THE jOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 12, Number 2
Editor: Vera Mowry Roberts
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Spring 2000
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THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 12, Number 2 Spring 2000
Contents
SARAH BAY-CHENG, 1
Atom and Eve: A Consideration of Gertrude Stein's
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights
jOHN H . HOUCHIN, 25
George Abbott and the
Total Theatre Perspective of Directing
jENNIFER STILES, 38
Import or Immigrant?
The Representation of Blacks and Irish on the
American Stage from 1 767- 1856
LAWRfNC G. AVERY, 56
Stereotypes and the Development of
African American Drama
ROBERT BAKER-WHITE, 71
Questioning the Ground of American Identity:
George Pierce Baker's The Pilgrim Spirit and
Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play
CONTRIBUTORS 90
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 1 2 (Spring 2000)
ATOM AND EVE: A CONSIDERATION OF GERTRUDE STEIN'S
D OCTOR FAUSTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS
SARAH BAY-CHENG
Attempting to categorize or classify the theatrical avant-garde of
the early twentieth century is at best problematic. As j.H. Matthews
points out in hi s Theatre in Dada and Surrealism, "No guaranteed
criterion exists that, cutting across misleading chronological
boundaries, would permit us to classify this play of unquestionable
Dada inspiration and that play as of purely surreali st derivation."
1
Considering that most avant-garde movements, both in drama and the
plastic arts, sought to explode conventional ideas, label s, and
categories of genre and form, it seems rather unfair to impose ri gid
limits on the artistic products of such movements.
However, despite the radical differences among various texts of
the period, every avant-garde play, according to Bert Cardullo can be
identified by its disruptions of three conventional or traditional
dramatic elements: faith in the providential designs of an omnipotent,
omniscient, and omnipresent God as well as a divine monarch;
confidence in a psychology of the individual that can cogently link
human motives to human acts; and belief in a causality of events, in
the idea that people's actions over time can be closely connected in a
logical, almost inevitable sequence. In effect, avant-garde plays
replace each of these three elements with its antithesis. If in modern
realistic and naturali stic drama, according to Cardullo, "the patriarchal
relationship between God and the indi vidual soul [was] replaced by
the adversarial relationship between man and his own psychology, hi s
will to comprehend himself, even as the patriarchal relationship
between rul er and subject [was] replaced by the adversarial
relationship between man and society,"
2
in avant-garde drama the
' j.H. Matthews, Theatre in Dada and Surreali sm (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1974), 4.
' Bert Cardullo, "Whose Town is it, Anyway?: An Historico-Aesthetic Inquiry
into Our Town." Journal of American Drama and Theatre 8, 2 (Winter 1996): 47.
2 BAY-CHENG
action "can be governed by something completely outside the triad
that links motive to act, act to logical sequence of events, and logical
outcome to divine or regal judgment. In other words, God is dead, the
King has been deposed, and moral authority as well as metaphysical
truth has consequently become relative; psychology itself has been
replaced by illogical if not incomprehensible human motivation; and
causality has been superseded by the non-l inear, sometimes even
static, plot. "
3
As I wi l l attempt to show through an examination of Gertrude
Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938), Stein's drama provides
ample evidence of these three disruptions of conventional drama, as
well as exhibiting similarities to the Dadaist and Surrealist drama being
written and produced in early twentieth-century Pari s. Stei n's work
not only shares formal similariti es with these artistic movements, but
also a modernist world view, which for Stein included feminism, a
fascination with ci nema, concerns about war, and questions regarding
the role of art in the new era. Beyond these interests she shares with
her male contemporaries, Stein demonstrates great concern for women
as they are represented in art and repeatedly exhibits feminist themes
in her work. Thi s feminist focus, presented in the form of the avant-
garde, is remarkably similar to that of Hannah Hoch, whose visual art
used the same fragmentation and montage techniques as other
Dadaists, but for, among other reasons, the purpose of cri ti ci zing
typical representations of women in art.
4
More intell ectually accessible than much of her early work,
Doctor Faustus blends Stein's unique approach to language and
structure with universal themes, which for her included feminist ones.
The play represents a transition between the two periods in Stei n's
oeuvre that Donald Sutherland has established: "The Play as
Movement and Landscape, 1922-1932" and " The Melodic Drama,
Melodrama and Opera, 1932-1946."
5
In Doctor Faustus Stein uses
identifiable characters and attributes specific dialogue to them, but the
language exhibits all the idiosyncrasies of her earli er work- lack of
3
Bert Cardullo, "Introduction," Theatre of the Avant-Carde: 7 880-7 950, Bert
Cardullo and Robert Knopf, eds. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
forthcoming).
4
For information on Hannah Hoch's art and her rol e in Dada, see Maud
Lavin, Cut with a Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
5
Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1951), 207.
GERTRUDE STEIN
3
punctuation, multiple identities for major characters, disembodied
voices, punning, non-sequiturs, and repetition. As Michael Hoffman
has written of thi s period, "[Stein's] language now focuses on
something other than its own structure; she shifts from its concern to
such literary problems as those of moral value and human identity; but
she still maintains throughout the play a style readily identifiable as her
own.''
6
Despite numerous essays that have been published on Stein's
drama in general, and Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in particular,
few attempts have been made to connect her plays with other avant-
garde drama of the period.
7
There are a variety of possible reasons for
this, not the least of which is her rather isolated position as an affluent
jewish American lesbian among the financially struggling European
men who constituted the vast majority of avant-garde writers.
Furthermore, Stein's plays are often considered to be more literary than
dramatic. In one of the first examinations of Stein's dramatic works,
for example, Donald Sutherland wrote that "Her operas do take music
and staging well, but they are first of all literary works embodying the
essential qualities of opera-lyrical dramas, if you will -as her plays
are literary works embodying the essence of stage plays (my
emphasis)."
8
Indeed, Stein is more often respected not for her own
oeuvre but for her influence on other artists: avant-garde painters such
Michael). Hoffman, Gertrude Stein (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 85.
' It should be noted here that I refer exclusively to the theatrical avant-garde.
There is a wide range of essays connecting Stein's poetry, fiction and drama with
Cubism and other avant-garde painting and visual art, most especially that of
Picasso. However, few of these discuss Stein's drama in the context of Dada or
Surrealist performance or any of the numerous theatrical writings of fellow avant-
garde wri ters. It is thus my intention, not to repeat the well documented
connection between Stein and Pi casso, Braque, Mati sse and others in the visual
but rather to examine her drama (those writings she as
"plays") in compari son with performances and dramatic writings of thi s avant-
garde. For information on Stein's poetry and drama and the visual avant-garde, see
Michael Hoffman's T!Je Development of Abstractionism in tile Writing of Gertrude
Stein (Philadelphia: Universi ty of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), Marianne DeKoven's
A Different Writing: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writ ing (Madi son: Universi ty of
Wisconsin Press, 1983), Randa Dubni ck's The Strucwre of Obswrity: Gertrude
Stein, Language, and Cubism (Urbana: Uni versity of Il l inois Press, 1984), El izabeth
Fi fer's Rescued Readings: A Reconstruction of Gertrude Stein's Diificult Texts
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), and Andreas Kramer's Gertrude
Stein und die cleutsclle Avanl-garde (Eggingen: lsele, 1993).
"Sutherland, 107.
4
BAY-CHENG
as Picasso, Matisse, and Braque; young American writers like Ernest
Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; and non-traditional American
theatre figures and movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including
Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson' s Theatre of Silence-and-Images,
Richard Schechner, and the Performance Group.
Interestingly, Stein is most often thought to have been influenced
by, and to have been a part of, the painting avant-garde more than the
dramatic one. Marc Robinson, for instance, wri tes that in Stein's plays,
'"Act' and 'scenes' function like frames around paintings directing and
focusing our attention on discrete sections of the perceived
And in hi s essay "Gertrude Stein und ihre Kritik der dramatischen
Vernunft," Andrzej Wirth argues that the confusion an observer might
feel upon viewi ng or reading a Stein play i s " the same uncertainty [one
feels] when facing a collage by Picasso, Braque or Heartfield (my
translation)." He goes on to state that " the programmatic and
frequently di sruptive Stein text is not unlike the strategy of a collage, in
which the symboli c decoding is left to the respective observer."
10
What Wirth fail s to include in hi s an<llysis of Stein's plays, however, is
that the technique of fragmentati on was not l imited to the visual art of
Dada, but could be found in their performances as well. Moreover,
the disruption of audience expectations w<ls an essential component of
avant-garde theatre beginning wi th Alfred )arry's Ubu Roi (1 896),
11
and
si multaneity was pioneered by the Futurists. It is no coincidence that
Stein's plays refl ect techniques and attitudes common among both the
Dadaists and the Surrealists, si nee many were her close friends and
associates.
To be fair, a few critics do acknowledge the connection between
Stei n and the drama of the avant-garde. Bettina L. Knapp, for example,
connects Stein's elrama to that of Alfred )arry, Apollinaire's The Breasts
of Tiresias (1917), and Tristan Tzara' s The Cas Heart (1920). Knapp
writes that, " Like her contemporaries, [Gertrude Stei n] advocated anti-
naturali sm in the performing arts: no plot; directionless happenings;
no characters; non-referential , and therefore self-contained movement;
no logic in the sequence of events; no transitions; no connections; no
9
Marc Robinson, "Gertrude Stei n," in The Other American Drama
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 14.
10
Andrzej Wirth, " Gertrude Stein und ihre Kri tik der dramatischen Vernunft,"
Lili: Zeitschrift fOr I ileraturwissenschaft und Linguistik 12 (1982): 66, 67.
" jarry, incidentally, wrote his own version of the Faust legend, titled The
Exploits and Opinions of Doctor F;wstro/1, Pataphysician: A Neo-Scientific Novel
(1898; published 1911).
GERTRUDE STEIN
5
sense of progress."
12
Knapp goes on to distinguish Stein from the
Surrealists by claiming that her interest was not in the unconscious, but
rather in an identity "composed of abstract temporal and spatial
posi tions lived in a continuous present."
13
Yet given Stein's study of
psychology at Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins Medical School, it seems
unlikely that she woul d have had no interest in the
unconscious, especially since Surrealism sought to unify the
unconscious and conscious minds.
14
In addi tion, both Stein and
Breton experimented with automatic writing. As a psychology student,
Stein used herself and others as subj ects for experiments in automatic
writing: "Each subj ect held a pencil, rested an arm on the planchette,
draped a hand over its edge, then li stened while Gertrude talked or
read. When she determined that the subject was sufficientl y
distracted, she unobtrusively guided the planchette into a movement
she desired, a figure eight or a long curve or an M shape. "
15
Stei n claimed to have used automatic writing in her early work,
and critics have cited evidence of it throughout her career. As late as
1936, only two years before Doctor Faustus was published, Stein gave
a lecture, "What Are Master-Pieces and why are there so few of them,"
in which she described automati c writing (or " secondary writing," as
she refers to it):
If you do not remember while you are wri ting, it may seem
confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that
clarity wil l be clear, that is what a master-piece is, but if you
remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time
to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a
master-piece is not.
16
Breton, for his part, considered i t the aim of Surrealism to promote
12
Bettina L. Knapp, Gertrude Stein (New York: Continuum, 1990), 137.
13
Ibid., 137- 138.
14
See Andre Breton's " What is Surrealism?," in What is Surrealism?, Franklin
Rosemont, ed. (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 116.
15
Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (New York: G.P.
Putnam' s Sons, 1996), 104.
16
Gertrude Stei n, " What Are Master-Pieces and why are there so few of
them," in Writing and Lectures, 7971- 7945, Patricia Meyerowitz, ed. (london:
Peter Owen, 1967), 150.
6 BAY-CHENG
e1utomatic writing to "the exclusion of all other" arts. In his essay
"The Automatic Message," he wrote:
If the surrealist effort has tended above all to restore
inspiration to favour, and if, in order to do so, we he1ve
extolled automatic forms of expression to the exclusion of all
others, and if in addition psychoanalysis, beyond every
expectation, has charged with penetrable meaning the kinds
of improvisation previously too easily held to be gratuitous
and has conferred upon them, outside all aesthetic
considerations, every significant value as human documents, it
is nevertheless necessary to admit that sufficient light is far
from having been cast on the conditions in which an
" automatic" text or drawing must be obtained in order to be
fully valid.
17
Certainly passages in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights reflect the
kind of stream of consciousness that Breton called "automati c
writing." In his opening monologue, for example, Doctor Faustus
"automatically" tells the story of Faust up to the turning point of most
other Faust versions. Whereas the turning point of Goethe's or
Marlowe's Faustian dramas is Faust's deci sion to sell his soul to the
devil, Stein begins her play after Faustus has made hi s decision:
What do I care there i s no here nor there.
What am I. I am Doctor Faustus who knows
everything can do everything and you say it
was through you but not at all, if I had not
been in a hurry and if I had taken my time
I would have known how to make white electric
light and day-light and night light and what
did I do I saw you miserable devi I I saw you
and I was deceived and I believed miserable
devil I thought I needed you, and I thought
I was tempted by the devil and I know no
temptation is tempting unless the devil tells
you so.
18
17
Andre Breton, "The Automatic Message," in Rosemont, 100.
'
8
Gertrude Stei n, "Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights," in Last Operas and Plays
(New York: Rinehart and Co., 1949). 89. All subsequent references cited
parenthetically in the text.
GERTRUDE STEIN 7
Considering the absence of syntax and the free association implied by
such shifts as "can do everything and you say it was through you," as
well as "and night light and what did I do I saw you miserable devil,"
one can deduce that Stein wrote this either without consciously
"thinking out" the speech of her character, or else by consciously
attempting to have Faustus speak as if he were not thinking in a logical
and orderly manner. Doctor Faustu.s speaks in such cycles throughout
the play, repeating phrases or words and frequently rhyming.
Critics have interpreted thi s style of speech in a variety of ways. In
one of the earliest analyses of Doctor Faustus, Allegra Stewart argued
for a Jungian interpretation of the text. To her, Faust's apparently
scattered ramblings actually represent three separate aspects of one
human psyche; in reading the play, "One should remember that it is
an interior action, and that all the characters are functions or
complexes within [that] one human psyche."
19
According to Stewart,
Stein's use of three different names for Faust-Faust, Faustus, and
Doctor Faustus-is additional evidence that, in Jungian terminology,
thi s character's psyche consists of the subordinate self, the ego, and the
persona, respectively. In a later examination of Doctor Faustus, james
F. Schaefer, Jr. , similarly argued that there are two Fausts engaged in a
" psychological duet." In Schaefer's interpretation, "[Faust] 1 has been
used to designate an aging Faustus who questions the value of his li fe's
work and is uncertain whether or not he ever had a soul, while F2
designates an arrogant Faustus who is cocksure of himself and his
invention, and who is convinced that he can outwit the devil who has
come for his clue."
10
Both these interpretations are plausible, as is the belief that Doctor
Faustus's di senchantment with his invention can be traced to Stein' s
anxiety following the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas (1932), her first commercial and critical success. As Betsy
Alayne Ryan notes, "After writing her widely disseminated
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody's Autobiography in
the early thirties, she wrote often about the consequences of fame for a
writer, wondering openly in plays and theoreti cal writings whether it
was possible to retain any sense of self in the glare of publicity and
,., Allt>gr<t Stewart, "An American Version of the Filust Myth," in Gertrude
Stein and tile Present (Clrnbridge, MA: Hilrv<trd Universi ty Press, 1967), 159.
'" j ;1mes F. Schaefer, Jr., "An Examin,1tion of Language as Gesture in a Play by
Gertrude Stein," Literature in Performance 3 (1 982): 5.
8
BAY-CHENG
with ever-present awareness of audience expectation."
21
Richard
Bridgman extends this analysis further, beyond Stein's concern with
her own irlentity to her anxiety over an emerging American
technology: "American technology and the threat of success to her
personal identity coalesced for her in the phenomenon of electric
lights to make Doctor Faustus a di sgruntled Edi son. Electric lights
stood for the sometimes useful but never ultimately satisfying, true, or
illuminating function of reason."
22
What all these interpretations ignore, however, are the blatant
similarities between Stein's response to twentieth-century experience
and the responses of the Dadaists and Surrealists. Rather than being
merel y an extension of her psyche, Stein's Faust exhibits the same
frustrations, desires, and creative impul ses as her fellow avant-garde
artists in Europe. To wit, he had been enchanterl enough with electric
light to agree to sell his soul for it, yet when Doctor Faustus first
appears in Stein's text, he has nothing but contempt for the light he has
created:
I keep on having so much
I ight that I ight is not bright and what after
all is the use of light, you can see just as well
without it, you can go around just as well
without it, you can get up and go to bed just
as well without it, and I I wanted to make it
and the devil take it yes devil you do
not even want it and I sold my soul to make
it. (90)
This sentiment is remarkably similar to that of the Dada artists, as
described by C.W.E. Bigsby in Dada and Surrealism: "Yet while the
Dadaists rejected what they saw as the banality of naturalism and
anthropomorphic arrogance of romanticism, they also came in time to
distrust the very modernism from which they emerged."
23
Like the
Dadaists, Faustus exhibits an early fascination with the technology of
the modern world, but he eventually rejects the light he has created.
" Betsy Alayne Ryan, Gertrude Stein's Theatre of the Absolute (Ann Arbor,
Ml: UMI, 1984). 128.
" Ri chard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1970), 290.
23
C.W.E. Bigsby, Dada and Surreal ism (london: Methuen, 1972), 10.
GERTRUDE STEIN
9
Written several years after the demise of Dada and on the eve of
Hitler's invasion of France, Stein's Doctor Faustus incorporates not
only the Surrealists' interest in the unconscious, then, but also both the
Dadaists' fascination with technology-particularly the technological
art of cinema-and their distrust of technology clearly warranted by the
horrors of mechanized warfare already exhibited during World War I.
Stein even uses formal techniques similar to those employed by
the Dadaists. In her lecture "Composition as Explanation" (1926), she
describes the "continuous present" as "a beginning again and again
and again, it was a list it was a similarity and everything different it was
a distribution and an equalibration."
24
Often referred to as repetition,
this "continuous present" might al so be understood as a form of
simultaneity, origin<'llly <'l performance technique borrowed from the
l tt=llian Futurists by D<ldt=l. In Dada Performance, Mel Gordon describes
Francis Picabia's D<ldaist play, Relache (No Performance or "Relax"),
<'l s an ex<lmple of such a performance:
Relache began with <'l film prologue by <'l young Rene Clair
Clnd music by Erik Satie. After one minute, hundreds of lights
in photographic met<'lllic reflectors blinded the audience.
These formed the backdrop. On the stage, dozens of
disconnected activities were enacted. A fireman for the
theatre smoked cig<'lrettes and poured water from one p<lil to
Clnother. Man R<ly, the Americt=ln artist, sat on the side of the
stage, occasiont=llly marking off spt=lce with his shoes. Figures
from Crant=lch's ''Adam t=lnd Eve" appe<1red. Tuxedoed
playboys disrobed. And Cln Clutomobile brought on <'l young
couple in evening clothes.
25
While Doctor Faustus does not contain such simultt=lneous, layered
Clctivity, the lack of progression in the plot does cre<1te a kind of
"continuous present." There is no cause and effect, no evolving plot
line. Rather, the events that occur in Doctor Faustus embody the
si multaneous present th<'lt Dont=lld Sutherland associates with twentieth-
century life: " It has been, in a way, the mission of the twentieth
century to destroy progressive history and cret=lte <'l single time in which
everything in the pt=lst Clnd possibly the future would be
'"Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation, " Writing and Lectures, 29.
" Mel Gordon, ed., Dacia Performance (New York: Performing Arts journal
Publications, 1987), 24.
10 BAY-CHENG
simultaneous. "
26
As Gertrude Stein herself writes in her 1934 lecture,
"Plays," "The business of Art as I have tried to explain in
'Composition as Explanation' is to l ive in the actual present, that is the
complete and actual present, and to completely express that complete
actual present. "
27
By opening her play after Faust's fatal decision has
been made, Stein creates that "complete actual " or continuous
present, for she has effectively robbed the drama of its potential
suspense. Without it, the tempo of the play is flattened, for suspense
by its very nature i s dependent on time. Although Marc Robinson
describes Doctor Faustus as "taut with anticipation,"
28
the audience
has most of its questions answered from the opening moment. There
is no question as to whether Faustus will or will not sell his soul , or as
to whether he made the right deci si on; from the start, Doctor Faustus
admits both his decision to sell his soul and his di ssati sfaction with that
decision. By so diffusi ng the suspense, Stein disrupts not only her
drama's time-line, but also its causal progression.
Similarly, Stein uses rapid shifts of location to create a sense that
various activities take place in simultaneous time, even if they do not
actually do so. This "editing" or "montage" is quite poss ibly a
technique Stein borrowed from the cinema, for we know she believed
that film had fundamentally changed people's ways of viewing and
hearing. In " Plays" she writes,
I suppose one might have gotten to know a good deal about
these things from cinema and how it changed from sight to
sound, and how much before there was real sound how much
of the sight was sound or how much it was not. In other
words the cinema undoubtedly had a new way of
understanding sight and sound in relation to emotion and
time.
29
Like Stein, the Dadaists and Surreali sts considered fi lm a major artistic
innovation. And film provides an essential link between the European
avant-garde and American art of the twentieth century. As Edward B.
Germain notes, "While Dada was growing up in Ameri ca, so were
moving pictures, and like Dada they were primarily an American,
133.
n Gertrude Stein, "Plays," in Writing and Lectures, 65.
'" Robinson, 24.
'
9
Gertrude Stein, "Plays," 64.
GERTRUDE STEIN 11
rather th,m a British phenomenon. "
10
The use of collage and montage,
the representation of unconscious desi re- all to be found in Dada and
Surreali sm-find their roots in cinematic technology.
In her analysis of Surrealist fi lm, Linda Williams writes, " (l]n the
dream and the film one sees the image of something that is not real ly
there in an illusion si milar to that of a mirror."
11
In his avant-garde
play, Him (1927), another American writer, e.e. cummi ngs-whose
poetic experiments with language in poetry were related to Stein's in
prose-explicitly plilys with the i llusion of the mirror and its reflection
of unconscious dreams and desires. cummings' two main characters,
Him and Me, take their names from their images in a mirror. In
ilddition to exploring the role of characters-as-mirrors, cummings
creates the structure of his play as the literal mirror of a play:
Him: Th is play of mine is all about mirrors.
Me: But who's the hero?
Him: (To her) The hero of this play of mine? (Hesitates) A
man ...
Me: Naturally. What sort of man?
Him: The sort of man-who is writing a play about a man
who is writing a sort of play.
Me: That's a queer hero, isn't it?
Him: Isn' t i t?
Me: And what is this hero called?
Him: (Ver y slowly) This hero is Cill led 'Mr. O.Him, the
Man in the Mirror.'
Me: O.Him. (Smiles) And the heroi ne? (Quickly) Or
isn' t there ;my?
Hi m: On the contrary. My heroine lives over there-.
(Points to the Mirror)
Me: (Turning at the invisible window) Me?
Hi m: Me, the beautiful mistress of the extraordinary Mr.
O.Him.
Me: - Extraordinary because he th inks she's beautiful?
Him: Extraordinary becclllse I need a sh<1ve because he
needs <t shave. I!
'" Eclw,ml B. Germ,lin, ed., Surrealist Poetry (Middle5ex, England: Penguin,
1978), -U.
" Li nd,1 Will i,Jms, Figures of Desire: A Theory ,we/ Analysis of Surrealist Film
(Urban,! : llniversity of Illinois Press, 19811, 19.
"e>.e. cummings, Him (New York: Boni ,mel Liveright, 192 7), 29-30.
12
BAY-CHENG
Aside from its formal si mil arities to the European avant-garde and
that avant-garcle's much smaller dri'lmatic offshoot in the United States,
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights is importc1nt, as I noted earlier, for its
explicit violations of the three fundc1mental elements of conventional
or traditional dre1ma: in brief, psychology, causality, and morality or
providentiality. Rather th<ln merel y mimic the techniques of the
Dadaists or Surrealists, Stein disrupts this triad even further than ei ther
cummings in Him or Wilder in his allegedly avant-garde Our Town
(1938), thereby esti1blishing herself Cls the foremost dri'lmClti st of the
Americcm avant-garde.
It is noteworthy that Our Town, published in the se1me year as
Doctor Faustus, dei11s with the same issues as Stein's play-namely, the
indi vidual 's place in the world, the rel<1tionship to a higher power, c1nd
the longing, if not for a better world, then for a greater appreciation of
the world-in-itself, in all its mundane dail iness. Considering that both
Stein and Wilder were writing in Europe (she in Pari s and he in
Switzerland) on the eve of World We1r II , it is not surpri sing that both
were preoccupi ed with the question of where the world was headed.
Although the two were friends Clnd corresponded during thi s time,
their dramatic results could hardly be more different.
33
Whereas
Wilder, amid the tri1ppings of the avant-garde as described by
Cardullo, cleMiy advocates a retreat from modernist technology and a
return to si mple living in the small towns of late nineteenth-to-early-
twentieth-century America, Stein seems to bel ieve that there can be no
retreat e1nd that the consequences of thi s technology must be faced in
the present as well as in the future. To repeat, Doctor Faustus begins
his journey not before or even with the deci sion to sell his soul, but
after its sale. And like Faust, in Bigsby's words, the Dadaists
themselves "emerged into a world which had already lost its secure
fai th in absolutes. Confronted wi th mechanical processes and
biological determini sm, the individual saw less and less scope for
action."
34
So too did Gertrude Stein emerge and so was she
confronted, with the result that a pCltriarchal God had to di sappear
from her dramCl , to be replaced by Cl humanity in conflict with itself
3
' Nonetheless, Wilder acknowledges Stein's influence on Our Town in a
letter to her and Al ice B. Toklas dated 13 September 1937: "The Play is an
immersion, immersion into a New Hampshire town. It's called 'Our Town' and its
third ilCt is bilsed on your ideils, ilS on great pillilrs, ilnd whether you know it or
not, unti l further notice, you're in a deep-knit collaboriltion already" [Edward
Burns and Ullil E. Dydo, eds., The Leuers of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder
(New Hilven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 175].
'" Bi gsby, 23.
GERTRUDE STEIN 13
and with an industrial-technological envi ronment of humankind's own
creation.
The Faust legend itself is a kind of retelling of the Biblical myth of
the Garden of Eden. Eve is tempted by the devil, in the form of a
serpent, to taste fruit from the tree of knowledge and to share that frui t
with Adam-an action that banishes all humanity from paradise.
Si milarly, the Faust of legend is tempted to sell his soul to the devil
(and, consequently, his right to paradise in heaven-the only Eden
humankind can ever know) in exchange for omni science, even
omnipotence. Throughout Stein's play, central characters themselves
usurp or reject power typically associ ated with God. Faustus claims
the power to create light, as does Marguerite Ida-Helena Annabel (the
central female character whose dual names and fluctuating identity
mark her as a kind of conflated womankind, complicating verb tenses
throughout the play), although she seems less interested in this power
than Faust.
35
Instead, Marguerite Ida-Helena Annabel rejects all
1
' There is room for speculation here as to the origins of Marguerite Ida-
Helena Annabel's name. Marguerite and Helena seem to come from the legend
itself, for Margaret appears in a wide variety of Faustian tales as F;wst's young
bride and dutiful wife, while Helena, or Helen, is a sexual temptress of men,
finding her origins in the Greek mythological figure Helen of Troy. In Chnstopher
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1588). Helen of Troy is a significant chJracter, while in
Karl von Holtei's Dr. Johannes Faust (1829), Helen fights the devil, Voland, for
possession of Faust's soul and in the final act threatens to abduct Faust and
Margarethe's baby (Nancy A. Kaiser, "Faust/Faustine in the Nineteenth Century:
Man's Myth, Women's Places," in Out Fausc?: Roots and Ramificaltons of a
Modern German Mych, Reinhold Grimm and jost Hermand, eds. [Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987], 72). In her own dramatization of the Faust
legend, The Seven Strings of the Lyre (1869), George Sand also included Helen of
Troy as a central character.
The name of Ida may also have its roots in Greek mythology. i\s Allegra
Stewart writes, "Mount Ida, the seat of worship of Cybele, is a place, not a person,
the scene of orgiastic celebrati ons of the Great Mother of the Gods." (Stewart,
163). She also notes that Ida may be a reference to Freud's concept of the id. Ida
may have its roots in Stein's life as well. Shirley Neuman states that Stein's play is
actually the result of her early attempts at a novel, Ida, in which a young woman is
stung by a viper and must find a doctor to cure her (Shirley Neuman, "Would a
viper have stung her if she had only had one name?: Doctor Fauslus Lighcs the
Lighcs," in Gercrude Scein and che Making of Literawre, Bruce Nadel and Shirley
Neuman, eds. [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988], 170). (Stein herself
was bitten by a snake in 1933, an experience she called " bibli cal"; on 17 May
1937, moreover, she wrote to Thornton Wilder that she was basing ldJ on him.)
The name might also refer to the author of one of the first feminist interpretations
of the Faust tal e, Ida Hahn-Hahn, whose Crafin Faustine (1840) tells the story of
Faustine and Mephistophela. Ida is even similar to one of Stein's nicknames for
Alice B. Toklas, Ada.
14
BAY- CHENG
deities, turni ng her back on both the sun (whi ch could be interpreted
as a natural god) and the electri c li ght (the new technol ogical god).
Like the Bibli cal Eve, however, Marguerite Ida-Helena Annabel is
bitten by a viper. Initi ally, Marguerite Ida-Helena Annabel appears to
tri umph over the bite. Faustus successfully cures her, despi te his
repeated asserti ons that he cannot see her, and consequently
Marguerite Ida-Helena Annabel becomes immune to the viper' s
poi son. As Stei n's Chorus intones, "See the vi per there, I Cannot hurt
her ( 1 06)." At first gl ance, th is seems to be a triumph of science over
God, but Margueri te Ida-Helena rejects both the li ght
of the sun the science of FCiust. And for the first time in the
she gai ns unity of identi ty: "With her back to the sun I One sun I
And she i s one I Margueri te Ida and Helena Annabel as well (1 07)."
With both uni ty and duali ty thus present in her main female
character, Stei n focuses attention on the multiple identi ties of women.
Like the Dadai sts, who expressed "skepti ci sm about the unity of
in theatrical presentation,"
36
Stein creates <1 character who i n
name alone evokes both the good and evil depictions of women in
hi story and literature. Half of the four-part name, Marguerite Ida,
contains posi ti ve connotations of motherhood-Margaret the faithful
wi fe and mother of multi ple Faust legends, and Ida the mother of the
gods-whi le the second hal f, Helena Annabel, suggests images of
sexual temptation and demonic, anti-famil ial sentiment, aside from its
possibl e (i roni c?) reference to the mother of the Virgin Mary (see note
35). In creati ng such a fractured, complex identity, Stein, in my view,
is contradi cti ng one-dimensional representations of women Cl nd
illuminating the absurdity of the longstanding Madonna-Whore
dichotomy. A reader or viewer must constantly reconci le the mani fol d
nature of Margueri te Ida-Helena Annabel with the si pronoun
"she. " The stubbornness of Stein's techni que i s evident i n cri ti ci sm of
the play, where schol ars almost always shorten the character' s name to
Accordi ng to Stewart, Annabel may simply mean " fai r Anna" and suggests the
name Hannah, which i n Hebrew refers to the "Anna Perenna of Ital ian tradition
and also the mother of the Virgin Mary" (Stewart, 163). "-Bel," for its part,
appears to be derived from the character of Bel le in Stephen Vi ncent Benet's story
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937), publ ished a year before Doctor Faustus, the
same year in which Stei n publ ished her own Daniel Webster Eighteen i n America
A Play. In Benet's version of the Faust legend, Bell e is a demonic maid (the evi l
antithesis to the heart- and hearth-warming Margaret) who terrorizes the fami ly she
serves (Kaiser, 72). For more i nformation on Faust and the femi nist tradi tion, see
Kai ser.
36
Matthews, 9.
GERTRUDE SHIN
15
"Marguerite or her initials, MIHA, rilther than confuse their own
readers' sense of grilmmilr ilnd logic.
The duality of Marguerite Ida-Helena character is visible
not only in her name, but also in the events that surround her. She is
at once an agent of action and the passive victim or recipient of others'
actions. As an embodiment of Eve, she survives the bite of the snake,
to become as powerful as Doctor FiWStus in her ,1bility to create light
(candlelight). Nevertheless, she still succumbs to "the man from the
sea (107)," who al)pears clS another embodiment of the same viper she
had earlier eluded ilntl seduces her, exclaiming that "I am the onl y he
and you are the only she and we are the only we (1 08)." His
language, of course, recalls Adam and Eve, the fi rst he and she. But
through Marguerite Ida-Helena Annabel, Stein inverts the story of
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. For thi s Eve is not only not
responsible for her own temptation (she is unwi ttingl y bitten by the
serpent and even fails to realize it was a serpent th<lt had bitten her),
she is also relieved of the responsibility for the fall of humani ty. It is
the Ad<lm figure, in fact ("the only he"), who is linked to both the
devil Clnd the serpent: "And indeed behind the mCin of the seas is
Mephi stopheles ... ( 1 08)." This Adam is born from the se<l, Cln imilge
often equ<lted with female sexuality, whereas the Eve of the Bible is
born of Adam's rib. When the man from the seas arrives with
Mephi stopheles, moreover, two children repeatedly call the
(maternal ?) mCin from the seas "Mr. ViiJer." Indeed, the only figure
from Genesis who does not appear is God himself.
Despite the inversion of the Eve chnracter <1 ncl the e1bsence of a
judeo-Christi<tn God in Doctor Fausllls, hum,mity suffers Cl spirituCII f,1 te
equivalent to Ad<lm and Eve's bani shment from the Garden of Eden.
Even as Stein dism,mtl es traditionCII theology, hum<t ns seem to impose
<l si milar f<lte on themselves <l S they choose to reject God Clnd face their
diffi cult lives alone. This rej ection of God by humanity culminates in
F.wst's damnation, not as the result of et ct of God or seducti on by a
woman, but r<lther of his own free will. Considering her dismissal of
tradi tional theology, it is not surpri sing, then, that Stein opens the J.>lily
c1fter the centr.1l reli gi ous cri sis- Faust's decision to sell his soul to the
devil for knowledge-which in other clr,ml<ttizdtions of the F<lllst
legend serves as the turning !)Oint. For Stei n, like the Dadaists <lllcl
Surreali sts, the religious crisis-whether to believe in or turn from <1
higher being, whether to .KCeJ)t or rej ect org<t ni zecl reli gion-is J)ast
hi story Clnd no longer to her "continuous J.>resent. "
Rather th,ln concern himself with hi s rel,ltionship to, or the
repercussions of the exi stence of, <1 godlike figure, Stein's Doctor
Fc1ustus begins the pl,y by l;unenting hi s own foolishness <1t allowing
<tnother (the devil ) to wield influence over him. Like th<lt of previous
16 BAY-CHENG
Fausts, hi s egotism i s central to his character, as when thi s Faustus
vents his frustration on Mephistopheles. While Faust immediately
regrets hi s decision to sell his soul for electric light, his remorse is
motivated not by fear of an almighty creator or a crisis of conscience,
but rather by his immediate physical discomfort-caused by the
relentless glare of the lights. " I keep on having so much light that light
is not bright (89)," he complains. As I have implied, the spiritual
wr<tth of God is systematical ly replaced by the secular wrath of
technology, as represented by electric light, in Doctor Faustus Lights
the Lights.
That God i s replaced by the modern technology of electricity may
be Stein's punning reference to Goethe's criticism of the Enlightenment
in his Faust. Despite its central ity to the play, the "spirituality" of the
electric lights has so far been ignored in criticism of thi s play. In
recent scholarship about Doctor Faustus, in fact, Faust is frequently
compared to so secular a figure as Thomas Edison, such as Richard
Bridgman's earlier quote that compared Stein's Faustus to a
"disgruntled Edison."
17
In his review of Robert Wilson's 1992 Lincoln
Center production of Doctor Faustus, David Savran suggests a similar
interpretation of Faustus' obsession with electric light:
In Stein's text Enlightenment is at once liberalized and subtly
degraded. Reconceptualized for a technological age, it means
little more than flicking on a switch. And the good Doctor in
search of illumination is less the sorcerer of yore than a
second-rate Edison completing an electric circuit.
38
james F. Schaefer, Jr., articulates much the same point with his
comparison between the morality of the play and economics:
Stein's play depicts Faustus as an embittered Thomas Edi son
who has sold hi s soul for the secret of electri c light. Tired of
technologi cal accomplishment, the aging inventor now wants
the freedom of a dark and solitary hell. But thi s twentieth
century Faustus is a businessman as well as a scientist, and hi s
bargain with Mephi sto has an odd capitalist twi st: since he
has sold hi s soul , he no longer has a soul, and without a soul
37
Bridgman, 209.
3
" David Savran, " Whistl ing 1n the Dark," Periorming Arts Journal, 15
(Januilry 1993): 26.
GERTRUDE STEIN 17
he cannot go to hell.
39
What these interpretations ignore is the tremendous theological or
ontological weight placed on the electric lights in the absence of a god
figure. Faust is not an inventor grown tired of his invention; rather, he
has ceased to be able to control it. He cannot escape the very lights
he has created and they torment him. Furthermore, these electric
lights communicate with Faustus, an issue not addressed by the Edison
analogy. Early in the play, for example, Faust sings a duet with his
dog-and the lights-about the electric lights:
Bath me
says Doctor Faustus
Bathe me
In the electric lights
During this time the electric lights come and go
What is it
says Doctor Faustus
Thank you
says the dog.
Just thi s moment the electric lights get brighter and
nothing comes
Was it it
says Doctor Faustus
Faustus meditates he does not see the dog.
Will it
Will it
Will it be
Will it be it.
Faustus sighs and repeats
Will it be it.
A duet between the dog and Faustus
Will it be it.
Just it.
At that moment the electric light gets pale again and
in that moment Faustus shocked says
It is it ... (92)
The above "duet" between Faust, the dog, and the lights cl early
indicates a superior role for the lights as well as their ability to convey
information to Faustus. Indeed, just before his repetitious questioning
19
Schaefer, 3.
18
BAY-CHENG
of the lights, Faust meditates so deeply that he seems to forget the dog,
with whom he has sung the duet until now. This meditation then
culminates in an unnamed or undecipherable revelation by the lights:
"It is it ... " Clearly this relationship is more complicated than that
between an inventor and his object, and, although Faustus does usurp
a godlike power in creating the light, it is the li ght that ulti mately
controls him.
Further articulated through this relationship between Doctor
Faustus and the lights is the play's singular moral design. Faust may be
able to create electric light, but he cannot control it; he has produced a
never-ending day, but no corresponding night. Stein has thus
returned, via Faust's creation, to a godless and di sordered world by
undoing God's first act of creation. As the first book of Genesis reads,
And God silid, "Let there be l ight"; and there was light. And
God saw that the light was good; and God separated the li ght
from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness
he called Night. And there was evening and morning, one
day. (Genesis 1 .3-5)
40
God's first act is to separate light from darkness, thereby creating d<1y
and night, evening and morning. But Faust's creation of the electric
light does away with this distinction, and Stein equates this merging of
day and night, light and dark, with the disappearance of moral order
from the universe. After Doctor Faustus has acknowledged that he
fooli shly traded hi s soul for the lights, he articulates the new "moral
order" of the play:
Who cares if you lie if you steal, there is
no snake to grind under one's heel, there is no
hope there is no death there is no I ife there is
no breath, there just is every day all day and
when there is no day there is no clay. (90)
The cycle of day into night has been broken and with it the moral
certainty of the separation of li ght from d<1rk, good from evil. When
Faustus questions, "Who cares if you lie if you steal ," i t is clear that
God might have cared, but He is now absent. In the absence of God,
the natural world suffers, as do all living beings who are dependent
upon it. Not only is Faust tormented by the unrelenting lights, for
40
Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger, eds., The Holy Bible: The Oxford
Annotated Bible, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).
GERTRUDE STEIN
example, but so is his dog as well:
I am a dog and I bCly at the moon, I did yes I used to do it I
used to bay Clt the moon I <llways used to do it Clnd now now
not any more, I cannot, of course I cannot, the electric I ights
they m<lke it be th<lt there is no night and if there is no night
then there is no moon and if there is no moon I do not see it
and if I do not see it I cannot bay at all. (111)
19
From the human angle, Faust's boy companion notes that, without a
moon, "no one is crazy any more (1 11 )." Given the events of the
play, however, the boy's observation begs the question, what is
"crazy" in the context of this play? Given the talking dog who says
"thank you," multiple identities, a day without end, a devil who
appears to have littl e direct power over humanity, and a society
without moral order, it seems that the lack of a moon has actually
made the world crazier. Of course, what Stein implies through her
dismantling of theological assumptions is th<1t the craziness of
humanity is neither the result of a natural aberration nor of the absence
of God. Humanity is innately prone to maddening self-destructiveness,
and the lifting of moral sanctions merely reveals the true nature of the
beings underneath.
Stein posits the inability of humanity to advance or improve itself
in her essay "What Are Master-Pieces and why are there so few of
them." In a piece that seems to gloss Doctor Faustus, she questions
anyone's ability to create art-to create timeless mas!erpieces-when
human development seems less to support Charles Darwin's theory of
evolution than to be trapped in its own vicious cycle or re-volution:
What is the use of being a boy if you are going to grow up to
be a man. And what is the use there i s no use from the
standpoint of master-pieces there is no use. Anybody can
really know that.
There is really no use in being a boy if you are going to
grow up to be a man and boy you can be certain that that is
continuing and a master-piece does not continue it i s as it is
but it does not continue. It is very interesting that no one is
content with being a man and boy but he must also be <1 son
and a father and the f<1ct that they all die has something to do
with time but it has nothing to do with a master-piece.
41
4 1
Gertrude Stein, "What Are Master-Pieces and why are there so few of
them,., in Writing and Lectures, 153.
20
BAY- CHENG
Written in 1936, just two years before Doctor Faustus, the above text
finds its w(ly into FClust's musing Clbout himself Clnd hi s role in the
universe: "I go where I go, where is there there is where Clnd Clll the
ciCly Clncl Clll the night too it grew Clnd grew and there is no way to say I
and Cl clog Clnd Cl boy, if Cl boy is to grow to be a mCln am I Cl boy Clm I Cl
clog is a dog a boy is Cl boy a clog and whClt Clm I I CClnnot cry what (lm I
oh what Clm I (98)." In what might be construed ClS Cl dreClm
sequence- "Doctor FClustus the dog Clnd the boy Clll sleeping (98)"-
Faustus repeCltedly sees himself here as interchClngeClble with the dog
Clncl the boy Clnd consequently lacking Cl definite identity of hi s own:
Man and dog dog Clncl man each one can tell it Clll like Cl bClll
with Cl caress no tenderness, man Clnd dog just the SClme each
one CCln tClke the biClme each one can well ClS well tell it all ClS
they cCln, mCln Clnd dog, well well mCln and dog whClt is the
difference between Cl mCln and a dog when I say none. (98)
TowClrcl s the end of the play, Faust even responds to his dog wi th the
very same line that has been repeated by the animal throughout the
play: " Yes thank you (111 )."
Stein may creClte multiple identities for Marguerite lda-HelenCl
Annabel, but Faust's ongoing questioning of himself does not result in
even a temporary unity or oneness of identity. Doctor Faustus thus
appears to be incapable of fulfillment through God or even the devi l ,
who is unable to convince Faustus that he has a soul. Faust's self-
querying actually begins with his questioning of the devil: "I have
made it but have I a soul to pay for it (90)." His question "what am I
(89)," made to appear a declaration, i s repeated frequently throughout
the piCly; yet Faustus does not find an answer. In fact, after his final
ClCtion-the killing of the boy Clnd the dog so ClS to gClin entr<Jnce into
heii-M<Jrgueri te Ida-Helena Annabel's failure to recognize him denies
Faust hi s identity. Before falling helplessly into the arms of the man
from the seCls, Marguerite Ida-Helena Annabel says, "you are not
Doctor Faustus no not ever never never (118). " Faust's quest to
understand himself may be as unrelenting as the glare of the electric
li ghts, but it is al so just as unfulfilling. As the circularity of Faust's
musings suggests, the attempt to know oneself-- in the hope of
bettering, renewing, or redeeming oneself-is essentially futile.
If, according to Cardullo, " the fundamental subject matter of
almost Clll serious plays of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the
attempt to resurrect fundamental ethical and philosophical certainties
GERTRUDE STEIN 21
without resurrecting the fundamental spiritual certainty of a
judgmental or mindful God,"
42
then not only has Gertrude Stein
replaced the spiritual certainty of God with the secular amorality of
modern technology, she has also replaced the psycho-scientific
certainty of integrated yet developing personality with the inability of
humanity either to comprehend itself or to evolve. In this play, all the
characters are reduced to the same frustrating. inability to understand
the world or act upon it. Margueri te Ida-Helena Annabel cannot
defend herself against the man from the seas; the devil cannot control
Doctor Faustus (not even long enough to convince him that he has a
soul); Faust cannot regulate the lights once he has created them, and at
the end of the play he fail s to convince Marguerite Ida-Helena Annetbel
to accompany him to hell ; and both the boy and the dog have no
power over their own lives, manipul ated as they are by Faust-and
ultimately killed by him.
Like Wilder's Our Town, to repeat, Doctor Faustus Lights the
Lights investigates the triumph of modern technology and the role of
God in the contemporary life. But retther than offer romantic nostalgiet
and spi ri tual redemption to a Depress ion-weary et nd war-wary
American public, through i solettion-and isolationi sm- in a quaint
New Hampshire town of the turn of the century, Stein accepts the
impotence of humanity without et god, without moret ls, etnd without et
real sense of itself. Indeed, in an almost Absurdi st fashion, Stein's
charet cters revel in their own frustration and ignoretnce. As a final
gesture of thi s frustration, Stein ends the play with a little boy and littl e
girl cet lling for the man from the sea, whom they call Mr. Viper:
"Pieetse Mr. Viper listen to me he is he and she is she etnd we etre we
please Mr. Viper listen to me (118)." The end for Doctor Faustus is a
simil arly fruitless gesture. Faust's frustrations with the world culminate
in his desi re to "go to hell,"
43
which neatly returns the play to its
theologi cal question- does Doctor Faustus have a soul? Ironi cally,
Mephistopheles informs Faustus thett he cannot enter hell without a
soul, which Faust hets sold. In order to enter hell , Doctor Faustus is
told, he must commit a sin. When he asks, " What sin, how cet n I
"' Cardullo, Whose Town is it, Anyway?," 47.
43
The word "hell " is used here with Stein's lower-case " h." Although it is
usual ly written as Hell, Stein never designates the word as such in this play. This
may distinguish " hell" as a pl ace different from the Biblical netherworld of
everlasting torment associated wi th the devil. But it seems j ust as likely that Stein,
like jean-Paul Sartre shortl y afterwards in No Exit (1944), is constructing the notion
of hell as the human conditi on- the unrelenting presence of other people-and not
as a place of eternal damnation worthy of capitalizati on.
22
BAY-CHENG
without a soul commit a sin," Mephi sto peremptorily replies, "Kill
anything (1 16)." Faust then kill s his companions, the boy and the dog,
and descends into hell.
In light of Faust's damnation, we may usefully consider the
doctrinal di sti nction between venial si n and mortal sin as articulated
by the Catholic Church. In her essay " Faustus and the Apple," Ceri
Sullivan articulates thi s distinction: " Damnation occurs where the sin
is mortal, not venial. For sin to be mortal the act must be of grave
matter and involve a deliberate turning away from God. This, say the
catechi sms, asks for as full a knowl edge of the consequences as the
sinner is able to comprehend. "
44
Such a di stinction may explain why
Doctor Faustus can turn away from God initially (through the pact he
makes with Mephisto before Stein's play begins) with no obvious
consequences, but turn from God at the conclusion of the play,
through murder, and enter hell. Significantly, the word "sin" is used
only in thi s final scene. Faust's initial turning away from God is
motivated by hi s desire for knowledge, not by any desire to repudiate
or "kill" the deity. For this reason we may regard his first sin as venial.
At the end of the play, however, Faustus consciously turns from God
by committing the mortal sin of murder- i.e., by killing a human being
made in God's image.
I believe that Stein uses the majority of the play as a build,
undramatic as it may seem, to this final moment. Faust desires to go to
hell to escape the reality that he himself has created through his
rejection of God in favor of technology. But, for Stein, the term "hell"
describes thi s very technologi cal reality (or nightmare): "Any light is
just a light and now there is nothing more ei ther by day or by night
just a light (91)." The unrelenting light can be read as a modern
analogue to the eternal fires of hell. Thi s technological light has the
capacity, with its heat and radi ance (neither warm and nouri shing like
the sun, nor gently haloed like candlelight), to overwhelm all other
forms of light and, like the hell of theology, every type of faith.
Living in Europe during the 1930s, Stein thus refl ects the anxiety of
a continent only recently recovered from the fi rst mechani zed world
war, yet now poi sed on the brink of a second-one whose
technological devastation and human waste would beggar the
imagination. Unl ike the retrogressive Emily in Our Town, Stein could
not advocate that humans simply and happily " realize [this] life while
Ceri Sullivan, " Faustus and the Apple," Review of English Studies 47
(1996): 49-50.
GERTRUDE STEIN
23
they live it-every, every minute."
45
Rather she suggests, like other
avant-garde writers of her time, that life cannot be totally realized or
understood, and she avers, unlike the comforting Stage Manager in
Wilder's Our Town, that no God exists to create moral order or to
prevent humankind from technological self-extinction.
The question remains, did Gertrude Stein reject faith in God or is
she warning others against the abandonment of such faith? Clearly,
Stein demonstrates a fascination with religion, Catholicism in
particular. As Linda S. Watts writes, "Though Stein herself was jewish,
Catholicism seems always to have held a fascination for her."
46
In
Everybody's Autobiography, Stein herself claimed to have read the Old
Testament at the age of eight. And Watts's Rapture Untold: Gender,
Mysticism, and the "Moment of Recognition" in Works by Gertrude
Stein ponders evidence of the spiritual in the work of Stein. Curiously,
this book does not explicitly address the religious themes in Doctor
Faustus, although Watts does refer repeatedly to Stein's rejection of
patriarchal rei igion:
In the early writings, such as the Radcliffe Themes, The
Making of Americans, and Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Stein
challenges institutional religion with its patriarchal and
hierarchical structure. Stein's objections to institutional
religion temper her enthusiasm for the Catholic Church. While
Stein's religious ideas owe much to Catholicism, then, even
her earliest writings are openly critical of some Catholic
beliefs and practices.
47
In their place, Stein advocated "an individualized, woman-
identified religion in which first-hand spiritual experience become the
individual's quest."
48
If one compares her characterization of
Marguerite Ida-Hel ena Annabel as a self-contained, candlel it entity to
her essentialization of Faust in the amorphous "what am 1," Stein
clearly argues for a feminine version of spirituality. And yet,
Marguerite Ida-Helena Annabel falls helplessly into the arms of Mr .
.; Thornton Wilder, Our Town: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Coward
McCann, 1938), 100.
'" Linda S. Watts, Rapture Untold: Cender. Mysticism. and the "Moment of
Recognition" in Works by Certrude Stein (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 27.
"' Ibid., 28.
""Ibid.
24
BAY-CHENG
Viper at the conclusion of the play, a final action that indicates
nihilistic hopelessness for humanity rather than religious salvation.
Like the Dadaists, to name only one avant-garde group, Stein has lost
faith in the tradi ti onal patriarchal God, but she has also lost faith both
in unconventional feminine spirituali ty and, paradoxically, in the
potential of any individual without absolute faith. Faust's "individual
quest," after all, ends in murder, despair, and chaos. And the grim
attitude that permeates Doctor Faustus continues after World War II in
the works of such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Samuel
Beckett, and Eugene lonesco, who saw humankind's trust in a higher
power betrayed by the human folly-the hellfire of the Holocaust and
atomic obliteration- of the last great war.
journal of AmPrican Drama and Theatre 12 (Spring 2000)
HAIR: THE LEGAL LEGACY
jOHN H. HOUCHIN
From 1970 through 1975 Hair, The American Tribal-Love Rock
Musical, was the subject of numerous state and federal court cases. At
issue was the right of theatre arti sts to use transgressive sexual and
political representations to critique contemporary society. The impact
of these decisions was profound. The various courts ruled that publ ic
official s could no longer order producers to remove di sagreeable
material from shows, no matter how offensive, unless the entire
production was judged legally obscene in a court of law. Nor could
they prohibit controversial productions from using publi c facilities
without due process. In essence, these verdicts affirmed that theatri cal
productions were a form of speech and were ful ly protected by the
Consti tution, an interpretation that had never before been so clearly
articulated. Although governmental entities have begun to use
economic blackmail to suppress disagreeable theatre productions, they
have been forced to admit that such representations have a
constitutional right to exist. It was Hair, Broadway's first rock musical
that established these guarantees.
Given the political climate of the period, it seemed unlikely that
Hair would emerge victorious. The radical 1960s were rapidly
drawing to a close. The militancy of Viet Nam protesters raised the
question of whether or not "symbolic speech"- actions and symbols-
merited the same First Amendment protection as spoken or printed
words. One of the most pivotal cases of the period was United States
v. O'Brien (1968) in which anti-draft activist David Paul O'Brien
burned his draft card on the steps of the South Boston Courthouse. He
was subsequently arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to pri son for
up to six years. O'Brien appealed claiming that his constitutionally
guaranteed right to freedom of expression had been abridged. The
Supreme Court disagreed. It stated, "when 'speech' and 'nonspeech'
elements are combined in the same course of conduct, a sufficiently
important governmental interest in regulating the nonspeech el ement
can justify incidental limitations on First Amendment freedoms
26
HOUCHIN
(emphasis added)."' The high court left no doubt that actions
performed in public, irrespective of their political content, did not
automatically merit constitutional protection.
The cast, director, and author of Che! by Lennox Raphael also
discovered that performing allegedly political actions did not
guarantee First Amendment safeguards. The production was meant to
reveal that the relationshi p of a small Latin American nation to the
United States was that of a victim to a rapist. The 144-page script
described characters who were violent and sexually aggressive and
was littered with obscenities. However, it was the action of the play,
its "symbolic speech," that caused the most furor. The actors, nude
through most of the performance, presented the unthinkabl e-
simulated sex acts, both heterosexual and homosexual-on stage. It
opened on 24 March 1969 at the Free Store Theatre in Cooper Square.
That night the cast, director, and playwright were arrested. The case
did not go to trial until january 1970, but the verdict was clearly
designed to ch ill the revolutionary ardor of theatre groups that used
sexual representations to communicate political messages. Presiding
New York City judge Arthur Goldberg ruled that Chef "pandered to
prurient interest " and exceeded the "customary limits of candor" by
graphically demonstrating deviant sexual acts. He also declared that
the politi cal content of the play was "elusive" and that it contained
" no redeeming social value."
2
By the time Hair's legal challenges had
begun, several levels of the judi ciary had already concluded that
actions did not automatically merit the same First Amendment
protection afforded to the spoken and written word.
The first incarnation of Hair, written by jerome Ragni and james
Rado with music by Galt MacDermot, opened at the New York
Shakespeare Festival on 2 December 1967.
3
The team had
unsuccessfully attempted to interest producers such as Robert
Whitehead, Hal Prince, and David Merrick in the project that initially
centered on vigorous anti -war protest. Finally, Joe Papp, who was
vitally interested in the hippie counterculture, agreed to produce Hair.
He hired Gerald Freedman, who had been jerome Robbins's assistant
on West Side Story, to direct the production.
' United States v. O'Brien, Supreme Court of the United States, 27 May 1968.
Al l court documents accessed by Lexus-Nexus and therefore lack page numbers.
2
People v. Larry Bercowicz, et a/., Criminal Court of the City of New York,
New York County, 15 February 1970. My investigation of this bi zarre episode,
"Radical Sexuality and Che!," will appear in Theatre Symposium, Summer 2000.
3
Barbara Lee Horn, The Age of Hair (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991 ),
141.
Hair
27
The production was plagued by casting problems e1 nd conflicts
between Papp and the writers and between Freedman and hi s
choreographer, Anna Sokolow. After its eight week run Papp
expressed no interest in moving the show to Broadway. The entire
production was on the verge of being consigned to the dustbin of
interesting but unsuccessful theatre experiments. Enter Michael Butler.
The scion of the exceedingly wealthy Chi cago based Butler family, a
confidant of john and Robert Kennedy, an advisor to Governor Otto
Kerner, and liberal Democratic candidate for public office in Illinois,
Butler believed that Hair had a future. He and his partner, Bertrand
Castel li , saw the play as a powerful means to oppose the Viet Nam
War and extol the liberated life style of American youth. Butler
invested $250,000 and moved the show to the Cheetah Discotheque
were it had forty-five performances. Although the response was less
than encouraging, he was convi nced that Hair had a future. Butler
decided to move the show to Broadway, but replaced Freedman with
Tom O'Horgan because he felt the former's direction was too
depressing. O'Horgan was a product of Second City, was in tune with
Grotowski's techniques, <1nd had been awarded an Obie in 1967 <1s
best off-off Broadway director of the season. Cue Magazine called
him the "high priest of off-off Broadway" and he was thrilled at the
prospect of introducing Broadway audiences to a healthy close of
radical aesthetics.
4
O'Horgan fundamentally altered Hair. He and MacDermot added
thirteen new songs and eliminated three that had appeared in the
Public's version. With more songs to fill the same two and one-half
hour production block, the already thin book was all but eliminated,
as was any emphasis on plot, character or theme. Instead O'Horgan
stressed picturesque physical activity and bold anti-iII usionistic devices
that were supported by a driving rock score.
5
O' Horgan also modified
/-lair's Weltanschauung. Although the production sti ll voiced
opposition to the Vi et Nam War and racism, it adopted a new pro-
love, pro-sex and pro-drug stance, while placing significant emphasis
on the "tribal" nature of the hippies. In other words, Hair was the first
"concept musical." It was self-consciously anti-illusioni stic, and
defi ;:mtly non-Bro<1clway, all of which clearly reflected O'Horgan's off-
off Broaclw<1y experiment<tl approach.
Even before the Broaclwc1y opening, the New York theatre
opposed Hair. Both the Shuberts and Nederl<1nclers
'Ibid, 40
, Ibid., 45-46.
28 HOUCHIN
refused to lease a theatre to Castelli and Butler. Finall y, Butler's
influential father convinced David Cogan, owner of the Biltmore, to
make his theatre available. Burt Bacharach, Richard Rogers, and
Leonard Bernstein all saw Hair on opening night, 29 April 1968. They
vehemently objected to its presence on the " Great White Way" and
lamented the future of American musical theatre. David Merrick
remarked, " I don't know what the hell this is. I don't know why
people like it."
6
Several establ ishment critics voiced si milar views.
John Chapman of the Daily News used the strongest language he
could muster to dissuade his readers from visiting the Biltmore. He
called it "vulgar, perverted, tasteless, cheap, cynical, offensive and
generall y lousy, and everybody connected with it should be washed in
strong soap and hung up to dry in the sun. "
7
Jack O'Brien labeled it
"a tangled mad-mod musical whose ultimate obsceni ties are not
shocking though execrably tasteless, whose cast with two exceptions
looks permanently bathless, whose points are not irreverent but
sacri legious; its hymns of ' love' are evill y hateful. "
8
William Goldman
called O'Horgan a "camp-fag" who distorted the anti-Viet Nam
message of the original Publi c Theatre version.
9
Martin Gottfried
offered perhaps the most compelling explanation for thi s virul ent
opposi tion of the Broadway establishment:
Hair was done by outsiders. Remember Broadway is a very
small place. It's really very i nbred. If you weren't a David
Merrick, an Alex Cohen or a Hal Prince, you did not bel ong to
the family. You were an outsider. Hair was brought in by
outsiders. It wasn't written by Jerry Herman, or Charl es
Strouse, or Cy Colman and worst of all it had all of this "f--
ing" music that everybody hated. Everybody wanted it to be
Guys and Dolls forever. They weren't paying attention to
what was on the radio. . . . And when Hair came in on
Broadway, the Broadway people were flabbergasted, confused
and angry, because they didn't know what this thing was or
how it could be a success. It failed every one of their
" Ibid., 86.
' Quoted in Wil li am Goldman, The Season (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World), 386.
8
Ibid., 386.
''Ibid., 387.
Hair 29
standards.
10
It wasn't only the establishment that chafed at Hair' s presence.
The East Village Other resented Hair for a completely different reason.
The paper, the voice of New York's hippie community, charged that
O' Horgan had blatantly commercial i zed the ethos of the counter
culture. It said, " Hair makes me sick .... Up. there on the stage for 2
1/2 hours [is] an ersatz tribe of loving, rocking, musical, hairy, quasi-
hip people .... No one has the validity to remove another's identity
as a joke; it' s too dangerous for both of them."
11
Ironically, one of
Hair's financial backers supported the Other's contention, only from a
completely different perspective. "I think I'll make a fortune. All the
touri sts want to see what hippies look like, but no one wants to go all
the way to the Village: it's too much trouble and it might be
dangerous. Here we' ve got them all nice and safe and bottled for view
on Forty-seventh Street."
12
Although Hair was never praised for capturing the anger, fear or
confusion of the American youth, it did win the applause of many
critics for its daring score and non-illusionistic staging. Most of al l they
loved the innocence with which the hippies were portrayed. After
admitting to hi s anxious readership that "yes" the music was loud and
" yes" there was nudity, Walter Kerr positively cooed: "The show i sn't
a hard sell. It i sn't even a sell ... there is no pressure to buy the bag,
no fear in the performers. They aren' t wooing you anxiously. Neither
are they walloping you desperately. They are simply beside you, like
bears coming into your cabin in Yellowstone Park."
13
Ri chard Watts,
Jr. also emerged as a supporter. He admitted, "The so-called
'American tribal love-rock musical' ... is strewn with four-letter words
and goes in for a few tentative forays into nudity, but although they try
pretty hard to be bold and outrageous, their rescuing virtue is their
inescapable youthful na"ivete."
14
Although 7776 won the Tony Award
10
Quoted in Horn, 83.
"Quoted in Goldman, 386.
12
Ibid., 387.
IJ Walter Kerr, " Hair: Not in Fear But in Delight, " New York Times, 19 May
1968, sec. II, p. 1.
1
" Richard Watts, Jr., "Music of the American Tribe," [New York Post. 30
April 1968], in New York Theatre Critics Reviews, vol. 29 (New York: Critics'
Theatre Reviews, 1968), 288.
30
HOUCHIN
for 1968, Ragni and Rado were voted outstanding lyrici sts of the
season and Galt MacDermot received the Drama Desk-Vernon Ri ce
Award for hi s score.
15
Hair may have been accused of destroying Broadway, insulting the
counter culture, and being amateuri sh, but no one ever interfered with
performances nor advocated that it be closed because it violated
obscenity laws. Such was not the case i n the other cities in which it
opened. Demonstrators from the Smite Smut League and the Gay
Liberation Front protested the Washington, D.C. production, and an
outraged clergyman in St. Paul released twelve mi ce in the lobby to
frighten the audience. These two events, however, were insignificant
when compared to what happened in Boston and Chattanooga.
By 20 February 1970, when Hair previewed in Boston at the
Wilbur Theatre, it had already been successfull y produced in fifteen
cities worldwide. Bostonians were obviously excited about Hair as
advance sales had exceeded $600,000. In his review, Boston Globe
critic Kevin Kelly called it "one of the most phenomenal musicals in
the history of the American theatre. Phenomenal, and pretty damned
wonderful as well."
16
Samuel Hirsch of the Boston Sunday Herald
Traveler was sl ightly more equivocating:
Hair is noi sy and unruly; it is vulgar and clamorous and full of
four-letter words and actions deliberately calculated to shock;
it mocks with athletic abandon all the sacred taboos of our
middle-class culture; and yet it fill s the stage with such
youthful energy and youthful exuberance ... that in the end
you are forced to accept their outlook- if not their insight.
17
Not all Boston critics agreed with Kelly or Hirsch. The Herald
Traveler's music criti c claimed that Hair had abandoned the real
power of rock and roll and sold out to middle class musical comedy.
He attacked the production as preachy, gratuitous, foul -mouthed and
self-consciously li beral. '
8
The Record-American call ed it witless and
arrogant. "It is entertainment by juvenile dropouts," the critic cl aimed.
15
Horn, 97.
16
Kevin Kelly, " Let the Sunshine In," Boston Globe, 6 March 1970, p. 15.
17
Samuel Hirsch, " Hair Message Love, Not Hate," Boston Sunday Herald
Traveler, 8 March 1970, p. 34.
18
Timothy Crouse, "Hair's Ugly Personality," Boston Sunday Herald
Traveler, 15 March 1970, [n.p.] .
Hair 31
" It preaches peace and love, but its tone is neither peaceful nor loving.
Its manners are bad and its morals are those of the barnyarci."
1
'
1
Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett H. Byrne, having seen a
preview performance, also disapproved of the production. He claimed
thett Hair had violated Massachusetts General Law 272 Section 16
because the actors were "guil ty of open and gross lewdness etnd
letscivious behavior" etnd therefore could be imprisoned and/or fined.
He vowed that he would close the production and prosecute all
offending parties. Gerald Berlin, counsel for the producers, P.B.I.C.
Inc. and Natoma Productions, Inc., duly incorporated in the Stette of
Illinois, requested that the Supreme Judicietl Court of Massachusetts
enjoin the district attorney from interfering with Hair. Each of the
justi ces saw a performance and on 9 April 1970, shortl y after their
spring session convened, they announced their decision. They ruled
that Hair constituted " in some degree, an obscure form of protest
protected under the First Amendment. " They continued that apart
from the nudity at the close of the first act, the bathing scene, and a
sequence where intercourse is simulated, Hair was not lewd.
Nonetheless, they refused to issue a restraining order against the
county unless the producers altered the production:
The incidents, already mentioned are separable from and
wholly unnecessary to, whatever theme thi s noi sy,
disorganized performance may have .... Injunctive rei ief wil l
be given, but, by analogy to the principle that he who seeks
equity must do equity, the injunction ... shall be conditioned
upon the excision forthwith of the specified lewd features as
(a) to have each member of the cetst clothed to a reet sonable
extent at etll times, and (b) to eliminate completel y et ll
si mulation of sexuetl intercourse or deviation."
20
Rather than make the required changes, Butler closed the show on 10
April. He kept the cast on call and paid all expenses while he
appealed to the U.S. Di strict Court to issue an injuncti on.
The deci sion of the Supreme Judicial Court rai sed three crucial
legal questions regetrcling the rights of theatre artists to express
themselves. Was a court of law empowered to determine what
''' Ell iot Norton, "Hair at Wilbur: Ugl y, Depressing," Bo.'tofl Record
American, 7 March 1970, [n.p.] .
'" P.B.I.C., Inc. el a/. v. Dislricl Allomey of Suffolk Counly, Supreme judicial
Court of Massachusetts, 9 April 1970.
32 HOUCHIN
elements were and were not germane to a theatrical production?
Could judges order producers to remove supposedly " lewd elements"
from a production that had not been adjudged lewd? Could the
Massachusetts law, which was meant to proscribe certain types of
public behavior, be applied to a theatrical performance?
On 6 May 1970 the United States District Court for the Di strict of
Massachusetts answered these questions. First, it affirmed that Roth v.
United States applied to live theatre as wel l as books and movies.
2
'
Thus, the judges clearly forbade the state from interfering with Hair or
other productions without first proving in a court of law that the
material taken as a whole "appeals to a prurient interest in sex," thilt
the materi al is " piltently offensive because it affronts contemporary
community standards," and that the material is "utterly without
redeeming social vnlue." For the first time in American hi story il
federal court hnd clearly establi shed that theatre merited First
Amendment protection.
22
Secondly, the judges nddressed whether or not the Massachusetts
statute punishing "open and gross lewdness and lasci vious behavior"
could be applied to theatrical performance. The state had argued thilt
audience members had been subjected to premeditated and
purposeful nudity and simulated sexual intercourse. The judges
agreed that the acts of the Hair Cilst were clearly intentional. They
reasoned, however, that these audiences, unlike unsuspecting citizens
on a street or in a park, had been adequately informed about the
nnture of and clearly desired to see the show.
23
After all, Bostonians
had purchased $600,000 worth of advance sale tickets.
The justices' decision also i llustrated a keen sensitivity to the
differences between the stnge Clnd the street. They claimed, for
instance, that stage nudity was mediated by "such other factors as
pose, lighting, angle of audience vision, mobi lity and dramatic
context." Otherwise, "a dim sil houette of a naked form would be as
" In Roth v. United States (1957) justi ce William Brennan articulated a three-
prong test for obscenity, which he described as being " utterly wi thout social
importance. " Such material would forfeit its consti tutional protection if " the
average person, applying contemporary community standards" believed the
" dominant theme taken as a whole" would find that it "appeals to prurient
interests." However, the decision only applied to literature and film. No mention
was made of stage productions.
u P.B.I.C., Inc. , Natoma Productions, Inc., v. Garrett H. Byrne, United States
Di strict Court for the District of Massachusetts, 6 Mily 1970.
'J P.B. I.C. eta/. v. Brrne, 6 May 1970.
Hair
33
punishable as the most blatant form of eroticism." Similarly, they
ruled that universal application of the "lewd and lascivious behavior"
statute to all simulations of sexual deviation might make the portrayal
of a deviate in a drama impossible. "
24
Finally, they stated an opinion,
which was utterly crucial to contemporary theatre:
We cannot escape the conclusion that to apply the standards
of the street and marketplace to the world behind the
footlights would be to sanction a censorsh ip dragnet of
unconstitutional proportions. . . . actors and producers will
either avoid Boston altogether or wi II steer clear of the
forbidden zone by excising constitutionally protected material
i n order to avoid the ri sk of a three year prison term. Either
result is offensive to the First Amendment.
25
Butler and Hair had won this battle and the district attorney was
enjoined from interfering with the production. Byrne, however, still
had one more trick left in his bag. He won a stay to prevent the
injunction from taking effect while he appealed the case to the
Supreme Court. But in a 4-4 decision, one vote short of the needed
majority, the Supreme Court voted to rescind the stay. Hair reopened
in Boston on 23 May 1970. District Attorney Byrne wanted to ban
public nudity and eroticism regardless of the context. The Circuit
Court recognized that there was a fundamental distinction between an
artistic statement that utilized nudity and sexuality to convey its
message and the commercialized sex of " the street and the
marketplace." These were essentially distinct worlds that had to be
governed by different regulations.
Court decisions regarding Hair also established that troublesome
theatre productions, l ike controversial politicians, could not be barred
from public facilities. During the summer of 1971 Southwest
Productions, Inc., of Little Rock, Arkansas attempted to book the Little
Rock Audi torium, a city owned facility, for a six-night engagement of
Hair. The Auditorium Commission refused to issue a contract,
claiming that the musical was obscene. Southwest filed suit against
the commission in Federal District Court. It claimed that the
prohibition constituted illegal prior restraint of First Amendment rights.
Federal judge G. Thomas Eisele concurred and ordered the
commission to i ssue a contract. Furthermore, he directed the
H Ibid.
25
Ibid.
34
HOUCHIN
comm1ss1on to al ter its methods. Until thi s case the auditorium
manager could force producers to delete any part of a production that
had been " publi cly criticized as ill egal, indecent, obscene, lewd, or in
any way publicly offensive." By hi s ruling the judge reinforced the
1970 decision of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts. Theatre
was indeed speech and could not be subjected to prior restraint.
26
Although the Little Rock case was i mportant, its impact was
limited because the defendants did not appeal to the Supreme Court.
That all changed in October 1974 when producers from Chattanooga,
Tennessee, argued before the hi gh court that their constitutional rights
had been abridged by that city. The saga began in October 1971
when Southeast Promotions applied to lease the Ti voli , a privately
owned theatre under long term lease to the city, to present /-lair for si x
nights beginning 23 November. Although the musical had been
produced in 140 cities worl dwide and had been pl aying on Broadway
for three years, the theatre's governing board decided that i t was too
indecent for thei r ci ty. The producers petitioned the United States
District Court for the Eastern Di stri ct of Tennessee to i ssue a temporary
restraining order to prohibit the board from denying the production
access to the Tivoli. The court refused. Some weeks later the
producers agai n petiti oned the city to use the larger Memorial
Auditorium for one performance of /-lair on 9 April 1972. Once again,
their request was rej ected and once again Southeast sought relief in
federal district court. The board, however, refused to file a formal
response to the complaint for five months. It merely advi sed the
producers to rent a private auditorium. When the hearing finally
began on 3 April , only six days before the first scheduled performance,
there was no possibi li ty that Hair would be seen in Chattanooga that
spring. Not surprisingl y, the court agreed wi th the board. Group
nudity and si mulated sex viol ated ci ty ordinances and state statutes
making publi c nudity and obscene acts criminal offenses. The court's
logic was, to say the least, arcane. It reasoned that the all eged criminal
conduct was neither speech nor "symbolic speech" and was to be
viewed separately from the musical 's lyri cs and dialogue. Being pure
conduct, "comparable to rape or murder," it was not entitled to Fi rst
Amendment protecti on. The U. S. Ci rcuit Court of Appeals affirmed
'" Mike Trimble, "Allow Hair at LR for Six-day Run, Judge Eisele Orders,"
Little Rock Cazecce, 8 August 1971, p. 1.
Hair 35
the decision of the l ower court c1ncl the proceeded to the Supreme
Court. n
Southeast Productions urged the hi gh Court to reverse the lower
court decisions the C!Cti on of Chattanooga's official s
constituted prior restraint the courts had used incorrect
to determine obscenity. Luckily, the producers were not upon
to in obscenity the justices chose to
on the issue of prior restrC1 i nt.
28
On 18 1975 Justice
speaking for justices Powell
concurred with the petitioners. He left no doubt that commi ssions
exercised blanket and ute powers to grant or deny I icenses to
unpopular speakers or groups were C!Cting unconstitutional ly:
the danger of censorship and of of our precious
First Amendment freedoms i s too great where have
unbridled discretion over C1 forum's use. Our di staste for
censorship-reflecting the natural distaste of a free people-is
deep-written in our law. . . . The board's
j udgment effectively kept the off stage. Respondents
did not permit the show to go on and rely on enforcement
to prosecute for illegal thCit occurred.
R<lther, they denied the in anticip<l tion th<lt the
production would viol<l te the l<1w.
29
The Court further th<1t the two Ch<ltt<lnoogCI the<1tres
were public faci liti es designed for and dedicated to expressive
activities. There no question as to their usefulness or that they
could the production. If one of these
" Southeastern Promotions, Ltd. v. Conrad et a/., United States Supreme
Court, 18 March 1975. It should be noted that neither the district court judges nor
the aJ.)peals court judges had seen a production of Hair.
20
H,1d the Court decided to rul e whether or not Hair was obscene, the
outcome might have been different. From 1969 through 1972 President Nixon
<lppointed four conservative justices to the Supreme Court-Chief Justice Warren
Burger, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell and Willi,un Rehnquist. These men along
wi th Byron Whi te formed a solid conserv<tti ve majority that on 21 june 1973
issued five decisions that comJ.Jietel y reversed earlier more l iberal rulings on
obs<"eni ty. Most importantly, these justices, in Miller v. California, affirmed th<t t
communi ties <md st,Hes, r,Hher th,1n the leder,11 government, had the ri ght to
determine wh,H was and was not obscene ior their citi zens.
2
" Southeastern Pro111otions v. Comad.
36 HOUCHIN
circumstances had obtained, the board might have justifiably denied
access. Moreover, it made no difference that a private theatre was
available. Justice Blackmun stated:
One is not to have the exercise of hi s liberty of expression in
appropriate places abridged on the plea that it may be
exercised in some other place. . . . Only if we were to
conclude that live drama i s unprotected by the First
Amendment- or subject to a totally different standard from
applied to other forms of expression-could we possibly
find no prior restraint here.
30
The Court was careful to point out that prior restraints per se were
not illegal. If they were by they
might not be deemed infringement of First Amendment freedoms.
However, it warned that such a position "comes to thi s Court
a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity. " Finally, the
Court reaffirmed that the censor, not the petitioner, was responsi ble for
obtaining judicial review, one of the safeguards mentioned <1bove. A
locill bo<1rd or commission thilt wils ilSsigned the til sk of il
interpretation of community propri ety would prob<1bly be less
responsive to the pleadings of an outside promoter thiln il court, iln
independent branch of government. If constitutionally protected
judi cial review wils m<1de too onerous, by reason of delay or expense,
the First Amendment rights could eilsily be compromised.
31
If Hair were on trial todily, the outcomes might have been
completely different. During the lilst ten to twelve yeilrs there has
been a concerted effort to curtail ilrt that ilttacks traditional morillity.
In 1991 in Barnes v. Glenn Theatre the Supreme Court clearly stated
thilt nude performilnce (in this case nude dancing) i s injurious to the
morality as well as the political stability of the society. Therefore, state
and local governments are clearly justified when they suppress such
di splays. During the past decilde cultural conservat ives have waged a
fierce battle in the United States Congress to de-fund the National
Endowment for the Arts because it supported artists who conveyed
controversial religious and sexual messages. In response to thi s attack
the NEA began to require its grant recipients to agree to honor
"generill stilndards of decency." Severill artists who objected to this
restriction sued the endowment. The Supreme Court, however, in
30
Ibid.
"Ibid.
Hair
37
National Endowment for the Arts, et a/. v. Karen Finley, et a/. (1998),
ruled that the NEA could justifiably require such compliance of its
grantees. Local l egislative branches of government have also been
actively involved in proscribing transgressive art. Municipal and
county assemblies in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Alaska, and
Colorado quickly embraced the strategy used by Congress and have
cut off funds to groups and individuals who deal t objectively with
homosexuality. Although these organizations and artists have not
been arrested for obscenity (thanks in no small part to the Hair
decisions), these various governmental units have made it abundantly
clear that art that utilizes sexual representations cannot receive public
support.
Although the recent "culture wars" have, to paraphrase Judith
Lynne Hannah, transformed the body into contested political terrain,
the Hair decisions continue to provide a modicum of protection to
theatrical presentations that attack traditional morality, religion, and
politics. While they may have been denied publi c support, such
productions may still demand the same First Amendment protections
as speech and print. The presence of isolated, morally objectionable
scenes does not automatically make them obscene. Nor may they be
barred from public facilities without due process. How long these
decisions remain undiluted is largely the f unction of evolving political
and cultural processes. To date, however, they are still intact.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 12 (Spring 2000)
IMPORT OR IMMIGRANT?:
THE REPRESENTATION OF BLACKS AND IRISH ON THE
AMERICAN STAGE FROM 1767- 1856
JENNIFER STILES
The 1607 founding of the jamestown settlement, the first English
colony on the North American mainland, planted an early seed of
American national identity. One hundred twenty English men and
women were enjoined by a royal charter to tame and colonize the
wilds of Virginia for the profit of james I, the Virginia Company of
London, and themselves. Twelve years later, after attempts had failed
to enslave the Native American inhabitants of the region, a business
transaction brought Cln ethnically different population into this
homogenous English colony.
1
In 1619, ironi cally one month after the
meeting of the New World's first representative assembly, a Dutch
ship put into jamestown carrying twenty captive Africans robbed from
a Spanish vessel; the ship's captain traded these people for food and
suppl ies.
2
Another significant group was added to the Anglo-
Americans and African-Americans when Irish fleeing high rents and
Briti sh economic policies escaped to the American colonies beginning
in the 1680s. Few of these Irish had the means to pay for their passage
across the Atlantic, and those that did not made the choice to
indenture themselves for several years' labor in exchange for
transportation to the colonies.
And so, over the course of the 17th century, the peoples which
form the basis of this paper came together on North Americ<ln soil.
While romanticized American histories would have us believe
' PhilipS. Foner, History of Black Americans: From Africa to the Emergence of
the Cotton Kingdom (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 187.
2
Lerone Bennett Jr. , Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, 5th
ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 29; Charles M. Chri stian, Black Saga: The
African American Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), 6-8;
Bernard Grun, The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and
Events, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 2 79.
Import or Immigrant? 39
otherwise, i t is important to realize that thi s new land was not a
leveled playing fiel d of equal opportuni ti es for all. Of the three
groups, only the English were for the most part comprised of "free"
men and women with full civi l rights at the moment of their landing;
the Iri sh and the Africans had long terms of indentured servitude to
fulfill.
3
In addition, the English and the Irish had some control over
where they settled; they could choose the destinati on of their voyage,
or at least had some idea of what" their indenture contract entai led.
The African captives, however, had no say whatsoever in their
disembarking point; that choice was made for them, first by the Dutch
crew who stole them from the Spaniards and then by the English
settlers who accepted them as payment for supplying the Dutch ship.
The original African servants, although considered indentured, were
treated as a commodity. At this early point in Ameri can history a logic
was established: there were those people who had agency and
immigrated to the New World and those who were merchandi se to be
imported. The inherent worth of any incoming human being was
determined by thi s dialectic. In essence, the newcomer was evaluated
as property on the one hand or as a temporary servant possessing the
potential for citizenship on the other. This assessment ran through
American discourse for the next two centuries, where it was
intertwined with already existing English prejudices and eventually
became further entrenched wi th the spread of the concept of race and
the rise of American raci sm.
While theatre was late in establishing itself in the colonies, it
rapidly asserted itself as one branch of developing Americetn
discourse. From the very start, plays of the American stetge relied on
ethnic and class-betsed stereotypes to convey set roles for each
segment of the population. We find well defined concepts of what an
Anglo-American audience expected from African-Americetns and Irish-
Americans in the very first plays and carrying over into the plays of the
nineteenth century. Early racietl and ethnic prejudices that the
colonists brought with them from England contributed to the formation
of a uniquely American identity on the eve of the Revolutionary War.
After the inception of the United States, these prejudices became an
cornerstone of the new nation, where the concept of
ci ti zenship had become on hereditary qualifi cations. By the
' Bennett suggests that before the 1660s. Afri can servants were considered
indentured and were entitled to freedom at the end of their indenture. In the
Virginia colony, these free Africans were allowed to own property, were entitled to
l<md grants in return for providing passage for other would-be colonists, and were
allowed to vote. See Bennett, 39-44. It was not until after the 1660s that the idea
of permanent Black enslavement became entrenched in the colonial American
economic system. See Foner, 190191.
40 STILES
mid-nineteenth century, tensions around race and ethni ci ty were high
as the subject of slavery was hotly debated and huge numbers of
immigrants entered the country. It became increasingly imperative in
American publi c di scourse to distinguish between "white" and "non-
white." The stereotypes of blacks and Iri sh played out on the
during this intense period of Ameri can identity development
indi cative of the public Clttitude. History give us one view, but
the contemporary stage portraits, created and endorsed by the people
of the time, are to an understanding of the perceived
differences between white, black, and Iri sh or, in other terms, between
citizens, property, and immigrants.
The Disappointment, or, the Force of Credulity
The first drama written for an American playhouse was Andrew
Barton's pseudonymous The Disappointment, or, the Force of
Credulit y. Thi s comic opera was ori ginally intended to be performed
at the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphi<l by the Ameri can Company of
on April 20, 1767. However, it was deemed unfit for the
stage because it contained too many "personal reflecti ons" of local
fi gures. The Disappointment was pull ed from production two days
before its schedul ed opening, leaving Thomas Godfrey's The Prince of
Parthia to claim the honor of being the fi rst drama written by an
American coloni st to be performed professionally on the North
American continent.
Even though it is not the first performed American play and has
subsequently remained somewhat obscure, The Disappointment is a
valuable example for thi s study because of its comparison of Anglo-
American gentry wi th ethnic characters. Four Anglo-American
gentl emen-Hum, Parchment, Quadrant and Rattl etrap-coax four
tradesmen-Raccoon, Washball , Trushoop and McSnip-into
bel ievi ng that they have the means to become very rich men by
digging up Blackbeard's treasure. An elaborate farce designed to
ridicule the four tradesmen is interwoven with a weak romantic pl ot
involvi ng Washball 's ni ece and a gentl emen in what amounts to a
passable, but not bri lliant, derivation of Engl ish ballad opera. Much of
the humor of the piece rel ies on the broadl y drawn ethnic
characteri zations of Raccoon the debauchee, Trushoop the Iri sh
cooper, and McSnip the Scottish tai lor.
For a more detailed account of the producti on history of and opposi tion to
The Disappointment , see David Mays's introduction to Andrew Barton, The
Disappointment, or, the Force of Creduli ty (Gainesvi lle, FL: Universi ty Presses of
Florida, 1976). All subsequent references wi ll be cited parentheticall y in the text.
Import or Immigrant? 41
In this normative comedy, these three outsiders are pitted against
the Anglo-Americans who uphold the standards of society. The Anglo-
Americans appear to stand for the Enlightenment ideal of rational man.
In fact, their very names are evocative of Reason and Science: Hum is
the pensive thinker, Parchment the writer, and Quadrant the scient ist.
In order to carry out their complex hoax, these gentlemen assume the
trappings of the occult: Rattletrap wears a "magic habit" and acts as
conjurer, while Quadrant appears with magnet, rod, and wand (86).
Their ultimate aim is to frighten and humiliate the tradesmen by
playing on their greed, superstitions, and irrational fears. Through its
plot, The Disappointment makes it clear that the rational Anglo-
Americans have the upper hand, while the tradesmen are targeted for
ridicule because of their class and the fooli sh folk beliefs.
This early play presents an enigma worthy of investigation
centering around the ethnicity of the character Raccoon. There is no
doubt that Raccoon is intended to be an ethnic stereotype; his lines are
all written in a stage dialect of some form where "d" replaces " t" and
"th ", and "b" replaces "v" among other deviations from standard
English. The exact ethnicity the author intends, however, is unclear.
The dialect can be consistent with later German, Swedish, and black
stereotypes that emerge on the American stage. Unlike Trushoop and
McSnip, whose names are labels of their trades, Raccoon bears a name
which at first glance points to the derogatory nickname "coon" aimed
at blacks in the nineteenth century. David Mays is quick to point out
that Raccoon was often the nickname given to mi liti a members during
the eighteenth century, and therefore is not necessarily indicative of a
black character; Raccoon i s, after all, a militia member.
Mays argues that Raccoon is a Swede, resting most of his case on
several points: first, there were few black militia members in the
colonies at the time; secondly, it would be highly unlikely that a black
could be a Freemason; and, finally, it would be even less likely that a
black man would have a white concubine as Raccoon (19). It is
not beyond the realm of possibility, however, that Raccoon is in fact a
black man. To begin with, black patriots played a large role in the
agitation that led to the Revolutionary War beginning in 1 765 and
culminating with the death of Crispus Attucks at the Boston M<'lssacre
in 1770.
5
There were also blacks in Freem<'lsonry: Prince
fourteen other blacks were initi<'lted into Freemasonry by the British
Military Lodge No. 441 in 1774; thirteen yeMs later, Hall founded the
Negro Masonic Order in Boston.
6
Moreover, one can not completely
rule out the existence of common law marriages among blacks and
5
Bennett, 58-60.
Christian, 48, 60-61; Bennett, 83.
42 STILES
whites of the lower-classes at this time, so that a black Raccoon and a
white Plackett could plausibly cohabitate.
Though we cannot know for certain whether Raccoon is a black or
white character, it is important to look at the implications of the
character if he were intended to be black. At the very least, it is
important to acknowledge that Raccoon may have been intended as
the first representation of a black on the American stage had The
Disappointment been performed. If this were the case, the American
theatre tradition would have had a portrayal to contend with that
differed from later black stereotypes in several key ways. While
Raccoon speaks in a dialect very similar to that of the traditional stage
black, these later characters are invariably slaves. Raccoon is a free
man with some status in his society. He associates with white men as
business partners and social companions, often referring to them as
"broder." If a black character, he is a unique portrayal of a black man
with military expertise; the comedy of the situation defuses this
potentially threatening proviso, however, because Raccoon is revealed
to be a coward when faced with Blackbeard's "ghost. " Superficiall y,
Raccoon i s depicted as being sexually active, called a "debauchee" in
the play's character list, and depicted as keeping " the woman of the
town" Moll Plackett (45). Like his military gifts, his sexual ones are
downplayed. Plackett makes it clear that "he has been deficient for
sometime past;" she "loves" him for his money alone and turns to
Topinlift the sailor for sexual satisfaction (65). If, indeed, Raccoon
were meant to be a black man, the depiction is unique in American
drama for the outward signs of competence, sexuali ty, prosperity, and
status that it assigns to him. By the end of the play, however, all of
Raccoon's positive qualities have been subverted in one way or
another, and he sinks to the level of a ridiculed caricature in keeping,
as we shall see, with later theatrical tradition.
About Trushoop's identity there i s no confusion; he is clearly an
Irishman. In fact, his characterization falls well into the long-
established English tradition of stage Irishmen which first appeared in
the late Elizabethan period and reached its peak in the mid-nineteenth
century. This type is best summarized by Maurice Bourgeois:
The stage Irishman habitually bears the generic name of Pat,
Paddy or Teague. He has an atrocious Iri sh brogue, makes
perpetual jokes, blunders and bulls in speaking, and never
fails to utter, by way of Hibernian seasoning, some screech or
oath of Gaelic origin at every third word; he has an
unsurpassable gift of "blarney" and cadges for tips and free
drinks. Hi s hair is of a fiery red; he is rosy-cheeked, massive
and whiskey-loving. Hi s face is one of simian bestiality, with
Import or Immigrant?
an expression of di abolical archness written all over it . ... In
hi s right hand he brandishes a stout Blackthorn or sprig of
shi llelagh, and threatens to belabor therewith the darling
person who will " tread on the tails of his coat." For his main
characteristi cs (if there is any such thing as psychology in the
stage Irishman) are his swagger, his boisterousness and his
pugnacity. He is always ready with a challenge, always
anxious to pick a quarrel; and peerless for cracki ng skull s.
7
43
Trushoop matches this definition almost point for point, and then
some, providing an example of the wholesale transport of English
prejudice into the developing American mindset.
Like the English stage Irishman, Trushoop speaks with an
outlandi sh brogue, replacing "sh" for "s" and "t" for "th" in a parody
of Hiberno-English pronunciation.
8
Blunders and bulls abound in his
speech. The blunder, as explained by Maureen Waters, "grows out of
the confusion of the Gaelic speaker who doesn't fully grasp the
meaning of the English words." After watching Rattletrap speak phony
Latin to the supposed ghost of Blackbeard, Trushoop exclaims, "And
he speaks halgebra to it (89)!" Trushoop is also responsible for several
bulls in his speech. Waters again explains, "The point of the bull ...
is its pregnancy; it is a metaphorical statement stressing apparent
connections which are not real."
9
After having a run-in with his angry
wife, Trushoop declares "Dis day will be a bad night for me." He
then threatens hi s servant Terence, " If you don't m<Jke me five tight
kaggs this day that will hold no vater I'll bate you so long as I'm abl e
and longer, too (62-63)." Indeed, his lines are well peppered with
oaths <Jbout the devil and purgatory, as well <lS transliter<J ted Gaelic
phr<Jses such as "Arra!" (from ara, literally "oh!"), "hon'acree" (from
' M<lllrice Bourgeoi s, /ofln Millington Synge and the Irish Thealre (london:
Constable, 1913), 109-1 10. For further discussion of the Engl ish tradition of the
stage Irishman, see also George Duggan, The Stage Irishman (london: longmans,
Green, 1937).
" The term "brogue" is derived from the Gilclic "br6ga" meaning "boots",
.mel is reported to be from the English-spe.1kers' perception of the Irish sounding as
though they spoke with "their boots in their mouths." The mispronunciation of
"s" and "th" is al so derived from Gaelic since in some cases the letter "s" is
pronounced as an English "sh" sound. The English "th" sound is non-existent in
G.1elic .mel is often replaced with a h.ml "t" by Gaelic and Hiberno-English
spe.1kers.
"M;1Ureen Waters, The Comic (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 1984), 11.
44 STILES
mitis mo chroi, literally "sweetheart", and "at al l, at all " (from ar char
ar bith).
T rushoop has the gift of "blarney" and can thickly lay on the
endearments when it suits him. When trying to convince hi s wife to
open the door to their house and let him inside, he frequently cal ls her
"my dare" and adds "if you please" to all his requests (60). He does
not beg for money from Washball, and yet does not resist when the
barber pays for hi s expenses in the treasure-hunting venture (59).
Much like the Engli sh stage Iri shman, Trushoop is portrayed as
extremely pugnacious and volatile. Soon <1fter hi s first entrance, he is
the first of the group to pounce upon the tavern servant accused of
steali ng Hum' s papers, and onl y gives in at Raccoon's request (52-53).
While venting his <1nger on Terence, he yells " Tarance! Why, you t'ief
of the world, if you don't come down in a minute, I' ll give shelaley!";
he then calls the slow Terence a " spalpeen" (from spailpin, literally a
migrant worker or tramp) (62). There are no physical descripti ons
included i n the stage directions, but from his lines, one Gln imagine
T rushoop to be a burl y, red-faced cooper rangi ng rapidl y from j oviality
to brawling.
For the most part, Barton's depiction foll ows the accepted stage
Iri shman formula. He deviates from it in a few telling ways, however.
The most obvious departure is Trushoop's sobriety. From their first
appearance on the Engli sh stage, Irishmen were al most invariably
portrayed as drunk, drinking, or carrying a keg of whi sky ("poteen" or
poitin) under one arm. Trushoop is a keg-maker but not a drunk. In
another deviation from the formul a Iri shman, Trushoop is a tradesman
rather than a peasant farmer, a tramp, or an outlaw.
Another noticeable divergence from the conventi onal stage
stereotype is Barton's treatment of Trushoop's Catholici sm. The
predominantly Protestant Anglo-Ameri can considered Catholicism a
somewhat sinister religion. Thi s religious bias was yet Clnother
manifest<1tion of Engli sh prejudice on Americ<1n soi l. As George Potter
points out, the C<1tholic Irish were members of a different and exotic
religion whi ch overwhelmingly Protestant Ameri ca associ<1ted, as an
inheritance from the Reform<1tion and from England, with idolatry and
superstition in worship and with despotism and tyranny in poli cy.
They were poor; and Americ<1, bouncy <1nd optimi stic, hewed to the
social assumption that poverty f lowed from defective and vicious
indi vidual character.
10
By making T rushoop's pi ety something of a joke, Barton undercuts
Anglo-American assumptions about the power and the associated evi l s
10
George Potter, To the Golden Door: The Story of the Irish in Ireland and
America (Boston: little, Brown and Company, 1960), 166.
Import or Immigrant? 45
of Catholicism. Soon after the curtain rises on The Disappointment,
Quadrant laughingl y tell s his confederates that he has drawn both
Trushoop and McSnip into the treasure trap. He continues by regaling
his friends with T rushoop's plans for his share of the treasure. " Ha,
ha, ha! Trushoop speaks of building a chapel at his own expense and
employing a score of priests to keep up a continual rotation of prayers
for the repose of the souls of the poor fellows who buried it (48)."
The barb of the joke aims at Trushoop's ignorant yet pious desire to
provide for the spi ritual comfort of supposedly bloodthirsty pirates.
Later, Trushoop himself dreams of what he will accomplish with the
money:
The devi I a hair do I care for a coat of arms, or a coat of legs.
Myself will build a shapple and help the poor priests, who
haven' t a toot'ful to put in their mout's. And the devil a
beggar shall l'ave my dure wid a hungry bally. And when I' m
dead, shure they' ll make a shaint o' me. (72)
He seems moved by heartfelt generosity, but his last lines betray a
concern for his own spiritual status and the final disposition of hi s own
sou l. These concerns are ridiculed when Trushoop watches the
"ghost" of Blackbeard. In a lampoon of the Latin Mass, Barton has
him sing, "Sinnerorum helpum deliverum, miserabulum tuscarorum
(93)." Shown in such a light, Catholicism and Catholics themselves
are clearly laughable but not dangerous to the rational men of the
Enlightenment.
The Padlock
The question of Raccoon's racial identity may never be resolved,
and so The Disappointment's place as the beginning of the American
history of the stage black must remain merely speculative. The
undisputed first appearance of a black character on the American stage
i s in the 1 769 prod uction of Sir Isaac Bickerstaff's play The Padlock.
11
This play, an import direct from Drury Lane, i s a sentimental comedy
set in Spain that introduces a black slave named Mungo.
12
Mungo,
whom Edward G. Smith reports to be from the West Indies, is the sole
slave in the house of Don Diego, an old nobleman bent on marrying
" Edward G. Smith, " Black Theatre, " in Ethnic Thealre in the United States,
Maxine Schwartz Seller, eel. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 38.
12
Isaac Bickerstaff, The Padlock ([n.p.]: [n.p.], 1783). All subsequent
references cited parenthetically in the text.
46 STILES
his fifteen-year-old ward, Leonora.
13
For the most part, Mungo is a
buffoon. His speech is made up of broken English, laced with
" Massas," malapropisms, and the equivalent of the stage Irishman's
bulls. He provides a crucial twist in the plot when he deliberately
goes against Don Diego's orders and helps the young Leander reach
Leonora despi te the prison-like conditions in which she lives.
However, the portrayal of Mungo does not only consist of comic
antics that serve the plot. The lines he speaks sometimes betray the
more serious aspects of his life as a slave. In his first appearance, Don
Diego pays him to learn of any strange happenings in the house.
Diego: There's a pisteren for you; now tell me, do you know of
any ill going on in my home?
Mungo: Ah, Massa, a damn deal.
Diego: How, that I' m a stranger to!
Mungo: No, Massa, you lick me every day with your rattan; I'm
sure, Massa, that's a mischief enough for poor Neger man.
Diego: So, so.
Mungo: La, Massa, how could you have a heart to lick poor Neger
man, as you lick me last Thursday?
Diego: If you have not a mind I should chastise you now, hold
your tongue. (273-74)
When Mungo attempts to point out to his master that the daily lashings
he receives are ills in Don Diego's home, he is threatened with yet
another lick of the rattan. This interchange was probably played for
laughs, yet when read without the tricks of a blacked-up comedian to
subvert their meaning, the lines reverberate with the slave's plight.
Soon after thi s scene, Mungo sings to himself: "Dear heart, what a
terrible life I am led!/ A dog has a better, that's shelter'd and fed;/
Night and day 'tis the same/ My pain is dere game:/ Me wish to de
Lord me was dead (274)." It is striking to see that Bickerstaff has given
his buffoon moments of self-reflection that are not tied to any other
theme in the play.
Mungo's song seems to be an attempt to earn the audience's
sympathy and lends the character some depth of personality. Soon
after helping Leander into the house, Mungo emerges from the cellars
drunk on wine. Don Diego, who has secretly returned, confronts him,
"Wretch, do you know me?" to which Mungo replies, "Know you?-
damn you." Moments later, Don Diego threatens him:
'
3
Smith, 38.
Import or Immigrant?
Diego: Monster, I'l l make an example of you.
Mungo: What you call me names for, you old dog?
Diego: Does the villain dare to lift hi s hand against me?
Mungo: Will you fight?
Diego: He's mad.
47
Mungo: Deres one in de house you little tink. Gad he do you
business. (285)
Drunk, Mungo finds a measure of freedom not granted to him sober.
He stands up to his master as an equal and asserts the value of his own
hard work in his master's household. Taken aback by thi s sudden
change in Mungo's behavior, Don Diego attributes it to madness and,
interestingly, does not follow through on his threats of puni shment.
Mungo's inebriated freedom spi ll s over into another exchange.
Leaving Don Diego on hi s own to handl e the crisis in hi s house,
Mungo wanders off. In his next entrance, he chases Leonora's white
duenna, shouting "Let me put my hands about you neck-"; Leonora
responds to the duenna's screams and the incident is dropped,
supplanted by Leonora' s plans for escaping over the .1-w.J.Jse wall s. It is
a brief scene, but full of Having faced off with Don
Diego, Mungo seems to want to fulfill another fantasy- the illicit
desire for Ursula, the white duenna. There are no serious
consequences to Mungo's attempt, and the moment remains merely
comic. However, the whole series of Mungo's actions while drunk
serves to c-ounteract arily syffi'llpathetic fee'l ing the audience may have
developed during !his earlier song. Mungo i s depicted as fulfilling the
worst thoughts entertained by white slave owners about their slaves:
left to his own devices, he raids the cellars, gets drunk, rises up against
his master and chases the women. With his depiction of Mungo,
Bickerstaff suggest that the slave is certainly less than an adult, even
less than human at times, and requires harsh di scipline to maintain
proper behavior.
The Triumphs of Love; or, Happy Reconciliation
In September 1795 the text of a comedy was printed, proudly
announced as "Written by an American a Citizen of Philadelphia"
c1nd acted by the New Theatre of Philadelphia. Almost two decades
after the founding of the United Stcltes by the signing of the
Deci<Hcltion of Independence, this dramil depicted both an lri shmCin
Clnd a black slave on the same stage. At thi s point in time, almost one-
48 STILES
twentieth of the n<ttion's population was Iri sh or of Iri sh descent.
14
An
even larger proportion, one-eighth, of the population w<t s estim<tted to
be Afri c<tn-Ameri c<tn.
15
These two groups were obviously vi sibl e in
Americ<tn everyday life, even more so in the e<trly urb<tn centers.
Their tre<ttment in The Triumphs of Love m<trks a departure from the
pre-Revolutionary pl<tys already examined. Nevertheless, thi s play is
cl early a descendent of the previous two.
The Triumphs of Love emulates English sentimental comedy with
its intricate b<t l<tncing of romanti c partners and their courtships,
misunderstandings, and final reconci li<ttions. However, it is di sti nctly
Americ<tn in its patriotism and democratic idealism as personified in
the character of Major Manly. The combination of English influence
<tnd American provenance i s also evi dent in the depictions of the
Iri shman Patrick and the black slave Sambo. Both Patrick and Sambo
are firmly rooted in the English tradition of the stage Irishman and the
stage bl<tck. They are comic stock figures who speak with
conventi onal st<tge di alects. Their very names are stereotypical:
Patri ck is even referred to as " Paddy Whack" by English Dick at one
point. lb True to form, S<t mbo, whose name needs no comment, enters
si nging and dancing on several occasions; like Mungo, he gets drunk
and meets up with his master (67-68). Because The Triumphs of Love
i s an American play, however, it emphasizes the differences between
Patrick and Sambo. While the two characters never share the stage at
the same time, they are shown as contrasts to one another.
On the title page, Patrick i s cl early marked as "a new comer," a
recent immi grant to the new democrati c nation; no indication is given
of Sambo's history. As the play unfolds, the audience learns that
Patrick is a servant to Mr. Peevish, and we are led to question hi s
competence <ts such after he founders Peevi sh's horses (2 1 ). Sambo's
slave status is treated as a given, confirmed by the way he refers to
George Friendly, Jr. as " Massa," and by the way he responds to
George Jr. 's commands. Hi s positi on is not made explicit until well
into the play, when he muses to himself: "He tink; he berry often tink
,. This figure based on the results of the Census of 1790 in Marjori e R.
Fallows, Irish Americans: Identity and Assimilat ion (Englewood Cliff. Nj: Prentice-
Hall , Inc., 1979), 19. Fallows reports that 44,000 respondents were Iri sh
immigrants and 150,000 were of Irish ancestry, out of the total populat ion of
4,000,000.
" Bennett, 46.
'"Anonymous, The Triumphs of Love; or Happy Reconciliation (Philadelphia:
R. Folwel l, 1795), 61 . Al l subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in
the text.
Import or Immi grant?
49
why he slave to White man? why Black foke sold like cow or horse.
He tink de great somebody above, no order tings so. . . . He pose
massa George die; den he sold to some other massa. May be he no
use him well. When Sambo tink so, it most broke he heart (52)."
With these lines, slavery enters as a minor theme in the play.
George Jr., having overheard Sambo, is moved to say, "Be softened as
thou wilt, still, slavery, thy condition is hard. The untutored, pathetic
sol iloquy of that honest creature, has more sensibl y affected me, than
all I have read, or thought, on that barbarous, iniquitous slave-trade
(52)." A strange change of feeling emerges in his next lines, one that
is reflected at various points in the comedy. George Jr. continues,"-
and yet how many thousands of the poorer class of whites are there,
whose actual situation are vastly inferior to his: he has no anxious
cares for to-morrow, no family looki ng up to him for protection- no
duns at his doors (52)." An early formulation of Southern paternalism
emerges from George Jr.'s lips, equating Sambo with a petted,
innocent child with no acknowledgement of the fact that Sambo's
enslaved condition prevents him from taking responsibility for his own
life. In an earlier interaction, George Jr. disguised as a beggar,
approaches Sambo and pleads for his pity by inventing a story of a
dying wife and three chi ldren with the pox. When Sambo is so moved
that he gives him money, George Jr. comments "You are a good Black
(42)." Two points are made here: first, that Sambo is much better off
than a poor white and can even afford to be charitable although a
slave; and secondly, that Sambo is a black, which was at the time not
the same as being a man.
Patrick, on the other hand, is portrayed as having the same
interests as white American men: he has fallen in love with the servant
jenny and wants to win her hand in marriage. The audience sees
Patrick as he courts jenny, wins her over his rival English Dick, and
eventually weds her. Patrick shows how he faces the responsibility of
marriage and the dilemma of supporting a wife and chi ldren:
Now, I think, if I had about three, or two hundred dollars,
could shut up a grate store; and it appares clare to me, I could
make a grate dale of money. jenny tells me, that many of my
countrymen came here very poor, and have made grate
fortunes out of nothing at all at all; and with the blessings of
heaven, Pat will do it too. (76)
Indeed, heaven smi les on Patrick when Mr. Peevish gives him his start
in the grocery store as a wedding gift (78). There is no such
opportunity at self-sufficiency given to Sambo. George Jr. does give
him hi s freedom, but no means to make the transition from slavery to
50
STILES
independent wage-earning. Sambo, too, has a woman he loves, but
she is never shown during the course of the play; we only learn of her
after he wins his freedom and resolves to save his wages in order to
buy her freedom (53). Sambo' s abili ty to succeed as a free man is
called into question, however, when he makes his drunken entrance.
While George, Jr. and hi s friend Careless are themselves sobering up
from indul gi ng in wine, on seeing the drunken Sambo, Careless
comments, " I am afraid our friend Sambo, will make a bad use of his
liberty (68) ." The audience is thus led to doubt Sambo and to imagine
that he will waste his earnings on drink in the company of his roguish
fri ends.
The juxtaposition of Patrick and Sambo highlights two disturbing
trends that were developing in the United States at the time-trends
which centered around the concept of race and the abi lity to
participate fully in society. Ameri cans were beginning to categori ze
the country's population in terms of " white/' " bl ack," with varying
degrees of " non-white" in between. The Irish were located
somewhere between " white" and " black" until the mid-nineteenth
century. Iri sh immigrants entering America had a long history of
experi encing themsel ves as bei ng essentially different from their
Briti sh oppressors. Engli sh tradition informed Ameri cans that the Irish
should be treated as sub-human, as essentially black.
17
However,
there were little-to-no physical signs of difference between the Iri sh
and the Americans and no easy way to police the desired racial
boundary.
18
As a result, the Irish could pass as white Ameri cans.
At this point in the development of the national identity, the
Ameri can publi c believed that it took a certain kind of character to
reap the benefi ts of citizenship in a democratic society. As George
Knobel explains,
By and large, before the mid-1840s Americans saw in others
what they took to be critical to defining themselves-
'character' . They perceived the Iri sh, in parti cul ar, as lacking
the intelligence and virtue that denoted the authentic
republican. But the cause was a disadvantaged envi ronment,
no more. Irish ethnicity, per se, was no greater quali fi cati on
" For a more detai led discussion of the early racial classificati ons of the Irish
i n England and America, see Theodore W. Allen, The lnven!ion of the White Race,
Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (New York: Verso, 1994); Noel
lgnatiev, How the Irish became White (New York: Routl edge, 1995); and, Dale T.
Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986).
'
6
Knobel, 100-101.
Import or Immigrant?
or disquillificiltion for republicani sm thiln Anglo-Americiln
ethnicity. Still, niltivity on Irish soi l (or perhilps even in iln
lrish-Americiln home) was grounds for suspicion of personill
suitilbility, without corrective nurture, for American
citizenship, ilnd, hence, niltionillity.
1
'J
51
Miljor M;mly is the ideal Americiln citizen. As an immigrant, Patrick
has the potential to change into suitable material for citizenship by the
careful nurturing of other Americans such as Mr. Peevish. Sambo,
however, is another matter entirely. George Frederickson writes, " In
the years immediately before and after 1800, white Americans often
revealed by their words and actions that they viewed Negroes as a
permanently alien and inassimilable element of the population."
20
The white characters in The Triumphs of Love clearly mark Sambo as
someone who is property simply because he is black, and who, once
freed, will be unable to fully function in society for the very same
reilsOn. By this thinking, immigrants have the critical makings of
"character" while imports do not.
The Irish Yankee: or, the Birth-day of Freedom
The early decades of the nineteenth century saw a continued
wrestling with the dilemma of where to place the Iri sh on the racial
continuum. The 1840s witnessed events that would eventually place
these immigrants firmly on the white end of the continuum. Early in
the decade, new Iri sh immigrants and Irish-Americans became
embroiled in the anti-abolition movement, prompted by an adverse
reaction to Daniel O' Connell's pro-abol ition appeal.
2 1
The pro-slavery
19
Ibid., 69.
20
George M. Frederi ckson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate
on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 18 1 7- 19 1 4 (Hanover, N H: Wesleyan
University Press, 1987), 1.
11
Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), called the "Liberator," was an Iri sh Catholic
lawyer and politici<Jn, most remembered for his work to repeal the Act of Union
and to secure Catholic emancipation. In 1830, O'Connel l became the first
Catholic in modern history to take a se:lt in Britain' s House of Commons. As a
member of P;1rliament, O' Connell opposed sl,wery in both the West Indies and
America. He wrote an anti -slavery appeal to the Irish in America, which was read
to an assembly of <lpproximatel y 4000 peopl e ,lt Boston Faneuil Hall on 28 january
1842. While reportedly received with gre<1t enthusi ,lsm that night, the appeal was
att<1cked and denounced by numerous Iri sh leaders ,1nd reporters in subsequent
weeks. See lgnatiev's How the Irish Became White for a comprehensive account
of this appeal and its aftermath.
52 STILES
Democratic Party and Southern slaveholders began to entice the Irish
voters to their side of the slavery debate by playing on Irish fears of
labor competition from newly freed black slaves. Thi s feM grew in
proportion to the number of newly arriving Iri sh immigrants as the
Potato Famine of 1845-47 and the resulting starvation and disease
forced over a million Iri sh to seek shelter in America's cities. Knobel
writes, " By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was becoming an
Anglo-American habit to regard the Iri sh less with missi onary
enthusiasm and more with resignation."
22
Arrayed against the blacks
and their abolitioni st allies, and with an ever-increasing political voice,
the Irish in America became increasingly white.
The change of the Irishman's racial status is reflected in the ri se of
the popular Iri sh-American actor and playwright John Brougham. He
made his American debut in 1840, and by the 1850s made several
attempts at managing his own theatres. During the late 1840s, he
began making a career from his pl ays, eventuall y authoring 126
melodramas.
23
Brougham's The Irish-Yankee: or, the Birth-day of
Freedom, published in 1856, presents an interesting development in
the American portrayal of the stage Iri shman. The play is a patriotic
melodrama about the early days of the Revolutionary War and
presents several American icons of patriotism, such as George
Washington and General Warren of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Against
this heroic backdrop, Brougham places what at first glimpse seems to
be a stereotypical comic Irishman, Ebenezer O'Donahoo.
Ebenezer has a wide brogue, i s a smooth-talker, and is quick to
fight-just li ke hi s predecessors Trushoop and Patrick; he i s even guilty
of the occasional bull and often throws in a Gaelic phrase or two
when speaking. Early in the play, he i s shown as a servant in the
kitchen, his status no higher than Patrick's in The Triumphs of Love.
When two American patriots come to the kitchen, he welcomes them,
excited by the prospect of a coming " ruction" between the British and
the colonists. The patriots do not treat Ebenezer as an equal, however.
After he has left the room, the Yankee jasper turns to his companion
and comments: "Hum! Plenty of courage, but no brains; useful but
dangerous; we can only trust him with the hard

O'Donahoo is taken to be the typical Iri sh immigrant of the day: al l
brawn and no wits.
22
Knobel, 7B.
2l Richard Moody, "John Brougham, " in The Cambridge Guide to American
Theatre (New York: Cambridge Universi ty Press, 1993), B7.

John Brougham, The Irish Yankee: or, the Birt/1-day of Freedom (New York:
Samuel French, 1B56), 9. All subsequent references will be ci ted parentheti cally in
the text.
Import or Immigrant? 53
Throughout the play, however, Brougham turns the stereotype
be1ck on itself. The e1udience lee1rns that O'Donahoo is <1n Iri sh-
American, born in thi s country but maintaining the accent of his
parents (6). Later, when the American patriots plan their defense
e1gainst Briti sh forces, they exclude O'Donahoo from the making of
strategy, sending him out instead on a dangerous mi ssion to deliver a
message to General Washington. Without their knowledge, he
momentarily delays hi s mission in order to head up the Boston Tea
Party (14) . And sti ll later, after learning that one of the patriots has
been captured, O'Donahoo cleverly plays the drunkard and manages
to safely enter the British encampment. Once there, he fool s the
British with a sham magic trick, blinding them by blowing snuff in
their faces, and effectively frees the captured patriot (16-18). Having
proven both hi s bravery and hi s cleverness, the Irish-American is
allowed to fight side-by-side with the Yankee and the other patriots,
helping to create the new nation. Like Patrick, he earns the hand of
his love. O'Donahoo has the extra honor of being shown taking his
place in the play's final tableau at the Temple of Liberty, shouting the
curtain line: "Now, boys, for a shout that will be heard across the
wilter. Liberty all over the world, ilnd where i t is not given with a
good will may it be taken by a strong hand (28)." As the title of the
melodrama suggests, O' Donahoo emerges as a hybrid of the stage
Irishman and the native AmericCi n Yankee character; the assimilation
of the Irish was well under way.
Dred: or, the Dismal Swamp
In the same year that he released The Irish Yankee, Brougham
printed a dramati c adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred.
This play was an obvious attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the
minstrel show and the success of the many stage adaptations of
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. When Dred was performed at the
Bowery Theatre in New York, T.D. Rice, an early blackface performer
Clncl portrayer of Uncle Tom, ple1yed the key role of the black slave Old
Tif.2
5
Brougham maint<1ins the abolitioni st message of Stowe's novel
with his sympe1thetic portraye1l of the two mulatto characters, Harry
and Lisette, as they try to escape from the evi l Tom Gordon.
However, a good deal of the stage time is dedicated to interpol ared
minstrel numbers that portray happy slaves under the benevolent care
of Miss Nina Gordon. The ple1y fai ls to adequately deal with the
question even when Miss Nina is forced to turn to the fugitive
'
5
John Brougham, Dred: or, the Dismal Swamp (New York: Samuel French,
1856), 2.
54 STILES
slave Dred in order to escape from her brother Tom; instead, the
elrama falls into an ineffective tone of pious reli giosity.
In Dred Brougham provides us with a signifi cant example of the
treatment of the stage black in mid-nineteenth century America. The
rise of minstrelsy "fixed the tradi tion of the Negro as on ly an
irresponsible, happy-go-lucky, wide-grinning, loud-laughing, shuffling,
banjo-playing, singi ng, dancing sort of being. "
26
Miss Nina's slaves
are very much depicted in this fashion, complete with the banjo-
playing and singing. These stage blacks have some agency-that is,
they have the freedom to contradict Miss Nina- but only so long as
they remain wi thin her care and good graces; there is never a doubt
that Mi ss Nina controls her slaves whatever liberties she allows them.
Brougham al so makes a di stinction among slaves based on the
darkness of thei r skin. The darker slaves are, with the exception of
Old Tiff, grouped together as minstrel cari cat ures. Old Ti ff, showi ng
hi s roots in Uncle Tom's Cabin, is treated as a mixture of Uncle Tom
and Aunt Chloe; he acts of hi s own volition, but only if hi s actions aid
the young Cripps children whom he is entrusted with caring for. Dred
does not easily fit into the color paradigm because he is neither a
minstrel caricature nor an Uncle Tom, nor does he play as crucial a
role as one would expect of the title character. Instead, he acts as a
black John the Bapti st in the swampy wil derness and a convenient
deus ex machina to resolve the plot. The two fairest skinned slaves,
Harry and Lisette-like their predecessors George Harris and Eliza-
are depicted with the most respect among the black characters.
However, they are clearl y given less agency and status than any of the
white characters. They win their escape at the play's end, but they
have no definite plans for their future. And, unlike Ebenezer
O' Donahoo, they do not achieve ful l participation in American
society.
In the ninety years fol lowing their first representations on stage in
Ameri ca, Irish and black characters underwent a series of
transformations. The earliest stage Iri shman and black were both from
the pre-existing English stage tradit ion, and plays in whi ch thi s
appeared tended to treat both equal ly as objects of low comedy and
ridicule.
In subsequent plays, a distinction is made between Iri sh characters
and bl ack, for example between Patrick and Sambo in The Triumphs
of Love. Although exhibiting most of the traits of the stage Iri shman,
Patri ck is depicted as a full -fledged character with a love-interest and
plans for the future. He is an indentured Irish immigrant, yet he is
26
Sondra Kathryn Wilson, " Introducti on" to James Weldon Johnson, Black
Manhattan (New York: Da Capo, 1930), 93.
Import or
55
shown CIS more a the audi ence at hi s comic
routines, but is to with him CIS he finds hi s way
in thi s new democratic society. SCi mbo is never given such
He remains the low comic figure. His
reflection on hi s condition prompts hi s master to di scuss the
far worse living conditions of poor whites; what could have been a
trul y effective launching of a three-dimensional Samba leads only to a
rationalization of the system of slavery. Hi s character is further
undermi ned by the very limited ways in which he is portrayed: either
obeying his master's orders, singing and dancing, or dead drunk. By
comparing Patrick with Sambo, the playwright passes a judgment
common to the time that the immigrant can be nurtured for citizenship
while the slave inherently lacks the strength of character to handl e
freedom.
The plays of john Brougham expand thi s judgment even further.
Less than a decade before the Civi l War, The Irish Yankee and Dred
demonstrate the beginnings of a final di stincti on being drawn between
the stage Irish and the stage black. Brougham uses the stereotype of
the Irishman to O' Donahoo's advantage: taken for a witless bruiser, he
is able to outwit Briti sh and patriots al ike, winning his place in the
patriotic American tableau. He is no longer an outsi der; he has
become American. Drawing on the various figures popularized by
minstrel shows and the many performances of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Brougham does not subvert stereotypes in Dred, but rather
perpetuates them. In no scene are the black ci1C1racters portrayed as
American.
By the mid-1850s, with the question of slavery being hotl y
contested, the American publ ic was polarized around i ssues of race.
Despite the enormous influx of immigrants from Ireland and the
perceived threat they posed to American j obs and mores, and despite
earli er perceptions of them as no different than blacks, in the service of
antebellum racial politics they were deemed white and therefore
thought to have potential for full ci ti zenship. By contrast, were
denied that potentiill. As they had been deni ed the initial choi ce of
in this country and had been treated as an economic import,
blacks continued to be denied agency in life and on the stage.
/o{lrna/ of AmNican Drama and Thf'alrf' 12 (Spri ng 2000)
STEREOTYPES AND THE D EVELOPMENT OF
AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA
LAURENCE G. AVERY
Stereotypes are everywhere. A few months ilgo ]ilnet Hil l, mother
of basketball plilyer Grilnt Hill, introduced herself ill a meeting neil r
my home ilS someone who Ciln' t di!nce or sing ilnd doesn' t like
wiltermelon. It brought down the house. In his beilutiful first novel ,
Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), Dilvid Gutterson took the mental
imilge of ]ilpilnese il S inscrutilble and treilcherous Orientals and used it
as the foundiltion of hi s story, showing how the image underlay the
unconstitutional impoundment of ]i'lpi'l nese-Americans on the west
coast at the outbreilk of World War II , then how in the post-war years
it illmost turned the death of an individual i nto a community tragedy.
The examples are di fferent as well as similar. The fi rst reflects a mental
image per se, dormant in numerous minds, capable of waking even at
a light touch. The second starts with the same kind of i mage in the
mind; then the image i s ful ly i'lrticulated in a formal work, articulated,
moreover, in a way desi gned to explode the stereotype rather than
reinforce it.
Stereotypes are everywhere because they originate in and, up to a
point, fol low a basic process of the mind, the formation of general-
i zations. Stereotypes are irresponsible generalizations, however, for
built into them is the idea of di stort ion. In the etymology of the word
this idea of falsification is a recent acquisition. Stereotype came into
the common language from the printi ng trade, where it denoted a
method of printing using metal plates derived from the standing type of
a book. The method originated in the earl y 18th century as an
economizing measure (type was the costliest part of a printer's
equipment and wanted protection), and of course a stereotype plate
was expected to duplicilte the stit nding type exactly. In the mid-
nineteenth century when ilccorcling to the OED stereotype began to be
used fi guriltively, the icleit of a copy faithful to its originitl was sti l l the
key element. Saying someone was " a sort of stereotype with me"
meant you recogni zed in the other person key simil<lrities to yourself.
Stereotypes and African American Drama 57
The idea of distortion entered the picture in the early twentieth
century. In his book Public Opinion, publ i shed in 1922, Wal ter
Lippmann seems to have been the first to focus on mental images such
as those assumed in my opening examples and l abel them
"stereotypes." Writing in the wake of World War I, Lippmann
explored how the American public developed opinions about things
never experienced directly, such as "German atrocities" or "the Red
Menace. " Hi s basic view was that " the real environment is altogether
too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance .... [But
since] we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on
a si mpler model before we can manage with it. To traverse the world
[people] must have maps of the world. Their persistent difficulty i s to
secure maps on which their own need, or someone else's need, has
not sketched in the coast of Bohemia."' The si mplified models of
reality are the stereotypes that inhabit the mind, and the danger always
is that the models are skewed by someone's "needs."
In current literary studies and daily life, stereotypes, building on
Lippmann, are understood as generalizations that through ignorance or
willful negl ect distort reality in line with strong subjective needs.
Social psychologists and cultural historians have laid the groundwork
for understanding how stereotypes take shape and function, and The
Dictionary of Persona/icy and Social Psychology offers a working
definition: stereotypes are " over simpl ified, rigid, and generalized
beliefs about groups of people in which all individuals from the group
are regarded as having the same set of leading characteri stics.''
2
Stereotypes operate like blinders, serving as barriers to real contact and
understanding between people. Frequently, they imply racist attitudes
since they tend to be based on assumpti ons of racial superiority and to
mask a complex of unwelcome feelings, notably guilt and fear.
During the years from the 1890s to the 1920s African American
performers began to move from the minstrel stage to thE' American
professional theater and develop their material into musical comedies.
At any time, given the nature of the theater audience- not individuals
scattered over a wide territory during an indeterminate time but large
numbers of people in the same place at one time-the theater i s ti ed to
its immediate cul ture more directly than are the other arts. With any
theater professional the opportunity to work depends in part on an
abi lity not necessaril y to accommodate audience expectations but
' Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 16.
1
Rom Harre and Roger Lamb, eds., Dictionary of Personality and Social
Psychology (Oxford: Blackwell Ltd., 1986), 34 7.
58
AVERY
certainly to negotiate them. When blacks beg2n their push into the
professional theater, the gulf between the r<l ces in thi s country was
near its widest and can be gauged by the prevalence and tenacity of
stereotypes of black Americans in the minds of white Americans, who
constituted the sustai ning theater audience.
The stereotypes most consequential in the theater of the era had
emerged in popular entertainments of the nineteenth century, chiefly
minstrel shows. Blackface entertainers-white men in burnt cork
makeup-began appearing in the 1820s. By the early 1840s full -
fledged minstrel shows were on the boards and, although centered in
New York City and other large northeastern towns, toured the country
into the 1890s, making them " the fi rst American popular
entertainment form to become a national institution. "
3
Robert Toll
articulates what everybody understands to be the case when he says,
" With its images of Negroes shaped by whi te expectations and desires
and not by black realities, minstrel sy ... deeply embedded caricatures
of blacks into American popular culture.' r1
Almost all of the black artists who contributed to the development
of African American drama around the turn of the century came out of
the minstrel tradi tion. All of them, along with white arti sts also
interested in the movement of blacks into the professional theatre, had
to contend with the stereotypes from minstrel sy in the culture at large.
In fact, the various ways they contended is the story of the early years
of Afri can American drama. It is a story of change that is of interest
both for what it has led to i n the theater today and for the real
achi evements of the pioneers. The directi on of change is clear in a
contrast of two case hi stories, one from the first generation of the
movement, the other from the second. From the earl ier generation I
wi ll take the comedian Bert Wi lliams.
By 1910 Bert Wi ll iams was at the top of the entertainment
profession in America. That year he joined the Ziegfield Folli es as one
of its highest paid performers, and from then until his death in 1922 he
moved in and out of the Folli es more or less at will, alternati ng
between that lavi sh and superl ative variety show and the musical
comedies he devi sed himself or had a large hand in devi sing. He was
the first black performer to gain the kind of mobility that came wi th
acceptance in the white professional theater.
Wil liams's earliest years were spent on the island of Antigua in the
3
Robert C. Toll , Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), v.
Ibid., vi.
Stereotypes and African American Drama 59
West Indies, where he was born in 1874. In 1885 hi s family moved to
Riversi de, California, near Los Angeles, where Williams fini shed high
school , then left for Stanford University. After his freshman year he
and several white friends formed a si nging and dancing group to make
money over the summer for a return to school in the fall. While the
troupe did a lot of traveling, it went nowhere in any other sense, but
the epi sode introduced Williams to the theaters, halls, saloons, and
other performing venues in San Francisco, and college was behind him
forever. After a year of free-lancing, he met George Walker, a young
bl ack man from Lawrence, Kansas, who had worked hi s way to San
Francisco in medicine shows, and the two decided to become a team.
That was 1893. For a couple of years the two experimented with roles
and routines in San Francisco, then worked their way eastward,
landing in a show in New York City in 1896. The show was short-
lived, but Williams and Walker attracted favorable attention and soon
had other and better offers. One thing led to another, and by 1899 a
white producing organization was willing to put up money for The
Policy Players first of five all-black shows largely conceived by and
featuring Williams and Walker.
5
The Policy Players was a fast-paced vari ety show, revealing its
minstrel ancestry. Over the five productions, however, there is a
development away from the loose minstrel pattern and toward a more
integrated structure, with character, action, and musical numbers
having more-that is, at least some-relation to plot. The shows
became more and more prominent, and the third one, In Dahomey
(1903), fully recognizable as musical comedy, was the first all-black
show to open in a major Broadway theater. It also had a successful
tour of the British Isles, with a long run in London and a command
performance for the royal family. George Walker's death in 1909
brought the string of successful productions to an end. He was the
business man of the partnership, and on the business si de of things
Williams was lost without him. Walker's death, probably more than
anything el se, caused Williams to accept the offer from Florenz
Ziegfield in 1910.
What interests me in this career i s the role of
stereotypes in Williams's development as an arti st. When he began
performing 1890 with hi s college friends, thought of
himself as a ballad singer (something like Harry Belafonte, I imagine) .
The f ive are The Policy Players (1899), file Sons of Ham (1900), In
Dahomey (1903), Abyssinia (1906), and Bandanna Lane/ (1908). After George
W,1lker's death early in 1909, Williams tried one more show in their format, Mr.
Lode of Koal (1909), but closed i t earl y in 1910 out of generJI dissatisfaction.
60 AVERY
When he and George Walker teamed up in 1893, they performed a
variety act, singing, dancing, and telling humorous stories in regular
street clothes and without makeup. In other words, they assumed
none of the stereotyped roles developed in minstrelsy nor the outward
signs of them: outlandish costume, dialect speech, and blackface
makeup. This refus<ll of the stereotype was deliberate on their p<lrt.
6
But they were trying to make a living as performers barely thirty
yeMs <lfter the Emancip<ltion Proclam<ltion, during the most repressive
er<l for black Americ<lns in post-Civil War history, when the Jim Crow
i<lws Clnd customs that began to unr<lvel only in the 1950s were being
est<lblished. So during their two years in San Franci sco, under the
pressure of finding jobs th<lt paid, Williams and W<llker took on
stereotyped roles and some of the outward signs of them. Most of the
stereotyped roles for blacks developed in minstrel sy had Southern rural
associations, but two had Northern urban associations: the Broadway
sport and the low-comedy bum. After some experimentation Williams
Clnd Walker settled into the Northern p<lir and stayed with them
throughout their careers, creating their characters developmentally in
the way many performing artists of the era did, for instance Charlie
Chaplin with his Little Tramp. Walker became the fast talking big-city
operator in fancy clothes, while Williams became the down-and-out
and inept loner, the butt of all jokes, pranks, and general misfortune.
They adopted costumes appropriate to their types and, to a degree,
dialect speech.
7
Blackface makeup was another matter. Today we look back on
blackface as perhaps the most degrading element of a generally
degrading sit u<ltion: forced portrayal of demeaning caricatures. On the
ground around the turn of the century, however, the bit of makeup that
6
George Walker, who did take on a stereotyped role and a costume (i n his
case, elegant clothes) but never wore blackface, later said: "Biackfaced white
comedians used to make themselves look as ridi culous as they could when
portraying a 'darky' character. In their make-up they always had tremendously big
red lips, and their costumes were frightfully exaggerated. The one fatal result of
this to the colored performers was that they imitated the white performers in their
make-up as 'darkies.' Nothing seemed more absurd than to see a colored man
making himself ridiculous in order to portray himself." Quoted in Ann Charters,
Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams (New York: Da Capo Press, 1983), 14.
' With his background in the West Indies and California, Williams knew
nothing about the speech patterns of Southern blacks and not much about the
minstrel distortions of them. For his character, he said, he had to study "the
dialect of the American negro, which to me was just as much a foreign dialect as
that of the Italians." [Bert Williams, "The Comic S1de of Trouble," The American
Magazine 85 (January 1918): 60.]
Stereotypes and African American Drama 61
had been an eye-catching novelty in pre-Civil War days had become
little more than conventional. In minstrel shows it wasn't even the
element that signifi ed portrayal of black characters. White minstrels in
blackface might portray Irish characters, or German, or Indian, or a
host of others. It was only when they went into black dialect that
audiences knew they were portraying blacks. In Williams's and
Walker's day, black performers resented blackface, but it wasn't a
mandatory part of their presentation. George Walker never used
blackface makeup, nor did a number of others. Bert Williams came to
it most directly for artistic reasons.
He refers to his adoption of blackface makeup in a
characteristically off-hand way in an account of the trip he and George
Walker made eastward from San Francisco. "One day at Moore's
Wonderland in Detroit," he says, "just for a lark I blacked my face and
tried [a song]. Nobody was more surprised than I when it went like a
house on fire." In the same article he notes that "It was not until I was
able to see myself as another person that my sense of humor
developed."
8
Objectivity is what he is talking about. Not until he
could see himself, that is, the character he portrayed, as another
person did he have the psychological distance from it to explore the
character and see what worked in the portrayal. And the objectivity,
the sense of distance, came as he put on the trappings of his
stereotyped character, the last element of which was blackface
makeup. The result was a character clearly different from himself.
Williams always referred to this character as a "shiftless darky,"
and from the late 1890s onward he worked at developing aspects of
the character-in songs, skits, and the plots of his musical comedies.
Sometimes the character was just the victim of particular bits of bad
luck, as when he found a dollar on the sidewalk only to have it
snatched out of his hand by the person who lost it. Much of the bad
luck material had an edge-irony, satire, outright ridicule-some of it
humorous social protest. The song "Twenty Years" evokes the
precarious situation of blacks before the law as the narrator, after
slipping on a banana peel, is sentenced to twenty years in jail for
sliding on the sidewalk without a permit. In another stanza he is
sentenced to life plus twenty years for race suicide, since he never
married.
In other songs and skits bad luck is raised to the level of fate. One
of Williams' s most memorable songs was "I'm a Jonah Man," in which
catastrophe, like the biblical whale, swallows up the narrator for no
apparent reason. The opening verse tells us that hard luck set in when
8
Ibid., 58-59, 33.
62
AVERY
he was born, for " They named me after Papa and the same day P<lpa
died." " I'm a Jonah Man" amplified Williams's character in In
Dahomey, where the song was introduced, and musically it is unusual
among his numbers for having the verse in a minor key. Then for the
chorus it sh ifts to the corresponding major (F) to qualify the pathos of
the refrain, "Why am I dis Jonah I sho' can't understand," and to
support the humorously ironic last words: "But I'm a good substantial
full fledged real, first class Jonah Man."
9
Contemporary accounts make clear that the decisive element in
Williams's success was not clever lyrics or skillfully done music but his
talent as an actor. Live stage performances are ephemeral , of course,
unless preserved on film, and virtually none of Williams's were. He
did see the potential in sound recording, however, even in its earliest
days, and between 1901 and 1921 recorded about eighty of hi s songs,
a few of them several times. Today those scratchy antiques provide
our best access to Williams as a performer, to his style of acting and
use of voice for character depiction.
10
After he introduced it in 1905, "Nobody" became Williams's
signature song. He incorporated it into Bandanna Land (1908), the last
of his musical comedies with George Walker, then performed it
hundreds of times over the rest of his career. It is among the songs
Williams recorded more than once, but even a glance at the lyrics
shows that "Nobody" adds a dimension to the character he was
continuously creating. The speaker in "Nobody" i s beyond mere bad
luck, and "fated victim" is too narrow a label. The twice sung chorus
with its quadruple and quintuple negatives acknowledges a human
community but sets the narrator well outside it: " I ain't never done
nothin' to nobody, I I ain't never got nothin' from nobody, no time. I
Until I get somethin' from somebody, some time, I I'll never do nothin'
for nobody, no time." Here is the individual without human ties, the
quintessential outsider. The song i s melancholy enough, but anything
Williams did existed at least in the context of humor, so in tone there
is a difference, as there is in scale, between "Nobody" and works such
as Camus's The Stranger or Elison's Invisible Man. In basic human
predicament, however, the song from the first decade of the century
9
Thomas L. Riis, The Music and Scripts of "In Dahomey" (Madison: A-R
Editions, 1996), 76, 77.
'
0
Williams discography, in Ann Charters, 149-151. Two recordings of
Williams songs are: Nobody and Other Songs: The Story of Bert Williams, comp.
by Samuel B. Charters (New York: Folkways Records, 1981 ), and Ziegfield Follies
of 7919, selected by Carl Scheele (New York: Columbia Special Products, 1977).
Stereotypes and African Americiln Drilmil
63
clnti cipiltes those mid-century clilssics of existentiali st fi ction.
11
The ex<lmple of Bert Willitlms shows the complexity in the subject
of stereotypes in the theilter during the e<lrl y of the century.
Under the pressure of prilcticill necessity, Willi ams adopted one of the
stereotypes of Africtln Americans on the nineteenth-century
minstrel stage, then found himsel f limited to thClt role throughout his
career. In what seems an unpromising situil tion, however, he bent hi s
energies to the role, and with tillent, imagintltion, and cretlt ive drive
developed one of the memorable chilrilcters of the era, a charilcter filr
l<uger Clnd more nuilnced than ilnything inherent in the stereotype he
began with. Hi s ilchievement makes us want to speak of an arti st
transcending the limittltions of his material.
Wil l iams was always immensely popular with audiences, black
and white. Not surprisingly, among whites there WilS hardly an
undercurrent of negative cri ti cism, since hi s character, always rooted
in the stereotype, disturbed few whi te expectations. Among blacks, on
the other hand, there was always a kind of restlessness in some
quarters over anyone's immersion in a stereotype. For serious black
wri ters of the dtly, bl<lck cli<llect, for them the first expression of the
stereotype, was galling. PC!ul Laurence Dunbar's frustration Cl t being
Clppreciated onl y for, Clnd thus in Cl sense limi ted to, biClck dialect
poetry is well known. jtlmes Wel don Johnson, like Dunbar <1
successful lyri cist in early musical comedies, including some of
Wil liams and Walker's, left the in 1906 partly out of disgust
with stereotypes and their fal sifications, then throughout his influential
career di scouraged the use of dial ect by other black writers and
eschewed it himsel f, even in Cod's Trombones where it might have
been expected.
EducCltecl black people in general , if they countenanced the
at ::! 11 , were pained by the di stortions of bl<lck life perpetrated by the
stereotypes, especiall y since there were no other, counter-balanci ng
represent<ltions of blacks in the theater <1t the time. One thoughtful
col lege professor in K<1ns<1s, who saw the imp<1ct of Wi llie1ms and
Walker on hi s students when In Dahomey pl ayed in K<tnsas City, sent
them cl letter that must have hit home since they publ i shed it along
" Lyri cs for the verses are: " When l ife seems full of cl ouds and rain, I And I
,un fllll of nothin' but pain, I Who soothes my thll mpin', bumpin' brai n? II
NuiJocl y! II When winter comes with snow ,1nd sleet, I And me wi th hunger and
r ole! feet. I Who ' Here' s twenty-fi ve cents, go ,1he<tcl ,1nd get something to
II Nobody! II [chorus] When summer comes ,111 cool I And my
friends see me cirawin' near, I Who 'Come in h,we some beer' ? II Hum-
Nobody! II When I was in that railro,1d wreck I And thought I'd in my last
clwrk,l Who took that engine off my neck? II Not a soul! [chorus]. " Charters, 9.
64
AVERY
with their reply. Why, Professor Albert Ross wondered, did Williams
and Walker limit themselves to types such as " the l udicrous darkey
and the schemi ng grafter?" There are black people with real abil ities
and ach ievements in the land (he mentioned several, including Alain
Locke, at the time a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.) Why not base
characters on admirable black people, and " lift the young Negro mind
up to imitate and emulate" the best in the race? By upholdi ng " ideal s
[that] are degenerative," he added more tactfully in context than my
excerpt suggests, "you are succeeding and prospering personally and
financially at the expense and to the injury of your own race and
people."
12
Thi s exchange occurred in 1907. A few years later, after
George Walker died, a black cri tic in the Freeman simply dismissed
Bert Willi;lms as a throw-back, calling him "a great comedian of only
one style of work-as an old-time darkey."u
Of course racial stereotypes did not evaporate in the 1920s. But
by the twenties black theater art ists from a newer generation felt the
grip of stereotypes less firmly than Williams and Walker and their
contemporaries had. In the earl y twenti es these young people did not
feel free to throw off stereotypes altogether. But they wanted to bring
the theater closer to the experience of real black people and open up
the range of possibi l iti es for bl ack actors, and they felt emboldened to
try, at first in small steps. In addition to natural impatience, several
factors help explain the new push toward artistic freedom.
The drive to bring all-black musical comedies like In Dahomey
into the mainstream of the American professional theater all but halted
around 1910 with the death of George Walker and several others who
had shown the vision, business acumen, and talent to get the effort off
to a promising start at the turn of the century. For black artists during
the second decade of the century, thi s meant the establ ishment of
smal l residenti al theaters in thei r home communities, especiall y
Harl em, and James Weldon johnson tells us of a happy result: "Wi th
the establishment of the Negro theatre in Harl em, coloured performers
" The letter, by Albert Ross, and the reply by Williams and Walker are
printed in Va riety 14 (December 1907): 30. The respectful reply essentially affi rms
the sense Williams and Walker had of the strength of stereotypes in the public
mind. Black performers must "please the non-sympathetic, biased and prejudi ced
white man .. . [on whom the performer depends) almost absolutely . . . for his
financial support. " "Such characters as you mention are worthy examples, but in
a public sense they are obscure and surely away from the type and consequently
would prove uninteresting."
13
Quoted in Thomas L. Rii s, Just Before jazz: Black Musical Theater in New
York, 1890-1915 (Washington: Smi thsonian Insti tution Press, 1989), 123.
Stereotypes and African American Drama 65
in New York experienced for the first time release from the restr<lining
fears of what a white <1udience would stand for; for the first time they
felt free to do on the stage whatever they were able to do."
14
johnson was also excited by another liberating experience, the
production at the Madison Square Garden Theatre of three short plays
of black life by Ridgely Torrence on 5 April 1917.
15
Unfortunately, the
d<ly after the opening President Wilson delivered his war message to
Congress, and the plays along with much el se were swept from public
view by attention to the war. But johnson was right to celebrate the
production.
16
Characters in the three plays were conceived outside the
narrow mold of stereotypes, but another aspect of the production
interested johnson even more. Part of the stereotype mentality had
held that blacks on stage were just being themselves, not acting;
indeed, that blacks could not act.
17
johnson's pleasure sprang from the
way the production put the lie to " the stereotyped traditions regarding
the Negro's hi strionic limitations .... It was the first time anywhere in
the United States for Negro actors in the dramatic theatre to command
the serious attention of the critics and of the general press and
public."
18
Another factor that allowed black theatre artists to go beyond
established stereotypes was the WWI. Participation in the war effort
led blacks to expect fuller acceptance into American society, and
despite their di sappointment after the war few blacks renounced the
expectation. For those who went to France, the mere fact of being
away from segregated America, of being in a country where their
humanity was unquestioned, was uplifting. And for a few of the
soldiers, notably those in james Reese Europe's famous 369th U. S.
Infantry Band, the jazz band that took Paris by storm with its
performances, their military experience paved the way into the theater.
james Weldon johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1930), 171 - 72.
''Ridgely Torrence, "Cranny Maumee," "The Rider of Dreams," and "Simon
the Cyrenian" in Plays for il Negro Theater (New York: Macmillan, 191 7).
'" Writing in the late 1 920s, johnson called it "the most important single
event in the entire history of the Negro i n the American theatre; for it marks the
beginning of a new era." Oohnson, 1 75).
"As George Walker put it: "Al l that was expected of a colored performer
was singing and dancing ilnd a little story tel li ng, but as for acti ng, no one credited
a black person wi th the ability to act." Quoted in Charters, 14.
'
6
johnson, 1 75.
66
AVERY
Noble Sissie, lead vocalist of Europe's jazz band, was among the
principle creators of Shuffle Along, in 1921 the earliest of the new all-
black musical comedies and an example of the growing willingness to
push against stereotypes.
Robert Kimball doesn't much exaggerate when he says Shuffle
Along "was a miracle." He continues:
In the spring of 1921 hardly anyone believed that a musical
written, performed, produced, and directed by American
blacks could be presented on Broadway. But on May 23
Shuffle Along opened [at a Broadway theater], and promptly
made theatrical history. I The show restored authentic black
artistry to the mainstream of the American theater. A daring
synthesis of ragtime and operetta . . . . [i]t featured jazz
dancing, was the first black musical to play white theaters
across the United States, and was a vital part of the black
cultural renaissance of the 1920s. I The triumph of Shuffle
Along and its creators, Noble Sissie, Eubie Blake, Flournoy
Miller, and Aubrey Lyles, was a beacon of hope to every bl<lck
<lrtist in America.
19
My interest in Shuffle Along is in the way it shows the growing
instability of stereotypes. On one hand there is ample evidence of
stereotypical thinking at all level s of the production. Eubie Blake,
composer and musical director of the show, had the orchestra
memorize the entire score so they could play each night without sheet
music. When asked why, he said, "We did that because it was
expected of us .... People didn't believe th<lt black people could re<ld
music-they wanted to think that our abi lity was just natural t<llent."'
20
A more telling example is " Bandana [sic] Days, " <l song in the show
evoking nostalgia for Old South plant<ltion days. The song came about
because Sissie C'lnd Bl<lke inherited some Old South costumes from a
and wanted to m<lke use of them in a musical number. The
costumes could have supported any number of possibi li ties: a
a blues number, a song growing out of some situati on in the plot-
even a protest song. The question is, why nostalgia for the Old South,
why that theme in particular?
'
9
Robert Kimball, "I ntroduction, " Sissie & Blake's "Shuffle Along," an
Archival Re-creation of the 7921 Production (New York: New World Records,
1976), 1.
10
Ibid., 3.
Stereotypes and African American Drama 67
Nothing remotely like personal experience was at the root of the
song. Neither Sissi e nor Blake knew much about the South, and whilt
little they did know was unpleilsant. Blilke, whose parents had been
slaves, grew up in Baltimore, where he leilrned and played his music
on the street, in Silloons and bordellos, then went north to New York
City. Sissie was rai sed in Indiana, and his one trip to the South had
been unhappy. In 1917 when his regiment was sent to a military
camp near Spartanburg, South Carolina, he nearly caused a riot after a
run-in with a bigoted shop keeper.
21
Sissie was the lyricist of the pair, and he tossed off the words for
"Bandana Dilys" quickly, he tells us, over the phone while he was in
Boston, Blake in New York.
22
Wilnting a song with a Southern setting,
in other words, he took the first idea thilt came to mind. Nostalgia for
the Old South had been one of the most prevalent themes in the
minstrel tradition, its prevalence stimulated by the way it reinforced a
self-serving nineteenth-century view in the North thilt the proper place
for African Americans was in the rural South and that those who came
North would only be fill ed with nostalgia for the old folks at home.
Sissie modified the stereotypical pattern of such songs by avoiding
black diillect and introducing a qualification of the nostalgia in a
subordinate clause in the refrain, " Though filled with turmoil , trouble
and stri fe." But essentially, with this song he did the "expected," as
Blake did in having his orchestra play without sheet music.
23
On the other hand, much of the vital energy of the show resulted
from a spirit of daring, a wil lingness to challenge the dominance of
stereotypes. The plot grew out of a farcical sketch Flournoy Miller and
Aubrey Lyles had done on the minstrel circuit for years in which two
comical rascals, co-owners of a grocery store .in a Southern black
community, run against each other .for the office of mayor. For Shuffle
Along, however, Flournoy Miller, the playwright of the g:roup,
" Robert Kimball and Wi ll iam Balcom, 'Reminiscing with Sissie and Blake
(New York: Viking Press, 1973), 65.
n Ibid., 88.
H Lyrics for " Bandana Days" are: "(refrain) Why the dearest days of my life I
Were bandana ci<Jys, b<Jnd<Jna d<Jys. I Though filled with turmoil, troubl e and strife,
I Dearest mem' ries will live always. (verse) In those dear old bandana days, I
Cane and cotton ne'er forgotten, I Bandana days. I And those qu<Jint old bandana
ways, I When our dads were courting our dear mammies, I They were sure some
bashful S.1mmies. I And in all their bandana plays, I Banjos strummin', they'd be
hummin' I Band,ma lays. I And in the pale moonlight I They'd swing left and right I
In those dear old bandana days." Sissie & Blake's "Shuffle Along," 5.
68 AVERY
expanded the story-li ne to include a third contestant in the race, a
young reform candidate named Harry. Whi l e the store owners
concentrate on each other and wi th mounting ludicrous villainies
finall y self-destruct, Harry is honest, sensible, and well meaning and in
the end wins the election. Miller's real achievement was to envision
Harry, a character clearly beyond the mold of stereotypes. While he
and Lyles, in blackface makeup, played roles from the minstrel
tradition, the actor playing Harry, without blackface, had a character to
develop who was decent and able, with a wide range of recognizably
human emotions and aspirations. Harry is the sort of talented
whol esome achiever Professor Albert Ross urged Williams and Walker
to put on stage.
Since he approached human dimensions, Harry presented a
situation filled with tension for the creators of the show, a situation that
in its outcome nicely illustrates the expanding possibilities of the day.
The problem involved Harry's love-life and came into focus with a
song, "Love Will Find a Way." James Weldon Johnson provides the
necessary background in his discussion of the second decade of the
century when black artists performed mainly for black audiences and
thus found themselves "in an entirely different psychological
atmosphere." Before that, Johnson reminds us, black actors
had been constrained to do a good many things that were
distasteful because managers felt they were things that would
please white folks [and likewise were] forbidden to do some
other things because managers feared they would displease
white folks. One of the well-known taboos was that there
should never be any romantic love-making in a Negro play. If
anything approaching a love duet was introduced in a musical
comedy, it had to be broadly burlesqued. The reason behind
this taboo lay in the belief that a love scene between two
Negroes could not stri ke a white audience except as
ridiculous . ... This taboo had been one of the most strictly
observed.
24
z johnson, 1 71.
Stereotypes and African American Drama 69
"Love Will Find a Way" confronted the taboo head on.
25
The key
point about the song is that it does not burlesque romantic feelings. No
more trite than popular love songs usually are, then or now, the lyrics
of "Love Will Find a Way" reveal a heart-felt statement of sentiments
going back at least to the chivalric middle ages: the woman's love is
an inspiration to the man and as long as their hearts stay on fire for
each other, things will work out. The melody, rhythmically smooth
and harmonious, even lush, provides support for the sentiments rather
than any kind of qualifying counterpoint. A few days before the New
York opening, Eubie Blake ran into a fellow writer, who had worked
on the Williams and Walker shows and knew the taboos. When Blake
told him about "Love Will Find a Way," the friend said, '"You're
crazy' ... and walked off shaking his head."
26
On opening night, Sissie said, "Love Will Find a Way"
had us more worried than anything else in the show. We
were afraid that when [Harry sang it to his girl friend in act
one], we'd be run out of town. Miller, Lyles, and I were
standing near the exit door with one foot inside the theater
and the other pointed north toward Harlem. We thought of
Blake, stuck out there in front, leading the orchestra-his bald
head would get the brunt of the tomatoes and the rotten eggs.
Imagine our amazement when the song was not only
beautifully received, but encored. During the intermission we
told Blake what we had been doing, and he came near to
killing us.
27
25
Lyrics are: [verse] "Come, dear, and don' t let our faith weaken, I Let' s keep
our love fires burning bright. I Your love for me is a heavenly beacon, I Guiding
me all through love's darkest night. I Don't start minding I Or fault finding, I No
m<Jtter how dark one's path may grow. I Fate won't hurry, I Well, don't worry, I
We'll just keep our hearts aglow. [refrain] Love wi l l find a way I Though skies now
are gray. I Love like ours can never be ruled, I Cupid's not schooled that way. I
Dry each tear-dimmed eye, I Clouds will soon roll by. I Though fate may lead us
<Jstray, I My dearie, mark what I say, I Love will find a way" (Sissie & Blake's
"Shuffle Along," 6).
21
' Kimball and Bolcom, 93.
27
Ibid., 93. Another song from the play, ' 'I'm just Wild About Harry, " got a
new lease on life in 1948 when Harry Truman used it as a campaign song duri ng
his presidential race with Thomas Dewey Ibid., 228). "I'm just Wild About Harry"
is a campaign song in Shuffle Along too, being sung by Harry's girl friend as a way
of rallying support for him. Like " Love Will Find a Way," it also avoids black
stereotypes.
70 AVERY
Probabl y Sissie's story is too good to be true in all its detail s, but
the image of the feet, one i nside the theater, the other pointing north
toward Harlem, beautifully evokes the tension of the moment. It was
as if they faced a line scratched in the schoolyard dust by a bully and
finally were daring to step over it. A feeling of unease was inevitable,
along with thoughts of escape and a place of refuge. Then they were
on the other side, and this time, at least, the reception was not hostility
but warm appreciation. The exci tement of success is clear i n Si ss ie's
story.
In relation to stereotypes, Shuffle Along was a mixed bag-and
therein lies its historical signifi cance. In its use of paraphernali a from
the minstrel traditi on, it looked to the past as numerous black shows
had clone since the turn of the century. But in crucial ways i t also
refused to reinforce stereotypes, instead claiming the freedom to
develop characters and situations wi th some authenticity. It was the
earliest play by black artists to make that kind of claim in the
professional theater, and in so doing it looked to the future. Shuffle
Along foreshadowed what came to be, with much discussion and
difference of opinion, the basic drive in African American drama
during the century, the drive to depict the realities of black experience
in America.
Journal of American Drama and Tl)('atrt' 12 (Spring 2000)
QUESTIONING THE GROUND OF AMERICAN IDENTITY:
GEORGE PIERCE BAKER' S THE PILGRIM SPIRIT AND
SUZAN-LORI PARKS'S THE A MERICA PLAY
1
ROBERT BAKER-WHI TE
In considering defining markers of American drama from an
ecological perspecti ve, we can start with ground, with earth, because
of its foundational status. Although ecologists and ecological criti cs
speak most often of li fe- of the biomass, the biota, of the
interconnectedness of "all living things," it is well also to take account
of the literal and figurative bedrock of ecological consideration. Life's
platform, its stage if you will, is earth, both in the sense of the planet,
and in the sense of the (usually broken) ground that comprises the
planet's surface. Gravel, rock, sand, dirt- these are the " boards" for
the ecologi cal pageant. Yet to invoke thi s metaphor is to mi ss an
important aspect of earth's representation in American drama, for, as
the analyses that foll ow suggest, ground matches not only the Burkean
dramatic category of scene, but functions crucially as actor as well.
The ground as an actor is a literal facet of George Pierce Baker's
monumental pageant-drama The Pilgrim Spirit , produced in 1921 at
Plymouth, Massachusetts, as part of the tercentenary celebration of the
landing of the Mayflower. A speaking rock opens and closes the
pageant, urging the pilgrims on and asking the audience to consider
what has become of these early settlers' hopes for the new continent.
The ground as actor is more subtly layered into Suzan Lori-Parks's
contemporary fantasy about the nation's Foundling Father, Cl grave-
digging actor who enacts the assassination of Abraham Lincoln for a
living in a space that Parks refers to as "A great hole. In the middle of
nowhere. The hole is an exact replica of The Great Hole of History."!
' earlier version of this p,1per was delivered at the Modern
Associati on annual convention in S,1n Francisco, December 1998.
Suzan-Lori Parks, "The America Play" in Tile America Play and Other
Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 158.
72
BAKER-WHITE
I suggest that these disparate examples, from near the beginning and
end of the "American century," demonstrate some particularly telling
ways in which the earth itself literally performs its own, and the
American, identity.
In American Drama: The Bastard Art Susan Harris Smith argues
against the time-honored tradition of finding authentic American
identity in the land and in what she calls the "autochthonic paradigm"
of American letters. As Smith notes, the lane! itsel f exists in American
writing as "an inescapable theme1tic concern," and in the development
of American literature " the insistence on the formative force of the
land was part of the culture as a whole." As a resu lt of this nostalgic
geographic determinism, Smith argues that "one factor for determining
the essential 'American ness' of American I iterature was <1 close
connection to the land, which die! not escape the notice of those
struggling to create an acceptable American dr<1ma."J In pl<1ce of this
historic<ll drive to <1uthentic<1te nationill literilture by virtue of its
attention to the earth, Smith suggests insteild a "generic paradigm" for
determining Americ<lnness in, at least, the drama-<1 pilr<ldigm b<1sed
on "the desire to perform, the desire to engage in di<1logic prilctices
onst<1ge in public." The impetus for such a transformation is cle<1rly
politic<li-Smith argues that such a performiltive test would allow for
an Americilnness thilt is no longer the "exclusive property of westering
white men."
4
Although it is far from my purpose here to dispute what
Smith describes as the American drama's propensity to define its value
around precisely that nexus of established, landed privilege, I will
argue that to replace thi s geographical, or what might also be called an
ecological, imperative in American drama with another paradigm will
not suffice. We are brought back to the natural in American drama not
only because doing so grants a kind of cultural power to those who
would associate themselves with the conquest of nature. In pilrt, I
wish to show how an alternative voice, exercising an option to
perform through her drama alternative visions of Americ<ln identity,
does so not by ignoring the natural in American life, but by recasting it
as Cln entity in tune with, and not illwilys opposed to, a hum<1nistic
vision. I also want to suggest here a corollary to Sergei Eisenstein's
notion of n<1ture as representing ilgent, rather than represented object. J
' Susan Harris Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1 997) 109.
" Ibid. , 113.
, See Sergei Eisenstein, "The Music of Landscape and the Fate of Montage
Counterpoint at a New Stage," in Nonindifferent Nature, Herbert Marshall, trans.
(Cilmbriclge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 216-383.
The Ground of American Identity 73
That corollary is that in American drama of the twentieth century, "the
natural" performs itself specifically as an exponent of what it means to
be American. The alternative paradigms of "autocthonic" and
"generic performative" need not be conceived as opposites. In
American drama, they are compli cit with each other.
The United States as a country has always defined its own culture
with a fantastically animated relationship to its original land-claims
and territorial possessions. Of course so have other nations. As Simon
Schama so convincingly demonstrates, al l cul tures, all nations, have
specific and crucial imaginations of landscape, of "wood, water and
rock" at the center of their cultural awareness.
6
Yet at least in the
Western experi ence, American identity has been conspicuously
determined in this way because of accidents of "discovery" and
exploration, because of the scale and idiosyncrasy of many key
features of the American continent (ecologically, the parts of Europe
are by and large more similar to themselves than America is to any of
them), and perhaps most importantly, because of an overt awareness
of this component of cultural identity as it has worked its ideological
and spiritual work on the populace. Americans may even reach to
nature in their quest for self-definition because of an inherent, relative
lack of depth of historical experience, at least in comparison with their
European forebears. And in the twentieth century, the influence of
one particular theory of Ameri can roots cannot be overlooked-the
theory of Frederi ck j ackson Turner's famous " frontier hypothesis."
Turner's The Frontier in American History, delivered first in 1893
as an address to the American Hi storical Society, has probably helped
to shape contemporary Ameri cans' view of themselves as an
intrinsically landed people more than any other single influence. This
is not to claim that most Americans could, in fact, describe Turner's
thesis with any confidence or accuracy. Rather, it is to claim that to
study the cultural production of things "American" in the twentieth
century is in many ways to interrogate the power of Turner's main
idea. (The originality of that idea, and the alternative notion that
Turner may simply have captured the zeitgeist with particular
concision and rhetori cal force, are issues that need not be decided
here.) Turner's frontier theory rej ects in part the "germ theory" of
American hi story, whereby germs of European instituti ons and
behavior grew into distinct but derivati ve American counterparts. By
contrast, Turner's vision is one of American originality, born of the
idea that the frontier, and its wilderness ecosystems, stripped the
American pioneer down to a "savage" state, from which hi s (for
6
See Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1995).
74
BAKER-WHITE
Turner, masculinity was assumed) behavior and society were created.
The constant renewal of this process became the constant remaking of
American character across the western frontier. Thus, " the frontiering
experience, as least as Turner perceived it, made Americans much
unlike their European counterparts."
7
Turner's frontier hypothesis has been challenged over time, and
like many such sweeping historical hypotheses, it tends to obscure
specific details of time and place with generalized notions of national
development. Yet its enduring power as an explanation of American
identity may rest in part on what Wilbur R. Jacobs calls its
"environmental-evolutionary" aspect. Most modern environmentalists
would likely disdain Turner's notions, or at least criticize the
imperialist (and ecologically insensitive) behavior of the pioneers that
Turner's work has been seen to champion. But it is interesting that
Turner does not define America as a place where man conquers
nature, but actually as quite the reverse. Turner wrote, "The
wilderness masters the coloni st. It finds him a European in dress,
industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It him from the
railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments
of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin."
8
What might now be viewed as a dubious social -Darwinian strain to
this thought is nonetheless entwined with the notion that Americans
become Americans through a series of intimate and intense
relationships to the land. Jacobs writes that in Turner's view
"American society was best understood as a kind of biological
organism evolving from frontier beginnings," and Turner himself
specifically referred to the frontier as a "fertile field" for investigation,
thus layering an ecological metaphor on top of an already ecological
referent.
9
Thi s ecological notion as a part of the frontier ethic is
echoed in the drama of twentieth-century America.
Before turning specifi cally to that drama, it should be noted that
many art-historical and literary-critical exegeses of culture
have explored in some depth the relations of American landscape and
identity. Thus Angela Miller in a study of landscape representation
and American cultural politics focuses on how " artists, critics,
collectors, and men of letters collaborated in devising an
7
Wilbur R. jacobs, " Foreword" in Frederick jackson Turner, The Frontier in
American History (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1947 [repri nt 1986]), xiv.
In hi s foreword, jacobs al so provides a complete account of Turner's " germ
theory. "
8
Ibid., xvii, 4.
9
Ibid., xii, 3.
The Ground of American Identity 75
institutionalized aesthetic and in implementing a certain criti cal and
stylistic orthodoxy that subsequently appeared as a fully natural
development of an emergent nationalism."
10
This description clearly
argues that the cultural creation of aesthetic taste in landscape
representation became complicit in a political project of nation
building. Thi s is not far from what can be seen in dramas of the early
twentieth century. Stephen Daniels carries this hermeneutics of
suspicion into both the English and American traditions, to investigate
how national identities "are co-ordinated, often largely defined, by
'legends and landscapes,' by stories of golden ages, enduring
traditions, heroic deeds and dramatic destinies located in ancient or
promised home-lands with hallowed sites and scenery. . . . As
exemplars of moral order and aesthetic harmony/' writes Daniels,
"particular landscapes achieve the status of national ir:ons."
11
Both
Baker in The Pilgrim Spirit, and more obliquely Parks in The America
Play, exploit and interrogate the notion of landscape, indeed of earth
itself, as a defining national entity.
One way to approach George Pierce Baker's The Pilgrim Spirit is
through the theology of its principal characters, the Puritans who
traveled to the "New World" in 1620. Indeed, according to the
ecological critic Frederick (not Jackson) Turner, "The two great
historical givens in American culture are Puritani sm and the
frontier."
12
In Baker's pageant drama these two givens collide, literally
and figuratively, on the natural stage of Plymouth's waterfront. If, as
Turner asserts, "The defining characteristic of Puritanism i s its denial
of the validity and permissibility of mediating terms," then in The
Pilgrim Spirit what we might expect to see would be the stubborn
resistance of theological man to the dictates of a harsh physical
frontier.
13
In fact, however, what we get is much closer to the well-
known story of accommodation to the land and to the native
Americans who already have learned to live with the environment that
has been "discovered."
'
0
Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American
Culwral Politics, 1825-1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 993), 3.
" Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity
in England and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 993), 5.
11
Frederick Turner, "Cul tivating the American Garden," in The Ecocriticism
Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Cheryl! Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds.
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1 996), 45.
''Ibid., 46.
76
BAKER-WHITE
Yet Purite1ni sm Cl S e1n idee1 is importe1nt in <1 sepe1re1te sense for The
Pilgrim Spirit. In Suse1n He1rris Smith's die1gnosis of the Americe1n
dr<1me1's enduring be1st<1rd st<ltus, she notes the1t " the well-documented
Purit<ln di stCl ste for thee1tre e1nd dre1me1 continues to hold strong swily
over the genere1l popule1ce e1s well ClS ace1demic instituti ons."
14
This
notion coupled with Smith's ee1rlier-cited observe1tions the1t uniquely
Americe1n drilmil he1s often been seen necesse1rily to include <1 close
connection to the le1nd e1nd thClt this idee1 "did not escape the notice of
those struggling to cree1te an accepte1ble Americe1n dre1me1" positions
Baker' s ple1y ClS <1 curious nexus of hi storical e1nd criti cil l significe1nce.
In effect, Smi th argues that the perception of a landed que1lity in
Cluthentic American experience drove those striving to legitime1te
American dram.-1 to privilege an "autocthonic" conception over a
perfonnative one, and yet George Pi erce Baker, Cl uthor of a text thClt
specifice1l ly focuses on the specie1l ple1ce of special earth in the
psyche, was e1lso one of the for <1 more
open e1nd perforn1<1ti ve sense of thee1tric<1 l legitimacy, especie1l l y within
the iiCCldemy. Baker i s perhe1ps most fe1mous for hi s ple1ywriting
courses, including the " 47 workshop" the1t originated at Re1dcliffe
college and le1ter moved to Harve1rd. But in many ways Be1ker's
passion we1s for performance itself, and in fact it was the lack of officie1l
support for a theatre- a legitimized space for the practice of
performance, as opposed to an academic locale for the study of
dramatic literature- that led him to leave Harvard in 1924 to help
found the Yale Department of Drama, one of the first such
departments in the country (and precursor to the contemporary Yale
School of Dre1m<1).
15
So in The Pilgrim Spirit we see not <1 divi sion
between landed American identity and performance, but rather <1
confluence of these two stre1ins. Perhaps then it is not surpri sing thilt
Baker's rock speaks.
Baker's avid interest in pageant drama may be understood as a
way of connecting the emotional power of theatrical production, ClS he
he1d come to understand it through academic investigations, to <1
popul ar- if not populi st-energy. One of his most famous e1nd
successful pageant productions was The Pilgrim Spirit, staged ill the
actual site of the pilgrim's landing. The text of The Pilgrim Spirit,
which Baker wrote in col laboration with several other writers ilnd
Smi th, 23.
" Bilker's Harvard-to-Yale migration was, of course, reversed, for interestingly
simil ar reasons, when Robert Brustein left Yal e to found the Ameri can Repertory
on the same Brattl e Street in C<1mbridge where Professor Baker
had lived over h<1lf <1 century previously.
The Ground of American Identity 77
musicians, exhibits a strong connection to the natural , as well as the
cultural, importance of the event of New World colonization. But it is
worth recognizing in this connection that Baker's original plans for the
Plymouth pageant grew from a different cultural and geographi cal
context altogether. After having directed a pageant that celebrated the
cultural and hi stori cal roots of a small New Hampshire town (The
Peterborough Memorial Pageant) in 1910, Baker was invited by the
Oregon Conservation Commission to plan a pageant that would
celebrate the centennial of the city of Astoria. As Baker plotted this
open-air theatri cal event, the place of the physical environment was
foremost in his mind. His biographer Wi sner Payne Kinne clearly
comments that in this endeavor, "Nature would be his backdrop, the
river and nearby mountains his properties." Believing the history of
the area to be intrinsically tied to the l ife of the Columbia River, Baker
insisted on having a river as part of the pageant's scenic environment.
Consistent with the i ll usionistic nature of theatrical mimesi s, and with
Baker's demonstrated will ingness to have nature itself play roles in hi s
theatrical creations, it mattered not that the river at hand happened to
be the Willamette, and not the Columbia-as Baker saw it, "kindled
imagination will make the change for the audience."
16
Despite thi s ahistorical and unreal use of natural properties,
Baker's emphasis in this spectacle was strongly swayed by the appeal
of the living world. Hi s notes for the pageant's opening stress the
importance of "Nature and the Wilderness. This by music and dance
and drama would suggest the receding of the glaciers and the
formation of the rivers and mountains. . . . I hope to find for thi s
section an Indian legend accounting for the troubled waters at the
mouth of the Columbia."'
7
We may, from our historical di stance,
recognize in this planned appropriation of indigenous cul tural
production the colonizer's move of retell ing his own version of
hi storical development through the seemingly innocent use of the
colonized's own imagination. Exactl y how the cultural politi cs of this
appropriative historical tale would have played out is i mpossible to
guess-the pageant never materiali zed in Oregon. But its planning
was important preparation for Baker as he approached an even larger
proj ect, that of the Plymouth pageant to celebrate the tercentenary of
the arrival of Briti sh pi lgrims to Massachusetts Bay.
The Pilgrim Spirit is not an overtl y ecological drama, and yet it is a
story of a people's intertwinement with their envi ronment in a very
16
Wisner Payne Kinne, George Pierce Baker and the American Theatre
(Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1954), 141. Baker quoted in Kinne, 141.
17
Ibid.
78
BAKER-WHITE
direct sense. And perhaps this is why, like any account of Oregonian
settlers, like any formation narrative in the "new" American world, its
telling must at some level evoke and even perform the natural in order
to capture the essence of the tale. The prologue is spoken by
Plymouth rock itself, which calls itself the "cornerstone of the
republic." The voice of the rock corresponded in Baker's staging with
a visual focus on the granite itself-the very granite that according to
lore was the Pilgrims' first stepping stone to the new world.
I, the rock of Plymouth, speak to you, Americans.
Here I rested in the ooze
From the ages primordial.
18
The unseen speaker goes on to chronicle earlier visitors ("Norsemen,"
"adventurers"), and to describe in brief the indigenous population and
the natural environment that surrounds the chosen spot ("The bay
swarming with fish, The woods full of game"). In later scenes, this
trope of teeming and bountiful nature will reappear in stereotypical
first Thanksgiving imagery, as Indians show fish, corn, turkeys, and
native grains to the thankful Puritans. Of course the unique quality of
Baker's pageant-drama is hardly the employment of such imagery, but
rather that the imagery need not be imported to the stage. It is there-
it is the stage, and the act of framing with audience bleachers, outdoor
illumination, and unseen voices is the act that prompts existent nature
into playing its role in this performance of national origins.
In an early scene from the pageant, one of the leaders of a pre-
Mayflower (Spring, 1619) expedition, Captain Dermer, exclaims as he
surveys Plymouth harbor and the surrounding hills, "Faith [as he looks
about} 'tis a pleasant spot, this Patuxet-the cleared fields, the bay
swarming with cod and bass. 'Tis as if 'twere waiting for the people in
England who talk much of settling on this new continent (20)." The
notion here that the land itself is "waiting" for explorers has actually
been introduced earlier, in the prologue of the rock, where the granite
block questions whether "chance" is responsible for the arrival of
these pilgrims at this site:
The Pilgrim ...
Sails westward, and comes to me,-
By chance, by choice, who knows? (6)
'"George Pierce Baker, The Pilgrim Spirit (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1921), 5.
All subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text.
The Ground of American Identity 79
The idea imputed in these instances to the English explorer, and to the
very territory of his exploration, that the land itself waits, that the earth
has volition and purpose in its patient anticipation of the European
settlers, figures nicely into the ideology of claims and eventual
conquest that will come to define American westering. It also coheres
with a notion of promise in the land that ties the Puritan narrative of
origins to other religious land claims. Specifically as presented in The
Pilgrim Spirit, the dramatization of 'Puritan repression at the hands of
English authority, of escape (exile) to a neutral territory (Holland), and
of eventual overcoming of hardship to found a new nation in a new
land, all combine to provide unequivocal reminiscence of the Old
Testament Exodus narrative. And just as nature performs in that
narrative (the Nile, the insects, the bush, etc.), so nature in Baker's
dramatized narrative will play a critical role in telling the tale.
The ways in which the Pilgrims' story is infused with natural
phenomena are myriad in Baker's drama, and range from such
theatrical events as the Song of the Pilgrim Women, which extols the
virtues of the New World earth, brooks, sea, and fields, to the staging
of the actual landing at the rock itsel f. We must recall here again that
this pageant was a monumental affair, using real ships in the actual
bay bordered by the same rocky New England soil that the
seventeenth-century adventurers had encountered. The "place of
nature" in thi s theatricalization i s hard to conceptualize- much harder
than if all this imagery and these evocations of the importance of the
non-human world were enclosed within a traditional theater space.
Indeed one of the hallmarks of contemporary theaters is their di stinctly
hermetic, non-natural feel, which allows for easy identi fication and
classification of " the natural" when it shows up in language or scenic
treatments. But in the fields on the hills overlooking Plymouth harbor,
separating "nature" from the place of theatre becomes impossi ble.
They are one and the same, and thi s too contributes to the dramatic
doubleness of the natural referents. When the women sing of the
brook which is actively running beside the spectator or when the
exploring men within the fiction survey the very fields upon whi ch the
spectators' ri sers have been constructed, is it proper to categorize
"nature" here as locale or as player, as scene or as actor? As nature
plays itself in Baker's drama, an autochthonous and performative
identity emerges for thi s particularly American drama.
Near the end of The Pilgrim Spirit, theatrical time i s warped so as
to project a vision of American freedom from the seventeenth through
to the twentieth century. A parade of hi storical figures including
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln appear to speak memorable
sound-bites, and in a bit of particularly jingoi stic stagecraft, the "flags
of the allies" appear over the fields to mark what in 1921 had recently
80 BAKER-WHITE
been the most pressing American adventure of the day. But finally it i s
again the "voice of the rock" that grounds the Americanness of the
drama, as it intones "Come west" to both the English Pilgrims, and, in
another instance of foreshadowing, to the generations of Americans
who would continue their westward push in later centuries. In
reference to a slightly later period in American history, Yi -Fu Tuan has
written
American space, from the time of the Revolution to the Civil
War, was a vast undefined hovering and haunting presence
" out there to the West." This vagueness of space had
correlates in a certain cloudiness of vision about what the new
nation wanted. [Daniel] Boorstin notes thilt during this period
Americilns were "distinguished less by what they clearly
knew or definitely believed thiln by their grilnd and fluid
hopes. If other niltions had been held together by their
common certil inti es, Americilns were being united by il
common vagueness Clnd il common effervescence."
19
Although T uiln refers to the period thilt comes ilfter the coloniill philse
which The Pilgrim Spirit drilmiltizes and that comes before the period
of its 300-year celebration ilt Plymouth, the generaliziltion about the
vilgueness of American purpose and its relation to spilce seems
applicable to these eras as well. The Pilgrims had moved across the
sea away from persecution, and despi te the theological rhetoric of
chosen ground, did not know what to expect from the "new" earth.
And in 1921, the United States was just poi sed on the verge of its real
emergence into its own ("American") century, unclear about its role
and mission in the world, and looking back across that same sea to a
homeland that until very recently had been embroiled in a brutal
conflict. Could not thi s vagueness, prompting a desi re for an absent
certitude, trigger the concretization of niltionill purpose Clnd the
grounding of identity in the figure of the Rock, whose strong, unseen
voice would ilssure those listening thilt their own earth i s solid, and, in
fact, is the cornerstone of their past, and the secure point of
embarkation for their future as well?
In the end Baker's extravagilnt pilgeant was plagued by bad
weather and by a seeming miscalculation of theatrical effect. Kinne
comments thilt Baker was much impressed by a William Butler Yeilts
'" Yi -Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture
(Washi ngton, DC: Island Press, 1993), 200. Tuan's citation of Daniel j. Boorstin
from The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Vantage Books, 1965),
219.
The Ground of American Identity 81
lecture he had heard regarding " the effects of artificial light in the
theatre," yet the importation of this technology to the Plymouth scene
apparently overwhelmed the drama itself.
20
Susan Harris Smith writes
that the "carefully researched dramatic story was lost in the
spectacul ar lighting effects and Baker's effort became little more than
an object lesson in the rise of technology leading to the dominance of
film."
21
Because of his enchantment with the new technologies of
light, Baker became convinced during the development of the pageant
that it must be presented at night, in order to capitalize on moving
illumination in telling the story. But in addition to creating production
challenges, thi s deci sion also may have obscured the most dramatic
scenic and performative element Baker had at his disposal . Kinne
describes tellingly a moment early in the pageant's conceptualization,
when the director stood, looking out over
raw earth and yellow sand which were being leveled to make
a stage between the foot of the hill and the water's edge. [He]
looked across the harbor to Clark's Island, where the Pilgrims
spent their first night ashore, and to the Gurnet, where
centuries earlier Thorvald the Norseman had slain and been
slainY
We see here through the director's eye the natural world, so vital a
character in the success or failure of the pilgrim's actual drama, being
pressed into service as a symbol of itself-as an agent of theatrical
representation that attempts to a tell the story of domination over and
accommodation with the land. That Baker recognized the unique
function of thi s special character actor in his dramatic fantasy is
emphasized once again at the pageant's close, when two men "in
modern dress/' identified in the text only as "Fi rst and Second
Speaker/' exchange the following words:
Second Speaker: What is your song?
First Speaker: The region sings it. Listen. (134)
What follows is the pageant's closing song (with original lyri cs by
Robert Frost) entitled "The Return of the Pilgrims." Yet the content of
that song is less important than what the first speaker has already told
1
Kinne, 221.
21
Smith, 141.
22
Kinne, 222.
82
BAKER-WHITE
us about it-that it is the region itself singing, the land presenting its
poetry, the earth performing.
The sincerity and utter earnestness of Baker's pageant-drama sits in
stark contrast to Suzan-Lori Parks's thoroughly ironic version of
American history. The verbal punning, visual self-referentiality with
regard to racial classification, and overall skepticism about the
possibilities for narrative "truth" that Parks instills in The America Play
are wholly absent from The Pilgrim Spirit's robust confidence in its
own heroic story-telling. Yet, despite this overwhelmingly
dichotomous situation, the two works share a central dynamic of
attention to the ground itself as a fundamental element of each one's
representative agenda, and of each one's relation to American identity.
Parks writes that she "take[s] issue with history because it doesn't
serve me- it doesn't serve me because there isn't enough of it. . . . I
don't see any history out there, so I've made some up."
23
Her "made
up" hi story, The America Play, written over seventy years after Baker's
pageant extravaganza, tells a convoluted story of a character called the
"Foundling Father," who travels throughout the country, digging holes
in the earth to construct a personal history. As Harry Elam and Alice
Rayner point out, by digging such holes (graves), the Foundling Father
"seeks an identity, a meaning, and an understanding of his
significance within the (w)hole of American history. "
24
In The
America Play the setting itself is defined as "A great hole. In the
middle of nowhere. The hole is an exact replica of the Great Hole of
History."
25
This staged absence exactly reverses the equation that
Baker's jingoistic theatricalization of American rock promulgates. In
Parks's version, American history is defined as an absence of
geological stuff, rather than its sanctified presence. Why the disparity?
Regarding another of Parks's formally challenging dramas, The
Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Elilm and
Rayner have written thilt "lilnguilge is very much the 'space' of this
play, and Parks responds in the milteriality of words to what Frederic
Jameson says is the essential gesture of postmodern political art in 'its
resolution to use representation against itself to destroy the binding or
23
Michele Pearce, "Alien Nation: An Intervi ew with the Playwright Suz<Jn-Lori
Parks," American Theater 12 (March 1994): 26.
24
Harry Elam and Alice Rayner, "Echoes from the Black (W)hole," in
Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, Jeffrey D. Mason
and). Ellen Gainor, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Mi chigan Press, 1999), 180.
15
Parks, The America Play, 158. All subsequent references cited
parenthetically in the text.
The Ground of American Identity 83
absolute status of any representation."'
26
Manipulation of the
materiality of words is indeed essential to Parks's dramaturgy, in that
her plays constantly call to the spectator's attention the
constructedness of language and patterns of speech and to the
ideological weight that such linguistic making must bear. But it is not
only in the realm of language that materiality intersects with space in
Parks's questioning of American identity. It is crucially also in the
stage picture, or rather in the actual physicality of presentation, that
her work inverts and upends representational cliches. Such physical
manipulation, coupled with references in language to the physical
world in which The America Play "takes place," inform a reading of
the text as an allegory of grounded (or groundless) American identity.
The character of the Foundling Father makes his living by
endlessly replaying the assassination of Abraham Lincoln for spectator-
actors who pay to shoot at him and to parrot the words of Lincoln's
actual killer. As Una Chaudhuri writes, "As person after person goes
through the murderous motions, the ludicrous script they follow is
gradually transformed through repetition into a ritual, in which what is
being celebrated, we realize, is the violence at the heart of American
hi story."
27
A ritual, yes, but with one very disturbing unanswered
question at its theatrical heart: who are the celebrants at the ritual of
violent history? The fictional participants who imitate john Wilkes
Booth and his Confederate identity? The theatre audience who may
laugh or at least be intrigued by the ritual display? The Foundling
Father himself, who profits from (indeed earns his livelihood by) the
theatrical recreation? This question, and its unanswerability, is of
course plagued by the haunting issue of race that sits behind every
word, gesture, and image in Parks's bizarre history play. The
Foundling Father never explicitly identifies his racial identity as the
defining aspect of his personhood (as Elam and Rayner suggest, race is
simultaneously erased and foregrounded through the performance).
Yet the insistence throughout the play that African-American history
must always represent itself in a kind of tortured resistance to
dominant images is nowhere more manifest than in the central
metaphor of a hole-the Great Hole of History, or rather, its exact
replica- where the ground of identity should be.
' "Harry Elam and Alice Rayner, "Unfinished Business: Reconfiguring History
in Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,"
Theatre Journal 46 (1 994): 449. Elam's and Rayner's citati on of jameson from "In
the Destructive Element Immerse: Hans-ji.irgen Syberllerg and the Cultural
Revolution," October 1 7 (1 981): 1 1 2.
" Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of American Drama (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 264.
84 BAKER-WHITE
The conflation of historical time and present-tense stage action i s
certainly a cent ral strategy of Parks's dramaturgy, and it leads toward
the notion that her overall aim may be to, as Elam and Rayner put it,
position "history as a site of contemporary resistance. "
28
Yet to
employ thi s language is to metaphorize time as space. I suggest that
the ecological ramifications of positing a temporal referent (history) as
a spatial enti ty (site) is to engage in precisely the form of identity
grounding that Parks's play di ssects. This is not to say that it is
possible to escape such metaphoriz<ltion, but it is perhaps to realize
that, to return to )Clmeson, "destruction of the binding or absolute
st<ltus of any representation" precisely involves invoking the
"representation against itself." The critical move that The America
Play demands recognition of is the move that ties our historical
development as a nation to the earth upon which that development
took ple1ce. If in replaying the story of Plymouth rock and the Pilgrims'
le1nding Baker exerci ses the first great American myth of trial and
cultural identity, Clnd in so doing solidifies the connection to the earth
as the primary stuff of Americanness, then in having her central
char<1cter endless ly relive the assassination of Lincoln, Parks exercises
the second great American myth of trial and identity by excavating the
grounded truths that Baker's work would champion. The stage space
here is the "site of history," but that hi story is blocked from construal
as solid and developmental and is instead insistently presented as
being composed of tragic fissures and fathomless gaps. Drawing
relentless attention to the hole of (absent) defining earth, Parks posits a
hi storical site that is perhaps no site at all.
What happens, we might ask, to the dug earth in a theatri cal
staging of Parks's text? She doesn't say in a stage direction, but
presumably the pile of dug earth grows and grows, either on stage in a
literal mound, or metaphorically, figuratively, if the act is mimed by
the actor, in the imagination of the spectator. Either way, presence or
conspicuous absence signifies central ity- the real or imagined dirt
persists in defining the America that is being excavated, explored,
interrogated, and in the end, excoriated by Parks's searching play. '
9
One could agree with Una Chaudhuri th<lt "The America Play locates
America where the theatrical imagination has long looked for it: in a
28
Elam and Rayner, " Echoes," 449.
29
We can compare the presence/absence di chotomy here to Maria Irene
Fornes's choices in Mud, where the sure presence of (wet) earth is crucial to the
semiotic fabri c of that text, but where, not coincidentally, that presence is not
mentioned in the of the play. Unmentioned earth must be present to
assert its importance- dirt that is constantly referred to (as in The America Play) has
the luxury of exi sting in the imaginati on.
The Ground of American Identity 85
grave," and yet one could also posit "America" in this play that
manifests itself as both the hole itself and the material earth that has
come out of it.
30
In such a reading, at least a part of American identity
becomes associated with what ought to be solid ground (the rock of
Plymouth), but by virtue of the Foundling Father's performed digging,
instead becomes a moveable pile of earth, as transient and ephemeral
as his character acting.
Ephemerality recalls again performance, and also Susan Harris
Smith's challenge to imagine a "generic performati ve" identity for
American drama. That the central activity of the Foundling Father's
life was itself essentially performative-the playing of Lincoln-is
crucial for understanding how The America Play critiques the process
of creating Americanness. American identity (racial or otherwise)-the
grounding of personal and national purpose in a solid idea of self and
community-is agonizingly absent from the characters in Parks's
drama, and this lack corresponds to a performance of void-creation in
the digging of holes in the earth. Similarly, when the Foundling Father
speaks of The Great Hole of History (which his own dug hole
replicates) he refers to what seems a strange amalgamated image that
combines elements of Dante's inferno with elements of Disney's
notion of a historical theme park.
31
This Great Hole is presented in the
text as an historical site where the "great" figures of American history
parade themselves for spectators. There specifically is American
cultural identity created through performance, and yet not "on stage"
in a normal sense, but buried in the ground, and with the ironicized
(and capitalized) title of Great Hole of Hi story, the identity thus
performed loses any notion of authenticity or use-value. This is
processed identity-sound-bite association to figures of an historical
epoch that the Foundling Father's pitiful digging and paltry
performance practice sadly cannot even match.
Or can't it? The second act of The America Play stages, among
other things, a search by the Foundling Father' s (now l'eferred to
primarily as The Lesser Known, in comparison to his performed
identity, Lincoln) widowed wife (Lucy) and son (Brazil) for elements of
hi s legacy which lay still buried in his dug hole. Through Lucy and
Brazil's dialogue, we learn that the Lesser Known had taught his trades
of digging and performing to his son at an early age, so that Brazil
could continue his father's work. (That Brazil is digging up hi s father' s
'" Chaudhuri, 262.
1
' Several critics have made the connection between Parks's text and Di sney's
proposal to create an historical theme park of American history in rural Virginia.
See Elam and Rayner, "Echoes," 178, and Chaudhuri, 268.
86
BAKER-WHITE
past in the pl ay's second act is both a realization and a commentary
on this notion of genealogical continuance.) What ensues from this
father-son education is an image of self-improvement and self-
definition directly related to the two trades of digging and performing.
One of the most poignant (and yet simultaneously humorous) sections
of The America Play involves Brazil recounting how hi s father taught
him, when he was two years old, the business of faking mourning.
The Father threw himself down in front of the Son and bit into
the dirt with his teeth. His eyes leaked. 'This is how youll
make your mark, Son' the Father said. The Son was on ly 2
then. 'This is the Wail,' the Father said. 'There's money init,'
the Father said. The Son was only 2 then. Quiet. On what
he claimed was the 101 st anniversary the Father showed the
Son ' the Weep' ' the Sob' and 'the Moan.' (182)
suggest that it is deeply significant that the performance act as
demonstrated by the Lesser Known is embroiled specifically with a
connection to earth-"threw himself down in front of the Son and bit
into the dirt with his teeth." Thus, the explicit performance of a
desperate act of grounding is what ties father to son, and history to
earthly presence, in The America Play.
As Elam and Rayner point out, "The showmanship in acting out
mourning parodies ritual s from the performative black church tradition
as well as with from minstrel tradition of stereotype exaggeration and
exploitation."
32
In this way, the metatheatricality of the play expands
exponentiall y, in a Genet-esque spiral of performance quoting
performance. Yet the confluence here of earth (biting the dirt, etc.)
and performance is hardly accidental. Elam and Rayner write,
" Brazil 's training in the fakin' of mourning is a way of crossing the
boundaries between the absence grounded in death and the presence
of performing signifiers."
33
In the text itself, Brazil puts i t more
succinctly: "Diggin was his livelihood but fakin was his call in. Ssonly
natural heud come out here and combine thuh 2 (179)." To
interrogate thi s language closely is to see how death/digging (or
"history" in thi s case, with reference to both Lincoln and the Lesser
Known), etbsence (the lack from which the need for performance- the
"callin"-springs) and groundedness (a seemingly essential tie to the
earth itself) are already intertwined in a linguisti c and metetphysicetl
web, much ets they are (with remarkably similar textual referents) in
32
Elam and Rayner, "Echoes, " 189.
JJ Ibid., 190.
The Ground of Americ,m Identity 87
George Pierce Baker's eJrlier dram,l. In effect, both B.1ker ,mel PJrks
demonstr<1te that a division of eJrth ,md of iln
from a "generic IJerformdtive" conceiJtion of American
elrama, is ,1lready ecliiJsed by dramatic works themselves.
Neither the 1920s IJageant nor the IJOStmodern ironi c fantasy
addresses directly the image of Americanism that Turner's frontier
hyiJothesis insiJired- the image of the self-improving, incleiJendent,
and always resourceful American character interacting with the land in
ever more beneficial ways. Yet each iJI<ly does show an image of
American character defined in some key manner by a westward
movement and a probing of physical circumstance. Baker's text
SIJecifically and self-consciously refers to the Pilgrim's landing at
Plymouth as the initial moment of westward exiJansion and thus plays
directly into the mythology of authenticating Americ<>n westering.
Parks, of course, is more circumspect about such traditional readings
of Americanness. The westering myth is played out in the narrative of
the Lesser Known-even though his is not the story of the conquering
white male. Brazil , the Lesser Known's son, in Act II relates that his
father "Come out here all uhlone. Cleared thuh path tamed thuh
wilderness dug thi s whole Hole with his own 2 hands and etcetera"-
this last phrase clearly indi cating the cliched nature of the story as it is
told (179). Such undercutting, couiJied with the Lesser Known's
identity as a bl<1ck person, which, as Una Chaudhuri contends, negates
the traditional meaning of the westering movement-the meaning that
confers ownership, mastery of circumstance, freedom, and personal
sel f-fulfillment in the recognition of national purpose, shows how
Parks upends received wisdom about "man Jnd

Yet the key !JOint is that both iJiays, whether upholding or
uiJending traditional views, evince the American desire to read the
cultural into the natural, and vice-versa, in the project of creating a
useful nation<1l history. In thi s way the iJiays are not unlike the
nineteenth-century iJioneer IJr<lctice of "cultural " names to
naturJI (castle rock, cathedr,1l bluff, etc.) and even bear some
resemblance to most American of monuments, Mt. Rushmore,
which lays culture onto nature in the service of nation<1l definition.
Thdt Parks ag,lin inverts such image-making-a hole instead of
mountain, digging clown instead of sculpting peaks-separates her play
from, but <tlso ties it to, the overall theme. In one sense, this tie brings
up the very idea of theatri cJI doubleness-of the ability of
IJerforrnance to invoke (and even, in stagings such Bc1ker's, to
physicc1lly present) a referent, ,mel yet at the s<tme time to di stdnce the
spect,ltor from thc1t referent, and of the pclrclllel c1bility to view "n<lture"
"See Ch,tudhuri, 263.
88 BAKER-WHITE
as something apart from yet intrinsically related to the human
si tuation. Earth as nature in these two plays becomes susceptible to
both forms of doubling. In thi s sense it is instructive to see the uses of
earth here reflecting a development of landscape vision gleaned from
art-historical investigations, wherein landscapes that initially implied
authoritative and reassuring contexts for human activity became
throughout the nineteenth century problematized by virtue of scientific
and philosophical attacks on the stability and orderedness of the
natural world. On thi s view, Baker's play can be seen as a kind of
throwback, a wistful vision of a past conception of authenticating
nature, whereas Parks's text incorporates and legitimates the unease
we may now feel at grounding our natural purpose in a vision of
reassuring rock.
Although The Pilgrim Spirit certainly seems to relatively
benign, democratic, American ideals squarely in mind when it
promotes its jingoistic agenda, it is possible to see in its
anthropomorphization of rock a kind of uncritical allegiance to sacred
national ground that is specifically opposed in Parks's play. In fact, the
literal dissection of earth in The America Play separates its politics of
nature from any overt sacralization of the environment but also from
many feminist views, which tend to encourage non-hierarchi cal, non-
violent interaction with the land. There is something quite invasive
about The Lesser Known's digging and about his kin' s desperate
search for his legacy in their own excavations. Parks seems to imply
that such archeological violence to the land is perhaps a necessary
component of the search for an African-American identity that has
been buried and obscured by centuries of a correspondingly violent
and oppressive history.
Both plays may be said to engage, without evincing polemical
attitudes toward, some of the more pressing issues in contemporary
eco-critical di scourse. Certainly to have a talking rock as a central
character i s to at least invoke the questions posed by the
debate: Do the Pilgrims of Baker's
pageant and the iti nerant diggers of Parks's fantasy define their natural
environments according to specifically human di ctates? Or does that
environment work upon them, and make us perceive them (and
ourselves) as part of a larger system of interrelated entities? Both texts
seem to activate in a special way Aldo Leopold's admonition to "think
like a mountain." (Although, in this case, Baker's play may be
showing earth thinking like a human instead.) Yet when comparing
the works, we see that the one that does in fact elevate " the
environment" to the status of sentient character is the one that evinces
the more traditional relation of humanity to the landscape, and the one
that allows (mostly) for a more traditional theatrical strategy of human
The Ground of American Identity
89
agency within a passive, non-human setting is the one that asks us
most specifi cally to analyze our search(es) for identity within the
assumptions of a grounded national history.
The so-called Gaia hypothesis- that earth itself and the entirety of
the surrounding biosphere can be described more accurately as a
biological system than as a purely physical environment-is reflected
relatively strongly in both plays. This is not to say that either Baker or
Parks-or their plays-actually seem to endorse such a concept, but
rather to comment that the assignation of natural agency and the
centrality of earth, ground, dirt and the physical properties of the land
itself to the unfolding events of each drama point toward a conception
of wholeness comprised of what we normally bifurcate into the
"biological " and "physical" realms. Such an observation
undoubtedly has fewer ramifications for the texts themselves, than it
does for the notion that perhaps the recent scientific (or quasi-
scientific) striving for such a unified ecological theory can be seen as
an extension of an older and more persistent vi sion in the general
culture. (This idea is of course reflected in the name Gaia itself,
deriving as it does from an ancient context.)
In the end, to view these two plays in the context of an ecological
consideration is to see how they each reflect nature as represented by,
and representative of, a variety of human concerns. In these dramas
ecological considerations coincide with dramatic ones. The theatrical
capturing of non-human images in these two plays evinces the notion
that the theatrical act itself is always potentially com pi icit in our
ongoing processes of "understanding" nature- whether from the
perspective of intrusive, Baconian, scientific inquiry, or from the
alternative perspective of letting nature present her- or himself in her
or hi s own terms. The presentation of nature in The Pilgrim Spirit and
The America Play defines them as texts that show how American
drama is implicitly concerned with American soil-even if some
traditional notions of national character springing from that special soi l
are complicated, and even refuted by, the latter play's special
theatri cality.
CONTRIBUTORS
LAWRENCE G. AVERY is a faculty member in the Theatre
Department of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill. Among his books are editions of the letters of Maxwell
Anderson, Dramatist in America, and Paul Green, A Southern Life.
His poems have appeared in several magazines.
ROBERT BAKER-WHITE teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio,
Texas. He has published widely on modern dramatic literature and
theatre practice, including The Text in Play: Representations of
Rehearsal in Modern Drama, published in 1999. He is currently
working on an eco-critical study of twentieth-century American
drama.
SARAH BAY-CHENG is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is currently conducting research for her
dissertation on the drama of Gertrude Stein in the avant-garde.
jOHN H. HOUCHIN directs and teaches theatre history at Boston
College. He has published articles in the New England Theatre
journal, journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre History
Studies, and The Eugene O'Neill Review. He is current ly writing
a book detailing the history of American theatrical censorship in the
twentieth century.
j ENNIFER L. STILES is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of
Drama and Dance at Tufts University and is a Lecturer in Theatre
Studies at Boston College.
90
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