THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 19, Number 1 Winter 2007
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Editor: David Savran
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THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 19, Number 1 Winter 2007
CONTENTS
SUN H EE TERESA LEE 5
Unnatural Conception: (Per)Forming History and Historical Subjectivity
in Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Plqy and Venus
Al..AN R. HAVIG 33
Nelgected Playscripts, Hidden Talent: The Vaudeville Playlet
ATIILIO FAVORINI 57
The History/Memory Discourse in Robert Sherwood's Reunion in Vienna
OLGA BARRIOS
Langston Hughes's Experimental and Revolutionary Theatre: ''Water
Drawn From The Well of the People" and "Given Back to Them in a
Cup of Beauty"
CONTRIBUTORS
71
92
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 19, NO.1 (WiNTER 2007)
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION: (PER) FORMING HISTORY AND
H ISTORICAL SUBJECTIVITY IN SUZAN- LORI PARKS'S TI-m
AMERICA PlAY AND VENUs
SUN HEE TERESA LEE
In her 1994 essay "Possessions," Suzan-Lori Parks expresses her com-
mitment as a playwright not only to investigate history but also to partic-
ipate in historiography.
1
Pointing out that the "history of History is in
question" in contemporary thought, Parks expresses her vision for the-
atre as participating in "creating and rewriting history'' (3). In particular,
the history that she is interested in creating is vitally connected to her
position as an African American woman. As a member of a group whose
history has been at best marginal within the national framework-"so
much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered,
washed out"-she sees theatre as a place where she may "locate the
ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing,
write it down" (4). While this gesture toward the African-American past
seems to suggest a need for recuperative history, Parks's historiography
does not assume that there is a knowable, real past to recuperate. This is
a point that is missed by some critics who laud Parks for attempting to
critique the dominant history's exclusion of black people but neverthe-
less chide her for not providing a clear enough alternative history that
gives full subjecthood to the black individual.2 This desire for whole-
ness-both of history and black subjectivity-betrays the assumption
that essential truth can be expressed through history and that an essential
self is reflected through black subjectivity. While I believe that such a
desire for a clear black history and identity has been a vital part of the
1
Suzan-Lori Parks, "Possessions," in The Amenca Plqy and Other Works (New
York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 3-5. Subsequent references to this volume
will be given parenthetically in the text.
2 See Jeanette Malkin's reading of The America Play in Memory Theatre and
Postmodern Drama (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), where she claims
that the main character attempts to "become imprinted in history, and thus celebrated and
remembered," only to experience "futility" (177). Also see Elizabeth Brown-Guillory,
who writes that Parks's "characters, generally speaking, do not achieve wholeness"
("Reconfiguring History: Migration, Memory, and (Re)Membering in Suzan-Lori Parks's
Plays" in Southern Women Plqywrights: New Essqys in Literary History and Cn'ticism, ed., Robert
L. McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige [fuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002),
184).
6
LEE
struggle for black empowerment, I believe that to read Parks's works with
the same desire can result in our overlooking a more radical comment on
how we can participate in contesting dominant histories and practices.
Parks deploys what I call an anti-essentialist strategy of minority
politics that questions the validity of such grand narratives as history and
the liberal humanist subject. Thus, when she creates plays to participate
in rewriting the history of black people as well as black identity, she posi-
tions neither her narrative nor her vision of the black subject as the truth.
In fact, she points out the opposite-the artificiality of both. This idea is
explicit, for instance, in the following sentence: "Theatre is an incubator
for the creation of historical events-and, as in the case of artificial
insemination, the baby is no less human."3 This metaphor of unnatural
conception tells us that the history offered by her plays isn't real or true
but created through art, imagination, and the theatrical apparatus.
Nonetheless, this artificial baby/ play /history is "no less human," mean-
ing no less legitimate, no less real. Parks's history and black identity mat-
ter-they are valuable-but they do not represent some unalterable
essence. This anti-essentialist position is also reflected in Parks's aesthet-
ic. Parks is a practitioner of non-naturalistic theatre; unlike plays in the
realist/ naturalist tradition, her plays do not attempt to present a seamless
mirror-reflection of reality but tout the workings of the theatrical appa-
ratus in production.4 As her plays' constructedness evinces, history and
identity are artificial, formed by the self, the other, and cultural forces,
and it is within this context that Parks imagines ways to counter oppres-
sive histories and ideologies that have systematically subjugated black
3 Parks, "Possessions," 5. Critics have read this statement in various ways. Katy
Ryan has read the metaphor of the artificial insemination as a focus away from hetero-
sexual reproduction to female-centered, new reproductive technology. Then she reads the
way in which African American racial and sexual politics is presented in The America Plqy.
Furthermore, she writes, "just as babies can be born without reproductive sex, history can
be made without whiteness" ("'No Less Human': Making History in Suzan-Lori Parks's
The Ammca Play," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 13, no. 2 [Spring 1999]: 91). S.E.
Wilmer contends that Parks's non-naturalistic theatre serves her political purpose: "Parks
accentuates the artificiality of stage space and insists on theatrical self-consciousness in
order to destabilize hegemonic discourse" ("Restaging the Nation: The Work of Suzan-
Lori Parks," Modern Drama 43 [2000]: 446).
4 Examples of non-naturalistic elements abound in her plays. The settings
range from a surreal location of a giant hole in the ground in The Amenca Plqy, to a test
tube for humans in Imperceptible Mutabilities, to Hester the abortionist's surreal backroom
clinic in Fucking A. Characters often begin by announcing their names that signify their
fictionality; two characters in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole World, for exam-
ple, are called "Black Woman with Fried Drum Stick" and "Black Man with Watermelon."
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION 7
people.
To arrive at a better understanding of her anti-essentialist strate-
gy, I will focus on two of her plays about history-The America Plqy and
Venus-and demonstrate the ways in which Parks self-reflexively calls
attention to certain devices of the theatre-costume, role-playing, and
performing-in order to lay bare the process of making history and
forming historical subjects. The plays reveal these processes to be per-
formative: history constructed through iteration and citation, and identi-
ty constructed through the subject's participation in historical scripting. I
will then argue that while history and subjectivity are thus formed, the
plays point to the dire necessity of positing histories and identities that
have been previously elided or truncated and open up space for signify-
ing and performing with a difference. Finally, this article will treat the
related issue of agency: to what extent are individuals able to rewrite his-
tory and reconfigure their historical subjectivity? I argue that the two
plays point toward an ambivalent position; while The Amen'ca Play stages
an occasion in which one has the agency to create history and to forge,
to some degree, one's relationship to history, Venus demonstrates the way
in which history can completely subsume individuals and smother their
agency. This ambivalence, rather than being a contradictory gesture by
Parks, informs the inevitable ambivalence of subjectivity in relation to
history; on the one hand subjects are formed by history, but on the other
subjects can write history and imagine their identities. This ambivalence,
then, must be an understood element in our efforts to reconfigure histo-
ry and our relationship to it. Parks imagines the possibility of our agency
but it is not a given; we must continually find ways to assert it and resist
the ways in which history unjustly writes and forms our identities.
Performativity of History and Revisionary Historiography
It is not difficult to see that The America Plqy is concerned with history. Its
setting-a giant hole, which is "an exact replica of the Great Hole of
History" (159)-certainly makes this apparent.S As a play about history,
it also participates in citing history, in particular the history of Abraham
Lincoln. This famous figure in American history is cited first through lan-
5 There are numerous interpretations of this giant hole. Wilmer reads the hole
as a symbol of "the absence of African-American history," such as the "invisibility of
African Americans in the anti-slavery struggle" ("Restaging the Nation," 449). David
Richards similarly argues, "The dark hole that serves as the setting is a Beckettian waste-
land par excellence. But it also represents the absence of black history in a society that
has long defined itself by the exploits of a few select white men" ("Seeking Bits of
8
LEE
guage; the play's main character, The Foundling Father, constantly talks
about Lincoln's life and legacy. We hear about the familiar aspects of his
life: his log cabin, freeing of the slaves, Gettysburg address, and assassi-
nation. Second, the play cites him through the body of The Foundling
Father who's been told throughout his life that he "bore a strong resem-
blance to Abraham Lincoln" (163). Because of this likeness, The
Foundling Father made a living doing impersonations of his famous
predecessor. In particular, he continuously staged Lincoln's assassination
scene, for enacting this part of Lincoln's life interested him the most and
also proved to be the most lucrative. The repeated iteration of Lincoln's
ftnal moment is one of the ways in which, as W B. Worthen points out,
"Parks's theater self-consciously underscores the performative, citational
dimension of the repetitive, ritualized events taking place onstage."6 Thus
history's performativity is demonstrated. The play suggests that every
time Lincoln is shot in the performance, the assassination takes hold that
much more in our collective history.
The process by which history is constructed reveals its own inau-
thenticity; in the way Parks's aesthetics point to the inauthenticity of per-
formance so does history's iterability point to its lack of originality. Each
performative iteration, therefore, is marked by difference from some
original stuff of history as well as other citations. The play's citations of
Lincoln self-reflexively point to this difference. Although Katy Ryan
argues that his "struggle is a mimetic one, with all the anxiety ventures
into truth and resemblance provoke," The Foundling Father does not
seem anxious about trying to copy Lincoln as closely as possible.? Quite
the opposite, I would argue that The Foundling Father is overtly uninter-
ested in creating an exact copy of Lincoln, and certainly contrary to what
Identity in History's Vast Abyss," New York Times, 11 March, 1994, section C, 3). Vit
Wagner also writes in this vein that "one can't help but be struck by how forcefully the
Foundling Father's situation mirrors the general experience of American blacks, whose
interrupted history is always framed by their culturally cataclysmic encounter v.ith white
Europeans. This historical gap is metaphorically represented as 'the hole"' ("The America
Pkfy is Remarkable Theatre," Toronto Star, 6 January 1995, C10).
6 W. B. Worthen, "Citing History: Textuality and Performativity in the Plays of
Suzan-Lori Parks," Essqys in Theatre 18, no. 1 (1999): 4-5. While Worthen's essay provides
key foundational concepts for studying Parks's history plays, he does not detail how the
performativity of history serves the specific purpose of contesting dominant, white his-
tory and how Parks's plays revise that history. Therefore, although I draw upon Worthen's
work, I gesture toward a more localized reading rooted in the particulars of black histo-
ry and subjectivity.
7 Ryan, "'No Less Human,"' 82.
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION 9
Ryan says, not "attempt[ing] to pass as Lincoln."S First, the genre of the
performance is vaudeville, which does not aspire to realistic representa-
tion.9 More specifically, when the play opens, Lincoln is cited through
The Foundling Father's costume, but The Foundling Father is in most
productions played by a black actor. Thus the racial incongruity immedi-
ately points to the inauthenticity of the copy, and this sense is com-
pounded by a cardboard cutout replica and a bust of Lincoln on stage, to
which The Foundling Father points repeatedly during his opening mono-
logue. Furthermore, the Lincoln costume that The Foundling Father uti-
lizes is not always meant to effect verisimilitude. Sometime he wears a yel-
low beard and a stovepipe hat that is meant for outdoors, not for the
indoor theatre setting of Lincoln's death. As he says, "Some inaccuracies
are good for business" (168). But it isn't simply for business that Lincoln's
act is more than necessarily artificial. The act of citation in various
degrees is inevitably unoriginal, already artificial and fake. This artificiali-
ty is even more apparent in the repetitive restaging of Lincoln's final
moments. Sometimes the scene plays out exactly the same, but other
times it plays out differently depending on the whim of the participants.
In one instance a man who frequents the show enacts the killing of
Lincoln and yells, "The South is avenged" in the way Booth had report-
edly done, but a married couple play the same scene by having the man
shoot and the woman exclaim, "They've killed the president." Thus every
repetition inherently carries a differential signification; history becomes
cleaved from the real, creating and perpetuating its discursivity.
By demonstrating history's performativity, Parks not only denat-
uralizes history but also reveals the process by which certain individuals,
events, and conflicts are imbued with value as facts, the real-items that
8 Ibid., 84. Ryan's larger argument is that the play presents a "queerly mimetic
strategy of performance" that takes into account the artificiality of Parks's, and The
Foundling Father's, theatre. However, she seems to assume early in her article that there
is a mandate for mimesis that effects The Foundling Father's theatre; this certainly would
not be the case since he isn't working within the realistic tradition. Elam and Rayner also
point this out: "The Foundling Father's portrayal of Lincoln can be read as mimetic, but
he is clearly not performing a 'realistic' imitation. He is rather, Parks says, a 'Faker'"
("Echoes from the Black ('W)hole: An Examination of The America Play by Susan-Lori
Parks," in Peiforming America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theatre, ed. Jeffrey D. Mason
and J. Ellen Gainor (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), 178-92).
9 Kevin Kelly, for example, writes that the play's "central image is a look-alike
Lincoln being assassinated six times in a kind of one-size-fits-all vaudeville skit" (Boston
Globe, 28 January, 1994, 45). Richards also calls the first act a "one-man minstrel show"
("Seeking Bits of Identity," 3).
10 LEE
become known. History determines what is to be known, and to be
known means to have a place in the social world. What Parks's play
demonstrates is that in this process history creates a dominant class of
those who are known, those who belong in history. This is the idea
expressed by Lucy, The Foundling Father's wife, when she comments:
"You could look intuh that Hole and see your entire life pass before you.
Not your own life but someones life from history, you know [someone
who'd done something of note, got theirselves known somehow, uh
President or] somebody who killed somebody important, uh face on uh
postal stamp, you know, someone from History. Like you, but not you.
You know: Known" (197). This passage clearly expresses the difference
between those whose lives are not known (such as The Foundling Father
who is also called The Lesser Known) and those whose lives are includ-
ed in history. The parades of "Reconstructed Historicities" that occurred
in the theme park where The Foundling Father and Lucy honeymooned
also demonstrate this mechanism of inclusion and exclusion: "Cannons
wicks were lit and the rockets did blare and the enemy was slain and lay
stretched out and smoldering for dead and rose up again to take their
bows" (163), and "everybody who was ever anybody parade on by ... Mr.
George Washington, for example, thuh Fathuh of our Country hisself,
would rise up from thuh dead and walk ahround and cross thuh Delaware
and say stuff" (179). Those in the parade are by virtue of the parade
marked as "everybody who was ever anybody." In this way, history's per-
formativity not only creates the cultural discourse of the past but also
sieves out events and people to place within that discourse.
In citing Lincoln's history, Parks not only presents history as per-
formative but also critiques the way in which history participates in cre-
ating a dominant culture that is predominantly white and male.
Furthermore, by citing history Parks finds a differential critical space for
revisionary historiography. To cite Worthen, "Like all acts of citation,
performative and otherwise, the Lincoln Act can only cite history with a
difference, difference that creates revision, change."10 The revision that
The America Plcry offers contests the idea of Lincoln as one of the indis-
putable founding fathers of America and in turn the idea of the America
he embodied.ll The idea that Lincoln as a quintessential American who
embodies liberty and justice is a founding father creates a myth of
10 Worthen, "Citing History," 6.
11
Instead of reading Parks's play as a critique of Lincoln myth, Kevin Kelly
assumes that Lincoln's noble status does not change in the play and instead is utilized to
express the following points: "That blacks are part of Lincoln's soul, that they are he, he
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION 11
America that is equally idealistic. It also creates a particular narrative of
post-emancipation America as unquestionably democratic, wholeheart-
edly embracing equality and freedom. This idea of the newly emerged
America is the reason that Lincoln's death is shrouded in pathos; sup-
posedly, the violence was not only against the president but also America
and her values-a monstrous mind created an anomalous event during
America's progressive years. However, in the replaying of the assassina-
tion scene in The America Plqy, we get a sense that Lincoln's death was not
simply a glitch in what we know of as America but a logical occurrence
in a nation divided over matters of race and equality. The fact that cus-
tomers would pay to shoot Lincoln repeatedly, as they express very clear
hostility toward his politics-some calling him a liar and the enemy of
the South-goes to revise the story of Lincoln not as an indisputable
founding father but as a questionable figure for many Americans. Hence,
the idea of America is also revisited: our nation isn't simply a haven of
equality and justice, but a place where inequality, prejudice, and injustice
also lie at its core. The Foundling Father's own name provides this revi-
sion of Lincoln from a founding father to a foundling father; linguisti-
cally enacting a repetition with revisionary difference, Parks's interven-
tion into Lincoln's historiography questions not only the founding father
himself but also the America that was supposedly founded.
One of the last instances of the enactment of Lincoln's assassi-
nation offers the most powerful revision of the Lincoln myth. It occurs
in act 2 as an echo that reaches Lucy and Brazil through the Great Hole.
This particular reverberation of the past begins with a nod to the
is they. The repetition of his murder is the slaughter not only of heroes (and tyrants), but
of black struggle, black promise deep in the hole of earth, all the way down to Africa."
Perhaps his limited interpretation is the reason why he believes that the play is "static,
abstruse, hung up on a perception it refuses to share. It's crypto-playwriting, concealment
meant to mean profundity" ("Diamond Sparkles in the Director's Chair," Boston Globe, 31
January, 1994, 30). Conversely, others have pointed out various ways in which the play
challenges the mainstream thinking about Lincoln. Haike Frank argues that "a black
Abraham Lincoln look-alike disturbs and challenges the white-defined Lincoln myth that
plays an essential part in American history" ("The Instability of Meaning in Suzan-Lori
Parks's The America PIL!J," Ammcan Drama 11, no. 2 [2002]: 45). Kurt Bullock also claims
that the play "subverts the image of [Lincoln as] an American hero" and his "legacy ...
is exposed fo.r its incompleteness" ("Famous/Last Words: The Disruptive Rhetoric of
Historico-Narrative 'Finality' in Suzan-Lori Parks' The America Play," American Drama 10,
no. 2 [2001]: 72-73, 83). He argues that the lack of Lincoln's definitive last words, which
would have finalized his legacy, disrupts the historical narrative that concerns him. For
Elam and Rayner, the incompleteness lies in Lincoln's identification as the liberator of
slaves, which elides the role of African Americans in the emancipation movement
("Echoes from the Black (W)hole," 183).
12 LEE
Gettysburg Address: "4 score and 7 years ago our fathers brought forth
upon this continent a new nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to
the proposition that all men are created equal" (188). Then the assassina-
tion is narrated in order except for one detail:
The watching of the play, the laughter, the smiles of
Lincoln and Mary Todd, the slipping of Booth into the
presidential box unseen, the freeing of the slaves, the pulling
of the trigger, the bullets piercing above the left ear (189,
emphasis mine).
The insertion of the detail of freeing the slaves may relegate this act to
"a very minor aspect" of Lincoln's achievements, as Frank argues, but I
believe that more is happening here. First, in line with the conventional
understanding of the Lincoln assassination, the mention of freeing the
slaves suggests that killing Lincoln was an act of protest against emanci-
pation. However, the more interpretative recounting of the scene that
follows the above narration again anachronistically mentions the freeing
of the slaves and suggests even more:
The year was way back when. The place: our nations
capitol. 4 score, back in the olden days, and Mr. Lincolns
great head. The the-a-ter was "fords." The wife "Mary
Todd." Thuh freeing of the slaves and thuh great black hole
that thuh fatal bullet bored. And how that great head
was bleedin. Thuh body stretched crossways acrosst
thuh bed. Thuh last words. Thuh last breaths. And how
thuh nation mourned (189, emphasis mine).
In this interesting variation, the freeing of the slaves is not an event pre-
vious to or even separate from the assassination but equal to it. The sen-
tence, "Thuh freeing of the slaves and thuh great black hole that thuh
fatal bullet bored," brings emancipation and the assassination together,
and at a metaphorical level indicates that both freeing of the slaves and
Lincoln's death wounded America, leaving both the man and the nation
with a "black hole." This moment in the play thus collapses time and
implies that both progress toward, and obstruction of, equality and jus-
tice was traumatic for America. In this vein, the mourning of the nation
is also double-edged; what is mourned is not only Lincoln but also the
pre-emancipation era. In this counter-intuitive pairing of two diverse
moments of Lincoln's life, Parks challenges the glorified view of America
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION 13
and reveals its ambivalence toward that very idealism.
As The America Plqy is preoccupied with a historical figure, Venus
is mainly concerned with Saartjie Baartman whose famed stage identity
(The Venus Hottentot) made a minor stir in early nineteenth-century
England. She was considered a physical wonder as a black woman with a
disproportionately large derriere. As was the case with Lincoln, Parks
directs her focus to the way in which history inscribes individuals within
its discourse. Fittingly, the most visible level at which Baartman is avail-
able to us is the textual world of historical documents that virtually litter
the play. The character Negro The Resurrectionist often reads from these
documents, one of which is Robert Chambers's Book of Dqys that
describes The Venus in the following manner:
Early in the present century a poor wretched woman
was exhibited in England under the appellation of The
Hottentot Venus. The year was 1810. With an intensely
ugly figure, distorted beyond all European notions of
beauty, she was said by those to whom she belonged to
possess precisely the kind of shape which is most
admired among her countrymen, the Hottenetots.12
At another point, Negro The Resurrectionist reads from a medical doc-
ument that describes Baartman's physical features:
Her hair was black and wooly, much like that of the
common Negro, the slits of the eyes horizontal as in
Mongols, not oblique; the brows straight, wide-apart
and very much flattened to the nose ... her lips black-
ish, terribly thick; her complexion very dark (109).
In literally citing historical documents, Venus is complicit in re-establish-
ing that history; in other words, the play functions in its performative his-
toriography. As Worthen points out, Baartman's history exists in various
texts: "court proceedings, newspaper accounts, advertisements, political
cartoons, memoirs and Baron Cuvier's (?) anatomical treatises," and the
numerous resignifications of these documents in Parks's play solidify that
history.13
12 Susan-Lori Parks, V enus (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997),
36. Subsequent references to this volume will be given paranthetically in the text.
13 Worthen, "Citing History," 9.
14 LEE
In addition to citing history through language, Venus iterates
Baartman/Venus through performance. As The Foundling Father per-
formed/ cited Lincoln through his stage acts, Venus functions as an occa-
sion in which Baartman/Venus is performed. Performance in the play
occurs on multiple levels; Parks's play performs the Venus but also refer-
ences the Venus's own performances in England. The performances of
the play, then, can be primarily distinguished by those occurring in real
time and those that occurred in the past. At numerous points, the play
reenacts the nineteenth-century Venus performances. In the flrst of these
occasions, the audience sees The Mother-Showman, The Venus's keeper,
calling out to her potential customers by flaunting the show's exoticism:
What a fat ass, huh?!
Oh yes, this girls thuh Missin Link herself.
Come on inside and allow her to reveal to you the Great
and Horrid Wonder
of her great heathen buttocks.
Thus Missing Link, Ladies and Gentlemen: Thuh Venus
Hottentot: ...
Plucked her from thuh Fertile Crescent
from thuh Fertile Crescent with my own bare hands!
Ripped her off thuh mammoth lap of uh mammoth ape!
She was uh (((keeping house for him))). Folks, The Venus
Hottentoot! (43).
Needless to say, the way in which The Venus was exploited as a horrific
display of the sub-human African is plainly reiterated in Parks's play.
Furthermore, the location of Africa as a place of degeneracy and ani-
malism is denoted in The Mother-Showman's vouch for Venus's authen-
ticity.
Because Parks re-stages the dehumanizing performance of The
Venus, some argue that Parks exoticizes Baartman as her colonizers had
done. In this vein, the Washington Post critic William Triplett writes, "Parks
deplores the exploitation of Venus, but is not above exploiting her to lec-
ture whites on their need to feel ashamed and blacks on their duty to feel
used."I
4
These are also the terms by which theatre scholar Jean Young
indicts the play: "Park's portrayal of Saartjie Baartman draws on cultural
1
4
William Triplett, "London Derriere: Studio's Poignant 'Venus,"' Washington
Post, 13 March 1998, C07.
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION 15
images and stereotypes commonly used to represent Black woman in
demeaning and sexually debased roles, the objectified oppositional
'Other' measured against a white 'norm."'lS Her antipathy is even more
directed and pronounced when she writes, "Saartjie Baartman becomes
twice victimized: first, by nineteenth-century Victorian society and, again,
by the play Venus."16 While it is indisputable that Parks reiterates the
exoticized performance of the Venus Hottentot, it is crucial to remem-
ber that the play's citation does not present an exact copy of the nine-
teenth-century performance. The play cites history but shows that any
citation is marked with difference. First, the performance of The Venus
in Parks's play is not presented in a seamless fashion but with the seams
of theatrical staging visible. Even before The Mother-Showman turns to
The Venus's audience, for instance, we see her placing The Venus in what
she believes to be the most optimal position and telling her how to pose:
"Turn to the side, Girl. I Let em see! Let em see!" She also coaches The
Venus how to perform, "Y r standing there with yr lips pokin out I like
uh wooden lady on uh wooden ship I look alive I smile or something I
jesus I stroke yr feathers I smoke yr pipe" (43). This goes to show that
Parks's performance does not perform the other, but performs the per-
forming of the other, and by so doing, the objectified version of The
Venus is presented as manufactured through staging and even acting-
artificial-and not a true representation of Africanness. Second, the play
provides more than the staged version of The Venus; we get some
glimpses into the woman behind The Venus, perhaps some version of
Baartman. For one, the play shows that she wasn't simply "plucked" from
Africa; she came to Europe as part of a business transaction. Before she
became The Venus, she was The Girl, working as a maid in a wealthy
family in Southern Africa. The Brother of the family, in an attempt to get
financing for his plan to tour Europe with African performers, suggest-
ed to his business associate, The Man, that The Girl would be perfect as
a "Dancing African Princess." He urged The Man further, "The English
like that sort of thing. Theres a street over there lined with Freak Acts
but not many dark ones, that's how we'll cash in" (12). Then The Girl was
offered monetary rewards-"Folks pay you in gold .... We'll split it 50-
50"-and enticed to make a "mint." Such an offer caused her to imagine
a superior life: "I would have a house. I I would hire help. I I would be
15 Jean Young, "The Re-Objectification and Re-Comrnodification of Saartjie
Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus," African American Review 31, no. 4 (1997): 699-700.
1
6
Ibid., 701.
16 LEE
rich. Very rich. / Big bags of money" (17). Although this background
story of Baartman may signal her complicity, it does not show that The
Girl simply made a personal decision in a vacuum to expose her body and
objectify herself; the colonial context already mandated a need for the
exoticization of the other and The Girl became implicated in this con-
text.17 Hartigan also points to the power of this system when she writes
that Venus "grows from a naive captive to a sensual siren who buys into
the system that buys her."tB Furthermore, as Laura Wright argues in her
fascinating reading of the vampire trope in the play, "Venus's complicity
... [may be seen] as a result of a vampiric infection [by the colonizer], a
situation that places the Venus in the interregnum space where true
choice becomes impossible."t9 And it is also important not to fall into the
trap of creating a binary of complicity/victimhood, which seems to be a
strong underlying element in Young's criticism. The Venus's partial com-
plicity does not negate, in any way, the fact that she was abused in
appalling ways.zo
Even without the contextual information about Baartman,
Parks's versions of the Venus performance rewrite her history. In the ear-
lier quote from Chambers's Book of Days, Venus was described as pos-
sessing "an intensely ugly figure, distorted beyond all European notions
of beauty." What this denotes is that Venus represents degeneracy and
regression, in line with the discourse of what the post-colonial critic
Anne McClintock calls anachronism: ~ f r i c a came to be seen as the colo-
nial paradigm of anachronistic space, a land perpetually out of time in
modernity, marooned and historically abandoned. Africa was a fetish-
land, inhabited by cannibals, dervishes and witch doctors, abandoned in
prehistory at the precise moment before the Weltgeist (as the cunning
17 William Triplett believes that the play does not explore the issue of Venus's
complicity enough: "[various) moments suggest the real pathos-her degree of complic-
ity in the corruption of her own soul. But instead of exploring that messy business, Parks
would rather we keep feeling Venus's pain" ("London Derriere," CO?).
!8 Patti Hartigan, '"Venus' as Victim: Symbol, Story Merge Seamlessly," Boston
Globe, 27 March, 1996 Arts & Film, 79.
1
9 Laura Wright, '""Macerations" French for "Lunch"': Reading the Vampire in
Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus," journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 17, no. 1 (2002): 79.
20 Greg Miller argues similarly about Venus: "If she is complicit, she is still dis-
proportionately, grotesquely wronged" ("The Bottom of Desire in Suzan-Lori Parks's
Venus," Modern Drama 45, no. 1 [2002): 127).
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION 17
agent of Reason) manifested itself in history."2t In The Venus's per-
formance, however, we see that even the representation of "the Missing
Chain" reverberates with a sub-text of eroticism. When The Mother-
Showman said that The Venus was "plucked" from her location, the
eroticism was supplanted by the violence evoked in the imagery; further-
more, the detail that she was wrenched from "thuh mammoth lap of uh
mammoth ape" references animal sexuality. This initial covert eroticism
becomes overt later when The Mother-Showman realizes that she can
make more money by prostituting The Venus: "Go on Sir, go on. Feel her
if you like" (45). This transformation of The Venus from an erotic spec-
tacle to a sexual object occurs alongside heightened physical abuse by The
Mother-Showman: "Observe: I kick her like I kick my dog!" After the
beating, the Venus is now ready to be prostituted: "Whew. Thats hard
work lemmie tel ya. I I need a rest. Hhh. I Paw her folks. Hands on. Go
on have yr pleasure. I Her heathen shame is real" (46). The way in which
The Venus becomes indisputable sexual prey makes her more of a victim
than official history would allow. As McClintock tells us, the colonized
was relegated to the "degenerate classes, defined as departures from the
normal human type," because they were "necessary to the self-definition
of the middle class" as morally superior and sexually pure.22 Parks's play
clearly contests this distortion inherent in the colonial enterprise; The
Venus's sexual victimization attests to the way in which the discourse of
sexual purity masked the violent erotic fantasy behind European imperi-
al endeavors.
Historical Subjectivity: Limitations and Possibilities
Although the performative model of history that is detectable in The
America Plqy and Venus points to the way in which history is constructed
discursively through repeated citation rather than through some authen-
tic relationship to reality, the plays show that much is at stake in deci-
phering and revising history. The reason that history matters even in its
incomplete, permeable state is identity's unbreakable link to history. The
plays offer an interestingly different view of identity and history, howev-
er; The America Plqy presents one's utter separation from history, while
Venus demonstrates one's complete incorporation into history. What the
two plays show in tandem is that one's detachment from history frag-
21 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 41.
22 Ibid., 46-47.
18
LEE
ments one's identity, but one's integration into history may cause its anni-
hilation. Therefore, to be a subject one must be tied to history, but keep-
ing history from disabling self-positioning and self-definition is a crucial
task. By rejecting both divorce from and complete imbeddedness in his-
tory, Parks advocates a historical subjectivity that maintains the agency to
cite/ perform history with a difference and thereby to define one's own
relationship to history.
The America Plqy's primary character The Foundling Father is
from the opening of the play marked with lack. First, he doesn't have an
individualized name as his wife Lucy does, for example.23 Furthermore,
The Foundling Father is already dressed as someone else; in fact for the
entire duration of the play he is in the costume of Abraham Lincoln. The
lack that marks this character is connected to the great hole that he has
been digging for a long time. Being a copy of the Great Hole in History,
this hole is directly related to The Foundling Father's lack of individual
identity; the void of history marks his separation from history. It is in this
context that we need to read The Foundling Father's transition from dig-
ging to "faking." Although performing Lincoln appears to be a frivolous
way of making money, there is a genuine desire on the part of The
Foundling Father to connect to the history to which Lincoln belongs.
24
In the following passage this desire is poignantly expressed:
It would be helpful to our story if when the Great Man
died in death he were to meet the Lesser Known. It
would be helpful to our story if, say, the Lesser Known
were summoned to Big Town by the Great Man's wife
. . .. "Emergency, oh Emergency please put the Great
Man in the ground" .... But none of this was meant to
be. For the Great Man had been murdered long before
the Lesser Known had been born. Howuhboutthat
(160-61).
This 1maginary scenario speaks of The Foundling Father's feeling of
23 Neither does his son Brazil, whose name is a reference to the Brazil nut,
nicknamed nigger toe. This is pointed out by Suzan-Lori Parks in an interview (Andrea
Stevens, ''A Playwright Who Likes to Bang Words Together," New York Times, 6 March
1994, Section 2, 5).
2
4
In this vein, Tony Kelly, the director of the Thick Description theatre's pro-
duction of The America Plqy, said, "Suzan-Lori's play is about the huge issue of finding a
place in history" (quoted in Steven Winn, "'Thick' Group Takes on U.S. Historical Farce,"
Sa11 Fra11cisco Chro11icle, 5 December 1994, E1).
UNNATUR.".L CONCEPTION 19
alienation in his present life due to his lack of a connection to the past.
His exclusion from history is again evinced when he is honeymooning at
a theme park. He calls out "Ohwayohwhyohwayoh" and "Hello" while
watching a parade of "Reconstructed Historicities," but no one answers
his call. Again, this disconnection leads him to flee his present life.
Unable to shake off the historical "summoning," he leaves his wife and
son to move out west and stage his Lincoln acts (162).
With The Foundling Father's desire to connect to history in
mind, we can see that his performance of Lincoln functions as a possi-
ble entry point into history. The Foundling Father cannot literally insert
himself into history, cannot actually be Lincoln or even the gravedigger
who buried him, but he can participate in citing history, which also enacts
an inclusion in historical genealogy. The play particularly focuses on the
significance of patriarchal lineage through the rhetoric of the father, and
The Foundling Father may have found a kind of historical father in
Lincoln. However, as his own name signifies, patriarchy is foundling, a
fleeting concept, which his own actions have ironically confirmed; in his
attempt to connect to Lincoln he has abandoned his own son. Parks also
comments more broadly on the idea of the Founding Fathers of
America; the promise of national lineage inherent in the concept is not
meant for all Americans, as it is certainly gender- and race-specific.
Because The Foundling Father is a black man, his connection to Lincoln
can never be complete, as the following passage demonstrates:
trying somehow to equal the Great Man in stature, word
and deed going forward with his lesser life trying some-
how to follow in the Great Mans footsteps footsteps
that were of course behind him. The Lesser Known try-
ing somehow to catch up to the Great Man all this while
and maybe running too fast in the wrong direction.
Which is to say that maybe the Great Man had to catch
him (171).
Although The Foundling Father arduously tries to reach Lincoln, there is
a sense that he will never get there. And ultimately, he is moving in the
wrong direction because it is the Great Man who has to catch up to him.
However, even this possibility of meeting does not ensure joyous reunion
or happy realignment of the severed historical genealogy. As the follow-
ing passage shows, meeting the forefather will reveal that he is in fact a
faux-father (a repeated pun in the play), as their coming together is
described in violent terms with the possible death of the Lesser Known:
20
If the Lesser Known had slowed down stopped moving
completely gone in reverse died maybe the Greater Man
could have caught up. Woulda had a chance. Woulda
sneaked up behind him the Greater Man would have
sneaked up behind the Lesser Known unbeknownst and
wrestled him to the ground. Stabbed him in the back. In
revenge. "Thus to the tyrants!" Shot him maybe. The
Lesser Known forgets who he is and just crumples. His
bones cannot be found. The Greater Man continues on
(172-73).
LEE
The passage suggests that only by losing himself he may be able to meet
Lincoln, because perhaps to travel only in reverse and to forget about for-
ward progress is a kind of death. The death of the Lesser Known rings
with another meaning connected to history's role in identity formation.
To immerse oneself in the history represented by Lincoln may mean that
history overcomes one's present and one's identity. And this scenario is
explicitly described in terms of violence perpetrated by Lincoln against
the Lesser Known. Thus official history has the power to subsume The
Lesser Known; the latter "forgets who he is," and even his bones disap-
pear, suggesting that he literally vanishes without even leaving any arti-
facts. In this scenario the dominant history incorporates rather than pro-
vides room for other histories such as that of The Foundling Father.
On the one hand, The Foundling Father demonstrates that to be
a whole person, one must have a place in history; to be a person means
to be a historical subject. On the other hand, history is not a neutral phe-
nomenon; with its performative power it can create individuals (such as
the historical Lincoln) and name them according to their designated place
in society. As a black man, The Foundling Father cannot simply enter into
history with full subjecthood; the history of racial inequality writes him
into an inferior being without a privileged position in the official geneal-
ogy of America. Therefore, The Foundling Father's performance of
Lincoln, on the one hand, disturbs the historical order by insisting on his
participation in the discourse that has excluded him. However, by
attempting to enter into history, he risks his own identity and becomes
susceptible to full absorption into that history. The crucial question then
is how an individual who is denied his/her place in history may find a his-
torical subjecthood without being subsumed by it. If to be a subject
means to be inevitably tied to history, and therefore dictated by it, is there
a way to retain agency in his/her own subject formation? Can an indi-
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION
21
vidual dictate his/her relationship to history, or does history always write
the individual?
In Venus, the individual, Saartjie Baartman, is literally absent. In
the list of the play's characters she is referred to as Miss Saartjie
Baartman/The Girl/The Venus Hottentot, but never in the play does the
first of these names actually appear. This name whose function is to sig-
nify an individual but is not allowed to signify points to the utter lack of
access to the individual of Saartjie Baartman; she literally does not exist
in the world of the play. As Worthen writes, there is a clearly detectable
"poverty of the external details of Baartman's life ... [an] inability to fill
in a subject, to cite 'Saartjie Baartman' authoritavely."25 The identities that
are cited are the latter two: The Girl, who belonged to the domestic work-
ing class of Africa during European colonization; and The Venus
Hottentot, the specularized commodity that fed the desires and the purs-
es of those who benefited from the colonial system. She is defined by
these contexts and does not exist outside of them. Although Miller is
right in saying that "the real Saartjie Baartman is not the concern; Parks
assumes that historical figures come to us already constructed," the rea-
son for her absence is not simply a matter of artistic and critical choice.26
While the name Saartjie Baartman promises some kind of identity
beyond history, the play in citing history is also limited, or even inscribed,
by it. As if to mark this absence of some essential being of Baartman,
the play begins with an announcement that Venus is dead and that there
won't be any performance. She died of the cold; as The Negro
Resurrectionist says, "Exposure iz what killed her" (3). Exposure here
rings with a double meaning; not only was she exposed to the elements
literally but she was constantly exposed to the world as a spectacle. In this
overture, multiple references to her naked body expand this notion of
exposure: "Venus, Black Goddess, was shameless, she sinned or else com-
pletely unknowing of r godfearin ways she stood totally naked in her iron
cage" (5). This sentence, along with "She gained fortune and fame by not
wearin uh scrap hidin only thuh privates that lipped inner lap" (6), is
repeated in its exact wording to establish Venus as a pure sexualized spec-
tacle, as an exposed object; pure specularization is equated with ultimate
objectification, both responsible for her death.
Venus's desire to profit from her situation, even as she says to the
court, to "make a mint," may be seen as a sign of her agency in an
25 Worthen, "Citing History," 16.
26 Miller, "The Bottom of Desire," 127.
22
LEE
oppressive context. Although the court scene seems to present Venus as
a subject who is speaking her mind by asking the court to grant her per-
mission to keep performing, we need to remember that she is speaking
as The Venus, the performed identity rather than Baartman. When the
court calls her to speak, she reiterates this identity of her staged charac-
ter; "Im called The Venus Hottentot," she says and afterwards refers to
herself in the third person, "The Venus Hottentot/ is unavailable for
comment" (74). If The Venus is always the performed version of the
exoticized, racialized other, then her expressed desire needs to be con-
sidered from this position. Before this court scene, The Venus hints she
holds a subjectivity beyond the role she's forced to play; she voices her
desire to change her act, alter the citation of herself on stage: "We should
spruce up our act. / I could speak for them. / Say a little poem or some-
thing" and ''You [The Mother Showman] could pretend to teach me and
I would learn before their very eyes" (51). This is a crucial point in the
play where we can detect something other than the specularized Venus,
someone behind the spectacle, perhaps Baartman. What she proposes
here is to revise the way in which her performances have constructed her
identity; we may think of this as a proposal of a subversive performance
that may alter the performativity of race and gender in the society of the
time-show the audience that she has a voice, an artistic sensibility, and
the capability to learn, that she is not just a body, an animal. However, she
is quickly denied this request by The Mother-Showman. The counter per-
formance cannot occur because there is simply no venue for it in her
time; her historical location limits her from flnding an occasion for dif-
ferential signiflcation through subversive performance. Denied her
request, The Venus is forced to continue to count the proceeds of the
day, and her repeated counting is audible to the audience " 10-20-30-40-
50-60-70-80-90," which is syncopated with The Mother-Showman's own
counting of every 100 that The Venus counts. In the rhythm produced
by both of their counting, one can detect a kind of hypnotic effect, or a
performative iteration. Instead of The Venus becoming a subject with
voice and agency, she is called into the discourse of money and the eco-
nomics of colonialism. This was from the beginning how she became co-
opted into the colonial system; she was promised money by those who
sold her to The Mother-Showman. Wright argues a similar point when
she writes that The Venus demonstrates a kind of "self-cannibalization
that functions as the colonial subject's attempted mimicry of the colo-
nizer."27 Continuing her focus on the vampire trope, Wright claims that
2
7
Laura Wright, ""'Macerations" French for "Lunch,"'" 70.
UNNATIJRAL CONCEPTION 23
Venus, once bitten by the colonial vampire, exists in "a third space-nei-
ther living nor dead-from which to signify, [and] the vampire is still a
parasite, still a creator of colonial mimics, who inhabits a position that is
never fully realized."28 Implicated in and inscribed by the colonial system
in this way-her identity literally usurped by the vampire-she can only
exist as a mimic. Therefore acts such as The Venus demanding more pay,
better working conditions, and later going with The Baron Docteur for a
better life signify less her agency than her co-option into the discourse of
colonialism and her utter inability to escape from her historical reality.
Even her relationship to The Baron Docteur is marked by the
colonial discourse that defines The Venus as both commodity and spec-
tacle. The doctor pays a great sum to buy her from The Mother-
Showman and he pays her as long as she is in his custody. The Venus
negotiates for 100 per week in exchange for sleeping with the doctor
and doing everything else he asks. In this way she participates in her own
commodification. In addition, as a spectacle she has to be exposed. This
time, she performs her specularized identity for scientists and academics,
who invade her body differently. When she is being prodded and meas-
ured by the scientists, the rhetoric of the spectacle converges with that of
the commodity; under these white men's gaze, her body parts become
quantified, the way that money is, as the audience is inundated with num-
bers that signify her body measurements. What these numbers specifical-
ly refer to does not matter because as the myriad specialized physiologi-
cal terminology escapes the audience. The Venus at this moment simply
is both the spectacle and the fungible object.
I n the way The Venus is hypnotized by money, the economics of
colonialism, she falls under the spell of colonial love. Unlike Hartigan
who sees this play as primarily a love story, I would argue that the play
complicates said genre by presenting a love manufactured in the colonial
context.29 Wright's reading of the initial love scene between The Baron
Docteur and The Venus insightfully points to "a series of 'spells' during
which the characters signify by their physical presence onstage, as mirror
reflections of one another."30 These spells can also be read as effecting a
kind of hypnosis; The Venus, and to some extent even the Docteur, may
28 Ibid., 71.
29 Hartigan writes: "But it is really about the human condition, about that four-
letter word that makes us all equal. That word is 'love,' and the play unveils our thirst for
it and, ultimately, our inability to obtain it" ("'Venus' as Victim," 79).
30 Wright, ""'Macerations" French for "Lunch,"'" 82.
24 LEE
have been hypnotized to believe she is in love, but ultimately it is the love
that is appropriate between the colonizer and the colonized. The
Docteur's controlling role is clearly demonstrated in his practice of giv-
ing chocolate to Venus. As she is continuously fed chocolate by the doc-
tor and later becomes addicted to it, her love becomes conditioned by
what the doctor gives.
31
Furthermore, this love, as JvWler claims, "merely
another gesture of oppression, a perverse form of desire that injects
death into love's hold and so hastens the Venus's decline," functions as a
tool for the doctor to use her for his science.32 That is how the Docteur
has his way with the Venus so easily-displaying and subjecting her to his
colleagues' gaze and inquiries-without much protest from her. What
one of the characters from the inner play says at one point demonstrates
how the sentiment of love functions in the play, a sentiment repeated
e ~ c t l y by The Baron Docteur: "My love for you is artificial I Fabricated
much like this epistle. I It's crafted with my finest powers I To last
through the days and the weeks and the hours" (102). This refrain char-
acterizes what The Venus, and perhaps even The Baron Docteur, believes
is love, love that is constructed by and for the doctor. What is even more
interesting is that when the doctor asks The Venus whether she likes this
poem, she says, "I love it." Thus playing the lover is also a performance
mandated by her context; what's most horrifying about it is that she does-
n't seem to know that she is actually playing a role here, not realizing that
her love is indeed "fabricated."
Performance of History and Historical Subjectivity
Other than a few moments that suggest the potential for her agency,
Saartjie Baartman for the most part exists only within her historical real-
ity. She can only play the part of The Venus; as fulfiller of colonial erot-
ic fantasy and pure commodity, she represents a subject too imbedded in
history and therefore at its mercy. If the individual Saartjie Baartman
exists, it is only a faint possibility, not a realizable identity. In this way, The
Venus is only a historical subject and as such she is only a signifier, not a
31 There are multiple readings of how chocolate functions in the play. Miller
writes, "The history of chocolate clearly suggests a history of colonization, a history that
is in no sense behind us" ("The Bottom of Desire," 134). Extending this idea, Wright
claims that the Venus's body parallels chocolate: "By equating the body of the Venus with
the chocolates she eats, the Venus's so-called complicity can be read as an act of self-
silencing cannibalism" ("'"Macerations" French for "Lunch,"'" 80).
32 Miller, "The Bottom of Desire," 131.
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION 25
being.33 This empty identity as pure signifier is what the danger of going
too far into the past was for The Foundling Father. The Foundling Father
in his attempt to locate himself in history by performing Lincoln may
indeed end up simply signifying that past and in the process lose his own
identity and agency. If one doesn't belong to history, one's identity is a
void, but if one is completely embedded in history, one's identity is also
an empty signifier. How do we then participate in history but keep histo-
ry from subsuming us? The answer may lie in the idea of performing his-
tory and thereby performing our historical identities with agency. If we
can somehow stage history just as history stages us, and in the process
find room for contention and differential citation, we can understand
ourselves as historical but avoid being coopted into any one particular
history.
The two characters that I have been primarily discussing, The
Foundling Father and The Venus, are not equally capable of subversive
performance. The Venus wants to alter her performance but is denied
that opportunity. She can only perform the role mandated by her context
and thereby function as a pure signifier. She participates in the perfor-
mativity of her culture and is not able to subvert it with agency.
Conversely, the Foundling Father has more control over his performance;
he chooses his profession and the exact acts he will stage. He doesn't
have full freedom, however; he happens to look like Lincoln, which sy.m-
bolizes the historical antecedents already having been decided upon.
Nonetheless, he has some agency in when, where, and how he will stage
Lincoln. Furthermore, as I have discussed earlier, The Foundling Father's
performance of Lincoln cites history with a difference and in so doing
exposes the Lincoln myth as having constructed an incomplete picture of
America. The fact that The Foundling Father was indispensable in this
subversive performance signals his agency in his performative rewriting.
Moreover, what further distinguishes the performance of The Foundling
Father from that of The Venus is the consequence of those perform-
ances. In other words, how these performances resonate in other con-
texts either contemporaneously or in the future implies their possible
subversive power. This is why it is significant that the performance of
Lincoln's final moments that revises the historical meaning attributed to
them comes to us as an echo heard by The Foundling Father's wife and
son. This goes to show that the listeners' role is crucial in determining the
33 In this vein Worthen argues, "Citing Saartjie Baartman as The Venus, Parks's
play rigorously performs the occlusion of 'Saartjie Baartman'; like the actress's padded
costume, The Venus emerges onstage as a signifier, which we encounter as the signifier
of an unavailable-indeed, perhaps unimaginable- history" ("Citing History," 13).
26 LEE
subversive power of any performance. Because Lucy and Brazil listened
with desire and compassion, they were able to hear the revised history of
Lincoln and America, that emancipation as well as Lincoln's assassination
signified national loss, resulting in a void, a chasm of the Great Hole in
History.
In act 2 of the play, Lucy and Brazil are at the hole that The
Foundling Father had dug, but instead of feeling ashamed and over-
whelmed by the void, as had The Foundling Father, they wait by it to hear
voices and find artifacts from the past. The hole has changed from a
mark of emptiness and separation into a kind of container of history;
returning to the metaphor of the incubator, the hole can be read as the
incubator that creates history and historical subjects. The act opens with
a sound of a gunshot: "Uh echo, uh huhn. Of gunplay. Once upon uh
time somebody had uh little gunplay and now thuh gun goes on playing"
(174). This gunshot has multiple reference points: it can be the original
gunshot that killed Lincoln or the multiple gunshots that enacted the
original assassination. What is interesting here is that we will never know
the exact referent of this sound, and because of that the gunshot sound
will simultaneously cite Lincoln as well as The Foundling Father. This
double reference signals on the one hand the latter's incorporation into
the former, but on the other hand an incomplete incorporation. Thus,
while The Foundling Father finds entry into history, he remains partly
outside of it. As Lucy tells Brazil, it is important to know the difference
between past and present, and self and other: "Itssalways been important
in my line to distinguish. Tuh know thuh difference. Not like your
Fathuh. Your Fathuh became confused. His lonely death and lack of
proper burial is our embarrassment. Go on: dig. Now me I need tuh
know thuh real thing from thuh echo. Thuh truth from thuh hearsay"
(175). And the echo, as a kind of Saussurian signifier, carries the mark of
that difference.
Difference also refers to history and material reality, identity in
history and in the present. Lucy and Brazil know that history is an echo;
they don't think that someone is actually speaking to them. They will hear
the echo, but they will not confuse it with their reality. This ability to sep-
arate one's connection to history and the present is connected to their
jobs; Lucy is a Confidant and Brazil is a mourner. Both tasks are involved
in dealing with death; the Confidant hears the last words of a dying per-
son and doesn't divulge the information until a proper time, and the
mourner is obviously someone who mourns and pays respect to the dead.
Both activities suggest a nod to the past but allow for a kind of transition
into the future; the Confidant passes on information from the past to the
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION 27
future, and the mourner allows for the living to move past the sorrow
into the future.
Lucy's and Brazil's jobs have personal importance, because they
must both pass on and mourn the Foundling Father. In order to do so,
they first need to find his remains. For this purpose, the son diligently
digs for his father's bones or "thuh Wonders surrounding his bones"
(177). A Wonder refers to a historical artifact, and once found it is placed
in the Hall of Wonders. Brazil also listens for whispers: "When theres no
Confidence available we just dribble thuh words out. In uh whisper." But
the whispers may not safely travel to them: "Whispers dont always come
up right away. Takes time sometimes. Whispers could travel different out
West than they do back East. Maybe slower. Maybe. Whispers are secrets
and often shy. We aint seen your Pa in 30 years. That could be part of it.
We also could be experiencing some sort of interference. Or some sort
of technical difficulty. Ssard tuh tell" (178). Despite the possibility that he
may not find or hear anything, Brazil continues to work. Finally he is
rewarded when after digging for some time, he flnds a Wonder, Lincoln's
bust from act 1. Then he hears a whisper in the form of another echo, a
performance echo of The Foundling Father's act. Then he finds more
Wonders and hears more echoes. At the end of the play these Wonders
are added to the existing collection that Brazil introduces to the audience:
To our right A Jewel Box of cherry wood, lined in vel-
vet, letters ''A.L." carved in gold on thuh lid. Over here
one of Mr. Washingtons bones and here: his wooden
teeth. Over here: uh bust of Mr. Lincoln carved or mar-
ble lookin like he looked in life.-More or less. And
thuh medals: for bravery and honesty; for trustworthi-
ness and for standing straight; for standing tall; for
standing still. For advancing and retreating. For makin
do. For skills in whittlin, for skills in painting and draw-
ing, for uh knowledge of sewin, of handicrafts and
building things, for leather tannin, blacksmithery, lace-
makin, horseback riding, swimming, croquet and bad-
minton. Community Service. For cookin and for
cleanin. For bowin and scrapin. Uh medal for fakin'
(199).
This Hall of Wonders exists in contrast to the historical parade at the
Great Hole of History. Although reference is made to Washington and
Lincoln, it is a kind a misreference; Lincoln's cherry wood box belonged
28 LEE
to The Foundling Father, not Lincoln, and rather than real bones of
Washington we have his wooden teeth. Furthermore, the list moves away
from the greats in our official history and tells of simple activities per-
formed by numerous nameless people, including Brazil's own father who
was the best faker. As Elam and Rayner write, "the Foundling Father has
in effect become the Great Man" and "has assumed a place within the
Hall of Wonders"34; I would slightly adjust this point by saying that he
hasn't replaced Lincoln, the original Great Man, but has become his own
Great Man in this revised history. Brazil's Hall of Wonders represents a
historical space but an alternative to that which is occupied by official his-
tory; it harkens back to it all the while moving beyond it. This emergent
new history ultimately is shrouded in mystery; what is real and what is not
are not specified, and new people are not named. But it is precisely offi-
cial history's need for naming and categorizing that the new history of
Parks's play seems to avoid; it doesn't look like history but it is just as real.
Unlike The America Plqy, Venus does not stage a possible way to
subvert the history of the Venus Hottentot. It actually stages the com-
plete opposite of subversion by showing an example of the way in which
The Venus performance works to maintain inequality. To demonstrate
this, the play again harkens to the figure of the listener or the audience,
which plays a more prominent role here than it does in The America Plqy,
because Venus itself dramatizes the watching of Venus's performances
and its effects. For example, we know that The Baron Docteur decided
to buy The Venus after watching her perform. To highlight this dynamic
of performing-viewing even more, the play stages an inner play called
"For the Love of Venus." Although only a few of its scenes are placed with-
in Venus, they are significant since they are also watched by The Baron
Docteur, and this suggests that performances of all kinds resonated pow-
erfully within the culture. In the first of the scenes of the inner play, we
meet The Bride-to-Be and The Young Man, the latter telling his fiancee
about his father's recent trip to Africa. From his notebook he reads: "The
Man who has never been far from his own home is no Man. For how can
a Man call himself Man if he has not stepped off his own doorstep and
wandered out into the world ... .Visit the world and Man he will be." He
reads on: "When a Man takes his journey beyond all that to him was hith-
erto the Known, when a Man packs his baggage and walks himself
beyond the Familiar, then sees he his true I; not in the eyes of the Known
but in the eyes of the Known-Not" (26). In the following scenes we learn
that The Young Man has stopped paying attention to his fiancee, causing
34 Elam and Raynor, "Echoes from the Black (W)hole," 190.
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION 29
his elders to worry. When they mildly reprimand The Young Man, he tells
them that he will do the right thing but only after he also has a kind of
journey to the unknown: "Before I wed, Uncle, I'd like you to procure for
me an oddity. I I wanna love I something Wild" (48). In the next scene
the Bride-to-Be laments that her fiance is in love with the Venus
Hottentot, and she and her mother devise a plan to flX this problem:
"We'll get you up, make you look wild I Get you up like a Hottentot"
(122). In the final scene of this play, the Bride-to-Be is dressed as a
Hottentot; The Young Man is mesmerized by her and vows his love.
Then the Uncle explains that "as we lose uh skin layer everyday I so will
she [the Bride-to-Be] shrug her old self off" (153), after which the Bride-
to-Be takes off the disguise and receives chocolate from her fiance.
First this play-within-the-play performs a specific type of mas-
culinity associated with colonialism- to be a man is to travel to the
unknown. Second, it shows the displacement of colonial desire upon sex-
ual desire; Venus becomes the metaphor for Africa, as The Young Man's
desire for colonial conquest becomes displaced onto his sexual desire for
something "wild." But what transpires after this is the most striking
aspect of this play-within-the-play; the Bride-to-Be's performance of The
Venus suggests not only a doubling of the white woman and the African
woman but also the former's appropriation of the latter. On the one
hand, the Bride-to-Be is at the mercy of her fiance, as the Venus is; she
doesn't simply desire his affection but is in need of it to legitimize her sit-
uation in society. Because her fiance falls for someone else, her position
is in jeopardy, and she must find some way to redirect his attention to her.
On the other hand, she clearly appropriates the image of the savage other
and its eroticism to safeguard her position in society and by so doing is
complicit in dominating The Venus. By presenting this complex web of
power within which performance resonates, this inner play in miniature
displays the hierarchy of the social structure explicitly founded upon gen-
der and racial inequality. The Venus performance disturbingly maintains
this order; it functions too well in constructing gender and race in nine-
teenth-century England.
The relationship between the inner play "For the Love of
Venus" and the outer play Venus raises interesting questions about per-
formance of a historically mandated role (The Venus), performance of
that performance in contemporary times (The Bride-to-Be), and finally a
performance of the previous two performances (Parks). If the second
performance is anything but subversive, what about the last? Is Parks's
play a performance that cites with a difference; is it a subversive per-
formance? Unlike the case of The America Plqy, Parks does not actualize
30
LEE
a subversive performance in her dramatic world; in other words, all per-
formances within the play of Venus are culturally mandated. Without an
audience such as Lucy or Brazil on stage who function as a barometer,
Venus passes the baton onto its audience to determine whether Parks's
performance of history is revisionary and whether we can imagine a dif-
ferent kind of historical subject position through her play.
Audiences reacted strongly to Venus. Most people were agitated
by a lack of clear message in the play; some critics expressed their inabil-
ity to interpret it. Others who were able to move beyond its purported
opacity accused the play of exoticizing Saartjie Baartman, and many
expressed their objection to and discomfort with watching a clearly dehu-
manized spectacle. While the audience may have been conflicted in
watching what they believed shouldn't have been seen, this kind of self-
consciousness is what the play directly invites. Because the play is less
about an individual, Saartjie Baartman, and more about the spectacle and
performance of the Venus Hottentot and the politics of watching and
performing that role, the audience member is asked to locate him/herself
among the various images, performances, reactions, and interpretations
that make up the history of this woman.3s Situating the audience in this
complex web, the play asks them perhaps the toughest question of all: to
what extent were they voyeurs as well as objectors to the sight of The
Venus? While this may be a difficult question to answer, the honest
answer may be, as Sara Gebhardt of the Washington Post writes, "There is
a voyeur in all of us."3G And what this ultimately demonstrates is that, as
Miller claims, "complicity extends from the figures onstage to the real-life
audience"37 even as they are abhorred by the very sight of The Venus. By
making the watching of the play its subject, "Parks effectively stage us"3B;
it asks us about our subject position in this history. What we discover
after seeing/ reading the play is that in many ways we can't simply choose
aspects of history to claim as crucial for our identity and discard others;
the play makes it impossible for us to be either complicit or detached and
35 Even as critic Tony Brown objects that "UJike the Venus, the people onstage
become exhibits," the play hinges on these objects that function primarily as spectacles.
Tony Brown, "Drama's Presentational Style Disconnects Audience from Horrific Story,"
Plain Dealer (Cleveland), 14 February 2005, D6.
36 Sara Gebhardt, "The Bottom Line on 'Venus,"' Washington Post, 27 August
2004, T22.
37 Miller, "The Bottom of Desire," 128.
38 Ibid., 135.
UNNATURAL CONCEPTION
31
asks us to reirnagine history and identity from the position of being both
in and out of that history. Although this may lead the audience to think
despondently, as Garrett writes, "whatever their backgrounds, travel
through her theatre's repetitions and revisions to arrive at an understand-
ing that they, too, must count themselves among history's dupes," it does
not foreclose the possibility that the audience may learn to be active par-
ticipants in reirnagining, rewriting, and redefining history and our histor-
ical identities with agency.39 Ultimately, I believe that the play urges us to
look into history and ourselves honestly and bravely, and perhaps to fol-
low Brazil's example. In the way Brazil had to learn to mourn properly,
pounding the ground and tearing his clothes, articulating our place in his-
tory is a painful process but one that can make possible rewriting of his-
tory and repositioning our historical subjectivities.
39 Shawn-Marie Garrett, "The Possession of Susan-Lori Parks," American
Theatre 17, no. 8 (2000): 26.
jOURNAL OF AMERlCAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 19, NO.1 (WINTER 2007)
NEGLECTED PLAYSCRIPTS, HIDDEN TALENT: THE
VAUDEVILLE PLAYLET
ALAN R. HAVIG
Research published in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a reli-
able guide to the subjects which theatre scholars deem worthy of study.
Since its inaugural issue in the spring of 1989, this publication has fea-
tured articles on a variety of stage, ftlm, and even radio presentations, in
many of which authors assess the roles of race, gender, and sexual iden-
tity in theatrical contexts. Readers of the journal find analyses of the
"legitimate" theatre and some of its key figures, including David Belasco,
Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Mrs. Leslie Carter, Lillian Hellman,
Sam Shepard, Arthur Miller, and Lanford Wilson. Articles which treat the
Little Theatre movement of the early twentieth century and the Great
Depression era's Federal Theatre Project remind us that dissatisfaction
with Broadway's commercialism and artistic conservatism has stimulated
innovation from within the creative community. Analyses of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century gothic plays, the Ten, Twent', Thirt' Theatres
which presented popular melodramas in the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, the U.S.O. shows of the Second World War, and musical
theatre also have appeared in the ]ADT.I Missing from the Journal's
impressive scholarly contributions, as well as from most overviews of
American theatre history, is the playlet, vaudeville's version of the one-act
play which a small army of authors created, and performers brought to
life, on hundreds of stages during the first quarter of the twentieth cen-
tury. The goal of this essay is to call attention to and suggest the research
potential of this rarely used and largely unknown category of American
playscripts.
Later generations recall vaudeville's singers and dancers, animal
acts, acrobats, and the stand-up comedians who transported their brand
of verbal and physical slapstick to radio and early television, while suf-
fering memory loss regarding this entertainment form's version of per-
The author wishes to thank Dr. David Wigdor, formerly Assistant Chief of the
Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, for reading a draft of this article and
offering helpful suggestions on its content.
I The journal's table of contents is available online:
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/journals/JADT.
34 HAV!G
formance storytelling.2 The neglect of playlets by scholars probably
reflects a restricted knowledge of this body of ephemeral stage literature
rather than an act of deliberate rejection. With that in mind, the first sec-
tion of this essay attempts to provide essential information about the
genre plqylet by distinguishing it from two other abbreviated dramatic
forms which flourished during the early twentieth century, the fine art
one-act play and the vaudeville sketch. Part two suggests what researchers
may expect to discover in the work of talented "playlet playwrights"
through a case study of authors Ethel Clifton and Brenda Fowler.3 Part
three offers information about locating surviving playlet scripts today.
I
By the 1890s, the American theatre had experienced more than a half-
century of audience fragmentation and differentiation of product. The
early nineteenth-century urban theatre which had served up a variety of
entertainment forms in the same building to a heterogeneous audience,
by around 1850 had given way to specialized presentations in separate
venues to more homogeneous crowds. In a rapidly-growing nation (as
measured both geographically and in population size and diversity) min-
strelsy, ethnic theatre, burlesque, vaudeville (both small- and big-time),
tent shows, showboats, resident and itinerant stock companies, melodra-
2
Anthony Slide, The Vaudevillians: A Dictionary of Vaudeville Performers (Westport,
CT: Arlington House, 1981 ), summarizes the careers of dozens of professionals, none of
whom was a featured performer or an author of vaudeville's one-act plays. John E.
Dimeglio, Vaudeville USA. (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular
Press, 1973), focuses on the culture of vaudeville from the performers' perspective, with
no treatment of vaudeville's storytelling devices, the playlet and sketch. Douglas Gilbert,
Amencan Vaudeville: Its Life and Times (New York: Dover, 1963 (1940)), reserves one chap-
ter out of rwenty-seven for "Sketch Writers and Players," (357-365). Robert W Snyder,
The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), includes a good discussion of one playlet (114-17). Written at the
peak of vaudeville's success, Caroline Caffm's, Vaudeville (New York: Mitchell Kennerley,
1914), includes a chapter on "Plays and Sketches" (115-133). M. Alison Kibler, Rank
Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarcf?y in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1999), discusses a few playlets in chapter 3: "Ladies of Rank; The Elinore
Sisters' Ethnic Comedy." Albert F. McLean, Amencan Vaudeville as Ritual (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 165-92 presents the only attempt in the literature to
construct a comprehensive interpretation of the playlet.
3 The phrase is Edgar Allan Woolf's, quoted in Bret Page, Writingjor Vaudeville,
volume in The Writers Library, J. Berg Esenwein, ed. (Springfield: Home Correspondence
School Publishers, 1915), 154.
NEGLECfED PLAYSCRIPTS, HIDDEN T ALENT
35
rna, the legitimate or "regular" theatre, and eventually, also, university the-
atres, brought live performances of all sorts to nationwide audiences.
Entertainment customers, at least in population centers, were free to
select the intellectually-challenging or banal, the morally strict or profane
and salacious, the feminized ("refined" vaudeville) or masculinized (con-
cert saloons and burlesque), and the innovative or merely formulaic, in
their stage presentations. Such impressive variety was appropriate in a
self-proclaimed democratic-capitalist culture which valorized choice. A
late-century observer might reasonably have guessed that the process of
differentiation by educational background, wealth, gender, ethnic and
racial identity, religion, and region (the Civil War was a fresh and power-
ful memory) could go no farther.
4
With the birth of the Little Theatre movement in the second
decade of the twentieth century, however, the one-act play became a new
focus of the continuing debate over hierarchy in stage storytelling.
Experimenting with the one-act play in the movement's early years, Little
Theatre companies not only excoriated the commercial, artistically con-
servative regular theatre epitomized by New York's Broadway, but also
carefully separated their serious and sophisticated one-acts from vaude-
ville's playlets and sketches. Simultaneously, proponents of the playlet dis-
tinguished their version of brief drama from both the Little Theatres'
one-acts and the slapstick sketch which frequented the stages not only of
vaudeville, but of burlesque and other venues as well. Assured of an
audience and unconcerned with aesthetics, custodians of the comedy
sketch ignored the other two entertainment forms. The emergence of
serious one-act plays and persistence of sketches persuaded those who
wrote and produced playlets to define them and identify their virtues.
Their case for the playlet provides modern scholars an understanding of
what this storytelling device was and was not.
4
Historians have documented changes in nineteenth-century theatre offerings,
venues, and audiences in numerous works, among the more important of which are:
David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1968), 46-75; Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show
in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 3-21; Robert C.
Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1991), 42-78; Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American
Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), passim.; Richard
Butsch, The Making of Amencan A udiences: From Stage to Television, 1750-1990 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), Introduction and chapters 1-5.
36
HAVJG
Students of American theatre history have access to numerous
informative surveys of the Little Theatre movement.s Milestones in the
development of that earnest effort to reform the American theatre were
the appearance of the Little Theatre of Chicago in 1912, the founding of
the Washington Square Players in 1914, and the Provincetown Players a
year later. By 1920, Mary C. Henderson writes, "there were more than a
thousand little theatres throughout the land."
6
Important to this essay's argument was the tendency of the most
influential Little Theatre groups to utilize original one-act plays to
demonstrate that Broadway and the American theatre were not synony-
mous. Experimenting with new modes of presentation and previously
unexplored subject matter, the pioneering groups "have in a measure
brought the one-act play again to life," observed Edward Goodman,
director of the Washington Square Players, in 1917.7 By one accounting,
Goodman's company had "produced no less than nineteen meritorious
one-act plays" during its 1916-1917 season.s Margaret Gardner Mayorga,
the first academician to study and anthologize one-act plays which Little
Theatre playwrights created, concluded in 1920 that "more often than
not these companies produce the one-act play" rather than full-length
ones.9
As Little Theatre groups shaped the one-act play into a vibrant
new art form between 1912 and 1920, right down the street, figuratively
if not always literally, a vaudeville theatre included a playlet on its bill.
5 Recent studies include Adele Heller, "The New Theatre," in 1915, The Cultural
Moment, Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1991), 217-32; Mary C. Henderson, "Against Broadway: The Rise of the Art Theatre in
America (1900-1920): A Photographic Essay," in ibid., 233-49; Dorothy Ann Chansky,
"Composing Ourselves: The American Little Theatre Movement and the Construction of
A New Audience, 1912-1925" (Ph.D. Diss., New York University, 1997); Chansky,
"Theatre Arls Month!J and the Construction of the Modern American Theatre Audience,"
]ADT 10, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 51-75.
6 Henderson, "Against Broadway," 239.
7 Edward Goodman, "Why the One Act Play?," Theatre 25 Qune 1917): 327. See
Henderson, "Against Broadway," 237, on the Little Theatre movement's innovative spirit.
8 "'The Old Lady Shows Her Medals'- A Salute in One Act by James Barrie,"
Cu"ent Opinion 63 Quly 1917): 23.
9 Margaret Gardner Mayorga, "Preface," Representative One-Act Plqys by Amencan
Authors (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1920), viii; see also Helen Louise Cohen,
"Introduction: The Workmanship of the One-Act Play," One-Act Plays by Modern Authors
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934), 2.
NEGLECTED PLAYSCRIPTS, HIDDEN TALENT 37
Simultaneously with the one-act play's emergence as an instrument of
change in the legitimate theatre, vaudeville authors and producers
brought their brand of diminutive dramas to full flower. Interestingly,
although a small number of fine arts one-acts found their way onto the
vaudeville circuits, neither creative community wanted much to do with
the other. As Mayorga perceived in 1920, "the vaudeville managers are
quite as insistent as are the managers of the Little Theatres" that the
playlet and the one-act play were quite different creations. Vaudeville was
"extremely wary of the intrusion" of one-acts; Little Theatres "have had
small desire to produce ... playlets."IO
Intending to elevate the one-act play above mass entertainment,
many commentators explored the similarity of serious one-act dramas
and short stories which aspired to literary status. One of these was
Clayton Meeker Hamilton, a lecturer in drama at Columbia University
and a New York theatre critic. The brief play, he wrote in 1913, "shows
the same relation to the full length play as the short story shows to the
novel." Both "produce a single dramatic effect with the greatest econo-
my of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis." Serious one-
act plays and short stories are "complete, concise, and self-sustaining,"
Hamilton concluded, and require "an extraordinary focus of imagina-
tion."11 Holbrook Blinn, who as director of New York's Princess Theatre
produced only one-act plays, pursued the same analogy. Most one-acts
"represent a tension or a mood that could no more be sustained through
three acts than you could hold the spell of The Pit and the Pendulum
through a novel." In addition, performers could not achieve the "inten-
sive kind of acting" demanded by a one-act throughout a three-act play.12
Goodman of the Washington Square Players refused to place the label
"playlet" on the one-act play. To do so assumed, according to him, "that
when it or its author grows up it will become a 'full-length drama."' Just
as "we have realized that the short-story is an art form in itself, not a
novel stunted in its growth," Goodman explained, "we must learn that
10 Mayorga, "Preface," vii-viii.
11 Clayton Meeker Hamilton, "The One-Act Play in America," Bookman 37
(Ap.ril 1913), 188-89; in 1944 radio writer True Boardman made a similar comparison:
"the narrative counterpart of the half-hour original radio drama is the short story." Cited
in Harry Heuser, "Etherized Victorians: Drama, Narrative, and the American Radio Play,
1929-1954" (Ph.D. Diss., City University of New York, 2004), 101.
12 David H. Wallace, "Holbrook Blinn and One-Act Plays," N ew York Dramatic
Mirror 70 (17 September 1913): 3. The Mirror hereafter cited as DM.
38 HAVIG
... a real one-act play is fulllength.13
These champions of the one-act play judged vaudeville theatres
as settings hostile to the arts. Goodman singled out the variety bill itself
as the reason. Incongruous performances - jugglers followed by a magi-
cian, who gave way to dance partners - "tend to induce in the spectator
a nervous inattention which each 'act' has to overcome by main force."
He implied that few one-act plays could do that.t4 Hamilton agreed that
"trained dogs and song and dance 'artists' ... reveal no relation whatso-
ever to the art of the drama," but he also charged that vaudeville's man-
agers misunderstood their audiences. Vaudeville customers may be "more
intelligent than the show," and therefore capable of appreciating the new
one-act plays.
1
5 Blinn doubted that. "The matinee girl, whose sweet inno-
cence must not be disturbed," controlled vaudeville content, he main-
tained, severely narrowing one-act playwrights' "choice of subject."16
Playwright Alice Gerstenberg experienced the frustrations these
men identified. Returning to her native Chicago after graduating from
Bryn Mawr College, Gerstenberg wrote for, acted in, and promoted ama-
teur theatre in the city that was the "home of the little theatre move-
ment's earliest stirrings."
17
Maurice Brown accepted her as a performer in
his Chicago Little Theatre company in 1912. Gerstenberg founded the
Chicago Junior League Theatre for children in 1921 and created the
Playwright's Theatre of Chicago the following year.
1
8 Her most highly-
regarded play was Overtones (1913), a one-act which pioneered the appli-
cation of Freudian psychology to drama. Edward Goodman directed the
1
3 Goodman, "Why the One Act Play?," 327.
1
4
Ibid.
15 Hamilton, "One Act Play in America," 184-85.
!6 Cited in Eva E. vom Baur, "A Theatre of Thrills," Theatre 17 Qune 1913): 186.
17 Stuart). Hecht, "The Plays of Alice Gerstenberg: Cultural Hegemony in the
American Little Theatre," Journal of Popular Culture 26 (Summer 1992): 1.
!8 Biographical sources include Who! Who In America, 15 (1928-1929), Albert
Nelson Marquis, ed. (Chicago: Marquis, 1928), 854; Debra Young, "Alice Gerstenberg,"
in Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary, Alice M. Robinson, Vera
Mowry Roberts, and Milly S. Barranger, ed. (New York: Greenwood, 1989), 325-26;
Yvonne Shafer, American Women Piqywrights, 1900-1950 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 241 -
54; "Introduction," Amencan Plqys of the New Woman, Keith Newlin, ed. (Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 2000), 17-22.
NEGLECTED PLAYSCRJPTS, HIDDEN TALENT 39
play's New York debut by the Washington Square Players in 1915.
1
9
When New York drama critics praised Overtones and, as its author
put it, "because the play itself was weirdly new," vaudeville managers
showed an interest in the work and Gerstenberg agreed to its booking. "I
was a lamb in the game," however, she admitted several years later.
Vaudeville theatre managers had considerable control over the makeup of
bills that played their houses, and it took little time for Gerstenberg to
discover that some of these men were unable to understand her innova-
tive drama which was long on sophisticated dialogue and lacked stage
action. They and other managers judged the merit of acts "according to
noise," Gerstenberg decided, taking their cues from the "illiterate, lowest
twenty-five per cent of the public" which shouted down performances it
disliked. Vaudeville, the creator of Overtones insisted, ought to seek the
approval of society's most literate cohort, and educate other patrons up
to their level. Vaudeville's treatment of her The Pot-Boiler (1916) was an
even more disillusioning experience. Unreliable casts-"the leading mao
has decided to quit," a booker informed her-paltry royalty payments,
and changes in the script left Gerstenberg "disgusted, disheartened." In
1922 she reported that while a butchered version of Pot Boiler continued
to tour vaudeville, her original play had found favor in university English
departments and Little Theatres; "it is the amateurs who have sustained
my faith."20
The number of Little Theatre one-act plays which toured vaude-
ville circuits was small; and surely most of them appeared in the larger
urban theatres of the Keith-Albee circuit in the northeast and middle
west and the Orpheum circuit in the west, not in small-town venues.
Scattered evidence suggests that vaudeville's response to short fine-arts
dramas was mixed. Some reviewers of acts and managers of theatres
echoed Gerstenberg's conclusion that Little Theatre productions had
failed to find a comfortable place on the popular stage. Other observers,
however, reported a more positive reception. An unsigned weekly report
to the circuit's New York headquarters from the management of B.F.
Keith's Theatre in Philadelphia accurately described the innovative story-
19 Young, ''Alice Gerstenberg," 325; Mary Maddock notes that in this play
"Gersten berg introduced the split personality to the American srage, thus initiating a sig-
nificant trend in twentieth cenrury American drama." See her ~ l i c e Gerstenberg's
Overtones: The Demon in the Doll," Modem Drama 37 (1994): 474; Marilyn J. Atlas,
"Innovation in Chicago: Alice Gersten berg's Psychological Drama," Midwestern Miscellaf!Y
10 (1982): 59-68.
20 Gerstenberg told her tale in "Vaudeville and the Playwright," Drama 13
(December 1922): 87-89.
40
HAVIG
line of Overtones, admitting that to appreciate it customers must pay "the
closest attention" to this "talky" production. But the writer added that
the all-female cast performed "very well," and that a January, 1917 audi-
ence awarded Gerstenberg's work "a liberal hand at the finish."2t One
month earlier R. G. Larsen, manager of Keith's Boston theatre, had
described Overtones as "well played and beautifully staged," but doubted
"if vaudeville audiences in Boston care for this sort of thing." The play's
complexity was an obstacle to its "popular appeal."22 H.T. Jordan of
Keith's Philadelphia reported in mid-1916 that his vaudeville audience
had responded well to a local little theatre company's presentation of a
one-act play. Familiar actors may have put vaudeville customers at ease as
they presented a fine art drama.23 Later Jordan wrote that "The Age of
Reason," which the Washington Square Players had introduced in New
York, "was very well received here."24
Back in New York Variery, the vaudeville industry's most influ-
ential voice by the 191 Os, posed as the common man's cultural defender.
"To the proletariat," reviewer "Jolo'' announced in 1916, "The Age of
Reason" "is unique twaddle." In 1918 the paper's founder and publisher,
"Sime" Silverman, heaped sarcasm on another play, The Best Sellers. Sime
witnessed the performance during a festival of one-acts presented in
vaudeville's own Palace Theatre, but it had originated with a Little
Theatre group in Manhattan which "may be another of these elevated
forehead [i.e., highbrow] affairs." People who find value in "such pieces
... must wear high hats" [i.e., were patrons of elite culture], Sime con-
cluded. The play "is either travesty, comedy or burlesque, or nothing. It
depends upon what kind of dinner you have had."2S With more restraint
than combative journalists could muster, George Kelly carried vaude-
ville's animus against Little Theatres into the legitimate. Based on his
playlet, Mrs. Ritter Appears (1916), Kelly's three act play, The Torch-Bearers
(1922), ridiculed the theatre's amateur aesthetes with greater subtlety than
21 Report of 29 January, 1917, Report Book 19, 33, Keith-Albee Collection,
Special Collections Department, Main Library, University of Iowa, Iowa City. Hereafter
cited as KAC.
22 Report for the week of 25 December 1916, Report Book 19, 12, KAC.
23 Report of 3 July 1916, Report Book 18, 185, KAC.
24 Report of 23 October 1916, Report Book 18, 237, KAC.
25 Review of The Age of Reason in Varie9, 1 September 1916, 16; of The Best
Sellers in ibid., 5 July 1918, 14.
NEGLECTED PLAYSCRIPTS, HIDDEN TALENT 41
Sime's apparent anger and blunt insults.26
Sime Silverman and his "mugs" (Variety's reporters and critics)
preferred the simple vaudeville sketch to the heady one-act play. But
other vaudeville professionals who, in the 1910s built a case for the
playlet as a serious contribution to American short drama, judged its
"elder half-brother" the sketch as forgettable entertainment.2
7
Sketches
were older than playlets, constituting, for example, the third part of mid-
nineteenth-century minstrel shows.28 They also found a place in the male-
only drinking and amusement venues known as concert halls or variety
theatres. After the Civil War, from New York's Bowery to San Francisco's
Barbary Coast, these establishments featured "roughhouse turns and
afterpieces ... smuttily 'blued' to amuse the tosspots, strumpets, dark
alley lads, and slummers who in those years made up variety audiences."
29
The founders of refined, big-time vaudeville had removed the smut from
the sketches which played in their theatres well before the turn of the
century. But in the opinion of the playlets' proponents, sanitized sketch-
es retained weaknesses, artistic rather than moral. Two examples of early
twentieth-century vaudeville sketches will demonstrate these liabilities, as
well as suggest their strengths as comic amusements.
Junie McCree, born Gonsalvo Macirillo in Toledo, Ohio, two
months before the Civil War ended, was one of New York's busiest
sketch writers in the half-dozen years before his death in 1918. In the
1890s, he had apprenticed as an actor and writer of song lyrics for the
musical burlesques that a resident stock company presented at San
Francisco's Bella Union Theatre, one of the West Coast's oldest and most
successful variety theatres.30 In less than twenty minutes, a McCree
26 George Kelly, Mrs Ritter Appears, A Cometfy in One-Act (New York: Samuel
French, 1916, 1943, 1964); The Torch-Bearers, A Satirical Cometfy in Three Acts, revised edi-
tion (New York: Samuel French, 1924).
27 The phrase is Brett Page's in his Writingfor Vaudeville, 146.
28 Toll, Blacking-Up, 51-57.
29 Cited in Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 6; see also 10, 38, 61.
30 McCree obituaries are in Variery, 18 January, 1918, 23; and New York Times,
14 January 1918, 11; a more recent overview of his life (which includes an incorrect birth-
date) is in Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, Don B. Wilmeth and Tice L. Miller, ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 293. On the Bella Union Theatre see
John Scott McElhaney, "The Professional Theatre in San Francisco, 1880-1889" (Ph.D.
Diss., Stanford University, 1972), 321, 327-30, 335-36; Edmond M. Gagey, The San
Francisco Stage: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 13, 31, 71-75.
42 HAVJG
vaudeville sketch depicted a humorous "incident" or "episode," terms he
often included in subtitles. His sketches resembled static snapshots of
characters interacting, rather than dynamic narratives which carried audi-
ences from the introduction of a problem to its resolution. Among his
titles were "Good-f?Je
1
Bqys
11
: Marital Episode (1913) and 'The Matinee Girls
11
:
Satiric Revue of Theatre Lobry Incidents (1916).31 To say that McCree's
sketches lacked depth of plot or the slightest character development rec-
ognizes his intention: to manufacture an entertainment vehicle filled with
ethnic and gender stereotyping and overflowing with numbskull comedy
and slapstick of both the verbal and physical variety. McCree's "Hebrewing
and Shewooing
11
: A Character Sketch (1909), will illustrate his methods.32
By means of a newspaper ad which displays her photograph,
Anna Himmelspeck, "a young and experienced widow," seeks another
husband. Isadore Zizzlebaum, a male gold-digger whose name "sounds
like a sky rocket" to her, answers the ad in person. Learning that two of
her three husbands died in recent months, Isado.re asks, "vos dey sober
when they married you?" "No," Mrs. Himmelspeck admits, but "as soon
as dey got sober dey took poison." Although the players performed in a
full-stage interior set, their dialogue was that of a pair of comedians
interacting before the curtain (a comedy two-act), each setting up the
other's one-liners. Isadore is a pawn broker who deals in second-hand
goods. "Dots der reason I vant to marry a vidow." Alert to business
opportunities, he offers "twenty dollars on your dress." "Veil upon my
word," she responds. "No, upon your dress," he f1res back. A photograph
of her grandmother and a dog elicits the question, "which one is your
grandmother?" In the sketch's closing minutes physical comedy domi-
nates. Isadore's insults drive Anna to summon the police who, she
demands, must arrest a "desperate character." Not without reason the
officer takes her away while Isadore dances a jig. When the officer returns
to arrest him, Anna dances. The cop finally decides that both of these
crazies should go to the precinct station, prompting Anna and Isadore to
join in beating him, tearing his coat, and kicking him out of the apart-
ment. Following this bonding experience the happy couple moves about
the room to strains of the wedding march. Neither has expressed a rea-
3
1
Library of Congress, U.S. Copyright Office, Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted
in the United States, 1870 to 1916, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1918), vol. 2, 3244-45.
32 Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Copyright deposits, 1901-1944, class
D dramas/Microfilm #20,849, Reel377, D16525, 10 August 1909. Cited hereafter as class D
dramas, either microfilm project #20,301 or# 20,849, with a reel number, aD number, and
copyright date for each script cited. See below for a discussion of the copyright deposits.
NEGLECfED PLAYSCRIPTS, HIDDEN TALENT 43
son why they should marry, but clearly these people deserve each other.
If audience members took anything larger than useable quips and happy
memories of chaotic action away' from the performance, it could have
been that marriage is the biggest joke of all.
Roger Imhof, born in Rock Island, Illinois, a decade after
McCree's birth in Ohio, also wrote what were clearly vaudeville sketches,
not playlets. Unlike McCree, Imhof played the lead roles in his popular
Irish sketches from shortly after the turn of the century into the late
1920s. His spouse, Marcelle Correne, joined Imhof in the three-person
cast of productions like "In A Pest House," in which they toured the
vaudeville circuits from at least 1917 to 1928.33
Imhof portrayed Michael Casey, a peddler. His horse's death
forces Casey to stop overnight in a broken-down rural hotel. Welcoming
him, Violet the clerk says, "I can give you a room and a bath for two dol-
lars." She considers Casey's answer "pretty fresh": ~ n d how much is the
room if I take my own bath?" Having accepted his payment, Violet
instructs Casey to "walk this way" to the room. "Oh, I wouldn't walk like
that," he quips, "I'm not bowlegged." Noticing holes in his room's base-
boards, Casey suspects that he will learn something about rats "before I
get out of here." The porter and caretaker Hank stores the hotel's coal in
Casey's bed. Hank wears a firefighter's suit as he tends the building's
stoves so he can maintain "a uniform heat." Casey mugs the audience
with wise-cracks at every turn, endures constant interruptions, ducks
through a door whose top one-third fails to open - and finally has had
enough of the hotel's "pests," two and four-legged. He redeems his
money from the cash register and escapes. The sketch has raised no ideas
of note, resolved no problem, altered no relationships among characters.
It is no more, but also no less, than a scene, humorous visually as well as
audibly.
Bret Page, in his Writing for Vaudeville (1915), readily acknowl-
edged that without sketches, vaudeville would have had no playlets. The
more complex playlet, that is, whose brief life ran its course during the
fifteen years from approximately 1908 to 1923, evolved from the more
elemental, almost uniformly comedic sketch. Page generalized that the
sketch "points no moral, draws no conclusion, and sometimes it might
end quite as effectively anywhere before the place in the action at which
it does terminate. It is built for entertainment purposes only, and fur-
33 Obituaries of Imhof are in New York Times, 18 April 1958, 23; and Van.e!J
Obituaries, vol. 5, 23 April 1958, n.p. In the summary of the sketch I have used "Short Version
of the 'Pest House,'" n.d., MS121, Box 3, Item 14G, Roger Imhof Vaudeville Collection,
Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence.
44 HAVIG
thermore, for entertainment purposes that end the moment the sketch
ends." Although the sketch's achievement fell short of the playlet's, which
accomplished what the sketch could not, the teacher assured his unseen
students that "a good sketch is decidedly worth writing."34 Others who
sought recognition of the playlet as a distinctive type of vaudeville per-
formance agreed with Page that playlets should join sketches on vaude-
ville bills as representational performances of different character. The
playlet's proponents were not alarmed by the physical violence that his-
torian Susan Glenn has singled out as "a hallmark of vaudeville comedy,"
an example of which is Anna's and Isadore's pummeling of the law offi-
cer.3s Sketch humor was outmoded rather than socially harmful, as author
Edgar Allan Woolf suggested when he characterized its traditional
"horseplay" as unsophisticated. Another successful playlet writer, Willard
Mack, affirmed in 1915 that with playlets now available, "vaudeville has
passed the stage of slap-stick humor."36
II
Unlike sketches, by the 1910s playlets characteristically employed con-
trolled rather than riotous stage business and conveyed an understated
humor through concise, carefully-edited dialogue. Some playlets which
were not comedies honored vaudeville's comedy imperative-the rule of
thumb that "audiences ... above all ... want to laugh"-by including
lighter moments.37 Taylor Granville's The System (1912), a nationally pop-
ular vaudeville depiction of police corruption in New York written when
newspapers covered a spectacular case of one law officer's betrayal of
public trust, is an example. The playlet shows Lieutenant Tim Dugan
framing Billy Bradley, an innocent ex-con, for a jewel robbery, while lust-
ing after the attractive Goldie, Bill's "gal." Serious stuff, but Granville and
two authorial collaborators, one of whom was Junie McCree, laced the
dialogue with ironic humor rendered in slang. A police inspector asks
who committed the burglary. Goldie confesses: "There was three of us,
me, Jessie James, and Christopher Columbus." The inspector tells Billy
34 Page, Writing/or Vaudevilk, 147, 150. The suggested chronology is mine, not Page's.
35 Susan Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots if Motkrn Feminism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 41.
36 Edgar Allan Woolf, "The One-Act Play," DM, 16 October 1912, 3; "Willard
Mack on the Vaudeville Playlet," DM, 3 March 1915, 19.
37 Carleton Macy, "The Sketch in Vaudeville," Variety, 12 December 1908, 42.
NEGLECTED PLAYSCRJPTS, HIDDEN T ALENT 45
that Dugan "bears you no malice." Billy agrees: "he thinks so much of
me, that if he saw me drowning, he'd bring me a glass of water."38
But while writers like Granville and McCree accommodated the
industry's felt need to offer light entertainment and an optimistic outlook,
others directly challenged that success formula, some even embracing
controversial stances on public issues. Those playlets which differed most
clearly from sketches gave frank treatment to current issues and person-
al relationships. Reviewing vaudeville's 1914-1915 season, New York's
Dramatic Mirror announced: "The ... playlet has grown in latitude and
advanced in treatment." Noting the "avalanche of war playlets" which
had poured onto vaudeville stages in the months following the outbreak
of fighting in Europe, the paper's vaudeville editor, Frederick James
Smith, clearly disapproved of many of these dramas. But he conceded
that in its treatment of the world's biggest news event, "vaudeville was
broadening ... its dramatic taste. The day of the old slapstick sketch has
passed for all time."39 A year earlier, in his evaluation of the 1913-1914
season, Smith praised the appearance of John Willard's dark, murderous
melodrama The Green Beetle, and Richard Harding Davis's mystery playlet,
Blackmail, neither of which allowed comic moments.40 In many ways,
including his college education, George Middleton was not a typical
author of one-act plays designed for vaudeville, which may be why he
expressed the hope that playlets as well as one-acts written for Little
Theatres had the potential to effect social change. Sharing his wife, Fola
LaFollette's, women's rights activism, Middleton believed that "the femi-
nist movement will have a tremendous effect on the elrama," presenting
even to vaudeville audiences "a new type of man ... to meet the demands
of a new type of self-reliant womanhood."41
If transforming American gender relations or ending war was a
tall order for twenty-minute dramas, other authors consciously sought to
introduce thoughts of a lesser order into their vaudeville stories. As
Edgar Allan Woolf proclaimed in 1912, "I try to make every playlet mean
something. Even if it is a farce, I want to feel that I have given the audi-
ence an idea in addition to some fun."
4
2 Similarly, actor Delavan Howland
38 Page printed "The System" in Writingfor Vaudeville, 537-73; 545 and 547 quoted.
39 DM, 12 May 1915, 16.
40 DM, 8July 1914,16.
41 Arthur Edwin !<rows, "The Feminist Movement as a Dramatic Theme"
(based on an interview with Middleton), DM, 20 May 1914, 3.
42 Woolf, "The One-Act Play," 3.
46 HAVIG
advised vaudeville's booking agents and theatre managers to schedule acts
which conveyed ideas to customers. "'Make them think' as much as you
can while amusing them ... if you are looking for future patronage."
4
3
Page endorsed the growing consensus in 1915: "the most important ele-
ment that has developed in the playlet of today is the problem, or
theme." Aspiring authors must construct their dramas around "a single
problem which predominates." He suggested that "a more artistic form"
of vaudeville's playlet had emerged, with literature's short story as its
model. "This age has been styled the age of the short-story and of vaude-
ville-it is, indeed, the age of the playlet."44
The work of playlet playwrights Ethel Clifton and Brenda
Fowler deserves greater attention than several pages can give it. But even
a brief look at several playlets that they, and Clifton alone, wrote begin-
ning in the mid-1910s, will convey both the creative possibilities and lim-
itations of the vaudeville playlet at high-tide. The two women were sis-
ters, born in the United States during the 1880s of British actors who
toured with stock companies. Both girls spent some time in California as
children, and as young adults found other outlets for their theatrical tal-
ents than vaudeville's one-act storytelling device. By the turn of the cen-
tury, Clifton had put in full seasons with several stock companies and was
living in the New York metropolitan area. She displayed her versatility in
1915 when she acted in a film and wrote and performed in a full-length
play, at the same time that she was deeply involved in playlet production.
Between 1906 and 1923, Clifton, occasionally with her sister, copyright-
ed nineteen one-act plays for vaudeville. 45 After a career performing on
Broadway, Fowler found success as a supporting actor in Depression-era
films, most notably Will Rogers's Judge Priest (1934).46 In the 191 Os the sis-
ters' collaboration on several playlets attracted press attention. Noting
4
3 Delavan Howland, "'I ntelligent Vaudeville': I ts Commercial Value," DM, 14
October 1914,5.
44 Page, Wntingfor Vaudeville, 154, 155, 151.
45 An advertisement in DM, 21 June 1902, 22, refers to one of Clifton's seasons
in stock; photographs of her appear in DM, 4 December 1915, 18, and 8 July 1916, 16.
Newspaper clippings in rhe Robinson Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Collection
(hereafter cited as BRTC), Nev. York Public Library for rhe Performing Arts at Lincoln
Center, series 3, Yol. 336, provide information on Clifton. These include unidentified clip-
ping, 13 February 1906, n.p.; and Columbus Dispatch, 25 January 1916, n.p.
46 New York Times Directory rf the Film (New York: Arno Press/Random House,
1971), 555; various articles in rhe Brenda Fowler clipping file (BRTC) contain tidbits of
information on her career.
NEGLECTED PLAYSCRJPTS, HIDDEN TALENT 47
that some of their creations toured major circuits with established stars,
a New Orleans paper commented: "The success of these two young
women has been one of the most emphatic of the 1915-1916 vaudeville
season." The Milwaukee News termed Clifton and Fowler "the wonder-
authors of the 1916 vaudeville season."
47
Clifton and Fowler creations featured large and serious themes
which were of an entirely different order than those addressed in vaude-
ville sketches. Their most gripping stories examined families in crisis and
wartime suffering, themes which brought a hint of literary realism to an
entertainment medium more comfortable with beautiful women, a rous-
ing song, and a kennel of trained dogs, than with tragedy. Early in the war
year 1918,]. Hartley Manners characterized "reality" as "the curse of the
modern theatre." With the legitimate drama in mind, he condemned "the
play of indecent suggestion, marital infidelity, and the exploiting of
woman's fraility."48 Clifton and Fowler tread on this dangerous ground.
Their women were hardly frail and as playlet authors these women did
more than suggest what Manners and no doubt others considered inde-
cent. Yet for all the realism with which Clifton alone and the sisters
together treated sexuality and the human costs of war early in the post-
Victorian era, the resolutions of their taut plot conflicts often fell back
on sentimental reconciliations and plot manipulations drawn from melo-
drama. Only rarely did Clifton, and most other playlet authors, for exam-
ple, challenge one of vaudeville's strongest taboos: that the serious treat-
ment of death would not "go over" in entertainment empires dominated
by uplift and comedy.
In 1915, the Clifton-Fowler partnership created The Decision of
Governor Loc/ee.
4
9 In its exposure of political and moral corruption, and
portrait of a reform governor whose goals included the elimination of
child labor, the establishment of a living wage for women workers, and
the suppression of prostitution, the drama reflected one impulse of
America's early twentieth-century progressive movement. Warren Locke,
the popular chief executive of a "western state," seems assured of reelec-
tion. While he is an innovator in public policy, the governor is a tradi-
47 Clippings from New Orleans Item, 5 February 1916, n.p.; Milwaukee News, 14
May 1916, n.p., both in Locke Collection, series 3, volume 336, BRTC.
48 J. Hartley Manners, ''The Freedom of the Dramatist," New York Times, 13
January 1918, 6.
49 The original title registered with the U.S. Copyright Office was "The
Governor," class D dramas/Microfilm #20,849, reel 644, 041526, 18 August 1915.
48 HAVIG
tionalist in his family life. Warren shelters his wife Lillian from the dirty
world of public life represented by political boss Dan Murphy, "one of
the festering sores on American politics." Attending to domestic duties
while shunning public roles, Lillian is Warren's "pure spring of inspira-
tion." The couple's only disappointment is that they have no children.
Shortly before election day, Murphy demands to see the gover-
nor. His purpose is blackmail. If Warren does not withdraw from the
campaign, the boss will publicly charge that Lillian committed an
immoral act. Nine years earlier, Warren, a poor but hard-working lawyer,
became critically ill. To meet their medical expenses Lillian took a job in
Boss Murphy's office. The lecherous politician coveted her, but Lillian
resisted his demands until she was desperate. Finally, in return for $1,000
which paid for her husband's recovery in a sanitarium, the young wife
accompanied the boss to Washington, D.C., where she slept with him.
The governor's immediate response to his wife's admission that the story
is true is harsh and unthinking: he condemns her immorality, deplores the
lie that they have lived, and grabs a gun with which to kill himself.
Lillian's revelation that she is pregnant with their ftrst child
instantly rescues the couple's relationship. The authors' melodramatic
magic also restores Warren as the crusading reformer. "We are going to
fight again, for my life, for your honor, and for him," the "Little
Governor" that Lillian carries. With a flash of insight, Warren calculates
that the Mann "white slave" Act went into effect on the day before
Lillian's trip to the nation's capital. If Murphy does not leave the state, he
tells the boss in a phone call, Warren will have him charged with trans-
porting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. The boss, who
surely has committed more serious offences and who might enjoy humil-
iating Lillian on the witness stand, complies. The governor, his "Saint
Lillian" now restored to her pedestal, and the child they eagerly await, will
be a loving family, a model for the state's citizens to emulate.
Clifton and Fowler's The Saint and the Sinner (1914), which toured
successfully in 1917, spoke guite frankly, for the mid-1910s, about adul-
tery and out-of-wedlock births.so The managers of big-time vaudeville
circuits, known for their aversion to sexually suggestive material, may
have accepted the drama's realism because of the safe, traditional solu-
tion which ended it. The authors, with purposeful irony, assigned the
label "saint" to District Attorney Trueman Van Osterman's wife Ada, and
"sinner" to his former secretary, Janet Page, now his mistress and the
50 Class D dramas/Microf1irn #20,849, reel513, D38077, 10 September 1914.
Reviews of the playlet are in Variery, 23 February 1917, 12; and Nellie Revell, ''Acts and
Artistes in Vaudeville," Theatre 25 (April 1917): 224.
NEGLECTED PLAYSCRJPTS, HJDDEN TALENT 49
mother of their child. By the conclusion of the 20-minute production
Janet clearly is the actual saint, for she alone of the two women genuine-
ly loves Trueman.
Van Osterman, the subject of an emotional confrontation
between his wife and lover, is an off-stage presence rather than a speak-
ing part in the playlet. To force Janet, played by Ethel Clifton, into an
admission of her relationship with Trueman, Ada feeds newspapers the
lie that her prominent husband is near death. As intended, an alarmed
Janet appears at the Van Osterman's New York apartment seeking accu-
rate information about his condition. When Ada confronts Janet with
check stubs and other documents proving that the District Attorney is
supporting her financially, the younger woman admits the relationship,
and then justifies it. Ada, she charges, has been more interested in shop-
ping excursions to Europe than in her husband's career and his desire for
a family. Janet has given him the support and the child that he needed. "I
his friend, THE SINNER, [am] the mother of his child," Janet reveals at
the story's climactic moment. Again a child is the pivot on which a mar-
riage turns and the fulfillment of a male character's private life. Mrs. Van
Osterman declares that she "shall leave immediately for Reno" to seek a
divorce. Audiences could assume that, freed from Ada, Trueman and
Janet will marry.
Ethel Clifton, with minor assistance from her sister, continued to
use families and domestic settings to depict pieces of the vaudeville era's
central tragedy, World War I. Evidence which would reveal her personal
views of modern warfare and American foreign policy is not available.
Whatever they were, however, Clifton's convictions were irrelevant to her
art. As a popular dramatist working in an industry dedicated to pleasing
the public mood of the moment, Ethel Clifton wrote plays which mir-
rored changes in America's wartime roles. Her stories from 1915 and
1916 featured female characters who articulate anti-war positions, as well
as German-Americans who must choose on which side of the hyphen to
place their loyalties. After the United States joined the conflict in April,
191 7, debate on such subjects were absent from Clifton's only wartime
playlet. It unabashedly promoted enlistment in America's armed forces.
Finally, Clifton wrote several playlets in the late 1910s and early 1920s
which focused on war's human wreckage, treating subjects such as the
commemoration of the war's dead and the drug addiction which stalked
the postwar lives of some wounded veterans.
Clifton's and Fowler's The Coward (1915), set in Great Britain, fea-
tured a woman's emotional critique of war.s1 Absent from this drama was
5! Class D dramas/Microfilin #20,849, Reel611, D40667, 15 May 1915.
so HAVIG
a miraculous plot device which reconciled differences, as anti-war senti-
ments prevailed in one family. Also notable is that the labor of four
women brought The Coward to the stage: authors Clifton and Fowler;
Lillian Kingsbury, the star; and Evelyn Blanchard, the playlet's director.
Nell is the wife of factory worker Bill, the mother of their four children,
and now pregnant with another. Her anti-war eloquence seems to issue
both from a feminist-pacifist's ideology, and also from a wife's fear that
Bill's passion to join co-workers already in the army will create unbearable
burdens for her and the youngsters left behind. Bill blames Nell for the
community's perception that he is a coward; worse, their sons will "grow
up to hate and despise me" when they learn the meaning of patriotism.
"I'm goin' tonight Nell," he tells her during dinner. "It's for my kids-for
my country-and for my king."
Nell brushes aside the duty-to-nation appeal. She accuses Bill of
thoughtlessly accepting the government's class-biased propaganda. Our
lords and masters speak of "a workingman's honor ... when they want
you to die for them." But these are the same men who ignored you when
you asked for improved working conditions and a living wage. "They feed
you to the mills- to the mines-they maim you, and mar you, and starve
you, and then when they want food for their cannon they talk of your
HONOR! and you fall for it .... we women are expected to stand by and
say 'GO.' Well I won't." When the local army recruiter brings the news
that Parliament has enacted conscription, thus depriving Bill of any
options, Nell turns to her last resort: she shoots her husband in the hand.
"I've been thinking of it for months. They can't take you now, they can't
take you now," she cries. When the recruiter accuses Bill of maiming him-
self to avoid service, Nell proudly claims responsibility: "take me, lock
me up! I will give your king his next subject, born in a prison cell, because
I would not send its father out to KILL!" "Nell needn't worry," the army
man says to Bill as he slips out the door. "I will report that you are unfit
for service."
Perhaps the most compelling of Clifton's playlets about war's
impact on invidividuallives is The Aftermath (1918), which she wrote with-
out Fowler's collaboration and copyrighted three months before the
armistice of November 11.
5
2 French women suffered as cruelly back
home as their men did in the trenches in Clifton's drama, and infant chil-
dren were the most tragic victims of national hatreds. During "the Hun's"
twenty-month occupation of her village, Joan and other women per-
formed forced labor in the fields, and she gave birth to an ailing son fol-
52 Class D dramas/ Microfilm #20,849, Reel993, D50161, 14 August 1918.
NEGLECfED PLAYSCRJPTS, HIDDEN TALENT 51
lowing repeated rapes. In her anguish this young wife of Vraymond, who
fights for France on a distant front, has considered suicide and infanti-
cide; and when she learns of her husband's imminent return on leave,
Joan begs Father Cartier to take the baby to a nearby convent. Vraymond,
she cries, "will not forgive-no man could forgive." The priest prevails
on her to give her husband a chance to understand.
Vraymond behaves as Joan predicted he would. When "he raises
the butt of his gun to smash the hated thing," Joan shields the infant with
her body. "My enemy is my enemy- in a trench or in my own house," he
shouts. Joan defends her innocent child. "A helpless babe has no nation-
ality- it is the trust of all the world." Vraymond: "this baby is carrion left
by the Bosh!" Joan: "A new life ... comes from God, not man." The cou-
ple agrees that Father Cartier should decide what they will do, and the
aged cleric prays for an answer. One comes in the midst of his petition,
as Joan's son dies in his cradle.
III
The final section of this essay intends to encourage theatre historians to
locate and read some of the playlets which survived vaudeville's demise.
At first glance, the Library of Congress's online "multimedia anthology,"
American Variery Stage (A. VS.), appears to be an easily accessible source
of playlets.53 While some of the English language vaudeville playscripts
in the collection, as announced in their titles, are monologues, comedy
two-acts, musical performances, pantomimes, and one "dramatic play
... acted by a troupe of educated dogs" (item 65), others are "playlets,"
if we accept the labels authors placed on them. Writers' use of the term
is misleading, however. In fact, the performed stage stories in this collec-
tion are sketches and not playlets, as this article has defined, and many
contemporary show business contemporaries understood those cate-
gories. Junie McCree has more titles in A. VS. than any other author, a
clue to the sort of narratives that the anthology presents to researchers.
He and other writers represented here typically construct the fantasy of
their light sketches around snappy flirtation dialogue and romantic songs,
delivered by a handsome young male and a thoroughly respectable, while
also spunky and coquettish, young female. Not one of the sketches
selected by Library of Congress professionals builds on a criminal act, a
marital betrayal, a wartime experience, or other weighty human experi-
ences, as many playlets did.
53 ''American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment 1870-1920,"
Library of Congress, http:/ /memory.loc.gov/ammem/vshtrnl/vshome.html.
52 HAVIG
Although the Library of Congress's online VS A . contains no
playlets, the library's Manuscript Division holds the most important col-
lection of vaudeville's one-act plays. For historians of ephemeral, but
nonetheless important, playscripts, United States copyright law accom-
plishes more than the protection of intellectual property. A democratic
device, it offered reasonably safe custodianship of any amateur or pro-
fessional vaudeville author's manuscript in exchange for, during the early
twentieth century, the payment of one dollar. A century later there they
are- monologues, sketches and playlets, all types of variety stage talking
acts- available to researchers on microftlm. Their existence forces recog-
nition not only that the playlet was an important part of vaudeville's
entertainment menu, but also that its one-act plays deserve the serious
study heretofore reserved for fine art one-act dramas.
An 1870 law assigned the "registration of copyright" function to
the Congressional Library. Today the US Copyright Office flies occupy
part of the fourth floor of the library's Madison Building, three levels
above the Manuscript Division, to which the office is administratively
attached. In 1901, the Copyright Office established categories for works
granted copyright protection, class C for musical compositions, for exam-
ple, and class D for dramatic compositions. Every vaudeville playlet thus
has a D number, examples of which appear in several of this article's
footnotes, as do full-length plays, sketches and all other scripted stage
acts. A notable attempt to make information about dramatic works avail-
able to the public was the library's publication of the two-volume set
Dramatic Compositions Copynghted in the United States, 1870 to 1916 (1918), a
resource which this essay has employed. (See note 31 for full biblio-
graphical information.) The library projected follow-up volumes as the
number of copyrighted manuscripts grew, but none appeared. The 1918
set includes an enormous list of titles-2,831 pages of them-while the
index of authors and their works in volume two also is comprehensive
and extensive. Researchers will not be able to locate every work copy-
righted and listed in Dramatic Compositions, or recorded on index cards
filed after 1916 in the Copyright Office, on the microfilm reels which the
library issued in the late twentieth century. One reason for gaps in the
numerical sequence of playscripts is the transfer of prominent play-
wrights' works to the Rare Book and Special Collections Division (e.g.,
Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller), or to individual's personal papers in
the Manuscript Division (e.g., Mae West). More likely explanations of
missing vaudeville playlets and sketches are the physical deterioration of
typed scripts before microfilming became possible, or authors' failure to
submit playscripts. Until 1 July 1909, the law permitted the granting of
NEGLECTED PLAYSCRJPTS, HIDDEN TALENT 53
copyright to a title page alone, on the understanding that the manuscript
would follow. Many authors failed to deposit copies of their composi-
tions, in some cases because they never wrote them.
During the 1980s, the Library of Congress transferred the paper
copies of the drama deposits from the Copyright Office to the
Manuscript Division. A 1981 microfilming project, #20,301, resulted in
415 reels of playscripts copyrighted from 1901-1909, which many
research libraries purchased. A second, ongoing project, #20,849, began
with items copyrighted in 1910. All reels produced to date may be con-
sulted in the Manuscript Division reading room in the Madison Building
and copies of playscripts for which copyrights have expired may be
requested from the library.54
Mention of other archives will serve as a reminder that the
Library of Congress is not the only source of unpublished playlets.
Theatre historians probably are most familiar with the collections in the
Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, a branch of the New
York Public Library. The venerable Harvard Theatre Collection and the
Miscellaneous Playscripts Collection located in the Department of Rare
Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, also include
playlets. 55 The most important way in which the class D drama collection
differs from the playlets available in New York, Cambridge, Princeton,
and elsewhere is its virtual comprehensiveness. Researchers, as noted
above, will not find on the Library of Congress's microfilm reels all
sketches and playlets ever copyrighted. But they will find many more than
in the other three archives, including the work of the most skilled writ-
ers. As a bonus, scholars will discover hundreds of amateurs' and failed
professionals's attempts at telling stage stories, an important resource for
students of the mass arts who must be alert not only to excellence in
writing and stagecraft, but also to trite ideas, conventional patterns of
action, clumsily reconstructed vernacular speech, and stereotyped char-
acters.
5
4
The last three paragraphs employ information found in the "Prefatory
Note" to Dramatic Compositions, vol. 1, i-ii; and "Copyright Drama Deposits, 1910-[1977],"
June, 1993, an informative introduction placed at the start of each reel of the Library of
Congress's microflimed playscripts in series #20,849. Dr. Alice Birney of the Manuscripts
Division staff wrote these explanatory comments. Dr. David Wigdor of the Manuscripts
Division has helped the author understand that for a variety of reasons, some of the
copyright deposits are in the collections of other Library of Congress divisions, but that
the Manuscripts Division has most of them.
55 A list of the Princeton scripts is available at
http:/ /libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/ firestone/ rbsc/ aids/ tc030.htrnl.
54
H AVJG
Few of those who wrote for vaudeville donated their personal
papers to archives, but in the collections that do exist researchers may
find typescripts of playlets and sketches. For example, in the Clayton
Meeker Hamilton papers, held by the Manuscripts and Archives Division
of the New York Public Library, is a hand-written version of his Stranger
at the Inn (n.d.). William deMille, who devoted most of his career to the
legitimate theatre and motion pictures, as a young man wrote successful
one-act plays for vaudeville. Several remain in his papers held by Special
Collections, the University of Southern California libraries. That reposi-
tory also has the Rupert Hughes collection, which includes typescripts of
Celluloid Sara (1914) and Miss 218 (1912?). Those playlets feature strong
young women who work in a movie studio and a department store,
respectively, and who defend naive co-workers from designing men. The
Imhof Vaudeville Collection at the University of Kansas, contains type-
scripts of numerous comedy sketches.
Although they represent only a small proportion of all playlets
copyrighted, some of these vaudeville narratives received public exposure
through publication as well as performance. This article has utilized Bret
Page's 1915 advice-book, Writingfor Vaudeville. One source of that book's
long-term value is the six playlets included in its appendix, representatives
of sub-genres such as the "tragic playlet"-Richard Harding Davis's
Blackmail (1910)-and the "satirical comedy"- Edgar Allan Woolf's The
Lol/ard (1 914).56 Davis, widely known for his magazine fiction and novels,
published Miss Civilization, a one-act play, in the Christmas edition of
Collier's in 1904.57 l.ippincott's Monthfy Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Theatre
Magazine, and The Smart Set were other mass-circulation periodicals which
published playlets. Especially receptive to one-acts performed in vaude-
ville was Smart Set, which published works by Paul Armstrong, S. Jay
Kaufman, George Middleton, Edith Sessions Tupper, and Edgar Allan
Woolf between 1909 and 1917. In 1904, Cosmopolitan carried Edwin
Milton Royle's The Squaw Man; An Icjyl of the Ranch, which became one of
the longest-lived of all vaudeville stories. Royle transformed his one-act,
set in the West and focused on race, into a full-length play, which
Hollywood filmed in silent and sound versions.ss
56 Page, Writingfor Va11deville, 429.
57 Richard Harding Davis, "Miss Civilization;" A Comedy in One Act, Collier's,
XXXIV (3 December 1904), 16-17, 20-21. Charles and Louise Samuels, Once Upon A
Stage: The Merry World of Vaudevtlle (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974), 260.
58 Cosmopolitan 37 (August 1904), 411-18.
NEGLECTED PLAYSCRIPTS, HIDDEN TALENT 55
Placed in print by Samuel French, are a number of one-act plays
that graced vaudeville stages. One example is George M. Cohan's "The
Farrell Case," which the Smart Set Company copyrighted in 1920 and the
French Company printed, under copyright renewal, twenty-nine years
later. Two other publishers, now out of business, specialized in variety
theatre material of all sorts: the T. S. Denison Company of Chicago, and
the Walter H. Baker Company of Boston. Their publications appear
occasionally in the listings of online marketers of books and collectibles
and, of course, circulate via interlibrary loan.s9 The US government's
Commission on Training Camp Activities, Department of Dramatic
Activities Among the Soldiers, printed a number of vaudeville playlets
that acting companies performed for the troops in World War I, includ-
ing Rupert Hughes' For She's A Joi!J Good Fellow (1918). Also available to
researchers are compilations of a single author's short plays. These vol-
umes, of course, gather the work of known authors whose activities
extended far beyond vaudeville, such as Upton Sinclair, George Kelly,
Alice Gersten berg, and Scottish author James M. Barrie.60 A final readily-
available source of playlets is anthologies of one-act plays published
beginning in the 1920s.61
This article has called the attention of theatre historians to
vaudeville playlets, a neglected but potentially useful source for expand-
ing our understanding of the American stage. The preceding pages have
set playlets in the context of early twentieth-century vaudeville and dis-
cussed their relationship both to one act plays which thrived in the Little
Theatre movement and to low comedy sketches which persisted in sev-
eral entertainment industries. The sister team of Ethel Clifton and
Brenda Fowler wrote playlets on contemporary issues which suggest the
quality of the best of these mini-dramas. Once theatre historians have
begun to study playlets, surely they will find imaginative ways to use them,
but how is a matter of pure speculation at this point. For now, what we
59 Three Baker Company publications are Plqys LI>'ith A Punch: A Collection of
One Act Plqys and Sketches, Serious and Seno-Comic (1916); Arthur LeRoy Kaser, Vaudeville
Turns (1923); and Jimmy Lyons, comp., Enrydopedia of Stage Malena/ (1925).
60 Upton Sinclair, Plqys of Protest (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912); George
Kelly, The Flattering Word and Other One-Act Plqys (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1925);
Alice Gerstenberg, Ten One-Act Plqys (New York: Brentano's Publishers, 1921);James M. Barrie,
The Pk:Js of J M. Barrie, In One Volume (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929).
61 For example, One Act Plqys for Stage and Study, preface by Augustus Thomas
(New York: Samuel French, 1925); and On To Victory: Propaganda Plqys of the Woman
Suffrage Movement, ed. Bettina Friedl (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987).
56 HAVIG
know for certain is that a large number of scripts remain. Theatre histo-
rians no longer have reason to neglect a resource as large and rich as this
one.
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 19, NO.1 (WINTER 2007)
THE HISTORY /MEMORY DISCOURSE IN ROBERT SHERWOOD'S
REUNION IN VIENNA
ATTILIO FAVORINI
At least srnce the publication of Maurice Halbwachs's The Social
Frameworks of Memory in 1925, history and memory have been conjoined
in historiographical discourse as alternative ways of understanding the
past.
1
like fraternal, non-identical twins, they have coexisted in some-
times harmonious, sometimes contentious relationship. Whether one
accepts the softer view of Patrick Hutton that history is an art of mem-
ory or the harsher one of Pierre Nora that "history is perpetually suspi-
cious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it,"
2
the
memory /history dyad increasingly thematizes studies in many fields,
including psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, fine arts,
and literary studies. Twentieth-century playwrights have increasingly been
drawn to staging open-handedly the encounter between history and per-
sonal memory as a way to put a human face on history and to balance
memory's imperative to hold close with history's inclination to under-
stand and place events at arm's length in order to gain perspective.
One might array stagings of the confrontation or convergence
of history and memory along a history/ memory spectrum whose chief
variable is their "objectivity," which I understand as not necessarily con-
noting historical accuracy, neutrality or non-partisanship, but rather hav-
ing to do with distancing and objectifying the past, either metaphorically
as with Brecht's historical parables or synecdochically as with certain
kinds of documentary theatre. From plays at the objective end of the
spectrum memory is frequently banished, as some proponents deem its
psychological and emotional force a distraction from the historical lesson.
Mother Courage and Ethiopia (the latter a Living Newspaper composed
entirely of verbatim speeches on the Ethiopian crisis) are very different
1
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed., trans., and with an Introduction
by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), includes The Social
Framewttrks of Memory, first published in French in 1925. Subsequent references will be
noted parenthetically in the text.
2
See Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, VT: University
Press of America, 1993) and Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de
Memoire," Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 9.
58 FAVORJNI
plays, but they are alike in that they are acted by "figures of the drama,"3
who take a distanced attitude towards the characters they represent while
forging an identification between spectator and objectifying author.
These two plays are only in the most diluted sense "memories" of the
Thirty Years War or the conflict between Ethiopia and Italy, respectively.
They and their fellows consequently stand together at one end of the his-
tory/ memory spectrum, at the other end of which stand what are termed
(after Glass Menagerie) "memory plays," in which elements of history may
be muted or, when present, may be absorbed into or interact with psy-
chological memory (e.g., Herb Gardner's Conversations with A1J Father or
Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom). In between are plays which
painstakingly construct individual memory (sometimes literally) against a
"backdrop" of history (Pirandello's Henry IV), which revise majoritarian
views of the past (August Wilson's plays, especially The Piano Lmon), or
which attempt to demonstrate the construction of history as an act of
memory (Emily Mann and Ann Deavere Smith, opera omnia).
Pirandello opened up the memory /history discourse in the early
1920s. In Henry IV (1922), he explores the impact of psychological trau-
ma upon the role memory plays in subjectivity, personhood, and self-con-
sistency. Its main character, whom we know only by his assumed name,
uses medieval history simultaneously to symbolize, instance, and displace
his personal memory. In Pirandello's less well-known As You Desire Me
(1930), the "Strange Lady," who may or may not be suffering from amne-
sia brought about by a war-time rape, flees those who would have walled
her in "stone upon stone" with their memories of her, choosing to make
an attempt at living life on her own terms. Both plays bring to the fore a
division between memory and history that rests in turn upon a distinc-
tion between internal and external representations of the past, and both
appear to conclude that such representations can never be brought to
syncretism.
At the same time Pirandello was wrestling with the memory /his-
tory opposition, and as his contemporaries Freud and Jung were also
struggling to discern via psychoanalytic theory the outlines of the inter-
nal and external factors of memory formation,
4
the Swiss sociologist
3
See Paul Hernacli, Interpreting Events: Tragicomedies of History on the Modern Stage
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 142.
4
Key publications include Sigmund Freud, "Childhood Memories and Screen
Memories" (1907), flrst published in English in Psychopathology of Everydqy Life (New York:
Macmillan, 1915) and "Remembering, Repeating and Working Through" (1914) in
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey,
vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 147-56. Jung first used the term "collective
THE HISTORY/MEMORY D ISCOURSE 59
Maurice Halbwachs was working to redefine such distinctions or, more
radically, to render them meaningless by rethinking the way individual
memory is constructed. In The Social Frameworks of Memory (1925),
Halbwachs argues that an individual's memory is framed by social struc-
tures from birth and that collectives such as families, tribes, and religious
groupings, create instruments (e.g., rituals, commemorations, epics, and
dialects) to represent the past through what he called collective memory.
If individual memory is socially constructed, Halbwachs argues, even
more manipulable is the memory of events we have not directly experi-
enced-historical memory-in the service of the pragmatic demands of
the social present: "Here it is only one framework that counts- that
which is constituted by the commandments of our present society and
which necessarily excludes all others" (50). Halbwachs in this passage is
very close to saying that group or collective memory is simultaneously a
form of forgetting.
Halbwachs understood that, on the one hand, collective memo-
ry could preserve the heritage and traditions of a neglected or oppressed
minority and contest majoritarian versions of the past; on the other hand,
common consent about the past within a group may be both the cause
and the effect of collective memory and may place it in conflict with his-
tory, when the latter is understood as the pursuit of truth about the past
employing the protocols of fact-gathering, evidence, and logical argu-
ment. While group remembering may be put in the service of cultural
continuity, it is more the case that societies remember selectively to serve
present values: "The past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the
basis of the present" (40). Among the examples Halbwachs lays out, his
later study of the biblical Holy Land as a memorial invention driven by
contemporary religious politics is even more relevant today than when he
wrote it in 1941.5
Halbwachs's work points in two directions. His application of
social constructionism to memory leads, through the Annales school, to
postmodernism and Nora's sharp history-memory antagonism.6 On the
other hand, Halbwachs's notion that memory was collectively construct-
unconscious" in a lecture, "The Strucrure of the Unconscious," in 1916, and the term
"archetype" in "Instinct and the Unconscious," 1919. See The Basic Writings of C G. Jung,
ed. VioletS. De Laszlo (New York: Random House, 1959), 106-118, and Ronald Hayman,
A Life of Jung (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1999), 222, 226.
5 The study is included in On Collective Memory, cited above.
6
See the fine chapter on Halbwachs in Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 73-90.
60
FAVORINI
ed effectively and permanently linked the psychoanalytic discourse,
wherein remembering plays a crucial role, with the historiographical dis-
course previously dominated by positivistic ideals. Though he mentions
neither Freud nor Jung by name in his work on memory, Halbwachs
invades their territory in contending that the distorted and fragmentary
way in which memories enter dreams, when compared with conscious
recollections, is as a pile of building materials to the erected edifice; our
recollections depend upon the "great frameworks" (42) provided by soci-
ety in order to stand. Each in his own way, Halbwachs, Freud, and Jung
were attempting to determine (1) how memory negotiates between the
individual and the group, and (2) what factors determine how memories
are formed, deformed, and reformed. Where Halbwachs reckoned as
crucial the pressures of a group with an interest in self-preservation,
Freud highlighted the impact of fantasies of familial primal scenes on
memory formation, and Jung posited that individual memories were
joined with archetypes of the collective unconscious: inherited ideas of
images derived from experiences held in common. Thus, each in his own
way was attempting to grapple with the fact that while an individual's
memory is quintessentially his own, indeed it is crucially formative of the
conception of a self, nevertheless that self is a social being whose con-
tours are inescapably shaped by localization in time and place. If each of
us possesses a memory that .is ours, each also is possessed by a history
that .is shared.
As Hutton puts .it, "What Freud characterized as individualized
images stored deep in the human mind was for Halbwachs the collective
imagery of social discourse."
7
Halbwachs acknowledged that "the coher-
ence or arrangement of our recollections belongs only to ourselves"
(171) and that "we preserve memories of each epoch in our lives, and
these are continually reproduced [and] through them, as by a continual
relationship, a sense of our identity is perpetuated" (47). But he also
declared that memories are personalized, localized, or associated not just
by virtue of individual psychological constitution but through "the
framework of collective memory [that] confines and binds our most inti-
mate remembrances to each other" (53). In case studies, Halbwachs
demonstrates how family, society, and religion offer the tools and terms
of self-construction: "In the same moment that we see objects we repre-
sent to ourselves the manner in which others would look at them ....
There are hence no perceptions without recollections. But, inversely,
there are no recollections which can be said to be purely interior, that is,
7
See ibid., 78, on the Freud-Halbwachs opposition.
THE HISTORY /MEMORY DISCOURSE 61
which can be preserved only within individual memory" (168-9).
Halbwachs did not see that such a position brings him close to the
hermeneutic conundrum of Gadamer that we can know the past only in
terms of the present and the present only in terms of the past. Nor did
he see that his historical positivism- he believed, as Hutton puts it, that
"the historian's first task is to keep memory honest"-is at odds with his
keen appreciation of how the values of the present figure in the con-
struction of the pastS
While the fullest dramatic explorations of this discourse mark
the latter half of the twentieth century, a largely forgotten play contem-
porary with Pirandello and Halbwachs brings engagingly to life the histo-
ry I memory consanguinity. Robert Sherwood could scarcely have known
the work of Halbwachs, who exerted little influence outside
Francophone culture until years after his death during World War II, and
Sherwood's Reunion in Vienna (1931) appears on the surface to resemble
more the comedies of Molnar than Pirandello.
9
Yet, this neglected gem
of American theatre contemplates-bemusedly-the confluence of his-
torical circumstance, personal memory, and a nostalgia nurtured by social
change. Few of us remember that Sherwood was the winner of four
Pulitzer prizes and the Bancroft prize for his monumental history of the
Roosevelt administration, Roosevelt and Hopkins, not to mention an
Academy Award for Best Years of Our Lives. Premiering on Broadway in
November of 1931, Reunion in Vienna preceded all these honors, and in
its own time was noticed more for its resemblance to The Guardsman and
as a vehicle for the Lunts than for its provocative ideas. Brooks
Atkinson's New York Times review is typical, celebrating the Lunts and
congratulating Sherwood for keeping "the fun exuberant and the evening
. . . heartily enjoyable," though gently chiding the play for wavering
"unsteadily between burlesque and satire."tO But Sherwood's historical
8
Ibid., 77.
9
Sherwood could scarcely have not known Pirandello's Henry IV, which was
produced in New York in 1924 with a design by Robert Edmund Jones. See Susan Bassnet
and Jennifer Lorch, Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre: A DoCIImentary Record (Chur, Switzerland:
Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993), for Pirandello's stage history. Sherwood may also
have known As You Desire Me (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1931), published in the year
Reunion in Vienna was produced. Is it mere coincidence that Henry IV has an "alienist"
(psychologist) character, As You Desire Me has a "psychiatrist from Vienna" in the cast, and
Reunion in Vienna features the Viennese psychiatrist, Anton?
10
Brooks Atkinson, "The Play; In Which the Lunts Bounce Back in an
Exuberantly Humerous Comedy by Robert E. Sherwood," New York Times, 17 November
1931.
62 FAVORINI
perspective on contemporary politics, which comes to the fore in his later
work, is charmingly forecast here.
Reunion in Vienna has as its central characters the thirty-ish and
beautiful Elena Krug, her husband the famous surgeon/psychiatrist
Anton, and Rudolph Maximilian, grandson to Emperor Franz Josef I,
former lover to Elena, and now an eccentric cabdriver in Switzerland. Act
1 takes place in the K.rug drawing room on the afternoon of 18 August,
1930, the hundredth anniversary of Franz Josef's birth. The supporters
of the old regime call on the K.rugs to say they are planning for that
evening a "rumpus," as Anton's father puts it, to which they invite Elena.
Elena protests she has "forgotten all those old times .... I advise you to
forget, too."
11
When one of them responds "You're asking a great deal
of people who have nothing but memories to live on," Elena turns on
them, accusing them of "liv[ing] on something that doesn't exist" (62), a
statement replete with Halbwachsian skepticism about collective memo-
ry. Reflecting how even somber episodes in the past are glossed over,
Halbwachs had observed, "society causes the mind to transfigure the past
to the point of yearning for it" (51).
Anton, in terms touched with psychotherapeutic moonshine,
urges her to go to the party to rid herself of her own "emotional
bondage" to the past (68), implying that she, ironically, has never gotten
over Rudolph. She reluctantly agrees, and at the first act curtain is seen
asking for her servant to fetch the diamond necklace Rudolph had given
her and practicing the waltz with her father-in-law. She has been literally
collared by Hapsburg nostalgia.
Act 2 is set in the anteroom of the Imperial Suite in the old
hotel, the Lucher, where Elena and Rudolph held their liaisons. Sherwood
here and elsewhere in the play is drawing on his visit to Vienna and the
Hotel Sacher two years previous.
12
Anticipating an evening of indulgent
nostalgia, Madame Lucher, the cynical, cigar-smoking owner, is seen urg-
ing the bandleader to provide "accompaniment for sobs-that's all that's
expected of you" (77). But the old, down-at-the-heels aristocracy is
mightily surprised and animated by the appearance of Rudolph
Maximilian himself, who has been spirited across the border in Tyrolean
mufti. To the accompaniment of the dance band in the next room,
Rudolph, whom we recognize as closer to madness than eccentricity,
11
Robert Emmet Sherwood, Reunion in Vzenna (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1932), 61. Subsequent citations are from this edition and a.re noted paranthetically
in the text.
12 See R. Baird Shuman, &bert E. Sherwood (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1964), 29-30.
THE HISTORY /MEMORY DISCOURSE 63
labors mightily to re-seduce Elena. Her resistance flagging, Elena makes
an escape through the bathroom, and Rudolph is forced to flee the
police, who want to discourage any nostalgia over the old Empire.
Act 3 returns the action to the Krug residence, later that night,
where Anton sits listening to the radio, and Elena enters wearing
Rudolph's cape, masking the absence of the dress she left on Rudolph's
bed. Anton doesn't notice the missing dress, though Old Krug does when
he enters, archly commenting, "and I don't set myself up as a great mind-
reader, like you" (156). Rudolph enters amidst shrieks from the maid and
much door-pounding. He and Anton take each other's measure, as Elena
becomes excited watching their sparring. Suddenly, more pounding at the
door signals the arrival of the police, and Rudolph reluctantly follows
Elena's command to hide. She persuades Anton to appeal to the higher
authorities to let Rudolph slip back over the border, and Anton's princi-
ples of rationality dictate that he agree and not give in to vindictive
reprisal by turning the Archduke in. He hopes his example will release
Elena from the thrall of Rudolph: "if you can see him for what he is and
not for what your memory tells you that he was-then you're free" (185).
Anton exits, taking the police with him. When Rudolph reenters, he in
effect declares Anton the winner, revealing that as he hid he came to rec-
ognize himself as "no longer an Archduke, nephew of an Emperor; I am
a taxi-driver, dressed up" (189). In this witty, if mini coup de theatre, it is the
villain, rather than either of the protagonists, who undergoes recognition.
As Rudolph exits for a few hours sleep before departing, Elena waxes
sentimentally over his cape, threadbare but still a symbol of his identity.
In the soft glow of light from the hall, she caresses the medals on his
cape, enters Rudolph's room-and the curtain discreetly descends.
It rises on the morning, as a sort of coda to the act. Rudolph
enters and enthusiastically settles down to a breakfast of kidneys that has
been set out by the maid for Anton. The emotional triumphalism of the
scene is manifest. Elena enters, "radian!' (196). Their almost domestic
banter is interrupted by the return of Anton, who is to escort Rudolph
out of the country. He soberly recognizes what has happened between
his wife and Rudolph. She asks him to retrieve her wedding ring from the
Archduke when they reach the frontier. The curtain falls on her and Old
Krug at the table, and the following exchange: ''You know, Elena-I've
never, in all my life, had so much fun!" "Neither have I," she smiles, and
sips her coffee (205).
Beneath the droll comedy and efficient melodrama, and more
shocking than the metatheatrical Jrisson of seeing Lynn Fontanne's Elena
seduced by Alfred Lunt's Rudolph, lies a play of subtlety and political
64
fAVORJNI
sophistication. Sherwood is watching the rise of Mussolini, Stalin, and
Hitler from across the Atlantic, scenes which Sherwood would evoke
more graphically in Idiot's Delight five years later and polemically in There
Shall Be No Night (1940). Likely to have been vivid in his memory was a
situation of near anarchy in Austria, where two years earlier, very near the
time of Sherwood's visit to Vienna, the army had put down a general
strike and where two years later civil war would break out. In 1929, he had
written to his mother of Vienna "that depressing place still trying to per-
suade itself that it is the gay opulent capital of all Europe," and John
Mason Brown reports that Sherwood's reading of the pessimistic Modern
Temper by Joseph Wood Krutch also influenced the composition of the
play.13 When Sherwood was writing Reunion in Vienna, Austria and
Germany had begun to negotiate Anschluss, and an insidious alliance was
in the making between Hitler and the aristocratic Papen, resulting in
Hitler's appointment as Chancellor within a year of the play's publication.
The return of the aristocracy, then, was not just a matter for comedy. But
if the Vienna of the time was known for dangerous politics, it was no less
known for Sigmund Freud, the obvious model for Anton Krug.
Sherwood, I think, has combined both of these hot topics, so that the
seduction of the past is played out in both the personal and historical
spheres.
14
In the banter of act 1, Elena claims to have broken from the
past, going so far as to redecorate her home in Vienna to erase it: ''We
must believe we know nothing of what went on in the world before 1920.
We are beginning anew" (18). But this is an oversimplification, amount-
ing to a distortion of Anton's Freudian belief that one can free oneself
of the past only after confronting it in clear-eyed fashion. Anton had
been an outspoken opponent of the Hapsburgs before and during the
First World War, and they had put him to work in a stone quarry-his
abused and crushed hands ending his career as a surgeon, but inspiring
his career as a psycruatrist. He is thus in his personal history and in his
profession a champion of what must be overcome and put "behind" one
and, only after that process, forgotten.
13 See Walter ]. Meserve, Robert E. Shenvood: Reluctant Moralist (New York:
Pegasus, 1970), 62-3, and John Mason Brown, The Worldr of Robert Shenvood: Mirror to his
Times 1896-1939 (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 276.
14
Brown, The Worldr of Robert Shenvood, 274, reports that in the rehearsal peri-
od, Lee Simonson, board member of the play's producers, the Theatre Guild, argued with
Sherwood over the orthodoxy of the psychoanalyst. Brown does not mention Freud
directly, however.
THE HISTORY /MEMORY DISCOURSE 65
Like Freud, Anton has been to America to spread the gospel of
reliance on scientific rationalism, which Sherwood evidently means to set
off against a romanticizing of the past and a forgetting of past wrongs
perpetrated by the old Empire. But Sherwood is no Bolshevik and is
aware that the left wing can fantasize the past as easily as the right. He has
Anton's student, Emil, naively "bless the war and the revolution that lib-
erated us from the tyranny of ignorance" (27), while Anton's father lis-
tens to Russian radio broadcasts he can't understand. Anton is a propo-
nent of sexual freedom-he prescribes Sons and Lovers to a Pennsylvania
woman who seeks his help with "the facts of life"-but he also advocates
adjusting unrealistic fantasies of lovers past with a dose of reality; drolly,
he recommends that the Pennsylvania woman rendezvous with her first
lover, who is now a manufacturer of dental supplies. Though Elena says
Anton "cured" her of her former infatuation with Rudolph and delivered
her "body and mind, to the new god" (38), infatuations, whether person-
al or political, do not die so easily. When Elena remembers to call Anton's
student by name, he excitedly remarks on the courtesy, and she responds
"I was trained to remember . .. under the Hapsburgs" (39-40). This is a
warning signal. As Freud would have phrased it, rather than remember-
ing and working through, Elena is evidently subject to repeating the
habits of her youth. Elena's behavior, including her donning the necklace
Rudolph gave her, piquantly suggests she is about to reenact the
Hapsburg history that victimized her husband.
Having now set up the seduction of the past in both its person-
al and historical implications, Sherwood sharpens the parallels in the sec-
ond act. Following the derision of "the old formalities, the old nonsense"
(78) by the shrewd Lucher (who orders that only cheaper Viennese beer,
"not Munchener!," be served), reminiscences are exchanged among the
arriving guests and war stories gaseously recounted, as the band saws
away lugubriously. The emptiness of the Old Regime speaks for itself.
But its putative reincarnation, Rudolph, presents a more complex picture
in his assault on Elena, initiated with a slap to her face and a fierce kiss.
Her first words to him claim to have erased his memory: "You know- I
realize now how completely I had forgotten you," but his reply signals the
struggle has just begun: ''Yes-it's too bad. We're not equipped with the
power to recall sensations .... However- to-night we will both refresh
our memories" (120). Quite obviously, more than Elena's virtue is at stake
here. While the ersatz Hapsburg history is instantly debunked by virtue
of its source, the chorus of declasse aristocrats, the madly charming
Rudolph is not so easily dismissed. His attempted re-seduction of Elena
of course puts to the test the rational realism of which Anton/Sigmund
66
fAVORJNI
is the chief proponent: will the reawakening of sensation "bring back"
the past for Elena, or will the image of the down-at-the-heels Rudolph
erase his former memory? But, as reflected in Rudolph's pursuit by the
police, no less at stake than the seduction of Elena is the seduction of a
nation by its falsely remembered or constructed past-a key issue for
Europe and the world in 1931. So when Rudolph suggests to Elena, "We
have made history in this hotel. Come-let us make some more" (131),
the insinuations are far more than risque.
When Elena claims to see, behind the curtain of her imagination,
only a "decayed and loathsome" memory of Rudolph (137), he launches
a sophisticated argument, almost a theory of emotional memory, against
her objections. He elicits from her the admission that she initially imag-
ined Rudolph when making love with her husband, but "learned" to be
resigned. He proposes to replace this learning, that is, to displace with the
pleasure principle the Freudian reality principle by which her husband has
urged her to live: "It's time for a little emotion," Rudolph urges. ''We'll
see if we've forgotten what life tastes like .... I'm only asking you to love
me again, for a little while, reminiscently ... as the echo of a voice that
enchanted you" (138-9). The phrases may be drawn from the lexicon of
seduction, but their connotation is more treacherous. Like Rudolph's pre-
vious "let's make history together," his invitation to reminiscence is here
put forth as a personal instance of bringing back an imagined past into
the present by common consent-the social phenomenon, identified by
Halbwachs as collective memory. The "cult of the past," Halbwachs
understood, was seductive precisely because one could "roam" in it selec-
tively and without the constraints that present society imposes (50-51).
No less seductively did Hitler invite his countrymen to indulge their fan-
tasies of a storied and gloried past that could be relived, allowing us to
glimpse the political idea Sherwood has so colorfully wrapped in roman-
tic comedy.
In a wonderful coup, Elena suddenly changes tactics-or
changes her mind-we are not sure which-kissing and slapping
Rudolph as passionately as he has previously done with her. She throws
open the doors, inviting the party-goers from the next room "to see that
I haven't changed, that there are some things that can never change" and
letting them witness Rudolph lifting her and carrying her off into the
bedroom (141). With keen irony, the event is acclaimed by the cheering
revelers as emblematic of "the same Vienna-the same exquisite
Vienna" (142), confirming our suspicion that the pleasure bond is forged
as much from nostalgia as sex. Though Elena's gesture proves to be a
ruse facilitating her escape from Rudolph's clutches, the events of the
THE HISTORY /MEMORY DISCOURSE 67
third act, as we have seen, drive her again into his arms.
Having borrowed a few schillings for cab fare, the scion of the
Hapsburgs arrives at the hearth of the I<:rugs. Rudolph makes a bizarre
offer: he will on the morrow pick a fight with a policeman, inviting assas-
sination, and he will bequeath his brain to Anton for study-in exchange
for a night with Elena. Anton's psychoanalytical probity makes him hesi-
tate to strike Rudolph for the insult, causing Elena to doubt her decision
to leave Rudolph's bedroom at the hotel. With aplomb bordering on dis-
passion, Anton tolerates the recital by Rudolph of the initial seduction of
his wife ten years earlier. Recognizing Anton's poise as an attempt to out-
charm him, Rudolph then trumps Anton by offering to submit himself
for analysis. In this game of cat and mouse, it is Anton who is finally
trapped-in a trap he set for himself. Just as Elena was forced in act 2 to
deal with are-materialized presence from the past, now Anton must face
the same challenge. Struggling with the temptation to abandon rationali-
ty-and removing his jacket-Anton makes an admission to Rudolph
that subtly but directly articulates the action-in-depth of the play: "We've
expelled the Hapsburgs from Austria, but not all of us have expelled the
Hapsburgs from ourselves" (175). The subsequent seduction of Elena,
then, gives carnal expression to the idea that while Hapsburg history is
over, the Hapsburg memory has been successfully, collectively interior-
ized.
Following the cue of the preface to the hard cover edition, in
which Sherwood appears to present his drama as a contest of
Superstition and Rationalism (vii), Christopher Bigsby sees the play as
setting off "an effete decadent culture" against "one which destroyed the
spontaneous."lS Indeed, this is the surface action of the play. But
Sherwood's artistic intellect gets the best of his schematic design, and the
play turns out to be less neat and more interesting than the maundering
preface promises. Both Bigsby and Fearnow give in to the temptation to
critique the preface rather than the play,
16
but a deeper reading of even
the former reveals that Sherwood had his eye on history. The Caesars, the
Tudors, the French Revolution, Mussolini, Stalin, Marx, and Lenin-not
just the Hapsburgs-occupy his text. And so do Darwin, Huxley, and
Freud.
Sherwood's preface oddly disparages the play as escapist, and the
15 C. WE. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, vol.
1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 142.
16 Mark Fearnow, The American Stage and the Great Depression: A Cultural History
of the Grotesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 58-61.
68
FAVORINI
gap between the perceived tone of the play and that of the preface pro-
voked a Pollyanna response to the published version from Atkinson in
the Times, consoling the playwright with assurances that "[f]riendship is
still man's grandest melody."
17
One wonders whether the author's inter-
pretation of his own play wasn't influenced by his close friends, the
Lunts, who certainly tilted the play towards their brand of "bounce and
merriment," to quote Atkinson's review.
18
But beneath the froth is a mar-
velously complex play, in which memory and history, rather than being
presented in confrontation or convergence, are intertwined like a double-
helix. In creating Elena, Sherwood offers us a ravishing and troubling
case study in the contesting forces of memory and forgetfulness on the
battleground of self-fashioning. A more doctrinaire Freudian would have
deemed her re-seduction by Rudolph a counter-therapeutic acting out, a
repetition. (One can imagine Ibsen handling the situation in such a man-
ner.) But Sherwood boldly allows her to keep her home and her marriage
and reclaim her self, thereby offending contemporary moralists who saw
the play as a defense of adultery and leading the police to halt the pro-
duction in Toronto.
19
In creating Rudolph, who resists change, who
remains brutally himself, Sherwood is close to incarnating the juggernaut
of history: to win his attention or favor, men and women will betray
themselves, or be sacrificed. A more doctrinaire Marxist would have
curbed Rudolph's Mephistophelean appeal-and never allowed the dash-
ing Alfred Lunt to be cast in the role. In creating the Freudian Doctor
Krug, Sherwood takes the psychiatrist as custodian and restorer of per-
sonal memory, and presses him in the vice of history. A more doctrinaire
comedian would have crafted a stereotype instead of a man.
Not for another thirty years, with Miller's After the Fall, would an
American playwright address the twinned issues of history and memory
in so sophisticated-if a good deal less charming-a fashion. In its own
brief time, Reunion in Vienna was grouped with the urbane little comedies
of Molnar and Fodor.
2
o As Walter Meserve reports, it was awarded a $500
prize from the Dramatists Guild, an award given to a play '"produced in
New York City, [that] makes the audience a little brighter and a little more
cheered when it leaves the theatre than when it came in."'
21
Only Richard
17
Cited in Meserve, Robert E. Sherwood, 74.
1
8 Atkinson, New York Times, 17 November 1931.
19 Shuman, Robert E. Shenvood, 140.
20
Ibid., 132.
21
Meserve, Robert E. Sherwood, 73.
THE HISTORY /MEMORY DISCOURSE 69
Dana Skinner in Commonweal offered Sherwood the back-handed compli-
ment that the play might have had a more satirical edge if the playwright
had more rigorously squelched the hollow romance of the old empire.
22
It has since been dismissed as superficial and unoriginal by one of its few
recent critics,
2
3 and as "an amusing star vehicle" by another.2
4
But from
its array of shrewdly constructed characters a watchful audience can sure-
ly glean the penetrating and paradoxical insight that together, history and
memory flx an individual in time ("I was trained to remember ... under
the Hapsburgs"), yet they are both the creation of the individual and con-
stitute individuality ("not all of us have expelled the Hapsburgs from our-
selves"); that together, history and memory fix a nation in time, yet they
are both products of and inputs to the system of national formation-
as when the memory of the Hapsburgs is etched again upon Austria in
the old jewels Elena puts on, the Viennese waltz she dances to the
"accompaniment for sobs" provided by the Lucher's bandleader, indeed,
by the very stones of the old hotel itself-social frameworks all.
The Reunion in Sherwood's Vienna is almost allegorically a meet-
ing of history and memory. That is, Sherwood's passion is engaged, not
just or even primarily by the opposition of decadence and sentimentality
to science and reason, but by the broad stage of history and the bright
scene of human memory. In eerie retrospect, the "reunion" also suggests
a meeting of Freud and Halbwachs. Was Freud, like Anton, in denial over
the politics of Vienna during the rise of Nazism,
25
while the clear-eyed
Halbwachs, like the Archduke Rudolph, understood that "reminiscendy"
embracing the past was indistinguishable from mischievously recon-
structing it? But history has its cruel ironies: the reluctant, apolitical
Freud escaped Vienna with his life less than two months after Hider's tri-
umphant entry in 1938; Halbwachs, a Swiss who married into a Jewish
family, lost his at Buchenwald in 1945.26
22
Richard Dana Skinner, ''The Play," Commonweal, XV (1931 ): 161.
23 Shuman, Robert B. S henJJood, 132, 141.
24
Fearnow, The American Stage and the Great Depression, 58.
25
Michael Roth, The Jronist's Cage: Memory, Trouma, and the Construction of History (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995), connects the foundation and development of psy-
choanalysis with mourning and loss, suggesting that psychoanalysis was "an elaborate mnemic
sign of the death of Freud's and his fellow liberals' political ambitions" (197).
26
On Freud's reluctance to leave, see Peter Gay, Freud: A Ufi for Our Times
(New York: W W Norton and Co., 1988), 624-28; on Halbwachs' death- he protested to
the Nazis the murder of his mother-in-law and father-in-law-see Coser's introduction to
On Collective Memory, 7.
jOURN.\L OF AMERICAN D RAMA AND THEATRE 19, NO. 1 (WINTER 2007)
LANGSTON H UGHES'S EXPERIMENTAL AND REVOLUTIONARY
THEATRE: "WATER DRAWN FROM THE WELL OF THE
PEOPLE" AND "GIVEN BACK TO THEM IN A CUP OF BEAUTY"
OLGA BARRIOS
As a war correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Langston
Hughes developed a strong affinity with the idea of art for the people. At
that time, Hughes had the opportunity to meet writers who shared this
affinity from all over the world including the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen,
the Mexican writer Octavia Paz, and Spanish poets such as Rafael Alberti.
In one report from Spain to newspapers in the United States, Hughes
quotes Alberti, who served as spokesperson for the Alianza of Spanish
Writers. These writers established a sort of manifesto defining the pur-
pose of art:
What the members of the Alianza want to do is make
art life, and life art, with no gu!f between the artists and the
people. After all, as [Federico Garcia] Lorca said, "The
poem, the song, the picture is only water drawn from
the well of the people, and it should be given back to
them in a cup of beauty so that thry mqy drink-and in
drinking, understand themselves." Now our art is at the serv-
ice of the Republic to help win the war, since we do not
want the books we write to be burned in public squares
by Fascists, or blown into bits on library shelves by
bombs, or censored until all their meaning is drained
away. That is why we artists help to hold Madrid against
Franco.
1
Alberti's and Garcia Lorca's words summarize what art, and specifically
theatre, meant to Hughes.2 Hughes's concept of theatre was inextricably
1
Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press,
1986), 387. Emphasis mine.
2 At the time of his stay in Spain, Hughes was translating the Gyp!] Ballads, by
Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, who was assassinated by Franco's
troops in 1936. Hughes was also familiar with Lorca's plays such as Blood Wedding. Many
similarities can be found between Hughes's and Lorca's lives and works. Both of them
were poets and playwrights, and researched and recuperated the folklore of their respec-
72 BARR! OS
linked to his concern for social justice and racial issues in regard to the
African American community and other oppressed peoples around the
world. Parallel to his concern for social justice was Hughes's ceaseless
experimenting with new theatrical forms that could accommodate his
social endeavor in reaching the common people and helping them fulfill
their needs and hopes. Both his concern for social and racial issues and
his incessant experimentation with new theatrical styles situates Hughes
as a revolutionary artist, forerunner of the Black Theatre Movement in
the 1960s.
Only recently has Hughes's theatrical work begun to receive the
same kind of critical analysis accorded his better-known poetry for its
revolutionary nature in dealing with social and racial issues. In 1979,
Amiri Baraka had already suggested that Hughes's work should be exam-
ined again so that he could be reintroduced "as a national resource" in
order to find out "how deep and important [he] is."3 In 1987, Arnold
Rampersad in his article "Future Scholarly Projects on Langston
Hughes," urged scholars to continue conducting projects on many dif-
ferent aspects and works by Hughes, which had not yet been carefully
examined; among them, Rampersad mentioned Hughes's "Marxism, or
international radical socialism, because Hughes was so far to the left
politically for a good part of his life, and was so brilliant and prolific as a
propagandist for the far left,
4
that his Marxism should be seen separately
rive communities. Hughes incorporated African American music in most of his plays and
Lorca recuperated traditional songs that he used to play at the piano with a famous actress
and singer of his time, La Argentinita. Both founded theatre groups to take theatre to the
people- Lorca, with his group "La Barraca," took plays to the Spanish people living in
villages; Hughes founded three theatre groups in various black neighborhoods as will be
examined later.
3 Arniri Baraka, "Restaging Langston Hughes's Scottsboro Limited: An Interview
with Arniri Baraka," The Black Scholar 10, no. 10 Guly/ August 1979): 66-67. Baraka refers
specifically to Scottsboro Limited (1932), which he was interested in staging at the time,
asserting that his approach would be "to align Scottsboro with contemporary issues of
police brutality, with the question of framing blacks for crimes they have not committed,"
concluding that the play could serve as a "weapon" (68, 67). Baraka also calls attention to
the two different African American traditions that run parallel, one revolutionary and
another one of capitulation, noting that it is crucial to differentiate both trends and assert-
ing that Hughes belongs to the first one (69) .
4
Hughes defined himself as a propaganda writer: "I am ... primarily a . . .
propaganda writer; my main material is the race problem." Quoted in Susan Duffy, ed.,
The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (Carbondale: Southern University Press, 2000), 4.
LANGSTON HUGHES'S EXPERIMENTAL AND REVOLUTIONARY THEATRE
73
from, for example, his anticolonialism, which is also a form of radical-
ism."S Furthermore, both scholars Baraka and Rampersad have recog-
nized the need to reprint Hughes's plays, especially the ones written in the
1930s, such as Don't You Want to Be Free?, 6 and it was just recently that four
of Hughes's agit-prop plays-Scottsboro Limited, Harvest, Angelo Herndon
Jones, and The Organizer-were reprinted with a thoughtful introduction
and analysis by Susan Duffy.7 The critical study Langston Hughes: Folk
Dramatist in the Protest Tradition by Joseph McLaren examines the plays by
Hughes written between 1921 and 1943, covering a wide range of his
political plays and analyzes them individually in depth.8 Finally, volume 5
of Hughes's Collected Works, edited by Leslie Sanders, focuses on the plays
written by Hughes before 1942.9
Each of these studies highlights the political and social signifi-
cance of Langston Hughes's theatrical work. The analysis conducted in
Duffy's and McLaren's more recent critical works-as pointed out by
Baraka and indirectly by Rampersad--demonstrates that Hughes's plays
were actually revolutionary, having taken their main issues and content
from the African American tradition and from the black community's
experience and social problems. Breaking with inherited stereotypes
about blacks, Hughes defended the need to create an authentic black the-
atre away from white-imposed models and experimented with new the-
atrical forms and styles that would set the basis for the African American
revolutionary theatre of the 1960s.
When examining Hughes's theatre work, it is important to keep
in mind the main social issues confronting the United States. Hughes
began to write plays in the 1920s, the era now known as the Harlem
Renaissance, one of the most prolific periods in the African American
artistic tradition, and a time when Harlem had become the meeting place
for a diverse black population-not only blacks emigrating from the rural
South, but also from the Caribbean and various African countries. It was
5 Arnold Rampersad, "Future Scholarly Projects on Langston Hughes," Black
American Literature Forum, 21, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 308.
6 Rampersad, "Future Scholarly Projects": 311.
7 Duffy, ed., The Political Plays of Langston Hughes.
8 Joseph McLaren, Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921-
1943 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997).
9 Leslie Sanders, ed., The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vo!. 5, The Plays to
1942: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move (Columbia, MI: The University of Missouri Press,
2002), 575.
74 BARRIOS
also a time of black nationalism, led by Marcus Garvey, and, according to
Henry L. Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y McKay, a period in which "black artists
laid the foundation for the representation of their people in the modern world, with a
complexity, and a self-knowledge that have proven durable even as the
African American condition changed with the unfolding of the twentieth
century."IO However, the creation of Harlem as the dwelling place of exot-
ic culture as perceived by the white population was, according to Nathan
Irvin Huggins,
as much a service to white need as it was to black. So
essential [had] been the Negro personality to the white
American psyche that black theatrical masks had
become, by the twentieth century, a standard way for
whites to explore dimensions of themselves that
seemed impossible through their own personae. The
blackface minstrel show stylized a Negro character type
that black men used to serve as a passport through
white America. Yet, the mask demeaned them while it hid
them.
11
Huggins's statement poses a dilemma the African American artist had to
face at the time of the Harlem Renaissance: either create a commercial
art addressed to white audiences, imitating their models and, conse-
quently, perpetuating the black stereotypes created by whites; or experi-
ment with new artistic forms that incorporated their own experiences
and tradition as African Americans and addressed mainly black audiences.
In order to understand the specific circumstances faced by
African American artists during the Harlem Renaissance regarding the
perpetuation and/ or destruction of old stereotypes based on the expec-
tations of the Euro-American population, it is essential to understand
how black stereotypes originated and were preserved throughout history.
In "One Hundred Years of Negro Entertainment," Allan Morrison
recalls that it was black slaves who provided the music in the plantations
to entertain their masters, and this servant-master relationship of black
performers to white audiences continued for many years in many differ-
ent forms. Moreover, blacks had been caricatured as irresponsible banjo-
10 Henry L. Gates Jr., and Nellie Y McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature (New York: WW Norton and Co., 1997), 936. Emphasis mine.
11
Nathan I. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1973), 11. Emphasis mine.
LANGSTON HUGHES'S EXPERJMENTAL AND REVOLUTIONARY THEATRE 75
playing and dancing types lacking depth and dignity. Later, Euro-
Americans demanded that African Americans use an idiom that was
racially degrading.t z In the North American tradition, then, African
American entertainers "had been forced to sell [their] wares to prejudiced
audiences, to use a racial idiom and, even more damaging psychological-
ly, to be [racial buffoons] rather than [human beings]."13 This was the
tremendously heavy legacy full of preconceived ideas and assumed roles
that blacks were carrying upon their shoulders, which inevitably made
them face a terrible dilemma. How could artists be themselves when what
was required from them was a shallow mask that satisfied white precon-
ceptions of their behavior and persona? On the other hand, as artists
began to offer new and more accurate images of black people, away from
old stereotypes, the use of black vernacular in their works might be mis-
understood as a stereotype and caricature. Hughes underscores this issue
in Simp!J Heaven!J (1957), when Mamie angrily replies to another charac-
ter who calls her a "disgraceful stereotype":
MAMIE: Mister, you better remove yourself from my
presence before I stereo your type .... Why, it's getting
so colored folks can't do nothing no more without some
other Negro calling you a stereotype. Stereotype, hah! If
you like a little gin, you're a stereotype. You got to drink
Scotch. If you wear a red dress, you're a stereotype. You
got to wear beige or chartreuse. Lord have mercy, honey,
do-don't like no blackeyed peas and rice! Then you're a
down-home Negro for true which I is-and proud of it.
(M.A.MIE glares around as if daring someboc!J to dispute her.
Nobocfy does.) I didn't come here to Harlem to get away
12 This refers to the speech that was mosdy used by illiterate members of the
African American community and was considered by Euro-Americans bad spoken
English, since it did not comply with English standard grammar, syntax and intonation.
Therefore, whites associated bad spoken English with the black community as a comic trait
to be used when portraying black characters. That speech was the black vernacular that
writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston had began to incorporate in
their writing during the years of the Harlem Renaissance, and in the 1960s was going to
be raised by African American artists to the higher status of new language, Black English,
as a genuine expression inextricably linked to the African American tradition and culture.
13 Allan Morrison, "One Hundred Years of Negro Entertainment," in
Anthology of the Afro-American in the Theatre: A Critical Approach, ed. Lindsay Patterson
(Cornwell Heights, PA: The Publishing Agency, Inc., 1978), 3, 5, 10.
76
from my people. I come here because there's more of
'em. I loves my race. I loves my people. Stereotype!J4
BARRJOS
Langston Hughes did not hesitate, though, and chose the rhythms of the
language spoken by common people as well as the rhythms of spirituals,
jazz, and the blues to create an authentic style that belonged to the
African American community. Hughes, then, had started to incorporate
into his theatre what might have been considered at the time a perpetua-
tion of stereotypes. However, he had begun to deconstruct the traits of
those stereotypes and dignify them as essential components of the
African American tradition, i.e., black vernacular.
In this sense, Langston Hughes's theatre had commenced to
raise black consciousness through an art that attempted to go beyond the
issue of double consciousness raised by WE.B. DuBois in 1903.15 In his essay
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Hughes agreed with Du
Bois's concept of double consciousness and asserted that African Americans
came to judge themselves by Western standards rather than recognizing
their own unique beauty. Consequently, African Americans themselves
drew a color line, which became a very high mountain for the "would-be
racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people."t6
Hughes had made the decision to climb that mountain in order to por-
tray real characters (rather than stereotypes) that did not follow Western
standards and represented the great variety of people and cultural rich-
ness found within the African American community.
Fortunately, the complexity of urban pluralism of the 1920s in
Harlem enabled the African American community to appreciate the
diversity of black life (artists, businessmen, musicians, students, laborers,
and so on) and helped leaders, scholars, and artists develop "race con-
sciousness."!? Intellectuals such as WE.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and
Langston Hughes were urging black artists to be honest with their art and
!4 Langston Hughes, Simp!J Heaven!J, in Five Playt by Langtton Hughu, ed. by
Webster Smalley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 125-26.
IS See W E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American
Library, 1969), 45.
16 Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," in CaJJ and
Ruponte: The Rivemde Anthology of the African Ameni:an Literary Tradition, ed. by Patricia Hill
Liggins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998), 899, 900.
! 7 Huggins, Harlem RenaiiSance, 304. Larry Neal in the 1960s asserted that the
Black Arts Movement represented "the flowering of a cultural nationalism that [had] been
LANGSTON HUGHES'S EXPERIMENTAL AND REVOLUTIONARY THEATRE 77
with themselves. The three of them agreed that theatre was the most
appropriate venue for creating a genuine black art, which needed to be
extracted from the African American community's life and experience
rather than from the tradition of the Western stage. Locke declared that
black dramatic art,
must have the courage to be original, to break with
established dramatic conventions of all sorts. It must
have the courage to develop its own zdiom, to pour itself into
new molds, in short, to be creative!J experimental . ... Art must
serve Negro life as well as Negro talent serve art. And
no art is more capable of this service than drama.
I ndeed the surest sign of a folk renascence seems to be
a dramatic flowering .. . . Obviously, though, it has not
yet come. For our dramatic expression is still too restricted, se!f
conscious and imitative.1B
On the one hand, Locke was indicating that black theatre artists were
restricted as long as they kept imitating Western artistic patterns at the
moment, and, on the other, he was encouraging African American artists
to experiment with new theatrical forms.
Through his influence as editor of the NAACP journal, The
CnSis, Du Bois, who had also been calling for a new theatre, founded the
Krigwa (Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists) that sponsored a playwriting
competition and helped develop the Krigwa Players, a little theatre com-
pany.19 In a 1926 issue of the journal, DuBois established the goals that
the new African American theatre should pursue:
[T]he plays of a Negro Theatre must be 1. About us.
suppressed since the 1920's." He referred to the Harlem Renaissance as a failure for not
addressing itself "to the mythology and the life styles of the Black community" (Quoted
in Freda L. Scott, "Black Drama in the Harlem Renaissance," Theatre Journal 37, no. 4
[December 1985): 426). However, although it is true that the achievements by African
American playwrights during the Renaissance have not received the same attention as
poets have, those playwrights did voice the spirit of the African American community,
and Hughes's plays are a clear proof of it.
18 Alain Locke, ''The Negro and the American Stage," in Anthology if the Afro-
American in the Theatre: A Critical Approach, 24. Emphasis mine.
19 Scott, "Black Drama in the Harlem Renaissance," 433.
78
That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as
it is. 2. By us. That is, they must be written by Negro
authors today. 3. For us. That is, the theatre must cater
primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sus-
tained by their entertainment and approval. 4. Near us.
The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the
mass of ordinary Negro people.2o
BARRJOS
Moreover, Du Bois advocated that artists might use propaganda if they
wanted to, but, above all, he insisted that they be sincere and true.
Agreeing with Du Bois's conception of a new African American
theatre, Hughes pointed out one more aspect to be taken into account:
consideration of social class within the black community. In ''The Negro
Artist and the Racial Mountain," Hughes argued that it was probably the
common people who would give the world a truly African American
artist, since it is the common people who are neither afraid nor ashamed
of their folk tradition, and are not afraid nor ashamed of being them-
selves.21 It is precisely the common people that Boyd, one of the charac-
ters in Hughes's Simp!J Heaven!J, turns to for inspiration: "Just making
some notes for a story I might write-after observing life in Harlem over
the weekend."22 Boyd is just one of the common people that shapes this
play, as Hughes himself states in his "character notes": "The characters
in Simp!J Heaven!J are, on the whole, ordinary, hard-working lower-income
bracket Harlemites."23 They represent the same characters that can be
found in most of his theatre work and who are elevated to the category
of complex characters, as explained by Hughes himself in the stage direc-
tions of Tambourines to Glory (1958): "On the surface [it is] a simple play
about very simple people. Therefore, all of its performers should be sen-
sitive enough to appreciate the complexities of simplicity. All of them
should be lovable, except BUDDY-whom one should love, too, in spite
of one's better self."24 Thus, Hughes elevates simple and ordinary people
20 Quoted in Scott, "Black Drama in the Harlem Renaissance,"433.
2! Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," 900.
22 Hughes, Simp!J Heaven!J, 149.
23 Ibid., 11 5.
2
4
Hughes, Tamboun!m to Glory, in Five Plays I?J Langston Hughes, ed. Smalley, 184.
LANGSTON H UGHES'S E>..'PERJMENTAL AND REVOLUTIONARY THEATRE 79
to the status of protagonists in his stories.zs
Langston Hughes was especially eager to witness the creation of
a new African American theatre as stated in his essay "The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain": "[W]e have an honest American Negro litera-
ture already with us. Now I await the rise of the Negro theatre."26 He
regarded art in general as the best vehicle for the black artist to "give his
racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, his incongruous
humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with
tears."27 Hughes vindicated the African American folk and musical tradi-
tions as a distinctive part of the new black art. Jazz, then, became to him
an essential component of his writing: "I try to grasp and hold some of
the meanings and rhythms of jazz .... But jazz to me is one of the inher-
ent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in
the Negro soul-the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white
world ... ; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a
smile."28 Not only did Hughes include blues and jazz music in his the-
atrical pieces, but at times he also gave them a quality and/ or pace asso-
ciated with jazz. For instance, in one of the stage directions in Scottsboro
Limited, Hughes writes: "It is the courtroom and the black prisoners come forward
before the Judge. The trial is conducted in ~ tempo: the white voices staccato, high
and shrill, the black voices deep as the rumble if drums."29 Jazz, the blues, spiri-
25 On the same line and following Hughes's artistic foundations, the African
American artists of the 1960s considered that art and artist should be committed and
address the mass, as Amiri Baraka has observed when referring to that period: "We want-
ed an art that was mass aimed, that could leave the libraries and academies and coffee
shops, and speak direct!J to the people . . . . We wan ted an art that 1/Jas ora4 one meant to be lis-
tened to, one that could be performed on the backs of trucks, in playgrounds ... , right on
the sidewalks. A ma.rs art and anti-elitist art." Amiri Baraka, "Black Theater in the Sixties,"
in Studies in Black Amencan Literature, vol 2, Beliif vs. Theory in Black American Literary
Criticism, ed. Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot (Greenwood, Florida: The PenkeYill
Publishing Co., 1986), 232. Emphasis mine.
26 Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," 901.
2
7
Ibid., 900.
28 Ibid., 901, 902.
29 Langston Hughes, Scottsboro Limited, in The Political Plqys of Langston Hughes,
41. Allen Woll asserts that Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps "attempted to rectify
the new white domination of a black musical theatre with their own black revue, Cavalcade
of the Negro Theatre, which would tell the true story of the Afro-American contribution to
American entertainment." (Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre: From Coont01vn to Dreamgjrls
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989], 23).
80 BARRIOS
tuals, and gospel, as well as dancing are an integral part of most of
Hughes's plays.30 Hughes, then, was using the rhythms, pace, and vernac-
ular familiar to a large part of the black community.
As I observed above, Hughes believed that African Americans
needed neither to be ashamed nor afraid of being black for there was
beauty they should seek and find within themselves, as he himself had
done: "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro--and beautiful!"3t
In "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Hughes foretold the
development in the 1960s of a black aesthetics that underlined the
importance for black artists to be themselves:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to
express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear
or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If
they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beauti-
ful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they
are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build
our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and
we stand on top of the mountain, free within our-
selves.32
Together with Du Bois and Locke, Hughes had begun to open the door
to what could be called a black aesthetic, anticipating the 1960s motto of
Black Is Beautiful, as Amiri Baraka has acknowledged.33
In his constant quest for a black aesthetic, Hughes turned to and
praised the beauty found in African American experience and tradition,
30 In Tambourines to Glory, we can frnd spirituals such as "When the Saints Go
Marching In" (199); blues and spirituals such as "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen"
(546), and "Go Down Moses" (545) are equally present in Don't You Want to Be Free, ''A
Poetry Play. From Slavery through the Blues to Now-and then some! With singing,
Music and Dancing"; or in The Sun Do Move, ''A Music Play" that also includes religious
music, just to give a few examples.
31 Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," 902.
32Ibid.
33 Baraka points out that "among the most sensitive, [Hughes] shows in the
development of his verse an earlier 'Black is Beautiful,' 'African consciousness' period as
well as a later, more sharply international and anti-imperialist period in almost exact
reflection of the heaviest (social) spirit of his times." Baraka, "Black Theater in the
Sixties," 227.
LANGSTON HUGHES'S EXPERIMENTAL AND REvOLUTIONARY THEATRE 81
considering common people the source of the rich material African
American artists needed to create their art. Consequently, he sought the
same people as the best possible audience to whom that art could be
offered. Like Alain Locke, Hughes realized that one of the best vehicles
to maintain a close connection between artist and audience was the per-
forming arts. This is why, since the 1930s, Hughes had attempted to cre-
ate a popular theatre himself, and in 1965 he still defended the need of
such theatre against the "controlled commercialism of Broadway."34 He
urged black artists to use the richness of music and dance encountered in
African American culture, insisting that African American directors, pro-
ducers, and actors should make use of plays written by African American
playwrights, and proposing the creation of a "National Afro-American
Theatre."
35
Hughes's defense of a theatre for the people and his emphasis
on the interaction between the artist/ actors and the audience follows
what Errol Hill traces as "participatory patterns" (the relationship
between presenter and receiver), found in the black church services, the
music hall, the small-town storyteller, or the festivals and carnivals with-
in the African American community, to mention just a few. 36 Margaret
34 Hughes wrote a poem called "Note on Commercial Theatre" in which he
underlined how North American commercial theatre preserved white superiority and
white models that did not suit the needs nor the experience of the African American
community:
You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones
And all kinds of Swing Mikados
And in everything but what's about me-
But someday somebody'll stand up and talk about me,
And write about me-
Black and beautiful-
And sing about me,
And put on plays about me!
I reckon it'll be
Me myself!
Langston Hughes, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), 190.
35 Hughes, "The Need for an Afro-American Theatre," in Anthology of the Afro
American in the Theatre, 163, 165. See also Langston Hughes, "Negro Theatre Groups
Should Aid and Develop Negro Playwrights," The Harold-Countee Cullen Memorial
Collection (Atlanta: The Atlanta University Center Woodruff Library, Archives
Department, n.d.). In this article, Hughes encourages the use of little black theatres that
should present African American plays, rather than staging European-American plays that
offered a "psychology alien to anything average colored folks know or do" (2).
36 Errol Hill, "Black Theatre in Form and Style," The Black Scholar 10, no. 10
Ouly I August 1979): 30.
82
BARRJOS
Wilkerson, has equally highlighted the essential part played by the audi-
ence since it effects personal and social changeY
What Hill and Wilkerson observed in 1979 had already been rec-
ognized and put into practice by Langston Hughes since the 1930s. This
may be observed in plays such as Harvest, in which the author states that
" [t] his plqy should give the iffect of a mass plqy. It is suggested that the audience as
well as the stage be used"3
8
; or in the prologues to some of his plays, such as
Tambourines to Glory, in which the actors address the audience; or in Don't
You Want to Be Free?, in which the idea is "to cause the audience to feel that thry,
as well as the actors, are participating in the drama."39 That the African
American community as audience was always in Hughes's mind is obvi-
ous in his attempt to provide first-hand experience, as expressed in his
more than sixty plays. Furthermore, his search for a popular and revolu-
tionary theatre is made evident in his incessant experimenting with new
forms and styles-many drawn from African American folk and musical
traditions. Both content and form have proven Hughes's faithfulness to
his idea of an African American artist being true to himself and his com-
munity as well as to his commitment to social justice.4D
Hughes's experience as a reporter and .his relationship with vari-
ous writers during the Spanish Civil War had a profound impact on his
later theatrical works. In 1937, after returning from Spain, Hughes decid-
ed to take theatre to the community rather than to the commercial the-
atres.41 With the assistance of Louise Thompson Patterson, he founded
the Harlem Suitcase Theatre-an important proletarian organization cre-
ated especially for labor audiences with the support of the North
37 Margaret Wilkerson, "Redefining Black Theatre," The Black Scholar 10, no. 10
Guly/August 1979): 33.
38 Hughes, Harvest, in The Political Plqys of Langston Hughes, 68.
39 Hughes, Tambounnes to Glory, 268.
40 During the 1920s and 1930s white playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill who
wrote on black subjects, such as Emperor jones (1920)--on which Hughes would later write
a satiric parody called The Em-Fuehrer jones (1938), but Hughes thought that those play-
wrights "could not think black" and, therefore, could not truly comprehend the black
experience (quoted in McLaren, Langston Hughes, 2). Consequently, Hughes was always
anxious to see on stage black plays written by black artists.
41
Spanish poet and playwright Garcia Lorca had made a similar decision during
the years of the Second Republic in Spain, just before the Spanish Civil War. See note 1.
LANGSTON HUGHES'S EXPERIMENTAL AND REVOLUTIONARY THEATRE 83
American Communist Party to promote interracial plays.
4
2 The theatre
opened with Hughes's play Don't You Want to Be Free?. Two years later, fol-
lowing the demise of the Suitcase Theatre, Hughes founded the New
Negro Theatre in Los Angeles; and some time after that, he founded
another community-based theatre in Chicago, the Skyloft Players. In
Chicago, Hughes actually became involved in the theatre productions
presented by the Skyloft Players-as production director, in their casting
or arranging rehearsal and performance schedules.43 Therefore, he par-
ticipated in almost every activity related to theatre, including acting if we
take into account his poetry-performances, accompanied by a jazz or
blues pianist. Faithful to the conception of the black aesthetic he had
42 In a sense, Hughes continued a tradition that had already been started by the
Lafayette Players at the turn of the century (1908). Anita Bush was in charge of it and
opened another unit in Chicago and Washington D.C. after 1918. The Lafayette Players
contributed enormously to the development of black actors by helping them to appear in
a number of significant dramatic roles. Prior to the foundation of this group, no signifi-
cant performing roles could be found on Broadway. Unfortunately, according to Sister M.
Francesca Thompson, "the Black writer did not keep pace. It would have benefited both
actors and writers if the progress made by the actors had been paralleled by a similar
progress among Black playwrights." Thompson considers that the demise of this theatre
group was due to the dilemma actors were facing: "[P]laying white roles and playing roles
written by black writers. It was not possible to continue trying to please two such diver-
gent audiences" (Sister M. Francesca Thompson, O.S.F., "The Lafayette Players, 1917-
1932," in The Theater of Black Americans, ed. Errol Hill, vol 2 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1980], 18, 25, 26, 30). The Lafayette Players had stopped their theatrical
activity by 1932. However, from 1935 to 1939 African Americans had another opportu-
nity not only to act, but also to direct and write plays thanks to the black theatre units cre-
ated by the Federal Theatre Project, one of the pivotal developments in black theatre his-
tory. For the first time, this project made drama available to the masses, and theatre was
taken directly to the people (Ronald Ross, "The Role of Blacks in the Federal Theatre,"
1935-1939," in The Theater of Black Americans, 34, 36). Moreover, the project contributed
to the development of African American theatre in its attempt to support black play-
wrights expressing their experiences in their own vernacular (Floyd Gaffney, "Black
Theatre: Commitmem and Communication," The Black Scholar 1 Qune 1970]: 10). Hughes,
on the other hand, did not participate in the project with his plays, but worked on his own
for community-based little theatres.
43 McLaren, Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist, 117, 141, 148.
44 Susan Duffy claims that Hughes was actually "in the vanguard of the 'poet-
ry-performance movement"' as early as 1927 (The Political Plqys, 168). Hughes included
poetry in plays such as in o n ~ You Want To Be Free?, described as a "poetry play," in which
piano music was required to accompany the performance of poems-as indicated in the
stage directions (Langston Hughes, Don't You Want to Be Free?, in Black Theatre U.S A., ed.
James V Hatch and Ted Shine, vol. 2 [New York: The Free Press, 1996], 278). The devel-
opment of this technique of reading poetry with the accompaniment of music, however,
has often been attributed to the Beat poets of the 19 50s.
84
BARRIOS
defended and the idea of considering the people the main
characters/agents of social change, Hughes had applied his theories to
his playwriting and staging techniques. The range covered by his sixty-
three plays shows Hughes's social, political, and racial commitment coin-
ciding with his sympathies with the North American Communist Party.
Such commitment is especially visible in the agit-prop plays he wrote in
the 1930s.
4
5 In an essay on black theatre written in 1979, Errol Hill
encouraged African American playwrights to seek new theatrical forms
and styles that might need to abandon the proscenium stage in favor of
a different pattern that could serve as a more relevant vehicle to portray
the African American experience, emphasizing the participatory models
of the African American tradition.4G In his study, Hill overlooks the ear-
lier experimental and revolutionary staging techniques and participatory
models employed by Hughes. This can be observed in Hughes's stage
directions for Harvest: "[I] t is suggested that ... the old frame if proscenium be
broken," and he adds that between scenes "a newspaper curtain might be
used."47 Four years later, in Don't You Want to Be Free?, Hughes employed
the use of a bare stage while keeping the house lights on during the whole
performance. Thus, four decades before Hill's encouragement of new
theatrical techniques, Hughes had already begun to apply them.
Moreover, through Hughes's various journeys all over the world,
he had been exposed to Russian theatre, Chinese and Japanese acting
techniques, European plays by Garcia Lorca and Bertolt Brecht, and
45 See Susan Duffy's exhaustive study on Hughes's political plays, which also
analyzes in depth the playwright's social and political commitment and support he
received from the Communist Parry during the 1930s. Duffy quotes Hughes's opinion on
his political ideas given to the American Consul General at Shanghai in 1933:
Being a Negro I have been struggling for the emancipation of the
Negroes and the oppressed masses and will continue ftl)' struggle forever.
Communism aims at the emancipation of the oppressed masses but
I still doubt whether or not complete freedom can be secured
through the realization of communism. I do not claim to be a com-
munist but I do not object to be regarded as a sympathizer because
I sympathize with and support all Communist movements and also
the oppressed people. After all I am a liberalist who is interested in
communism and the struggles for the liberation of the oppressed.
Duffy, The Political Plays, 196. Emphasis mine.
46 Hill, ''Black Theatre in Form and Style," 29.
47 Hughes, Harvest, 68.
LANGSTON H UGHES'S EXPERIMENTAL AND REVOLUTIONARY THEATRE 85
North American theatre. Such exposure helped Hughes embrace innova-
tive and avant-garde staging techniques that he combined with the ele-
ments found in the African American tradition without forgetting his
commitment to social and racial issues. Harvest remains one of the best
examples:
This plqy should give the effect of a mass plqy. It is suggested that
the audience as well as the stage be used, that runawqys be
employed, and that the old frame of proscenium be broken ....
Between scenes, a "newspaper" curtain might be used, reproducing
actual portions of the reporting of the strike. Bits from the strik-
ers' handbills, or from the Vigilantes' and growers' advertisements
could be flashed on the screen. 48
Parallel to his innovative staging techniques, Hughes experimented with
various theatre subgenres that ran from the historical and agit-prop (the
most propagandistic pieces were written by Hughes in the 1930s) to
tragedy, comedy, and satiric parody. In most of them, a wide range of the
African American musical tradition is present.
Among the most political, agit-prop, and revolutionary are the
plays written during the 1930s, the majority of which are intended to be
didactic and mobilize the audience-Scottsboro Limited, Harvest (previous-
ly titled Blood on the Fields, Angelo Herndon Jones, The Organizer, and Don't You
Want to Be Free?. Hughes includes blues and jazz in all of them, which
according to Duffy, become "agents of social propaganda rather than
mere social lament." And it is precisely the musical structure of these
labor plays that makes them distinct from other labor plays written at the
time.49 Baraka, for instance, considers Scottsboro Limited one of Hughes's
most revolutionary plays. Scottsboro is written in verse, and there are dif-
ferences between black and white voices, giving the black ones a jazz-like
and deep shade, whereas the white racist ones "are shrill and staccato";
also, the play is supposed to be performed on a bare stage.so This piece
was based on the case of nine young black men who were accused of
raping a white woman on a freight train, eight of whom were tried by a
jury of southern whites and sentenced to death for the crime, but
released years later when their innocence was proven.
48
Ibid.
49 Duffy, The Political Plqys, 10.
50 Baraka, "Restaging Langston Hughes," 65.
86 BARRJOS
Like Scottsboro, Angelo Herndon Jones was inspired by a southern
legal case. Jones was charged with inciting insurrection at an interracial
rally and sentenced to 18 to 20 years. Further, Don't You Want to Be Free?
was the play with which the Harlem Suitcase Theatre opened.St This play
incorporates poems by Hughes, spirituals, and blues from the African
American tradition. It intends to show the trajectory of African
Americans through history from slavery to the Harlem riots of 1935-
which "foreshadows the urban unpheavals of the 1960s."52 The play crit-
icizes European colonization and North American racism, and sends a
message of unity between black and white workers. In the first actor's
own words, the play is "about what it means to be colored in America."53
The staging, in McLaren's opinion, was influenced by Meyerhold's con-
structivist theatre, but Hughes only borrowed "the basic utilitarian con-
cept of constructivism, which could be adapted to the limited economic
resources of the Suitcase Theatre." In addition to influences from
Russian theatre, the play shows a complex structure that includes dance,
speech, poetry, and song, unlike most conventional Western drama that
follows a linear and more realistic style.5
4
The staging of the play is sim-
51 Slavery was one of the main topics dealt with in this theatrical piece. Another
play that dealt with the issue of slavery was The Sun Do Move (1942), which was performed
with Mulatto (1935) by the Skyloft Players. Tbe Sun Do Move, however, "avoids didacticism
and proletarian themes, evidence of waning radicalism in Hughes's 1940s plays." But this
plar also offers innmative staging possibilities. The play is set in Tennessee at the time of
the Civil War, and it could be staged "without scenery ... in the style of a motion picture
drama or radio drama with no break in continuity and no intermissions, the spirituals
between scenes serving as transition music during blackouts." Besides, according to
McLaren, the Prologue follows Brechtian style in depicting the slave trade while address-
ing the audience (McLaren, Langston Hugbes: Folk Dramatist, 149, 150)- something that
can also be observed in the Prologue to Tambourines to Glory, where Buddy talks to the
audience and introduces himself as "the devil" (Hughes, Tambourines to Glory, 188).
Another important play by Hughes written in 1943, was For This We Fight (1943), which
according to McLaren offers a "more complex presentation of racial issues." A play that
also deals with the US Civil War and the differences black soldiers suffered in pay rations,
promotions and prisoners exchange-issue that is also presented in the film Glory
(McLaren, Langston Hugbes: Folk Dramatist, 157). For This We Fight was staged on 7 June,
1943 in Madison Square Garden as part of a ''Negro Freedom Rally." Considered a pag-
eant by McLaren, he emphasizes that the play "uses black participation in the military and
historical icons to critique Jim Crow" and "echoes the Frank Capra ftlm W-?J We Fight,
used by the War Department in training soldiers" (Ibid., 156).
52 McLaren, Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist, 125.
53 Hughes, Don't You Want to Be Free, 268.
54 McLaren, Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist, 121.
LANGSTON H UGHES'S EXPERJMENTAL AND REVOLUTIONARY THEATRE 87
ple: a bare stage with a lynch rope "which hangs at the back, center,
throughout the entire performance, and serves as a symbol for Negro
oppression." In a Brechtian manner, the house lights were to be kept on
during the whole performance. 55 Finally, the audience, as in previous the-
atrical pieces, plays a fundamental role as their participation is required:
"[f]he audience-space should still be employed for much of the action.
Since the idea behind this type of production is to cause the audience to
feel that they, as well as the actors, are participating in the drama."56 As in
Harvest, close contact between actors and audience is effected by using
the audience seating area in addition to the stage as acting space.
Another theatre subgenre used by Hughes is satiric parody or
skit. Most of his skits were also written during the 1930s with the inten-
tion of satirizing white superiority as portrayed in US motion pictures. 57
These skits include The Em-Fuehrer Jones, Colonel T o m ~ Cabin (also called
Little v a ~ End, a parody on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle T o m ~ Cabin),
Scarlet Sister Barry (a parody of Julia Mood Peterkin's Pulitzer Prize-win-
ning novel about Sea Island African Americans, Scarlet Sister Mary), and
Limitations o/ Lzje (1938, a parody on Fannie Hurt's novel and John M.
Stahl's 1934 filin melodrama Imitation o/ Lzje). As can be observed in the
titles, there is a hint of Hughes's choice to reverse roles. Thus, in
Limitations o/ Life, for instance, Audette (who is a blond maid) tells her
mistress Mammy Weavers (a colored lady):
AUDETTE: Lawd, Mammy Weavers, rna little dauther's
tryin' so hard to be colored. She just loves Harlem. She's
lyin' out in the backyard in de sun all day long tannin'
herself, every day, tryin' so hard to be colored.
MAMMY: What a shame, the darling's so fair and blue-
eyed!58
In Colonel T o m ~ Cabin, some reversal in the characters' features can be
observed as well: "UNCLE TOM has a halo o/ snow white hair circling a bald
pate . ... On!J UTilE EVA is abnormal. She is an overgrou;n adult in child's
55 Hughes, Don't You Want to Be Free?, 247.
56
I bid., 268.
5
7
Hatch and Shine, Black Theatre U.S A., vol1, 223.
58 Langston Hughes, Limitations o/ Lzft, in Black Theatre USA, 225.
88 BARRIOS
clothes, frills and ribbons. Also, alas, she is colored, with blond cur/s."59
Like social justice and race, humor plays an essential role in
Hughes's theatrical pieces. According to McLaren, "black humor in liter-
ature can be traced to vernacular rhythms, folk ironies, and satiric, comic
riffs" that are found in the language used by black folks in the street.60
Humor and black vernacular are widely used in Hughes's plays, including
Little Ham (1936, abbreviation for "Hamlet," and also a biblical reference
to Ham); When the Jack Hollers (1936, in collaboration with Arna
Bontemps);Jqy to My Soul (1937, a farce comedy); and Simp!J Heaven!J.
However, if comedy occupies an important space in Hughes's
theatrical work, he also experimented with tragedy-Mulatto (1935) being
the most popular. The play is set in the 1920s but mirrors social relation-
ships during slavery. Robert, the main character who is a young mulatto,
shows a rebellious attitude towards being confined by a racial definition:
CORA [Robert's mother]: When the Colonel [Robert's
white father] comes back, in a few minutes, he wants to
talk to you. Talk right to him, boy. Talk like you was col-
ored, 'cause you ain't white.
ROBERT (angri!YJ: And I'm not black either.61
Hughes shows mulattoes' feeling of alienation because of their hybrid
status which (according to some critics) mirrors Hughes's own inner con-
flict.62 The tragic mulatto figure of this play has also been seen by Judith
Berzon as a symbol of the "failure of the American myth of egalitarian-
ism."63 Mulatto was produced on Broadway by Martin Jones-including
sequences not written by Hughes-the year of the Harlem uprising, and
was also staged in Europe (Paris, Rome, and Madrid) and various Latin
American countries. It enjoyed 373 performances on Broadway, which
made it the longest running play by an African American author until
Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun reached Broadway in 1959.
59 Langston Hughes, Colonel T o m ~ Cabin, in The Collected Works if Langston
Hughes, ed. Sanders, 575.
60 McLaren, Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist, 9.
61 Langston Hughes, Mulatto, in i ~ ~ t Plays by Langston Hughes, ed. Smalley, 19.
62 McLaren, Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist, 61.
63 Quoted in McLaren, Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist, 67.
LANGSTON HUGHES'S EXPERIMENTAL AND REVOLUTIONARY THEATRE
89
Parallel to the use of tragedy to underscore social injustice and
cruelty suffered by the African American community during slavery,
Hughes ventured into the historical mode to criticize the abuse of power
and betrayal of one's community and principles in postcolonial societies.
Thus Emperor of Haiti (originally titled Drums of Haiti, and then, Troubled
Island) stands as the best example of this category. Although the play does
not faithfully follow historical events, it draws upon the figure of Jean
Jacques Dessalines and main episodes of the Haitian revolution.64 The
play presents the tension between the Africans and the mulatto elite, the
tyranny of Dessalines once he is in power, the mulattoes' betrayal, and
Dessalines's eventual murder. When Dessalines becomes Emperor of the
island, he leaves his African wife for a mulatto woman and rejects an
important element of African traditions-its drums:
Stop it! Stop it! The Empress don't like drums!
Drums in the Court! The idea! Suppose we had guests
from abroad, what would they think of us? They'd think
we are all savages, that's what. Savages! Here I am, try-
ing to build a civilization in Haiti good as any of the
whites have in their lands. Trying to set up a court equal
to any Court in Europe. And what do I find-voodoo
drums in the banquet hall.65
Dessalines's statement revises his former love of drums, when he was
leading a black revolution: "Soon the drums of freedom will begin to
sound."
6
6 Consequently, the play shows Dessalines' downfall as a result of
having betrayed the ideals of revolution. Emperor of Haiti displays the
abuse of power, treachery, and misguided love, all of which foreshadow
dilemmas encountered in postcolonial societies.67
64 Dessalines was one of the leaders of the African slave revolution at the end
of the eighteenth century against French rule in San Domingo. After 12 years of war,
black slaves defeated the French and formed the independent Republic of Haiti. For fur-
ther information on the Haitian revolution, see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint
L'Overture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).
6
5 Langston Hughes, E1!7f>eror of Haih; in Black Heroes: Seven Plays, Errol Hill, ed.
(New York: Applause, Theatre Book Publishers, 1989), 54-55.
66 Ibid., 29. Hughes actually uses African drums and dancing in his play o n ~
You Want to Be Free? to underscore two important components of African American cul-
ture. Hughes, o n ~ You Want to Be Free?, 269.
67 McLaren, Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist, 106.
90 BARRIOS
In sum, Langston Hughes's theatrical trajectory demonstrates
that he actually set the foundations for the Black Arts and Black Theatre
Movements of the 1960s. Thanks to these movements, the 1960s wit-
nessed the rise of a new theatre aesthetic that left Western patterns
behind and gave the black community as audience the most prominent
role in the creation of a new black art. Echoing Hughes, Larry Neale
wrote that the 1960s Black Arts Movement was "radically opposed to any
concept of the artist that [alienated] him from his community," asserting
that "Black art [was] the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power
concept," which envisioned "an art that [spoke] directly to the needs and
aspirations of Black America."68 Using Ethreridge Knight's words, Neale
recalls what was understood by black aesthetic, which simply highlights
what Hughes had been reflecting upon in his various artistic expressions,
but, particularly, in theatre: "Unless the Black artist establishes a 'Black
aesthetic' he will have no future at all. To accept the white aesthetic is to
accept and validate a society that will not allow him to live. The Black
artist must create new forms and new values."69 Or as Baraka pointed out
in "The Revolutionary Theatre," "black theatre must force change .... It
is a political theatre, a weapon .... It is a social theatre."70 The manifesto
that Neale, Knight, and Baraka were giving shape during the 1960s had
already been put into practice by Hughes in his plays much earlier.
In conclusion, I would like to end with Gates's and McKay's
words which closely connect Hughes's and the 1960s's conception of
Black Art whose main goal was the African American community as a
source and the main recipient of that art:
Langston Hughes ... was far more the model for the
artistic and intellectual creativity championed by the six-
ties than either WE.B. Du Bois or, certainly, Ralph
Ellison. Like Hughes, Black Arts workers wished to con-
struct performances, essays, books, dramas and stories
that would have the feel of the black majority. They
wanted their work to be experimental, musical, vernacu-
68 Larry Neale, "The Black Arts Movement," in The Norton Anthology o/ African
American literature, ed. Gates and McKay, 1960.
69 Ibid., 1961.
70 Amiri Baraka, "The Revolutionary Theatre," in The Norton Anthology o/
African Ammcan literature, 1900.
LANGSTON HUGHES'S EXPERIMENTAL AND REVOUITIONARY THEATRE
lar in harmony with the "dream life" of the masses
.... Like Hughes, the Black Arts wished to give back, in new!J
creative form, the beauty it discovered in the Black mqjority ... .
Like Hughes, the Black Arts deemed political as well as
spiritual liberation wd joy an essential part of its mis-
sion. To tell a black truth to white power was a central
goal of the Black Arts.7
1
91
71 Gates and McKay, The Norton AntbololJ of African American Literature, 1803.
Emphasis mine.
92
CONTRIBUTORS
OLGA BARRIOS gained her Doctorate degree in Theatre Arts at UCLA.
Among the books she has edited are: Las mujeres en Ia Constituci6n Europea.
Estudios multidisciplinares de Genero (2005), La familia en Africa y Ia ditispora
ajricana: Estudio multidisciplinar / Fami!J in Africa and the African diaspora: A
Multidisciplinary approach (2004), Realidad y representaci6n de Ia violencia (2002),
Contemporqy Literature of the African Diaspora (1997). She currently teaches
at the University of Salamanca, where she is the Erasmus Coordinator for
the English Department. She is also a member of the Editorial Board for
the Journal of the Women's Studies Centre.
ATTILIO FAVORINI is Founding Chair Emeritus of the Department of
Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also founded the
Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival and continues to teach. He is the
author of Voicings: Ten Plqys From the Documentary (Ecco Press) and (with
Lynne Conner) of the award-winning play on Rachel Carson, In The
Garden of Live Flo11;ers (Dramatic Publishing), among other plays. The cur-
rent article is part of his work-in-progress, The Scene is Memory.
ALAN R. HAVIG received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-
Columbia in 1967 and taught American history at Stephens College for
39 years before retiring in February, 2006. His research continues to be
in the field of popular culture, broadly-defined, including vaudeville writ-
ing and performance, network radio programming, and early 20th centu-
ry automobile "trails" (highways).
SUN HEE TERESA LEE has recently completed her Ph.D. in English at
the University of Southern California and she currently holds a
Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her
research areas include contemporary American drama and performance,
and Asian American and African American literatures.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
THE HE\RS OF
MOLIERE
FOUR FRENCH COMEDIES OF THE
17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES
@ Reg=d: TheAI-at.-M!nded l.owr
@ De.toucheo: TheCo..ceited Cow.t
@ I...Cl.ausMe:
@ I...IJ"'Thefrleaclolti...La ....
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
MARVIN CARLSON
The Heirs of
Moliere
Translated and Edited by:
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four
representative French comedies of
the period from the death of Moliere
to the French Revolution: Regnard's
The Absent-Minded Lover,
Destouches's The Conceited Count,
La Chaussee's The Fashionable
Prejudice, and Laya's The Friend of
the Laws.
Translated in a poetic form that
seeks to capture the wit and spirit of
the originals, these four plays
suggest something of the range of
the Moliere inheritance, from
comedy of character through the
highly popular sentimental comedy
of the mid eighteenth century, to
comedy that employs the Moliere
tradition for more contemporary
political ends.
In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that
show changing ideas about such perennial social concerns as class, gender, and
politics through the turbulent century that ended in the revolutions that gave birth to
the modem era.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
A ICe
Pixerecourt:
Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by:
Daniel Gerould
&
Marvin Carlson
THe RUINS Of BAllY ON
CHIIISTOPHU COLUMIIUS
THE Doc or MONlARCIS
This volume contains four of
Pixerecourt's most important
melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon,
or Jafar and Zaida, The Dog of
Montatgis, or The Forest of Bondy,
Christopher Columbus, or The
Discovery of the New World, and
Alice, or The Scottish Gravediggers,
as well as Charles Nodier's
"Introduction" to the 1843 Collected
Edition of Pixerecourt's plays and
the two theoretical essays by the
playwright, "Melodrama," and
"Final Reflections on Melodrama."
TkANSLAT D AND EDITED liY
DANI L GEROULD & MARVIN CARLSON
"Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and
brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He deterrrlined the
structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century .. .
Pixerecourt determined that scenery, music, dance, lighting and the very movements
of his actors should no longer be left to chance but made integral parts of his play."
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited
by Daniel Gerould
This volume contains seven of
Witkiewicz's most important
plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor
Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar,
The Anonymous Work, The
Cuttlefish, Dainty Shapes and
Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub
Sonata, as well as two of his
theoretical essays, "Theoretical
Introduction" and "A Few Words
about the Role of the Actor in the
Theatre of Pure Form."
Witkiewicz . . . takes up and
continues the vein of dream and
grotesque fantasy exemplified by
the late Strindberg or by
Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the surrealists and
Antonin Artaud which culminated in the masterpeices of the dramatists of the
absurd-Beckett, Iones co, Genet, Arrabal-of the late nineteen forties and the
nineteen fifties. It is high time that this major playwright should become better
known in the English-speaking world.
Martin Esslin
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
The Arab Oedipus:
THE ARAB OEDIPUS
Four Plays
Editor
Marvin Carlson
Translators
Marvin Carlson
Dalia Basiouny
William Maynard Hutchins
Pierre Cachia
Desmond O'Grady
Admer Gouryh
With Introductions By:
Marvin Carlson, Tawfiq AI-Hakim,
& Dalia Basiouny
This volume contains four plays based on the
Oedipus legend by four leading dramatists of the
Arab world: Tawfiq Al-1-lakim's King Oedipus, Ali
Ahmad Bakathir's The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali
Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus, and Walid
..._ ______ ....... ____ __, ......... _. lkhlasi's Oedipus.
The volume also includes Al-Hakim's preface to his Oedipus, on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a
preface on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general introduction by Marvin Carlson.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modem Arabic theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the
Western theatre community, and we hope that this collection will contribute to that awareness.
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" JIIS 1l'JGII. ... ,., rtf ( .,; <: -\l '' f't. f 1 .. ,. 11' rHO
A:o.u rtt:M, t, ut 1-. Jut t
Comedy:
A Bibliography
Editor
Meghan Duffy
Senior Editor
Daniel Gerould
Initiated by
Stuart Baker, Michael Early,
& David Nicolson
This bibliography is intended for scholars,
teachers, students, artists, and general
readers interested in the theory and
practice of comedy. It is a concise
bibliography, focusing exclusively on
drama, theatre, and performance, and
includes only published works written
in English or appearing in English
translation.
Comedy is designed to supplement older, existing bibliographies by including new areas
of research in the theory and practice of comedy and by listing the large number of new
studies that have appeared in the past quarter of a century.
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Contemporary Theatre in Egypt contains the proceedings of a Symposium on
this subject held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of 1999 along with
the first English translations of three short plays by leading Egyptian play-
wrights who spoke at the Symposium, Alfred Farag, Gamal Maqsoud, and
Lenin El-Ramley. It concludes with a bibliography of English translations and
secondary articles on the theatre in Egypt since I 955.
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Zeami and the No Theatre in the World, edited by Benito Ortolani and Samuel
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Symposium" held in New York City in October 1997 in conjunction with the
"Japanese Theatre in the World" exhibit at the Japan Society. The book contains
an introduction and fifteen essays, organized into sections on "Zeami's Theories
and Aesthetics," "Zeami and Drama," "Zeami and Acting," and "Zeami and the
World."
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Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus contains translations of four plays
by the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry, and
prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety
plays, novels, and collections of poetry. The plays collected here with an intro-
duction by David Willinger include The Temptation, Friday, Serenade, and The
Hair of the Dog.
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Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive cata-
logue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars, including
public and private libraries, museums, historical societies, university and college
collections, ethnic and language associations, theatre companies, acting schools,
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