Tamerlane (Rowe), 46
Tammany (Native American chief), 39, 59
Tammany; or, The Indian Chief (Hatton), 59
Tanner, Jo, 215n12
Tao House (O’Neill), 255–257
A Taste of Honey (Delaney), 459
Taubman, Howard, 352
Tavel, Ronald, 419, 460
Taylor, Bayard, 83
Taylor, Charles Western, 138, 154
Taymor, Julie, 426
Tea and Sympathy (Robert Anderson), 458
Teatro Bufo (Cuba), 83
Teatro Campesino. See El Teatro Campesino
(ETC)
Teatro Chicano de Austin, 488
Teatro de la Esperanza (Santa Barbara,
California), 414, 488
Teatro Desengaño del Pueblo (Gary, Indiana),
488
teatropoesia, 495
technology themes in American drama
capitalism and, 442–447, 449
cultural anxiety and, 442, 446–448, 450–451
expressionism and, 274–275
The Glass Menagerie and, 14, 441–443, 451
identity formation and, 449–450
the Internet age and, 14, 453
Mamet and, 14, 445–446
INDEX 563
“media text” and, 453–454
Miller and, 441–442, 444
nuclear technology and, 442, 447–448
postdramatic theatre and, 452–453
technology contrasted with science and,
443–444
technology use in American drama and, 13,
372–373, 443, 450–454, 500–502
television and, 441, 443
Tectonic Theater Project, 419
Teer, Barbara Ann, 382
The Temperamentals (Marans), 467
temperance dramas
censorious themes in, 138
culture of sentiment and, 141–143
delirium tremens in, 139
enduring cultural legacy of, 131–132, 144
market for, 138, 144
masculinity and gender themes in, 6, 132,
144–146
melodrama and, 78–79, 136, 138–141,
144–146
regenerative themes in, 138–140
threats to bodily integrity in, 139
Yankee characters in, 138–139, 142
temperance movement
impact on other reform movements, 134,
144–145
Maine Law (1851) and, 79, 134–135
patterns of American alcoholic
consumption and, 135
Prohibition and, 132, 134
strategies of, 135–138, 141, 144
strength of, 132–134, 136–137, 140
women’s participation in, 134, 145–146
Temperance Tales (Arthur), 136
The Temple of Minerva (Hopkinson), 44–45
Ten Days That Shook the World (Reed), 234
Ten Nights in a Bar-room (Pratt), 79, 139–144,
146
Teresa Contarini (Ellet), 119, 123, 127
Terry, Megan
feminist drama and, 418, 430–431
Vietnam themes and, 14, 416, 476
Thacker, David, 471
That Uppity Theatre Company (Saint Louis),
461
564 INDEX
Theatre Guild, 237, 284–285, 290–291, 474
Théâtre Libre, 268–269
Theatre of Cruelty, 409
theatre of the absurd, 261, 347, 351, 473–474
Theatres Against War (THAW), 420–421
Theatre Union, 284, 286–288, 291
Theatrical Nation (Ragussis), 99
Theatrical Syndicate, 169, 182
The Bottle (Taylor), 138
The Colored American (magazine), 307
“The Literarization of the Theatre” (Brecht), 472
Theory and Technique of Playwriting (Lawson),
286
theory of natural selection, 265
Thérèse Raquin (Zola), 265
There Shall be No Night (Sherwood), 290
The Sound and the Fury: April Seventh, 1928
(Elevator Repair Service production),
505
They Shall Not Die (Wexley), 290
They That Sit in Darkness (Burrill), 312
Thirst (O’Neill), 237
This Bridge Called My Back, 495
This Is the Army, 200
This Property Is Condemned (Williams), 347
Thom Pain (based on nothing) (Eno), 507
Thompson, Eloise Bibb, 311
The Three of Us (Crothers), 206–207
Three Pieces (Shange), 473
Three’s A Crowd, 199
Three Sisters (Chekhov), 372, 517
Throckmorton, Cleon, 246
Thurber, Lucy, 465
Thurman, Wallace, 314
Timebends (Miller), 475
The Time of Your Life (Saroyan), 291
Tip-Toes, 197
Tocqueville, Alexis de
on Americans’ attitudes toward history,
75–76
critiques of, 5, 68, 75–76
on theatre, 67–69, 71, 80
“To Disembark” (Ligon), 385
The Toilet (Baraka), 460
Tolins, Jonathan, 464
Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro
(Graham), 317–318
Too Many Girls, 199
Toomer, Jean, 277
Topdog/Underdog (Parks), 387–388
Torch Song Trilogy (Fierstein), 14, 419
TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), 461
A Touch of the Poet (O’Neill), 256, 259, 262n3
Trafficking in Broken Hearts (Sanchez), 495
Tragedy: A Tragedy (Eno), 507–508
transgender drama. See LGBT drama
Translations, 426
The Traveller Returned (Murray), 61
Treadwell, Sophie, 273, 285, 442
Tremont Theatre (Boston), 153
Trial of Dr. Beck (Allison), 304
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Berrigan), 416
Triangle Players (Richmond), 461
tribalography, 494
Trifles (Glaspell), 8, 237–241, 245–246, 266,
270, 282
Triple-A Plowed Under, 304
A Trip to Chinatown, 194–195
The Triumphs of Love (Murdock), 61–62, 99, 218
Tropicana, Carmelita, 466
Trouble in Mind (Childress), 320, 428
Trowbridge, John Townsend, 94
True West (Shepard), 388
Truth, Sojourner, 210
T-Shirts (Patrick), 462
Tucker, Saint George, 63
Turman, Glynn, 383
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 149
Turner, Nat, 75
Turpentine (Gus Stone), 305
Twain, Mark, 84, 177
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 189
The Two Faces of the Boss (El Teatro
Campesino), 367
Two Trains Running (August Wilson), 386
Tyler, Royall, 47, 54. See also The Contrast
(Tyler)
Tyrones (O’Neill characters), 250, 259–260
Tyson, Cicely, 383
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (novel by Harriet Beecher
Stowe)
blackface minstrelsy’s adaptations of,
87–91, 223, 307
blackface minstrelsy’s influence on, 5,
86–87, 89–91

dramatic interpretations of, 88–91, 108
Fugitive Slave Law and, 86
realism of, 87–88
sentimentalism of, 87
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (play by George Aiken), 79,
88–91, 130, 139, 223
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (play by H. J. Conway),
88–91
Uncommon Women and Others (Wasserstein),
431
Underground Railroad Company, 225
Under the Gaslight (Daly), 166
Undesirable Elements (Chong), 370–371
United Farm Workers (UFW), 413–414, 478,
488
United Scenic Artists (USA), 318
United States Congress
Federal Theatre Project and, 304, 318
funding for theatre from, 359–360,
364–365, 377
House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC) and, 318, 322, 327,
458, 471, 474–475
United States Temperance Union (USTU), 135
Uno, Roberta, 495–496
Until Someone Wakes Up (Levy), 418
Up in Central Park, 200
Upton, Robert, 19–20, 22
urban themes in American drama
in antebellum era drama (1820–1860), 6,
68, 133, 149, 153–157
class themes and, 154, 156, 166
confidence men and fraud in, 154–156, 166
melodrama and, 127, 133, 162–166
realism and, 182–185
Urinetown, 404
Vaccaro, John, 460
The Vagabond King, 197
The Vagina Monologues (Ensler), 419, 426
Valdez, Luis
El Teatro Campesino and, 413–415, 478
immigration and ethnicity themes of,
366–367
themes of transcending stereotypes and,
494
Zoot Suit and, 492
INDEX 565
Valgemae, Mardi, 272–273
Valparaiso (Delillo), 450–451
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (Busch), 460
Van Dam, Rip, 17, 20
van Gogh, Vincent, 371
Vanities (Carroll), 196
Van Volkenburg, Ellen, 234
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 280, 290
Vardac, Nicholas, 168
Vassar Experimental Theatre, 300
vaudeville, 163–164, 191–192, 474
Venus (Parks), 434, 443
The Verge (Glaspell), 9, 238, 244–246
Verling, William, 27
The Vermont Wool Dealer, 101
Verne, Jules, 191
Very Good Eddie, 195
Very Warm for May, 199
Vietnam Campesino (El Teatro Campesino),
415
Vietnam Trilogy (Rabe), 14, 476
Vietnam War
societal opposition to, 357–358, 366, 409
theatre in opposition to, 409–411, 415–417,
473, 475–476
Vietnam Veterans Against War (VVAW)
and, 416–417, 421
Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theater
Company and, 476
Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie (Terry), 14, 416,
476
Vieux Carré (Williams), 352–354
A View From the Bridge (Miller), 327, 334, 458
Virginia
colonial era theatre in, 2, 17–22, 24–26, 28
Revolutionary era theatre in, 34–35,
42–43
Virginia: A Pastoral Drama, on the Birthday of
an Illustrious Personage and the Return of
Peace, February 11th, 1784 (Parke), 45
Virginia Minstrels, 81
The Virgin Man, 456
Vital Statistics (Rosler), 418
Vizenor, Gerald, 490
Vogel, Paula, 433–434, 464–465
The Voice of the Turtle, 323
Vollmer, Lula, 267, 270
566 INDEX

Volunteers (Rowson), 59 propaganda plays of, 4, 32, 34–36

Vorse, Mary Heaton, 234–236 republican dramatic themes of, 50–51
Votes for Women! (Robins), 211 Washington, DC, African American drama
and theatre in, 308–309, 313
Wacousta; or, The Curse (Medina), 102, 152 Washington, George
Wagner, Robert, 302, 303–304 Caribbean travels of, 23
Wagner Act, 285, 338n9 dramatic representations of, 45, 52, 55, 61,
Wainscott, Ronald, 284 292
“Wait for the Wagon,” 92 Revolutionary War and, 28, 30, 33, 38–40
Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 351 theatre attendance by, 25–26, 30, 44–45
Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 11, 287, 326–327, Valley Forge and, 28, 33
338n9, 408 Washington Square Players, 175, 234, 237
The Waiting Room (Loomer), 438 Washington Temperance Society, 136–137,
Wales Padlock Law, 456 139
Walker, Aida Overton, 307–308 Wasserstein, Wendy, 13, 426, 431–433, 437,
Walker, Jonathan, 121 479
Walker, Joseph, 383 Watch on the Rhine (Hellman), 291
Walker, Julia, 9 Waterboard Thrill Ride in Coney Island
Walker, Thomas, 21 (Powers), 422
Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), 364–365 The Water Engine (Mamet), 14, 445–446
Wallace, Michelle, 432 Waters, Ethel, 313
Wallace, Naomi, 276 Watkins, Perry, 318–319
Wallack, Henry, 105, 116 Watson, Morris, 301
Wallack’s National Theatre (New York), 116, Watt, Stephen, 14
119 The Waves (Woolf), 502, 505, 517
Wallinger, Hanna, 225, 228, 230 Wayburn, Ned, 198
Walls, 495 Weaver, Lois, 418, 436, 462
Walnut Street Theatre (Philadelphia), Webb, Byron, 318
117, 151 Webb, Mary, 89, 91
Walter, Eugene, 239 Webber, Sir Andrew Lloyd, 201, 393, 400–401
Wang (Goodwin & Morse comic operetta), Webster, Noah, 150, 156
193–194 Wedekind, Frank, 272
Ward, Douglas Turner, 381–382, 389, 487 Weems, Marianne, 358
Ward, Theodore, 10, 12, 303–304, 316–317, Weidman, John, 399
376–377 Weil, Simone, 418, 431
Warhol, Andy, 353 Weill, Kurt, 286
Warner, Marina, 501–502 Weinberger, Harry, 246
Warner, Sara, 437 We Keep Our Victims Ready (Finley), 362
The Warning: A Theme for Linda (Milner), 383 Welded (O’Neill), 253
War of 1812, 63–64, 100 Well (Kron), 462–463
War on Poverty initiatives, 486 Welles, Orson, 283, 288, 305, 377
Warren, James, 51 The Well of Horniness (Holly Hughes), 462
Warren, Joseph, 40–41, 45, 62 The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 214
Warren, Mercy Otis Werdenberg; or, The Forest League (Hentz), 119
dramatic representations of, 44 Wertheim, Arthur, 235, 291–292
plays attributed to, 43 West, Mae, 456, 467
political family of, 34 The Western Canon (Bloom), 181

West Side Story, 403
Wetback Run (Apstein), 486
We the People (Elmer Rice), 297
Wexley, John, 288, 290
Wharton, Edith, 212
Whatever, Heaven Allows, 505
What Happened (Stein), 502–503
What Price Glory? (Anderson and Stallings),
284
What Strong Fences Make (Horvitz), 480
What Use Are Flowers? (Hansberry), 447
The Wheel of Fortune (Tucker), 63
Where’s Charley?, 201, 323
Where the Cross Is Made (O’Neill), 245
“Which Theatre Is the Absurd One? “(Albee),
351
Whigs and Democrats (Heath), 107
White, George, 196–197
White, Grace Miller, 165
“The White Cat” (d’Aulnoy), 511, 513–514
White Manifesto and Other Perfumed Tales of
Self-Entitlement or, Got Rice? (Gotanada),
494
Whitman, Willson, 296, 298–299, 301
Whitman Sisters, 229
Whoopee!, 197
Whoriskey, Kate, 481–482
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee),
350–351, 426
Why Marry? (Lynch Williams), 282
Widowers’ Houses (Shaw), 238
The Widow of Malabar (Lemierre), 56–57
Wiene, Robert, 275
Wignell, Thomas, 32, 47, 57
Wildberg, John, 319
The Wild Duck (Ibsen), 174, 182–183
Wilde, Oscar, 344, 348
Wilder, Thorton, 276, 292, 448, 450, 511
Willett, John, 272
Williams, Barney, 108
Williams, Bert, 196
Williams, Jesse Lynch, 282
Williams, Linda, 131 , 144, 223, 225
Williams, Raymond, 266, 276
Williams, Tennessee. See also specific works
Broadway productions of, 340–344, 441,
443, 457
INDEX 567
commercial successes and, 11, 323, 352
experimentalism and, 11, 340–341, 350,
352, 354
expressionism and, 277
gay liberation and, 352
gender themes and, 342, 442
homosexuality of, 344, 348, 352, 457, 459
homosexuality themes and, 11, 14, 348,
350–351, 353, 457–459
Miller on, 340–341
misfit individual themes and, 340
narrative technique and, 504
naturalism and, 277
Off- and Off-Off-Broadway productions of,
11, 341, 345, 347–349, 353, 459
one-act plays of, 347
poetic lyricism of, 340, 347–348, 352
realism and, 264, 340–341, 351
sexual themes and, 11, 14, 341, 343, 350,
457–458
stage directions of, 340–343, 350–351
technology themes and, 441–443, 451
Williams, William Carlos, 242
Williamsburg (Virginia), 18–22, 24, 26, 34–35
Wilmer, S.E., 13
Wilmeth, Don B., 150, 182
Wilson, August, 12, 385–387, 389, 413, 466
Wilson, Dooley, 308
Wilson, Doric, 347, 349, 460–462
Wilson, Frank, 314, 316
Wilson, Lanford, 347, 349, 460
Wilson, Robert, 505
Wine in the Wilderness (Childress), 428
Winterset (Maxwell Anderson), 290
Winter’s Night (Boyce), 237, 240–241
Witham, Barry, 10
With an Air Debonair (Susan Porter), 3
Witherspoon, Rev. Jonathan, 40
The Wizard of Oz, 194–195
Wodehouse, P.G., 195
Wolf, Stacy, 394–395, 397
Wolfe, George C., 3, 12, 384–385, 467
Wolfe, James, 35, 41
Wollman, Elizabeth, 393, 403, 404–405
The Woman (Belasco), 170
Woman’s Body and Other Natural Resources
(Segal and Sklar), 431
568 INDEX

Woman’s Rights Convention (1851), 210 Wuornos, Aileen, 438

Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 140 Wyoming (Dr. M’Henry), 102
Women’s Crusade (1870s temperance
movement), 138, 140, 145 Yamuachi, Wakako, 496–497
Women’s Experimental Theatre (WET), 418, Yang, Philip Q., 486
431, 436 Yank! (Zellnik & Zellnik), 467
The Women’s Project, 420, 438 Yank (O’Neill character), 10, 244–245, 250,
Woodham, Charles, 21 252–253, 281
Woods, Rose Marie, 439 Yankee characters in antebellum American
Woodson, Carter G., 309 drama, 77–78, 94, 101, 107–108,
Woodworth, Samuel, 64, 101 138–139, 142, 150
Woolf, Virginia Yankee Dawg You Die (Gotanda), 466,
The Waves and, 502, 505, 517 493–494
criticism of New Woman fiction by, 212, The Yankee Pedlar, 101
215 Yankey in England (Humphreys), 64
Freshwater and, 438 Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 495
The Wooster Group, 353–354, 358, 372–373, Year of the Dragon (Chin), 490
452 Yellow Death (Edmonds), 315
Work: A Story of Experience (Alcott), 134, 146 Yellow is My Favorite Color (Sakamoto), 489
Workers Laboratory Theater, 284 Yellow Robe, William S., 415
Workers Theatre, 297 Yes Men, 421, 423
Works Progress Administration (WPA), 295, Yew, Chay, 466
316 Yiddish Workers’ Theatre (ARTEF), 284
World War I, 243, 267 Yippie movement, 416
World War II Yordan, Phillip, 319
American drama during, 292 The Yorker’s Stratagem (Robinson), 56
changing sexual identities during, 457, 467 Youmans, Vincent, 197
Worthen, W.B., 478, 496
WOW (Women’s One World) Café, 420, 437, Zamba, or, the Insurrection (Ricord), 120–121,
462 127
Woyzeck, 181 Zellnik, David and Joseph, 467
Wrecked, 138 Ziegfeld Follies, 196–197, 199
The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five (Wilder), Zip Coon character, 154
448, 450 Zola, Émile, 180, 265
Wright, Doug, 467 The Zoo Story (Albee), 347, 459, 504
Wright, Frances, 58 Zoot Suit (Valdez and Davidson), 492
Wright, Richard, 283, 317, 377 Zorach, Marguerite and William, 235,
Wright, Richardson, 23 241–242