THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 19, Number 2 Spring 2007
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve
Editor: David Savran
Guest Editors: American Theatre and Drama
Society's Publications Committee
Robert Vorlicky (Chair), Dorothy Chansky, Kim Marra, William
Demastes, Heather Nathans, and Amy Hughes.
Managing Editor: Naomi Stubbs
Editorial Assistant: Debra Hilborn
Circulation Manager: George Panaghi
Circulation Assistant: Frank Episale
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Professor Daniel Gerould, Executive Director
Professor Edwin Wilson, Chairman, Advisory Board
Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration
Frank Hentschker, Director of Programs
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSI1Y CENTER
OF THE Cl1Y UNIVERSI1Y OF NEW YoRK
EDITORIAL BOARD
Philip Auslander
Una Chaudhuri
William Demastes
Harry Elam
Jorge Huerta
Stacy Wolf
Shannon Jackson
Jonathan Kalb
Jill Lane
Thomas Postlewait
Robert Vorlicky
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THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 19, Number 2 Spring 2007
CONTENTS
FORWARD 5
ROSEMARJE K. BANK, HARRY ELAM, JOHN FRlCK, L ISA MERRlLL,
AND DoN B. WILMETH 9
"Looking Back to Look Forward": Assessing Future Directions in
American Theatre Studies
GARRETT EISLER
"I am a Mere Business Machine": The Commodification of the
Heart in Bronson Howard's The Henrietta
ROBIN BERNSTEIN
"Never Born": Angelina Weld Grimke's Rachel as Ironic Response
to Topsy
BRJAN HALLSTOOS
Pageant and Passion: Willa Saunders Jones and Early Black Sacred
Drama in Chicago
L EIGH KENNICOTT
Dislocations of Time and Space on the Early Twentieth-Century
Broadway Stage
CONTRIBUTORS
37
61
77
99
119
JOURNAL OF AMERJCAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 19, NO.2 (SPRJNG 2007)
FORWARD
This special issue marks the fifth anniversary of the American
Theatre and Drama Society's guest editorship of The Journal of American
Drama and Theatre. In Spring 2002, ATDS, in partnership with ]ADT,
published its first collaborative installment of the journal. An interna-
tional organization "dedicated to t he study of United States theatre and
drama, its varied histories, traditions, literatures, and performances with-
in its cultural contexts," ATDS has wholly embraced its relationship with
]ADT as annual guest editors.
To mark this year's celebratory occasion, the Publications
Committee of ATDS is committed not only to publishing the very best
in recent theatre studies and performance scholarship, but also to high-
lighting public debates that focus on pressing topics within our profes-
sion. Here, published in its entirety, is a transcript of a recent forum of
prominent U.S. theatre scholars- Rosemarie K. Bank, Harry Elam, Lisa
Merrill, and Don B. Wilmeth-focusing on and challenging the past,
present, and future of Theatre Studies in the American academy as a field
of critical inquiry and cultural significance. Chaired by ATDS President
John Frick, this panel presentation and subsequent discussion took place
before a packed audience at the 2006 Association for Theatre in Higher
Education (ATHE) conference in Chicago.
Following the transcript of the scholarly panel are four essays
selected competitively from those submitted by members of ATDS.
Authors whose works were chosen for publication were paired with sen-
ior editors from ATDS (who are identified below). This strategic cou-
pling proved to be a model of effective, efficient collaboration, estab-
lishing a close, dynamic relationship between authors and editors from
within the larger ATDS organizational structure.
In the first essay, "'I am a mere business machine': The
Commodification of the Heart in Bronson Howard's The Henn'etta,"
Garrett Eisler reads this 1887 satire of emerging U.S. corporate capital-
ism in the context of Wall Street's first Golden Age. Written a century
before computers, cell phones, and Blackberries, the play is eerily pre-
scient of the ways in which the American obsession with speculation and
stock returns intrude on family life and personal happiness. Eisler also
considers how the play's mixed reception and revisions for subsequent
productions have contributed to its misinterpretation and marginalization
in theatre scholarship. The essay recovers the play as a richly illuminating
document of the historical dynamics of American business culture and
6
FORWARD
of the stage.
Robin Bernstein focuses on the theatrical, textual, cultural, and
political significance of the first non-musical play that was written, pro-
fessionally produced, and performed by African Americans. In "'Never
Born': Angelina Weld Grimk:e's Rachel as Ironic Response to Topsy,"
Bernstein positions Grimke's Rachel (1916) as propagandistic drama that
attacks anti-black violence and racist imagery. Bernstein argues that schol-
ars generally overlook the playwright's dramaturgical choice to counter
cultural stereotypes through "the role children play in Grimke's interven-
tion in mass culture." Throughout its dramatic narrative and action,
Rachel responds not only to racist violence (both physical and cultural),
but to the "culturally violent figure of the "pickaninny," popularized
most prominently through staged adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin. Persuasively, Bernstein analyzes Grimke's strategies to
present African American child characters as fully-realized subjects and
subsequently demonstrates how the playwright "ironizes that humaniza-
tion." Rachel, according to Bernstein, suggests that "a fully human, think-
ing, feeling, black child is ironically, in the face of racism, the greatest
source of pain and vulnerability to African American families." The
insidious tragedy of racism-grounded in the earliest of African
American dramas, Rachel-has only deepened in U.S. theatre up through
these early years of our new century.
Brian Hallstoos's article, "Pageant and Passion: Willa Saunders
Jones and Early Black Sacred Drama in Chicago," introduces us to an
African American woman who in 1926 at the age of twenty-one staged a
passion play in Chicago which was to have an Easter-season stage life well
into the 1970s when Jones died. Her play quickly moved from a small
Southside Chicago church to venues that finally included Chicago's Civic
Opera House and featured such luminaries as Mahalia Jackson and Dinah
Washington. Hallstoos follows the play's evolution from its conservative
church-based roots into transformations that included "sensational and
seemingly secular content, such as sexually charged dance ... which in
other contexts would spark the condemnation of churchgoers." But
given that at heart the play remained solidly a product of the black
church, it was successful at holding onto its original audience base while
expanding beyond the confines of its original home. As Hallstoos notes,
Jones's "fluency with highbrow sacred expressive culture, which placed
her among the ranks of elite religious authorities, precluded negative
responses to the spectacular aspects of her play that undoubtedly attract-
ed the size of audience needed to sustain annual productions in high-
priced venues." This article introduces us to an American cultural artifact
FORWARD 7
long overlooked but finally brought quite ably to critical light.
In the fmal essay, "Dislocations of Time and Space on the Early
Twentieth-Century Broadway Stage," Leigh Kennicott investigates "how
cinematic ways of seeing penetrated human consciousness and paved the
way for innovations in theatrical structure" using examples from Roy
Cooper Megrue's Under Cover and It Pqys to Advertise (both produced in
1914). Megrue deployed what Kennicott calls a "dramaturgy of attrac-
tions," which she explains by drawing on early cinema theory, itself based
in part on Meyerhold's ideas about "molecular" units within a perform-
ance or film that are independent of the main narrative and of interest in
and of themselves. These typically occur as part of the director's contri-
bution, but Megrue embedded them in the script. Kennicott's proj ect is
to historicize and investigate early instances of the fraught dance between
the live and the mediated, and the way each spoke to the other. She invites
further thought and work on "the symbiotic call-and-response" between
flim and theatre.
Our thanks to Heather Nathans and Amy Hughes, members of
ATDS's Publications Committee, for their assistance in coordinating this
issue. Finally, our appreciation to David Savran and the JADT Editorial
Board for their sustained commitment to a yearly special issue edited by
ATDS.
Dorothy Chansky
William Demastes
Kim Marra
Robert Vorlicky
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 19, NO.2 (SPRING 2007)
"LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD": AsSESSING FUTURE
DIRECTIONS IN AMERICAN THEATRE STUDIES
ROSEMARIE K. BANK, HARRY ELAM, JOHN FRICK, LISA MERRILL,
DoN B. WILMETH
At the 2006 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) con-
ference in Chicago, the American Theatre and Drama Society (AIDS)
sponsored a special panel designed to discuss and assess the current state
of American Theatre Studies and its future. The panel featured recog-
nized senior scholars, experts in various facets of American Theatre
Studies. The invited speakers included: Don B. Wilmeth (Asa Messer
Professor Emeritus and Emeritus Professor of Theatre and of English,
Brown University; Editor, Cambridge Studies in American Theatre &
Drama; Editor, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History);
Rosemarie K. Bank (Professor of Theatre, Kent State University and Past
President of ATDS); Lisa Merrill (Professor of Theatre, Hofstra
University and President of the Women and Theatre focus group,
ATHE); and Harry Elam (Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities,
Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts and Chair, Department
of Drama, Stanford University). The panel was organized and chaired by
John Frick, Professor of Theatre and American Studies at the University
of Virginia and the President of the American Theatre and Drama
Society (2006-2009).1
****************************
JOHN FRICK To those of you who have been attending conferences
for a while, this probably looks like just another of those "state of the
profession" panels; but our hope in composing this panel is that it's going
to be a good bit more. Our hope is that it's not simply going to be a sum-
mary of where we are-what sort of situation we find ourselves in at this
particular point- but hopefully an inquiry into where we, as Americanists,
conceivably can go in the next five, ten, twenty years.
1
According to its mission statement, the American Theatre and Drama Society
(AIDS) is an incorporated organization dedicated to the study of United States theatre
and drama, its varied histories, traditions, literatures, and performances within its cultural
contexts. ATDS also encourages the evolving debate exploring national identities and
experiences through research, pedagogy, and practice. ATDS recognizes that notions of
America and the U.S. encompass migrations of peoples and cultures that overlap and
influence one another. To this end, ATDS welcomes scholars, teachers, and practitioners
world-wide.
10 ATDS PANEL
The idea for this panel and the longer inquiry that it hopefully
will generate was ftrst raised at a dinner when ATDS joined the University
of Kansas at the New Literacies Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, in
March 2005. At that dinner, three of us-Rose Bank, Marti LoMonaco,
and I-were discussing the state of academic theatre in general when
Rose posed the simple question, "When was the last time you saw an ad
for an Americanist?" That simple question led to a series of rather dis-
turbing observations-all that could be considered possible symptoms of
the gradual deterioration of traditional American Theatre Studies in the
academy and the scholarly realm. These "symptoms" included how
quickly Brooks McNamara's and Don Wilmeth's American Theatre/
Popular Entertainment positions were redefined and ostensibly lost as
American Theatre Studies positions when they retired; the abrupt and
unceremonious demise of the highly acclaimed Cambridge University
Press American Theatre series that Don edited and that Rose and I wrote
for; my observation that last year, when I ran the recruitment table fol-
lowing the annual ATHE membership meeting, I couldn't help but note
that other focus groups (e.g., the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender
Focus Group [LGBT]; Women and Theatre; the Latino/Larina Focus
Group; Performance Studies) attracted twenty to thirty interested people
while only two people came to the ATDS table; and, most recently,
American theatre historians and ATDS were actually referred to as
"dinosaurs," by one of our own members.
The recognition of these symptoms started us thinking about
our current standing in the academy and, more significantly, about our
future in the face of a rapidly changing scholarly landscape- one with
many more fields of inquiry than were present when ATDS joined
ATHE. Taken singly, I think it might be possible to overlook the symp-
toms and what they portend; but viewed collectively, I'm not sure we can
really afford to ignore these signs any longer. So that is the reason that I
decided to convene this panel of well known and respected senior schol-
ars, each with a different research orientation and perspective.
Some of the questions that were raised in my mind and that I
posed to the panel were: Why are ATHE focus groups like Performance
Studies; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender; Women and Theatre;
Latina/Latina focus groups eclipsing us? (I'm basing that on the fact that
many more people went to other recruitment tables last year than came
to ours.) Are our methods regarded as antiquated? Is our focus too nar-
row? Is our diminishing popularity a result of changing perceptions or a
function of what we are doing or are not doing? These, then, were the
questions I e-mailed our panelists last spring and asked them to consider
LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD
11
(although they were certainly not restricted to these issues). So the for-
mat quite simply is that the panelists will briefly address these questions
or questions that they have raised on their own, and then we will open
the discussion to the entire audience. A discussion among all of those
present is really, to me, the principal goal of the panel- to get everybody
involved in thinking about the current health of American Theatre
Studies, because in a sense we're all in this situation together. And, since
two of the so-called symptoms of decline directly involve Don Wilmeth,
I'm going to ask him to begin.
DON WILMETH: Unfortunately, I'm not prescient, so I can't tell you
what the future has to hold. While perhaps I may have some perspective,
I have no panacea for our current situation. John suggested that I speak
rather personally, so I don't intend to respond to all of the questions
posed, but I am going to say a few things based on forty years of obser-
vation and my own personal experience. I should apologize in advance if
I seem anecdotal, imprecise, and a bit biased. I don't mean to appear as a
purist or old-fashioned or negative because I don't think I'm any of those
things; but we're all facing change. Change, be it advantageous or delete-
rious, is natural, often outside our control, and we have little choice but
to deal with it, embrace it, oppose it, or simply live with it. My sense is
that in the field of American Theatre Studies some of the changes-
many unconscious, some deliberate (such as the rightful acknowledge-
ment of the diversity of our theatrical past be it in the areas of gender,
race, class, etc.)-have tended to place what has always been regarded as
a poor cousin of the wider field of theatre studies in an even more threat-
ened position simply through segmentation.
Perhaps this is just my reading, but it seems ironic to me that
some of the best historical studies in American theatre and performance
in recent years have been written by non-theatre specialists; not people
trained by us, but trained in other disciplines. Of course, we have great
examples from our own discipline as well, including everyone at this table
whom I consider first-rate historians who have written outstanding work.
Let me keep this brief. I'll simply list some of the changes that
I've seen over my years in the profession beginning in the late 19 50s and
I'll suggest some possible causes of what I see as our current situation.
I'm retired, so I guess these changes don't impact me as they once did, so
I can be fairly objective about our current state. This past month the
eighty-nine year-old critic Henry Hewes died. I grew up reading his
urbane and wise criticism in the Saturdqy Review along with other theatre-
wise critics like Harold Clurman, Walter Kerr, Eric Bentley, and a few
12 ATDS PANEL
others. In some way, Hewes's death, I think, marks the end of an era in
American theatre criticism-an era characterized by thoughtful assess-
ments complete with context and perspective found in weekly or month-
ly publications. Few critics of Hewes's ilk remain and the ones that do are
"endangered." Think about it: Bob Brustein, critic for the New Republic,
was born in 1927; Stanley Kauffmann, critic for several periodicals, was
born in 1916. Even the New Yorker's John Lahr is in his sixties, as is the
Village Voice's Michael Feingold. Now I truly hope there are others wait-
ing in the wings, or being mentored to take their place, but it surely tells
us something about the importance of theatre in our culture when nei-
ther Time magazine nor 1\Jewsweek have a regular theatre critic or, in fact,
even cover theatre very often.
I consider myself quite fortunate to have been in a generation
strongly influenced by mentors, and many of those mentors were giants
in American Theatre Studies: people like Richard Moody, Walter
Meserve, Helen Chinoy, Charles Shattuck, and my dissertation advisor
Barnard Hewitt, among other notable Americanists. Hewitt, for example,
during his tenure at the University of Illinois from 1948 until his retire-
ment in 197 5, directed over ninety dissertations- most on American sub-
jects. And, in turn, he sent many disciples into the field. However, when
Hewitt retired, he wasn't replaced by a comparable scholar, or even an
Americanist (although there is now one on the faculty). This is a pattern
that, I fear, has been followed frequently over the past thirty years at
many institutions, often in order to save money by not hiring the most
experienced scholar. In the process, we have lost the kind of influence
and even the love of American Theatre Studies that I think the scholars
I mentioned instilled in younger minds.
And this trend continues today. As you have already heard, my
colleague and friend, Brooks McNamara, who certainly was a pioneer in
American Theatre Studies-especially in the area of American popular
entertainment-was not replaced with an Americanist or even a "tradi-
tional" theatre historian when he retired at New York University. I don't
mean to step on anybody's toes, and I'm trying hard not to be overly per-
sonal, but the second example John cited hit even closer to home. My
replacement when I retired three years ago, strictly speaking, is an
Americanist, but with a scholarly interest in the ritual of a specific region
of Mexico. Sadly, this shift of focus has resulted in the neglect of a major
archive. The resources of Brown University, where I taught for thirty-
seven years, include one of the great collections devoted to American
drama-that is drama of the United States and Canada- and has signif-
icant holdings in American popular culture. In some cases, this was
LOOKING BACK TO LooK FORWARD 13
because I got the collections to come to Brown. These invaluable
resources are not even being glanced at now by faculty, although I hope
that some Ph.D. students are secretly discovering them.
I might add that while we were still on our respective faculties,
Brooks and I also experienced the growing incursion of Performance
Studies, which, by the way, is still largely ill-defined and, I'm afraid, ill-
equipped to meet the needs of small colleges and non-research oriented
universities who still want to offer fairly standard and traditional theatre
history courses in a restricted curriculum. This fmally hit me when I
moved to Keene, New Hampshire, where I currently live and where there
is a small state college. The only thing this college offers that is academ-
ic is a three semester theatre history survey (about to shrink to two
semesters, I believe) . They don't want anything else. I'm not sure that we
are training our graduate students to serve these kinds of needs. Two
other examples and I'll move on. I believe, in fact, that theatre studies in
general, not just American Theatre Studies, face a crisis. I know it's easy
to toss that word "crisis" around and many might say that it's change, not
a crisis; but among today's students, the theatre is rarely considered the
art form of choice. It's ftlm! That automatically gives us a real struggle.
When I was flrst discovering theatre, there were both Theatre Arts
Magazine and something called the Fireside Theatre. Some of you may
remember the Fireside Theatre. It was a book club devoted to published
plays in hard cover. At the same time, there was a handful of publishers
who published dozens of play collections. Neither Theatre Arts nor the
Fireside Theatre exist today, of course, but we do have American Theatre,
with a play in almost each issue, and a few publishers (e.g. TCG, and
Smith and Kraus, a small publishing house in Vermont) still issue scripts.
And, I was encouraged at the book exhibit [at the ATHE conference] to
see more plays there than I have seen in a number of years. Nevertheless,
the truth of the matter is, plays do not sell today, and publishers general-
ly eschew their publication; so I think this is a sign of some pretty fright-
ening changes in our world.
When I flrst taught a course in American Theatre history, I had
a number of available collections of American plays, most notably
Quinn's Representative American Plqys and Richard Moody's superb Dramas
from the American Theatre, 1762-1909. Soon after I started teaching, these
went out of print and, despite efforts to save at least one of them-
Moody's-nothing was available other than collections that focused
almost completely on twentieth-century drama. Actually, I was among the
few luci9 Americanists, because I taught at a university with a great col-
lection of plays, but even that didn't make American play texts readily
14
ATDS PANEL
accessible. As a consequence, in 1998 I published a small collection of
early American plays with Bedford Books, to try to help my situation, and
perhaps that of others as well. Within a couple of years, however,
Bedford wanted to discontinue the volume because of modest annual
sales. Thanks, in fact, to an effort that was started with the support of
readers of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR)-List, the
volume was saved and it still exists, which makes it a long run, because
books don't stay in print very long anymore. This is particularly true for
anthologies of plays.
[Since this presentation at ATHE, Staging the Nation was taken out
of print, though the editor has purchased surplus copies and has offered
them to interested parties, at least for a limited time. Clearly, there should
be other choices. Walter and Molly Meserve have tried to sustain interest
in early American plays through their collections of texts, published by
their own press, Prospero, but publishing and producing your own
anthology is not easy. My observations suggest that, in fact, the teaching
of drama as a genre is more marginal than ever. It's always been margin-
al in literature departments. About the only thing the English department
at Brown teaches is Shakespeare, and I'm not sure they're reai!J teaching
Shakespeare. I think that maybe they're teaching something else and call-
ing it Shakespeare. In any case, the presence of published play texts,
American or otherwise, is less than vital to the marketplace.]
The truth is, we are an extraordinarily small discipline; not just
American theatre specialists, but those in all areas of theatre studies. If a
university press can sell five hundred copies of a scholarly monograph,
that's exceptional today. They essentially out-price individual buyers, so
the market is primarily libraries. Twenty years ago, or less even, a press
like the Cambridge University Press- one that I know better than others
-had initial runs of a thousand or more, with most copies selling as part
of a library's standing orders. No longer! Today a run of three hundred
to five hundred is common, and fewer and fewer libraries have standing
orders.
Without question, studies of American theatre today are far
more sophisticated, and arguably even more learned, than those of a
quarter of a century ago; but without a market, this matters little. And
finding theatre books, of any kind, in a bookstore today is difficult. The
once extensive theatre section has virtually vanished, while there are
increasingly larger film sections. If you don't believe that there's this shift
of focus in what's important, look at fllm versus theatre. I'm not putting
down film; it's theatre that's slipped. Specialist stores are even less com-
mon. With the demise of Applause in New York, the Big Apple has only
LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD 15
one major store-the Drama Book Shop-and it's certainly not what it
used to be when it was on Seventh Avenue.
Academic presses, even those that are part of a commercial coo-
glomerate, really don't care. The library is their marketplace- not indi-
vidual faculty members in the academy. And this brings me to my last per-
sonal example. For the past fifteen years I've edited a series of books for
the Cambridge University Press called Studies in American Theatre and
Drama. A year ago, the series officially ended; but there are still a few titles
in the works, my name still appears as series editor, and I'm still shep-
herding to completion those books that are left in the pipeline. In defense
of Cambridge, which made the decision to end the series with virtually
no warning, they did buy the idea of the series in the first place, and when
the last book appears, there will have been some thirty titles published, all
(in my opinion of course) important; all good; some superb; many award-
winners. Cambridge also initiated the project that became the Cambridge
History of American Theatre, now in paperback and affordable. And they
encouraged the spin-off Cambridge Guide to American Theatre from its World
Guide, as well as supported a new, expanded edition of the American Guide
recently completed (not yet published, but projected for publication in
June 2007). Cambridge is thus to be applauded for their generous support
of our discipline.
But all of the good reviews, all of the recognition of the books
in the series, ultimately meant very little to the press. What really hurt, if
my understanding is correct, was the glaring fact that the decision was
based largely on sales, not the criterion I would expect from a respectable
university press (i.e. scholarly merit and value). Granted, some titles were
clearly specialized, fairly narrow in their appeal to a finite audience, and
had few sales; however, I'm sure I'll never fully understand the reasoning
behind the decision since I also know that maf!J titles did above average
sales, and they should have balanced the poor sellers. But all publishing
- be it commercial or non-profit- is a business and, I repeat, we are a
very small discipline. ASTR, for example, has fewer than eight hundred
members. Do you know what our [ATDS's] current headcount is? ATDS
has-drum roll, please- about two hundred members.
Our scholarly theatre organizations are therefore miniscule,
compared to those of larger disciplines. Our America-focused journals
have relatively small subscription bases and if books are not written that
an adequate number of people (and librarians) want to buy or read,
they're not going to sell. I guess that's really my message. A number of
the most distinguished books in my series do not deal with the modern
or postmodern period; yet, with an ever-growing focus on both eras by
16 ATDS PANEL
younger scholars (thanks in part, I believe, to our permissive attitudes of
the 1970s when we de-emphasized the use of archives and primary
sources and failed to adequately encourage pre-twentieth-century studies)
the market [for pre-modern] scholarship has shrunk.
My final comment relates to mentors. There have always been
studies on what is modern or contemporary, and there always should be,
but many of the books and many of the manuscripts that I read are writ-
ten with an agenda-an agenda that, whether it's ideological, theoretical
or historiographical, determines the direction of the book. I have noth-
ing against any of those. Some of our better historians have written
extensively on historiography. I only wish that they would write more his-
tory and write less about historiography and that graduate advisors would
re-emphasize histories; but that's my own problem.
To conclude, as a small discipline (theatre studies that is) and one
that has never been close to the top of the academic pack, all the per-
mutations of recent years, for good or ill, complicate our very existence,
and subdivide our focus and interest. Thus, in a culture where the study
of the arts of other cultures has always been more favored and prevalent,
to forget our own "big picture" and to minimize the history of the
American theatre in the process, in my estimation, can only lead to our
possible elimination, or at least a diminution of our significance as a
viable and integral discipline. Call me a Greek messenger! Sorry!
ROSEMARIE BANK: [fhis presentation was titled "'What's Love Got
To Do With It?': Getting a Grip on the Historiography of the History of
American Theatre in 2006'1- Yesterday evening, at the Roundtable dis-
cussion about theatre studies sponsored by the ATHE Theory and
Criticism Focus Group, I reflected that I have often felt (and feel) ham-
mered from two sides: by theoreticians who fault historians (and history)
for repeating-unexamined-the cultural, social, and political values of
the status quo, and by historians for telling them to examine the histori-
ographical implications of their subjects and their own work. I have
weathered these storms long enough to have seen the theoreticians pub-
licly espouse history and the historians publicly practice theory and,
indeed, although the attacks continue-and you know who you are-I
think the debate is a dead letter. In reflecting on it, I encourage the nay-
sayers to give thought to the support their hostility gives to the conser-
vative establishment, academic and political, and its on-going war against
individual thought, public critique, and intellectual innovation. In one of
the few essays in the 2004 Theatre S urvry special issue that really had to do
with historiography, Herbert Blau observed that "the writing of history
LoOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD 17
occurs through the questions asked about it." There is no ending to the
historical inquiry, "an incessancy of instants," Blau says, "but never the
last instant, nothing but history, if maybe a different kind."2
The writing of history, as I understand it, is antithetical to the
consensus thinking that dominates the current climate. That climate now
has its few black, brown, and Asian, and rather more white, female faces
in it, as well as a sea of white male ones. No book is written that does not
give its nods to race and gender, just like the highly visible spokespersons,
lawyers, and apologists for the Bush regime. We're all in this together,
right? The hell we are. The twenty-years of ATHE's life testifies to the
necessary diversity of thought that history, in fact, represents, and testi-
fies as well to the narrow constructions of that history grand theory
would like us all to espouse . .. again (different players, same game).
At issue is not whether younger scholars are drawn to interest
groups other than ours or think themselves somehow outside the stream
of history-they, too, will learn that there is (Blau again) "nothing but
history."3 What matters is that we do the work, that we "keep [our] bear-
ings in the idea of history," despite the spirals of power that take history
as a suspect fiction. Do the work and don't care whether they love you
because that kind of love is consensus thinking and kills the diversity of
thought, the creative innovation that makes American theatre history
worth writing and reading. American theatre and drama constructed as a
competition among subject areas returns us to the way things were when
I was a doctoral student writing my comprehensive exams and was asked
by the major professor in my area to defend my interest in nineteenth-
century American theatre, given that all thinking persons knew it had nei-
ther a drama of literary merit nor a history distinct from Europe's-and
there are still prominent scholars patrolling those borders.
Let me embolden you with a little historiography of (theatre) his-
tory. When it became clear the American Theatre Association was going
to crash and burn, Paul Voelker, a professor of English, began the work
of creating the American Theatre and Drama Society, one of several sep-
arately incorporated groups that became affiliated with the new
Association for Theatre in Higher Education. At that time, some groups
spun off for good- the Secondary School Theatre Association and the
Armed Services division, for example-and new interest groups that had
not been parts of ATA, such as ATDS, Women and Theatre, and the
Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA), came on board. From
2
Herbert Blau, "Thinking History, History Thinking," Theatre Suroey 45, no. 2
(November 2004): 257.
3 Ibid., 258.
18 ATDS PANEL
its inception, ATHE organized more sub-groups than ATA had con-
tained. That had consequences-competing sessions and business meet-
ings, and small audiences at sessions, to name just a few consequences.
Indeed, the last time I read a paper here, there was one more person in
the audience than on the panel, something I saw at the sessions of other
groups as well. There was difficulty finding, meeting, and significantly
interacting with people, as well. If there is an administrative or intellec-
tual incentive to merge with other groups in order to gain critical mass
here at ATHE, that gain can be measured against the losses merging
would entail. Within the current mix, ATDS remains a separately incor-
porated body which meets with other organizations outside the annual
meeting of ATHE (for example, last year's meeting with the New
Literacies Conference at the University of Kansas). ATDS's presence at
ATI-IE may be ATHE's "problem," rather than ATDS's (we had good
houses in Lawrence). All this takes place, of course, in an academic cli-
mate that could hardly be less supportive of, if not actually hostile to,
intellectuals congregating to discuss ideas.
Another historiographic reflection on the history of American
Theatre Studies in the U.S. that ought to put some lead in our pencils is
the fact that there have never been very many "Americanists," as those of
us who do historical work in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and earlier twen-
tieth centuries sometimes call ourselves. When I came out of graduate
school in the 1970s, just in time for the first oil crisis and declining enroll-
ments and academic positions, the major complaint among theatre histo-
rians was the decline of language skills among emerging scholars. Roger
Hertzel, long-time editor of ASTR's Theatre Survey, kept track of the
annual "dissertations in the field" report published in Theatre Journal, and
bemoaned how even when scholars in languages and comparative litera-
ture were included, the research areas of young American scholars (as
defined by dissertation topics, at least) were overwhelmingly English-lan-
guage-some British, but many more U.S. and most of those later twen-
tieth century drama and criticism subjects.
Where American theatre and drama research is concerned, those
dissertation statistics have not changed over the course of my career,
except, of course, that the Americanist numbers are migrating toward the
latter end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Moreover,
the number of scholars specializing in eighteenth-century American
(U.S.) theatre I could identify when I was a young whipper-snapper and
the number I can identify today remains constant, with more working
over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American drama because of the
larger number of Ph.D.s produced by English departments. The number
LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD 19
of those working in nineteenth-century theatre history has remained fair-
ly constant as well. You can still read in recent works the same old canards
about American drama put out in the World War I years, as well as bad
scholarship produced by contemporary history-trained historians who
assay theatre history. All this is to make a point about the warrantless
inferiority too many theatre-trained scholars feel about their bona fides.
Plus <;:a change, plus la meme chose, but some things do change,
so it is a particular pleasure to share this podium with folks who have
helped bring about those changes. The "thin entering wedge," as we used
to say in logic and debate classes, was the work in popular theatre Don
Wilmeth, Brooks McNamara, and others did, that pried open the gates to
a wealth of studies--of melodrama, of variety and burlesque, of freak
shows, temperance, minstrelsy, and the like. These studies revolutionized
what was considered American theatre and ended apologies for studying
it, if not the view that American drama before 1914 was somehow
flawed. That wedge helped open the door for studying the theatre of the
rest of us (as James Hatch once put it), and Harry Elam and Lisa Merrill
sustain and further the tradition of a theatre culture that is demonstrably
(as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has said) "mutually constituted and socially
produced."
4
The success of these efforts to open up what was once consid-
ered American drama and theatre had some (I think, unforeseen) conse-
quences. Twenty years ago, when ATHE was founded, theatre curricula
were still divided into history and drama courses. Most theatre depart-
ment faculty had wrested drama out of the hands of English depart-
ments and taught (at least) a theatre AND drama survey course to under-
graduates, and as many specialized courses as the curriculum and staff
permitted. Some colleges and universities still split the turf between
Theatre and English departments. The explosion of the canon has more
commonly caused genre collapses in English departments, represented
by drama, novel, and poetry courses to collapse into "literature of the
eighteenth century" or "early modern literature" courses, overwhelming-
ly with negative effects on the number of plays that get studied. It would
be a nimble undergraduate these days who could readily do what I did in
wedding my theatre major to an English minor that encompassed sepa-
rate courses in: "chief pre-Shakespearean drama" (as medieval was con-
strued in those days, and, oh, the joys of reading Gorboduc, Ralph Rnister
4 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ''African American Criticism," in Redrawing the
Boundaries: The Traniformation of English and American Literary Studies, eds. Stephen
Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Languages Association of America,
1992), 309.
20
ATDS PANEL
Doister, and others when you had never studied old or middle English);
"Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama" (exclusive of Shakespeare);
Shakespeare (the comedies); Shakespeare (the tragedies); Shakespeare
(the history plays); Shakespeare (the problem plays); Shakespeare (the
poems); Restoration and Eighteenth-century Drama; French Drama in
translation (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries); Italian Drama of the
Renaissance and the Eighteenth Century in translation; Modern English
and Irish Drama; Modern Continental Drama; and Modern American
Drama. I think you get the idea (and I'm not making this up; these were
the offerings of one university in one four-year period).
If I sound nostalgic for this expansive menu that is only because
I am deeply, deeply envious of the educational resources that curricula
represents, "the great come and get it" days. You will already have seen,
however, that a great deal of what the scholars at this table and others
were to add to our knowledge was missing from my undergraduate cur-
riculum-all the work of women ("Restoration" did not include even
Aphra Behn, nor do I remember studying a single female dramatist
before Rachel Crothers and Lillian Hellman, never mind the careers of
any female managers, American or other), anything by or about African-
American playwrights, critics, managers, or actors, except for Ira
Aldridge, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, anything about non-
European and non-American theatre (except a Sanskrit drama, and a
glance at Kabuki and Noh), anything much about dramas that didn't have
"literary merit," such as melodrama or Futurist sintesi (except to denigrate
them and all popular or unconventional entertainment as non-art), and
nothing much about labor theatre, economic history as it affected theatre,
etc., etc. I was not only ignorant about the world in which I actually lived,
most of my work scorned who and what I was, and who and what I came
from (i.e., the daughter of working class, immigrant parents, born and
brought up in "the City of Big Shoulders," the second rate "Hog Butcher
of the World"). It was up-lift with a vengeance. So, no nostalgia about the
end of all that and a real sense of relief when, come the revolution, I
began to find my.s.clf and l1l}C history in theatre.
A THE's birth marked an important transition point. I spoke at
the Theory and Criticism Roundtable last night of the second Ph.D. I
gave myself in the 1980s in what I'm going to call the postrnodern. (I
don't really understand what that word means, but it serves me as a form
of shorthand for the theory that began to emerge in U.S. theatre studies
at that time, some developed in Europe between the World Wars and
some from the 1960s forward.) The postmodern, in my corner of the
world as an Americanist, is historiography, the investigation of the
LOOKJNG BACK TO LOOK FORWARD 21
arrangement/ arrangements of the historical record. These arrangements
I had studied largely in a literary and philosophical way in graduate school
(from Homer and Hesiod to Kenneth Burke and Brecht) and had
expanded in my early teaching career into the turn-of-the-century (nine-
teenth to twentieth) "isms" (Futurism, dada, Surrealism, Expressionism),
into Artaud, performance art, multimedia, and so on. The issue for me
was how to think about a broader and diversified (in my case) nineteenth-
century American (U.S.) theatre history that did not replicate the false
generalizations of past teachings-my own and others-about history as
given, but, rather, that asked how to think a history that was value-laden,
ideologically and economically driven, a history productive of a diverse
culture which had constituted itself into--what? I didn't share the hostil-
ity of some of my peers toward theory nor did I share the ambitions of
others of them to be the new kings in Israel, vis a vis what they called his-
toriography, the new totalizations and grand theories of the same old
game (now with different, more multiculturalized players-with those
obligatory nods in the work in the direction of gender and race).
Re-entering the stream in the twenty-first century is to find many
things as they have been-the same old jockeying for position (now white
women doing a lot of the muscling), the same old climb by younger
scholars to meet their own and others' expectations in the face of an
increased gap between salaries and costs for professional travel, and, for
all of us-at least those of us trying to keep public education for the sons
and daughters of the working class something worthy of and available to
them-sky-rocketing class sizes, increased pressures to make theatre
practical (i.e., something marketable), endless bake sales to generate
money that state and federal governments refuse to provide public edu-
cation at any level (and so the problems of under-educated students,
graduate students included), and on and on in the litany of disasters with
which we are all familiar. These factors drive a class division in our pro-
fessional societies and journals among those producing histories and crit-
ical analyses of American theatre and drama that are worthy of study, and
it produces a smug elitism on the parts of those-graduate students to
emeriti-who think all paths are as cushioned as theirs have been. Worse,
it creates an unanalyzed conservatism that serves the status guo, a con-
servatism that should shock those who fancy themselves to be the count-
er-position to current political and academic regimes of power.
I am very grateful to the professional societies that have offered
a home to my work through their conferences and the journals they sup-
port, and I am optimistic about their future usefulness. I think we are all
spread very thin right now and we are all very besieged. Rather than
22 ATDS PANEL
bemoan participants "lost" to other focus groups, however, we need to
recognize that Performance Studies, LGBT, Women and Theatre,
Latino/ a studies, and other groups, are overwhelmingly Americanist in
what they study-and they also have other fish to fry, for example, pro-
viding social support and networking for the specialty. The question I
think needs asking is whether there is a connection between the work of
any focus group and the conservative consensus politics now afoot in
academe. That politics is antithetical to (theatre) history and to the inde-
pendent thought that produces lasting scholarship. What's love got to do
with it? Ask, rather, what does it mean to be popular in 2006? To reduce
critical reception to approval ratings and market share is to equate histo-
ry with a television show or with the current regime. In Hitler's Germany,
the thousand-year Reich, public extravaganzas were all the rage, and these
forms of theatre tell us a great deal about the society that produced them,
just as the current spectacles in North Korea do about that regime. What
matters to history, historians, and historiography is what the surface show
conceals-and reveals-when we question how these historical records
were and are arranged. That, I would argue, is the work we need to do
and to support, and the less popular it is, the more important.
LISA MERRILL: I'm a theatre and performance historian. I perform my
research in archives, wading through manuscript collections of unpub-
lished nineteenth-century correspondence to find traces of theatre histo-
ry. In some ways this may appear the most conventional of approaches
to our discipline; but I examine both on and off-stage performances. I
use performance theory and theories of spectatorship to explore the let-
ters that I'm traipsing through, as well as other cultural products, as per-
formances. I interrogate the self-presentation of subjects whose same-
sex desire and whose shifting identifications of gender, sexuality, nation-
ality, and race in different performance settings are informed by the dis-
ciplinary foundation of some of the groups that we're talking about.
These include Performance Studies, a historicized approach to LGBTQ
and Women's History, and critical race studies.
Historian E. P. Thompson has described history as "the ruthless
discipline of context."S In my remarks today I'd like to suggest an evolv-
ing context for our discipline by placing it within other contexts of other
disciplinary formations to which, in my mind, it relates strongly and
which many of us as theatre historians may have neglected to recognize.
5 E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," Past and
Present 8: 56-97. Cited in Arjun Appadurai, Moderm!J at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 17.
LOOKING BACK TO LoOK FORWARD 23
And so we miss an opportunity that I want to suggest for us here. This
is a more positive response to where we are. What I'll suggest is that the
current context offers us an opportunity to rethink the optic of our dis-
cipline, rather than bemoaning the ways American theatre history has
been equipped. I suggest we think of this as a shift in figure and ground.
Raymond Williams has described ideological structures as "resid-
ual, dominant, or emergent," with residual signifying a legacy from some
previous social formation that still continues to exercise power in the
dominant culture.6 In Williams's terms then, we might consider whether
a theatre history, especially American Theatre history as it has conven-
tionally been taught and studied, is a residual discipline whose legacy con-
tinues and continues to exercise power and influence on our campuses,
our publications, our thinking; but has, or is becoming, eclipsed by other
ideological approaches to performance and theatre. So I want to start
with a kind of politics of location of place and state.
I try to locate much of my work in American theatre within the
fields of American Studies and I'll talk about why in what follows. To
foreground what Paul Giles, an American Studies colleague at Oxford
called "the virtual cartographies of national identity," he and Emily Apter
propose a means of interrogating the boundaries of traditional fields,
such as literature, which was Giles's training. For Giles and Apter, this
approach offers a way of examining such identities as-in Giles's words
-"a play of effects, a performative mimicry which consciously acknowl-
edges rather than suppresses the differential power relations negotiated
within."7 So here's the American Studies scholar using our tropes. By
positioning American theatre history in dialogue with the discipline of
American Studies, however, I think that we need to rethink some of what
Giles has described as "the virtual dimensions implicit in America's myth-
ic construction of itself."S Admittedly, Paul Giles's wonderful work does
not discuss theatre at all, but in exploring the effect of what he describes
as such mythic narratives, in attempting to illuminate the fictional, con-
tingent nature of what he calls "national mythography," his work on
American literature offers us yet another way that theatre historians
6 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Littralure (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), 121-27. Cited in Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the
Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 8.
7 Giles, Virtual Amencas, 14. Giles is citing Emily Apter, Continental Drift: From
National Characters to Virtual Suijects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), vii, 18-
19,20.
8 Giles, Virtual Americas, 14.
24 ATDS PANEL
might position our work within the politics of place and state within our
projects. Similarly, current work in postcolonial studies that interrogates
and explores transnationality and migration, building on the work of
diaspora studies, offers ways to think about conceptual spaces and
modernity that can helpfully inform our search.
Susanne Langer has suggested that the questions an age offers to
the art work that is being examined are more important than the answers,
and so the optical shift I'm suggesting is an embracing of a wider and
more diverse set of questions--questions and a dialogue which, I con-
tend, theatre historians with our skill set and rigorous training in histori-
cal work, in archival work, in cultural projects, are uniquely able to bring
to the contemporary conversation. In these ongoing dialogues I suggest
that we welcome some of the connections that we haven't explored as
much-that we present work at conferences, publish, explore, within the
realms and disciplines of history. I am astonished at how welcomed by
the history community in general I have been: at History conferences; at
American Studies conferences; when my book, When Romeo Was a Woman:
Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (University of
:Michigan Press, 1999), was reviewed by M. Alison Kibler in the American
Historical Review, the official journal of the American Historical
Association (volume 105, October 2000); and by colleagues in general
who welcome that work within the U.S. American Studies context. Also,
for the past ten years, I have been presenting at the British Association of
American Studies, the Collegium of African-American Research in
Europe, and the European and International American Studies-all
places that we Americanists can find our work welcomed, as well as by
women's studies organizations.
We also need to explore grant funding possibilities that are tra-
ditionally explored by people in those other disciplines, especially the big
"H" history. I was very pleased to have the current project of publishing
Charlotte Cushman's letters-called "Burn this letter''-partially funded
by a NEH senior scholar grant. So we need to recognize the activities I
have just mentioned as opportunities for dialogue, opportunities for
funding, opportunities to have our work recognized; but unfortunately a
lot of us don't think about these as opportunities to present our work.
When we think broadly and enter into the ongoing conversations
embracing the questions important to us, we recognize that all history is
contemporary history in that every historian carries the problems and
challenges of her own time into her research. In this work I assume a
posture :Michel de Certeau describes when he refers to the "historian as
prowler" in the margins of accepted narratives and disciplinary practices;
LOOKING BACK TO LoOK FORWARD 25
I "circulat[e] around acquired conventions" of theatre history, reading
the spaces, silences, rationalizations in the archive and "deciphering hid-
den relations held in discourses of other times."9 As many of you know,
de Certeau, in The Writing of History, describes the work of the historian
as transporting the raw material of a primary source from one region of
culture (he describes those regions as curiosities, archives, collections) to
another history.IO So it's in the transport. Those of us uniquely trained to
do this work-and I mean the training that Don was talking about-and
committed to training others to do that hard, archival work, have an
opportunity and a responsibility to participate in what I am calling the
discursive transport, impelled by training in our historical discipline, but
directed by an ever-changing road map of questions and a virtual cartog-
raphy of trans- and inter-disciplinary locations.
HARRY ELAM: In her 2004 address to the American Studies
Association, President Shelley Fisher-Fishkill spoke of a conversation
she had with a former student after the last presidential election, an
account that I find particularly apropos to us today as we consider the
future of American Theatre and Drama Studies and scholarship. In her
address, Fisher-Fishkill talked of the current predicament of American
Studies:
The complexity of our field of study as we understand
it today, however, requires that we pay as much attention
to the ways in which ideas, people, culture, and capital
have circulated and continue to circulate physically, and
virtually, throughout the world, both in ways we might
expect, and unpredictably. It requires that we see the
inside and outside, domestic and foreign, national and
international, as interpenetrating. What would the field
of American Studies look like if the transnational rather
than the national were at its center-as it is already for
many scholars in this room?1
1
I have quoted Shelly Fisher-Fishkin at length because of her call
9 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988), xi, 79.
IO Ibid.
II Shelley Fisher-Fishkin, Address to the American Studies Association,
Adama, GA, 12 November 2004.
26 ATDS PANEL
for a transnational direction in American Studies. This approach, I
believe, has special meaning for us as we consider the current state of
scholarship in American Theatre and Drama. What we must understand
is that increasing global tensions and international cultural traffic have
created an environment where the notion of viewing America in isolation
is an incredibly flawed strategy. This is not just a political reality, but a
scholarly and theatrical strategy as well. The transnational is not a call to
imagine just how America has been imported or to examine the impact
of America abroad, but rather to see America in relation instead of in
isolation; to see how scholars and artists in other places construct
America and define our field of American drama; to examine compara-
tatively American works; to see America not as exceptional or exemplary,
but as interconnected to the global community.
Clearly for some time on the American stage, there have been
works we could consider transnational. Here, I am thinking about plays
such as David Henry Hwang's M. Butteiffy, the well-known play by an
Asian American playwright, that is not actually set in the United States,
but uses the transnational to comment on race and gender in America.
More recently, Tony Kushner's Homeboc!J/ Kabul also employed the
transnational to comment on American foreign policy and American
fears of and lack of understanding of the Middle East. I am also remind-
ed of Stuff Happens or Continental Divide--plays written by foreign writers
that comment on American life and politics and consider how America
can impact the world. All of these works then are examples of the
transnational in American theatre and drama.
But what does the transnational mean in terms of our own
work? What does transnational scholarship in American theatre and
drama entail and how can it help us in terms of our own work or our
Ph.D. programs, or admissions, or our desire and need to have more
graduate students? My first thought is that it we must, as scholars, do as
Fisher-Fishkin suggests and provide "nuance, complexity, and historical
context to correct reductive visions of America."tz An eye to the transna-
tional will necessarily compel us to rethink the narratives of American
progress. It will mean allowing oneself to be reshaped and to the decen-
tering of America- moving a fixed vision of America away from the
center in ways that prove productive to reinterpreting what a particular
play means or what a particular time in American theatre history might
reveal. The American Theatre and Drama Society is one organization that
already recognizes the significance of European scholars examining
American theatre, with members such as Johan Callens and Barbara
12 I bid.
LoOKING BACK TO LoOK FOR\10\RD 27
Ozieblo (who write on American theatre subjects and have served as the
society's International representative) as examples of this European
input. What I believe the transnational proposes is that we go even fur-
ther than just recognizing this scholarship; it means reorienting our own
scholarship to appreciate how global developments, interests, and activi-
ties impact our subject of study.
Such a transnational decentering is in line with other trends that
we have seen within the field of American theatre and drama during the
1980s and 1990s. In this time, we have seen scholars and students take up
issues of race, gender, sexuality and, even more recently, disability, not as
tangential to, but constitutive of how we understand America. As a result,
American theatre history has been reinterpreted. How we understand the
American avant-garde and other movements within the American the-
atrical past history have been reexamined. The scholarship of people of
color and on people of color within American theatre and drama studies
has served to critique the field's orientation and helped to rewrite
American theatre history. Recently, scholars such as Bruce McConachie
and Heather Nathans have done compelling new studies of early periods
of American drama. Young scholars of color such as Daphne Brooks
and Camille Forbes have productively reexamined historic figures such as
Bert Williams and Henry Box Brown, not with a presentist paternalism,
but with the perception and insight gained through new tools and
methodologies of approaching how we understand race is constructed
and even performed.
What we have gained in terms of the field of American theatre
and drama is a wider view of American scholarship. The field is not, and
can not be, static, but must understand the point that Asian American
scholar David Palumbo Lui proposed when he said that America is a
place "always in process itself."
1
3 Anna Deavere Smith has further argued
that American identity is always in flux, always in the process of becom-
ing; and because America is always becoming, always in process, it must
repeatedly be enacted and reenacted.l4 Thus, at its crux, America has a
performative dimension to it and what we as theatre and performance
scholars can and must evaluate is how America is and has been consti-
tuted and performed.
13 David Palumbo Lui, "The Politics of Memory: Remembering History in
Alice Walker and Joy Kugawa," Memory & Cultural Politics, eds. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T.
Skerrett, Robert Egan, and Appaduria Arjun (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1996), 215.
14 Anna Deavere Smith, "Introduction," Fires in the Mirror; Crown Heights,
Brook!Jn, and Other Identities (New York: Anchor Books, 1993).
28 ATDS PANEL
The field of American Theatre and Drama, like all performative
and fluid definitions of America, must not be static; nor can it be insular
to changes and influences from other fields. One of the most important
of these most certainly is Performance Studies. What I am advocating is
an idea I attribute to a conversation with Joe Roach in which we agreed
that we in theatre and drama must reclaim the term "performance" to our
own ends-how we can understand performance as both a methodolo-
gy of and a subject for analysis. This includes works such as E. Patrick
Johnson's award winning study, Appropnating Blackness, with its consider-
ation of how race is performed; Jennifer Brody's work on reading Ralph
Ellison; Harvey Young's study of lynching; or Sandra Richards's work on
cultural tourism. IS All of these are seeking to understand what perform-
ance as a critical methodology can tell us about the construction and
intersection of American images of race, gender and sexuality. These are
projects nominally placed under Performance Studies, but have much to
say to us within the field of American drama and theatre as we consider
how performance on stage impacts our thinking about how America is
performed in everyday life.
Our field is and has been decidedly interdisciplinary. Such is the
nature of the theatre and theatre scholarship; they demand and depend
on work in other areas from the humanities and the social sciences and
even the hard sciences. And so now, interesting new work that even uti-
lizes theories of cognitive science to examine performance is being done.
The call to the transnational is a further move in the direction of
a cross-disciplinary understanding of American theatre and drama and an
extension of other movements that have decentered America. It is in the
service of American Studies and theatre. Most recently I have had two
Ph.D. students doing work that could be read as transnational. Alma
Martinez discussed the Quinta Temporada, the 197 4 theatre festival in
Mexico that featured the participation of Louis Valdez and El Teatro
Campesino; while Micaela Diaz Sanchez is working on the African pres-
ence in Mexican performance, reimagining notions of mestizo identity
and exploring how this cultural heritage is manifest in contemporary
Chicano musical performances. Both of these are newly imagined proj-
ects in American theatre and drama studies, opening us up to Latin
America in ways that move us outside provincialism in definitions of
IS E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blacknus (Durham: Duke University Press,
2003); Jennifer Brody, "The Blackness of Blackness ... Reading the Typography of
Invisible Man," Theatre journal, 57, no. 4 (December 2005): 679-714; Harvey Young, "The
Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching," Theatre ]ourrtal 57, no. 4 (December 2005):
639-59; Sandra L. Richards, "What Is to Be Remembered?: Tourism to Ghana's Slave
Castle-Dungeons," Theatre]ourna/57, no. 4 (December 2005): 617-38.
LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD 29
America or the Americas. Moreover, they are transnational in the
approach, not simply because it is the newest vogue, but because the
transnational makes these projects better and all the more meaningful. So
the transnational, as these students suggest and as I would imagine it, is
a bold new frontier that will expand and will help us regenerate our field.
After each of the invited guests had presented, panel chair, John Frick, opened the floor
for questions and responses. Responses/ questions were subsequentlY posed by John
Gronbeck-Tedesco (University of Kansas); Christopher Bigsby (University of East
Anglia, UK); Bob Vor/ic-9' (New York University), Bill Demastes (Louisiana State
University), and an unidentified audience member.
JOHN GRONBECK-TEDESCO: I t seems to me, from what you have
said, that you can all declare victory and move on. I n other words, you
seem to be saying that the function of this group-this body-in terms
of American historical research, has been so successful that it has
spawned or has moved the findings of Americans into other contexts,
and sponsored those other kinds of disciplines and fields or endeavors
among American Studies. So, the real question to be asked-and it's one
among the hundreds that exist-is how to sustain that role of the sup-
plier of the "juice," the "good stuff," that inspires others. I suppose there
are other questions that could be asked, but that's what strikes me as most
important.
JOHN FRICK: Does anybody want to respond to that?
ROSE BANK: I think that there are material circumstances that are real-
ly significant in terms of keeping the work going. I said at last evening's
meeting with the Theory and Criticism focus group, that when I came out
of graduate school, we used to get five fully funded conference trips a
year, provided, of course, our work was accepted at those conferences.
Imagine that! Five! That included air travel, registration, room, something
toward food and so on. Imagine that; I can't imagine it either. So part of
what you're talking about, John [Gronbeck-Tedsco], really requires some
facilitation, and a constant going up the hill with your empty bucket and
trying to come back down with something in it.
JOHN FRICK: Chris?
CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY: I agree with everything everyone has said,
even when they disagreed with one another. It is undeniable that the
30 ATDS PANEL
study of American drama has been marginalized. It pretty well always has
been. It was never in fashion. I don't mean that pejoratively; I mean that
any period, for complex reasons, decides to focus on a particular thing.
In the 1940s, the cutting edge was poetry. In the 50s and 60s, it was the
novel. Then it was theory. In the 1970s, it was gender and then Chicanos,
Hispanics, sexual orientation, the transnational, etc. But there was never
a period in which drama was regarded as the cutting edge, the focus of
the intellectual, a fit subject for the bright young Ph.D. Yale was produc-
ing literary theorists by the bucket and when they'd had enough of New
Haven, they went to Irvine. But they were never interested in drama.
I'm glad to hear what you were saying about theatre and litera-
ture departments breaking down the barrier between themselves because
I've always been bewildered by that division in the United States. I have
given lectures in American universities and one department would not tell
the other department that I was there; they regarded me as part of their
territory, and they didn't want to share. What conceivable sense does that
make?
Although I've spent much of my life writing about American
drama, I am actually a professor of American Studies and one thing that
is especially interesting, from a European perspective, is America's fasci-
nation with its own identity. Given that America is an unfinished enter-
prise, it always seems anxious to defme itself. It is forever standing up and
saying "America this" and ''America that," as though it knows what it
means. But, it is constantly changing. Why else would you get your poor
children to stand up, put their hands on their hearts, and talk about "one
nation indivisible" unless the thing that worried you most was division.
Not so long ago the President of the American Studies
Association proposed its own abolition on the grounds that it accommo-
dated different groups, races, nationalities under the name ''American," as
though unsure if such a thing existed. If you are outside the country,
however, believe me there is such a thing as America, because we get the
sharp end of it quite often. Every generation rediscovers de Tocqueville
and I think we're rediscovering him now, not least because of what he
had to say about super-patriotism-the need of Americans to reassure
yourselves about how great and good you are. American president after
American president insists that this is so. I don't know if Americans real-
ize it, but this is unusual.
What is it about a country that needs to say such things to itself,
to fly flags everywhere? For whom are you flying the flags? Whom are
you speaking to? Are you speaking to your next door neighbor? Are you
speaking to Homeland Security? Or are you speaking to that bit of your
LooKING B ACK TO LoOK FORWARD 31
brain that has an anxiety about who you are? Samuel Huntingdon's book,
which is deeply flawed, nonetheless picks up on this anxiety.16 But that
anxiety is very interesting; it's very informative. The fear is of society's
disintegrating (although Margaret Thatcher insisted that there was no
such thing as society, a proposition from which Ronald Reagan hardly
dissented). And it is here that drama has a function. It engages with the
political and social world. It could not exist without a society. Every per-
formance creates a provisional society and for the course of the per-
formance, people share the same space and time. We see through other
people's eyes, and therefore grant authority to what they see. I saw August
Wilson's Ma Rainrys Black Bottom at the National Theatre in London. I
came to that play from a wholly different place, in terms of race, history,
nationality; but it is when those differences strike against one another that
sparks fly. That is what makes this career that we're all involved in so
compelling.
HARRY ELAM: Could I comment quickly on what Chris said? Chris, I
agree with everything you said. Here's one idea- and it's something per-
haps to think about-in terms of the marginalization of our field and
how we use that and how it is that we find ourselves in a position of
resentment in terms of that and victimage. It's a strategy-a sort of
"strategic defensive" to use Gayatri Spivak's words. The question then
becomes, how can we use that to our advantage? How do we see our-
selves other than as marginalized and therefore as lesser or as victims or
always put down by our university? How can we take the forefront?
That's why I mentioned it in terms of performance because, although
Performance Studies is making incursions into what we do, we ourselves
nevertheless talk about performance. The term was ours originally and so
I am thinking about how we can strategize about our position and not see
it as a disadvantage, but potentially turn it into an advantage.
LISA MERRILL: And embracing those tools is critical. I don't plan on
being Pollyanna or utopian about it, but this moment, whether it is seen
as a moment of crisis or not, I think, is a moment of both danger and
opportunity-the opportunity to work together in some wonderful ways.
I want to keep that "oscillation" going, because it's what makes us reach
out to look for necessary interconnections. To do less is to do so at our
peril. The tools that are ours are ours, and we need to keep using them
and sharpening them and training people to use them; but we ourselves
!6 Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
32 ATDS PANEL
can use them in any number of different ways, informed by the questions
that other parts of our discipline and colleagues with different interests
are asking. Here at ATHE, I'm in different subgroups and that shifts
because of the richness of possibilities of these subgroups and the fact
that identification is a process. It doesn't mean that these identities,
whether they're performance studies or theatre history, are fixed.
Therefore, I want to look at this process of identification and how that
influences the work that we do.
UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER: That's exactly it ... Isn't
this the nature of Americanism? The coexistence of different kinds of
melting pots-ones that are distinct from one another and, at other
times, necessarily stirred together. This is what I like about Performance
Studies. I'm one of those Performance Studies types and I wonder if the
notion of change is just a necessary catalyst for existence?
DON WILMETH: I think you're right. I too believe in change. I'll go
back to something I said earlier. My concern, in terms of history, is that
we don't ignore the past. That's all I'm saying, and in my lifetime I've seen
a movement away from anything before the twentieth century. I suppose
if I have a problem with Performance Studies, it is that it tends to be very
much tied to the twentieth century. I just don't want us to forget our past
and what it tells us about the present. I also agree with what I heard from
my colleagues; but I do have that concern about the past, and I don't see
that we are inspiring younger scholars enough to go back and look at, for
example, the colonial period, as Heather [Nathans] does. But Heather is
perhaps one of three or four people that I know who have any interest.
UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER: But that's what I want to
offer. My own research has to do with the eighteenth century; what I'm
interested in happened before 1970. But you don't know me yet because
I'm young ... I'm new, fresh, right? I'm not tenured. What I'm trying to
say-and I'm saying it the only way I know how to say it-I'm inviting
you to consider that you have already gotten the job done. It may not
look like it right now, but we're [the next generation of Americanists]
corning!
DON WILMETH: I hope you are! Heather and I have had this conver-
sation, and I know she has students who are coming along; so, I'm not
that pessimistic. And, I have seen changes. I mean, I published Heather's
book in my series and I think that I have always tried, as an editor, to look
LoOKING BACK TO LoOK FORWARD 33
for younger scholars and encourage their work. Furthermore, if you look
at the thirty books in my American series, you'll see a wide range of ideas
and approaches. So, you just have to be vocal and let us know about your
work. I'd love to know what you're doing.
UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEt\.ffiER: Well, good! I'll tell you. But
I wanted to-forgive me for taking so much time- I just wanted to tell
you, thank you. One of the things I think that people forget is what it
took for you to get us here. I don't take that lightly. And I think that one
of the things that gets lost in the old guard/ new guard comparison is
that, if it hadn't been for you up there [at the table], there would not be
a me. I don't know how to say it in any other language.
ROSE BANK: I think that you've said it very well.
UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you! And thank you
again for what you've done.
BOB VORLICKY: I have one observation and a question. Chris referred
to America as an "unfinished enterprise" and we've been talking about
America as "constantly changing." I'd like to reframe the conversation
about the United States by not only accepting this feature but situating it
as a given-thereby creating a paradoxical (but not necessarily contradic-
tory) identity for the nation. This alternative concept of national identity
becomes a less "anxious" one, as Chris alludes to, in favor of one based
on an acceptance that fixity can coexist with change to create a new
space.
Many Americans experience change as a given in the United
States, and, speaking from the inside, it's not necessarily a source of anx-
iety. Change can be experienced as dynamic, imaginative, and freeing.
When I hear references to the United States, a place and its people, only
marked by unstable, constant change- this position seems increasingly
automatic and unexamined. Instead, I experience a place and a people for
whom change is a kind of stabilizing feature of our identity. While para-
doxical, this coexistence creates a space between fluidity and fixity with-
in which to consider multiple identities, including the national. It is a
space that is too easily overlooked in our discussions of America.
I do have a question I'd like to ask Rosemarie. Thank you for
providing a history of ATHE. I'm struck by the growth in the organiza-
tion over these last years-we now have twenty-eight focus groups, of
which ATDS is one of them. I'm concerned, as I know others are, with
34 ATDS PANEL
the practical implications of this expansion within a modest sized inter-
national organization that is admirably working toward embracing the
diverse interests of its members. I think there's a kind of crisis in the dis-
tance within the organization, however, if one focuses on how people
can continue to work in their own areas of specialization and also engage
the work of cross-pollination (that is, work across focus groups).
Inherent in this observation is an (arguable) premise that cross-pollina-
tion is desirable. To what extent are groups such as ATDS finding them-
selves unintentionally erasing their own visibility that, for years, many
have worked very hard to create? From an organizational and practical
standpoint, the conference, despite its efforts to the contrary, depends
upon a certain loyalty to focus groups if anyone is to attend their ses-
sions. But ATDS, by virtue of its mission statement, is also part of the
plurality, the diversity that is embodied in any number of the other more
specialized focus groups. Where do you see this headed?
ROSE BANK: I want to duck and cover when I hear this- this language
- because I want to emphasize historiography. Change is one thing-
progress-but we need to consider what are the historiographical impli-
cations of diversity, if you want to use that word. What are its politics? I
really am wary of words like transnational. I see the yellow and black
signs and I start crouching under my grammar school desk. What does
this mean? If we move our minds to a recognition of the diversity that is
mutually constructed, what have we realized?
HARRY ELAM: From a practical standpoint, cross pollination is the hot
button topic for me. In thinking about my ATHE schedule, our [ATDS]
business meeting is at the same time that the Black Theatre Association's
meeting. So there is a crisis, in a sense, and everybody wants a piece of
ATHE pie. I think that we all understand that new focus groups like the
recently formed the Latino/Larina focus group should be welcomed, but
I'm wondering if ATHE can't do something to enhance the relationship
between focus groups- possibly say that focus groups have to do at least
two things in relationship to somebody else. That could be part of
A THE's plan, for, in truth, there are many things that are happening that
we could call American Studies here at this conference.
DON WILMETH: I think the number of focus groups is something to
be concerned about. I have no answers, but you remember that the ATA
fell apart ultimately because it was going in too many directions. There
were other problems that I won't go into, but that was very much at the
LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD 35
core of the problem. It [ATA] was trying to do too much for too many
people. It wanted to make sure we all had good health insurance, travel
funding, etc. We seem to be reinventing that direction, and I think we
should think carefully about what we are now doing and learn from the
mistakes we made twenty years ago. The last thing in the world I thought
could ever happen was that ATA would disappear. It had been there my
entire life. All of a sudden it vanished.
ROSE BANK: And quickly ...
DON WILMETH: Overnight. And this organization [ATHE] was begun
overnight. I know because I was one of the founders; so you have to
understand that if you divide yourself too much, it's hard to sustain the
"throughline" that you need in order to maintain continuity.
LISA MERRILL: But you also need to remember that a human being's
identifications are always multiple. I think that's self-evident. We're always
in multiple positions, and I think we deny that at our peril- peril for our
research and peril for what feeds us as humans. So you know when I joke
about which hat I'm wearing at any given moment (I'm President of one
of the other focus groups), I'm acknowledging that there needs to be a
fluidity, because I am not just that one thing.
DON WILMETH: And, again I think we need to remain aware that one
small organization can't do everything. There are other organizations that
serve certain interests. Maybe that's the way it should be, and maybe they
can't all come under the ATDS umbrella. I don't know of an obvious res-
olution to this, but I think the leaders of lATHE] really need to be aware
of the problem.
JOHN FRICK: Unfortunately, we're down to our final question. Bill ...
BILL DEMASTES: This may be a question that you don't want to
answer, so let me put it in the form of a hypothetical. You have a rising
scholar who has travel funds for just one conference. Would you recom-
mend to that scholar to come to ATHE or to go to ASA? In other words,
to put it another way, is there an affiliation that's more "American?"
Demastes's question elicited the mention of several "alternate" associations, but there
was no definitive answer to his question. Before the panel was adjourned, Don
W/meth and Kim Marra informed the audience about the recent deaths of theatre
studies pioneers Kal Burnim and Esther Merle Jackson.
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 19, NO.2 (SPRING 2007)
"I AM A MERE BUSINESS MACHINE": THE COMMODIFICATION
OF THE HEART IN BRONSON HOWARD'S Tim IiaNRIEITA
GARRETT EISLER
From The Gilded Age to Glengarry Glen Ross, the American theatre has
offered a running commentary on the ethics of business.
1
While famous
business plays of modernity like The Adding Machine and AI/ My Sons
sound a tragic warning against the perils of losing one's soul to corporate
capitalism, the nineteenth-century stage tended to offer a more sunny,
"Horatio Alger" view of industry.2 Between these poles, Bronson
Howard's The Henrietta stands out as something unique-a Wall Street
satire. This highly successful 1887 comedy employed the exaggerated
characters and ridiculous plot twists of farce in a highly specific and mul-
tilayered critique of the culture of the stock market at what was then the
height of i ts prosperity. The play's reception as a comedy may have con-
tributed to its devaluing in subsequent years and led to confusion over
how seriously to take its argument. Today its more serious cautionary
speeches have prompted some scholars to dismiss it as melodrama; oth-
ers see its happy ending as exonerating its captain-of-industry protago-
nist. When read against the seismic social and economic shifts of its his-
torical moment, though, The Henrietta emerges as a Gilded Age answer to
Jonson and Moliere.3 Like the conmen and misers of those earlier
I The Gilded .Age was Mark Twain and Dudley Warner's seminal comic novel
which was adapted for the stage in the form of the play, Colonel Sellers (1874), which lam-
poons Washington more than Wall Street.
2 According to Thomas Postlewait, "between the Civil War and World War I a
number of plays celebrated the triumph of hard work, cunning, and integrity .... Many
of these plays provided sentimental versions of the rags-to-riches story." As examples
Postlewait cites George Broadhurst's The Speculator, Owen Davis's The Power of Monry, and
the early works of George M. Cohan ("The Hieroglyphic Stage: American Theatre and
Society Post-Civil War to 1945" in Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume II, eds.
Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999],
158).
3 Howard wrote an 1879 adaptation of Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes and L'Ecole
des Maris under the joint title of Wives (Richard Moody, Dramas .from the American Theatre:
1762-1909 [Cleveland: World Publishing, 1966), 570). Thackery seems to have been an
even more explicit high-satirical influence on The Henn'etta; in the Dramatis Personae,
Howard includes an epigraph from Vaniry Fair next to the name of the hypocritical
Reverend Hilton: "It was to combat and expose such as these, no doubt, that laughter was
made" (Allan Gates Halline, ed. American PltfYs [New York: American Book Company,
38 EISLER
satirists, Howard's Robber Baron hero is exposed not as an anomaly but
merely an extreme symptom of a common social malady.
Howard was not known for satire, but he did frequently write-
and write critically-about business. Young Mrs. Winthrop (1882) intro-
duced his interest in its effects on private life in a dark story of a mar-
riage almost ruined by the husband's obsession with commerce. Even in
his more genteel society comedies (such as Aristocrary) or marital melo-
dramas (e.g., The Banker's Daughter) Wall Street often looms prominently
in the background as a source of class tension or corrupting wealth. In
an age when American dramatists still sought to identify distinct nation-
al qualities, Howard was among the first to seize upon business as the
American subject. "Howard's thinking on the subject of the drama,"
claims Allan Gates Halline, "led him to the conclusion that each country
had its own master theme: in England it was caste, in France marital infi-
delity, and in America business."4
Long before today's "information revolution," Howard foresaw
the havoc instant communications and twenty-four-hour accessibility can
wreak on our personal happiness. In The Henrietta various "affairs of the
heart" constantly intersect with the dehumanizing ways of the market.
Blood proves thinner than tickertape when even family relations see each
other as business competitors. Electricity and the increased pace of the
stock market allow business to invade the domestic sphere like never
before. In its vivid depiction of early "day trading," The Henn.etta provides
a compelling glimpse at a darker side of Gilded Age prosperity and of
our ongoing national love affair with "speculation." As one of the high-
est grossing and widely seen American plays of the late nineteenth cen-
tury-both in New York and on tour around the country-its enactment
of Wall Street mania was one of the most prominent documentations of
that era's Wall Street obsession, and one worth returning to for insight
into our own.s
1935], 414). Subsequent references to the edition of The Henrietta published in this vol-
ume will be given parenthetically in the text.
4 HaJ!ioe, American Plqys, 410. For a brief testament to the significance of
Howard's business plays, including synopses, see Walter]. Meserve, An Outline History of
American Drama (New York: Prospero, 1994), 156-57.
5 The initial run of The Henrietta at the Union Square theatre was cut short after
155 performances (and a box office take of close to half a million dollars) after a fire in
February 1888, but the play soon returned in numerous repeat engagements in houses
throughout New York for the next five seasons (Lloyd Anton Frerer, Bronson Hmvard,
Dean of American Dramatists [Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001], 203; Tice L.
.Miller, "The Plays and Playwrights: Civil War to 1896" in Wilmeth and Bigsby, Cambridge
"1 AM A MERE BUSINESS MACHINE"
39
Wall Street, 1887: Golden Moment in a Gilded Age
Howard wrote The Henrz"etta in the midst of-and in response to-"Wall
Street's first golden age," a time of unprecedented financial prosperity,
optimism, and technological innovation.6The stock market both profited
from and fueled the expanding post-Civil War economy as a whole. After
the setback of the Panic of 1873, the total average traded shares on the
New York Stock Exchange proceeded to double over the next ten years,
peaking with the first million-share day in 1885.7 The exchange's total list-
ed issues were doubling as well, from just five hundred in 1865 to one
thousand by 1900.8 By 1887 both the stock market and the American
economy at large had been radically transformed by the rise of super-
industries like railroads and mining; the giant sums of capital necessary
to back multiple competing railroad companies could only be raised on
the open exchange.9 The resultant exponential growth in the national
economy would enable it, by the time of World War I, to overtake the
United Kingdom as the largest in the world.IO
Technology played a decisive role in this rise. On the one hand,
some of the industries themselves relied on improved machinery and
mining of raw materials; railroad tracks, for instance, became more
durable and bankable with the flourishing of the steel industry. But the
activity of stock trading itself needed innovations to keep up with the
increasing scale and urgency of business. The communications revolu-
tion marked by Edison's stock ticker (1869) and Bell's telephone (1876)
History, 240-41). According to programs collected in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at
the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, tour stops throughout the 1890s includ-
ed Boston, Buffalo, Newark, St. Louis, Toledo, Minneapolis, and Denver.
6
Charles R. Geisst, Wall Street: A History .from its Beginnings to the Fall of Enron
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 109.
7 Ibid., 101, 109.
8
Deborah S. Gardner, Marhtplace: A Briif History of the New York Stock
Exchange (New York: New York Stock Exchange, 1982), 97.
9
Gardner, Marhtplace, 6; Charles W. Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age: Perspectives on
the Origins of Modern America, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 19.
10 John D. Buenker and Joseph Buenker, eds., Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2005), 28.
40 E ISLER
was especially fortuitous, offering brokers and their wealthier clients (who
had heretofore been relying on messengers traveling to and from the
exchange by foot) immediate access to every rise and fall on the floor of
the exchange. This was especially essential after 1873, when the NYSE
began trading in continuous session-10:00am to 3:00pm on week-
days-as opposed to the auctions, or "calls," previously held at
announced times throughout the day. As Wall Street historian Deborah
Gardner asserts, "without the telephone and the ticker, the daily trading
volume could not have reached the millions which became the standard
by 1900 ."1
1
Increased access to market information could mean increased
profits, but it also meant that investors were increasingly wedded to their
new communication devices in hopes of getting financial data quicker
than their competitors.
Machine-mania provided something else for this high-octane
economy: a metaphor for society as a whole. According to John D.
Buenker:
Using the age's high-speed, complex, precision machin-
ery as metaphor and model, an emerging elite of entre-
preneurs, financiers, intellectuals, professionals, techni-
cians, managers, bureaucrats, and politicians strove to
recast most facets of existence into large-scale, com-
partmentalized, impersonal systems made up of dis-
crete, hierarchically arranged components. People- like
machine parts-became increasingly interchangeable
and disposable.12
This "model" spread beyond just the factory floor. In the business world
in general it encouraged a view of all people as commodities, to be trad-
ed and/ or exploited just as any other item on the market.
Overall, however, the prevailing public view of technology in the
Gilded Age was optimistic. Machines were supposed to make labor easi-
er in the factories, work more efficient at the office, and life more com-
fortable in the home. A utopian strand of this philosophy was expressed
even on the radical left, as in Edward Bellamy's extremely popular 1888
socialist novel, Looking Backwards. "For Americans in the Gilded Age,"
writes historian W Bernard Carlson, "technology was not the cause of
11 Gardner, Marketplace, 7.
12 Buenker, Enryclopedia of the Gilded Age, 2.
"I AM A MERE BUSL'IESS MACHINE" 41
their troubles but rather the solution to their problems."13 In this context,
Howard's more skeptical view in The Henn.etta of the new machine-men-
tality stands out as a clear dissent.
Steve Fraser, in his Wall Street history Every Man a Speculator, says
of this era, "For the first time the Street became a spectacle, an object of
mass fascination," even if actual trading was still limited to the small pop-
ulation of wealthy individuals who could pass the credit restrictions of
most stockbrokers.
14
Howard was hardly the first writer, or even play-
wright, to capitalize on and criticize this public appetite for behind-the-
scenes glimpses of the market. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's
satirical 1873 novel The Gilded Age was on stage as Colonel Sellers the very
next year, followed soon by The Big Bonanza (1875). But Howard's first
business play Young Mrs. Winthrop (1882) preceded by three years William
Dean Howell's landmark realist novel The Rise of Silas Lapham.
The object of greatest "fascination" in the public eye was the fig-
ure of the Robber Baron, who frequented the headlines of the 1870s and
1880s in connection with banking and trading scandals. Cornelius
Vanderbilt, David Drew, James Fisk, and Jay Gould were notorious for
their aggressive seizures of large corporations (usually railroads) only to
use their leverage to manipulate stock prices, ruin rival investors and busi-
nesses, then sell off everything once their profit was secured. A stark
contrast to their predecessors in the age of family businesses, these men
felt no personal connection to the companies they ran; they were in it
only for the stock-sometimes to raise it, sometimes to ruin it. Gould
was consistently one of the most loathed men in public life and Fisk was
assassinated in public. IS Such figures might not seem the natural model to
build a romantic comedy around, yet these are exactly the men Bronson
Howard had in mind when writing The Henrietta.
Family/Business, Home/Office
Howard makes clear from the very opening curtain of The Henrietta how
much business (and business machines) have invaded the home life of his
Vanalstyne family. The act 1 scene setting reads: "Residence of Nicholas
!3 W Bernard Carlson, "Technology and America as a Consumer Society, 1870-
1900," in Calhoun, The Gilded Age, 49.
14 Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life
(New York: Harper Collins, 2005), xvii.
!5 See Edward Renehan, Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Ltfe of Jqy
Gould, King of the Robber Barons (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
42 EISLER
Vanalstyne, in New York. Private office" (415). At rise, Vanalstyne's son,
Nicholas, Jr., and the clerk Musgrave are busy answering correspondence
and tabulating figures. The first spoken words in the play are merely a
string of numbers, virtually rendering the speaker a human adding
machine:
16
MUSGRAVE lfooting up the columns): Five; eight; fifty-
three. (Speaks to Vanalstyne, Jr.) The whole amount is
fifty-three millions, eight hundred and fifty thousand
dollars, sir. ( 415)
Aside from announcing right from the start how great a "millionaire"
Vanalstyne is, the line also situates the audience immediately in a mecha-
nized world of figures over feelings. As the oxymoron inherent in the
very phrase "private office" (or, as we would call it today, a "home
office'') implies, the setting violates one of the tenets of Victorian bour-
geois life: the separation of home from work, the division of life into dis-
tinct professional and domestic, public and private, spheres. In this con-
text, Vanalstyne's home/ office seems a throwback to a medieval artisan's
shop.
At the same time, though, the business obsession built into his
home also reflects a forward-thinking taste for "cutting edge" technolo-
gy and anticipates the "telecommuting" of today. Among the items list-
ed in the opening scene setting is a "telephone on wall of this apartment,
near the door," and within the first minute of stage action it is put to use
for business: "the telephone bell sounds. Musgrave goes to it, putting the
tube to his ear." In this their first decade of use, telephones were still pro-
hibitively expensive and a private one was still quite a luxury in 1887 New
York; without central exchanges yet, each user required an individual
"battery."t7 A telephone in the home provided both a link to the hus-
band's office and a reinforcement of work and family boundaries: "pri-
vate lines between office and home connected but protected the domes-
tic (female) sphere from the (male) world of work."ts As a widower with-
out a separate "female sphere" to counteract his "world of work,"
16 The adding machine itself was just about to be patented one year after The
Henn'etta, in 1888. Forty years later, the image of the human being as adding machine was
the impulse for Elmer Rice's famous anti-business play of that name.
17 Howard P. Segal, "Technology and Systematization," in Buenker, Enryclopedia
of the Gilded Age, 19-20.
18 Carlson, in Calhoun, The Gilded Age, 47.
"I AM A MERE BUSINESS MACHINE" 43
Vanalstyne runs an unnatural home, a hybrid of both spheres, male and
female. This becomes evident during act 1, when the young women of
the Vanalstyne family easily come and go into the "private office," inter-
rupting the flow of work.
In New York City, such bifurcation of work and home was
encouraged by the changing geography and demographics of an expand-
ing metropolis. The age of the pre-Civil War "walking city," when the rich
and powerful lived and worked within one small radius of downtown,
was over; the creation of distinct residential districts for the wealthy away
from the financial district now concretized, literally, the separation of
spheres. (fhe advent of the electric streetcar in 1888 was to encourage
commuting even more.) Vanalstyne makes the move uptown-it is
implied at one point he lives on Fifth Avenue (431)-but still resists leav-
ing any distance at all between Wall Street and himself. The anti-business
Dr. Wainwright, regarding the high-tech household, diagnoses the prob-
lem:
The telephone and the stock indicator have enabled His
Sable Majesty to move up town with the rest of the
fashionable world; he used to content himself with
wearing out your souls and bodies at your offices. (419)
This is addressed to the sickly Nick, Jr. whose weak and erratic "pulse" is
here directly blamed on the mechanization of the home and round-the-
clock business.
The result, as Dr. Wainwright makes explicit, is to turn young
Vanalstyne into a mere gadget himself. While the father was "bred in the
country" with "nerves ... as firm and cold as steel before he ever came
to the city," the son is presented as a weaker creature, spoiled by the com-
forts of the industrial age, a fabricated mechanical copy, as opposed to
the hearty "natural" original:
The furnace-bred young men of New York are pigmies
... mere bundles of nerve, that burn themselves like the
overcharged wires of a battery. Notice the electric lights
at your club. Every now and then one of them fizzles
convulsively and goes out. ( 419)
The invocation of Edison's incandescent light bulb (invented in 1879)
again positions the characters at a nexus of the latest Wall Street inven-
tions. Edison's main support for his electric lighting work came from J.P.
44
E ISLER
Morgan, who famously offered his own offices to unveil it in 1882. That
same year he helped Edison set up his first power station in Pearl Street,
at the heart of the financial district, to supply reliable electrical current,
chiefly for lighting, to all of Wall Street.I9
Vanalstyne, Jr. has become such a heartless business machine
that he has taken the tools of predatory speculation he presumably
learned from his father and turned them against him. In act 2 Old Nick's
secret nemesis-who counters his every "bullish" raid on his stock with
a "bear" tactic to lower it-is revealed to be none other than his own son.
Young Nick bears no grudge against his father, personally. His only
motive is to be "Master of Wall Street" (425). Access to his father's
secrets provides him with the perfect opportunity in the business system
of this world, a system in which the ideals of the "family firm" have been
increasingly displaced by a more mercenary, less personal ethic. In the
Gilded Age, according to Buenker,
relationships, values, and institutions formerly based
upon kinship, locale, and religious affiliation had largely
given way to those rooted in occupation, income level,
and social status. As a result, an ever increasing portion
of life was dominated by large-scale, impersonal,
bureaucratic organizations.zo
In a sense, Young Nick has been programmed to overthrow his father
since the beginning. By the rules of the speculation game, the only way
to become Master of Wall Street is to take down the current master by
any means necessary.ZI A real-life model for this subplot might have been
the overthrow of railroad magnate Daniel Drew in the late 1860s by his
former protege and surrogate son, the Robber Baron Jay Gould.2
2
The
Henrietta shows why a true family business has become impossible in the
"every man for himself" spirit of the Gilded Age.
19 Geisst, Wail Street, 109.
20 Buenker, Enryclopedia if the Gilded Age, 1.
21 He is in every way his father's heir, down to his very name. By choosing to
name father and son identically, Howard invites us to see them as rwo reflections of the
same person. In effect, the story of the Robber Baron is told twice: once as tragedy and
once as farce.
22 Robert M. Sharp, The Lore and ugends if Wall Street (Homewood, IL: Dow
Jones-Irwin, 1989), 125.
"I AM A MERE BUSINESS MACHINE" 45
Old Nick himself exhibits a similar lack of family feeling in the
exploitation of his blood relations, albeit in a less lethal way. In one of
the play's running gags, he tries to charge family members for their own
gifts, secretly getting money back from them by way of a deceptive mar-
ket tip.23 When his daughter Mary seeks to invest his $50,000 wedding
check to her, he quotes her a stock price ten points above its worth, so
that he may "get back that wedding present" (430). He surreptitiously
steers his in-laws wrong, too, effectively billing them for the whole wed-
ding. Like Nick, Jr., though, Mary has been trained too well, as we see
when she double-crosses her father on the stock and turns a profit at his
expense. "Exactly like her mother," Old Nick concedes. "I always tried to
do Matilda out of her anniversary presents. But she doubled them on me
every year" (440). The Vanalstyne family becomes a parody of "The
Street" in miniature-a collection of hyper-competitive individuals, each
constantly seeking to do the other out of a dollar.
This otherwise comic family squabbling turns tragic in act 3,
when young Nick's schemes and weak heart give out simultaneously. In a
brilliantly scored scene, Howard counts down the clock to the Exchange's
three o'clock closing time, as father and son engage in a vicious bull-ver-
sus-bear tug-o'-war over the Vanalstyne stock. While the frantic selling
and buying are going on offstage on the NYSE floor, Howard sets the
scene across the street in a broker's office, where the characters follow the
proceedings remotely via the ticking of the "stock indicator" (Figure 1).
Shortly after young Nick has been taken off stage by Dr. Wainwright for
immediate care, he bursts back on to read the final results off of the tick-
er, which becomes his life support system, his heart in sync with the mar-
ket's vicissitudes and fluctuations. When the ticker ceases, he expires
along with it- his death timed perfectly to the ending of the trading ses-
swn.
VANALSTYNE, JR.: Be patient, Doctor! I'll return in a
moment; but I must see the closing quotation. (Crosses
hurried!J to indicator, throws Musgrave aside rough!J, seizes tape
eager!J .. . looks at the tape.) ... (Indicator ticks.) ...
WAINWRIGHT: The infernal machine is still at work.
It kills more men than dynamite.
VANALSTYNE, JR. (with sudden interest, giving the words
one I?J one as they come off the indicator;: "Heavy and unex-
pected-orders-for-the Vanalstyne- Stocks." . . .
------
23 This is one of the many outward ways in which Vanalstyne, Sr. resembles
Moliere's Harpagon.
46
Wild excitement! Prices bounding up--seventy-nine-
eighty! (He draws up, bringing his hand to his heart and step-
ping back; the Doctor starts, watching him; Musgrave rushing
down to indicator.)
MUSGRAVE Eighty-three, eighty-five. Ha-
ha! (Turning to Vanalsryne, Jr.) You tried to ruin your
father- it is you who are ruined ... (Points exultant!J to
Vanalstyne, Jr., who has staggered and fallen into Wainwnght's
arms.) ... "Eighty-eight,-ninety." (Indicator stops.) One
point higher than it was yesterday, and-and the
Exchange is closed. (Rushes up, wheels down armchair;
Wainwright places Vanalsryne, Jr. in chair.) (444)
EISLER
Howard then briefly resurrects young Nick-like a monster who refuses
to die- linking the taunts of the machine's ticking to the villain's exhaust-
ed heart even more explicitly.
VANALSTYNE, JR.: (the indicator ticks; Vanalsryne, Jr.
starts; it stops; he rises; starts forward) Seventy-one-sixty-
eight. (Ticker stops. Vanalsryne, Jr. staggers back into Doctor's
arms and sinks into chair; his head drops on his breast lifeless;
the Doctor places his hand over his patient's heart; the indicator
ticks a few times, and is silent.)
WAINWRIGHT: Tick on! tick on! Bring fortune-and
despair-to the living; the ear of a dead man cannot
hear you. (Indicator ticks till curtain is down.)
Slow Curtain (445)
As even Howard's confusing stage directions might unintentionally imply,
it is hard to tell when it is Nick who is "starting" and "stopping" and
when it is the ticker. The two have melded to the extent that one literally
picks up where the other leaves off. And, as if the point had not already
been made clearly enough, Howard brings up the curtain one more time,
leaving the corpse and the machine alone together on stage for a haunt-
ing, even gothic, silent tableau.24
Second Picture
Everybocjy off stage except Vanalsryne, Jr. Ticker ticks slow!J
and sharp!J until curtain zs doum.
Curtain (445)
24 As in many traditional melodramas, each of the acts in The Henrietta ends
with a post-curtain "picture."
"I AM A MERE BUSINESS ]\,fACHINE" 47
Figure 1: Act 3, William H. Crane (center) as Vanalstyne in the office of his
broker. Flint (second from right), with the stock ticker at left .. Courtesy of
Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing
Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
The image-almost a parody of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart-is as complicated
as it is affecting. On one level, the human heart has been exposed as
mechanical. But, also, the machine has been endowed with human prop-
erties. Is Nick's unstoppable drive for profit the "ghost in the machine"?
"Tick on," Wainwright apostrophizes, ascribing demonic motives to the
device. Brander Matthews, in memorializing Howard twenty years later,
does likewise: "There is imagination, and imagination of a high order, in
that scene of The Henrietta where the stricken stock speculator dies alone
in his chair while the indicator behind him ticks off the death-watch."2s
While the Oxford English Dictionary traces the slang usage of the
word "ticker" for "heart" only back to 1930, the connection here sug-
gests it may already have had currency with Howard and his audience at
least four decades earlier.26 A hint of the link can be found as far back as
Francis Marion Crawford's 1883 New York novel, Dr. Claudius, in which
one Wall Street character hails his stock ticker as "the pulse of New
25 Quoted in Halline, Amen'can Plays, 412-13.
26 "ti.cker3 (c)," Oxford English Dictionary Online, Second Edition 1989. Oxford,
2006.
27 Ibid., "ti.cker3 (b).
48 EISLER
York."27 A critic for the New York Dramatic Mirror certainly caught onto
the metaphor in praising The Henrietta for showing "how men's hearts
beat with the ticker and throb faster and slower with the market."28 The
fact that the stage picture could be read either way-mao as machine,
machine as man-may be exactly Howard's point. Modern business soci-
ety has brought us to the point where we cannot tell the difference.
"Henrietta is not a woman"
In a clever twist on the comedy of mistaken identity, Howard's main run-
ning joke in The Henrietta is the confusion among the supporting charac-
ters over just who or what the eponymous "character" is. The audience
knows from the very beginning that the Henrietta Railway and Mining
Company is Vanalstyne's largest holding. But the name quickly gets mis-
taken by others for various women real and imaginary, and even, in one
scene, for a racehorse.
29
The more profound joke, however, is how easily
everyone in the play conflates stock speculation and sexual desire. As the
"The" in The Henrietta indicates, women are objectified and machines
fetishized. 30
That Vanalstyne's main "concern" involves railroads is no arbi-
trary choice on Howard's part. The railroad train was the super-machine
of late nineteenth-century America and one of the largest and most pros-
perous of all industries. While the first companies had been flourishing
before the Civil War, the completion of the f.trst transcontinental line by
Union Pacific in 1869 spurred an unprecedented explosion of capital and
construction pouring into the western territories. According to K.. Austen
Kerr, "in the 1880s, Americans laid about 75,000 miles of track, more
than was laid in any other decade anywhere on the globe."31 The oppor-
tunities to profit from the transportation surge, and from the resultant
28 "At the Theatre," New York Dramatic Mirror, 1 October 1887, 2.
29 The racehorse episode provides an almost too perfect metaphor for capital-
ist exploitation, including suggestions of prostitution. Bertie offers to take his visiting
brother-in-law to the races at St. Jerome Park (famous gathering ground of New York's
leisure class) where Henrietta, "a young mare from Kentucky" is a sure bet. Agnes and
Mary enter overheating only Bertie's line, "We will go to the races together and take
Henrietta between us." "The ladies start with a scream," read the stage directions ( 432).
30 The fact that there actually were-and still are-"Henrietta Mines" in the
American West (mainly in Arizona, Colorado, and Idaho) suggests Howard's inspiration
for the play's title and dominant motif was from real life.
31 K. Austen Kerr, 'The Economy," in Buenker, Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age, 29.
"1 AM A MERE BUSINESS MACHINE" 49
sprouting up of new towns and economic markets in the "wild west,"
made railroad stock irresistible to the adventurous investor-and the
prime target for stock manipulators like the Robber Barons, who focused
their most notorious schemes on this industry.
Aiding the railroad entrepreneur was the invention and legal
sanctioning by the 1870s of the modern corporation, under which
Congress and state legislatures allowed great latitude in raising capital and
issuing stock without accountability. Conveniently for crooked specula-
tors, a corporation was "considered by the courts as a 'person' [so that]
its owners- the shareholders-were protected from liabilities should the
company fail."32 Hence, business legislation of the time endowed objects
with personhood while simultaneously objectifying people. Technically,
then, it would not have been wholly incorrect to describe "The
Henrietta" as both a Railroad and a woman-or at least a "person"-after
all.33 The irony of the corporation as (non) person is one that does not
escape Howard as comic dramatist.
The story Howard gives Vanalstyne on the origins of the com-
pany-which he first acquires (in a card game, tellingly) as a mine in the
Southwest- follows a typical venture capitalist narrative of the time:
I incorporated ... the mine for twenty millions capital;
bought the whole town, including two newspapers and
an opera house, and all the railways, running in that
direction, not to mention the branch lines and a
steamship company, to say nothing of six million acres
of public land grants. The Henrietta Railway and Mining
Company now pervades and ramifies the entire coun-
try-from Ohio to California. (416)
As a Robber Baron, Vanalstyne naturally cares little for the welfare of the
mining town and the spread of transportation and goods through the
country. Henrietta for him is simply a tool with which to manipulate the
rest of the stock market. As Steve Fraser explains about the true purpose
driving the railroad industry: "perhaps a third of the new tracks were
32 Ibid., 31-32.
33 According to John DeNovo, legal backing for early corporate protection law
was founded by courts in the civil liberties granted by the 14th Amendment Qohn
DeNovo, ed. The Gilded Age and After [New York: Scribners, 1972], 3). This amendment,
originally addressing the enfranchisement of ex-slaves, was not applied during the nine-
teenth century to women, who did not gain nationwide suffrage until 1920. Arguably,
then, the corporation was put even ahead of women under the law;
so
EISLER
built to meet current demand, a third might find some useful future, but
a final third were of no value to anyone except their promoters."3
4
In
other words, its chief value is in how much others desire it, regardless of
what is tangibly there. With Union Pacific stock boasting as much as
1200% return in one year, it was not difficult to lure gullible investors.
35
What feeds each case of mistaken identity in the play is
Vanalstyne's need to maintain a veil of secrecy around his business plans,
so as to prevent leaked intelligence about Henrietta from getting to his
rivals on the Street. Outside of his business partner son, he cannot even
trust his most intimate friends and family and so his paranoia perpetuates
the misunderstandings. The first close call arises when, revealingly, a love
letter crosses paths with a business inquiry. Vanalstyne finds himself in a
rivalry with his pastor, Reverend Hilton, for the hand of a wealthy widow,
Mrs. Cornelia Opdyke. Hilton craves both Cornelia and a piece of the
Henrietta windfall with equal passion. (Given Cornelia's wealth, both are
financially driven pursuits.) By accident he puts his letters to Cornelia and
Vanalstyne in the wrong envelopes, so that Cornelia receives the follow-
ing text:
I would like another chat with you [i.e. Vanalstyne]
about Henrietta ... I am deeply interested in that direc-
tion, you know .. . I trust that Henrietta is still booming
.. . I give you my entire confidence in this matter, my
dear brother Vanalstyne, for I know thatyou are more
interested in Henrietta than anybody else. (433-34)
Given that the language for discussing business and love are so similar in
this world, Cornelia can hardly be blamed for interpreting this as a collu-
sion of two scoundrels over a mistress. (1viany more jokes are had
throughout the play over the double meaning of "interest," for instance.)
Indeed, the source of the humor throughout all the mistaken identities of
"Henrietta" is precisely that identifying Henrietta as a woman always
seems more plausible and appropriate to such heartfelt words than the
material properties of money, stock, and machines.
Howard drives this parallelism home with yet another story of
confusing love and business matters. "When I got the screws on old Van
Brunt," recalls Vanalstyne of a rival, "it was because he sent his broker's
wife an order for stocks, and her husband a love-letter; he got' em mixed"
34 Fraser, Every Man a Speculator, 112.
35 Christopeher Cumo, "Railroads" in Historical Dictionary of the Gilded Age, ed.
Leonard Schlup and James G. Ryan (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2003), 406.
"I AM A MERE B USINESS MACHINE"
51
(430). In the best comedies of errors, things always "get mixed" for good
reason. The mishap begs the question: what is the difference, in this
world, between a love letter and an order for stocks? Even the very image
of a Robber Baron making love to his broker's wife is revealing. As
becomes clear with the relationship between Vanalstyne and his own bro-
ker, Watson Flint, there is nobody a speculator trusts more, and is more
financially intimate with, than his broker. In this tangential episode, the
wife (the socially sanctioned love object of the opposite sex) is arguably
a mere surrogate for the broker himself. In this Gilded Age cautionary
parable Van Brunt's two letters seem literally interchangeable.
As much as Vanalstyne claims to love Cornelia he cannot risk her
knowing anything about the real Henrietta. Hilton, on the other hand,
does not want to lose her favor by confirming her suspicions of infideli-
ty, which leads to a second misunderstanding. When Vanalstyne pressures
Hilton to concoct a cover story for Cornelia, to convince her "Henrietta"
is neither a mistress nor a hot stock tip, the best the reverend can do is to
tell her that Henrietta is a disreputable woman in his congregation known
as "The Witch of Wall Street," whom he and Vanalstyne wish to warn
their male colleagues against. The joke for Howard's audience (shared by
Vanalstyne who cannot keep a straight face through Hilton's explanation)
is that the real-life "Witch of Wall Street" was no temptress but an eccen-
tric old millionairess in tattered clothes famous for conducting her lend-
ing business out of a trunk in the lobby of Chemical Bank.36 Hilton has
apparently misunderstood the epithet-but revealingly so. The equation
of railroads with loose women was proverbial. In the late 1860s the Erie
Railroad was tarnished as "The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street" after spec-
ulator Daniel Drew had his way with her.37 That both phrases imply a
kind of prostitute, or at least a higher-class "kept woman," foreground
sex itself as a commodity and bring to the play's surface the frequent
exchange in this period of cash for sexual favors.38
36 The odd story of Hetty Green, "The Witch of Wall Street," is recounted in
Sharp, The Lore and Legends of Wall Street, 147-50. Fraser sees her as a more threatening,
gender-bending, and monstrous figure in the context of the time, given her "distinctive-
ly male ruthlessness" and how she "was regarded as possessing a man's brain trapped in
a woman's body" (100) .
3
7
Giesst, Wall Street, 70. Fraser attributes the name "Scarlet Woman" to the fact
that Erie's "stock price bore little if any connection to the value of the company but see-
sawed in response to ... manipulations" (87). See also John Steele Go.rdon, The Scarlet
Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, The Erie &iiJvay Wars, and The
Birth of Wall Street (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988).
38 According to Rebecca Edwards, "Prostitution probably reached an all-time
national per capita peak in the 1870s. New York's vice district was the most notorious,
52
EISLER
The blurring of industry and sex continues in yet another
"misidentified" Henrietta. Vanalstyne's younger son, Bertie, is confront-
ed by his girlfriend, the innocent Agnes (young Nick's sister-in-law), over
some racy photos displayed in his bedroom, especially one signed
"Henrietta." Bertie explains how this innocent infatuation of he and his
chums for this proto-covergirl involves a complex chain of economic
transactions: "Henrietta is the most famous ballet dancer in New York.
All of us have her picture. We get them from the photographer for fifty
cents apiece, but we have to pay her business manager five dollars apiece
for her autograph" (422). The industry addressed here is show business
and the increasingly sophisticated tools developed by its peddlers at this
time for celebrity image-making. By "ballet dancer" Bertie could mean
many different kinds of performer, but the trade in "carte-de-visites," pho-
tos of female dancers sporting revealing outfits and come-hither looks-
"! didn't like her face at all," scowls Agnes ( 422)-was most popular
among Burlesque stars.39 As Robert G. Allen documents in Horrible
Prettiness, Burlesque in this period was not yet the sleazy sideshow it
would later become, but still attracted a steady clientele of rich business-
men and playboys. It also drew from and "burlesqued" the imagery of
high-art ballet. A more respectable offshoot were the elaborate "specta-
cle ballets" thriving in the legitimate theatre, the first of which, The Black
Crook, opened in 1866 and ran more or less continuously in revivals
through the following decade. By the standards of the day, these chorus
girls were denounced, even in court, as scantily clad, with numerous pub-
licly distributed photos cited as evidence. Bertie does not entangle him-
self in prostitution, but in an exchange of money for sexual pleasure nev-
ertheless. The fact that his object is a totally disembodied photograph
with a standardized price further commodifies his infatuation.
This particular mistaken identity never crosses Vanalstyne's path,
but still gets "mixed" with the railroad company in comically appropriate
ways. In act 3, Bertie fears he has lost Agnes over a misunderstanding-
a wrongful accusation of sexual impropriety-for which he blames his
photo collection. He despondently wanders onto the Stock Exchange
floor, coincidentally at the very moment a "panic" is setting in over his
father's stock (of which he is still unaware) only to be accosted by what
he imagines are fellow Henrietta-devotees. Seeking refuge in Flint's office
occupying many blocks along Broadway." (New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-
1905 [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 131).
39 Robert G. Allen, Hom"ble Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 197.
"1 AM A J\,fERE BUSINESS MACHINE" 53
Figure 2: Act 3, Stuart Robson (right) as Bertie recounts his adventure on the
Stock Exchange floor, as Musgrave tends to the ticker. Courtesy of Billy Rose
Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts,
Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
(Figure 2), he recalls his traumatic experience:
I had no sooner worked my way to the front rail, than I
was recognized by every man on the floor below. They
all suddenly began to howl: "Henrietta!" As I reached
the street, a man ran up to me and cried out: "How is
Henrietta?" I knocked him down and proceeded on my
way. Half a dozen newsboys ran by me, yelling at the top
of their voices: ' 'All about Vanalstyne and Henrietta."
(443)
This Dante-esque vision of the entire floor of the New York Stock
Exchange crying out in sexual desire may be a foolish man's delusion, but
once again Howard's running joke-and, thus, his social critique- is that
such misunderstandings often seem more plausible explanations for the
passions unleashed in the play than the reality. The audience must won-
der at some point if it would not indeed make more sense for such excite-
ment to be generated by a sex symbol than by a railroad stock. This is
why the comedy of errors can persist for nearly three entire acts before
Vanalstyne is finally forced to reveal his secret and dispel them of their
logical conclusions. "Henrietta is not a woman," he declares, in a line that
would be nonsensical if not for its dramatic context (440).
54 EISLER
Love and Money
Women are commodified and exploited in numerous ways in The
Henrietta.4o Vanalstyne wages an all-out bidding war against his romantic
rival, Hilton, employing all the bullish and bearish tactics in his Wall
Street arsenal; he is willing to bankrupt the woman he loves in order to
lower her value to Hilton. Young Nick, who plots a bear raid (a veritable
rape in Wall Street terms) against his father's "Henrietta," has already,
before the play's start, sired a child by his mistress, who dies offstage
when abandoned by him.4J
Objectification of women was not unique to the Gilded Age, but
the fetishizing of commodities, of technology, and of money itself in late
nineteenth-century culture was particularly a characteristic of booming
industrial capitalism. It is this phenomenon that affects the love-lives of
Howard's characters the most. According to biographer Lloyd Anton
Frerer, Howard at one point proposed for the play an alternate title of
striking simplicity: "Love and Money."
42
The phrase could be read as pos-
ing the two words in opposition (as in, "love versus money") but it also
suggests a parallelism and symmetry that asks the audience to compare
how the characters (and perhaps they themselves) value the two. The title
of the story of most of the male characters might as well be "Love for
Money" or "Love= Money."
The Vanalstyne broker, Watson Flint, a would-be suitor of
Agnes, continually inverts the expected values of love and business. His
expected marriage proposal never happens because of his preoccupation
with the financial subplots of the play. In the two scenes in which he calls
upon Agnes at the house, he delays seeing her in order to talk business
with the Vanalstynes. In act 2 he confronts young Nick over his double
dealing, which he has uncovered. Nick assumes Flint intends to extort
40 An area of further research here would be how the slow but increasing gains
in the women's suffrage movement throughout this period, as well as increased presence
of women in the workforce, increased male anxiety over traditional social roles, prompt-
ing an even more extensive commodification of women by men in order to keep the new
economy from changing the hierarchy of domestic relations.
4! The subplot of Vanalstyne, Jr.'s extramarital activities anticipates by five years
the central plot point in James Herne's more lbsenite 1892 version in Margaret Flemming.
The fact the The New Henrietta took the running "Henrietta" motif so far as to give the
name to Nick, Jr.'s mistress as well perhaps pushed the joke too far, but seems not total-
ly inappropriate.
42 Frerer, Bronson Howard, 205.
"l AM A MERE BuSINESS MACHINE"
55
him in exchange for keeping silent, but Flint's real blackmailing demand
is only to intercede with Agnes so she will choose him over Bertie. Flint
knows he is a better suitor of stocks than of spouses. Agnes' older sister,
Rose, at first favors the match with Flint, but not after he arrives in act 4
for what should finally be his proposal, which turns into an awkward mix
of business and pleasure.
FLINT: (Looking across at Bertie and still holding Agnes'
hand.) Money at fifteen per cent. and stocks going down
with a rattle. (To Agnes) I have longed for this moment,
Agnes, since you first left us. ( 446)
Rose offers to leave the young lovers alone, but Flint opts to talk business
with Bertie first. "I am not quite sure that Watson would make a woman
happy," Rose confesses in an aside. As his name implies, Flint does not
rise to the era's expectations of virility.43 But he is not feminine, either. In
his own words- explaining to young Nick how he follows only the letter
of his instructions regarding trading of his clients' stock-"! am a mere
business machine" (438).44
Compared to such men, the ultimate joke about Vanalstyne's
"Henrietta" is that "she" can seem more of a real person after all. In
Vanalstyne's act 3 courtship of Cornelia, Henrietta becomes very much a
woman-in fact, the "other woman"-when once again, the stock ticker
takes on comically human properties and reveals itself to be the true
"ticker," or heart, of the male Vanalstynes. Because Howard sets what
should be their big proposal scene between Vanalstyne and Cornelia in
the midst of the young Nick's "bear raid" against Henrietta, Vanalstyne's
attention is constantly distracted by the latest reports coming in off of
the ticker; the moment it activates he becomes a machine himself, fol -
lowing its motions in step. The scene is also a perverted Jove triangle,
where the ticker takes on a definite (and demanding) personality as "the
old lady"-and one particularly sensitive to the word "heart."
VANALSTYNE: I haven't completed my business with
you, madam ... (Holds tape in right hand, looks at her, then
at tape several times undecidedjy, then drops tape and goes to her.)
43 See Jay Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern Amencan Homophobia
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
44
Herman Hollerith patented his first "Tabulating Machine" in 1889. Thirty-
five years later his company, "Tabulating Machine Company," would be renamed
International Business Machines, or IBM.
56
I'm in love with you ....
CORNELIA: At last!
VANALSTYNE: But my heart-(The indicator ticks. He
stops abrupt!J and goes back to it, watching tape.)
CORNELIA: ... (Aside) His tongue falters.
VANALSTYNE: Holy Moses!
CORNELIA: Eh? ...
VANALSTYNE: I've got to back out of this.
CORNELIA: Sir?
VANALSTYNE: Henrietta down to seventy-six. The
old lady is getting me into a trap .... (Turns square!J
towards her.) They've got the old bull in a corner.
CORNELIA: Really, sir, I don't know what all this has
to do with-with-(Indicator stops.)
VANALSTYNE: Oh, of course! As I was saying. (Backs
awqy from ticker.) I've been in love with you since we ftrst
met. I have loved you more and more from that day to
this. You must be my wife ....
CORNELIA: Do give me time.
VANALSTYNE: How much?
CORNELIA: Time-to-say-''Yes."
VANALSTYNE: Yes! (Throwing out his arms eager!J.)
CORNELIA: Y-e-s. (Spreading her arms and falling back
towards him. The indicator ticks. He drops his arms and rushes
to it, leaving her to totter back over her skirts and sit square!J on
the floor. She springs up at once and stands like an enraged tigress,
glaring at him. He is staring at the tape.)
VANALSTYNE: The old girl is down again.
CORNELIA: Mr. Vanalstyne!
VANALSTYNE: That's the worst tumble I ever saw in
so short a time.
CORNELIA: I say no-no-no-no!
VANALSTYNE: Sixty-nine!
CORNELIA: A thousand times-no! (Sweeps up stage,
throws open both doors with her hands, angri!J, exits rapid!J.)
VANALSTYNE: Cornelia! Cornelia! Cornelia! (Has tape
in right hand, ha!f turning each time to see, as if undecided
whether to follow or remain at ticker, but remains at ticker. The
indicator ticks.) ( 441)
EISLER
In short, the "old girl" ticker wins this round. Howard clearly delights in
"I AM A MERE BUSINESS MACHINE" 57
all the words and phrases ("back out," "tumble'') that can apply equally
to the market and Cornelia because they reveal Vanalstyne's true love
affair is the one with Henrietta. The stage effects Howard achieves with
the ticker demonstrate the gradual submission of Americans throughout
the Gilded Age to their own machines, which although originally intend-
ed to serve them and make life easier, instead have taken on a domineer-
ing life of their own.
Production and Reception
Given the dark side of speculation that Howard dramatizes, it is under-
standable that he did not initially intend The Henrietta to be light comedy.
His inspiration, he claimed, was the loss of a good friend, whose death
he attributed to his exhaustion from the stock market. But since he was
already under commission from the comedy team of William H. Crane
and Stuart Robson, he decided to submit this surprisingly somber subject
as the requested vehicle. The two entertainers were "deeply shocked"
when they read the finished script by its requirements for pathos and ter-
ror alongside the belly laughs for which they were better known, and ini-
tially told Howard they felt inadequate to playing it.4S
The legacy and reputation of The Henn.etta have ever since been
greatly colored by its association with Crane and Robson, who originat-
ed the roles of Vanalstyne and Bertie, respectively. Of the two, Crane
reportedly rose to Howard's dramatic challenges more successfully, with
the scene of his fatal act 3 confrontation with Nick, Jr. winning him some
of the most laudatory notices of his career, praising him for his instant
transformation from comic fool to tragic patriarch.46 Robson fared less
well with the critics. Even though Bertie, a dimwitted weakling, is a clas-
sic comic type, the climax of act 2 requires him quite seriously to take
upon himself the blame for Nick, Jr.'s adultery. "His few sober periods,"
wrote the New York Sun critic, "were declined as such by the audience, and
even a grievous sacrifice, made with heroic intent, was construed merri-
ly."47 With his trademark "squeak" of a voice and "blinking" mannerisms,
the New York Mirror remarked, "Mr. Robson's peculiar personality is
4
5 I rely here on the account of the play's origins in Frerer, Bronson Howard, 201 -
03.
46 See "At the Theatres," New York Mirror, 1 October 1887, 2;
Ne1v York Sun, 27 September 1887, 3; "The Henrietta," New York Times, 27 September
1887, 4.
47 New York Sun, 27 September 1887, 3.
58 EISLER
inseparable from all his work. He cannot overcome it."
4
8 While Robson's
dramatic shortcomings seem not to have detracted from the play's popu-
larity, his long-term effect on the play's early reception was apparent and
probably did not help give it an impression of dramatic verisimilitude.
For instance, at the time of the premiere Robson was fifty-one, at least
twenty years older than his character; he also was nine years older than
Crane, who, as Vanalstyne, was playing his father. He then continued to
play Bertie over the next decade and until his death in 1903 at the age of
sixty-seven.
49
The classification of the play as broad comedy began tarnishing
it as early as 1902, when a revival with both original stars was dismissed
as dated and as "old fashioned as a colonial play," especially due to the
suddenly dated practice of Howard's written "asides" in the increasingly
darkened auditoriums of the new century, peopled by audiences accus-
tomed to modern realism. so Also lessening the play's appeal was that by
this time the Age of the Robber Barons had ended. The very year of The
Henrietta's first premiere also saw the creation of the Interstate
Commerce Commission to regulate Wall Street. In 1890 the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act cracked down on industrial monopolies and stock "cor-
nering," a cause taken up after 1900 by President Theodore Roosevelt.
And the sudden shock of the severe 1893 Depression, for those who suf-
fered through it, may have made the legacy of rampant speculation too
difficult even to laugh at.
Given these changed circumstances, when Crane remounted the
play in 1913, after both Robson's and Howard's deaths, he had it drasti-
cally revised. This New Henrietta (credited to boulevard playwrights
Winchell Smith and Victor Mapes) enjoyed only a modest Broadway run,
but then toured for three years. Altering Howard's original almost beyond
recognition, its chief villain was no longer a blood relation but only a son-
in-law who was spared any punitive death scene-arguably erasing all
traces of Howard's very impetus for the play.st Even without Robson,
48 "At the Theatres," The New York Mirror; 1 October 1887, 2.
4
9 Robson actually bought the rights to The Henrietta soon after the ftrst run for
the express purpose of touring. When the partnership of Crane and him ended in 1889,
he hired other, lesser known actors to play Vanalstyne, making Bertie the more prominent
star role by default. By 1900, then, it was Robson more than Crane who was most asso-
ciated with (and seen in) the play by theatergoers nationwide; he "owned" the play in
more ways than one.
50 New York Herald, 16 May 1902. (Quoted in Frerer, Bronson Howard, 210.)
51 A synopsis of The New Henrietta is provided in Frerer, Bronson Howard, 211.
"I AM A MERE BUSINESS MACHINE" 59
Bertie still stole the show in a breakout performance by the young
Douglas Fairbanks, who went on to triumph in a 1915 filln version-
renamed The Lamb to shift the focus to Bertie even more. A Hollywood
remake five years later re-dubbed Bertie The Saphead and tailored the part
for the slapstick of Buster Keaton. Thus the form in which The Henrietta
was transmitted to most early twentieth-century audiences was extensive-
ly rewritten, broadly comic, less satirical, and-as silent filln-deprived
of Howard's intricate wordplay.
Even among the few historians who have gone back to the orig-
inal script, debate continues over how seriously to take the play as an anti-
business statement. Tice L. Miller accuses Howard of going so far as
"romanticizing the American business class," expressing "sentiments
[that] helped create the myth of big business in America," and wonders
if "the success of this play ... would indicate that business values were
taken for granted" by its Gilded Age audience. 52 Yet Steve Fraser accuses
Howard of just the opposite fault, self-righteousness. Calling Henrietta
both a "didactic piece of satire" and "a Victorian melodrama," he privi-
leges the moral lectures of the play's raisonneur, Dr. Wainwright, and the
narrative of the fall of Nick, Jr. over the farcical misunderstandings and
sexual threads. 53 Such lack of consensus is perhaps understandable con-
sidering how Howard deliberately juggles so many dramatic traditions at
once. But although the play has been criticized for genre irregularity and
inconsistencies, the coexistence of clashing elements is precisely what
makes it so illuminating as a cultural document. After all, the social and
economic upheavals of the Gilded Age constantly subjected Americans
to profit and loss, giddiness and despair, in both love and money with
mercurial irregularity.
Conclusion
Like all good satires, The Henrietta makes audiences laugh at events dead-
ly serious in the lives of its characters-and, normally, in the audience's
as well. Indeed, when the play toured abroad, one London critic balked
at the "unreality" at which its American financiers "sport with millions."54
But to its originally intended business-class audience at the Union Square
Theatre-in the heart of the city's commercial center, at the peak of
52 Miller, in Wilmeth and Bigsby, Cambn'dge History, 240, 243.
53 Fraser, Every Man a Speculator, 141-42.
54 Quoted in Frerer, Bronson Howard, 210.
60
EISLER
Gilded Age prosperity, on the threshold of an alluring technological rev-
olution-the onstage antics were instandy recognizable.ss Fellow play-
wright William Gillette hailed Howard's depiction as true to life as a
"series of photographs."56 The New York Times notice remarked, "a large
part of the dialogue concerns transactions in the Street, which it is to be
presumed, everybody understands."5
7
To Americans today, it is no less relevant, since the practices of
"The Street" have come into our homes and private lives even more
aggressively. Although the original moment for The Henrietta may have
been short-lived before the twentieth century dismissed it as a quaint
relic, perhaps its time has come again in the twenty-first century. Stock
trading has now officially become a "24/7'' activity for people across
lines of class, race, gender, or even geography. Steady streams of stock
quotes continually flood digital "tickers" below our TV screens, in the
margins of our computers, and on our phones. Without need for mid-
dlemen, day-traders without offices can serve as their own Watson Flints,
and the "private office" has become the "mobile office." Armed with no
more than a laptop "business machine" and a portable (not wall-bound)
phone, every man now really can be a speculator. And woman. While the
Ne1v York Sun reported that the original production's "hits at stock gam-
bling" were "uproariously enjoyed by the male hearer, although on the
ladies they were naturally lost," might both Vanalstyne and Cornelia find
themselves equally distracted from their wooing today by matching
Blackberries?SB
As we continue to contemplate the increasingly blurred line
between business and leisure, Howard's comedic warning against the sell-
ing out of privacy and intimacy may finally prompt the laughter of recog-
nition it has long been denied. It merits a fresh look both from audiences
who might see themselves in it and from scholars interested in the his-
torical and social causes and effects of our ongoing "irrational exuber-
ance" over Wall Street.
SS For an account of the ascendancy of the "business class audience" after the
Civil War-particularly in Union Square-see Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Fom;ations:
Amencan Theatre and Society, 1820-18 70 (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1 992).
56 Quoted in Gary A. Richardson, American Drama from the CokJnial Penod
Thro11gh World War I: A Critical History (New York: Twayne, 1 993) 289n.
57 "The Henrietta," New York Times, 27 September 1887, 4.
58 ''Amusements," Ne111 York S11n, 27 September, 1887, 3.
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 19, NO.2 (SPRING 2007)
"NEVER BoRN": ANGELINA WELD GruMiffi's RAa-IEL AS
IRONIC RESPONSE TO TOPSY
ROBIN BERNSTEIN
The turn of the twentieth century constituted, in the famous term of his-
torian Rayford Logan, a "nadir" in the status and civil rights of African
Americans;
1
the passage of Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896 institutional-
ized segregation; white southerners used violence and legal tricks to extir-
pate African American suffrage until the Fifteenth Amendment remained
"in name only"; and anti-black race riots erupted in cities including
Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), Atlanta, Georgia (1906), and
Springfield, Illinois (1908).
2
Lynching terrorized African American com-
munities throughout the United States, with one person lynched every
fourth day between 1900 and 1909, and nine out of ten of these victims
were African American.3
This physical and legal violence coupled with and depended on
cultural violence, and sometimes the connection was direct; for example,
a dramatization of Thomas Dixon's 1905 white supremacist novel, The
Clansman, was staged in Atlanta immediately before the 1906 riot, and
many scholars believe that the theatrical production fomented the vio-
lence.4 However, such explicit connections were exceptional; more com-
monly, racist violence occurred alongside with and received justification
from a rising mass culture-particularly advertising-that dehumanized
The author thanks Koritha Mitchell .for her comments on this essqy.
I Rayford Logan, Betrqyal if the Negro: Fron1 Rutheiford B. Hqyes to Woodrow WiLron
(New York: Collier, 1965), 62. See also Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The
Nadir, 1817-1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954).
2 Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1871-1919 (New
York: WW Norton and Company, 1987), 167.
3 Joel Williamson, The Crucible if Race: Black-White Relations in the American South
Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 117-18. See also Jacqueline
Denise Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2006); Philip Dray, At the Hands o/ Persons Unknown: The
qnching if Black America (New York: Random House, 2002) and Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough
Justice: ynching and A merican Society, 1874-1947 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
2004).
4
Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 219.
62 BERNSTEIN
African Americans and naturalized white supremacy.s
The African American poet Angelina Weld Grimke understood
the connections between physical and cultural violence. An anti-lynching
activist since her teens, Grimke wrote Rachel, a 1916 propagandistic
drama that attacked both anti-black violence and racist imagery.6 Rachel
earns prominence in the history of American drama not merely because
it was the ftrst non-musical play that was written, professionally pro-
duced, and performed by African Americans, but more importantly
because it deeply influenced African American theatre.? Errol G. Hill and
James V Hatch credit the play with "spark[ing]" the debate, most often
associated with Alain Locke and W E. B. Du Bois, on whether African
American plays should aim to produce propaganda or "art for its own
sake"; David Krasner reads the play in light of Walter Benjamin's work
on mourning and allegory to argue that Grimke's drama "constructs the
spiritual quest of redemption for those seeking answers to indescribable
terror"; and Judith L. Stephens shows that Rachel inaugurated the genre
of the anti-lynching drama, which was to include at least eleven extant
plays written by African American women between 1916 and 1933.8 Most
recently, Koritha Mitchell argues persuasively that Grimke and her play
inspired Du Bois to create the Drama Committee of the NAACP, and
that Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory constructed the influential
theatre department of Howard University in reaction against Grimke's
5 On the concomitant rise of advertising and of racist imagery, see Kenneth W
Goings, Mamnry and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (Bloomington and
Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 1.
6 At the age of nineteen, Grimke gathered signatures for a petition opposing
lynching (Letter of Archibald H. Grimke to Angelina Weld Grimke, 16 November 1899,
qtd in Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Wn"ters of the Harlem Renaissance
[Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987], 131).
7 Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens, eds., Strange Fruit: Plqys 011 Lynching
I?J Amencan Women (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 24.
8 Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of Afn.can American Theatre
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 220; David Krasner, A Beautiful
Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Perjom1ance in the H ariem Renaissance, 1910-192 7
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 110-11; Judith L. Stephens, "Anti-Lynching Plays
by African American Women; Race, Gender, and Social Protest in American Drama,"
African American &vie111 26, no. 2 (Summer 1992), 329-39. Koritha Mitchell counts four-
teen known anti-lynching plays written between 1916 and 1935 (Koritha Mitchell,
Plays: Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the Evolution of
African American Drama," chapt. in Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard, eds., Post
Bellum, Pre-Harlem: Afn'can Amen'can Literature and Culture, 1877-1919 [New York: New
York University Press, 2006], 212).
NEVER BoRN 63
use of propaganda.9 Mitchell's location of Grimke at the root of both
DuBois's and Locke's contrasting theatrical practices significandy revises
scholarly understanding of both &chef and the history of African
American theatre. The case for & chef's influence as seminal-stimulating
both congruent and oppositional drama-enables scholars to look for
the play's strategies, ironies, and agonies echoing far beyond Grimke's
period of productivity. Thus Mitchell shows that James V Hatch was
even more correct than he knew when he called Grimke the "Mother of
African American Drama."10
Scholars largely agree that Grimke viewed physical and mass cul-
tural violence as interdependent, and that &chef constitutes a sophisticat-
ed and complex intervention in that intersection. Grirnke acknowledged
her intention to intervene in mass culture in a 1920 essay explaining why
she wrote & chef: 'Whenever you say 'colored person' to a white man,"
she wrote, "he immediately, either through an ignorance that is deliberate
or stupid, conjures up in his mind the picture of what he calls 'the dark-
ey."'ll &chef counteracted that tendency by presenting, as many scholars
have noted, emphatically respectable, clean, hard-working, family-orient-
ed African American characters who value their domestic life. Less com-
mented upon, however, is Grimke's choice to counter mass cultural
stereotypes specifically through her deployment of child characters.
While many scholars have mentioned the plethora of child characters
that appear in the play (enough children onstage to constitute a "direc-
tor's nightmare"),12 no one has considered the role these children played
in Grimke's intervention in mass culture.13 This essay shows that &chef
responds not only to physical racist violence, and not only, as Grimke
9 Mitchell, "Antilynching Plays," 211-12.
10 Christina R. Gray, " Discovering and Recovering African American Women
Playv.rights Writing before 1930," chapt. in Brenda Murphy, ed., The Cambnage Companion
toAmencan Women Plqywrights (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 245.
11
Angelina Weld Grimke, "'Rachel' The Play of the Month: The Reason and
Synopsis by the Author," Competitor 1 Qanuary 1920): 52.
12 James V. Hatch, ed., Black Theater USA: 45 Plqys by BlackAmencans, 1847-1974
(New York: Macl\.1illan, 1974), 138.
13 When Grimke placed children and childhood at the center of her anti-racist
politics, she struck an early note in what would become a trope for Harlem Renaissance
writers. As Katharine Capshaw Smith and Caroline F. Levander have recently shown, the
figure of the child became central to the literary and political work of W. E. B. Du Bois
and other African-American writers of the early twentieth century (see Smith, Children$
64 BERNSTEIN
acknowledged, to cultural violence perpetrated through the racist image
of the "darkey," but also to the culturally violent figure of the "pickanin-
ny." The pickaninny was a dehumanized black child who was typically
depicted semi-naked, outdoors, eating watermelon, and merrily accepting
(or even welcoming) comic violence.14 As many scholars have noted,
playwright George Aiken's dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin provided a
central source for the popular cultural figure of the pickaninny. Grimke's
Rachel contests the pickaninny image and re-writes elements of Uncle
Tom's Cabin; however, her play's intervention does not end there. In Rachel,
Grimke produces tender, fully-realized African American child characters
who counter dehumanizing representations of black children, but then
Grimke ironizes that humanization. Rachel ultimately suggests that a fuJly
human, thinking, feeling, black child is ironically, in the face of racism,
the greatest source of pain and vulnerability to African American fami-
lies.
Angelina Weld Grimke was born in 1880, the daughter of a white moth-
er and an African American father who was vice-president of the
NAACP.
1
5 She was named for her great-aunt, the white abolitionist
Angelina Grimke Weld, who died shordy before the playwright was
Literature if the Harlem Renaissance [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004] and
Levander, Cradle o/ Liberry: Race, the Child, and National BeiiJngingfrom Thomas Jdfirson to W.
E. B. Du Bois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006]). Levander forcefully shows
that in The Souls o/ Black Folk (1903), DuBois figured the death of a black child as an
"escape" from the "living death" of racism (Levander 157) . Later, however, DuBois
changed his position. The juvenile magazine, The Brownies Book, which The Cnsis (the offi-
cial magazine of the NAACP) published and which Du Bois co-edited from 1920-1921,
constructed black children as "culturally, politically, and aesthetically sophisticated" peo-
ple capable of leading and uplifting the race (Smith, Children's Literature, 1). Rache4 which
was first performed in 1916 and which ends with the protagonist deciding never to bear
children, could be simplistically positioned a mediation between the 1903 and 1920-1921
extremes of viewing the death of black children as an "escape" and viewing black chil-
dren as potential leaders or even saviors. Such a characterization would, however, elide the
innovations unique to Grimke: her devastating use of irony, and her signification upon
(rather than simple riposte to) the popular cultural figure of the pickaninny.
14 On the figure of the pickaninny, see Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and
Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books,
1994). A superb overview of the pickaninny image appears in The Jim Crow Museum of
Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan
http:/ /www.ferris.edu/htmls/ news/jimcrow /index.htrn. See especially David Pilgrim's
"The Picaninny Caricature" http:/ /www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow / picaninny /.
IS Hatch, Black Theater USA, 137.
NEVER BoRN 65
born.16 A well-educated writer of fiction and poetry with a long history
of opposition to lynching, Grimke began writing Rachel by 1914.17
Although the play's earliest draft preceded the premiere of D. W
Griffith's ftlm, Birth of a Nation, in 1915, the completed Rachel is widely
viewed as a response to that ftlm.1s Mitchell suggests that Grimke wrote
her play in the context of not only Griffith's film, but also the 1906 tour
of the dramatization of Thomas Dixon Jr.'s novel, The Clansman, upon
which Griffith's film was based.19 Grimke described her play as "the first
attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the
American people relative to the lamentable condition of ten million of
colored citizens in this free Republic."20 Sally Burke notes that the play
addressed this propaganda to "two audiences": both African American
and white theatregoers.21
Rachel is a realistic drama with melodramatic elements. The plot
centers on a teenaged girl named Rachel Loving who learns, in the course
of the play, exactly how her father and brother died ten years earlier: what
she learns is that they were lynched by a white mob. This discovery com-
bines with a growing awareness of racism in daily life to convince Rachel
that she must never bear children-although she desperately wants to be
a mother. The play ends with Rachel turning away her suitor, John Strong,
and sobbing as she resigns herself to a childless life.
The play debuted in a performance sponsored by the NAACP at
the Myrtilla .Miner Teachers College in Washington, D. C. on March 3-4,
1916.22 Later performances were staged at the Neighborhood Playhouse
in New York City in April 1917; in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where it
was sponsored by St. Bartholomew's Church) in May 1917, and, in an
16 Grimke's father, Archibald Grimke, was the son of Angelina Grimke Weld's
brother Henrr Grimke. See Sally Burke, American Feminist Pfqywrights: A Critical History
(New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 86. See also Herron, "Introduction," Selected Works
of Angelina Weld Grimki, 5 and Hull, 108.
17 Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 118.
l8 Hill and Hatch, A History of African American Theatre, 220.
19 Mitchell, "Antilynching Plays," 210.
20 Uncited program note quoted in Burke, American Feminist Playum'ghts, 87.
21 Burke, American Feminist Plqywrights, 87.
22 Hill and Hatch, A History of Ajn'can Amencan Theatre, 220; Hull, Color, Sex, and
Poetry, 119.
66
BERNSTEIN
adaptation, at Spelman College in March 1991.23 While the productions
were few in number, their influence on African American communities,
and writers in particular, was vast. In 1920, the play was published in
book form. It circulated and was reviewed widely; thus it continued and
extended its influence.24
The play polarized not only Du Bois and Locke, but also critics
and audience members. The African American sculptor Meta Vaux
Warrick Fuller attended a performance in Cambridge, and she described
a "mixed" and "sympathetic" audience that filled the house ("I think
many people must have been turned away"). Although Fuller felt that the
audience did not "ar[i]se to the high tention [sic] of the play in every
instance," she called the play "beautiful-terribly beautiful. ... [a] splen-
did drama."25 Elizabeth C. Putnam, a white author, described &chef as
"interesting and very beautiful, self-restrained and convincing."
2
6
About half the reviews were positive; the negative reviews, how-
ever, were vitriolic.27 Grimke weathered attacks for her play's alleged
over-emotionalism, its disturbing subject matter, and most of all, its
apparent call to "race suicide." Grimke responded to this final charge in
an essay in Competitor.
Since it has been understood that "Rachel" preaches
race suicide, I would emphasize that that was not my
intention. To the contrary, the appeal is not primarily to
the colored people, but to the whites.zs
Within the category of white people, Grimke particularly addressed
white women, and even more specifically, white mothers. Writing only
eight months before the final ratification of the nineteenth amendment
23 Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 119; Addell Austin Anderson, "Review of Rachel
by Angelina Weld Grimke," Theatre]ournal43, no. 3 (October 1991): 385-86.
24 Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 121.
25 Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller to Angelina Weld Grimke, 25 May 1917, Angelina
Weld Grimke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
26 Elizabeth C. Putnam to Angelina Weld Grimke, 7 December 1918, Angelina
Weld Grimke Papers.
27 Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 121-22.
28 Grimke, Competitor, 51.
NEVER BoRN 67
that granted American women the right to vote, Grimke criticized white
women who "although they are beginning to awaken, form one of the
most conservative elements of society." Such
white women . . . are about the worst enemies with
which the colored race has to contend. My belief was,
then, that if a vulnerable point in their armor could be
found, if their hearts could be active or passive enemies,
they might become, at least, less inimical and possibly
friendly. Did they have a vulnerable point and, if so,
what was it? I believed it to be motherhood. Certainly all
the noblest, finest, most sacred things in their lives con-
verge about this. If anything can make all women sisters
underneath their skins it is motherhood.29
Grimke's strategy to use motherhood to enable white women to
empathize with black women-and thus to effect political change-par-
tially echoes that of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1852) depicted slavery as a destroyer of families. Stowe aimed to recruit
white women to the abolitionist cause by depicting, in heart-rending
detail, scenes in which enslaved mothers and children are separated from
each other. In A Kry to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe explicitly called for mater-
nalism as a basis for cross-racial empathy:
An incident which (Frederick] Douglass [whom Stowe
claims as an inspiration for her character of George
Harris] relates of his mother is touching; he states that
it is customary at an early age to separate mothers from
their children, for the purpose of blunting and deaden-
ing natural affection. When he was three years old his
mother was sent to work on a plantation eight or ten
miles distant, and after that he never saw her except in
the night. After her day's toil she would occasionally
walk over to her child, lie down with him in her arms,
hush him to sleep in her bosom, then rise up and walk
back again to be ready for her field-work by daylight.
Now, we ask the highest-born lady in England or
America, who is a mother, whether this does not show
that this poor field-labourer had in her bosom, beneath
her dirt and rags, a true mother's heart? ... We are told,
2
9 I bid., 52.
68 BERNSTEIN
in fine phrase, by languid ladies of fashion, that it is not
to be supposed that those creatures have the same feel-
ings that we have, when, perhaps, the very speaker could
not endure one tithe of the fatigue and suffering which
the slave-mother often bears for her child. Every moth-
er who has a mother's heart within her ... should indig-
nantly reject such a slander on all motherhood.30
While Grimke and Stowe both deployed maternalism in an effort
to arouse white women's empathy for black women, Stowe did so with
the straightforward sincerity prized in sentimental culture; Grimke, on
the other hand, marbled the address to her audience with irony. Stowe
appealed to white women, especially Northern white mothers, who
regarded themselves as unirnphcated in the system of slavery; she aimed
to prick these women's consciences and thus to recruit them to the cause
of abolition. Grimke, in contrast, addressed white women, and especial-
ly white mothers, not as passive colluders but as active enemies. Whereas
Stowe wanted to implicate and recruit her well-intentioned readers to
antislavery action, Grimke implicated her white audience members and
demanded that they desist from their active viciousness)!
The simultaneously parallel and reversed connection between
Stowe's and Grimke's strategies for arousing white women to action on
behalf of African Americans ought not to surprise, because Grimke's
drama responded indirectly to Uncle o m ~ Cabin: Grimke completed
&chef in the context of, and in opposition to, both Birth of a Nation and
3
0 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Kry to Uncle Tom's Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts
and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1853),
16-17.
31 Attention to the subtleties and complexities of Grimke's address, combined
with new understanding of Rachel's widespread influence, prompts a fresh look at strate-
gies employed throughout tv;entieth-century African American theatre. The Black Arts
Movement of the 1960s and 70s, for example, is known for having centered African-
American audiences and having declared non-black audiences irrelevant; Harlem's Black
Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART /S), founded by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones),
barred white audience members. However, a Rachel-like irony in which racially diverse
audiences are addressed, and white audiences are simultaneously engaged and attacked,
emerges in the context of Baraka's Dutchn1an, which opened in 1964 not at BART /S, but
instead for a "resolutely left-liberal, activist, but decidedly integrationist audience"(Mike
Sell, "The Drama of the Black Arts Movement," chap. in David Krasner, ed., Companion
to Twentieth-Century American Drama [Malden, MA: Black-well Publishers, 2005), 265; see
also Hill and Hatch, A History o/ AfticanAmerican Theatre, 390). In the context of this audi-
ence, one sees the attack-within-engagement, the simultaneous invitation to white empa-
thy and attack on white racism that is fundamental to Grimke's play.
NEVER BoRN
69
Dixon's play and novels on which the film was based. The novels, The
Clansman (1905) and The Leopard's Spots (1902), constituted Dixon's delib-
erate white supremacist responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Dixon attended a
performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin in early 1901, and he "could hardly
keep from jumping to his feet and denouncing the drama as false." When
"the performance was over, he arose, vowed that he would tell the 'true
story' of the South," and began drafting The Leopard's Spots.32 The novel,
which explicitly positioned itself as a sequel to Stowe's, included charac-
ters from Uncle Tom's Cabin such as Simon Legree and George Harris,Jr.3
3
The trail of influence, then, reads thus: Stowe's novel was adapted for the
stage by Aiken and others; these stage productions spurred Dixon to
write his white supremacist riposte in the form of two novels and a play;
Dixon's anti-Tom writing served as the kernel for Griffith's film; and
Grimke completed Rachel in the context of, and in reaction to, Griffith's
fllm and Dixon's work.
It is not surprising, then, that traces of Uncle Tom's Cabin should
appear in Rachel. The most obvious of these traces appears in the char-
acter of Thomas, Rachel's brother: when Rachel adopts a neighborhood
boy, Thomas becomes known as "Uncle Tom." This appellation, repeat-
ed and emphasized in many lines, cannot be accidental-particularly
when one considers Grirnke's decision to give characters blatantly mean-
ingful names such as "Rachel Loving" and "John Strong."34
Even more significant than the echo in names and in the ironized
strategy of demanding white mothers' empathy, however, is Grirnke's
contestation of the figure of Topsy as performed on stage. Grimke re-
writes elements of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but she ultimately ironizes that
rewriting. Whereas the theatrical Topsy, the titular pickaninny, dehuman-
ized African American children, Grirnke stages fully-realized black child
characters who counter, blow by blow, racist libels. However, Grimke
32 Raymond Allen Cook, Flint .from the Fire: The Amazing Careers qf Thomas Dixon
(Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1968), 1 OS.
33 For more on the connections between Uncle Toms Cabin and Birth qf a Nation,
see Linda Williams, Plqying the Race Card: Melodramas qf Black and White from Uncle Tom to
0.]. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Thomas F. Gossen,
Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University
Press, 1985), 346-47.
34 Grimke's persistent attention tO meaningful names caused her, at the last
minute, to rename her protagonist from "Janet" to the Biblically resonant "Rachel" (Hull,
Colorj Sex, and Poetry, 118). Given Grimke's penchant for explicitly meaningful names, it is
inconceivable that the "Uncle Tom" in Rachel bears no relationship to Stowe's hegemon-
ic character of the same name.
70
BEJU'lSTEIN
ironizes this humanization with the ultimate suggestion that racism ren-
ders a black child a source of pain and vulnerability to African American
families.
Several scholars have traced the reach and influence of the char-
acter Topsy. Folklorist Patricia A. Turner calls Topsy "the first truly
famous pickaninny," and performance scholar Tavia Nyong'o describes
Topsy as "an inaugural figure in the genealogy of performing black chil-
dren."35 As Nyong'o correcdy notes, it was Aiken's Topsy, not Harriet
Beecher Stowe's, that became a staple of U.S. popular culture. The cru-
cial difference between Aiken's and Stowe's Topsy was that Stowe's Topsy
was a tragic figure, a human being damaged by violence, whereas Aiken's
Topsy was comically impervious to pain.
For Stowe, the character of Topsy represents a set of problems
with slavery: fust, Stowe is unambiguous that Topsy's negative qualities-
her lying and stealing, as well as her atheism- result direcdy from physi-
cal and emotional abuse. Furthermore, Stowe explicidy states that such
abuse- and the damaged human beings that abuse creates- are wide-
spread and inevitable within the system of slavery. Stowe delivers these
points through the eyes of the white northerner, Aunt Ophelia St. Clare,
who is disgusted with Topsy until Ophelia sees, "on the back and shoul-
ders of the child, great welts and calloused spots, ineffaceable marks of
the system under which she had grown up thus far." When Aunt Ophelia
sees these signs of violence, Ophelia's "heart [becomes] pitiful within
her."36 The sentimental logic of Stowe's novel urges the reader's heart to
follow suit and to feel for Topsy, whom Stowe calls a "neglected, abused
child."
37
Aiken crucially re-writes these points and thus reverses Stowe's
antislavery politics. In Aiken's drama, Topsy arrives in the St. Clare house-
hold without welts and calluses, without any history of abuse legible on
her body. In her first entrance, Topsy is described by Ophelia and St.
Clare as an "object," a "thing," and a "funny specimen in the Jim Crow
line."38 Asked to sing and dance, Topsy belts out a catchy tune that high-
35 Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and their
Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 13; Tavia Nyong'o, "Racial Kitsch
and Black Performance," The Yale Jourttal of Criticism 15, no. 2 (2002): 376.
36 Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Or, Life Among the Lmv!J (1852;
reprint, edited by Elizabeth Ammons, New York: WW Norton, 1994), 209.
3
7
Ibid.
38 George Aiken, "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly." 1852 in
Ear!JAmerican Drama, ed.Jeffrey H. Richards. (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 391.
NEYER BoRN
lights her signature lines, "I was never born," and "I's so wicked":
Oh! White-folks I was never born,
Aunt Sue, raise me on de corn,
Sends me errands night and morn,
Ching a ring a ring a ricked.
She used to knock me on de floor,
Den bang my head agin de door,
And tare my hair out by de core,
Oh! Cause I was so wicked.39
71
This song merrily, blithely reverses Stowe: violence is visited on
Aiken's Topsy by a black caretaker, not by white slaveowners, and because
Aiken's Topsy is "wicked," not because the system of slavery is evil.
Whereas Stowe's Topsy believes herself to be "never born" because of
ignorance and godlessness unnaturally imposed by the system of slavery,
Aiken's Topsy transforms "never born" into a catchphrase, an automatic
laugh line emptied of meaning. And finally, Aiken's Topsy responds to
violence not by becoming physically and emotionally damaged, but by
laughing and singing about her invulnerability. The contrast between
Aiken's and Stowe's Topsies continues from this opening scene to the
final actions of the characters: Aiken's Topsy exits her final scene after
animalistically head-butting a corrupt lawyer, whereas the last that Stowe's
reader learns of the novelist's Topsy, the character has grown up, become
a Christian, and traveled to Africa as a missionary.
Grimke carefully counters the libels packed into the pickaninny
image. Throughout the first act of Rachel, Grimke spotlights her African
American child characters, showing them to be well-behaved, respectful,
and respectable. The main such child character is Jimmy, an adorable
three-year-old neighbor on whom the teenage Rachel dotes. While Rachel
lavishes Jimmy with kisses, she makes clear that her love is not restricted
to this individual child, nor is that love race-blind. "[T]he loveliest thing
39 George Howard, "'Oh, I'se So Wicked' As Sung by Mrs. G. C. Howard in Her
Original Character of Topsy [in Uncle Tom's Cabin]" (New York: Horace Waters, 1854).
The sheet music was "Respectfully Dedicated to G. L. Aiken, Esq." Although George
Howard, the producer of the inaugural performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin, wrote the song,
he did so for inclusion in Aiken's script. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to the iteration
of Topsy who performs this song as ''Aiken's Topsy." An audio clip of this song is avail-
able online as part of the University of Virginia's website, "Uncle Tom's Cabin in
American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive" http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/songs/
sowickedf.html.
72 BERNSTEIN
of all the lovely things in this world is ... being a mother!" Rachel enthus-
es in the play's opening. "I love the little black and brown babies best of
all" (143).40 In Jimmy's first scene, Rachel leads the boy onstage "by the
hand." The "little fellow is shy but smiling," the stage directions tell us.
"This is my brown baby," Rachel announces proudly as she presents her
little friend to her mother (144-45). The tenderness of this entrance re-
writes the entrance of Topsy in Aiken's drama-an entrance spangled
with words such as "object" and "thing." Over and over, Grimke pres-
ents Jimmy and other African American children as loving and lovable,
needing and deserving protection. "There is something about [little black
and brown babies] that-that-clutches at my heart," Rachel declares. "I
don't understand [it]. More than the other babies, I feel that I must pro-
tect them. They're in danger, but from what? I don't know. I've tried so
hard to understand, but I can't" (143).
This line strikes an early, ominous chord in Grimke's drama:
Rachel, who does not yet know that her father and brother were lynched,
wants to protect black and brown babies, but she cannot name the men-
ace. Rachel's mother, however, knows that the menace is racism, as enact-
ed through not only physical violence but also through a culture that
imposes a thousand daily humiliations and griefs. Furthermore, Mrs.
Loving knows a worse truth: adults cannot protect black children from
racism. The central dramatic arc of the play consists of Rachel gradually
apprehending both these facts, and then drawing the shocking conclusion
that she must never bear children, despite her intense desire to be a moth-
er.
Slowly, inexorably, the loving kisses that suffuse the ftrst act link
to this inability to protect black children from racism. Mrs. Loving
laments, "When you [children] are little, we mothers can kiss away all the
trouble, but when you're grown up---and go out-into the world-and
get hurt-we are helpless" (151).41 Thus the kisses-a chief means by
which Grimke dramatizes the lovability of black children-become iron-
ic. In Mrs. Loving's view, kisses provide temporary comforting, but they
lose power when a child becomes an adult. But Grimke's play slowly
proves Mrs. Loving wrong: kisses do not even provide temporary relief
from racism's assaults.
Whereas loving kisses pervade the first act, impotent kisses dom-
inate the second act. Act 2 opens four years after the close of act 1.
40 Page numbers refer to the edition of Rachel included in Hatch, Black Theater
USA.
41 Mrs. Loving refers here to hurts caused by racism, not to the inevitable
knocks that assail all people.
N EVER BORN 73
Jimmy's parents have died of smallpox, and Rachel, now twenty-two, has
adopted the child. Omnipresent racism has taken a toll on the Loving
family. Rachel's suitor, John Strong, graduated from college, but while
John's white classmates entered the professions, John could find work
only as a waiter. He rose as high as possible, to head waiter, but racism
prevents him from gaining employment that utilizes his education; he bit-
terly acknowledges that he will be head waiter for the rest of his life.
Rachel's brother Tom trained as an electrical engineer, but he also cannot
find work in his field. Tom investigated the individuals who lynched Tom
and Rachel's father and brother, and discovered that the murderers and
their children are prospering. Tom laments the disparity between the fam-
ilies' fates:
Their children ... are growing up around them; and they
are having a square deal handed out to them-college,
position, wealth, and best of all, freedom, without
galling restrictions . . .. Look at us- and look at them.
We are destined to failure- they, to success. Their chil-
dren shall grow up in hope; ours, in despair. (153)
Systematic racism renders kisses useless, as Grimke dramatizes in
one particularly moving episode. Immediately after her suitor delights
Rachel with a tender kiss that leaves her dreamy, a "poorly dressed" black
woman and child enter Rachel's apartment. The mother, Mrs. Lane,
explains that she seeks information about the local elementary school.
Rachel graciously receives the mother and daughter, and offers the girl,
Ethel, a "big, red apple, cut into quarters" and served "with a fringed
napkin" (158). Rachel says "very gently," "Here, dear, little girl, is a beau-
tiful apple for you," but this tenderness has no effect on Ethel, who cow-
ers. Mrs. Lane explains Ethel's strange behavior: until recently, the Lanes
had been a happy family, but then Ethel began school. A racist teacher
was cruel to her, and white students followed the teacher's lead. In only
two weeks, Ethel transformed from a shy, slow child, to a terrified, self-
loathing child. Now the family must move to place her in a new school.
As Mrs. Lane tells her story, Ethel "makes no attempt to eat the apple"
that Rachel lovingly prepared. Instead, Ethel "holds the plate in her lap
with a care that is painful to watch" (158). Rachel describes the sight of
Ethel as "heartbreaking." Thus Grimke reverses the move that George
Aiken made when he adapted Topsy for the stage: whereas Stowe pre-
sented Topsy as a human tragically damaged by slavery, dramatic adapta-
tions erased that damage and constructed Topsy as a pickaninny who was
74 BERNSTEIN
comically impervious to pain. Grimke, returning to Stowe's political strat-
egy, emphasizes the damage done to an individual black child.
When Ethel and Mrs. Lane prepare to leave the apartment,
Rachel tries to kiss Ethel goodbye. Unlike the many child characters who
enjoyed Rachel's kisses throughout the play, Ethel refuses to be kissed.
Rachel is dismayed: "Oh!-no child-ever did-that to me-before!"
(160). Rachel is devastated to discover that her kisses cannot help the
damaged child. Moments after the mother and daughter exit, six rose-
buds are delivered to Rachel's door-a gift from her suitor John. The
flowers comfort Rachel: "Dear little rosebuds-you-make me think-
of sleeping, curled up, happy babies" (160). This pleasant moment is
interrupted, however, by the entrance of her adopted Jimmy, who returns
from school with the question, "Ma Rachel, what is a 'Nigger?"' (160).
The exchange that follows becomes the third of three linked
moments in the drama. The first two moments seem benign, and it is
only with this third event that Grimke's irony reaches full, devastating
effect. Early in act 2, Jimmy comically describes the way in which he
"runned lots of water in the tub" for his bath (149). Rachel gently cor-
rects his grammar as she praises him for bathing himself. As many schol-
ars have noted, Grimke's drama constantly emphasizes the Lovings'
cleanliness as a sign of their respectability, and Jimmy's grammatical
error-as well as Rachel's correction-seems only to highlight and ratify
that respectability. Halfway through the second act, Jimmy again jubilant-
ly reports his success at bathing: "I tanned, no[-]I runned, I think-the
water ... and got in it all by myself." The repetition of the bath, punctu-
ated by the repeated grammatical error, underscores yet again the clean
wholesomeness of the Loving family.
However, at the end of act 2, Jimmy asks Rachel what a nigger
is, and Rachel "recoils as though she had been struck" (160). "Honey
boy," she asks, "why do you ask that?" Jimmy replies,
Some big boys called me that when I came out of
school just now. They said, "Look at the little nigger!"
And then they laughed. One of them runneti no ranned,
after me and threw stones. (160, emphasis added)
In this third and final repetition of the grammatical error,
"runned" refers not to cleansing water and attendant bourgeois
respectability, but to Jimmy's attempt to escape racist violence. That
attempt, we learn, failed: a mob of white boys chased Jimmy, hurling both
racist epithets and stones. Jimmy reports, "One stone struck me hard in
NEYER BoRN 75
the back, and it hurt awful bad .... The stone hurts me there, Ma Rachel;
but what they called me hurts and hurts here" (160-61). Jimmy, like
Stowe's Topsy (and unlike theatrical Topsies), now has a bruised body and
soul.
With this scene, Rachel finally confronts what her mother knew
from the play's opening: she cannot save this or any other child from
racism. She hugs and kisses Jimmy, but she knows that caresses are not
enough. In an action that is pathetically inadequate, Rachel offers Jimmy
cookies. After Jimmy exits with his treat, Rachel despairs: "First, it's little,
black Ethel- and then it's Jimmy. Tomorrow, it will be some other little
child. The blight-sooner or later- strikes all" (161). At that moment,
Rachel makes the decision- which some black reviewers, in the parlance
of the day, denounced as "race suicide"-never to have children. She has
finally solved the play's central dilemma of how to protect black children
from racism: the only way to keep black children safe is never to give
birth to them. The solution devastates Rachel. "I am afraid- to go- to
sleep," she explains in the final scene, "for every time I do-my children
come- and beg me- weeping- not to- bring them here- to suffer"
(172). And thus Grimke delivers her final ironic twist on the figure of
Topsy: the only safe black child is the one who-like Topsy- was "never
born."
In Rachel, Angelina Weld Grirnke brilliantly counters not only D.W
Griffith's Birth of a Nation, but also the theatrical and novelistic iterations
of Uncle Tom's Cabin on which the ftlm was based. First, Grirnke responds
to the popular cultural figure of the pickaninny, the dehumanized black
child who was invulnerable to pain, by creating fully-realized black child-
characters who are painfully vulnerable to racist violence. Grirnke goes
far beyond a simple negation of a stereotype, however, when she reveals
a terrible irony: because black children are thinking, feeling human beings,
they cannot be fully protected from racism's physical or cultural violence.
Aiken's Uncle Tom's Cabin and other elements of mass culture construct-
ed black children as subhuman sources of comedy. Grimke's Rachel iron-
ically countered: black children are fully human, but racism perverts that
truth into tragedy.
JOURNAL OF AMERJCAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 19, NO.2 (SPRJNG 2007)
PAGEANT AND PASSION:
WILLA SAUNDERS JONES AND EARLY BLACK SACRED DRAMA IN
CHICAGO
BRIAN HALLSTOOS
In April of 1926, a group of thespians in crepe-papered costumes took
the stage before an audience of about twenty-five in a storefront church
on Chicago's South Side. The players performed a passion play written by
Willa Saunders Jones, a twenty-one-year-old African American woman
who had migrated from Arkansas only a few years earlier. This modest
performance marked the inaugural performance of what would soon
become an annual event in Chicago during the Easter season. By the time
Jones died in 1979, her passion play had shown in more than a dozen
local churches and for over thirty years in some of Chicago's most pres-
tigious commercial theatres.! It had featured famous vocalists, like
Mahalia Jackson and Dinah Washington. Four Chicago mayors, including
Richard Daley and Harold Washington, declared days in honor of Jones
and her play. Numerous individual donors, churches, organizations, and
companies, including the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition,
Church Federation of Greater Chicago, and the Chicago Tribune, helped to
sponsor the play. The increasingly elaborate production eventually cost
tens of thousands of dollars annually to promote and stage and boasted
a cast of over three hundred actors and musicians. According to Earl
Calloway, arts editor for the Chicago Defender, Jones's passion play was
"one of the great productions in Chicago every year."2
In this essay, I trace the play's transition from a modest produc-
tion in black Baptist churches to a major theatrical spectacle in Chicago's
Civic Opera House, the first of several high-profile commercial stages
upon which the play appeared. To understand this transition, I focus on
the life of Willa Saunders Jones, in particular on the social implications
of her role as a cultural agent (Figure 1). Her story offers an interesting
contrast with the more typical South to North migration narrative, which
depicts the newly arrived Southerners as alienated by the formality of
mainstream church practices that she embraced. I argue that Jones's pas-
I After Jones's death, her grandson and understudy, Rogers Jones, continued to
produce the play through the early-1980s until increasing costs and decreasing financial
support rendered the production unfeasible.
2 Earl Calloway, interview by author, Chicago, 13 August 2006; Calloway wrote
several glowing reviews of Jones's play during the 1970s.
78 HAllsTOOS
sion play was successful, in part, because she consistently and very effec-
tively catered to the expectations of a culturally conservative church audi-
ence. Rather than reflecting a calculated attempt to play upon the reli-
gious moorings of this audience, however, her passion play expressed
Jones's own profound spirituality, most effectively through music. It
therefore was a product of the black church, even long after leaving the
confines of official church space. This grounding enabled Jones to intro-
duce sensational and seemingly secular content such as sexually charged
dance into the play, which in other contexts would spark the condemna-
tion of churchgoers. Her fluency with highbrow sacred expressive cul-
ture, which placed her among the ranks of elite religious authorities, pre-
cluded negative responses to the spectacular aspects of her play that
undoubtedly attracted the size of audience needed to sustain annual pro-
ductions in high-priced venues.
Jones's passion play is one of the earliest passion plays written by
an African American, and perhaps the first by an African American
woman.3 The fact that Jones was able to produce her play at a time when
racism and gender inequalities usually rendered ambitious cultural efforts
by black women untenable, attests to her remarkable vision, tenacity, and
creativity. It also reflects her exceptional skills as a musician, talent scout,
and director. By all accounts, she was the force that not only brought the
play to life, but also kept it alive for five decades. While she depended
upon Chicago's African American church community for actors, musi-
cians, audience, and sponsorship, the community depended upon her
ability to bring the music, dance, and drama of the play into a dynamic
harmony that portrayed Christ's life, death, and resurrection in a singu-
larly poignant way. Furthermore, by integrating the casts in the late 1940s,
Jones demonstrated how the arts could be a progressive agent in foster-
ing healthy race relations.
In addition to its relevance to American theatre, Jones's passion
play also deserves critical attention because of what it reveals about black
sacred music, church history, and race relations during a period of dra-
matic social change. Jones was one of the hundreds of thousands of
southern African Americans who migrated to Chicago between the First
World War and the end of the civil rights movement.4 Historians and
3 One of the earliest documented African American passion plays took place
in Augusta, Georgia in 1887, but authorities prohibited the "representation of Christ and
the Virgins." The author has found no records to indicate that this production was staged
more than once. "The Criminal Calendar," St. Louis Clobe-De!llocrat, 2 September 1887, 1.
4 Jones and her husband, George Washington Jones, moved from Little Rock,
Arkansas to Chicago sometime between 1921 and 1924, based on 19 30 census data that
PAGEANT AND PASSION 79
Figure 1: Willa Saunders Jones. Courtesy of Willa Saunders Jones
Papers/Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of History and
Literature, Chicago Public Library.
musicologists have clarified the impact this demographic shift had on U.S.
culture. For instance, the religious practices of the southern migrants
mixed with the urban church during the Great Depression to produce a
potent form of sacred music, epitomized by the gospel songs of Thomas
A. Dorsey, which quickly spread across the country and continues to
shape music globally. Through her church contacts and work as a soloist,
Jones participated in the rise of black gospel music. Yet her catholic tastes
and, paradoxically, highbrow pretensions kept her firmly committed to
disseminating Negro spirituals and hymns and anthems rooted in
church traditions, which represented more tradi-
tional and staid forms of sacred music than gospel. Her choice of music
for her passion play and the way in which it was performed spoke to
notions of respectability and social uplift within the black church and
community. While not known as a musical innovator, Jones ingeniously
drew upon the rich diversity of sacred music styles and some of the finest
church performers to achieve religious ends.
Jones began composing her play in the early 1920s, after prom-
showed that her ten-year-old son, George Jr., was born in Arkansas and her seven-year-
old son, Charles, was born in Chicago. Phone directories from this peri od indicate that
several men with the name of George W. Jones lived in the city at this time. The 1923
Chicago criss-cross directory contains one woman with the name Willa Jones, who is
ed as a domestic worker. This woman's address does not match any of the listings for
George W. Jones, which does not mean that the couple did not yet live in the city by 1923,
but allows for this possibility.
80
HAllSTOOS
ising God that she would do so if she recovered from a life threatening
illness.s By the 1930s, her play featured annually in black Baptist church-
es of various sizes and reputations. Ruth Cooke, an elder at St. John
Church-Baptist, remembered that it played "all over" at "pretty much
every black Baptist church."6 Around 1940 the play moved to the Du
Sable High School auditorium, a popular site for various sacred and sec-
ular cultural functions, which increased the theatre capacity to about
1200.7 The play then moved to the Civic Opera House in April 1946,
where it proceeded to show annually until the late 1950s. Performances
in this venue enabled Jones to increase the size of the cast and the qual-
ity of costuming, sound, lighting, and staging. An article in Ebony maga-
zine highlighted the fact that the play produced an annual box office of
nearly $10,000 at the Opera House, an amount that probably could not
have been raised by churches, whether through donations or ticket sales.
8
Melvina Alexander, whose sister played the role of Mary Magdalene for
several years, remembered that Jones stopped performing the play at St.
John Church-Baptist when the head pastor refused to let her charge
admission to performances. She therefore moved production to another
church that did not enforce this restriction.9 While we may never know
precisely to what extent Jones's decision to leave for commercial venues
was motivated by the push of church prohibitions or the pull of greater
seating capacity, profits, and cultural prestige, once the play left the
churches, it never returned.
The earliest extant documentation of the play, a program from
1930 bearing the title The Resurrection, offers insight into what changed
between the church performances and the later ones in commercial ven-
ues. The early productions were not only smaller in scale and scope, but
5 Jones was apparently so weak from her illness that she had to write the pas-
sion play by guiding her right hand with her left hand. The story of the play's origins
appears in numerous programs and newspaper articles and lives on in the memories of
former cast members who heard Jones tell it. For instance, Ella Jackson recounted a per-
sonal telling of the story in the mid-1960s with vivid clarity and palpable respect for the
teller. Ella Jackson, interview by author, Chicago, 17 December 2006.
6 Ruth Cooke, interview by author, Chicago, 21 November 2004.
7 After a few consecutive years at Du Sable, it showed occasionally at the school
until 1983.
8 "Passion Play: Annual Chicago presentation of all-Negro religious play
proves big office draw," Ebony 5 (May 1950): 25.
9 Melvina Alexander, interview by author, Chicago, 23 November 2004.
PAGEANT AND PASSION 81
also undoubtedly shorter than the Du Sable High School and Civic Opera
House productions.1o The synopsis on the back of this program briefly
describes the play's four acts: The Resurrection begins with the chief priests
and scribes plotting to put Jesus to death, proceeds to Peter denying
Christ three times, shows Pilate begrudgingly sentencing Jesus to die, and
concludes with Jesus' burial and rising from the dead and into heaven.
Performed at Saint Luke Baptist Church, the play featured the church's
choir and had a cast of forty people. Not part of the regular morning
church service, it began at eight p.m. on Sunday, and repeat performanc-
es were given on Monday and Tuesday nights at Shiloh Baptist Church in
Waukegan and at New Hope Baptist Church in Morgan Park.ll The fact
that the play was featured at three different churches and towns in three
days not only suggests that Jones wished to engage a broad church audi-
ence, but also that the staging for the production was rather modest and
easily transportable. The play may have compensated for the lack of an
elaborate backdrop by fitting the cast with "GORGEOUS, DAZZLING
COSTUMES: Depicting the Styles and Customs of That Day."12
This eye-catching description of the costumes suggests that the
program also served as an advertisement. Perhaps Jones included the
program with the Sunday morning church bulletin or posted it at strate-
10 Although the program does not list the year in which this production took
place, it includes enough information to pinpoint it to 1930. The cover lists a Rev. E. L.
Randall as pastor of St. Luke Baptist Church. Reverend Randall served as one of the ftrst
pastors of the church, which was formed in 1918. He was active in Chicago's church com-
munity at least as early as 1923, at which point he served as treasurer for the Baptist
Ministers conference, and served as pastor of St. Luke's Baptist Church at least until 1932.
During 1941, the next year in which the days of the week match those on the program,
Reverend S. Grayson, not Randall, pastored the church. See "City News in Brief," Chicago
Defender, 28 July 1923, 4; "St. Luke Baptist Church Marks 31st Year, Sets $10,000 Goal,"
Chicago Defender, 5 November 1949, 13; "Obituary: James Edward 'Papa Jimmi' Irving,
MCC Pioneer," Metropolitan Community Churches website, http:/ /www.mccchurch.org
(accessed 22 December 2006); "Review of 1937 Events," Chicago Defender, 1 January 1938,
20; "St. Luke Has Baby Contest," Chicago Defender, 5 August 1944, 15. Consult also the
program from the Willa S. Jones Papers, Box 1, The Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection
of Afro-American History and Literature, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Chicago.
11 Willa Jones served as choir director and pianist for Shiloh Baptist Church,
perhaps even at this point in time.
12 This description from the program suggests that costuming had improved
considerably since the first production four years earlier in 1926, which was referred to as
"a simple, crepe-papered pageant." "Passion Play," 25. According to the Ebony article, the
inaugural performance was in 1927. See also Patricia Smith, "Passion Play: Vow becomes
a city legacy," Chicago Sun-Times, 28 April1980, 33.
82 HAllSTOOS
gic sites around the church where congregants gathered before and after
service. The fact that the cover of the program prints the address of the
church and even a photo illustration of its impressive gothic fa<;ade may
indicate that she distributed the program outside of the church in order
to attract others in addition to St. Luke members (Figure 2). Some of the
text in the synopsis reads like sensational ad copy one would expect to
find on a poster. For instance, ''ACT III finds Pilate, a governor, sur-
rounded by pomp and splendor, with his court of the most beautiful
maidens that Jerusalem boasts. See him as his manhood quivers under the
test, not wilfully [sic] desirous of putting Jesus to death but forced to
obey the wishes of his subjects." "Beautiful maidens" and "quivering
manhood" are not subjects that one expects to encounter in the Baptist
church, unless used as illustrations of transgression and spiritual weak-
ness. Here, however, the passage seems to present them as spectacles for
viewers' entertainment.
Along with promising a visual feast, the program highlighted the
music, which seemed to tend toward conservative and genteel tastes judg-
ing by the composers it listed on the cover.
1
3 One of these composers,
William A. Fisher, had studied under Antonin Dvorak, and his best-
known song, "Going Home," appropriated a portion of Dvorak's New
World Symphony (which had itself been based on Negro spirituals). Fisher
published a book of Negro spirituals that Jones may have consulted since
she featured spirituals like "Were You There When They Crucified My
Lord" in her production. By the 1920s, Negro spirituals had assumed a
prominent place in America's cultural landscape, in part through the pop-
ular success of artists like Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson and the
efforts of touring African American college choirs. While Fisher's
arrangements appear relevant to Jones's sacred play, another one of the
listed composers, Frederic I<night Logan, composed nostalgic and
romantic ballads and formal dance songs that seem a little incongruous.l4
Regardless, the inclusion of Logan's and Fisher's compositions suggests
that the vocalists in the performance used sheet music, a signifier of ele-
vated class status since the majority of choral music in the black church
at this time was transmitted orally.
Notably, none of the composers listed came to be associated
with black gospel music, a genre that radically transformed the sounds
and performance practices in the black church. Stimulated by the creative
13 The program stated that "The Music is selected from the following Authors:
A. J. Ramler, F. H. Bullard, Wm. A. Fisher, F. K. Logan and many others."
14
Some of Logan's compositions include "Killarney, My Home O'er the Sea"
(1911), "Missouri Waltz" (1914), and " Pale Moon: An Indian Love Song" (1920).
PAGEANT AND PASSION
6)' OlE
Qilplir of tlje Jfiulte 1M11ptist (!:lprnl!
l663 lNl'UA..'fA AVENUE
ArTrt;lfti nd bv M,t.. \\'lLLIE c;_ Jl_)NL"t
Rc:\. E L ltANJ.,.'\1 L. l?a'ftcr
l;be music

4.J. RA'!otttk,P.H

"t.
A'iD M\.' :\1\
83
Figure 2: Cover of 1930 program. Courtesy of Willa Saunders Jones
Papers/Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and
Literature, Chicago Public Library.
efforts of composers and performers who wedded sacred lyrics with a
blues sound and nourished by the tremendous influx of poor Southern
migrants who gravitated to less formal church practices, gospel music
flourished in Chicago's black churches during the Great Depression and
quickly fanned out to other urban centers across the country. Many
church members and clergy criticized and resisted gospel music, in part
because it introduced demonstrative expressive practices into services. It
not only involved bodily movement on the part of the performer, such
as hand clapping, walking, and "shouting" (i.e., holy dancing), but also
elicited vocal and physical responses from the congregation.JS
Jones apparently did not include gospel compositions in her play
in 1930, but she appreciated gospel music and over time included well-
known gospel singers in her production. In fact, her work as a soloist and
member of a women's chorus brought her in immediate contact with
IS For an excellent study on the development of gospel music in Chicago, see
Michael Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: Thomas Andrew Dorsry and the Music of the Urban
Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
84
HAll.sTOOS
some of the individuals most responsible for the rise of black gospel
music, in particular Magnolia Lewis (Butts) and Thomas A. Dorsey.
During the same time that Lewis conducted the flrst chorus to feature
Dorsey's gospel compositions, she also sang with Jones as part of the
Treble Clef Glee Club (both groups originated from the Metropolitan
Community Baptist church) (Figure 3).16 As a member of the Gospel
Choral Union, Jones sang the spiritual "City Called Heaven" at the first
annual session of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and
Choruses, founded by Lewis, Theodore Frye, and Dorsey, who proceed-
ed to serve as president of the organization for decades.17 Over the years,
Jones included gospel performers such as Dinah Washington (who went
on to jazz music stardom), Mahalia Jackson Oanes's close friend and per-
haps the most famous gospel singer of all-time), Sheila, Jeanette, and
Wanda Hutchinson (sisters who later formed the pop group The
Emotions), and the Barrett Sisters (major figures in Chicago's gospel
scene).18 Steeped in both traditional and the most contemporary music
performed in the black church, Jones offered a compendium of black
sacred music styles in her play, echoing a similar diversity in the music
programs of many large African American churches in Chicago that
catered to the various musical tastes of their congregants.
16 Maude Roberts George, "News of the Music World," Chicago Defender, 4
February 1933, 15. A few years earlier, both Jones and Lewis sang solos at a concert in
Chicago's Orchestra Hall before a predominantly white audience. Henry Willingham,
"George Garner Pleases Chicago Audience," Chicago Defender, 13 December 1930, 3.
1
7 "Gospel Singers Close National Meeting," Chicago Defender, 9 September
1933,15.
18 Many articles refer to the participation of Dinah Washington and Mahalia
Jackson in the play, although none of them indicate exactly when they participated.
Washington probably sang in the play as a child or teenager prior to becoming an inter-
national pop star. She attended St. Luke's, where she learned to sing gospel and play piano
under the tutelage of her mother Alice Williams, an accomplished choir director, and may
have seen the play during the 1930s. While one of Mahalia Jackson's biographies mentions
Jones multiple times and also refers to her play, it does not indicate when she participat-
ed. Both Jones's grandson, Rogers Jones, and her daughter-in-law, Ruth Jones, remember
Jackson performing in the play, but could not pinpoint this event to a specific time.
Rogers Jones recalls that Jackson made cameo appearances to help her friend attract audi-
ences. For participating in the play as angels in 1966, the Hutchinson sisters received
attention in the pages of the Chicago Defender. The newspaper also highlighted the appear-
ance of the Barrett Sisters (Delois Barrett Campbell, Billie Green Bey, and Rodessa
Porter) in the 1970s. See Nadine Cohodas, Queen: The Ufe and Music of Dinah Washington
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2004); Laurraine Goreau, Just Mahalia, Balry (Waco, TX:
Word Books, 1975), and Mary Kay Baum, "Novice Players Find Opportunity in Passion
Play Kept Alive by Vow," Chicago Defender, 27 March 1966, X1.
PAGEANT AND PASSION
85
SANG AT DEFENDER MUSICALE SUNDAY
Figure 3: Jones (far right) and Magnolia Lewis-Butts (not pictured) sang with
this choir under the direction of]. Wesley Jones (center) in April 1935.
Courtesy of Chicago Defender.
If Jones embraced the sound of gospel, she nevertheless
eschewed the aggressive physicality generally associated with the per-
formance of this music. This meant that she discouraged vocalists from
wedding the energy and expression in their voices to the movement of
their bodies, preferring instead that they perform relatively still. As
Jones's grandson Rogers Jones explained, she was a "cultured person,"
which precluded her from including the emotional exuberance of gospel
music for her "refined" production.19 The terms "cultured" and
"refined" indicated a particular social attitude associated with linked
notions of class-consciousness and religious decorum. Although Jones
rose from humble origins in the South, she lived in relative comfort in
Chicago, wearing fashionable clothes, attending fashionable social events,
and eventually owning homes in middle-class black neighborhoods. The
music that she listened to and performed, however, had no less impor-
tance as a marker of her identity than any other sign of Christian middle-
class respectability. What Jones viewed as excessive physical display may
have registered as the unrefined exuberance of working class culture,
which shared more with the expressive practices of blatantly secular
music, in particular jazz and blues, than she cared to condone. Her musi-
cal training and affiliation with pioneers of gospel music prepared her to
accept the sound of gospel as a noble vehicle for the glorification of her
God, but she could not view the demonstrative aspect of the music as
anything but socially regressive, if not sacrilegious, in the context of her
19 Rogers Jones explained that he added emotionally and physically exuberant
gospel music after he took over as director of the play at the end of the 1970s. He made
these changes in order to attract younger and broader audiences, and he claims that it
worked. Rogers Jones, telephone interview by author, 8 December 2004.
86 HALLSTOOS
play.
Jones's music background, which she discussed in a 1956 pro-
gram, indicates how central music was to her conception of the play.2o As
a girl, her parents could not afford piano lessons or a piano, so she taught
herself to play by practicing on a picture of the piano keys drawn with
charcoal on a piece of cardboard. Her only instruction came from a girl
who lived next door and took lessons. In adulthood, Jones studied with
several prominent vocal instructors, and Dr. Charles Carleton of
Columbia University, New York, taught her piano and organ.2
1
She per-
formed as soloist at several churches, sang in many large-scale church-
sponsored events, and served as pianist, organist, and choir director for
eight different churches (including eighteen years as director and organ-
ist at St. Luke's Baptist Church) .22 Perhaps the most impressive testimo-
ny to her exceptional musicianship and the rare esteem with which
church officials held her musical abilities was her experience as the direc-
tor of mass choirs. According to her account, she served as choral direc-
tor of thousand-voice choruses for the National Baptist Convention in
Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, California, and Arkansas.23 From
20 Program dated 1 April 1956, Willa S. Jones Papers, Box 1.
2! The vocal teachers included Dr. A. ]. Offord, Prof. J. Wesley Jones, Dr.
George Garner, and Prof. William Myricks. Church choir director J. Wesley Jones led the
annual Bud Billiken Easter Music Festival to which the Chicago Defender dedicated ample
attention. For one of many examples, see "Billiken Easter Music Festivals Thrill 20,000,"
Chicago Defender, 15 April1950, 19.
22 Jones served as soloist, organist, pianist, and/ or choir director for St. John
Baptist Church, Metropolitan Community Center, St. Luke Baptist Church, Bethel Baptist
Church choir, Tabernacle Baptist Church, Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, Shiloh Baptist
Church, and Mt. Sinai Baptist Church (all in and around Chicago), and Holy Trinity
Baptist Church (Brooklyn, NY).
23 She also served as Assistant Director of a 5,000 voice chorus for the Baptist
World's Alliance in Cleveland, Ohio (1956 Program). Dr. J. Robert Bradley, former direc-
tor of music for the National Baptist Convention (NBC) and internationally celebrated
singer, remembered Jones fondly, but had no recollection of her directing mass choirs. He
claimed that prior to his tenure as music director, his predecessor, Lucie Campbell, direct-
ed all NBC mass choirs for several decades and suggested instead that Jones may have
directed a choir at a pre-convention event. J. Robert Bradley, telephone conversation with
author, 2 August 2006. According to newspaper accounts, Jones co-directed a 1,500 voice
chorus at the forty-first session of the National Sunday School and Baptist Training
Union Congress in 1946, along with Prof. George Guillat and another gospel music lumi-
nary, Prof. Theodore Frye. Albert G. Barnett, "Expect 15,000 Baptists For Chicago
Conclave," Chicago Defender, 22 June 1946, 1, 3. In 1958, she served as the central director
of a 1,500 voice chorus for a pre-convention event at the Chicago Coliseum for which
she received ample attention in the newspaper. In one of these articles, she was quoted
PAGEANT AND PASSION 87
humble origins, her talent developed into a major musical force that even
the organizers of the most significant gathering of the largest African
American denomination in the country recognized and utilized.
These credentials attest to her formidable music talent, but they
do not indicate what type of training she had as a dramatist. This same
program makes no mention of her theatre experiences, other than to list
five other plays she wrote and produced, and offers no indication from
where she received creative inspiration for her drama, other than from
the Bible.24 What possessed Jones to write a play when her background
appeared so slanted toward music? It may be that she simply took greater
pains to document her musical than theatrical accomplishments.zs Rogers
Jones claims that his grandmother studied theatre at Columbia University
as saying "'I have had the privilege of directing convention choruses all over the country
for many years."' "Chicago Is Ready For Baptist Meet," Chicago Defender, 30 August 1958,
3. Her statement does not clarify whether or not her experiences as director of NBC cho-
ruses occurred before or during the official annual meeting, although the distinction may
be a bit superfluous. These pre-convention events appeared to be on a par with the music
during the convention in terms of prestige and cultural significance. One reason Bradley,
who met Jones through their mutual friend Mahalia Jackson, may not remember more
about her involvement with NBC choruses is that during the late 1940s until the mid-
1950s (the most likely period during which Jones would have directed NBC choruses
other than the ones discussed above) he was primarily in New York City and London,
England. He apparently had a lengthy hiatus from the annual convention until being
appointed Director of Music Promotion for the Sunday School Publishing Board in 1955.
J. Robert Bradley, I Have Always Been In the Handr of God: An Autobiograpf!J of the Lje of Dr.
]. Robert Bradlq (Nashville, TN: Townsend Press, 1993), 83-150. See also "Baptists Prepare
Huge Convention Chorus," Chicago Defender, 10 May 1958, 12; "Baptist Women Give
Preview of Gala NBC Activities at Elaborate Banquet," Chicago Defender, 16 August 16,
1958, 15; "Church Choirs Give Program Tuesday Night," Chicago Dai!J Tribune, 5
September 1958, A4; Ted Ston, "Heard and Seen," Chicago Defender, 8 September 1958, 17;
"Expect 9,000 Persons At Baptist Convention Fete," Chicago Defender, 9 September 1958,
1; "Baptists Applaud Mass Pre-Convention Musical," Chicago Deftnder, 11 September 1958,
5; Ted Ston, "Heard and Seen," Chicago Deftnder, 17 September 1958, 17.
24 Jones titled her other plays The Lft Boat, Just One Hour to Live for the Dope
Addict, The Call to Arms, Up From Slavery, and The Birth of Christ.
25 I n contrast to Jones, her husband, George W Jones, had a one-page feature
in this same program that focused on his theatrical experience. The program notes that
George Jones's "ancestors for generations were Biblical dramatists . . .. Since childhood, he
has been trained and prepared in every detail to enact the leading role of the Passion. For
it was at his mother's knee he received his 'first' training. Both his mother and father are
devout Christians. In the past 22 years he has interpreted the part of the Christus before
more than six thousand audiences." While this fmal claim seems implausible, the descrip-
tion suggests that he did not separate his theatrical training from the religious training he
received his entire life.
88
HALLSTOOS
in New York and had a particular fondness for drama.26 She also may
have studied drama and participated in sacred plays at Arkansas Baptist
College, where she graduated in 1920 at the age of sixteen.2
7
Churches provided another venue in which Jones may have
observed sacred drama and learned to create her own work. By the early
twentieth century, at least some congregations staged productions, and
many more showed passion play films.2s Judging by the fact that newspa-
pers failed to mention Jones's play until after more than a decade of
annual productions, the vast majority of plays mounted by churches
received no media attention.29 About the time that the Chicago Defender
and the Chicago Tribune started to run stories on Jones's established and
mammoth production, the Chicago Bee reported on comparatively small
productions from the city's black churches. For instance, a pageant enti-
ded The Cross featured a cast of one hundred and showed in an auditori-
um under the auspices of the Bethel A.M.E. Church, and the All Nations
Pentecostal Church staged Echoes of the Cross, thus indicating that the
Baptists were not the only ones interested in sacred drama.30 While these
26 Jones, interview, 8 December 2004.
27 The college's curriculum apparently did not include the study of drama, but
Jones may have participated in extracurricular theatre activities at the school. Vertie L.
Carter, Arkansas Baptist College: A Historical Perspective 1884-1982 (Houston, TX: D.
Armstrong Co., Inc., 1981), 46-48, 108.
28 For example, the Mt. Olive Church in Joliet, Illinois staged a "well attended
and very interesting" passion play. Myrtle L. Clark, "Prairie State Events," Chicago Defender,
16 October 1915, 2. Some of the more popular passion play films traveled to numerous
black churches during the Easter season. A film touted as "The new and revised Passion
Play of the Life of Christ" showed in at least five Baptist and Methodist churches, includ-
ing the one in which Jones first staged her play, St. John Baptist, and may have shown in
many more judging by the fact that advertisements for it ran into August. See Chicago
Defender, 5 May 1918, 12; 11 May 1918, 6;25 May 1918, 6; 8June 1918, 10; 15June 1918,
2,10; 22 June 1918, 6; 29 June 1918, 12; 6 July 1918, 12; 13 July 1918, 13; 27 July 1918, 3;
3 August 1918, 14.
29 The Chicago Defender made the first explicit reference to Jones's play in late
1944, although an earlier mention in a South Side community paper in April1941 may have
been referring to the play. The announcement said, "Hear about the development of reli-
gious drama and attend a presentation of the Passion Play by Negro actors. Meet at 3 p.m.,
4920 Parkway." "'Birth of Christ' Produced in East," Chicago Defender, 30 December 1944,
14; "Tours Dealing With Religion Set by WPA," Southt01vn Economist, 2 April 1941, 5.
30 Chicago Bee, 6 April1947, 18; Chicago Bee, 7 April1946, 2. For additional adver-
tisements and articles on church plays, see Chicago Bee, 4 April 1943, 12; Chicago Bee, 18
April 1943, 9; Chicago Bee, 25 April 1943, 12; Chicago Bee, 25 March 1945, 18; Chicago Bee,
14 April 1946, 8, 11; Chicago Bee, 6 April 194 7, 14; Chicago Bee, 13 April 1947, 18.
PAGEANT AND PASSION 89
and other productions may have developed in response to Jones's play,
they also may serve to suggest the under-examined cultural traclition that
informed the inception of The Resurrection two decades earlier.31 In spite
of their relative obscurity, the presence of these homegrown dramas by
the 1940s belies the recent claim that no African American passion plays
existed prior to Langston Hughes's The Gospel Glory: From the Manger to the
Mountain (Gospel Glow) of 1962.32
By writing her own passion play, Jones joined a dramatic tradi-
tion that originated over one thousand years earlier in European medieval
churches. In spite of some general similarities with these liturgical dra-
mas, Jones's play seemed more akin to the outdoor vernacular religious
plays performed during the .Middle Ages, which featured a broad array of
realistic special effects. They also involved lay people, representing all
ranks and professions. Jones drew upon clergy and laity, young and old,
rich and poor in her production.33 Another basic similarity to these early
productions was that music served a central role.34 It is not clear that
Jones ever witnessed the famous Oberammergau passion play, let alone
found inspiration from it, although the play came to the U.S. in 1923 and
was well known in Chicago's African American community.35 At the very
least, the popularity of this play and another passion play from Freiburg,
3l Rogers Jones claimed that many churches initiated their own passion plays in
response to the success of his grandmother's play. Rogers Jones, interview by author,
Chicago, 23 November 2004. Choral director Dr. Robert E. Wooten supported this
assessment when he suggested that some audience members of Jones's play "would go
back and try to duplicate that type of performance at their church ... on a smaller scale."
Dr. Robert E. Wooten, interview by author, Chicago, 12 August 2006.
3
2
Joseph McLaren, "From Protest to Soul Fest: Langston Hughes' Gospel
Plays," The Langston Hughes Review 15 (Spring 1997): 52.
33 According to one account, "There are more than a dozen ministers in the
group, church workers from nearly all of Chicago's churches, a policeman, several attor-
neys and school teachers, and even a few young toughs off the street who begged to be
included in the cast." "Passion Play," 26.
34 For more on vernacular religious plays, see Oscar Brockett and Franklin
Hildy, History of the Theatre, 9th ed. (New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), 82-95.
35 Many wealthy black Chicagoans made the trip overseas to see the
Oberammergau play, which was performed for several months every ten years. Others vis-
ited churches, community centers, and auditoriums around the city to see films and hear
travel lectures, often supplemented with slides and ft.lms, on the play. During their visit to
the U.S., the man who played Christ, Anton Lang, and other members of the
Oberammergau cast were feted by members of the black elite at a home on the South Side.
90 HAll.sTOOS
Germany which showed in the Civic Opera House in 1930, gave Jones's
efforts cultural legitimacy and demonstrated that the ancient biblical story
could be presented in a format for popular consumption.
In addition to the links between Jones's passion play and its
European predecessors, another dramatic form-the pageant-exhibited
equal, if not greater influence on the conception and development of her
production. In fact, rather than referring to The Resurrection as a play, the
1930 program announced that the production was "AN EASTER
PAGEANT" on its cover.36 Similar to passion plays, pageants had
medieval origins and, having been transplanted to America, were being
updated to serve the cultural needs of new audiences. In the late nine-
teenth century, African Americans began using pageants to celebrate
black history, combat derogatory racial representation, and instill racial
pride.37 During World War I, women mounted more pageants than men,
in part because "pageantry, unlike the theatre, was accepted as a proper
endeavor for respectable middle- and upper-class women."38 Impressing
through sheer size, pageants included orators, musicians, and other pre-
dominantly amateur performers, sometimes numbering over one thou-
sand participants, and were seen by even larger audiences, which often
filled stadiums or other mammoth outdoor venues. Organizers placed a
premium on visual spectacle (costumes, staging, choreography), high-
Mrs. Yerby, the host of the event, returned the favor of a few years earlier when she had
stayed at the home of Lang and his family while visiting Oberammergau. "Chicagoans
Meet Passion Players at Yerby Home," Chicago Defender, 1 March 1924, 8. Perhaps the most
engaging and informative account of African American experiences with the
Oberammergau play during the first half of the twentieth century comes from Annabel
Casey Prescott and her attorney husband Patrick Prescott, who visited Oberammergau in
1934. See Patrick Prescott, "Prescotts Compare Fatherland with Romantic France,"
Chicago Defender, 8 December 1934, 5; Patrick Prescott, "Tourists Continue Trip Through
Old Country," Chicago Defender, 22 December 1934, 5; Annabel Casey Prescott,
Travelers Tell of Trip ro Europe," Chicago Defender, 15 December 1934, 5. Annabel
Prescott's article reYeals that lectures, movies, and musicales (music festivals) on the pas-
sion story were commonplace in Chicago's churches.
36 The program also refers to The Resurrection as "A Sacred Pageant" and simply
as "this Pageant."
37 For an overview of pageants in African American culture, see Christine R.
Gray, Introduction, Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, ed. Willis Richardson
Oackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993 [1930)) and DaYid Krasner, A Beautiful
Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927
(New York: Palgrave, 2004), 85, 93-94.
38 Frances Diodato Bzowski, "'Torchbearers of the East': Women, Pageantry,
and World War I," Journal of American Drama and Theatre 7, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 88.
PAGE.\NT AND PASSION 91
quality music, and historical veracity. According to the eminent African
American intellectual WE.B. Du Bois, pageants were "a great historical
folk festival ... with the added touch of reality given by numbers, space
and fidelity to historical truth."39 The fact that he wrote his own pageant,
entitled The Star of Ethiopia (1913), attested to his belief that the form
could promote social progress.
The size of the cast of and venue for The Resurrection paled in
comparison to the pageants Du Bois created and championed, but the
program suggests that Jones borrowed from the pageant format
nonetheless. For instance, in the opening prologue she included the alle-
gorical figures Father Time, Truth, and Mystery, who exclaim "the true
mysteries that have happened since the beginning of time," thereby con-
textualizing the moral lessons to be learned from the sacred story that
follows. Like its much larger outdoor counterparts, therefore, Jones's play
sought to edifY audiences. In September 1930, only a few months after
Jones's production of The Resurrection, musical educator Manet Harrison-
Fowler produced a massive pageant, entitled The Voice. Held at the
Chicago Coliseum, it documented the history of black Baptists. In a pub-
lication from the event, Harrison-Fowler ended her foreword with the
hope that her pageant would inspire "all who may chance to see it to 'Do
Good."'
4
0 This impulse to lead observers to virtuous behavior may be a
characteristic unique to sacred pageants in contrast to the more common
secular African American pageants, which focused more on feeling good
about oneself in a racist world pitted against this possibility. Du Bois's
The Star of Ethiopia, for example, attempted to foster racial pride rather
than prescribed action. Given its significance in African American culture
at the time, the pageant provided both Harrison-Fowler and Jones with
an effective format for inspiring their audiences to "Do Good."
Perhaps nothing linked Jones's production more ambiguously
between the traditions of pageants and passion plays than how she
employed music. From one perspective, the differences between the two
traditions blurred, emphasizing the centrality of music in both. Analyzing
the function of music in a passion play in Bloomington, Illinois, which
developed in relative proximity to Jones's production in both space and
time, theatre historian Lawrence Tucker offered an apt description for
either dramatic form. He wrote that music was used "to enhance the
39 W E. B. Du Bois, "A Pageant," Crisis 21 (1915): 230, quoted by Gray, in
Richardson, Plays and Pageants From the Lfe of the Negro, xxvii.
40 Manet Harrison-Fowler, The Voice: A Pageant of the Origin, Growth and
Accomplishments of the Negro Baptists of America (Chicago: National Baptist Convention,
1930), 2.
92 HAILSTOOS
emotional effects, to provide background for dialogue, to bridge the story
from one scene to another and to permit time for scene changes."41 Like
Harrison-Fowler's The Voice and the passion play in Bloomington, The
Resurrection probably had an uninterrupted string of music that shifted
between background and a more prominent position in relation to the
drama.42 All three works ended with rousing choruses. According to the
description of the final act, The Resurrection concluded when the "multi-
tude bursts forth in the mammoth chorus 'Zion Awake from their
Sadness."'
4
3 In spite of these similarities, pageants tended to foreground
music to a greater degree than passion plays, using it to serve more explic-
itly as the expressive focal point. When central characters from Jones's
play sang solos (such as the apostle Simon Peter, who bid Mary to "Weep
no more") and together in smaU groups, they relied more heavily on the
power of music to convey dramatic content that in conventional passion
plays depended more upon the spoken word and visual effects. Whether
viewed as a pageant-like passion play or a play-like pageant, the point is
that Jones's production represented a hybrid of the two dramatic forms.45
The Chicago Defender featured an advertisement for the opening
of the "PASSION PLAY" at the Civic Opera House in 1946, which
marked a permanent transition to labeling the production a play rather
than a pageant. This new designation only mildly evoked the substantial
change that had occurred in the production since its inception. For
instance, the play increased from four acts to ten episodes, which
increased the number of biblical events that the play covered and the
41 Lawrence Elza Tucker, The Passion P!qy in Bloomington, Illinois (Ph.D.
Dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1951), 353.
42 For instance, "Note Music should be played throughout, always softly, when
parts are spoken" (Harrison-Fowler, The Voice, 11). Various informants have claimed that
the music continued uninterupted in Jones's play, although none of these people wit-
nessed productions from the early years. The 1930 program lists an organist, who prob-
ably provided background music in the absence of singing.
43 The Voice concluded with the "Hallelujah" chorus from Beethoven's oratorio
The Mount of Olives and the Bloomington passion play ended with the "Hallelujah Chorus"
from Handel's oratorio Messiah, a work that Jones also included in productions of her play.
44 See Dorothy Chansky, "North American Passion Plays: 'The Greatest Story
Ever Told' in the New Millennium," TDR 50 (Winter 2006): 120-45.
4
5 When questioned about why Jones did not refer to her production as a musi-
cal, Earl Calloway differentiated between musicals and pageants by highlighting the
humor and entertainment value of the former and gravity and religious significance of
the latter. Calloway, interview, August 2006.
PAGEANT AND P ASSION
93
depth in which it explored them. Whereas the earlier production began
with the priests and scribes plotting the death of Jesus, the later version
dramatized a series of the miracles that Jesus performed earlier in his life,
including the calming of the sea and the healing of Lazarus. The increase
in scenes also increased the number of roles and lengthened the produc-
tion to nearly three hours. While the 1930 production had a cast of
around forty, including the choir members and musicians, by the end of
the 1940s it had swelled to around three hundred members.46
Moving into the Civic Opera House in downtown Chicago also
opened up a new realm of creative possibilities unavailable in the Du
Sable High School auditorium, let alone in local churches. The elegant
venue allowed for an impressive array of technical and stylistic innova-
tions to the play. For instance, the large orchestra pit in front of the stage
established an ideal space for a mass choir of seventy-five to eighty voic-
es, who provided the music for most of the production. The elevated
proscenium and sophisticated rigging behind the stage allowed for Jesus'
dramatic ascent into the heavens via a pulley system. Moving into this
venue also led to more extravagant costumes than before, which the cast
borrowed from the Civic Opera Company (Figure 4). "One of the great-
est things that ever happened in having the play at the Civic Opera House
was the fact that we were able to borrow and use the costumes and
scenery from the Lyric Opera [Company]," recalled Rogers Jones, who
felt these additions brought a high level of historical veracity to the pro-
duction. 47 A descriptive booklet, probably published in the 1930s, offers
an illuminating look at the beauty and grandeur, as well as lists the ameni-
ties of the large theatre. According to this source, the theatre boasted
3,517 seats on the main floor, in two balconies, and in thirty-one boxes.
It included separate elevators for the cast and crew, a special microphone
system for the stage manager, hydraulic bridges to change the topography
of the stage, hydraulic machines to quickly move curtains, and an elabo-
rate array of lights that could be operated by remote control.
The costumes, staging, lighting, and other mechanical sophisti-
cation of the Opera House offered concrete expression to the consider-
able social prestige that performing in this venue conferred on Jones.
Signaling her cultural ascent, Chicago newspapers began to announce the
production regularly during the Easter season. Gospel singer and choral
director Ella Jackson, who worked for Jones during the mid-1960s in
preparing for the play, remembered that she "loved the Opera House."48
46 "Passion Play," 25.
47 Jones, interview, August 2004.
94
HAU.STOOS
g,
J; -.
~ ..
t.
;.'\'
' .1:, _ .. '
. r.: , ,
~ ~ I
,'!'"'
The Kiss of Death
Jl.ldo. Borgains for 30 Pieees of Silv.,.
Before Pilate
Figure 4: Page from 19 56 program. Courtesy of Willa Saunders] ones
Papers/Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and
Literature, Chicago Public Library.
Some of this affection may be attributed to the connection Jones made
between this venue and her increasing cultural capital within the black
church (which may have contributed to her selection as one of the three
esteemed directors who led a mass choir a couple months later at the
annual session of the National Sunday School and Baptist Training
Union Congress).49 Judging by people's memories of her, Jones gravitat-
ed to people, places, and events associated with high social status.
Jackson, who remembered her as "a pleasure to work with," also charac-
terized her as "very highbrow" and used to "the finer things in life."
50
While committed to spreading the good news of Jesus Christ to every-
one and a friend to people from all stations in life, Jones was susceptible
48 Jackson, interview, December 2006.
49 Barnett, "Expect," 1, 3.
50 Jackson, interview, December 2006.
PAGEANT AND PASSION 95
to elitism.
Her attraction to the social prestige attendant with the Civic
Opera House, however, represented something more significant than this
insight into her personality. It represented black achievement in theatre,
offering tangible proof that African Americans could produce serious
and noble drama at a time when popular culture presented the opposite
perspective. In a highly visible way, her play refuted the pervasive and
degrading stereotypes of African Americans in radio, film, and print
media. In a 1950 feature on Jones and her play in Ebony magazine, Jones
explained why she had rejected offers to sell her play: "I just wouldn't
want to see it re-written and jazzed up as another 'heavenly fish fry' for
Negroes like Green Pastures."St Written by Marc Connelly after a book by
Roark Bradford (both white men), The Green Pastures was an extremely
popular play during the 1930s and featured an all-black cast portraying
scenes from the Old Testament. After a long and successful run on
Broadway, it toured around the country for several years before returning
to New York. Hollywood made a highly acclaimed movie of the play in
1936, which spread and prolonged its popularity. While featuring a black
man as God, a move that could have been perceived as radical and poten-
tially subversive at the time, The Green Pastures drew upon offensive
stereotypes of blacks and the dialogue reflected a white man's conde-
scending interpretation of Southern black dialect. In mentioning this play
as an example of what she consciously wished to avoid replicating, Jones
implied that her own work embodied an ideology of racial uplift that
served to redress the hurt and degradations inflicted on African
Americans by a racist society.sz
Any umbrage she may have taken to plays and ftlms like The
Green Pastures, however, spoke as much to her Christian piety as it did to
her racial politics, indicating a point at which the boundaries between race
and religion blurred. If we may label Jones as a "race woman," the femi-
nine form of a term used in the first half of the twentieth century for an
African American leader who embodied success and the hope of black
social progress, it is because her religious faith impelled her to "Do
Good" and use her considerable gifts to lead people to the word and way
51 "Passion Play," 26.
52 Ironically, Jones served as the soloist during the funeral of the man most cel-
ebrated for his role in The Green Pastures, Dr. Richard B. Harrison, who played "De Lawd."
During the ceremony, one eulogist claimed that Harrison "converted an otherwise ridicu-
lous play into a masterful interpretation of dignity and beauty," illustrating that others
shared Jones's view of the play, yet also felt that the play's limitations could be transcend-
ed. "Pay Tribute to 'De Lawd' at Memorial Services," Chicago Defender, 8 June 1935, 3.
96 HAllsTOOS
of a just and all-powerful God. As many have attested, her deep faith or,
as one of her friends and supporters put it, her "profound spirituality,"
was the secret to her inextinguishable energy and unwavering commit-
ment to perpetually mounting her play.s3 To this end, her success proved
that she took her initial covenant with God regarding the passion play
most seriously. Several years after rising as a major cultural figure, she
described her "most thrilling moment" as the day she "accepted Christ."
She wrote, "I never shall forget Thursday night, more than thirty years
ago, in the little Mt. Ollie Baptist Church, at Little Rock, Ark., when the
minister extended the invitation and I accepted Christ as my personal
Savior."
54
It is easy to understand the transition of Jones's passion play
from the church to prominent commercial venues as an inevitable devel-
opment in a cultural form fueled by faith and geared toward proselytiz-
ing. This development, however, depended upon Jones's mastery of the
expressive conventions that resonated with the Christian audience who
made her passion play-cum-pageant possible. I n particular, Jones knew
what music audiences wanted to hear and how they wanted it performed.
Her choices mirrored and helped to shape the expectations of mainline
black churchgoers in Chicago, who viewed sacred music as an important
index of class and respectability, as well as an agent of great emotional
power and beauty. Had Jones only included black gospel songs in her pro-
duction or encouraged a demonstrative delivery of the music, she would
have lost a large portion of the audience she intended to reach. As a
result, her play probably would have remained in the church and left no
trace other than in the memories of the few who witnessed it each year.
Jones's words and actions indicated that this would have been an unfor-
tunate fate for a cultural production to which she devoted her creative
energies for life.
On the other hand, she also indicated that devotion to a higher
power trumped such worldly concerns. In her favorite hymn "I'm a Child
of the King," the final stanza suggested that human edifices, presumably
including opera houses, were meaningless in light of heavenly promise:
A tent or a cottage, why should I care?
They're building a palace for me over there;
Though exiled from home, yet still may I sing:
All glory to God, I'm a child of the K.ing.ss
53 Calloway, interview, August 2006.
54 Program, 1956.
PAGEANT AND PASSION 97
Her expressions of pious humility convinced many people that Willa
Saunders Jones, a southern migrant from humble origins, truly was "a
child of the King." Ultimately, her reputation as a woman of deep faith
underwrote her status as an authority of sacred music and the success of
her drama on the story of Christ.
55 For lyrics and music to the song "I'm a Child of the King," see www .. cyber
hymnal.org/htm/ c/h/ childkin.htm.
JOURNAL OF AJI.IEIUCAN DRAJVlA AND T HEATRE 19, NO.2 (SPIUNG 2007)
DISLOCATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE ON THE EARLY TWENTIETH-
CENTURY BROADWAY STAGE
LEIGH KENNICOTT
The regular theatre ... will, of course, always exist, but not, I
think, as now. The [moving] pictures will utterly eliminate
from the regular theatre all the spectacular features of pro-
duction .... Pictures have replaced all that.
- D. W Griffith
1
For a ftlm. theory class at the University of Colorado, I conduct-
ed an experiment entided "Mediatized/UnMediatized" about the recep-
tion of cinematic versus theatrical images. Although there is some contro-
versy about these terms, I use them to connote the commonly held des-
ignations for ftlm (mediated) and theatre (unmediated).Z
I performed a monologue twice in the same room, under the
same conditions, first using my live performance, then presenting the
same monologue on video. I supposed the students would feel closer and
more connected to the live performer. To my surprise, however, they felt
just the opposite. They reported feeling direcdy addressed in the per-
formance directed to the camera, whereas, in the live presentation, they
were watching a "performance" not directed to any one individually. In
conducting the experiment, I had tapped into the adjustment in percep-
tion that, after more than one hundred years of cinematic influence,
engendered a greater feeling of intimacy between the spectator and the
mediated, unanchored image, than the "flesh and blood" rendition of the
same thing.
The author thanks Dorothy Chansl;y for her editorial assistance with this essay.
1
David Wark Griffith, "Some Prophesies: Film and Theatre, Screenwriting,
Education" in Theatre and Film, ed. Robert Knopf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2005), 99.
2
Susan Sontag writes, "Theatre has been described as a mediated art, presum-
ably because it usually consists of a pre-existent play mediated by a particular perform-
ance which offers one of many interpretations of the play. Film, in contrast, is regarded
as unmediated- because of its larger-than-life scale and more unrefusable impact on the
eye .... But there is an equally valid sense which shows movies to be the mediated art and
theatre the unmediated one." "Film and Theatre," in Film Theory and Criticism, 4th ed., eds.
Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leon Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), 368.
100
K.ENNICOTI
In Liveness, Philip Auslander asserts that "live performance
inevitably yields a sense of the failure to achieve community between the
audience and the performer"
3
-he argues that live performance necessi-
tates distance between audience and spectator, whereas a mediatized
image beckons each member of the audience into the spectacle and suc-
cessfully registers as a group experience.
4
Auslander's conclusion con-
firms that, rather than experiencing the recorded image at a remove, as
earlier observers have maintained is the case, spectators consider it to be
transparent, even penetrating. What, then, accounts for cinema's capacity
for uncritical absorption while theatre seems to remain a discrete, sepa-
rating medium? Further, how does the variation in reception between the
two media identify differences in their construction? Answering these
questions became the project of this paper.
To trace the concomitant paths of film and theatre in the early
years of the twentieth century I take the view that, as a cinematic ration-
alization of vision began to take hold, audiences desired in plays the same
visual grammar they were learning from movies. In addition to
Auslander, I call upon the pioneering work of Hugo Munsterberg,
Marshall McLuhan, and more recendy, art historian Jonathan Crary, to
help me investigate the origins of the relationship between mediatized
and unmediatized images, a relationship that seems to build upon the
dialectic of presence and absence, attention and distraction. These theo-
rists' perspectives help illuminate a period at the turn of the twentieth
century that became the turning point in a struggle for influence between
two media-at the time, one long established, the other a new, young
upstart.
In the plays of Roi Cooper Megrue, a litde-known playwright
who produced some of the earliest responses to the cinematic shift in
perception, I uncovered the beginnings of a temporal and spatial eman-
cipation on the Broadway stage taking place early in the twentieth centu-
ry. Megrue was one of a small cadre of playwrights who, influenced by
both demand for novelty and a newly naturalized way of seeing, began in
1914 writing plays that integrated cinematic techniques with those of the
well-made play.
5
That year, Megrue, a man rooted not in theatrical tradi-
3
Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 57.
4
The word "mediatized" comes from Jean Baudrillard in ''Aesthetic Illusion
and Virtual Reality," in Reading Images, ed. Julia Thomas (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 179.
5
For this reason, 1914 marked a turning point in public recognition of cinemat-
ic influence, placing Roi Cooper Megrue at the head of a long, diverse, and accumulating
number of dramatic experiments deemed "cinematic." After 1914, a rising tide of plays
identified as cinematic inhabited Broadway stages. The effects ranged from enframing sto-
ries (the plays of Edward Knoblock, George Broadhurst) to adding ftlm clips, thus creating
DISLOCATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE 101
tion but in the world of commerce, brought two plays, Under Cover and It
Pqys to Advertise (with Walter Hackett) to Broadway within weeks of one
another. Both exhibited the dramaturgical characteristics immediately
defined as "cinematic." It can be argued that Megrue's works recognized
and responded to what Jonathan Crary describes as the "sweeping reor-
ganization of visual/ auditory culture."
6
Instead of flowing strictly into
the future in the traditional cause-effect construction, however, Megrue's
plotting unfolds sideways, through overlapping scenes in Under Cover, and
in quick cuts in his It Pqys to Advertise. Such scrutiny sets the stage for dis-
covering how cinematic ways of seeing penetrated human consciousness
and paved the way for innovations in theatrical structure that did not truly
reach fruition until Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams brought their
innovations to Broadway.
7
Cinema and Theatre: Same Space, Different Time Duration
Dr. Hugo Munsterberg (1863-1917) stands as one of the flrst
important observers of cinema who considered the dichotomies in
time/ space perception between fllm and theatre. A psychologist who had
trained with Sigmund Freud, Munsterberg wrote a groundbreaking trea-
tise, The Photoplqy, a Prychologica! Stucfy (1916).
8
Applying psycho-physio-
logical theory to the screen, Munsterberg elaborated how with cinema,
the spectator ceased to be merely the recipient of vision but became a
participant in the creation of it. He combined physical psychology with
dream analysis, building on Freudian concepts to identify crucial percep-
tual differences between theatre and fllm.
9
film/ theatre hybrids (such as The Battle Cry (1914] and The Alien [1915]).
6
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions o/ Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
(Cambridge, MA: An October Book, The l\1IT Press, 1999), 2.
7
Yet, when Tennessee Williams wrote his first play, Not About Nightingales
(1936), it was deemed so cinematic that, at the time, it was not producible. Clearly his new
"way of seeing" had overstepped the contemporary stage- or, in Strindberg's words, he
"tri[ed] to put new wine in old bottles" ("Preface to Miss Julie," August Strindberg: Selected
Plqys, trans. Evert Sprinchorn [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press], 204).
8
Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Stu<!J (New York: D.
Appleton and Company, 1916).
9
Freud established his career as a respected neurologist who followed the work
of physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholz. His school of thought held that
organisms could be explained exclusively in term of physical and chemical forces.
Munsterberg was among those who came from this background before following Dr.
Freud's psychoanalytic theories (see the introduction by Ritchie Robertson in Sigmund
Freud, The Interpretation o/ Dreams [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999]).
102
KENNICOTI
Paradoxically, Munsterberg was an advocate of the well-made
play who had clearly defined, culturally charged attitudes about the the-
atre. He asserted, "the consciousness of unreality, which the theatre has
forced on us, [determines] the condition for our dramatic interest."
10
In
contrast, "in every respect the film play is further away from the physical
reality than the drama and in every respect this greater distance from the
physical world brings it nearer to the mental world."
11
Further,
Munsterberg stated, "it is interesting to watch how playwrights nowadays
try to steal the thunder of the photoplay and experiment with time rever-
sals on the legitimate stage."
12
He gave as examples three productions
that opened in the fall of 1914; among them was Megrue's Under Cover.
The other two plays cited by Munsterberg are On Trial by Elmer
Reizenstein (later Rice), and Between the Lines by Charlotte ChorpenningY
It is intriguing that three plays exhibiting cinematic qualities appeared one
after another during the same season. Their presence seemed to herald
the rippling influence of cinema to the stage.
This influence-or new way of seeing-may not have been as
easy for Megrue's contemporaries to recognize as it is in retrospect.
Jonathan Crary explains that reorganization in the observer had to occur
before technological advances could be purposefully utilized. He writes,
"the break with classical models of vision in the early nineteenth centu-
ry was far more than simply a shift in the appearance of images and art
works, or in systems of representational conventions."
14
Just as photog-
raphy predicted movies, he posits, the invention of a new observer pred-
icated differences in reception that made movies possible.
15
But it was
Marshall McLuhan, at mid-century, who remarked, "it was only in the
nineteenth century that artists, painters, and poets began to notice that it
was the environmental form itself, as human!J constituted that really provid-
10
Munsterberg, The Photoplay, 163.
11
Ibid., 175.
12
Ibid., 181.
13
Chorpenning set her play within a frame taking place in the present, while
each act depicted the past to dramatize the contents of three letters. This device was
becoming a staple of D. W Griffith's film technique through 1912 and beyond.
14
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.
15
For example, Paul Levinson repeats the story of Lumiere's The Train Enters
the Station, the movie that is said to have caused "people in the audience [to] duck and
scream as if the train were charging right at them." He explains that people had to learn
how to accept the images on the screen in Digital McLuhan (New York: Routledge, 1999),
143-44.
DISLOCATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE
103
ed people with the models of perception that governed their thoughts"
(emphasis mine).
16
The premise that changes in mechanization create
changes in the environment in which people live, perceive and react, pro-
vided the fulcrum for McLuhan's media theories. ~ n y understanding of
social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way
media work as environments," he explained in The Medium is the Massage.
17
The year 1914 seems to mark the deflning moment in an unspo-
ken film/theatre popularity contest, as cinema ceased to emulate theatri-
cal form, coming into its own through the experimentation of D.W
Griffith and others like him. In turn, some new playwrights like Roi
Cooper Megrue, searching for an antidote to cinematic influence, began
to experiment with traditional dramatic structure in admittedly cinematic
ways.
Roi Cooper Megrue, the "Broadway Trickster"
The author of Under Cover, one of the plays cited by Hugo
Munsterberg, was somewhat of a dandy. He attended Trinity School and
Columbia University, domiciled at the Ansonia Hotel in Manhattan, and
made numerous crossings to Europe with his mother, socialite Stella
Cooper Megrue.
18
Rather than studying to become a playwright with
George Pierce Baker at Harvard, where he might have encountered icon-
oclasts like Eugene O'Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, Kenneth Macgowan,
and other "new dramatists" who were about to appear on the Broadway
stage, he apprenticed instead with the prominent literary agent Elizabeth
Marbury, reading "4,000 scripts" in his eleven-year tenure.
19
When he
joined the venerable Players Club, he made important Broadway connec-
tions and became a confldant of many producers and managers, particu-
larly the Shuberts, who just happened to have bought many adapted plays
from Marbury's concern.
But everybody, including Megrue, was going to the movies.Z
0
16
Marshall McLuhan, "Hot and Cool Interview" (with Gerald Emmanuel
Stern), in Media &search: Technology, Att, Communication, ed. Michael A. Moos (Amsterdam:
Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), 67.
17
McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 26.
18
Montrose J. Moses, ed., Representative American Plqys (Boston: Little, Brown,
and Company 1929), 676.
19
Megrue seemed to inflate this number as he gained success. He cited only
2,000 scripts in "Roi Cooper Megrue- The Boy with Two Plays on Broadway," Theatre
20, no. 165 (December 1914): 276.
20
Publisher Harrison Grey Fiske editorialized, "There have been various esti-
mates as to the number of persons that weekly witness moving picture shows in Greater
104 KENNICOTT
The proliferation of nickelodeons represented a social phenomenon that
developed a new, diverse audience only recently cultivated by vaudeville.
Nickelodeons continued the vaudeville format-some even going to the
lengths of re-integrating live entertainment-and provided the site for a
transition toward the greater "narrativization" of cinema. Combining
more complex plotting with progressively more sophisticated cinematic
techniques insured that a distinct way of seeing became widely estab-
lished. The new audience relied for meaning upon a system of under-
standings based upon visual signals rather than on spoken words, thus
reinforcing an imagistic language that rested "on a spatial freedom
unavailable in the theater."
21
In such an atmosphere the structural exper-
iments of playwrights unleashed new sorts of cinematic gimmicks on
Broadway.
2
Watchful critics colluded in this process, proclaiming each new
approach to be the "New Drama" they were longing for.
23
While Sheldon
Cheney lobbied for "the art piece," Clayton Hamilton offered prescrip-
tions for greater success and found delight when playwrights took him up
on his suggestions. Hamilton is notable because he encouraged innova-
tion in theatre from the point of view of the cinema. He addressed his
remarks to the reformers of the day in an effort to gain acceptance for
cinematic techniques and change movies' disreputable reputation. In The
Bookman, one of the period's widely read intellectual magazines, the influ-
ential Hamilton often ruminated in print about the contrasts in media. He
considered the motion picture play "a more serviceable medium for story
telling that the spoken drama. The author is granted an immeasurably
greater freedom in handling the categories of place and time."
24
Hamilton's ideas fit well into the reformers' project of bending movies
toward morally uplifting material. His project in equating the cinema with
the legitimate theatre was meant to elevate films to acceptable status in
Nev: York, and it has been said the number will reach half a million. The patronage of
the fifty odd theatres devoted to regular or standard amusements in this city sinks in com-
parison to an insignificant number." "Moving Pictures," New York Dramatic Mirror, 30
January 1909,2.
21
Tom Gunning, D. W Griffith and the Origim of American Narrative Film
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 35.
22 See note 5.
23
For instance, on the opening of Elmer Rice's On Trial, Wendell Philips
Dodge wrote, "The real novelty in 'On Trial' as a play-is its 'movie' aspect. This is a new
dramaturgy, and one that bids fair to revolutionize playwriting and play production." "The
New Plays," Theatre 20, no. 164 (October 1914): 198.
24
Clayton Hamilton, "The Decorative Drama," Bookman 35 (1912): 166.
DISLOCATIONS OF TiME AND SPACE
105
order to attract a "better" class of audience.l" In becoming an advocate
for fllm, he helped to popularize trends in cinema such as relaxing the
strictures of time and space in the well-made play formula.
Hamilton's articles not only critiqued, they suggested and
cajoled. In "Building a Play Backwards," he proposed, "[T]here are cer-
tain other stories which can be understood most truly only if we follow
them backward from effects to causes. As a matter of experiment, it
would be extremely interesting if some playwright should soon set before
us a story of this type in the perspective of reversed time."
26
Furthering
his "experimental" critique, he reflected in The Bookman,
American drama at the present time seems to be hover-
ing in a state of transition between that initial period
during which it was made up of mere theatrical machin-
ery and discussed no topics of serious importance to
the public, and that still future period during which it
will ascend to the revelation of permanent realities of
life.
27
Hamilton was not the only one who believed that the commercial theatre
was straying farther and farther from serious drama in an attempt to
retain its mass audience. The drumbeat had grown louder in the previous
decade as worried commentators signaled legitimate theatre's imminent
demise. Dorothy Chansky samples some fifteen articles published
between 1890 and 1923, concerned with the issue.
28
Such notable critics
as Montrose J. Moses ("The Disintegration of the Theatre") and Walter
Pritchard Eaton ("The Menace of the Movies") joined with t he more
prescriptive voices of men like Hiram Kelly Moderwell, Thomas
Dickinson, and Sheldon Cheney, all searching for the same strategy for
the salvation of an institution that they saw was in need of resuscita-
tion.29 Mark Hodin suggests that the major reorganization of theatre
called for during those early days was necessary to arrive at its uniquely
American voice. He remarks,
25
Ibid., 167.
26
Clayton Hamilton, "Building a Play Backwards," Bookman 38 (1913): 608.
27
Clayton Hamilton, Problems of the PlayJVright (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1917), 323.
28
Dorothy Chansky, Composing Ourselves: The little Theatre Movement and the
American Audience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 36.
29
Ibid., 72, 73, 75.
106 KENNICOTf
If one response to an increasingly unstable and multiple
turn-of-the-century cultural landscape was to cordon
off the territory of "high culture," as Lawrence Levine
and others have argued, then another, related Bourgeois
project involved appropriating working-class cultural
practices as forms of therapeutic revitalization.
30
As if in reaction to the call, Roi Cooper Megrue obligingly stepped into
the limelight.
Under Cover
Megrue's Under Cover opened the season on 26 August 1914.
Crook plays such as this one were then a popular dramatic genre. With
this play, one of Munsterberg's observations about the difference
between theatre and cinematic time sequence came to the fore.
Munsterberg had compared cinema's ability to rove backward and for-
ward in time to involuntary reveries and temporalities of the mind. In a
like manner, Megrue's play began the fourth (and final) act five minutes
before the events of the third act ended. In act 3 all the action is located
in the room of the main character, Steven Denby, up to his returning to
it, and all the scenes held downstairs continue, out of time sequence, in
act 4. The unifying feature was a clock striking three a.m. in both acts,
further emphasizing a dramaturgical fracturing of time. Since the over-
lapping action in both places was shown consecutively, the audience was
asked to negotiate in its own mind the juxtaposition of the appropriate
occurrences at the appropriate moments. Megrue manipulated time, pro-
longing his climax, essentially repeating it with different characters; jux-
taposing "there and then" in one act with "here and now" in another, and
managing to make them both resonate as "now."
Critics assessed Megrue's strengths as well-defined characters
and clever dialogue, but his plotting was critiqued as "lacking in ingenious
touches and highly illogical."
31
"The First Nighter" seemed unimpressed
that Megrue had grafted a complex time sequence onto an otherwise tra-
ditional "crook" play. Although "The First Nighter," recognized
Megrue's "cinematic" stage technique, the reviewer labeled it as a typical
cliff-hanger:
To what expedients the author is compelled to resort
appears from the fact that the last act is retroactive ...
30
Mark Hodin, "Legitimate Theater and the Making of Modern Drama"
(Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995), 63-64.
31
"The First Nighter," Ne11' York Dramatic Mirror, 2 September 1914, 8.
DISLOCATIONS 01' nME AND SPACE 107
just as in a novel when the author says, "We will now
return to our hero, whom, the kind reader will remem-
ber, we left hanging from the end of a broken bough by
the seat of his trousers."
32
The New York Times took a cynical view: "these adventures in dramatic
construction threaten soon to become so much the order of the day that
a performance like Mr. Megrue's will hardly deserve to be described in
terms of temerity."
33
Fashionable Vogue dismissed it as, "good of its kind,
and the kind may be defined, in the familiar phrase, as 'what the public
wants."'
34
drama:
But in his review of Under Cover, Clayton Hamilton defended the
There are two points in Under Cover which call for seri-
ous consideration from students of the technique of the
drama . ... After we have been shown what happened in
one room of a house during a certain period of five
minutes, we are shown what was happening in another
room of the house during the same period.
35
As to "locations to give the impression of simultaneity" in Megrue's con-
struction, Hamilton noted charitably, "there is no reason whatsoever why
the dramatist should not be permitted to turn back the clock whenever,
by so doing, he can heighten the dramatic interest of his story."
36
Film historian Tom Gunning posits a theory of cinematic dis-
course that not only serves to describe the evolution of narrative in cin-
ema but illuminates developments such as Megrue's on Broadway. The
theory has three parts: the pro-filmic, the enframed image, and the
process of editing. These three are necessary components of f.tlm lan-
32
Ibid.
33
"Smart Melodrama Splendidly Acted," New York Times, 27 August 1914, 11.
34
"Under Cover By Roi Cooper Megrue, Cort Theatre, New York," Vogue
(October 1914), Roi Cooper Megrue file, New York Public Library of the Performing
Arts, New York, New York.
35
For the second point, Hamilton groused that Megrue had "deliberately cho-
sen to violate the traditional maxim that a dramatist must never deceive his audience."
Megrue's central conceit, he noted, lay in Stephen Denby's identity as a jewel smuggler
when in reality (as we discover), he is part of the secret service. For Hamilton, the sec-
ond point was much more important. See "Chronological Sequence in the Drama,"
Bookman 40 (1914): 184.
36
Ibid.
108 KENNICOTJ
guage and together constitute what Gunning calls "narrative integration."
His categories are recognizable components of theatrical experience as
well: pro-fllmic elements include objects to be viewed, such as actors,
sets, lighting and props. The "enframed image," described as "an image,
filmed from a particular point of view, framed within the camera aperture
that geometrically defines the borders of the image,"
37
can be equated
with the proscenium arch with its elements of framing, perspective, and
distance. Finally, Gunning defines the process of editing that developed
between 1904 and 1913 as "the differences that can arise between the
temporality of events as presented in narrative discourse and their time
relations within the story being told."
38
In his construction, Megrue's sequencing is reminiscent of the
methods of ftlm director D. W Griffith, whose trademark became the
suspenseful use of parallel editing-achieving exactly the same result that
Megrue was trying for in his play. In 1914, as Under Cover came to
Broadway, the popularity of Griffith's "one-reelers" had reached a high
point. The technique had progressed in sophistication and complexity in
Griffith's hands, until, by 1913, "he developed a rudimentary rhythm in
his suspense sequences with shorter and shorter shots and cuts not only
from action to action- from the pursued to the pursuer to the rescuer-
but also from medium shots to long panorama shots to close-ups."
39
The
pioneering director's use of parallel editing served yet another purpose
related to Megrue: Griffith's technique functioned melodramatically to
extend and enhance suspense in two simultaneous locations.
An avid movie-goer and script-reader, Megrue could envision an
alternative that might not have occurred to someone less steeped in the
manners of the boulevard. Hampered by the inexorability of time and
space/ cause and effect that Munsterberg maintained was the raison d'etre
of all drama, Megrue solved his problem the only way he knew how: by
overlapping time to demonstrate crucial developments in plot. Megrue's
structuring places all the action in Denby's room up to his returning to it,
in act 3; then all the scenes taking place simultaneously are held down-
stairs in act 4. The unifying feature of the clock striking three a.m. in both
acts further emphasizes the fracturing of time. Since the action in both
places is shown, the audience mentally rearranged the appropriate occur-
rences into chronological order.
A synopsis of the final moments of act 3 and the first of act 4
follows: amateur sleuth Ethel enters Denby's room to search it and he
catches her in the act. Denby tosses the contested necklace out the win-
37
Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 19.
38
Ibid., 21 .
39
Robert Sklar, Movie Made America (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 54.
DISLOCATIONS 01' 1iME AND SPACE
109
Figure 1: (L toR) William Courtney, Lily Cahill, and De Witt C. Jennings in a
scene from Roy Cooper Megrue's play, "Under Cover," at the Cort Theatre.
From The Theatre Magai}ne, October 1914.
dow, setting off the burglar alarm. In the commotion, Denby accidental-
ly makes the pre-arranged signal that Ethel has the necklace. One of the
partygoers enters Denby's room and accuses him of stealing the necklace
as the others follow into the room. Denby convinces them that he is not
the crook, but abruptly runs out. End of act 3. Downstairs (act 4), the
houseguests are playing bridge when the necklace drops in front of the
window. They hear the burglar alarm. The guests head up to Denby's
room to see what the ruckus is all about, leaving Nora and Monty down-
stairs. In a short scene, the two declare their love and Monty proposes as
two inspectors pass by on their way upstairs. In a moment, everyone
reassembles downstairs talking excitedly about what they have just wit-
nessed. Denby, who had returned to his room after they left, comes down
accompanied by the two policemen.
As a representative of the new observer, Megrue wrote a play
that was emblematic of a new phase of theatrical innovation, when artists
began fitting cinema-like fragments into more conventional dramatic
construction. Under Cover ran for 349 performances before taking to the
road, where the second company traveled for a number of years to great
acclaim.
40
110 K.ENNJCOTI
Another Op'ning, Another Show
The young playwright did not have time to contemplate the con-
sequences of his innovations in Under Cover before the first play he ever
wrote opened on September 8, 1914. As a result of his connections at the
Marbury Agency, Megrue had entered into a fortunate collaboration with
the knowledgeable veteran Walter Hackett. The result, It Pegs to Advertise,
proved to be an extraordinarily popular farce about a young man who
turns his fortunes around through the power of advertising. Because
George M. Cohan produced the play as part of a package, Clayton
Hamilton labeled this joint enterprise as a product of "the Cohan for-
mula." Hamilton ticked off the formula's characteristics: it must treat of
success; feature "a hopeless failure" as the hero (but one who needs to
display the potential for success); and the hero must demonstrate his
cleverness through "some preposterously imaginative scheme," ultimate-
ly winning the girl and the keys to whatever fortune has been in dispute
all along.
The currency of Advertise stemmed in part from actual advertis-
ing statistics and recognizable sloganeering of real products: their subti-
tle for the comedy was ''A Farcical Fact in Three Acts." In his 1929 vol-
ume, Representative American Dramas, Montrose ]. Moses acknowledged
grudgingly: "there are many who have taken such a dramaturgic [farcical]
knack for what it is worth, and acknowledged its cleverness, its amusing
quality."
41
He considered it, at best, "avowedly a play constructed on the
model of its period," quoting at length from Walter Lippman:
The authors were not writing a play, but a panegyric
backed by all the faith of Broadway .... It pursues one
step further the magazine policy of surrounding reading
matter with publicity, and if the logic of the situation is
developed we shall have Bibles with the magazine adver-
tisements, sermons in which mention can be purchased
and schoolbooks garnished with Campbell's Soup.
42
An example from the play illustrates his accusation. In act 1 Peale tells a
doubting Rodney:
PEALE: If I say His Master's Voice, you know that
advertises a phonograph. You're on to what soap "It
40
Burns Mantle and Garrison P. Sherwood, eds., The Best Plqys of 1909-1919
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943), 529.
41
Moses, American Plqys, 330.
42
Ibid.
DISLOCATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE
floats" refers to. There's a Reason-Uneeda-Quaker
Oats- Phoebe Show-Children Cry for It . . . The
Watch that Made the Dollar Famous. I suppose you
don't know what any of them mean?
RODNEY: (amused) I know what they all mean.
43
111
Indeed, It PC!Js to Advertise was stylistically formulaic in the Cohan
tradition, but that did not prevent the New York Dramatic Mirror from
gushing that it was "[o]ne of the cleverest farces of years."
44
Here is the
plot in outline: Martin, a prosperous soap manufacturer, has an idler for
a son. Hoping to jog him into usefulness, the magnate makes a pact with
Mary Grayson, his stenographer, with whom his son, Rodney, is in love.
On a pretext, Martin says, he will throw Rodney out. Only when Rodney
has proven himself worthy will his father condone a wedding between
the two lovers. Rodney seeks the advice of his friend Ambrose Peale, a
theatrical press agent. The friends plan to go head to head with the old
man by introducing a new line of soap. They pour all their money
(anonymously supplied by Rodney's father) into beautiful offices and an
extensive ad campaign, leaving them with no capital to fund soap manu-
facture. When the orders roll in, they are forced to buy their product
from Rodney's father before managing to sell it at a higher price.
45
One quality setting the "farcical fact" play apart from other
comedies of 1914 was its clever use of curtain calls.
46
Advertise boasted a
series of act-ending scene-lets, at once reminiscent of the old staged
tableaus in melodramas, of vaudeville and also, the screen. Gerald
Bordman writes, "In some plays, these curtain calls were simply the usual
bows, but other plays, and It Pqys to Advertzse was one, employed them for
mini-scenes."
47
The influence of cinema can be felt in the execution of
these rapid "scene-lets," a series of fast curtains serving as cinematic
"quick cuts," suggesting Megrue's appropriation of the newest in cine-
matic techniques. Unlike other uses of its kind on the stage, these scenes
43
Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackert, It Pqys to Advertise (New York: Samuel
French, 1917), 28-29. Nowadays we may be hard pressed to remember these slogans, although
they remained current through the mid-twentieth century.
44
"It Pays to Advertise," New York Dramatic Mirror, 10 September 1914.
45
Adapted from my own synopsis in "Playing With Time: Cinematic Influences On
Broadway Plays 1900-1918" (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 2002), 202.
46
In the opening weeks of the 1914-15 season alone, in addition to Advertise, the
comedies Apartment 12-K, The Third Parry, Twin Beds, and The High Cost of l...tJving rolled out
in rapid succession ("Rise of the Curtain," Theatre 20, no. 163 (September 1914): 98-99.
47
Gerald Bordman, Amencan Theatre: A Chronicle of Comet[y and Drama, 1914-
1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8.
112 l<ENNJCOTI
were meant to be experienced as

Gunning relates that, at the same time Megrue was writing, over-
lapping cuts and analytical editing (exclusive of chase scenes or parallel
constructions) began to be used in feature films. Significantly, in the years
1912-1913 Griffith began to "break a single space into separate shots."
49
The resulting scenes, providing a larger cache of information with which
to read the action, promoted a new sense of participation in spectators.
But such cutting techniques accomplished another, unintended function.
Time slowed and splintered, as the necessary components of the scene
were shown one after another, in the space intended to be read as a con-
tinuous action.
A series of cuts that Griffith employed in his Biograph featurette
The Girl and Her Trust (1912) demonstrates this point. To depict the com-
plex action needed to stave off an assault on the heroine's locked door,
Griffith broke down the scene into a sequence that juxtaposed close-ups
against medium and long shots: Grace, the heroine (played by Dorothy
Bernard), has only a pair of scissors and a bullet but not a gun to defend
herself. In a close-up, she inserts a bullet into the keyhole where two ban-
dits are banging at the door. At the top of the sequence, a long shot
shows her backing away from the door in fear or indecision. Then she
finds a hammer, and with hammer and scissors, in close-up, she hits the
scissors against the bullet inserted into the keyhole with the hammer.
Reaction shot: nothing happens. From the rear, she raises the hammer,
and, in a cut to a side-angle medium close-up, she tries again. This time
she succeeds. A cut away to the startled bandits (and a puff of smoke)
reverts to the same medium close-up of the heroine inside, registering
relief.
Gunning names this series of shots "an analytical sequence"
combining "direct assault" (the close-up) with "linear narrative" (the rest
of the story), to accomplish an explanatory function separate from its
exposition.
50
Invoking Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage, he desig-
nates the entire sequence as the "cinema of attractions" that describes "a
unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in
itself."
51
Eisenstein had originally coined the term "Montage of
Attractions" to explicate a concept the revolutionary filmmaker
absorbed, in turn, from his mentor, Vsevolod Meyerhold. The great
Russian defmed an attraction, as "an independent and primary element in
the construction of a performance-a molecular (that is component)
48
''A series of cuts that CUT and/or DISSOLVE into one another to tell a
story within the story, or denote the passage of time, often without DIALOGUE." Ralph
Singleton, Film Dictionary (Beverly Hills, CA: Lone Eagle Press, 1986), 106.
49
Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 264.
50
Ibid., 265.
DTSLOCA110NS OF TiME AND SPACE 113
.-... .._ .. , --............ -..
1- 1': J IT f'.\ 1'" "' o\lniu;., <- J.()Yll HJV nr r_,n.l AI t$1 ('t'""' fti i Anr
Figure 2: (L to R) Grant Mitchell as Rodney Martin, Ruth Shepley as Mary Grayson in a
scene from "It Pays to Advertise" Now Being Presented at the Cohan Theatre.
From The Theatre Magazine, October 1914.
unit of effectiveness in theatre and of theatre in general."' Megrue and
Hackett's curtain calls functioned similarly to extend the time and the
world of the play: simultaneously to tell a joke and create a bridge of
anticipation toward the next act, all in the space of a minute. In like fash-
ion, Megrue and Hackett picked up a cinematic style of action offering
"quick takes" to enliven their play and make it, as Megrue insisted, "out
of what is going on around you."
53
51
Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator, and
the Avant-garde," in Earfy Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam
Barker (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 60.
52
Sergei Eisenstein, "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," in Film Form
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1949), 943.
53
Megrue, "Boy with Two Plays," 276.
114
KENNI COTI
To illustrate, the first act of It Pqys to Advertise ends with fast sec-
ond and third curtains. The two scenes depict Peale and Rodney making
a start-up deal based on their advertising. The act ends first with Rodney
extolling the benefits of advertising to his father:
RODNEY: ... Think what advertising means: the
power of suggestion-the psychology of print. Why, 97
percent of the public believe what they're told, and what
they're told is what the other chaps have been told, and
the fellow who told him read it somewhere . . . .
54
As the curtain begins to fall, he finishes his diatribe. Then quickly, the
second curtain opens.
(The second curtain-PEALE and RODNEY on either side
of MARTIN, are talking advertising, while MARY has her
fingers in her ears);
followed by a third curtain,
(MARTIN is protesting angri!J to MARY, while RODNEY
and PEALE are talking gleiful!J to each other and shaking
hands).
55
In the second act, the final moments portray the three simultaneously
phoning soap manufacturers on three phones situated in three separate
spaces, as a series of curtains fall. In between, the three have the follow-
ing mini-scene together, before returning to their simultaneous phone
calls.
RODNEY (Holding wire): It'll have to be Old Rose.
PEALE: Castile is the cheapest.
MARY: Order small cakes.
RODNEY: Hello, this is Martin Soap Company-we
want to get some soap-pink castile- small cakes--40
or 50,000 ....
56
From these cinematic articulations I have come to think of the
fragments, shards, and time shifts found in Roi Cooper Megrue's early
54
Megrue and Hackett, It Ptrys to Advertise, 48.
55
Ibid., 49.
56
Ibid., 87.
DISLOCATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE 115
plays as models of a "dramaturgy of attractions"-examples of a sort of
grandstanding effect existing within the text, not just the performance.
Unlike a theatre auteur such as Meyerhold fashioning his attraction out of
the components of stagecraft, the playwright deploying a dramaturgy of
attractions finds his power in the crafting of the script. When an attrac-
tion becomes identified as cinematic, it sheds its performative aspect in
favor of the dialectic of disparate elements, as Gunning points out. The
renderings of attractions (in Under Cover, a displacement of time; in It Pegs
to Advertise, a displacement of space) follow Gunning's theories, to which
I would add the observation that the innovations of both plays emanate
from the fabric of the work rather than having been super-imposed upon
the material.
Megrue went on to complete fourteen plays, most of which had
decent runs on Broadway. However, he never repeated his early experi-
ments in time and space, whether at the end of acts, as in It Pqys to
Advertise, or within the structure of the play, as with Under Cover. His
experiments signaled only the beginning for a succession of cinematic
hybrids having varied life-spans on Broadway stages.
The pressures on dramatic formation had begun with photo-
graphic imagery, normalizing desire in audiences with less linear and
more emotive structures. Throughout the 'teens, Broadway was home to
an asynchronous progression interweaving threads of popular culture
with the well-made play in ever more extraordinary combinations.
57
Suffice it to say, Broadway realized only isolated attractions that accented
unique elements over integrated plotting. These relics reveal a progressive
release from the strictures of the well-made formula that helped pave the
way for American expressionism.
Since communication between Germany, in particular, and the
United States came to a stand-still in the lead-up to World-War I, it is
notable that the experiments in form that I have described managed to
progress without outside interference.
58
Julia Walker also takes up ques-
tions of fragmented dramaturgy and argues for a home-grown form of
expressionism based on the theories of expressive culture figure, S.S.
Curry. Using this lens, she, too, concludes that American expressionism
found its voice quite separately from its European counterpart. Walker
explains that, in order to reach "authentic self-expression," Curry formu-
57
Besides the aforementioned The Alien and Battle Cry that were film hybrids
(see note 5), plays endeavoring to depict the past and present simultaneously began to
appear with greater frequency. They include: The Bi.g Idea (1914), Yes and No (1917), Forever
After; and The Unkno11111 Purple (both 1918).
58
Mardi Valgamae records that, although the first German Expressionist play
may be dated from 1908, few examples of the genre were produced in America before
the 1920s (Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the A merican Drama of the 1920s [Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Universiry Press, 1972], 3).
116 I<ENNICOTI
lated the concept "three languages" of the body, described as "verbal (the
conventionalized symbols of language), vocal (e.g., tone-color, rhythm,
and inflection, which register emotion), and pantomimic (gesture and
bodily comportment)."
59
Curry's aim was to achieve a unification within
the individual through these modes of expression. However, Walker
writes, "What the so-called expressionists did was effect an ingenious
solution to this dilemma by borrowing Curry's three languages but coun-
terpointing rather than coordinating them to express the spiritual dishar-
mony of their artist-figure alter-egos."
60
Rather than coming exclusively
from European and expressionist influences, as has been commonly
understood, then, I have suggested, and Walker in a separate way has
borne out, that structures much closer to home helped influence
America's emerging narrative techniques.
One Hundred Years Later ...
The advent of new perceptions and responses from theatre
practitioners coalesced in Broadway's 1914-15 season in the work of a lit-
tle-known playwright, Roi Cooper Megrue, who served as the bellwether
for isolated cinematically-influenced experiments continuing sporadically
on Broadway until the twenties. That some of these were singular
achievements does not negate their increasing frequency and impact.
Walker contends, "cultures also develop out of a dialectic engagement
with failed ideas-those ideas that are disproved, disparaged, and dis-
missed from the dominant culture but whose negation gives shape to
subsequent patterns of thought."
61
Most of the "gimmicks" during the
early decades were dead ends that nonetheless gathered momentum,
merging, exploding, and reorganizing ultimately yielding the cinematic
immersion in theatrical form we see today. Reactions from the new audi-
ence were instrumental in this phase of theatrical innovation, when
artists began fitting 11m-like fragments into integrative drama to initiate
the "dramaturgy of attractions." Cinematic features grew ever more
embedded in traditional structures, until, finally, the American expres-
sionism took dramaturgy another step by institutionalizing the interplay
between past, present and future within structures that centered less on
plot and more with the human struggle against an increasingly imper-
sonal world.
62
In the intervening hundred years, the pervasiveness of mass
media has grown to monolithic proportions and we see that D.W
59
Julia Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 68-69. Her expressionist playwrights include Elmer
Rice, Eugene O'Neill, John Howard Lawson, and Sophie TreadweU.
60
Ibid., 120.
61
Ibid., 3.
DISLOCATIONS OF TlME AND SPACE 117
Griffith, whose search for a new visual vocabulary made such an impact,
was wrong in his assessment of theatre in the future. Blau, Crary, and
Auslander have each traced threads in the evolution of physical, mental
and psychological shifts in perception over time. Crary writes, "As numer-
ous critics have suggested, film became a validation for the authenticity
of the perceptual disorientations that increasingly constituted social and
selective experience."
63
Blau focuses upon the divide between observer
and stage. His theory points to an attentive self. ''As for the question of
meaning in the theater," Blau writes, "it resides ... in the field of percep-
tion between the thing seen or being-seen and the articulation or abrasion
of perception by the observer of the scene."
64
As a result of audience self-
awareness, he notes, efforts to overcome the formal divide between audi-
ence and performer instead "opens up a new disjuncture ... that neces-
sitates a new spectatorial negotiation"
65
Auslander expands on Blau's
conception: "the experience of theatre (of live performance generally, I
would say) provokes our desire for community but cannot satisfy that
desire because performance is founded on difference, on separation and
fragmentation, not unity."
66
All three are responding to the perceptual cri-
sis caused by the dislocation of time and space precipitated by human
relationships with fleeting images. Their unique perspectives converge to
verify the shift made so clear in the "Mediatized/UnMediatized" experi-
ment that I performed.
Now that this clear demarcation in modes of seeing between
film (and now the "three screens"-computers, i-pods and television)
and theatre has been identified, we have reached a new crossroads.
Examining the entertainment that appealed to public perceptions in
1914, therefore, is instructive in understanding our contemporary, inter-
active spectators with their emphasis on the manipulation of images as
well as outcomes. How will the theatre ultimately respond to streaming
video, pod-casting, internet file sharing and My Space? Marshall
McLuhan's explanations of the influence of media defy time, moving
backward into the nineteenth century and forward to our own period.
McLuhan, himself, put it succinctly: ''A new medium is never an addition
to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to
62
See Walker's four characteristics of American expressionism (Ibid., 120).
63
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 345.
64
Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1990), 26.
65
Ibid., 18.
66
Auslander, Liveness, 57.
118 I<ENNICOTI
oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for
them."
67
Following his idea, Auslander finds,
[M]y view of cultural economy holds that at any given
historical moment, there are dominant forms that enjoy
much greater cultural presence, prestige and power than
other forms. Nondominant forms will tend to become
more like the dominant ones but not the other way
around.
68
He goes on to warn that the generational issues surrounding "the rela-
tionship between the live and the mediatized is a volatile question subject
to change over time."
69
This conclusion seems to draw on McLuhan's
assertion that "media, by altering the environment, evoke in us their
unique ratios of sensed perceptions. The extension of any one sense
alters the way we think and act-the way we perceive the world."
70
The theatrical events of 1914 reassure that our present efforts to
negotiate between screen and-to use Auslander's term-"Liveness,"
will eventually lead us to recognize new forms and modes of seeing. How
to bridge the divide between mediatized and unmediatized remains
beyond our grasp as yet. But our awareness of the technical dominance
of electronic media, our attention to an even newer category of specta-
tor, and an understanding of shifts in perception between media will
ensure there is a vibrant, new era for the art of theatre that has survived
for the past three thousand years, despite the death knell by critics since
the advent of fJ.l.m. Paul Levinson observes, "[E)very medium is like a
Chinese box or a nesting doll-a medium within a medium, going back
to thought itself-and when we experience any given medium, we hear
the voices, see the faces, feel the breath, of all the media that have come
before."
71
Grassroots efforts to create a new theatrical landscape (on i-
pods, in animation and within programs like Real uje) currently abound
with youthful energy as a new generation experiments in the shifting per-
ceptual landscape. When the dust settles, we may well find that, rather
than leading away, dislocations of time and space will return us to the
heart of it all-our own human condition.
67
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:
New American Library, 1966), 62.
68 Auslander, Liveness, 162.
69 Ibid.
70 McLuhan, Medium, 41.
71 Levinson, Digital Mcuhan, 109.
CONTRIBUTORS
RoBIN BERNSTEIN is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and
Sexuality and of History and Literature at Harvard University. The edi-
tor of Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press,
2006), she has published articles on Lorraine Hansberry and Anna
Deavere Smith in Modern Drama and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and
Criticism, respectively. She is currently writing a book that uses perform-
ance theory to argue that cultural constructions of childhood played a
key role in U.S. racial formation from the mid-nineteenth through the
early twentieth century.
GARRETT EISLER is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre at the Graduate Center
of the City University of New York. He holds an M.A. in English from
New York University, an M.F.A. in Directing from Boston University, and
has served as a professional literary manager in regional theatre. He has
published in Studies in Musical Theatre and is editing a forthcoming volume
of the Dictionary of Literary Biograpf?y on Twentieth-Century American
dramatists. His theatre and book reviews have appeared in Theatre Journal
and Theatre Survey, as well as The Village Voice and Time Out New York. He
also writes on contemporary theatre for his blog The Plt!jgoer (http:/ I play-
goerblogspot.com).
BRIAN HALLSTOOS is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the
University of Iowa. His dissertation focuses on a passion play by Willa
Saunders Jones- what it reveals about gender and racial politics in early
twentieth-century Chicago and the links between black sacred music and
drama. He has four biographical entries (including one on Jones) slated
for publication in the forthcoming African American National Biograpf!J
(Oxford University Press). He has an M.A. in Art History from Rutgers
University.
LEIGH KENNICOTT presently teaches at California State University,
Northridge and the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California.
She received her Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado in
2002. Before returning to the university, she worked in fllm and televi-
sion for many years, notably in Current Television at ABC and for Miller-
Boyett Productions at Warner Brothers. She has written, directed, and
produced two films: the short Rubber Gloves and the documentary
Streakin'.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
THE HEIRS OF
MOLIERE
FOUR FRENCH COMEDIES 01' THE
17tH AND 18TH CENTURIES
@ Rega<ud: TheAhoent-.Mlncled Lover
@ Deotouchec: TheCc..ceited Count
@ I.... O...uoOe: Thel'o.oh1oaa!Xe Prejudice
@ r....'I'L The l'r!ead oi the r.... ...
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
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In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that
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CAn
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This volume contains four of
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"Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and
brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined 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
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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
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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, Ionesco, 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:
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 Al-Hakim,
& Dalia Basiouny
This volume contains four plays based on the
Oedipus legend by four leading dramatists of the
Arab world: Tawfiq Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali
Ahmad Bakathir's The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali
Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus, and Walid
L - - - - - - - - - - - ~ ~ ~ ~ _ . Ikblasi's Oedipus.
The volume also includes Al-Hakim's preface to bis 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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A utr.-. 1' l.-.. 1 ,,.., t' rot l: .-.:.-.
" I),._,, 11. t lf LI!Wflh Ua\M\. llh ." 1r:
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-
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Zeami and the No Theatre in the World, edited by Benito Ortolani and Samuel
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Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus contains translations of four plays
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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
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Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive cata-
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