THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 14, Number 1 Winter 2002

Editor: Vera Mowry Roberts Co-Editor: Jane Bowers Managing Editor: Kimberly Pritchard Editorial Assistant: Melissa Gaspar Circulation Manager: Jill Stevenson Circulation Assistant: Jenna Soleo

Edwin Wilson, Executive Director James Patrick, Director Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Editorial Board Ruby Cohn Bruce A. McConachie Don B. Wilmeth Margaret Wilkerson Robert Vorlicky

The journal of American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions . Our aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre, and to encourage a more enlightened understanding of our literary and theatrical heritage. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes (rather than endnotes) . Hard copies should be submitted in duplicate. We request that articles be submitted on disk as well (3 .5" floppy), using WordPerfect for Windows or Microsoft Word format. Submissions will not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Please allow three to four months for a decision. Our distinguished Editorial Board will constitute the jury of selection. Address editorial inquiries and manuscript submissions to the Editors, jADT/Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 1 00164309 . Our e-mail address is: mestc@gc.cuny.edu
Please visit our web site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc Martin E. Segal Theatre Center publications are supported by generous grants from the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Copyright 2002

The journal of American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1 044- 93 7X) is a member of CELJ and is published three times a year, in the Winter, Spring, and Fall. Subscriptions are $12 .00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an additional $6.00 for postage. Inquire of Circulation Manager/Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016- 4309.

THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Contents

DAVID SAVRAN,

Rent's Due: Multiculturalism and the Spectacle of Difference

BRANDl WILKINS CATANESE,

15

"And the Rest is La History": Autobiographical Strategies in The Colored Museum

HEATHER

5.

NATHANS,

29

Trampling Native Genius : John Murdock versus The Chestnut Street Theatre

RAY SCHULTZ,

44

When the "A" Word Is Never Spoken: Fear of Intimacy and AIDS in Lanford Wilson's Burn This

MARVIN McALLISTER,

64

Bob Cole's Willie Wayside: Whiteface Hobo, Middle-Class Farmer, White Trash Hero

CONTRIBUTORS

78

journal of American Drama and Theatre 14 (Winter 2002)

RENrS DUE: MULTICULTURALISM AND THE SPECTACLE OF DIFFERENCE

DAVID SAVRAN

During the last decade of the 2oth century, multiculturalism became the watchcry of liberal pluralist orthodoxy in the United States. Book and record stores, university classrooms, museums, cinemas, and theatres became the privileged sites to shop for cultural productions by and/or about the assorted hyphenated identities that are supposed to coalesce felicitously under the sign "America." A new, antiassimilationist model of cultural pluralism, multiculturalism has been imagined to provide understanding of the marginalized and abject ones who historically have been excluded from literary canons and denied the promises of upward mobility. This paradigm, however, was by no means an invention of the 1990s. It began to coalesce in the United States some two decades earlier, after the heyday of decolonization abroad and the rise of cultural nationalisms at home. Arising in the wake of the 1973-74 world- wide recession that ended the post-World War II economic boom and stranded much of the working class, it represents the adaptation of an almost infinitely pliant American brand of individualism to a post- welfare state economy. Paying scant attention to the contemporaneous triumph of the socalled free market, the rule of regressive taxation, and the relentless upward redistribution of wealth, it tends to promote a rhetoric of diversity, pluralism, and moderation rather than agitate for the radical changes in economic policy that might in fact produce a more equitable and less segregated society (on the bases of race and social class). Reformist in method, it endeavors to fine tune the status quo while at the same time acknowledging-and celebrating-the diversity of American culture. For the multiculturalist, America is less a melting pot than a smorgasbord. He or she takes pride in the ability to consume cultural difference-now understood as a commodity, a source of boundless pleasure, an expression of an exoticized Other. The access to so-called minority cultures that multiculturalism provides is, however, little more than consumerist. Despite its many well-intentioned champions and its vaguely oppositional posture in relation to the conservative hegemony of the 1 990s, this cultural pluralism has developed into yet another way to flatten out (and sometimes misrepresent) a multiplicity of differences by, for example, equating the oppression of sexual minorities with that of racial minorities. It also contributes handily to the massive undertheorization of the category "class," which tends to be added to the multicultural

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recipe-race, gender, sexuality- mechanically and carelessly. The reluctance to address economic relations in the analysis of racial and gender inequalities at home is echoed by a similar reluctance, in the name of globalization, to address the iniquitous international divisions of labor and the increasing immiseration of the Third World. For the discourses of both multiculturalism and globalization represent the victory of image over substance, triumphalist cliche over close analysis. As James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer note, one of the defining events of the post- Cold War era "is the corruption of political language, the obfuscation of capitalism as it presently exists through the use of euphemisms and concepts that have little relationship to the social and political realities they purport to discuss."l Whether on a national or international scale, then, both paradigms could be considered an effect of what Hazel Carby describes so suggestively as "the ideology of equality in the supermarket," that ideology that conceals the dynamics of capital accumulation by rendering invisible certain important inequalities: those who cannot afford fresh fruit and vegetables appear to choose not to eat them ; the limited purchases demanded by food stamp allowances dictate diet; and the relations of exploitation and dependency between the metropolitan nations and the so-called "Third World" are hidden in the large display of bananas imported from Central America courtesy of a corporate entity more powerful than many small nations, the United Fruit Company.2 Because it requires an ostensibly free agent, multiculturalism (along with its global counterpart) reconstructs and renovates a subject who appears to be able to choose freely. Because it celebrates diversity, it is preoccupied with advertising the visible markers of difference and aims to populate visual representations of all kinds with a happy assortment of black, brown, red, yellow, and white faces. Multiculturalism, in short, uses spectacle- and the spectacularization of difference- to mask divisions of labor, relations of production , and distributions of wealth. The spectacle of difference that multiculturalism produces thus aids and abets capital by allowing it to conceal or belie the gross inequities in the United States and the world beyond. The more effective the concealment, the more certain it is that the multiculturalist consumer will become (if only inadvertently) the new, passive racist described by Carby who uses "texts"- whether
1 James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century (London: Zed Books, 2001 ), 61 .

2 Hazel Carby, "The Canon : Civil War and Reconstruction," in

Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (London : Verso, 1999), 239.

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literary, musical, visual, cinematic, televisual, or theatrical - as "a way of gaining knowledge of the 'other,' a knowledge that appears to replace the desire to challenge existing frameworks of segregation."3 The triumph of multiculturalism in the United States during the 1990s could be observed in a great many cultural phenomena: in the popularity of hip- hop and novels by African- American women, the veneration of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods , Madonna' s appropriation of gay black and Latino performance, the success of Will & Grace and In and Out, the critical and popular acclaim accorded Philadelphia and Boyz 'n ' the Hood, and even the vogue for pan-Asian, pan- Latino fusion cuisines. Although many examples come to mind in the American theatre, from Angels in America to Ragtime, one production stands out, I believe, as the epitome of multiculturalism, in all its deceptive charm. I am referring of course to Jonathan Larson's Rent, the most successful new musical or play of the decade. As a multicultural extravaganza, Rent takes a promiscuous pleasure in mixing races, sexualities, and a rainbow of genders by bringing together all those persons that give social conservatives the heebeejeebees: "faggots, lezzies, dykes , cross dressers," junkies , anarchists, the homeless, people with AIDS, and artists of all stripes.4 Practicing racial and cultural miscegenation, it translates La Boheme into a kind of "Lower East Side Story," mixing high and low more aggressively than any other play of the 1990s, turning the frail Mimi into a Latina S/ Mclub stripper and junkie, the musician Schaunard into a Latino transvestite who dies of AIDS, roasted chestnuts into heroin and Ecstasy, and "Musetta's Waltz" into a few feverish guitar licks . Unlike Puccini's opera, which does not take on explicitly political issues, Larson's first act ends with a celebration of a kind of multicultural anarchism, "going against the grain," of "Revolution, . . . / Forcing changes, risk, and danger," of 'Tear[ing] down the wall" (1: 23) . When Rent opened at the 1 50- seat New York Theatre Workshop in February 1996- two weeks after the sudden and ill-timed death of its author- it at once became, in Peter Marks's words, "the story of the theater season, a surprise triumph in an industry short on sensations ."S The small, nonprofit theatre reopened the play on Broadway in April to "a tornado of hype" and generally ecstatic reviews, bagging the triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the 3 Hazel Carby, "The Multicultural Wars," in Gina Dent, ed., Black Popular Culture, a project by Michele Wallace (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 197.
4 jonathan Larson, Rent libretto, Dreamworks compact discs DSMD2 - S0003, 1: 23 . Because there are no page numbers, I identify the source of lyrics by citing act and song number. All further references will be noted in the text.

s Peter Marks, "Looking on Broadway for a Bohemian Home," New York Times, February 26, 1996, C9.

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New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.6 Four months later, the two- CD recording "entered the Billboard Top 200 album chart at number 19, the highest Broadway cast album debut in more than a decade" and "went gold" by the "end of the year."7 The musical spawned a Newsweek cover story, a Bloomingdale's boutique, and a doubledecker bus New York Apple Tour of the East Village that provided tourists with the chance to see real bohemians and junkies . As was repeatedly pointed out, "the easy intercourse (social even more than sexual) among characters with variegated and flamboyant predilections" clearly struck a nerve in the multiculturally- literate youth market, holding out the promise of bringing the theatre back to life by attracting "a new" and much younger "audience to Broadway and thereby stak[ing] a claim to [Broadway] for a new generation."8 Rent's multicultural mixing is as conspicuous in its form as in its dramatis personae. For the musical seems especially to want to foist itself off as a naughty jumble of elite and popular cultures guaranteed to thrill audiences that can appreciate its slightly blasphemous appropriation of Puccini. And despite the fact that its appeal across generations and classes is predicated on the deterioration of the cultural hierarchy that was firmly in place until the 1960s, Rent still stakes a claim to certain styles and cultural tropes associated with what little remains of high culture. On the one hand, the piece appropriates the plot and characters of what continues to epitomize old- fashioned, high culture: opera. On the other hand, it also cops a hipper- than-thou attitude, recycling the forms, technologies, and conventions of new media and performance; taking up for its guiding philosophy a kind of watered- down, generic existentialism ("There is no future/There is no past/1 live this moment/ As my last," 1: 1 5); and exploiting the chic of "anything taboo," particularly when it is embodied by a sexual avant- garde that comes in all colors and flavors (1 :23). At the same time, Rent is unabashedly populist in its use of an extremely eclectic musical style best described as commercial, corporate rock with touches of rhythm and blues, house music, techno, and club. For there is no question but that its particular mixture of high and low, of avant- gardist and vernacular, is in large part responsible for its great appeal to a youth culture Bruce Weber dubs the "hopefully hip."9 Rent's triumph as the multicultural extravaganza, its difference 6 John Simon, Review of Rent, New York, 13 May 1996, 250. 7Jonathan Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by Evelyn McDonnell and Katherine Silberger (New York: William Morrow, 1 997), 135. 8 Bruce Weber, "Renewing the Lease on the Innocence of Youth," New York Times, 18 August 2000, E2; Marks, "Looking on Broadway for a Bohemian Home," Cl1. 9 Weber, "Renewing the Lease on the Innocence of Youth," E2.

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from more conventional Broadway mus icals of the period (like Phantom of the Opera or Crazy for You), lies in its claim to a kind of gritty authenticity. For the piece unquestionably looks back to and tries to revive the project of the first avant- garde- the bohemians of Puccini's era- so intent on defying both aestheticism and the commodification of the artwork by "reintegrat[ing] art," as Peter Burger famously ex plains, "in the praxis of life."10 La Boheme, for this reason, provides an especially apt scaffold for Larson 's neo- avant- gardist design. Yet at the same time, Rent is very obviously a product of a society in which all cultural productions are widely acknowledged to be always already commodified. Like its 1969- and even then neo- avant- gardist predecessor, Hair- Rent is clearly aware of its status as art object but quite unlike the far more political Hair, Rent uses a calculated reflexivity to pass itself off as a relatively elitist, theory- conscious , postmodernist representation . The actors conspicuously sport headset microphones and, as in most musicals, perform unabashedly for the theatre audience. The staging tends toward the emblematic and presentational. Mark, a documentary filmmaker who is in fact filming a part of the action that he screen s in the second act (shades of MTV' s pioneering series , Real World), is foregrounded as the play' s raisonneur and "witness" (2 : 11). And the musical clearly spotlights Maureen's performance art at a pivotal moment in the unfolding of the plot. It is, after all, the spark for the riot and the text that Mimi recalls when she magically comes back from the "tunnel" of death (2 : 17). Like a selfconsciously Baudrillardian simulacrum, Rent flaunts its status as endlessly self- reflexive re-presentation . Rent's awareness of itself as text is not, however, the relatively guilt- free and delighted celebration that characterizes so much art classified as postmodernist. Rather, its self- awareness is the cause of considerable pain and anxiety because it is continually linked- both in the musical itself and in the discourse surrounding the production- to the problematics of selling out. This anx iety clearly distinguishes it from the mass culture that surrounds it in which, john Seabrook points out, "concepts like 'going commercial' and ' selling out' became empty phrases."11 Mark's only real inner conflict is his ambivalence about selling his footage of the riot to and working for Alexi Darling who, like an information- age Mephistopheles, tempts him to "sell us your soul" (2 : 8) . In the end he refuses to work for her, despite his admission (in one of Larson's many flat-footed lyrics): "So I own not a notion/1 escape and ape content" (2 : 13). Maureen is chided by joanne for wanting an agent, "That's selling out" (2 : 4), while Benny is ridiculed by all for his attempt to unite art and commerce and for having lost "the

10 Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant- Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 22. 11 John Seabrook, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture (New York: Knopf, 2000), 69.

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ideals he once pursued" (1: 11 ). Most tellingly, Mark is denounced by the Blanket Person he attempts to film for being a "bleeding heart cameraman ... /Just trying to use me to kill his guilt" (l: 17). Rent's commitment to multiculturalism does not quite have the feel-good cast of "global village" television commercials. Rather, all the members of the production team suffered considerable anxiety over the play's purported authenticity. They were especially eager that Rent not be seen to exploit and commodify the experiences of persons who, by any measure, must be numbered among the abject. They were very nervous, for example, that the musical present an "honest" picture of the homeless rather than an "insulting" "chorus of cute homeless people."12 Michael Greif, the director, was particularly concerned that Rent maintain the precarious balance that characterizes virtually all illustrations of cultural pluralism: "I think the issue has always been preserving authenticity and preserving real integrity in the way we present these characters, and also presenting them in ways that make them very identifiable and sympathetic and human."13 He goes on to explain that his casting choices were decisive in constructing the mystique of authenticity that makes Rent unique among contemporary musicals: I thought that we really needed some sort of kooky, authentic folks to pull it off, to teach me and Jonathan things. I wanted to see how the real thing responded to the material. And we learned that those authentic presences really, really, really made it exciting. The audience could tell the difference between someone who'd lived in that world and someone who hadn't. One of the reasons we all loved Daphne [Rubin-Vega] so much is that she found a way to seem like she really lived in that world - not in the world of musical theater, but in the world of Rent.14 On the one hand, Greif's concept requires "kooky, authentic folks," these "authentic presences" whose uniqueness is founded on their experience living in "that world ." For like the identity politics to which it is obviously indebted, his discourse fetishizes personal experience as the defining characteristic of "the real thing." Despite the irreducibly personal, unique, and incommunicable quality of experience, however, Greif fantasizes that this "thing" possesses an almost magical power to 12 Michael Yearby and Jim Nicola, quoted in Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by McDonnell and Silberger, 40, 23. 13 Quoted in Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by McDonnell and Silberger, 25.
14 Quoted in Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by McDonnell and Silberger, 26.

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bring "the material" to life, to give it that unmistakable aura of authenticity that is antithetical to "the world of musical theater" but that presumably characterizes the urban folk culture of the East Village. For he imagines that Rent must be the result of a necrophiliac intercourse between "the real thing" and "the material," between the agents of pure experience and that dead simulacrum that is the text. But "the real thing" (like the transcendental signifier o r God Himself) by definition defies and exceeds representation-it does not show itself, it merely is. So to re - present it is always already to have turned it into something else: a play, an image, a fake , the "virtual life" that Maureen finds so repugnant (1 : 22). The impossibility of pure presence does not stop Greif from using an exorbitance of "really"s to try to coax it into existence, but it does guarantee that the musical can be no more than a failed representation of that which by definition can never be represented . And it doesn't take a deconstructionist to spot a $3 bill. Howard Kissel described the play as being "full of phoniness ."l 5 In order to realize Rent's multicultural aspirations, Greif and the producers made several important decisions. Although the cast of the first NYTW reading had been "nearly all - white," it became "increasingly racially diverse" as the play neared production.l6 Greif may not admit it, but his singling out of Rubin - Vega betrays an unspoken assumption on the part of the production team that persons of color- who play five of the eight major roles- give the musical the aura of "kooky" authenticity it so desperately needs. For like South Pacific or The King and I, Rent uses persons of color to turn what would otherwise be just another Broadway commodity into "the real thing." And while there is no question but that Rent remains, in Jesse L. Martin's words, a "minority heaven" in a musical theatre that offers few roles to persons of color except in so-called black musicals, it also clearly needs persons of color to give it the "exoticness" that Greif finds so alluring .l7 On the one hand, it is arguably salutary for Broadway to provide a home for a long - running musical with a largely non- white cast which is not in fact about race. On the other hand, Rent (unlike South Pacific) completely sidesteps issues of racial discrimination, using its persons of color to provide a middle- class, "not exactly rainbow- colored" audience with an exotic, multicultural experience guaranteed to make it feel liberal and hip.l8 And while it clearly attempts to break with certain forms of racial stereotyping (by casting

15 Howard Kissel, "Rent Comes Due on Broadway" in National Theatre Critics' Reviews 56, no. 20 (1996) : 249. 16 Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by McDonnell and Silberger, 3 5. 17 Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by McDonnell and Silberger, 35, 26. 18 Weber, "Renewing the Lease on the Innocence of Youth," E2.

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Benny, for example, the "yuppie scum," as an African American), it also manages all- too- neatly to portray the two Latino characters, Mimi and Angel, as updated tragic mulattas (2 : 12). And in the case of Angel , his tragic and exotic status is made all the more vivid by positioning him between races and, as a drag queen, between genders as well.19 Moreover, although it was written during a period when hip- hop had become the most popular music form in the United States, Rent remains as white as South Pacific in its musical pedigree and, with the exception of Angel's house music inspired "Today 4 U," virtually ignores the unprecedented richness of both African-American and Latino musical forms . Rent's exploitation of racial minorities is echoed by its exploitation of sexual minorities. Five of the eight leads are coded as queer: two lesbians, two gay men, and, in the case of Mimi, a sex worker in an S/ M club. And while (to Larson's credit) the representations may not be obviously homophobic, they function, even more distinctly than the portrayals of racial minorities (because more premeditatedly) as the sign of a certain multicultural chic that gives the musical an air of transgression and danger. Celebrating what Greif calls "queer life"- along with "Bisexuals, trisexuals, " and other perverts- the musical takes a positive delight in letting the characters (as they did in Hair) sing out in chorus the glory of "sodomy" and "S & M" (1 : 23).20 Nonetheless, the central romantic couple in the piece remains heterosexual as does Mark, the raisonneur. Perhaps the most disturbing change that larson effects in his rewriting of La Boheme, and the one that most betrays its multicultural pretensions, is his transformation of the economic plight in which the characters find themselves . As Howard Kissel emphasizes, "Puccini's bohemians are genuinely destitute . Several of Larson's have wealthy parents eager to help them out."21 Most are well- educated and have marketable skills . But almost as if larson were usurping the rhetoric of the religious right that regards homosexuality as a choice, his musical takes up the kind of lifestyle politics that became so popularized during the multicultural 1990s and that regards one's associations, pleasures, and purchases as volitional. Roger may be despondent at the beginning of the musical, but he considers his indigent "life" and that of his cohort to be something "that we've 19 Although transgender was becoming an increasingly important identity (and site of subversion) during the mid 1990s, the play and the production team unequivocally imagine Angel as a gay man and transvestite. See Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by McDonnell and Silberger, 21. 20 Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by McDonnell and Silberger, 25 . 21 Ki ssel, "Rent Comes Due on Broadway," 249.

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chosen" (1: 4). And later Mimi assures him when inviting him out to a club, "We don't need any money/1 always get in for free" (1: 14). For these new bohemians are all committed to a kind of guerrilla warfare against bourgeois culture. All the leading characters (except Benny) can retain and fortify their outlaw status only by foregoing economic success (that is why Mark must refuse Alexi Darling's offer to sell out) . And although HIV status is not (to Larson's credit) regarded as volitional, most of the protagonists are in the enviable position of being able to exploit poverty for the cultural chic it supplies them. A kind of conspicuous impoverishment thus becomes, as Kissel notes, "a merchandising handle," both in the play itself and in its promotion and marketing . After Rent's brief but sensational run at NYTW, its designers commandeered the Nederlander Theatre, which had long been dark, and, in John Simon's words, "tarted [it] up inside and out with countercultural, grunge chic" to look like an East Village dive.22 Brantley correctly identifies this makeover as "the stuff of theater-as-theme park" that provides some carefully staged and controlled sex and grittiness in a renovated, sanitized, desexed, tourist- friendly, Disneyized Times Square-courtesy of Mayor Giuliani. And this version of environmental theatre for an unapologetically consumerist and voyeuristic audience has become an increasingly prevalent phenomenon as Broadway has become more and more expensive and the movies (with which Broadway must compete) have developed ever more sophisticated technologies to envelop the spectator in digitalized sound and light. The immersion ritual that Rent subjects spectators to can also be seen as an updated version of the so- called poverty balls of the Gilded Age that gave the wealthy the opportunity to indulge their appetite for abjection for a few hours by masquerading as the poor. And one San Francisco hotel gives theatre lovers a chance to relive a poverty ball for days at a time. The Hotel Triton offers a "Room for Rent," designed by the play's Assistant Set Designer, that features all of Rent's '"tacky chic"' furnishings and set pieces as well as a "private bar" that sells "CO's, temporary tattoos, stationary, and T-shirts." Meanwhile, the closet-and where would a Rent-head be without one?-is stocked with "three costumes from the show" that allow the eager fan to try on one of the roles in the privacy of his or her hotel suite or simply prance about in "Angel's Santa suit" or "Roger's shirt."23 And all for only $299 per night! Rent's success testifies not only to the disruption of cultural hierarchies, but also to the utter commodification of what used to be called the counterculture-which now could be labeled the multiculture. It unquestionably looks back to and places itself in the tradition of the youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s, attempting in "La Vie Boheme" to appropriate the oppositional posture and the miscengenated appeal of the original White Negroes and hipsters, 22 Simon, Review of Rent, 250. 23 Advertisement, "There's a Room for Rent," Rent website, 1999.

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figures like "Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage/ Lenny Bruce" (1 : 23). By aligning itself with the White Negroism of the 1950s, Rent updates the quirky, individualist politics of the so-called rebel without a cause. Although this 1950s rebel was contemptuous of the increasingly standardized and commodified postwar society, his or her desire for change was routinely channeled into non - political- or more commonly, anti-political-directions. Rent, meanwhile, for all its "antiEstablishment attitude," its lip service to "Revolution, justice, screaming for solutions, / Forcing changes, " radically depoliticizes economic inequalities by imagining them as "chosen" (1 :25).24 In its consumerist utopia, so evocative of Carby's "ideology of equality in the supermarket," all have access to the stuff of life and culture, "To handcrafted beers made in local breweries/To yoga, to yogurt, to rice and beans and cheese/To leather, to dildos, to curry vindaloo" (1 : 23). For the "revolution" in Rent is clearly coded as an adolescent, Oedipal rebellion : "Hating convention, hating pretension,/ Not to mention of course / Hating dear old mom and dad" (1: 23). It is little wonder then that Maureen infantilizes herself in a performance piece that is allegedly a political protest. But it is never clear what exactly her invocation of Elsie the cow is protesting. Gentrification? The eviction of the homeless? Dairy cooperatives? Bad art? Mom and dad? Moreover, her transcel')dent "way out"- "Leap of faith"-epitomizes the quiescent, new age- y non - solutions that during the 1990s came to substitute for political struggle (1 : 22). More than any other play of the decade , Rent was and is paradigmatic of a new era of hip consumerism in which buying is imagined as a subversive activity, Allen Ginsberg peddles for the Gap, and "hip" has become "the orthodoxy of Information Age capitalism."25 It sadly testifies to the fact that the only apparent solution to the problems of a rotten world is to vacate the premises. The true genius of Rent's multicultural celebration has been its marketing, which its producers describe as "a business revolution." (And indeed, that almost oxymoronic phrase is symptomatic of a culture in which the very concept of revolution-as exemplified by Newt Gingrich 's Contract With America, the would - be American Revolution of 1994-has been completely co-opted by corporate interests.) They emphasize that they "were selling this concept called Rent," in other words, selling less a musical play with a plot, characters, and score than a mystique, an aura, a mythology of an allegedly authentic, multicultural, urban folk community that would appeal to "a young, hip, urban, bohemian sensibility."26 But to do so, they needed "a distinctive marketing aesthetic." Unlike most other Broadway 24 Jeremy Gerard, review of Rent in National Theatre Critics'

Reviews 56, no. 20 (1996): 250.

25

Tom Frank, "Hip is Dead," The Nation, 1 April 1996, 18.

26 Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by McDonnell and Silberger, 133.

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l l

musicals that adopt logos that are iconic expressions of the narrative content of the show, Rent's stencil and masking tape logo is "based on the POST NO BILLS signs that are painted on construction-site walls" and evokes (variously) a guerrilla artwork-in-progress, a handmade poster, a Robert Rauschenberg knock-off, or an announcement of a hit-and-run political demonstration .27 To this logo- which is nothing if not cool-the poster, program, and CD cover add distressed, slightly druggy, tinted photographs of the leading characters (four in close-up) that suggest the "warmth, tragedy, [and] laughter" that the designer, Drew Hodges, wanted to convey, as well as the characters' atomization and anomie.28 Most important, the collage is eye-catching because of its many studied imperfections: the folds, tears-and yes, rents-in the photographs, the unaligned letters in the word "rent," and the violated borders of the photographs. For the design suggests nothing less than a series of stop-action frames of scarred young women and men living on borrowed time, an image calculated to appeal to rebellious adolescents convinced that they, too, are the isolated victims of a world-and parents-who cannot understand them. The starkly black and white billboard advertisement that long dominated Times Square is rather different from the poster. And while it uses the stenciled title, it adds a manual typewriter font text"TICKETS FOR RENT," a telephone number, and the name and address of the theatre-that accentuates the contradictory, highbrow-meetsmass-culture quality of the poster design. For it evokes the improvisatory, ephemeral, and handmade (yet mass-produced) characteristics of a predigital era when writers and activists still used manual typewriters and oppositional social formations had a precise meaning. Even more intriguingly, however, the billboard represents a kind of visual pun that appears, if one merely glances at it, to advertise that the billboard itself is for hire. "Your ad here," it seems to be saying. In other words, it announces its own vacancy, the fact that it is an extremely profitable site at the crossroads of the world owned by invisible others but available to all with the money to lease it. Its very vacancy, moreover, signals that the billboard, like Rent itself, is a site on which one is free to project, a kind of blank screen just waiting for the fantasies of a public eager to buy some space and time. Although the mystique of Rent's logo clearly owes a good deal to the allusive logo designed for Cats some fifteen years before, the musical was fortunate to appear at a historical moment when the marketing of goods was undergoing a significant change. For the midl990s, as Naomi Klein demonstrates, bore witness to the swallowing of the product by the brand, the commodity by the image. Like Nike, Starbucks, the Gap, and the Body Shop, Rent developed a distinctive 27 Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by McDonnell and Silberger, 59. 28 Quoted in Larson, Rent, with interviews and text by McDonnell and Silberger, 59.

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logo and brand identity that allowed the producers to sell the show less as a piece of theatre, or even as an experience, than as a kind of lifestyle philosophy: "No day but today," the ads proclaimed from seemingly every taxi and bus in New York. For like these other corporate success stories, Rent functions, in Klein's phrase, as a meaning broker that signifies and markets "experience," "lifestyle," and "corporate transcendence."29 The show itself thus disappears into its logo and becomes much like its billboard, an "empty carrier ... for the brand . . . [it] represent[s]."30 Like Shakespeare's Romeo + juliet or Forrest Cump, it is transformed into a mere pretext for the merchandising of multicultu ralism . For the Rent logo as meaning broker uses an obviously mass- produced image to point up by contrast the play's status as a live, ritual - like performance that will enable the consumer, like Maureen and her friends, to make a "leap of faith" (1 : 22) . No account of Rent's multicultural coup can be complete without considering the other elements that comprise its social and economic context: the romance of miscegenated cultural forms; the commodification of queer culture; the prolonged economic boom that particularly benefited the Broadway theatre-going classes; the gentrification of the East Village; and the trickle- up effect of MTV-style editing, graphics, rhythms, and multiracial bodies into almost every form of culture. And because Rent is such an accurate barometer of United States culture at the end of the twentieth century, it reveals the fact that so many cultural productions that aspire both to hotness (especially to the youth market) and to a measure of artistic seriousness require the simultaneous deployment of a standardized, easily recognizable formula and a mystique of authenticity (or realness), supplied preferably by racial and / or sexual minorities . This new multiculture could now be renamed Hipbrow.3l For it trades at once on anonymity and uniqueness , predictability and a radically chic pose. Hipbrow (like Seabrook's theorization of Nobrow) rewrites Walter Benjamin's argument about art in the age of mechanical reproduction. For it is simultaneously mass- produced and auratic. The aura of old that used to attach to the unique existence of the art object has simply been remade for deconstructionist times when , we are assured, the "historical testimony" that "rests on authenticity" has been so completely shaken by a thoroughgoing and cynical relativism that the

29 Naomi Klein , No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador USA, 1999), 21 . 30 Klein, No Logo, 28. 31 See Peter Lunenfeld, "Hipbrow," http:/ / wwwdb.heise.de / tp/ english / inhalt/ kino / 31 4 71 1 .html.

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auratic itself becomes indistinguishable ontologically from the copy.32 Authenticity is now imagined to be an effect produced at the intersection of "kooky, authentic folks" with a particular kind of artistic self-consciousness, a knowing self-reflexiveness that results from both embracing and protesting the commodity form. In Hipbrow, in other words, the mass-produced becomes auratic when it advertises its own world-weariness and ennui, when it both succumbs to and tries to transcend the vertiginous play of doubles. Although this neeexistentialist brand of Hipbrow is ubiquitous in mass culture, it remains in short supply on Broadway. It did attach, however, to the revivals of Chicago and Cabaret and plays like Art and Dirty Blonde, all of which are very much about both an ineffable liveness and the allure of the copy. If the Hipbrow appeal of Rent, with its rainbow-colored cast and its empty gestures of rebellion, has indeed replaced a part of what used to be the counterculture, its hegemony is undoubtedly linked not only to the triumph of deconstruction but also to the near elimination of oppositional politics in the United States, a loss of faith in the idea of progress, and a profound disillusionment with all forms of social engineering and welfare. Rent's simultaneous need for and deconstruction of notions of authenticity is linked to a historical change in the United States in the imagined relationship between live and mechanically reproduced media. During the 1950s, television mimicked live theatre by borrowing its conventions, forms, and rhetoric. By the end of the 1960s, however, that pattern was being reversed as theatre tended more and more to mimic mass culture-a pattern most noticeable in the increasingly ubiquitous translation of movies into plays and musicals. As that pattern has become more pronounced, it has become symptomatic of the decline of theatre as a popular form andironically-of a wholesale and unprecedented theatricalization of politics and culture. Theatre may be disappearing, but the theatrical is everywhere. As a result, liveness-as a kind of reality effect-is produced these days less by live theatre than by mass-mediated spectacle since (as any postmodernist will remind you) the binary opposition between the original and the copy has been definitively undermined and the video image now stakes a preeminent claim to facticity. In these circumstances, then, the theatricalization of multiculturalism should hardly count as a surprise. And, indeed, the problem with this theatricalization is less ontological than semantic and ethical. For in too many instances, "theatricality" has become synonymous with "fraud." Cannot the continuing disparity between appearances and underlying economic and geopolitical realities be adjudged-if you'll pardon my attempted rehabilitation of a word that seems perhaps quaintly Marxist-a form of mystification? Isn't there a 32 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans., Illuminations, (New York: Schocken, 1969), 221.

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problem when everyday we witness the persistent deployment of racist tropes and we justify them in the name of authenticity? Or the commodification of abjection and we call it real? Or the reestablishment of imperialism and we call it the triumph of the free market? Or an ever- widening abyss between rich and poor, black and white , and we call it multiculturalism?

journal of American Drama and Theatre 14 (Winter 2002)

"AND THE REST IS LA HISTORY": AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STRATEGIES IN THE COLORED MUSEUM

BRANDl WILKINS CATANESE

The excluded and the empowered do read history differently. Indeed, they cannot but do so, since so much of reading consists of position and wishes, of constructing and projecting .... History for the excluded is non- linear, non - rational .... African- American writers have helped build up an alternative model of history: not an authoritative presentation of "what really happened," but an array of readings that challenge the dominant way. -John Timpane, Filling the Time: Reading History in the Drama of August Wilsonl ...circum- Atlantic societies, confronted with revolutionary circumstances for which very few precedents existed, have invented themselves by performing their pasts in the presence of others. -Joseph Roach, Cities of the Deacf2

In his landmark 1 986 play The Colored Museum, George C. Wolfe creates an important discursive space for the cataloguing of African- American history. Comprised of episodic "exhibits," the play intercepts traditional history on behalf of individuals and the African American community by presenting characters self- consciously engaged in the performance of parallel, explicitly subjective narratives . Wolfe's characters resist the narrow strictures of the histories they have inherited and create complex alternatives for themselves, devising pasts that imply the present and futures that they would like to inhabit. In this essay, I aim to explore Wolfe's use of the theatre as an alternative forum for history by investigating the way performance employs the dynamics of production and consumption of history. More
1 In Alan Nadel, ed., May All Your Fences Have Cates : Writings on the Plays of August Wilson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 81. 2 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 5.

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specifically, I am concerned with the implied reconfiguration of power upon which the play' s exhibits rely: who profits from these autobiographical histories that challenge the dominant narrative- the characters within the exhibits and/or the audience? Further, how successful or effective can these neo- histories be when situated within a cultural context that devalues or problematizes them? My use of the term histories betrays my conviction that the past is constantly reconstructed to make sense of the present, and because these revi sions occur on individual as well as cultural levels, multiple historical nar ratives circulate throughout our society. In each moment of revision, history is created through the complicity of author I performer and audience. Four of Wolfe ' s exhibits offer useful material for my discussion of self- narration and history, as they frame the African- American historical subject within a larger cultural and political narrative and also address the very American tradition of self- making through literature. The first and last exhibits, "Git on Board" and "The Party, " respectively, offer complementary transhistorical narratives inflected with personality, and two exhibits within the play, "Symbiosis" and "Lala 's Opening," stage the crisis of African - American individuality in the face of traditions of American racism . Taken together, these four exhibits offer a composite critique and celebration of performativity in AfricanAmerican culture that illuminates the malleability of history and illuminates the strategic role it plays in individual and communal identity formation . Ever since Othello told his life story to a Desdemona who "with a greedy ear / Devour[ed] up [his] discourse ," black characters in the Western dramatic t radition have tried to invent or legitimize themselves through language, whether or not the author was invested in a larger project of creating tenable black identities. This tendency toward what Stephen Greenblatt refers to as "self- fashioning" arguably appears in much art, whether or not it explicitly addresses racial issues. However, Toni Morrison ' s Playing in the Dark makes a claim for the di stinctly national valences of American literature , reflective of the fact that "The flight from the Old World to the New is generally seen to be a flight from oppression and limitation to freedom and possibility . ... a oncein - a- lifetime opportunity not only to be born again but to be born again in new clothes." 3 While Morrison's project is an examination of how an "American Africanism" was strategically employed in service of a "self- conscious but highly problematic [literary] construction of the American as a new white man,"4 it is an important contextualizing comment on the power of the canon to create white subjectivity, with black abjection as the cost. Hence the overwhelm ing importance of 3 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 34. 4 Morrison, 39.

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African-Americans' insistent entrance into humanistic disciplines like literature: beginning with the slave narrative, African-Americans have constructed "a parallel discursive universe"S within which to counter the limitations of Anglo-American literary antecedents. Editorial modifications notwithstanding, African- Americans have used literary autobiography as "the ultimate form of protest ... to register .. .the existence of a 'black self' that had transcended the limitations that racism had placed on the personal development of the black individual."6 language for the African-American, then, has always been performative, of greater effect than the mere words being uttered: speaking of oneself as a subject creates that very subject, insinuating the black self into a discursive system that may previously have held no place for her. The speech act is generative, empowering, and even subversive, as when Sojourner Truth famously asked, "Ain't I a woman?" My reading of the significance of Wolfe's accomplishment with The Colored Museum relies upon my estimation of the conjunction of history and memory. While both have roots in performance, I see their relationship as causal-memories are constructed by individuals but are not deemed history until after authentication by an external source, and the process of historical revision occurs when memories, perspectives, and/or authenticating gestures compete for priority. It is in this transaction that performativity resides: "The paradox of the restoration of behavior resides in the phenomenon of repetition itself: no action or sequence of actions may be performed exactly the same way twice; they must be reinvented or recreated at each appearance. In this improvisatorial behavioral space, memory reveals itself as imagination."? According to Roach's model, history (as socially authenticated memory) is ontologically unstable and compulsively performative, unavoidably bound to (re)produce itself in an ironically subservient relationship to the passing of time. Viewing history as a performance- based episteme destabilizes its claims to neutrality and veracity. The subjectivity of both performers and spectators contributes to the meaning derived from any narrative. In traditional history, though, this subjectivity has not been seen as limitless: on ly certain versions of history receive institutional sanction. The efforts of certain scholars to validate alternative primary sources Uournals, performances, poetry and fiction) into the canonical narrative of America has met resistance, hence Alan Nadel's claim that "the failure of ... historical narratives to acknowledge black American s Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfroAmerican Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxiii. 6 Henry Louis Gates, Bearing Witness: Selections from AfricanAmerican Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 3.
7

Roach, 29.

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history ... becomes [a] form of historical discrimination ."B It is precisely this historical erasure that African - Americans in various di sciplines have attempted to redress, as Suzan- Lori Parks suggests in discussing her approach to her work. She says: Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre , for me, is the perfect place to 'make' historythat is, because so much of African - American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to- through literature and the special strange relationsh ip between theatre and real - life- locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, hear the bones sing, write it down ... . Through each line of text I'm rewriting the Time Linecreating history where it is and always was but has not yet been divined .9 Through the work of Parks and other playwrights, theatre has the potential not only to embrace the idea of history as an act of performance memory, but also to assert actively that the history "made" by playwrights is just as valid as the history authenticated by those who uphold traditional standards of history. Wolfe's choice to situate the action of the play in a museum immediately encourages a specific, pre- existing way of viewing what will come. As museum "patrons ," we are allowed, even implored to look at this catalogue of "the myths and madness of black / Negro/ colored Americans," l o simultaneous ly endowing them with and ingesting their significance. However, as the play unfolds, a tension arises between the idea of Wolfe as curator, gerrymandering the content of the museum, and the exhibits as autonomous entities, yearning for a connection to their audience . The fractured relationship between the part and the whole that Colored Museum stages metaphorizes the AfricanAmerican individual's relationship to larger (Afr ican) American history. The juxtaposition of exhibits , whose placement puts them in dialogue with one another, responds simultaneously to the d ivisions within the black community (over issues such as class , sexuality, politics, and standards of beauty) and the division between different races in America. The latter is made most clear in performance before a racially
8 Alan Nadel, "Boundaries, Logistics, and Identity: The Property of Metaphor in Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone" in May All Your Fences Have Gates: Writings on the Plays of August Wilson, 99.

9 Suzan- Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 4- 5.
1o George C. Wolfe, The Colored Museum, in William Branch, ed., Black Thunder: An Anthology of Contemporary African- American Drama

(New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 3. All future references will be noted intratextually and will be taken from this edition.

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mixed audience, when the many jokes Wolfe includes in the play often elicit markedly different responses along racial / cultural lines. After encouraging us to inhabit the standard role of museumgoer with the title and structure of the piece, Wolfe rebels against protocol, reversing everything from the viewer / viewed relationship to the content of the exhibits. Featuring among other things, talking wigs, drag queens , and a girl named Normal who gives birth to an egg, Wolfe's museum creates distance in order to reconstruct an audience capable of absorbing his message. Fittingly, the play begins with a narration of the originating moment in African-American consciousness: the Middle Passage. "Git on Board" bombards the senses of the audience, combining drum sounds with slide images from the slave trade. When these subside, the flight attendant, Miss Pat ("black, pert, and cute"), welcomes us aboard Celebrity Slaveship Airlines, beginning her tenure as our conduit into the imaginative space of the play, and her monologue forces the audience to shift from passive spectatorsj"patrons" to active participants . The fourth wall, that traditional, imagined barri.er between the action of the stage and the world of the audience, never exists in Colored Museum: Miss Pat speaks directly to us. The boundary between observer and observed blurs as audience members are forced to perform in the piece as "passengers" on Celebrity Slavesh ip, repeating rules aloud and singing songs dictated by Miss Pat in an invocation of the African-American rhetorical tradition of call and response. The uncertainty of audiences as to how they are meant to participate in the exhibit and the fact that they may not have expected to do so, parallel the experience of Africans who were brought to the Americas to become slaves, a liminality which compromised their subjectivity. The future slaves occupied an intermediate space where they could no longer hold onto a sense of being solely African (if that appellation is as much ideological as locational), but in transit, could not yet imagine what identity would supplant or at least augment their former Africanness. Neither the slaves in the Middle Passage nor the audience members of "Git on Board" can derive solace from occupying any stable subject position. This audience instability derives as much from their unwitting performance (and condition) of enslavement as from Miss Pat's ironic relationship to her material. Her monologue serves as an impromptu history lesson for members of the audience who may not already be familiar with the details of slavery. Citing religious traditions, the programmatic destruction of black families, astronomical casualties during the Middle Passage, internecine class conflicts and the mechanics of the Negro dialect, Miss Pat imparts history with a glib demeanor meant alternately to amuse and shock audience members. Wolfe's deft comic hand seems intended to elicit a Brechtian alienation that will facilitate a critical subjectivity toward the work. However, he himself acknowledges that "the self- appointed guardians of black culture" responded unfavorably to his play when it debuted, saying " 'Oh, he's making fun of slavery,' 'oh, oh oh he's saying this about that'

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.. . Because they were offended. And they were jealous . And they didn't get it . . . it was very startling to them because many of the plays that had been done had not dared to self- examine."11 A prototypical example of Wolfe's failure to "speak with reverential tones"12 comes at the end of this first ex hibit: as Miss Pat bids farewell to her passengers, stage directions indicate that "Luggage begins to revolve onstage .. . mixed in ... are two male slaves and a woman slave, complete with luggage and ID tags around their necks" (9). The contrast of this image with the beginning slide images of torture and suffering brings us full circle in physicalizing the circumstances of slavery, but we must view this closing image differently. At the beginning, audience members have no idea what will follow the slide show's images of slavery (is this the entire exhibit, or will there be more?), but after having experienced Miss Pat and having laughed, perhaps involuntarily, at the perkiness with which she does her job, we face a decision: should we laugh at the sight gag of black people treated as objects? If we do laugh, are we betraying our insensitivity? If we do not laugh, are we somehow making amends for having laughed at earlier jokes, or does our inability to laugh take us by surprise? Whether our response is laughter or silence, the conclusion of "Git on Board" provokes a self- consciousness about our involvement that sets the tone for the rest of the play: Wolfe disrupts complacency and demands a rigorous self- critique of our moment- to-moment response to the ex hibits that comprise the museum. The beginning moments of the play set audiences up for a fall: by using slide "[i]mages we've all seen before, of African slaves being captured, loaded onto ships, tortured" (S), Wolfe invites audiences inured to the traditional rhetoric of slavery to take what they see for granted . Miss Pat's words have a more devastating effect as a follow-up to these images than they would without this phenomonological frame . Miss Pat can be read a number of ways, but her complex subject position reveals the difficulty of extirpating authorial perspective and arriving at a neutral account of history; in fact, her resolutely cheerful demeanor and rehearsed narrative may be seen as a critique of the commodification of black culture and history. At the same time, though, her identity as a black woman might be read as an important revision of black history, for despite her cheeky tone and susceptibility to the critique that she might be a mere mouthpiece for the dominant ideology, complicit in the enslavement of blacks, the mere facts of her blackness and femaleness laying audacious claim to the subject position inherent in historical narrative become political, striking a blow against the seemingly impenetrable tradition of (white) male author- ity decreeing history. In addition to politicizing the authorship of history, Miss Pat

11 Charles H Rowell, '"I Just Want t o Keep Telling Stories'": An Interview with George C. Wolfe," Callaloo 16, 3 (1993) : 61 7. 12 Rowell , 617.

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fulfills another key role for Wolfe by effecting a significant audience transformation necessary to experience the rest of the play: audience members, regardless of their ethnic / cultural backgrounds, assume the shared identity of new arrivals in a strange land. If the black condition is one of estrangement, we all become black (as a social status, though not culturally) through our participation in this performance. The effect of Miss Pat's historical narrative assimilating a diverse audience into a newly constructed social group points to the important role history plays in shaping identity, in helping to create subject positions in the present. By the end of the opening monologue, each audience member must rewrite her own autobiography to account for the new relationship to African - American history "Git on Board" has engendered. The exhibit makes it clear that we have entered an environment with its own peculiar conventions of both subject matter and decorum. The audience finds itself in the position of ratifying through participation or enjoyment the versions of the past presented by the various exhibits, connecting various characters' autobiographical offerings to create a larger narrative of AfricanAmerican history. The characters in the exhibit "Symbiosis" struggle over the relationship of the past to the present, and through them, Wolfe offers a very interesting model of African - American identity. Throughout the play, Wolfe's characters seem caught in a tenuous balance between the opposing hypotheses of absolute deracination and selective retention of culture, which attempt to explain the relationship between enslaved Africans in the Americas (and their descendants) and the cultures from which they were taken . Time and again, Wolfe reifies the impossibility of achieving the fresh start, the complete autonomy of self- selected hybridity. The Man in "Symbiosis" attempts an absolute deracination by forcing himself to be a part of America's national history at the expense of having a personal or a cultural one. Object by object, he attempts to shed artifacts that link him to his identity as an AfricanAmerican, particularly those associated with a time in the 1960s and 1970s when blackness was linked in the public imaginary to radical activity. The scene begins with the sound of "My Girl" by the Temptations, perhaps the internal soundtrack for The Man and The Kid who are about to engage in a contest of wills. The two figures represent different moments in the life of the same man, his present day self, the successfully assimilated black corporate male, and the resistant, 1960s activist. The juxtaposition of youth vs . adult implies a sense not only of individual history, but also of a generational divide that literalizes both the individual "cultural schizophrenia" of being from a minority culture and the fallacy of a monolithic black community. The fact that The Kid can exist beyond his correct historical moment and influence The Man's actions in the present is a concrete visualization of the ways in which we are always, in the present, the sum total of the things we have experienced in the past. Symbols of consumption permeate the scene: The Man enters in expensive clothing, carrying a Saks Fifth Avenue bag full of items he

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can no longer use : a dashiki, an Afro comb, Afro Sheen , Converse AllStars. The Man is trading in the outdated, specifically "black" consumerism in which he participated during the 1960s for a new level of consumption embodied by the bag from Saks. While The Man discards the items one by one, naming them as he banishes them to their ignoble grave, The Kid remains the figure of resistance, virtually begg ing him to hold onto his- their- past. The Kid rejects The Man 's equation of the past with garbage, seeing the worth in all that The Man hopes to throw away, as he reacts in horror to the news that Eldridge Cleaver's seminal work Soul on fee has "been replaced on my bookshelf by The Color Purple" (29). The Man rationalizes his choices to The Kid by explaining that he is simply practicing Social Darwinism at its new extreme, bracing himself for "the Ice Age [that] is upon us" (29), in which artifacts of the past become dangerous to retain. However, The Man's struggle to survive is being waged on multiple fronts: it is clear to The Man that performative utterances are a necessary complement to his physical rejection of the material signifiers of his Afrocentric past. The formal repetition within the piece ("Gone ... Gone ... Gone") offers another clue as to the performative imperative behind his actions and reveals the maintenance necessary to sustain his deracinated identity. His words and actions attempt to historicize the objects of his youth , to entomb them and thereby distinguish between the past and the present. This exhibit is also fascinating in that it offers one of the few occasions when the theatrical fourth wall is upheld so that the character does not speak directly to the audience. The fractured soliloquy that "Symbiosis" represents stages the distinction between history and memory, as The Man tries to bifurcate himself in order to disqualify memory with some measure of authority. His faith in traditional models of history leads him to designate his memories as those of an Other, so that he may banish them as superfluous to the present. The Ice Age situates The Man in a historical era, one to which he feels he must adapt in order to survive. The Man creates himself by erasing himself, by willing his survival in an atmosphere he believes is designed to ensure his failure . His non- relationship with the past is a shift in strategy, a reassessment of his goals , and The Kid forces him to confront the drastic shift in his priorities that has been perhaps an unwitting result of his attempt to cl imb the corporate ladder. The Man has not only erased his personal past by purging his former wardrobe, but he has also cut himself off from an African - American cultural past (old music and literature) and pol itical struggle. The Kid responds to The Man's attempts to destroy him in a variety of ways , telling jokes, pleading , cajoling, singing, until he finally employs force to gain control : stage directions indicate that The Kid "hits his fist into his hand , and The Man grabs for his heart. The Kid repeats with two more hits, which causes The Man to drop to the ground, grabbing his heart" (30). The Kid castigates The Man for attempting to pretend that he has no past, for attempting a worse erasure of history than African Americans have suffered at the hands of the mainstream culture. This

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is a revelation that the private performance of nonblackness (I hesitate to say whiteness) attempted by The Man is a sinister internalization of the regimes of social control that performative theories of race and gender hope to expose. The Man's insistence that "I have no history. I have no past. I can't . It's too much" is countered by The Kid's promise that "regardless of how much of your past that you trash, I ain't gain' no-damn-where" (3 1). The scene's final image is one in which 'The Kid ... emerges from the can with a death grip on The Man's arm" (31 ), a refutation of The Man's triumph over his "essential" self. The Kid's invincibility is proof that there is some part of his inner self that will not allow him to "be black only on weekends and holidays" (31 ). While this scene might seem to suggest that there is an essential blackness that can be identified , if not eliminated , I infer instead that the renewed confrontation staged at the end of the scene resists totalizing blackness as either entirely assumed or entirely innate . In tracing the progression of The Man's life from radical to Republican (so to speak), Wolfe suggests that one impediment to The Man's reconciliation of the varied parts of himself lies in his flawed relationship to history. The Man sees history as fixed, its only mutation being its absence. Wolfe proves this through The Man's attempt to get rid of everything connecting him to the past, but also though the physical juxtaposition of The Man who succeeds in contemporary society against The Kid, who remains in an adolescent limbo. The difference in age between the two suggests that The Man views The Kid's way of relating to the world as not only antiquated but also immature. Because The Man cannot envision a means of incorporating any aspects of the past into his present success, he must dismiss them all . The dashikis, hair care products, and old black music of the 1960s have no place in The Man' s Saks Fifth Avenue bag of today because they represent a devalued currency in the homogeneous capitalist paradigm of the late 1980s. The Man attempts a Faustian pact with the mainstream and will accept the certain cultural death that it entails, but he underestimates the resilience of the things that he must kill to reach the mainstream. The tragedy of The Man's crisis lies in the fact that he tries to pay the social and psychic costs of success in mainstream America but ultimately fails; however, a still greater tragedy is that our society holds out this course of action as one with potential rewards. While Miss Pat's version of history editorializes, it tries to stick to facts; The Man edits strategically, resituating himself in relation to the cultural context of his time; a later exhibit, however, offers an even more egregious instance of historical selection . "Lala's Opening" features "the definitive black diva" (32), Lala Lamazing Grace, a recently repatriated black American who has "[come] home .. . to prove you ain't got nothing on me" (3 7). Of all the characters Wolfe creates, Lala lives most consciously in her alternate reality. Unlike Miss Pat, who irreverently interprets the horrors of the past, Lala chooses to erase and re - create rather than re- interpret by performing a palimpsest of glamour, success, and haughty pride . Lala represents artifice at every level : her wig, her gaudy clothing, her accent, and even her name offer

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the fullest demonstration of the fissure between ideas of essential and assumed selves as materialized by history and the complicated ways in which the two coexist. Wolfe tells us that Lala loses her French accent "when she's upset," and throughout the scene her tone ranges from glamorous and confident to frustrated, angry, and manic. The clear gap between who Lala professes to be and the anterior self she shed to assume a new persona reveals itself throughout the exhibit in language, authority, and physicality. Of primary interest in Lala's exhibit is the fact that performance is foregrounded in a number of ways: beyond our understanding that all of the exhibits in the museum are here because someone wants the audience/patrons to see them, and even beyond the conceit that as with Miss Pat the fourth wall is broken immediately, Lala is a performer by vocation. Her entire sense of self and indeed her livelihood are staked on her successful performance of a role that will please others. Her status as performer also encourages us to look more ardently than we do in other exhibits for something 'real' behind the performed facade . In some ways, Lala's performance encapsulates the African- American experience (although this experience is common to many immigrant communities) : she thinks she must change her name (from Sadie to Lala), her looks (a wig replaces her true hair), and her language (trading in her own speech patterns for "Franglish") in order to assimilate and find happiness. Lala's self-construction is extremely thorough. She kills her former self, Sadie, and becomes Lala in order to escape what she perceives as an unsatisfactory life in America, where no one appreciates her. Realizing that a name change will not be enough to effect her transformation, Lala creates a new genealogy, giving herself a safely deceased (and therefore silent) mother, about whom she says, "my mother and Josephine Baker were French patriots together . . . Mama died a heroine" (36). This recreation of her mother is an important demonstration of the mechanism of traditional history. Rather than hearing directly from Lala's mother, her past is mediated by her daughter's narration. Killing off her mother allows Lala to devise narratives of the past that will help sustain the present she desires for herself. The distinction between memories versus histories of other people is elusive when private recollections enter the social realm. Lala's strategy certainly supports Roach ' s claim that "memory is revealed as imagination," and despite the fact that traditional history tends to privilege biography over autobiography, the conspicuous performance in which Lala indulges makes the branches of her family tree flimsy at best. Lala simultaneously creates and ratifies her mother's biography, which facilitates her larger autobiographical agenda, but not content to leave her created self in the realm of the anecdotal, Lala authenticates her version of the past by publishing it in her autobiography, Voila Lata! This book is a literal and ideological manifestation of the parallel universe Lala has constructed for herself: within it, the genealogy, the literature, and the value system cohere, supporting one another and serving her interests, but ultimately at the

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cost of her sanity. The ruptures in Lala's carefully crafted world take many forms: asides within her performance piece suggest an anger and pain that her songs are intended to mask; and most literally, the intrusion of the "real," outside world through the device of telegrams sent by her irrefutably alive mother. Seated in the audience, her mother simultaneously resurrects herself and overrides Lala's vision of herself by calling her Sadie, asserting that "I'm not dead" and that "Your child misses you." These telegrams serve as formal competition with the written history Lala has created for herself, refuting the fiction .of Voila Lata! by inscribing Lala in a world she thought she had escaped, insisting on her place within it as both daughter and mother. Caught literally in a lineage that bounds her on both sides, Lala begins to succumb to madness . She tells the story of a dream in which she is lost in the hair on Sammy Davis Junior's head, suggesting her feelings of loss in the midst of overwhelming blackness. She longs for "a machete [to] cut away the kinks [and] remove once and for all the roughness" (3 7), but before that is necessary, pomade saves La Ia, making "everything nice and white and smooth and shiny" (38). This sense of relief lasts only until a comb arrives and attempts to integrate the pomade into the hair, to maximize its effect. This painful process draws blood from Lala, leaving recognizable traces "on [her] back. On [her] thighs" until "It's all over" (38). Culturally specific hair and culture-augmenting pomade mix only through violence, just as Lala exists only in the aftermath of symbolic death and erasure of Sadie. And similarly, each process of transformation marks the victim (or agent?) of cultural death. Lala's downward spiral concludes when she rips off her wig, literally stripping herself of her mask, and sings a song more autobiographical than her book Voila Lata!, describing a woman who "runs away to find her own/And tries to deny/What she's always known/The girl inside/What's left is the girl inside/The girl who died/So a new girl could be born" (38). In an inversion of the struggle between words and bodies that characterizes the end of "Symbiosis," Lala's reunion with the child mentioned in her mother's telegram can be read as a reclamation of her past and her future, in which the child is both the young girl she once was and also the next generation of black womanhood. Whereas The Man and The Kid remain locked in a struggle to the death, Lala and her child reconcile in a space where history becomes a lived phenomenon and is accepted rather than deleted. Although I have elected to focus on characters within the play without much discussion of Wolfe's own project as a playwright, I think it fair to mention another exhibit in the piece, called 'The Last Mama on the Couch Play." This exhibit offers a typically irreverent examination of the canon of black drama, acknowledging while poking fun at such classics as Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough. This play within a play serves as a clear allegory

26

CATANESE

of Wolfe's own struggles to define his voice as an artist in the face of a tradition that is endorsed within the black community as well as the mainstream theatrical community as a trajectory worth following. In various interviews, Wolfe has decried the pressure put on him to write what someone else would define as "a black play." His struggle for his artistic autobiographical imperative parallels that of his characters who seek a subject position from which to make sense of themselves and their world . Each of the exhibits I have discussed practices a repetition with revision that suggests that on both vi sual and symbolic levels, Wolfe i s working to reconceive of history as circular rather than linear and omnipotent. Highly volatile in that each reiteration is an alteration attempting the impossible task of fully apprehending the past, the performative autobiography that characterizes these exhibits stands in complex relationship to time . The final instance of repetition with revision comes in the scene that closes the play, "The Party." Diametrically opposed to Miss Pat from "Git on Board," the character in "The Party" speaks directly to the audience but does so from a confidently idiosyncratic position. Topsy Washington offers her vision of the party of African - American life as a dream, an ambiguous appellation referring not only to something that is not real but imagined, but also to something hoped for. Various historical figures transcend time and space, politics and genre to mingle, and in the resurrection of Nat Turner, Malcolm X and interaction of figures from different historical moments, Wolfe repeats and revises history. As voiced by Topsy, Wolfe hopes audiences will recognize the potential of different events in history to collide and inform one another in a way that may not make traditional sense, but is ultimately, in its negation of the unities of time and place, liberated and liberating. Topsy suggests that the best autobiography is eclectic, with a balanced appreciation for the potential and limitations of individual projects of self- fashioning. The goal of autobiography should not be to eliminate the "colored contradictions" of the black experience in America, but rather to claim them in the face of a discursive system that prefers essentialist rac ial categories and believes that the power of socially coerced performance can overcome individual complexity. Like the playwright himself, Wolfe's characters find themselves caught in limbo between discursively, coercively constructed identities and the possibility for a more proactively created sense of self. The multiple layers of meaning in The Colored Museum combine to create a world in which Wolfe ultimately celebrates the performance of history as liberating, as proof of the agency that America consistently attempts to deny African - Americans. In the play's closing exhibit, Wolfe introduces the character Topsy to encourage the characters in the museum as well as the theatre patrons in the audience to embrace the contradictions of life and to understand history as fluid rather than proscriptive and fixed . The liberation of fluid history does not come without cost, however: the play closes with characters from various exhibits onstage reenacting moments of crisis: Lala recounts her

COLORED MUSEUM

27

Sammy Davis Jr. dream, and Miss Pat screams to quell an insurgent rebellion on her flight. Characters and audience alike struggle to make sense of the chaos that ensues when various characters that have created history out of or against context are forced into the same space. The madness of the characters at the conclusion of The Colored Museum comes not from their attempts to fashion an individual relationship to history, but rather from their insistence on replicating the traditional model of history, merely trading one intractable narrative for another. Historical critic Hayden White has said that historiographical consensus about any event of interest to a given society is very difficult to achieve , is always open to revision from another perspective, and never lasts forever. The relation between facts and events is always open to negotiation and reconceptualization, not because the events change with time, but because we change our ways of conceptualizing them."l3 The characters in The Colored Museum attempt to use the first half of White's statement without fully appreciating the second half: in a world where history cannot be pinned down, attempts to fix and perform a new history as a cure- all for what Wolfe posits as the crisis of being black in America will never succeed. History cannot be self-selected and rendered impervious to revision; instead, as Wolfe reminds us through his characters and his own work as a playwright, it is highly subjective and consciously manufactured. Wolfe leaves us with an uneasy awareness of our shifting roles as performers and ingestors of history, of our complicity in the struggles of competing narratives. Somewhat aligning himself with the Black Arts ideologies of the 1960s, Wolfe seems to suggest that an individualist approach to the world (even through the discourse of drama) is incomplete. Autobiographical tales are always situated within larger communities, and we must work just as diligently to overcome the master narratives that elide our personalities as we do to construct those personalities. Because autobiographical impulses are always tempered by their social context, they are most beneficial when they work to repair the rift between the individual and her world rather than to efface it. In form and content, George Wolfe's The Colored Museum offers a new critical mode of resistance to the ravages of traditional historiography. Sanctioned history usually relies upon a process of mediation, whereby an external party analyzes and authenticates subjective material, determining whether individual narratives of the past will help to make proper sense of the present. The autobiographical tendencies of the characters in Wolfe's exhibits, coupled with their conspicuous awareness of audience members
13

Hayden White, "Response to Arthur Marwick," in Journal of

Contemporary History, 30, 2: 239-240.

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beyond the fourth wall, reject the hertofore- necessary impartial observer and make history an immediate transaction between a subject and his or her audience .

journal of American Drama and Theatre 14 (Winter 2002)

TRAMPLING NATIVE GENIUS: JOHN MURDOCK versus THE CHESTNUT STREET THEATRE* HEATHERS. NATHANS

Occasionally v1s1tmg the theatre, I was, at times, much disgusted to see and hear pieces performed so foreign to the circumstances of a republican people; which prompted me, at my leisure moments, to throw my ideas into a proper train to produce a drama, which would be more consonant with the ears of Americans.l Thus wrote John Murdock, Philadelphia hairdresser, in the prologue to his 1 800 play, The Beau Metamorphasized; or The Generous Maid. Murdock's words offered far more than an apologia for thrusting himself into the public eye. They were a defense of American "genius" and a challenge to America's theatre-going public. The two decades following the American Revolution produced hardly any original American dramas. Few authors could compete with the popular British fare on offer in every American playhouse from Charleston to Boston. Attempts by "native" authors such as Royall Tyler or William Charles White to infuse a uniquely "American" spirit into the playhouse realized only limited box office success and often received patronizing reviews that praised the effort and the enthusiasm, rather than the product. The complex social and economic structure of the post- war period further complicated any attempts to cultivate American "native genius." Though ostensibly a democracy, the new nation retained a class-based social and political hierarchy which dictated that the wealthy would lead, while the poor would follow. This same mentality manifested itself in the cultural experiments of the new nation. The lavish playhouses of urban centers like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York were under the sway of the nation's elite. In an effort to demonstrate that their theatres could rival the fashionable houses of Europe, these elite filled their theatres with the latest British plays. As businessmen, they knew that homespun American theatricals were a risky financial venture. They also knew that while their playhouses could compete in luxurious appointments with those of Great Britain, their native drama was liable to suffer by comparison. *An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Society of Early Americanists in 1999.
1 John Murdock, The Beau Metamorphasized; or the Generous Maid (Philadelphia, 1800), prologue.

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Thus, throughout much of the early national period, British, French, and German plays remained the staple of the American theatre. Yet there were those who hoped to create a "native" drama- one that would represent not merely the elite, but the working class, immigrant, and black populations of the nation as well. John Murdock, in an effort to produce theatre "more consonant with the ears of Americans," wrote three plays : The Triumphs of Love, or Happy Reconciliation (1 794), The Politicians, or A State of Things (1798), and The Beau Metamorphasized (1 800). Each of these plays presented the Philadelphia Murdock knew, a hodgepodge of recent German and Irish immigrants, slaves and free blacks, Quakers, artisans, and wealthy elite. Each of his plays reflected the pressing political concerns of the day, from anti-Irish prejudice, to abolition, to party politics. Unfortunately, Murdock's name has been largely forgotten by contemporary theatre historians. Daniel Havens describes Triumphs of Love as an "awkwardly constructed" play, categorizing it as a "minor comedy."2 Yet to dismiss Murdock's work without viewing it in the larger context of post- Revolutionary American culture and politics risks overlooking the nuances of class conflict that shaped both the early national theatre and our understanding of American "native genius." Murdock's plays and their critical reception reflect the growing schism between the elite and working classes in the early Republic. Beyond that, they challenge the criteria for cultural legitimacy in the new nation. By examining the issues that Murdock confronts in his plays and by tracing the rise of class awareness in post- Revolutionary Philadelphia, theatre historians may gain both a greater appreciation for Murdock's own "native genius," as well as a clearer sense of the disjunction between the rhetoric of republicanism and its practice. As a hairdresser, Murdock belonged to that class known as "artisans" or "mechanics." Though the mechanics had played an important role during the Revolution both as soldiers and as "Sons of Liberty," the end of the war saw a dimunition in both their political and economic influence. The monied classes (primarily merchants and wealthy landowners) assumed control of national, state, and local governments. Even in Pennsylvania, site of one of the most radically democratic political experiments of the Revolution, the reins of power rested with men of great wealth or influence.3 Additionally, the 2 Daniel F. Havens, The Columbian Muse of Comedy: The Development of a Native Tradition in Early American Social Comedy, 1787-1845 (Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 103. 3 See both Owen Ireland, Religion, Ethnicity, and Politics : Ratifying the Constitution in Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1995), and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776- 1787 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993). These works offer close readings of the radical politics in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary period.

TRAMPLING

31

economic depression of the post- war period hit the mechanics particularly hard. Thus, by the 1790s, many of Philadelphia's "laboring sort" found themselves at the mercy of a wealthy elite and increasingly resentful of the "consummate display of boldness and presumption on the part of the aristocratic junto"4 that dominated Philadelphia society. They might not have resented the elite to such a degree had they been allowed to share in their post- war prosperity or partake in their entertainments. Two telling examples reveal the extent to which Philadelphia mechanics found themselves marginalized by the city's "aristocratic junto." When William and Anne Bingham, the leaders of Philadelphia's social life, gave the city's first masquerade ball in the early 1 790s, "the strictest measures were used to keep out the mechanics and their wives."S This anecdote suggests that the mechanics had hoped to participate in the same social events as the wealthier members of Philadelphia society but that the perception of class difference on the part of the elite led to their exclusion. In another example, a theatre- goer at the Chestnut Street Theatre, who described himself as one of the "middling sort," published a letter in the General Advertiser, complaining about seating arrangements in the playhouse that reserved all of the best and closest seats for the "well- born." According to the author, he had no aspiration to change his social status by changing his place in the theatre; he was simply unable to see from where his pocketbook and Indeed, many citizens of social background dictated he sit.G Philadelphia must have found the theatre's boast of separate entrances and seating areas based on ticket cost incongruent with "republican simplicity.''? The offerings of the Chestnut Street Theatre also reflected the

4 Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830 (New York : Oxford University Press, 1993), 128.
5 Henry Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, Now Deceased (Philadelphia: William Brotherhead, 1859), 87.
6 General Advertiser, 24 February 1794.
7 Ricketts Circus offered a more "democratic" atmosphere that many patrons of the "middling sort" appreciated. See the letter from a patron in the Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Advertiser, commending manager Ricketts for his special attention to the needs and wishes of his audience, the "19/ 20th's [sic] of those who fill up the house.'' The writer noted that, "the will of the people ought to prevail in a place of amusement as well as a Senate." Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Advertiser, 27 February 1796.

32

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tastes of its wealthy patrons. a Though managers Wignell and Reinagle often altered standard British plays for American audiences (eliminating the more overt references to the British aristocracy, praise of the king, etc.), their repertoire consisted primarily of a combination of old and new British scripts. Indeed, wealthy patrons reminded the managers that their continued success depended on their producing the most "fashionable" scripts from London. As one patron noted: "unless you speedily alter your mode of conduct, your company will play to empty benches."9 With social, cultural, political, and economic spheres dominated by the upper classes, how could Philadelphia's mechanics hope to assert their own influence? Some did so through popular demonstration both on the street and in the playhouse. Audience members in the galleries (generally drawn from the mechanic and laboring classes) often proved a disruptive force, clamoring for particular songs, attacking-sometimes with words and sometimes with missiles-those actors or orchestra members who refused to comply with their requests. Yet these displays only reinforced the elite perception of the "lower sort" as an unruly mob, unfit to guide the politics or culture of the new nation. In the absence of any middle or lower-class contenders, it seemed that "high" culture- literature, poetry, and music- would remain the province of the elite. America's "native genius" would reside with the "approved guardians" of the country's political and civic spheres. Enter John Murdock and The Triumphs of Love. The Triumphs of Love reflects three contemporaneous events that were of particular concern to the Philadelphia mechanics: the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793, the Convention of Delegates from Abolition Societies in Philadelphia in 1794,10 and the rise of the Democratic-Republican party. Though these three events may seem unrelated, they were in fact significant factors in the creation of a politically aware artisan class. In 1793, Philadelphia faced one of the worst yellow fever epidemics in the city's history. The wealthy citizens of the city (including the elite sponsors of the theatre) fled, leaving the poorer
8 The original charter and arrangements for the theatre included an agreement between the managers and the stockholders, allowing the stockholders final approval on all script choices. See the Chestnut Street Theatre Collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

9 General Advertiser, 1 April 1794.

1o It should be noted that a third event may also have factored into contemporary views on slavery: the 1 793 slave uprising in SaintDomingue led by Toussaint I'Ouverture. Refugees from the rebellion streamed into the United States in 1793 (the character of George Friendly Jr. in Murdock's play is engaged to a refugee from the rebellion).

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people, including the mechanics and the city's large free black population essentially to shift for themselves .11 Only a handful of the city's leaders, including Dr. Benjamin Rush and politician Tench Coxe, remained behind . The blacks helped to nurse the sick and bury the dead, winning commendations from Rush, who had stayed to treat the sick (and who was, incidentally, an abolitionist). 1n A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, the authors, two prominent black citizens, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, described their role in the plague time: Many whose friends and relations had left them, died unseen and unassisted. We have found them in various situations, some laying on the floor, as bloody as if they had been dip't in it, without any appearance of having had even a drink of water for their relief.. . We feel a great satisfaction in believing that we have been useful to the sick, and thus publicly thank Dr. Rush for enabling us to be so.12 The conduct of Philadelphia's black population during the fever heightened awareness of their presence in the commun ity and helped to fuel the nascent abolitionist movement in the state. Other prominent Philadelphians like Tench Coxe tried to help mechanics stranded in the city to escape the fever. One of John Murdock's few surviving letters thanks Coxe for helping to get his family out of the city during the epidemic.13 In the wake of the yellow fever crisis, the Democratic- Republicans gained support from the Philadelphia mechanics- both out of gratitude for their help during the fever, and in protest against the elite's abdication of responsibility during the crisis . Many members of the Democratic- Republican societies also supported the abolition of slavery. Both Coxe and Rush participated in 11 Martin S. Pernick, "Parties, Politics, and Pestilence: Epidemic Yellow Fever in Philadelphia and the Rise of the First Party System ," in A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic (Philadelphia: Science History Publications, 1997). 12 A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1794), 1 7- 18. Note that Allen and jones were refuting printer Mathew Carey's assertion that Philadelphia blacks had used the time of crisis to loot the white homes they visited. Allen and Jones reminded Carey that since he had fled the city during the fever, he was in no position to speak about the events that had taken place during his absence . 13 Tench Coxe Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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the convention of Delegates from the Abolition Societies which met in Philadelphia in January of 1 794 to protest the continuance of slavery in America. The delegates published a pamphlet in which they decried slavery as "degrading to our rank as men," and "repugnant to the principles of Christianity."14 Both Coxe and Rush also sponsored Murdock's play, which contains the first emancipation scene presented on the early American stage.15 Thus, as Martin S. Pernick has noted, the yellow fever of 1793 fundamentally transformed Philadelphia's political structure, bringing to prominence a party whose outlook was more in keeping with the sentiments of the American Revolution and fueling the state's growing anti-slavery movement. The events of 1793-1794 also underscored a growing opposition to the "aristocratic junto" in Philadelphia society.16 The strong local flavor and unique class perspective of Murdock's work makes it especially intriguing for scholars of the early national period. For example, while many playwrights of the early Republic situated their plays in recognizable locales Uohn Daly Burk's Bunker Hill and Royall Tyler's The Contrast being two of the bestknown examples), little aside from the scene painting or references to American cities marks them as grounded in a uniquely American environment.17 Murdock, on the other hand, explores Philadelphia from stable to parlor to tavern . Like Royall Tyler, Murdock tackled the Whiskey Rebellion and the genesis of party politics. Like Tyler, he satirized Americans who aped British manners and customs. But unlike Tyler, he did so from the mechanic's perspective-from a segment of American society not traditionally given voice in the playhouse or credited with cultural "genius."18 14 Address of a Convention of Delegates from the Abolition Society to the Citizens of the United States (Philadelphia: 1 794), 5. 15 See the list of subscribers for Murdock's 1795 printing of The Triumphs of Love. 16 Schultz, 128. 17 One of the chief attractions of Burk's Bunker Hill was the realistic scene painting, which, according to some critics, attracted as much audience approval as the play's patriotic subject matter. 18 Playwrights such as John Daly Burk (an Irish immigrant and Boston newspaper editor), Royall Tyler (a Harvard graduate who had once aspired to marry john Adams's daughter), Robert Treat Paine (Boston newspaper editor and offspring of a well-connected Boston family), and William Dunlap (who had received formal training in the arts) had a better "claim" to genius than did a professional hairdresser. As the rise of literary magazines and "gentlemen playwrights" such as James Nelson Barker and Robert T. Conrad in the early nineteenth century suggests, for many Americans, the arts remained the province of the leisured and educated class.

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35

Murdock submitted The Triumphs of Love for Chestnut Street managers Thomas Wignell and Alexander Reinagle's consideration during the theatre's first season in 1794, but the play was rejected .19 On the surface, The Triumphs of Love is a simple tale that revolves around the trials and tribulations of three pairs of young lovers. The couples include Patrick and Jenny (a recent Irish immigrant and his American sweetheart), George Friendly, Jr., a young man of Quaker background and his ladylove Clementia (a refugee from the political crisis in St.Domingue), and Major Manly, a former Revolutionary officer, and his fiancee, Rachel Friendly (a young Quakeress, who fears leaving her religious community to marry outside her faith) . Yet underneath the trappings of its sentimental plot lurk critiques of almost every aspect of Philadelphia's cultural and political life. Among the most interesting are Murdock's presentation of the relationships between Jenny, her Irish suitor Patrick, and their employer, Mr. Peevish, and between George Friendly, Jr. and his slave, Sambo.2o The Jenny/ Patrick relationship raises questions of class and "American" identity in the new nation, as Patrick struggles to assimilate into American culture . Irish immigrants played a crucial and often problematic role in Philadelphia's post- war economy. They provided a cheap source of labor but also created problems in already overcrowded working class neighborhoods.21 Though Irish immigrants came to America expecting to reap the benefits of increased wages and a democratic system, they frequently fell victim to the same kinds of economic exploitation that they had experienced in Ireland and found that the "equality" of a democratic government applied only to the very wealthy. Relegated to stablehand status, Patrick laments that he ever left his "dare [dear] lreland."22 His employer, Mr. Peevish, attacks Patrick as a "blundering Irish fool," threatening to "send to England for servants I can depend on." He complains that it is "mortifying that 19 Murdock offers an account of his efforts to stage his first play in the introduction to The Beau Metamorphasized. 20 In the Spring 2000 issue of The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Jennifer Stiles offers a different interpretation of the GeorgeSamba relationship in her essay, "Import or Immigrant: The Representation of Blacks and Irish on the American Stage from 1 7671856." Stiles places Murdock's treatment of blacks (and Irish) characters in the context of a broader survey of black/Irish stereotypes in the early national theatre. 21 See Billy Smith, The "Lower Sort: " Philadelphia's Laboring People,
1750-1 BOO (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) for a discussion of

urban overcrowding, Irish immigration, and increased mortality rates in the post- war period. 22 John Murdock, The Triumphs of Love, or Happy Reconciliation (Philadelphia, 1794), 22 .

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people of fortune and family should be treated this way."23 Peevish's attack on Patrick emphasizes the growing socio-economic divisions in post-Revolutionary Philadelphia society, as well as the mechanics' resentment at the artificial distinctions made between the wealthy and laboring classes. As Patrick observes after Peevish storms away, "I heard the paple spaking [sic] in the kitchen, that he never had a fader, and that his moder was a fish woman and sold tripes in the market."24 To Patrick, Peevish's origins place them on the same social level : only Peevish's wealth enables him to "lord" it over Patrick, an attitude out of keeping with true republican spirit. Murdock's depiction of the negative treatment of Irish immigrants in the new nation reflects a pressing concern of the period . The discrimination practiced against Irish immigrants may also explain why so many Irish- Americans flocked to the Democratic- Republican party, which held as its motto the "Equality of Man."2S A comparison between the Patrick / Peevish relationship in Triumphs of Love and that of Colonel Manly and Jonathan in Royall Tyler's The Contrast may offer some insights into the way different socio- economic groups perceived the interaction between classes in the new nation. Tyler, a Harvard - educated member of the uppermiddle class, presents Jonathan as an entertaining rustic, but one who adamantly rejects the notion that disparity in wealth in any way indicates inferior social or political status. When jessamy describes him as a "servant," Jonathan replies indignantly, "Servant! Sir, do you take me for a neger - 1 am Colonel Manly's waiter.. . No man shall master me: my father has as good a farm as the Colonel."26 Manly seems to share Jonathan's understanding, and never tries to draw an overt distinction between them. However, Manly's "Federalist" outlook manifests itself in his patriarchal attitude towards both his "waiter" and his former comrades in arms . Moreover, Manly belongs to the Society of the Cincinati , an organization of Revolutionary War officers that

23 Murdock, Triumphs of Love, 21. 24 Ibid ., 22 . 25 For more information on the Democratic- Republican societies of the early national period, see Ph ilip S. Foner, The Democratic Republican
Societies, 1790- 1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, l 976).

26 Royall Tyler, The Contrast, in Arthur Hobson Quinn, ed., Representative American Plays: From 1767 to the Present Day, sixth edition (New York: Appleton- Century- Crofts, Inc., l 930), 60.

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excluded common soldiers.27 Murdock, on the other hand, as a member of the mechanic class, understands the gap between the rhetoric of republicanism and its practice. Patrick's fiancee, Jenny, becomes the means through which Patrick is "reconciled" to the democratic system . As a wedding gift, Peevish offers his patronage to Patrick and Jenny so that they can open a small shop. Though Patrick becomes independent of Peevish by the end of the play, he must still rely on the "patronage system" both to start and sustain his business. Without the goodwill of his employer, he would not have had the opportunity. The George/Sambo relationship in Triumphs of Love also raises the question of how different groups defined democracy and American identity in the post-war period- but it centers around the thorny question of slavery. During one scene, George watches hidden as Sambo dances and cavorts in front of a mirror. Contemplating his reflection, Sambo asks, "Sambo wonder, he berry often wonder, why black folk sold like cow or horse." He adds that his fear of being sold to a cruel master, "almost broke his heart."28 Moved by Samba's grief, George reveals himself and declares Sambo free. While the GeorgeSamba subplot reflects one of the pressing political issues of 1794, the question of why a hairdresser would choose to include a scene of emahcipation in his play is an intriguing one and, as I have suggested, may be traced back to the yellow fever epidemic and the crisis of authority during that period. Moreover, in championing the cause of abolition, Murdock allied himself with two groups anathema to the reigning Federalist elite who governed the Philadelphia theatre. Both the Democratic- Republicans and the Quakers had consistently tried to undermine the Chestnut Street Theatre; the Quakers through grass roots protests and petitions (which lasted until the end of the eighteenth century), and the Democratic- Republicans through an effort to impose a ruinous tax on the new playhouse.29 27 The exclusivity and elitism of the Society of the Cincinati provoked a strong negative response among many of the working class males who had fought au ring the Revolution. The rise of the "Anc1ent and Honorable Artillery Company" was, in some measure, a response to the Cincinati. Most of the members of the Ancient and Honorable companies were drawn from the artisan class. 28 Murdock, The Triumphs of Love, 1 9- 20. 29 For examples of Quaker petitions against the theatre, see petition submitted 3 February 1 784, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; see petition submitted 19 December 1 793, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For a summary of the Quakers' ongoing struggles to prevent the establ ishment of a theatre see William Dye, "Pennsylvania versus the Theatre," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. LV, 1931,333 - 372. Also see Harold C. Shiffler, "Religious Opposition to the Eighteenth Century Philadelphia Stage," Educational Theatre journal, 14 October 1962, 215 - 223. For debates on the plan of "partial taxation" proposed by the theatre's opponents , see Dunlap's Daily Advertiser, 1 5 February- ! 5 March 1 793.

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Murdock's venture into playwriting reflects another trend of the 1790s: the gradual division of post- Revolutionary American society into separate spheres based on social and economic status. Many mechanics had sought to establish their independence from the "aristocratic junto" through the creation of charitable organizations that fulfilled a host of both official and unofficial functions. These organizations provided structures for regulating prices, wages, and pensions, but more than that, they "formalized personal networks" and created a parallel system of interest- related ties to those that linked the members of the Philadelphia elite.30 The mechanics also used their charitable and business connections to strengthen their own cultural rituals. Most focused on public celebrations, such as parades, which could be used to demonstrate solidarity within a select community, and as a vehicle of protest against their exclusion from the nation's "democracy of glee."31 Murdock's Triumphs of Love emerges as an effort on the part of the mechanic class to give a more democratic representation of Philadelphia society.32 Unfortunately, the play and its author appealed to just that sort of American that the theatre's founders did not want represented in their class-regulated theatre.B After Triumphs of Love was rejected for the first season, Murdock resubmitted it in 1795, recruiting a number of Philadelphians to plead his case. He complained that he perceived in the managers,

30 Schultz, The Republic of Labor, 11 8. 31 Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 89.
32 Triumphs of Love was also a welcome antidote to such standard British fare as Love in a Village, Venice Preserv'd, The Lying Valet, The Provok'd Husband, The Recruiting Officer, The School for Scandal, and Miss in her Teens, which formed the bulk of the Chestnut Street Theatre's repertoire . See Thomas C. Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre in the Eighteenth Century, Together with the Day Book of the Same Period (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 224. Also see newspapers of the period for both theatre listings and editorial responses to the Chestnut Street's offerings. Benjamin Franklin Bache's General Advertiser (later the Aurora), offers a particularly entertaining sampling of play critiques.

33 As Dunlap's American Daily Advertiser noted, "The entrances are so well contrived and the lobbies so spacious, that there can be no possibility of confusion among the audience going into different parts of the house." See Dunlap's American Daily Advertiser, 4 February 1793. Also see a letter to the Philadelphia General Advertiser, 24 February 1794, in which one patron complains that he is not allowed to sit among the "well - born," but yet cannot see the stage in the area reserved for the "middling sort," due to his poor eyesight.

TRAMPLING

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"a confirmed temper ... to trample upon native productions."34 Murdock was not the only one who sensed a reluctance on the part of the managers to accept "American" works. Benjamin Bache, editor of the pro-jacobin Aurora, criticized the theatre managers for their play selections, demanding, "Why do not Americans form for themselves a national taste in an age as enlightened as this?"35 Indeed, the question of cultivating "native genius" remained a pressing one throughout the early national period. Theatre managers relied almost exclusively on British works, saving exhibitions of "native genius" for prologues, epilogues, and occasional afterpieces. Those few American authors who did have their plays presented seem to have sensed the need to emphasize their own novice or amateur status, often begging the audience's forbearance as they struggled to create a new American art form. At the urging of Murdock's supporters, Triumphs of Love went forward in the spring of 1795.36 Yet Murdock noted bitterly that though the play was finally presented, it was given at the "eleventh hour," and was "shoved into the world most unmercifully dissected by the managers."37 Reviews of the play observed that while the comedy voiced, "sentiments that do honor to the writer's heart as a man and a citizen," and addressed "several interesting topics such as negro slavery and our glorious revolution," the plot "wants interest and incident, and the sentiments are also rather trite." The writer added that the opening night production had been "received with wonted indulgence."38 While the critic's comments sound patronizing, in many ways, the responses given to Murdock's work were not atypical of those given to other native authors. William Charles White, a Boston actor

34 Philadelphia Gazette, 24 February 1 796. 35 Aurora, 16 January 1795. 36 Murdock did not name the "friends" who were able to compel production of his play, but his list of subscribers for the published version of the script includes some powerful members of Philadelphia's Democratic-Republican society, as well as some of the Pennsylvania delegates to the Abolition Society (Benjamin Rush and Tench Coxe among them). 37 Philadelphia Gazette, 24 February 1796. Alteration of even wellknown scripts was standard practice during this period. Managers often removed material that they feared would offend the audience. For examples of Wig nell's script alterations, see the outstanding Promptbook Collection at the Library Company of Philadelphia. 38 Aurora, 25 May 1795.

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NATHANS

and playwright hailed as an "American Garrick," received similar comments on his first play, Orlando.39 The Triumphs of Love received only one public performance on the Philadelphia stage.40 When Murdock petitioned the managers to revive it for the 1 796 season, they refused. He penned a series of letters to local papers, exhorting the public to rally to his support and force the managers to restage his play. He asserted that "with all the imperfections which they (the managers) or those who influence them may charge it with ...(the play) has the undoubted right of taking its place or chance in the early part of this season with other pieces."41 While one citizen writing in support of Murdock's play commented, "The subject is so characteristic of our situation, that it makes us love our country," adding, "Genius in our own country ought to be patronized,"42 another correspondent dismissed the play as unworthy of so much attention , observing, "the author certainly misplaces his abilities when they are employed in the production of dramatic production."43 What is most interesting about this exchange is Murdock's implied attack on the proprietors of the Chestnut Street house- whom he describes as "those who influence" the managers-as the real party interested in the suppression of his play-and the retaliatory snubbing administered by the critic who urges Murdock to turn his attention back to his true talent: hairdressing. Indeed, the presumption of a hairdresser to dictate to theatre shareholders such as Robert Morris and William Bingham (two of the
39 See "An American Garrick: The Strange Career of William Charles White," paper presented by HeatherS. Nathans at the New England Historical Association , 2000.

40 A relatively small number of performances for an original American play was not unusual during the early national period . For example, though Royall Tyler's The Contrast has been widely hailed as the first real "American " play, it received only four recorded performances in Philadelphia between 1 787 and 1 796. Thus a limited run does not necessarily indicate that a play was unpopular-merely that the audience pool was limited and that managers did their best to offer a constantly rotating menu of plays. 41 Philadelphia Gazette, 24 February 1 796. 42 Aurora, 10 February 1 796. 43 Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Advertiser, 2 5 February 1 796. The critic also added that the manag ers had been fully justified in refusing to remount the production, since they were dependent on box office revenues for their support and the play would certainly fail to make a profit.

TRAMPLING

41

richest men in America) may have rankled among members of Philadelphia's wealthy class. Murdock, as a mere artisan , was not one of the "approved guardians" of his country's virtue, as the theatre's founders had styled themselves in 1789.44 Yet Murdock obviously believed that he was well within his rights to comment not only on the state of Philadelphia politics, but on its cultural future as well. Murdock's attitude reflected the growing dissatisfaction among the artisans of the young republic with the cultural assumptions dictated by their "betters." In Boston, the growing rift between the mechanics and the merchant elite produced a schism in the theatre that led to the creation of a new playhouse. 4 5 In Murdock's case, it led to his claim of a mechanic's share in American "native genius." Murdock's second play submitted for production at the Chestnut Street house and also rejected was The Politicians; Or a State of Things. The play examines the reaction of a cross - section of Philadelphia society to the political upheaval caused by the jay Treaty, an agreement negotiated by politician John Jay to halt British depredations on American ships. Some believed that Jay had conceded too much to the British in forming the treaty, while others supported a renewal of relations with Great Britain. The debates over the treaty helped to polarize the budding party system in the new nation, and discussion of the issue permeated every level of American society. The most striking scenes in The Politicians demonstrate this phenomenon, presenting political wranglings among traditionally under-represented groups of Philadelphia society: women, African-Americans, and mechanics. For example, the play opens with a savage argument between Mrs. Violent (a Federalist) and Mrs. Turbulent (ajacobin). Both are well informed and outspoken in their opinions about the current political crisis facing the nation. Another scene presents a political debate between the now- free Samba and two other slaves, each of whom argue a point of view based on what their masters advocate. But perhaps the most intriguing scene- and the one closest to Murdock's own milieu-takes place in a tavern between a Scotsman and an American. The American, Mr. Adz , confesses that he has never read the jay Treaty and acknowledges that his perspective on the issue has been shaped by what he hears from "Mr. Buzzabout." The Scotsman, Mr. Sawney, rebukes him for his inattention to these issues and reminds him that it is his responsibility as a citizen to participate in his government. He says : "All power is from the people. The people are

44 Petition of the Dramatic Association to the General Assembly, Minutes of the General Assembly, 16 February 1 789. Also see Pennsylvania Packet, 1 7 February 1789.
45 HeatherS. Nathans , "All of the Federalist School?: Choosing Sides and Creating Identities in the Boston Theatre Wars," New England Theatre journal, Winter 2000.

42

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the great foundation from which all authority flows."46 Murdock ends the play with a satire on the elite politicians shaping Philadelphia society, showing them at a formal dinner, offering a series of increasingly drunken and nonsensical toasts. In so doing, he deflates the egos of Philadelphia's ruling class by mocking the importance attached to toasts, cockades, and other demonstrations of political allegiance to France or England. 47 Murdock's last play, The Beau Metamorphasized; Or The Generous Maid offers his strongest defense of both the mechanics' pos ition in American society and his own "native genius" as an author. Like Murdock's other two plays, The Beau Metamorphasized was rejected by the Chestnut Street managers. Yet unlike his earlier works, this play directly attacks those members of Philadelphia society still unwilling to encourage native talent by linking them with the British aristocracy. For example, in a heated exchange the character of Mr. Vainly, a visiting foreigner, ridicules an American play he has just read, "written by a hairdresser. ..which smells of pomade," (an allusion to Murdock's own work). Vainly claims that the script lacks plot, incident, and wit. Miss Sprightly, an American , defends the play and the social position of its author: "No doubt it has its defects ... but it was written by an American, and not one of the first grade ," to which Mr. Vainly retorts , 'To be sure, it was a damn'd piece of presumption in the fellow."48 In a later scene, Vainly insults his tailor, saying that American - made clothes are not fit for a mechanic to wear. His tailor responds indignantly, "Who has a better right to wear good and well fitted clothes than mechanics? Are they not the most useful and industrious part of the people?"49 In the end , the mechanics have their revenge against the haughty Vainly, as Puff, the hairdresser (again, a figure for Murdock) enters and chops off all of Vainly's hair! Though The Beau Metamorphasized was published in 1800, it is clearly set prior to 1799 since it makes reference to Ricketts Circus (which burned down in late 1 799) , and since it seems to attack john Adams's pro- British political policies and the strong pro-British bias of

46 John Murdock, The Politicians; Or a State of Things (Philadelphia, 1798), 25 . 47 For a discussion of the symbolism of cockades and toasts during the early national period, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, I 776- 1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street. 48 John Murdock, The Beau Metamorphasized; Or the Generous Maid (Philadelphia, 1800), 24- 25. 49 Murdock, The Beau Metamorphasized, 3 5.

TRAMPLING

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Philadelphia's Federalist elite. Though the Federalist elite dominated Philadelphia politics into the late 1790s, the mechanic class and the Democratic- Republicans were gaining ground. Indeed, the state election of 1 797 witnessed the largest turn out of laboring class voters in the city's history, and by 1 799, a Democratic governor had toppled Philadelphia's Federalist regime.so In addition to the political upset, by 1 799, many of the post-war Federalist elite had lost their financial clout as well; men like Robert Morris landed in debtors' prison as speculation deals collapsed. The Federalist might that had ruled the Chestnut Street playhouse fractured under the political and economic strain of the late 1 790s. By the time that Murdock published The Beau Metamorphasized, both class and cultural conditions in the new nation had begun to shift away from the elite- dominated regime of the postwar years. The rising artisan class sought new access to opportunity, making their presence felt both in the electorate and in the theatre. Managers like Wignell and Reinagle (and their successors at the Chestnut Street Theatre, and later at the Walnut Street Theatre), learned the importance of catering to the "middling sort." Though Murdock's plays failed to secure recognition in his own time, due, in some part, to the class controversies swirling around the theatre of the period, theatre historians may find in his work one of the best keys to understanding the artisan class's perspective on the early national theatre. While "genius" commonly denotes extreme intelligence or aptitude, it can also describe "a particular character or essential spirit or nature of a nation." In that sense, John Murdock's plays truly fit the definition of "native genius," since they capture the particular character of the new nation at a critical moment in its cultural history.

so Schultz, The Republic of Labor, 148.

journal of American Drama and Theatre 14 (Winter 2002)

WHEN THE "A" WORD IS NEVER SPOKEN: FEAR OF INTIMACY AND AIDS IN LANFORD WILSON'S BURN THIS

RAY SCHULTZ

In a 1989 Theater Week article entitled "A Look Back in Anguish," Stephen Gutwillig assesses how playwrights and the theatre community at large have responded creatively to the issue of AIDS since the landmark premieres of As Is and The Normal Heart in 1985. From his perspective- ignorant of such AIDS plays as Angels In America and jeffrey yet to come-he raises "the frightening possibility that the theater's greatest artistic contributions in the fight against AIDS have already been made." Although lamenting the dearth of drama directly concerned with AIDS, Gutwillig, on a brighter note, points to such plays as Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles and Richard Greenberg's Eastern Standard as attempts at least to incorporate the disease as one of numerous issues which challenge America in the 1980s. Although their authors have been criticized by some for trivializing the epidemic, Gutwillig finds merit in these attempts: "However, these authors have integrated both the harsh realities of AIDS and sympathetic gay characters into the mainstream. In an age of small favors, those accomplishments should not be underrated."! Indeed, from the time AIDS penetrated mainstream America's consciousness, both gay and straight playwrights have naturally included references to and depictions of AIDS in their work, particularly as part of a larger canvas which paints the problems of a chaotic, urban lifestyle. Some, like John Guare in Six Degrees of Separation (1990), voice the topic bluntly; when a gay, African-American interloper ingratiates himself into the rarefied world of affluent, Waspy New Yorkers, one of its members fears that the young man may be tainted by this new form of urban blight: "You were lunatic! And picking that drek off the street. Are you suicidal? Do you have AIDS? Are you infected?"2 Other playwrights, like Greenberg in Eastern Standard (1988) and Wasserstein in The Heidi Chronicles (1988), while never voicing the word "AIDS" plainly, expect their audience to incorporate
1 Stephen Gutwillig, "A Look Back in Anguish: How Well Has Theater Coped With AIDS?" Theater Week, 25 December 1989, 33- 38.

2 John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation (New York: Random House, 1990), 98.

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AIDS into their urban landscapes. For example, in the The Heidi Chronicles, the title character's best friend is a young, gay pediatrician who speaks of "safe sex," a "sick" boyfriend, and his despair over attending countless funerals with and for "handsome men all my own age."3 Within the context of this time span, roughly encompassing 19861993, Lanford Wilson, arguably one of America's most prominent gay playwrights writing for a mixed audience of both gays and straights, wrote Burn This (1987). Like the aforementioned works, this play addresses the problems of love and loss while coping with the vagaries of modern, urban living. Wilson's work features a sympathetic gay character who has successfully assimilated to the heterosexual majority in the play. Yet in Burn This Gutwillig's "harsh realities of AIDS," at first glance, seem totally absent. Indeed, although in his first entrance one of the play's central characters, an angry young urban man, launches into a tirade that catalogues every conceivable urban ill from the lack of available parking spaces4 to the "dipshit" who runs his mouth off in a bar (34), he never includes the city's number one health emergency in his harangue. Moreover, upon closer examination of Wilson's text, the apparent absence of AIDS becomes not only glaringly evident but also decidedly suspect, especially when considered within the context of the time and setting of the play, and its initial productions and given the author's own homosexuality. The following analysis of Burn This will explore the possible reasons for the mysterious exclusion of AIDS in a play by a gay writer set and produced in a city that is one of the major epicenters of the disease at a time when this disease was at the forefront of American consciousness. Furthermore, a case can be made that the play, rather than ignoring the disease, may actually be one of the most extreme examples of writing subtly about AIDS without once voicing the word. Ironically, by scrupulously avoiding the subject-indeed, with barely an implied or passing mention of its existence-Wilson may have written one of the most eloquent and articulate statements to date about the uncertainty of loving and living in post-AIDS urban society. Burn This-directed by Wilson's long-time collaborator, Marshall Mason, and starring Steppenwolf Theatre Company regulars john Malkovich and joan Allen-was first produced for a limited run in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum in january, 1987. The production was then presented in New York in February as part of Circle Repertory Company's regular subscription series. (Indeed, Circle Rep, Wilson's long-time artistic home, commissioned the play.) In September of 1987 the production traveled to Chicago for a third limited run, this 3 Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles (New York: Random House, 1990), 233, 237.
4 Lanford Wilson, Burn This (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 25. All subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text.

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BURN THIS

time under the auspices of the Steppenwolf Theatre. Finally, on October 14, 1987, Burn This opened on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre and closed there a year later, having racked up an impressive run of seven previews and 437 performances . The production history of Burn This coincided with the emergence of AIDS as a major political and medical concern in mainstream America. In the fall and winter of 1986- 87 then Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released his controversial report on the disease which called for extensive AIDS education, and the nomenclature for the AIDS virus, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), was, at last, officially decided upon.s By january 1987, the month of the play's Los Angeles debut, a proposal for both mandatory and voluntary testing was issued by the federal government; eliciting five hundred thousand participants and extensive media coverage. The March on Washington for gay rights and increased AIDS funding preceded the play's Broadway premiere by a mere three days. Moreover, Burn This closed on Broadway in October of 1 988, a few days before President Reagan belatedly declared October as "AIDS awareness month."6 AIDS was, thus, very much a hot button issue when Wilson's play was performed in America 's three largest cities. In Burn This Wilson presents a heterosexual love triangle played against a dramatic landscape inhabited by an extended family as they cope with grief and loss stemming from the sudden death of two of its members. The "extended family" is familiar terrain for Wilson ; his plays roughly divide themselves between urban settings, as in Balm in Gilead (1965) and The Hot I Baltimore (1973), and rural ones , like the Missouri town of Lebanon, the playwright's own birthplace, as in Fifth of july (1978), Talley's Folly (1979), and Talley & Son (1985). In a 1982 interview Wilson readily acknowledges this recurring pattern in his work: "A friend of mine once told me that in all my work I'm either trying to put my family back together again or to create a new one. I guess he was right. I just don't think about it much ."7 For Burn This Wilson returned to an urban setting, placing his extended family in 1987 New York City, where AIDS already existed for six years as a distinct, if unpleasant, fact of life. According to the journal of the American Medical Association, by March of 1988 56,212 cases of AIDS and 31 ,400 deaths from AIDS had been reported in the United States alone since 1981, the year that the then unnamed disease first began to permeate the consciousness of the medical and gay communities. Gay men comprised an overwhelming majority (some s James Kinsella, Covering the Plague: AIDS and the American Media (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 267. 6 Kinsella, 268, 269.
7 Ross Wetzsteon, "The Most Populist Playwright," New York, 8 November 1982:43.

SCHULTZ

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68%) of these cases. a In New York City, the play's setting, the outlook was even bleaker: In July 1989, the city's health department announced in its AIDS Task Force Report that New York could claim close to 17,000 of these reported cases, with gay/bisexual men comprising over 50% of them.9 The estimates for HIV infection at the time were even more staggering: the Task Force numbers ranged from 149,000 to a possible high of 400,000 New Yorkers infected with the virus. Although the experts were, in essence, indulging in sophisticated guesswork ("The actual overall sere- prevalence of HIV among homosexual / bisexual men in New York City is unknown"), the report noted that some studies suggested that as many as 35 - 50% of the city's gay / bisexual men might be harboring the virus.1 o Burn This contains not only a gay character, Larry, an art director for a major advertising firm, but also makes the two deceased characters (who, though already dead at the play's outset, remain vital to its action) homosexual lovers . The three remaining characters of the piece, though heterosexual, live and work either in or on the fringes of gay society: Anna, the roommate of Larry and Robbie, one of the dead lovers , works in the predominantly gay world of the dance as a choreographer and dancer; Burton, Anna's current lover, who displays both tolerance and sensitivity to gay sensibility (even boasting of one gay sexual encounter) is a writer, an occupation often associated with homosexuals; and Pale, Robbie's brother and Burton's rival, manages a restaurant, a business whose ranks are dominated, at least in metropolitan New York, with gay workers, particularly waiters. Thus, Wilson fashions his mise en scene within a decidedly gay milieu, peopled with intelligent characters who are either gay or sensitive to the gay lifestyle of the late 1980s. Given these circumstances and the tenor of the times, it would not be too far- fetched for the reader 1audience to expect plot development, or at least some discussion, to focus on the issue of AIDS. As James Jones asserts in "Refusing the Name," " . . . it is impossible to read a piece of fiction about gay men in the present and not assume AIDS is going to make its presence felt one way or another."11
8 "The Quarterly Report to the Domestic Policy Council on the Prevalence and Rate of Spread of HIV and AIDS in the United States," journal of the American Medical Association 259.18, May 1988: 26572661.

9 New York City Department of Health, New York City AIDS Task Force Report, Washington: U.S. Department of Commerce, National Technical Information Service, 1989: 25.
1 o New

York City AIDS Task Force Report, l 7.

11 james W. jones, "Refusing the Name : The Absence of AIDS in Recent American Male Fiction," in Timothy F. Murphy and Suzanne Poirier, Writing AIDS: Cay Literature, Language and Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 2 29.

48

BURN THIS

Yet the dreaded word "AIDS" is never uttered by a single character in Burn This. just as Wilson goes to such painstaking lengths to create a situation ripe for including AIDS as a primary concern, ironically, he works almost doubly hard to exclude it from the play's overt discourse. With his very first lines of dialogue, Wilson deliberately proceeds to defuse the disease as a potential source of conflict or discussion in the play. Almost immediately Wilson discloses in Burton's and Anna's expository scene that the gay lovers, Robbie and Dominic, have been killed, not by the premier and expected cause of death among homosexuals in 1987 New York, but instead melodramatically in a "freak accident" while piloting a motorboat (6). Through this plot contrivance, Wilson permits the remaining living characters of the extended family and the outsider, Pale, ironically a member of Robbie's estranged nuclear family, to act out the grief and loss of two promising young lives cut short not by the lethal disease of their time but by romantic and sudden death. Among the characters, not even Larry, himself a gay man whose passion is grand opera, makes the connection that what possibly, indeed expectedly, might happen in real life and what actually happens smacks of the operatic or ironic. The tragic and ironic parallels to AIDS as a killer of young and vital men must, instead, be inferred by the audience or reader because the characters themselves either fail to draw the parallels or evade the issue. just as the word "AIDS" is excluded from the play's dialogue and the disease not made the cause of the lovers' deaths, strategies that might raise the specter of AIDS indirectly are likewise almost entirely absent from Wilson's text. As discussed by William Leap in "Language and AIDS," such references allow the speaker to talk of or around the disease while maintaining linguistic distance.l2 Some of these strategies include open-ended references to the disease, such as "sick" or "it," "the most open ended and neutral of all of the English pronouns" and perhaps the most "popular replacement for direct reference to AIDS"; indexing one or more of the external symptoms of the disease rather than naming the disease; the use of synonyms and/or code words; and the use of "medical, technical, clinical, or other scientific jargon instead of 'ordinary English."'l3 Despite their proximity to and presumed knowledge of the epidemic, the play's characters adopt these strategies only minimally. For example, Larry's remark that he's "always willing to drape the joint in crepe" (8) and Anna's lament that the streets around their neighborhood are "haunted" (42) are expressions which, given the proper context, could be interpreted as coded references to the disease. However, Wilson blunts the potential for such a reading by tying the remarks directly to the drowned lovers. Oddly enough, Wilson allows Burton, perhaps the most disinterested party to the deaths, to initiate the most easily discernible examples of 12 William Leap, "Language and AIDS," in Douglas A. Feldman, ed., Culture and AIDS, New York: Praeger, 1990: 140-148.
13

Leap, 141, 142, 144.

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indirect discourse associated with AIDS in Burn This, and this discourse is veiled and meager at best. When he rum inates with Larry over his resentment in losing Anna to Pale, he strangely invokes language associated with AIDS: BURTON . .. I've never lost anything before . ... See, what gets to me is, I keep feeling angry. You know, I could tear the shithead apart. LARRY I know. BURTON I could. But, you know, that doesn't mean anything . What' s bothering me is, I keep feeling "Fuck her," you know?- and then I know that' s not what I'm really feeling - that's just a protective mechanism sort of thing that I've always used so I wouldn't lose . You know? 'Cause I've never lost. And I don't really feel "Fuck her" at all. That' s just my immune system defending me. LARRY It's a handy thing to have.

(93)

Though Burton is ostensibly speaking of his crumbling affair with Anna, he might also spark an association with AIDS in the sawy reader, since "immune system" is a medical term, as Leap suggests , frequently employed indirectly to index the disease . Moreover, one could argue that Larry's reply extends this association since it certainly represents a coded reference that would be shared at least by many gay men. His ironic quip, "It's a handy thing to have," supports Leap's contention that "these highly personalized shared references" allow a specific social group to index "meanings that they have in common" and remind them of the "intimacy and the solidarity that they also share ."14 In this case Larry, and by extension most gay men , could fill in what is left unspoken : To have a healthy immune system (which, if the virus were present, would be inevitably ravaged) in the midst of the AIDS epidemic is both enviable and desirable. That he says this to Burton, a straight man shown to be sensitive to gay issues and presumably knowledgeable about the disease, additionally widens the "in- group" to include the heterosexual reader who is similarly gay sensitive and AIDS aware. Burton triggers another in stance of a coded reference to the AIDS epidemic at the beginning of the second act when , intoxicated by New Year's Eve champagne and cocaine, he relates to Anna and Larry his 14 Leap, 143 .

50
sole homosexual encounter:

BURN THIS

BURTON I just shook it off and turned around and leaned against the wall and watched it snow while he went down on me. I came, and he put it away and said thank you, if you believe it, and I said, Have a good life, and went on walking down to the Village. And I never thought about it again. So I'm not completely unversed in your world. LARRY That is gorgeous. With the snow falling. God . I mean it's not Wuthering Heights, but ... God. BURTON It was very nice, and I never thought about it. And it didn't mean anything, but I've never been sorry it happened or any of that crap. (63) This encounter, which predates the advent of the epidemic, consisted of oral sex, arguably an unsafe sexual practice in the era of AIDS. Larry barely acknowledges the potential danger of the act in a post- AIDS society; rather, he again responds with a quip: "Lord, the innocence and freedom of yesterday." Anna's reaction is even more liminal; she barely musters a response , revealing that she, like Larry, "was just thinking that." Once more Wilson slips in a subtle reference to AIDS through a coded phrase most easily picked up on by gays. Here Larry indulges in his nostalgia for "the innocence and freedom" of a pre- AIDS "yesterday," where such acts of sexual liberty were both safe and permissible. Such an act of nostalgia is viewed by John Clum in '"And Once I had It All'" as a "convention of gay AIDS fiction ."lS Through Larry, Wilson invites the post- AIDS gay reader- as well as the sympathetic and enlightened heterosexual reader by virtue of Anna's echo of this sentiment- to remember a less complicated past, thereby, according to Clum, offering the character and the reader both comfort and empowerment: In a gay culture rightfully obsessed with a plague, remembering becomes a central act, and it is how and what one remembers that defines much of AIDS literature, art, and film. That focus on memory and desire take on new meaning as links to the past must be forged, the past is sad and terrifying, and the future is dramatically foreshortened . To affirm the past is to

l s John M. Clum , "And Once I Had It All : AIDS Narratives and Memories of an American Dream ," in Writing AIDS, 208.

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affirm the power of sexual desire; affirming the foreshortened, uncertain future is to affirm the possibility of love in the face of death.l6 However, unlike , for example, the main characters in William Hoffman's As Is, whose memories of a nostalgic gay past consist of graphic sexual testimony, Wilson's characters fail to enlarge on the "innocence and freedom of yesterday." Although Wilson evokes Clum 's notion of nostalgia, at the same time he prevents a prolonged, overt discussion of AIDS to enter into the play by failing to elucidate specific memories of Larry's sexual past. These scant passages of dialogue constitute the only textual references to AIDS in Burn This. Even when Anna- who has implied in the above quote that she knows about the dangers of AIDS - sleeps with Pale, an unfamiliar and potentially "dangerous" sex partner, questions about the relative safety of the act go conspicuously unasked by this group of highly intelligent and presumably aware New Yorkers. By comparison, the equally hip but vastly more immature characters of Howard Korder's Boys' Life (1988) do not hesitate to ask blunt questions about similar heterosexual acts in post-AIDS New York: "Did you use a condom? . . . Because you slept with her, and then you slept with me, and you don't know who she's been fucking, do you, Don."17 Indeed, just as Pale and Anna's act of sexual intercourse will reveal the play's thematic core , namely the awakening of Anna's dormant emotional and sexual passion, so too will Anna's res istance to this awakening expose her and the others ' fear and evasion of se x . Anna speaks for Wilson , for the other characters, perhaps for us all , when she laments: "I'm sick of the age I' m living in. I don't like feeling ripped off and scared" (87) . For one can argue that sex in Anna's age represents a truly scary prospect. On one hand, one could die in a freak boating accident in any time period or, as Pale cautions, "You walk down the street, a brick falls on your head" (82); on the other hand, physical and emotional intimacy,"those ships-that- pass- in- the night- scenes," as Larry calls them (63) , can now lead to possible death when placed in the context of Anna's "age," the age of AIDS. Thus, just as Wilson sets up constructs deliberately to avoid both direct and indirect disc ussion of AIDS among his characters, so too does he develop strategies to discourage sexual intimacy among them and between them and the outside world . Considering the play's time and setting, it is by no means far- fetched to entertain the notion that Wilson's characters may perceive sex and AIDS to be bound together in an intricate knot. Although Wilson chooses to leave the "A" word out of his text, the disease may be seen to lurk in the play's subte xt ,

16 Ibid . 17 Howard Korder, Boy's Life (New York: Dramat ists Pl ay Service, 1988), 38- 39.

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almost as if it were another character, as real as the unseen dead lovers. Even as AIDS remains an unseen and unspoken presence in the downtown loft, Wilson, nonetheless, invites the reader to observe how his four corporeal bodies unconsciously relate to the specter of AIDS as they avoid the problems of intimacy. For a start, the household arrangements of all the characters , both living and dead, do not appear conducive to private sexual intimacy on a regular basis. Anna, Larry, and Robbie co-habit the play's setting, a spacious loft in lower Manhattan's trendy Tribeca area. The three friends occupy separate bedrooms (Wilson's stage directions actually assign Robbie to a sleeping loft above the public room), and they live there without sexual mates. Larry is unattached with no past or prospective partners ever mentioned in the text; Burton, though Anna's long-time lover, has his own apartment; and, until their untimely deaths , Robbie and Dominic had separate residences, although Anna reveals to Pale that Dominic "spent half the time here. We'd been trying to get him to move in, there's plenty of room " (41 ). The loft may provide ample living space; however, privacy is at a premium since its interior doors and walls prove thin . When Anna sleeps with Pale in Act One, the next morning Larry quotes snatches of their conversation in the public room and tartly refers to "all the music" originating from Anna's bedroom. He has clearly heard every detail of the previous evening's tumultuous activities: " ... my eyes did not close. I had one hand on the phone and the other with a finger poised to dial 911." During this exchange Larry also proceeds to violate the privacy of Anna 's overnight guest by rifling through the pockets of Pale's clothing (45-46). In Act Two, when, during Anna's and Burton's intimate New Year's Eve celebration, their only display of sexual attraction throughout the entire play shows signs of heating up, Larry's unexpected return from his Christmas vacation interrupts the couple. Rather than engage in sex, they appear relatively content to hear Larry's humorous account of the holidays with his nuclear family (55). The loft, while designed as a space to promote warmth and solidarity among the extended family unit and their respective friends and lovers, seems at the same time constructed to discourage private sexual activity, a situation to which its inhabitants rarely object. Additionally, the loft also functions as a retreat for Anna, since part of the public room doubles as a dance studio, Robbie's and her working area. By consolidating the major components of her life into one space, Anna constructs an almost cocoon-like environment (in Act One she recounts a long story about sleeping on the night of Robbie's funeral in his family's attic, full of drugged butterflies, which reinforces this image [21 - 22)), through which she can filter out any unwanted threat of social or sexual intercourse . Such a threat does seep through when Pale and Burton struggle for possession of her, but she retreats to the even more insulated cocoon of her own room (91 ), or else, uncharacteristically, she leaves the loft entirely, seeking refuge at a friend's dance studio where she can be alone to throw herself into her work (88). For Anna, as for the other characters in Burn This, attitudes

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towards work will block yet another path that leads to the dangerous road of intimacy. Throughout Burn This Wilson shows Anna, Burton , and Pale to have practically no life outside their work and little emotional investment in their respective occupations. At the start of the play, Anna has returned for Robbie's funeral from Houston where she has been teaching a dance company another choreographer's work. She has been making a living doing this but feels artistically dissatisfied: "But I'm back the day after. Here for a week, then go to Seattle for no more than six days, and then that's it. No more teaching other companies Charley's dance" (20). At the time of Robbie's death, the two had also been working together on a dance piece, but" ... it was too much like Charley's work, anyway" (11 ). Conducting a tepid affair with Burton, traveling around the country performing unfulfilling work, and surviving the shock of Robbie's sudden death have drained her of any passion . She confides to Larry that she feels "as stiff as a board . ... I'm completely out of touch with my body" (19). In the same vein, Anna distances the men in her life by constructing them as working rather than sexual entities : Robbie is a "workaholic"; Pale works "hard" and has "a very demanding job"; and Burton is "good" because he is a successful writer. Her torrid encounter with Pale, however, shakes Anna's complacency and begins to put her back in touch with her body. Dancing and singing around the loft the morning after, she contemplates skipping class and going back to bed, prompting Larry to remind her she has "work to do." Anna's response is enigmatic: "I'll take a shower and think about it" (49). The act ends without Wilson's revealing her decision. When an ugly fight between Burton and Pale results in her sleeping with Pale for a second time, Anna this time rebuffs his attempts at further intimacy: "Pale I have never had a personal life ... it wasn't important .. . I have nothing for you . . . I'm frightened of you" (86). In the same scene she also brandishes the excuse of work (no fewer than four times) as a shield to ward off his advances. Subsequently, Anna uses her work to sublimate her potentially dangerous sexual urges towards Pale, rushing off to enlarge the dance she has resumed choreographing from two couples to three and pointing out to Larry that "If I can 't have a life at least I can work" (88). These repres sed desires are rechanneled into the sexually "safe" realm of art. Pale recognizes Anna's sublimation when he sees the newlyeroticized, finished product: "That was you and me up there. Only we ain't never danced. I could probably sue you for that" (97). The men in Burn This employ similar measures to guard against possible physical and emotional contact by sublimating physical passion in passionless work. Pale has toiled for years in the restaurant business and has survived an almost superhuman work schedule which leaves him no time for any sort of private life; any feeling of satisfaction about his job is derived strictly from its monetary benefits (79). Until he meets Anna, any sexual desires appear to be submerged in either work or substance abuse . Likewise, Burton earns huge sums of money

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as a writer of science fiction screenplays, yet continually disparages his efforts : "There are no good movies .. . . They're produced by whores, written by whores," (17). His earned and inherited wealth allows him the freedom to travel and to dictate his own schedule, but in the play he travels not with Anna, but with male friends on a camping trip or by himself on a visit to his family's home. When he finally begins to write about something real and personal , he resists the impulse, dismissing his attempt as "nothing, goes nowhere" (60). It is only when Pale and Burton assume that they have each lost Anna and no longer run the risk of intimacy that they can adjust their attitudes towards work : Pale quits his job for a less grueling one; Burton can finish his story from a more objective and, thus, safe distance. Larry, too, by choosing to work for a conservative advertising firm , lessens his chances of finding love in the workplace and, consequently, minimizes any risk of sexual complications. Constructs of work and environment are but two of the ways by which Wilson navigates his characters past the menacing shoals of sexual intimacy. Most importantly, the strongest link between sexual evasion and AIDS in Burn This perhaps rests in the even more complex interpersonal relationships among its characters, particularly Anna and Larry, for it is in these that they betray their deepest anxieties about sexual contact. It is an especially understandable fear when viewed in the context of the dangerous, possibly deadly, time in which they are living. From the very start of Burn This, Wilson presents the relationship between Anna and Burton to be one based on emotional and physical evasion . The pair have been physically separated by work (Anna) and vacation (Burton); they are seeing each other for the first time since the fatal accident, yet Anna immediately must resist the impulse to distance herself from her lover: "I didn't know if I wanted to let you in. I think if I have someone to cry on, I'll fall apart completely" (6). The two then stand in the loft exchanging dialogue until Larry enters and Burton leaves. Wilson' s stage directions call for no physical contact between them . By contrast, Burton urges Larry to "Take care of her" (19); although not in Wilson 's stage directions, the subsequent scene between Anna and Larry was staged for the play's Broadway production on the couch with considerable physical moves between the characters, such as hugs, Larry's massaging Anna's shoulders and so forth. Conversely, throughout the play what Anna and Burton do engage in is lots of talk: They talk about Robbie; they talk about their respective work; they talk about moving to Martha's Vineyard. They even talk about living together, although Anna proposes the unprivate and, therefore, "safe" conditions : "You want to live with me, you move in here" (54). Although Anna goes so far as to reveal to Larry that she "had almost decided if he proposed again I was going to accept him" (74), all their talk still leads nowhere . just as Anna keeps Burton at arm's length, Burton reciprocates. He does not object to Anna's emotional dependency on Larry and Robbie, to their physical separations, or even to their infrequent sexual

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intercourse. (Wilson's delineation of time in the play is often vague, but Burton tells Anna it's been "a while" since they made love [54], and Anna confesses to Pale that she hasn't had sex since their previous encounter of a month ago [83] .) Instead, Burton objectifies himself in a sexual conte xt, regaling Anna and Larry with the stories of his previously discussed homosexual encounter and his most recent camping trip. In the latter instance he exhorts Anna to feel his thigh while Larry watches (12); in both instances his flirting with Larry reduces him to the position of a poseur, enjoying the sensation of sexual excitement without the physical contact. Moreover, his most passionate physical gesture towards Anna is of a violent, not sexual, nature, when he beats Pale in her presence (71 - 73) . Throughout Burn This the two complicitly engage in a passionless relationship seemingly devoid of any sex ual intimacy. Pale poses the astute question to Anna: "You like him so much, why ain't you makin' it with him?" (86) Ironically, Anna seems to reserve whatever passionate desires she possesses for the living and deceased gay men in her life. Her relationship with Robbie resembles more of a marriage than a deep friendship; its intensity far exceeds her half- hearted involvement with Burton. Living and working closely together, the two share the excitement of joint creativity; moreover, Anna reserves for Robbie the highest place in the hierarchy of her cherished work ethic: "He worked harder than anyone I've ever known" (42). Larry reveals that the intense feelings were mutually shared, when he laments that nothing meant much to Robbie except "work, and you and Dominic" (23); this statement becomes all the more telling by his placement of Anna before the dead man's lover in the list of priorities. Wilson most dramatically points up the marriage-like quality of the relationship, however, when the events of the funeral are related. Robbie 's relatives mistake Anna for his girlfriend, assigning her the role of "the bereaved widow," a role which she later claims filled her with terrible anger (ironically, a typical widow's response), yet she yields to participating in the charade (1 0-11 ). While, on the one hand, Anna 's relationship with Larry seems to lack the intensity of passion that she shared with the dead man , on the other, its emotional intimacy greatly surpasses her experiences with the straight men in her life. Larry takes care of her basic needs throughout the play ("She's had a very protected life" [94]), and Anna, in turn, more willingly reveals her inner self to him than to her heterosexual suitors. In one sense the combination of the two gay men seems to fulfill her completely: Robbie functions as "lover," Larry as "husband ." Finding safety in this arrangement, Anna accurately assesses the situation when she rejects amorous advances from Pale and Burton: "I could live my life very well, thank you, without ever seeing another straight man" (74). Even though the two gay men in Anna's life appear to provide emotional satisfaction, the relationships fail to operate on a sexual plane . Any overt sexual impulses are sublimated in Anna's and Robbie's "dancing" and emotional honesty and in the non- sexual physical affection between her and Larry. Within Anna's binary

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relationship Wilson buries a crucial and ironic paradox: fleeing from the threat of sexual intimacy with the straight men in her life, she seeks refuge with two gay men who are potentially lethal, since they belong to the group at highest risk for AIDS in 1987 New York City. This threat is neutralized, however, because the very sexual orientation that places them in jeopardy poses little or no risk of sexual contact with a heterosexual woman. Naturally, this construct begins to crumble with Robbie's death and the arrival of Pale on the scene. For Pale is more than Robbie's brother: he is also, according to Anna (and all the other characters), his brother's heterosexual "double" (2 5). A considerable part of the woman's attraction to Pale resides in this resemblance to her dead "lover" and her mourning for him: "I miss him like hell. I go to the Studio, I think I see him ten times a day. Someone dressed like him, or walking like him. Then I remember he's gone, and it's all that loss all over again" (41-42). Although the heterosexual Pale comes from a much lower-risk group for AIDS, the danger for Anna, ironically, becomes greater, since any sexual fantasy for the homosexual brother can now be acted out for real. Though within the play's time frame the estimates for HIV infection among straights were considerably lower than for gays, the numbers for this group were still high enough to arouse concern, particularly in New York City, where the AIDS Task Force Report cited as many as 36,000 possible infections in 1988 within this group.lS Since Wilson ascribes a vague sexual history to Pale (he is estranged from his wife, so is no longer, presumably, in a monogamous relationship [79]) and Anna is involved in another relationship, one may question why she would twice sleep with Pale without ever affirming or questioning the relative safety of their sex acts. Although Wilson slightly neutralizes the threat of possible infection by revealing that Pale has not slept with anyone between their encounters (83), his substance abuse and possible promiscuity should alert Anna to the heightened risk of infection. After all, since she has spoken a coded reference to the disease and is shown to be cognizant of sex acts between gays ("They have anal intercourse, take turns having oral . .. "[40]), she should be, by extension, presumably aware about AIDS. But although she at one point calls Pale "dangerous" (82) , she never once directly questions the relative "danger" of their sexual activity. Rather, Wilson seems to leave the reason for Pale's danger to Anna deliberately ambiguous: Is he "dangerous" to her emotionally or biologically? Within the play's post-AIDS time frame and given the fact that Wilson leaves all heterosexual intercourse, including Burton's and Anna's, equally ambiguous as to whether such acts consisted of "protected" sex, it is a legitimate question to ponder. Wilson further extends the ambiguities of the situation when, after her two sexual encounters with Pale, Anna again defuses any potential for sexual threat by banishing Pale, like Robbie, to the erotic but "safe" world of the dance. Moreover,

1s

AIDS Task Force Report, 31 .

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she fashions a strange commingling of the two brothers; although Pale supplies the content of her piece, it is the ghost of Robbie who performs the dance : "I did it for Robbie, actually. In my mind Robbie did it" (96). Such ambiguities-of gay and straight personas, of the relative safety of the sex act in the midst of an epidemic-may, thus, allow the specter of AIDS to be raised, if not in the consciousness of the play's characters, then at least in the consciousness of its reader I audience. Even as Wilson designs a complex, interwoven series of relationships for his female character, he seems to veer to the opposite extreme in his depiction of Larry, perhaps the most problematic character in Burn This. As the only living gay man in the play and being, according to the playwright's stage directions, "twenty- seven, medium everything, very bright" (7), he fits the profile of the perfect candidate for AIDS in 1987 New York. For one thing, Larry's residence in lower Manhattan places him practically at the epidemic's ground zero. The statistics speak for themselves : By November, 1989, New York State had more AIDS cases than any other state in America, with New York City accounting for a staggering 84% of the state's totaJ.19 South of 14th Street in Manhattan, the area which encompasses a large gay population in its Greenwich and East Village, Soho, and Tribeca neighborhoods, the nearly 3,000 reported cases of AIDS were mostly gay men, 58% in Larry's home turf of Tribeca.20 In light of these statistics, it seems reasonable to assume that Larry would have some personal contact with the disease. A study of a sample panel of gay men in relation to AIDS conducted between 1985- 1991 lends credence to this supposition. An average or "medium everything" gay man like Larry would almost certainly have been subjected to one or more of what Laura Dean calls "AIDS stressors," which primarily stem from the following causes: knowledge or ignorance of HIV status; the "rampant and irretrievable loss of friends and lovers due to AIDS"; and acts of AIDS and / or antigay violence and discrimination.21 According to Dean, by 1987 almost all the gay men in the study had experienced one or more of these AIDS stressors,22 yet Wilson offers no direct or implied evidence that Larry has experienced any of these stressors, unless one 19 Perry F. Smith, M.D., "The AIDS Epidemic in New York State," American Journal of Public Health 81 (May 1991 ): 59. 20 Albert R. Jon sen and Jeff Stryker, The Social Impact of AIDS in the United States (Washington D.C: National Academy Press, 1993), 248. 21 Laura Dean, "Psychological Stressors in a Panel of New York City Gay Men During the AIDS Epidemic, 1985-1991 ," in Gregory M. Herek and Beverly Greene, eds., AIDS, Identity and Community: The HIV Epidemic and Lesbians and Cay Men (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 136.
22

Dean, 145.

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counts his complete silence on the subject as a kind of implied repression or denial of them. Wilson's choice to ignore this obvious facet of gay urban life in Burn This seems particularly odd when contrasted with similar situations and characters in other post- AIDS gay plays around this time. For example, the gay characters in Terrence McNally's The Lisbon Traviata live in the Village and on the Upper West Side (another gay enclave with large AIDS casualties, 1 ,807 by 1990 according to jansen and Stryker23), and they speak in coded references of friends who have died from the disease . More dramatically, Larry Kramer's protagonist in the The Normal Heart recounts a typical evening out- and - about his Greenwich Village neighborhood where the presence of AIDS literally bombards him: "At Glen Fitzsimmons' party the other night, I saw one friend I knew was sick, I learned about two others, and then walking home I bumped into Richie Faro, who told me he'd just been diagnosed .... All this on Sixth Avenue between Nineteenth and Eighth In contrast, Wilson, by rendering Larry's character Streets."24 enigmatic in several crucial ways, subtly dodges this troubling familiarity of gay men with the disease. Upon closer examination, Larry may indeed appear far from the "typical" New York gay man that Wilson seeks to portray. In contrast to his treatment of his heterosexual characters, Wilson provides even scanter information concerning Larry's social or romantic history. Besides his relationships with the living and dead characters in the play and his previously noted advertising job, he is shown only to have a family living in the Detroit area (57) and to have left Robbie's funeral with a person named "Kelly" (20), interestingly enough, a gender- neutral name . He also mentions a man named Tom, "who managed a restaurant in the Village for two years" (48), but the name only comes up incidentally in a conversation about Pale's similar occupation. At no time does he volunteer how or how closely he knows or knew this man. Furthermore, when Anna goes into seclusion in order to create her dance, Larry seems to do the same. He ventures out of the loft at night only to eat, but he mentions no dining companion(s) (91 ). Significantly, the text provides Larry with virtually no romantic or sexual experiences in the past, present, or seemingly in the future . Perhaps more significantly, despite evidence of his popularity, he doesn 't seem to care seriously about this curious lack of sex or romance in his life . Nor does he consciously seek to fill this void. When, on New Year's Eve, Anna urges him to socialize with his peers, Larry pleads exhaustion from his plane ride home from Detroit, rejecting the idea with his trademark, evasive sarcasm :

23 Jonsen and Stryker, 248. 24 Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart (New York: New American Library, 1985), 55.

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ANNA You've got a dozen invitations to parties ; hop in a cab, have some fun . They'll go on all night. LARRY Have you ever been to a gay New Year's Eve Party? The suicide rate is higher than all Scandinavia combined. My arms are falling off, my head hurts, I'm exhausted. For the first time in my life I have sympathy for Olga in The Three Sisters. ANNA Go out. Meet someone . LARRY Anna, an Olympic gym team performing naked would not turn me on. The defensive front line of the Pittsburgh Steelers could rape me on the floor of the locker room, I'd bring them up on charges . If you're trying to ditch me, forget it. Go to Burton's . (57)

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Larry's lack of a sexual history and his sarcastic indifference to sex prove even more perplexing when he is compared with another of his dramatic contemporaries who foregoes sex. In Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey (1993), the title character swears off gay sex because of its physical dangers and emotional inconveniences in a post- AIDS world . Jeffrey could be Larry's double: Both are "typical" gay men in post- AIDS New York- single, attractive, popular, bright, and witty. However, in contrast to Wilson's Larry, Rudnick 's Jeffrey has a definite- and active-sexual past ("You know those articles, the ones all those right wingers use? The ones that talk about gay men who've had over five thousand sexual partners? Well, compared to me they're shut- ins . Wallflowers ."25). Jeffrey is candidly frustrated and conflicted over his decision to give up sex ('Things are just- not what they should be. Sex is too sacred to be treated this way. Sex wasn't meant to be safe, or negotiated, or fata1."26). He will enter into a romantic (and physical) relationship with an HIV- positive man by play's end . Moreover, Jeffrey, unlike Larry, visibly grapples with all the "AIDS stressors" common to gay men of the period: He openly discusses his HIV- negative status; is assaulted by homophobic thugs who equate gays with the disease ("Shit, he's bitin' my leg! I'm gonna get AIDS!"27); and counts HIVpositive and AIDS-inflicted men (both living and dead) among his friends and acquaintances . In these respects, Jeffrey seems far closer
25 Paul Rudn ick, Jeffrey (New York: Plume, 1 994), 7.

26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. , 50.

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to the norm for both literary and real men of the period than Larry. Rather, such absences of stressors and sexual history seem atypical and become highly suspect if one views them within the context of post- AIDS gay literature, where issues of gay sexual activity take on extreme importance: Sexual history is particularly important in AIDS literature, since a sexually transmitted disease has, for many, replaced the sex = life equation of gay liberation with the equation of sex = death and the causal linking of the disease with the sexual playground of the 1970s .. . . It is the linking of sex = disease, promiscuity disease, and, finally, homosexuality = promiscuity = disease that enchain people with AIDS and, by association, all gay men.28 By denying Larry the chance to speak of any such sexual history-past, present, or future- Wilson prevents such troubling equations to enter overtly into the world of the play. Thus, Wilson again eliminates the threat of AIDS from the discourse of Burn This. Additionally, by ascribing no hints of potentially "dangerous" sexual history to Larry, the living member of the group at highest risk for the disease, the playwright paradoxically makes him as "safe" as or safer than the lower-risk straights and the gay lovers "safely" killed by external circumstances. Secondly, since Wilson portrays the gay man as bright, popular, and attractive yet curiously lacking any sexual experience or any overt desire for it, any of Larry's possibly deadly sexual impulses instead must be confined to the "safe sex" realm of fantasy and sublimation. The text supplies ample evidence in support of this conjecture . For instance, Larry reveals a passionate attachment to the romantic world of movies and opera. This enables him , to flirt "safely" with the two heterosexual (and thereby doubly "safe") men in Burn This by invoking with Burton and Pale the erotic discourse of film (sexually suggestive quotations from Lust in the Dust [17, 28]) and the romantic discourse of opera (the story of The Flying Dutchman[15]). When Burton relates the story of his homosexual encounter, he assumes the relatively harmless position of a voyeur as he, almost greedily, co- opts Burton's fantasy: "You don't care if, in my mind, I sort of push your shirt up to above your navel, and let your pants fall to about mid-thigh, do you?" (64). This request, appropriately enough, comes soon after one of the possible coded references to AIDS- Larry's "innocence and freedom of yesterday" remark. Similarly, Larry gets vicarious thrills and risk- free sexual gratification from Anna's sexual escapades with Pale, confessing that he "abused himself terribly" as he listened to their 28 Clum, 206.

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lovemaking (46) . These are just a few examples . Throughout Burn This Wilson clearly shows Larry to have strong sexual desires ; however, they are never manifested in overt homosexual activity with a homosexual partner. Like his more unwilling literary cousin Jeffrey, Larry seems to have fulfilled without complaint Dennis Altman's prediction in AIDS in the Mind of America, namely the fear of AIDS' potential "to lead not just to a change in sexual pace but to a wholesale retreat from homosexuality, indeed from sex itself."29 This leads to the final, and perhaps most important, way in which Wilson dodges the threat of AIDS to Larry- namely, the character 's choice of partner for his sole emotional involvement. Unlike Anna, who spreads her emotional resources not solely on Larry but upon a number of other recipients, both gay and straight (i .e., Burton , Pale, Robbie), Larry invests his exclusively in the heterosexual woman. Wilson again reinforce s the paradox that the character at greatest risk for infection from the HIV virus is the least susceptible to it, since he has settled with seeming complacency, into a "safe" emotional and (by extension) sexual relationship. However, in Larry's case, "safe" sex virtually equals "no" sex. In contrast, Anna does indeed flirt with chance by indulging in apparently unprotected sex, however infrequently, with Burton and Pale ; and even Robbie, Larry's counterpart in Anna's affections , exposes himself to potential risk by taking a male lover. The dynamics of their relationship appear even odder if one contrasts it to a similar one-that of Heidi and her gay friend Peter in Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles. Here a straight woman and gay man engage in a complex emotional friendship, yet both parties maintain active sexual and emotional attachments to others in tandem with their friendship. Furthermore, when Larry, like Anna, is directly confronted with the implications of this strange arrangement, he, likewise , evades the issue of sex and intimacy. He deflects Burton's painful questions with flippancy, a posture that has protected him throughout the play: BURTON . So what's she planning to do with her life? Live here with you? LARRY (Pause) I . .. uh .. . think I'll duck that one , if you don't mind . BURTON Sorry, I didn 't intend that to sound like it did . LARRY No , actually that 's very vivid. Put like that.

(Makes

29 Dennis Altman, AIDS in the Mind of America (New York: Anchor, 1986), 170.

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himself another drink) And by extension , what the fuck am I doing?

BURTON Well, listen, it's none of my business. Tell her, you know, what we said, if you want to. Or not. LARRY (Beat) Huh? ... Oh, uh .. . no, I definitely will. BURTON This isn't the way I was hoping ... LARRY Tell me about it. (94-95)

Wilson does not have Larry answer his own inferred question, and, by doing so, he transforms the question into a rhetorical one. Moreover, its rhetorical nature makes it an especially loaded question in the age of AIDS, as ambiguous as Anna's description of Pale as "dangerous." The playwright leaves Larry's life both literally and figuratively hanging in a sort of suspended animation, for if he answers it by leaving the warm cocoon of the loft and his safe relationship with Anna to enter into a homosexual relationship, he will be increasing his chances of exposure to a life-threatening disease. Larry's ambiguous fate might impel the reader to question the relative medical dangers of sexual and emotional intimacy. Even by avoiding these traps, how safe are we? As Wilson hints, Larry may stay with Anna and remain seemingly celibate, one of those many gay white men who by 1986 had refrained (albeit drastically in Larry's case) from risky sexual behavior;30 however, realistically he must have engaged in some kind of prior homosexual activity. If so, though he may avoid sex within the time span of the play, is he already marked for death, one of the onehalf to two- thirds of men who had sex with men estimated at the time to be HIV- infected by 1989?31 Similarly, were Robbie and Dom, romantically cut down by a reckless accident, mercifully spared a decidedly unromantic death from the AIDS scourge? Wilson's play may spur the reader to entertain these crucial questions, but the playwright apparently prefers to leave them unresolved. While he appears to favor the necessity for sexual and emotional commitment, intimacy in the 1980s may exact a terrible price. Even though both Anna and Pale by play's end take tentative steps towards blazing a trail to intimacy, they do so with trepidation, both readily conceding that they "don't want this" (99). Ironically, their 30 Jonsen and Stryker, 263 . 31 Jon sen and Stryker, 2 59.

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dangerous journey will be initiated by the manipulations of the seemingly more fearful Larry, who suggests in a note to Pale that chances must be taken : "This isn't opera, this is life, why should love always be tragic? Burn this." (98). What's more, Larry's unattached status at the end of the play, the ambiguous nature of his sexual life, and his silence regarding his personal relationship to the disease further keep the potential for intimacy in abeyance, while at the same time allowing niggling worries about AIDS to rise to the fore: The equation of sex and disease suggested by AIDS can best be compared to sixteenth- century fears of syphilis, and not surprisingly it is having a deep impact on the ways in which we think about sex. The specter of death and disease haunts us even when we are fairly sure that both our partners and our practices are "safe"; even in the privacy of the bedroom, in the intimacy between two lovers, the fears and doubts engendered by AIDS persist. (And if this is true for already established couples, imagine the barriers fear of AIDS presents in the creation of new relationships .) There may be no better example available of the assertion that "the personal is the political."32 Viewed in this light, Wilson's play still presents a portrait of people caught up in the dilemma of sharing or rejecting intimacy, but the stakes have been substantially raised. For by placing his characters in an era of epidemic disease , Wilson implies that the consequences of their actions may mean more than a broken heart; they may also lead to certain death. However, by never directly invoking the dreaded curse of "AIDS," the play's message may still remain potent, even when the day perhaps comes that the disease is remembered as a black period in history. But for the present, with th e "A" word consigned to th e position of an unseen, unspoken presence, it is possible to perceive Burn This as resonating with a deeper, more poetic meaning- a cautionary tale for post- AIDS America.

32 Altman , 1 72 .

journal of American Drama and Theatre 14 (Winter 2002)

BOB COLE'S WILLIE WAYSIDE: WHITEFACE HOBO, MIDDLECLASS FARMER, WHITE TRASH HERO

MARVIN McALLISTER

"You can have all of your Greece and Turkey too. But give me chicken." -Willie Wayside, A Trip to Coontown

In a significant scholarly contribution to the ever broadening conversation on whiteness and whiteness studies, minister, academician, and columnist Michael Dyson asserts: [o]ne of the benefits of, for instance, ethnographies of white cultures, practices, and identities is that we begin to get a fuller picture of differentiated whiteness. The fissuring and fracturing of whiteness, especially along axes of class and gender, gives us greater insight into how white cultures have adapted, survived, and struggled in conditions where their dominance was modified or muted.l Dyson contends the artistic and scholarly production of nonwhites, specifically African - Americans, can have a significant impact on the theoretical and practical fracturing of whiteness. "It's also important," writes Dyson, "to explore histories of white difference to highlight how whiteness has not been made by Whites alone . . . One of the great paradoxes of race is that whiteness is not exclusively owned or produced by whites. White is also black. As we discover how black whiteness is, we discover how interesting and intricate, whiteness is."2 For centuries, African- American theatrical and social performers have been "interested" in whiteness and have creatively appropriated and reconstructed specifically white-identified gestures, dialects, appearances, and entitlements. These performances have produced
1 Michael Dyson and Ronald Chennault, "Giving Whiteness a Black Eye: An Inte rview with Michael Eric Dyson," in joeL. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg, eds., White Reign: Deploying Whitness in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 320.

2 Ibid.

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complex versions of whiteness which signify on racial identity while also exploring those associated axes of class, gender, and sexuality. Whiteface minstrelsy, the phenomenon of African - Americans performing whiteness, dates back to the earliest North America slaves who reveled in "acting white" and precedes blackface minstrelsy, that once amazingly popular national commodification of blackness.3 Paul Gilroy explains that "[a]part from the work involved in enacting their servitude and inferiority while guarding their autonomy, people found significant everyday triumphs by mimicking and in a sense mastering, their rulers and conquerors, masters, and mistresses."4 Such "everyday triumphs" through social performance were not limited to slaves mastering masters and mistresses but extended to free AfricanAmericans, North and South, who mimicked and mastered multiple variations of privileged and under- privileged whiteness. Performance theorist joseph Roach defines whiteface minstrelsy as "stereotypical behaviors- such as white folks' sometime comically obsessive habits of claiming for themselves ever more fanciful forms of property, ingenious entitlements under the law, and exclusivity in the use of public spaces and facilities."S Roach formulated this definition through an ingenious reading of the 1895 Plessy versus Ferguson racial accommodations case as a social performance . The all - white Louisiana train car represents what Roach terms "fanciful" white privileges , and the mulatto Homer Plessy engaged in whiteface minstrelsy when he consciously attempted to pass into that all - white conveyance and partake in their "entitlements." Roach's whiteface minstrelsy, which consists of whites constructing entitlements and blacks appropriating them, demonstrates how African- Americans have aggressively assumed the social privilege and cultural prestige enjoyed by white America . More recently, performance studies scholar jose Munoz has devised a contemporary theoretical approach to whiteface minstrelsy through his work on disidentification and queer performers of color. By disidentification
3 This early African - American concept of "acting white" should not be confused with contemporary accusations, leveled in American classrooms, that black students who produce academically are "acting white." Signithia Fordham & John Ogbu have studied this educational dilemma in "Black Students' School Success: Coping with the 'Burden of Acting White."' Urban Review 1 8:3 (1986): 1 76-206. More recently, John H. McWhorter's Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000) presents a provocative personal and analytical assessment of African America's relationship to whiteness, blackness, and educational achievement.

4 Paul Gilroy, "'To Be Real': The Dissident Forms of Black Expressive Culture," in Catherine Ugwu, ed., Let's Get It On: Politics of Black Performance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1 995), 14- 1 5. s joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 236.

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Munoz means "the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship."6 Today's surviving and negotiating queer performers, as well as other modern "minoritarian" artists, work inside and outside a public sphere largely defined by the majority culture but tend to identify with and against the normative racial and sexual codes of the dominant group.? This article examines an explicitly theatrical whiteface act which emerged on America's most public theatrical stage only a few years after Homer Plessy's overtly political appropriation of whiteness in protest of racial segregation. In the late nineteenth century, versatile performers-turned-producers Bob Cole and Billy Johnson launched a ground-breaking and mildly revolutionary musical A Trip to Coontown. The plot, if the specialty- laden revue could be accused of having one, features Willie Wayside, a white hobo performed by Bob Cole in whiteface, who rescues Silas Green, a black retiree with a $5000 pension, from the stratagems of a cunning black con man named Jim Flimflammer, created by Billy Johnson.s This essay examines the heroic hobo's fractured even conflicted selves through close readings of Willie's highly conspicuous role in an all - black musical, the innovative pairing of Flimflammer and Wayside, and Willie's two signature songs, "All I Wants Is Ma Chickens" (1899) and "Chicken" (189?).9 Cole, johnson, and the entire Coontown company exploited traditional and transgressive images of race and class to expose commonalities and differences between Euro- America and Afro- America. Customarily, the chicken odes were reserved for "coon" characters, but Cole's 6Jose Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4.
7 As for other recent studies of whiteface performance, in Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre (1997), David Krasner has examined Bob Cole's whiteface vaudeville creation, Willie Wayside, which emerged in the 1890s. Nadine George - Grave's recent history, The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville (2000), also explores how the Whitman Sisters performed whiteness and passed as white ladies onstage and offstage in the early twentieth century.

8 There is some confusion about the musical's actual plot. This version of the musical's story was recorded in the Dramatic Mirror (9 April 1898), but the New York Sun (7 April 1898) published a slightly different scenario. The Sun claimed both Cole and Johnson appeared as bunco artists pursuing a "moneyed" innocent in Silas Green. Other sources replicate the Mirror version with Flimflammer as the primary con man, so I have proceded with that interpretation of Coontown's apparently difficult to decipher plot.

9 According to various playbills and reviews for the Coontown production, Willie Wayside's roster of songs constantly changed. These are simply two of the chicken melodies Bob Cole featured at some point, and fortunately, publication has made them accessible.

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whiteface act disconnected such racially marked melodies from a more familiar blackface minstrel context and re - deployed Willie Wayside's undeniable love affair with poultry to represent multiple white identities. Cole's tour- de- force whiteface figure mutates over the course of this musical, alternately appearing as dispossessed chickenobsessed tramp, as propertied poultry farmer, and ultimately as subversive class hero. The Coontown production history is itself an epic tale of class, racial, and professional struggle as African - American artists bypassed white theatrical managers to produce the first truly independent black musical. I o In the late nineteenth century, many American artists, managers, and audiences were abandoning the coarse working - class medium of blackface minstrelsy for allegedly more wholesome and middle- class possibilities in vaudeville and musical theatre. Bob Cole and Billy johnson honed their performative skills and discovered their writing voices in vaudeville houses and with black musical revues like the white-owned "Black Patti Troubadours." Frustrated by copyright disputes with the "Black Patti" managers and inspired by the enormously successful, Asian- inflected musical revue A Trip to Chinatown (1 891 ), Cole and johnson left the "Troubadours" to produce an independent musical. They recruited a cadre of ambitious black artists to create A Trip to Coontown, a series of vaudeville - not blackface- specialty acts arranged around the aforementioned simple plot. As far as revolution, the dynamic duo succeeded in staging the first musical produced, written, directed, and performed by African Americans. By circumventing white managerial control and most remnants of blackface minstrelsy, Cole and johnson created a foundation for the black musical and inspired other African - American producers. Yet as theatrical renegades, Cole and johnson confronted major obstructions when they attempted a Coontown premiere in New York City in 1897. The incensed and well - connected "Black Patti" managers blackballed the production from Manhattan houses which forced Coontown to tour the eastern U.S . before ultimately debuting in New York in April 1898. An extant copy of the entire musical, book and lyrics, does not exist, but this discussion of Coontown' s content is made possible by music historian Thomas L. Riis who has recovered many published copies of the featured songs. Building on Riis's research, theatre historian David Krasner has examined the artistic and political implications of this black musical breakthrough, specifically Bob Cole's whiteface Willie Wayside character. Krasner concedes that Coontown "reflected racial humor of the time by portraying the stereotype darky
10 This brief production history is distilled from Thomas Riis's research on Bob Cole, Billy Johnson, and their production team. Previous to Coontown's premiere, most black musicals or musical revues like The Creole Show (1 890), Oriental America (1 896), and The Octoroons (1 896) were produced by Euro- Americans like Sam T. jack and john W. Isham.

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character," 11 and clearly the musical 's title, setting, and song lyrics are saddled with the offensive "c" word.1 2 Yet, Krasner also asserts Cole's innovative Willie "dislodged a colonial representation that for generations framed the idea of race" and "interrupted the continuity of minstrelsy's semiotic tradition." He even concludes a new form of African-American modernism emerged through Cole's artistry; "a new hybrid aesthetic whereby the appearance of accommodation and resistance could be fashioned in a single performance."13 Cole's whiteface act does simultaneously accommodate and resist, identify with and against, the racial assumptions of the majority culture, but Willie Wayside did not introduce this hybrid balancing act to American performance. Rather, Cole tapped into the aforementioned performance tradition of whiteface minstrelsy developed by New World slaves as survival strategies and entertaining diversions. With decades of performed whiteness to draw from and A Trip to Chinatown as a production model, the entire Coontown company rediscovered and staged a range of ethnic images that had been regrettably obscured by blackface minstrelsy's immense popularity. Historian David Roediger contends minstrelsy may have appeared to foster "astonishing ethnic diversity," yet "this extreme cultural pluralism was at the same time a liquidation of ethnic and regional cultures into blackface, and ultimately into a largely empty whiteness."14 After blackface minstrelsy submerged American theatrical diversity, vaudeville rediscovered ethnic difference. "In the literary and entertainment worlds of that day," specifically late nineteenth - century vaudeville, music historians Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis recall that "there was a general spoofing of the Irish and the 'Dutch,' of pig- tailed 'Chinese,' of Negro and of Jew that, though crude perhaps, was productive of a certain intentional camaraderie. More than a reasoned tolerance, it was a recognition of the natural differences that exist between peoples."15 Cole and his all- star lineup of African - American talent created Hebrew, Italian, Chinese, and Negro characters which embraced America's ethnic variety and reclaimed constructive, non- derogatory racial play. In particular, 11 David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theatre, 1885-1910 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 32. 12 Krasner's Resistance, Parody and Double Consciousness .... (1 997) also cites a 1905 Bob Cole interview in which he renounces the term "coon " and urges black artists to drop the term. 13 Krasner, 32. 14 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso Press, 1991), 11 7- 118. 1s Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime (New York: Oak Publications, 1971), 92-93.

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Cole's Willie Wayside would rescue whiteness from that unfortunate vacuity inflicted by a century of blackface performance. The two central characters, Willie Wayside, a tattered white hobo and protagonist in waiting , and Jim Flimflammer, a seemingly cultured black predator in finely tailored sheep's clothing, are both strangers to this fictional, -black community ignominiously called Coontown. By all accounts, Coontown is a segregated yet prosperous hamlet blessed with comfortable homes, stable middle-class families, lively social engagements, and even substantial retirement funds . A reviewer from the colored newspaper Indianapolis Freeman raved about how the production "beautifully staged" the parlor of Silas Green, "the grand old man of Coontown."16 When contrasted against Coontown's material and communal wealth, Willie 's dispossession becomes all the more apparent and inescapable. The spectacle of a tattered white hobo and comfortable Coontown citizens resists racial presumptions by thrusting black prosperity and indigent white vagrancy into the theatrical foreground . The Indianapolis Freeman reviewer further commented on the musical's implicit class contrast embodied by the Flimflammer and Wayside pairing : Mr. Johnson as Jim Flimflammer, the bunco, is also a rare professional, and handles the 'straight' of the play in masterly style. While he is strictly business in his role, he combines business with pleasures , making the whole affair funnier and perplexing for his partner, the tramp , who produces the fun in the plot.17 Blackface minstrel tradition, manufactured by white Americans , typically featured a dapper, upper- class white interlocutor who interacted comedically with tattered, barely articulate black end men Tambo and Bones . Producers Cole and johnson reversed that convention by crafting an outwardly respectable black "bunco" artist who assumes the serious or "straight" role and instigates the major scheme which drives the comedy. The comedy or "fun" was then supplied by Cole's whiteface creation, a decidedly lower-class tramp clown or hobo trickster. The Freeman reinforced Cole and Johnson's inventive dramatic revision by publishing illustrations of Cole costumed as Willie in ragged clothing and a scruffy beard to reflect a chaotic and comic profile, while Johnson is rendered in a dashing top hat and tailored suit to create a most gentile demeanor.18 Krasner contends Cole and Johnson, along with other black musical pioneers like Williams and Walker, gradually retired the "darky" figures inherited 16 Indianapolis Freeman, 20 October 1 898, 5. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.

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from blackface minstrelsy in favor of more tasteful and dignified imagery of the emergent "New Negro ."19 If the character's agendas, attitudes, and attires are not divergent enough, their musical selections further establish distinct racial and class identities. In songs like "I Hope These Few Lines Find You Well," Flimflammer boasts how "a damn swell coon" like himself can bilk money from any unsuspecting mark.20 By "swell coon," Cole and Johnson indicate t hat this boastful Flimflammer is crafted in the mold of the overly adorned, highly mannered, and relentlessly aspiring "black dandy" popularized by early blackface minstrelsy.21 However, unlike the black dandy who often functions as the "mark"or butt of the jokes in minstrel material, Flimflammer audaciously embodies a highly dignified yet conniving antagonist. By contrast, the signature chicken tunes artfully graft recognizable racial and class-marked imagery onto Cole's rendering of displaced whiteness, beginning with an act one ode to poultry, "All I Wants Is Ma Chickens" (1899). The first verse of this melody conjures a farmer named Jasper Smith who raises prize Shanghai chickens and vows to protect his valuable livestock from all cunning chicken thieves. The second verse introduces another poultry devotee named 'Fessor Kidney, an esteemed academic who attends a "coon" picnic where he wins two prize hens in a hotly contested chicken race. After the race, the professor and his wife are returning home: To the boat he quickly went and for home he did start Four miles from home the boat went down, his wife sank with a groan; In a half- drown'd state they picked him up, and he began to moan : All I wants is ma chickens, dem lubly chickens, ma feather'd pickens! Now don't mind ma wife, but save my chickens!22 'Fessor Kidney clearly prefers saving his lovely hens over his lovely wife 19 Krasner, 27. 20 In More Than Just Minstrel Shows, Riis includes selected lyrics from Flimflammer's melody in his reconstruction of A Trip to Coontown "Grande Finale." 21 For an excellent article on the dandies of blackface minstrelsy see Barbara Lewis, "Dandy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Dandy" in Anne marie Bean, James V. Hatch and Brooks McNamara, eds ., Inside The
Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth - Century Blackface Minstrelsy

(Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). 22 Wilson & Deas, "All I Wants Is Ma Chickens" (New York: jos. W. Stern & Co, 1899), 2- 4.

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and even calls for divers to go down and recover his poultry. The final verse of "All I Wants Is Ma Chickens" depicts Razor Jake, the prototypical shiftless chicken thief, the kind of unrelenting bandit who keeps Jasper Smith constantly vigilant. Razor Jake has fallen ill and lies on his death bed, but with his last words, he requests "roasted chicken with gravy drippings" for his trip to the great beyond. Among the chicken lovers, only 'Fessor Kidney's ethnic background is identified through the racially marked "coon" picnic he is attending and the slippages into Negro dialect-"dem" and "ma." But based on Razor Jake's own forays into dialect, his colorful moniker and the contemporary "darky" associations between Negroes, razors, and chicken larceny, the melody implies that the dying bandit is inescapably black.23 As for Jasper Smith, his economic position and virulent proprietary attitude could easily read as white farmer; however, like 'Fessor Kidney and Razor jake, Smith also slips into Negro dialect signified by words like "ma" and "wid." By intoning these different yet similar identities from behind his white mask, Bob Cole effectively signifies across race, class, the law, death, and matrimony to conflate conventionally "coon" traits, like an overriding passion for poultry, with whiteness and white people. Furthermore, the trio of verses in "All I Wants Is Ma Chickens" fractures traditional notions of whiteness by forcing Cole's whiteface creation to embody both a presumably white chicken farmer and a presumably black chicken thief. Although an unmistakable tension between propertied farmer and dispossessed thief surfaces in Willie Wayside's initial performance of "All I Wants Is Ma Chickens," by the end of act one , the character appears to resolve this fracturing. Thomas L. Riis has recovered and published a piano/ vocal arrangement for a "grande finale" consisting of a four song medley. Not surprisingly, included in the medley is Flimflammer's signature "I Hope These Few Lines Find You Well" and Willie's signature "All I Wants Is Ma Chickens." In the finale, Cole does not perform the entire song but only reprises the verse in which Jasper Smith confronts all chicken thieves and boldly proclaims: "I'll bet six bits I'll kill a coon if I don't get ma chickens."24 The "coon" in this line alludes directly to black criminals like Razor jack, or even potentially 'Fessor Kidney, who are irredeemable chickens fanatics not above poaching poultry. This line also firmly aligns Jasper Smith and Wayside with fully possessed and propertied white authority. Cole not only particularizes Willie's identity as middle- class white farmer but the finale stage directions describe Willie's brief exit and re - entrance with his prize chicken safely nestled under his arm for the curtain .25 When 23 Mel Watkins ' On The Real Side (1999) and Sam Dennison's Scandalize My Name (1982) examine the proliferation of negative black imaging in "coon" songs beginning with the work of Ernest Hogan . 24 Thomas L. Riis, More Than just Minstrel Shows (Brooklyn : Brooklyn College Institute for Studies in American Music, 1992), 17. 25 Ibid., 18.

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first introduced, the song offered a tri - vocal range of chicken lovers from varied classes and races, but to close act one, such diversity and even the displaced hobo persona is submerged and the audience is left with a familiar racialized image of a white chicken farmer securing his prize poultry against ravenous, razor- packing "coons." In act two, this defensive, fully impassioned middle-class white landowner disappears, and instead , Willie Wayside's poultry obsession and "coonish" metamorphosis intensifies through a mono- vocal melody titled "Chicken" (189?). For this signature tune, Willie assumes the persona of Eph Jackson, a black valet who embarks on a world tour with his wealthy employer. Although he is treated very "white"meaning well - by his millionaire boss, entertained by sultans, and exposed to foreign lands with all their exotic delicacies, Eph still declares his unwavering allegiance to chicken. Willie/ Eph summarizes his passion in this memorable refrain : Chicken, kase its best to eat Chicken, kase it's good and sweet Chicken, kase it can't be beat.26 Such simple and direct lyrics flowing from Cole's whiteface lips skillfully displaces "coon" stereotypes, like the poultry fetish and Negro dialect, onto this white hobo. The two "coon" personalities in "All I Wants Is Ma Chickens" began this process of displacement but that act one melody was complicated by Jasper Smith's authoritative presence. Now in act two, all assumptions about whiteness and authority are neutralized as essentialized black markers are fully incorporated into Cole's version of lower- class whiteness. As Michael Dyson has suggested, Cole ' s performative engagement with whiteness begins to disclose how "black" whiteness can be . However, Cole's creation also elicits important questions concerning race, representation, and social dynamics . In the topsyturvy world projected in Trip to Coontown, does Willie Wayside stand in for authority or "the man" through his assumption of the privileged and propertied farmer Smith who protects poultry? Or is he more aligned with the dispossessed white hobo who enjoys stolen chicken as much if not more than the conventional "coon"? Also, as the only white character in this all- black musical, has Willie forfeited all prestige commonly associated with whiteness? To answer the final and most pressing question, film theorist Richard Dyer argues that in the pantheon of white filmic and literary representation, certain white figures have failed to uphold certain ideals or standards of whiteness. For example, in westerns , white bad guys who brandish black hats, cavort in Mexican bars, and sleep with native women are dismissed as "blackened" figures who have fallen short of or abdicated pure, 26 Bob Cole, Billy Johnson, Willis Accooe, "Chicken" (New York : Howley, Haviland & Co., 189?), 3.

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honorable, and fully entitled whiteness.27 One could easily classify Willie Wayside as a similar kind of race failure or a "poor white trash" figure estranged from the benefits of white America and marooned on the margins of the dominant culture. In their study of "white trash" in American culture, whiteness scholars Annalle Newitz and Matt Wray have researched this class- marked racial identity and found : ... the earliest recorded use of the term white trash dates back to the early part of the nineteenth century. Sources attribute the origin of the term to black slaves, who used it as a contemptuous reference to white servants. While there is some reason to doubt these accounts, the emergence of whitetrash in the context of black slavery and white servitude speaks to the racialized roots of the meaning of the term .28 Although Newitz and Wray are not convinced of the term's origins, they concede its racial , caste, and class connotations. They further assert that many media representations "suggest that poor whites are trash who don't deserve the benefits of social welfare, sympathy, or national power," and in addition, "such stereotypes maintain-in a contained, taxonomic sense- images and narratives about poor whites in order to provide something against which 'civilized' whites can measure themselves."29 Much like the typical blackface minstrel "coon," a "white trash" Willie Wayside could easily signify the laughable, hard- luck loser, an identity which all decent, self- respecting, industrious nineteenth- century Euro-Americans must avoid at all costs. Newitz and Wray conclude, "what we are seeing in all these representations from contemporary Hollywood and the mass media is a growing familiarity with- if not acceptance of- lower-class whiteness as racially marked and made Other."30 For nineteenth - century audiences, black or white, Cole's whiteface invention may have registered as a white "Other"; inferior, flawed, and isolated. Yet Wray and Newitz warn audiences, past and present, against blindly succumbing to ethnic absolutism when engaging the problematic yet powerful cultural binary of whiteness and blackness. They argue : .social problems like unequally distributed resources, class privilege, irrational prejudice, and 27 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 35 . 28 Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, "Introduction," in White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2. 29 Newitz and Wray, 1 36. 30 Ibid., 137.

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tyrannical bureaucracy which we associate with whiteness are just that- associated with whiteness, particularly at this point in history. They are not essential to whiteness itself, any more than laziness and enslavement are essential to blackness .31 A Trip to Coontown directly challenges the essential assumptions of the binary. Cole's version of a tattered, misplaced, even minority whiteness sojourning through a solidly African-American community stages an obvious lack of white privilege . Despite a momentary act one turn as a tyrannical jasper Smith, Willie Wayside disproves the assumed linkage between whiteness and political power or economic prosperity. Furthermore, Willie's identification with Eph Jackson through "Chicken" resists dominant prejudices by disconnecting "darky'' stereotypes like servility and chicken obsession from blackness and associating such traits with lower- classness and whiteness. Beyond the stage, Cole's "white trash" hobo mirrored nineteenth- century downturns like the bank panic of 1893, which thrust an entire nation into four years of depression and produced armies of unemployed , dispossessed white and black Americans. His materially grounded whiteface act did not conform to absolutes like black poverty and white wealth but demonstrated how economic conditions were shared and felt across racial constructs. Cole's whiteface act identifies, exposes, and even showcases the increasing representational ranks of poor, powerless, and allegedly "undeserving" Euro- Americans. Hollywood media representations aside , Cole 's innovative, socially connected, and sympathetic "white trash" image heralded a new breed of down - and - out tramp or hobo clowns, which flourished in various American entertainment venues. Willie Wayside anticipates "white trash" tricksters such as Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp" popularized in silent film of the 191 Os and 1920s; Emmett Kelly's "Weary Willie " perfected in the Ringling Bros . and Barnum & Bailey Circus of the 1930s through the 1950s; Red Skelton's Willy Lump Lump and Freddie Freeloader featured on 1950s and 1960s television; and finally singer Lecil Martin's Boxcar Willie introduced on the 1 970s country music scene.32 What these clowning or singing "Willies" share is an irresistible underdog quality which many American audiences can consistently root for if not identify with. In his study Subversive Laughter, professional clown Ron Jenkins characterizes Charlie Chaplin's little tramp as a "hero" who disregarded class boundaries. He writes: . . . as one of the twentieth century's first great 31 Ibid., 14. 32 See LaVahn Hoh and William Rough, Step Right up!: The Adventure of Circus in America (White Hall, Virginia: Betterway Publications, 1990).

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clowns, Chaplin moved beyond the traditional slapstick adversaries of gravity, cream pies, and authority figures to wage comic battles against the oppressive economic and political constraints of contemporary civilization.33 Jenkins maintains that Chaplin's tramp "is always seen subverting the established social order to give power to the powerless, homes to the homeless, and dignity to the poor. The impact of Chaplin's comic defiance can be measured in part by how much it threatened the guardians of the status quo."34 But before Chaplin debuted his singular " Little Tramp," Bob Cole's vaudevillian creation transgressed class barriers to become the prototypical "white trash" hero. As the poorest and whitest character in an decidedly black "middle- class" musical, Willie's mere presence contests the economic , political, and social presumptions of America's white supremacist status quo. Because he is the star and dominant force in Coontown, the audience is encouraged to root for Willie Wayside, an inferior, over- matched, and displaced whiteface "Other," to prevail in the end. According to Cole and Johnson's tenuous plot, Willie does transgress class and racial barriers to rescue Silas Green, the black retiree who is decidedly better off than the impoverished white tramp. However, like Cole's whiteface act, this plot resolution generates more questions than simple answers . Is Willie's act of "white trash" heroism truly subverting the white supremacist social order? Or is our white hobo hero ultimately reinforcing that status quo? By saving Silas Green, a home- owning, law- abiding, retiring black gentleman from the schemes of a devious black trickster in Jim Flimflammer, our "white trash" hero defends property, the law, and decency. More importantly, by scripting a white protective figure- reminiscent of act one's jasper Smith- rescuing this vulnerable Coontown citizen, Cole and Johnson appear to re- inscribe the dominant culture's contention that AfricanAmericans are a helpless community in need of rescue from EuropeanAmericans irregardless of class status. Furthermore , Ways ide's triumph over the dapper Flimflammer demonstrates that even the most cunning "swell coon" cannot outsmart the poorest "white trash " tramp clown. White, or at least whiteface, substance trumps black style. By extension, Coontown also features a duet between Wayside and Flimflammer, titled "No Coons Allowed, " which meditates on Jim Crow segregation. Specifically, this duet exposes the harsh reality that if Willie stumbled into a financial windfall, he could dine at the finest white restaurant but the more refined yet darker Flimflammer, or any

33 Ron Jenkins, Subversive Laughter: The Liberating Power of Comedy (New York: Three Free Press , 1994), 2. 34 Ibid., 3 .

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black middle- class Coontown resident, would be denied on sight.3S Willie's whiteness, no matter how denigrated or damaged by his material shortcomings, still eclipses Green's money and Flimflammer's duplicitous flare. For the predominately white audience that the Coontown company entertained, Willie Wayside may have been an ideal white underdog to align with, momentarily. Nevertheless, there was still ample room for resistance or disidentification with the dominant culture in Cole's performance of cross - racial, cross- class heroism. Given the long history of class-rooted racial antagonisms in Americathe term "white trash" a potential product of such tensions-a white tramp assisting a well - to-do black retiree was a most unexpected plot development. Historian Paul Gilje asserts that when blacks and whites engaged in inter- class conflict, the circumstances were most often working-class or lower-class white mobs attacking middle-class black churches, schools, and fraternal orders established by affluent and therefore threatening African-Americans.36 When Willie Wayside swoops up from below on the economic ladder to save Silas Green, our "white trash" hero is essentially rescuing a man who is the greatest threat to the white underclass's economic, political, and social position in America's racial hierarchy. Viewed from this perspective, whether by white or black audiences, Willie Wayside becomes a surprising and glaringly ahistorical late nineteenth- century hero. As with any product of popular culture, Cole's whiteface invention elicits a range of potentially conflicting readings. Essentialized racial and class assumptions abound in Cole's performance and the entire Coontown musical, but such familiar and perhaps comforting notions are crossed, crisscrossed, and resisted until certain binary limits are revealed. This production challenges what scholar/activist Peter Mclaren terms the "limit text of identity," a seemingly permanent polarity embedded in that "white/non- white" (or black) binary which many black and white subjects come to accept as the "constitutive foundation of subjectivity."37 Dropped in the middle of an all- black, healthy, wealthy, and fully functional Coontown and cast opposite a dapper "swell coon" named Flimflammer, Wayside's 35 David Krasner's Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African- American Theatre (1997) provides an intriguing analysis of this "coon" melody. 36 Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763- 1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 153-155. Also see Emma jones Lapsanksy's article "Since They Got Those Separate Churches: Afro- Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia." American Quarterly 32 (Spring 1980). 37 Peter Mclaren, "Whitness is ... The Struggle for Postcolonial Hybridity," in White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 68.

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dispossessed, lower- clas s, and outsider whiteness is fully amplified . Yet, as the obvious minority in this musical, our white hobo "Other" musically expresses material conditions and desires in common with similarly disenfranchised African- Americans. Through his signature chicken songs, Willie proves as poultry- obsessed as the conventional razor- wielding, chicken - stealing "coons," but still manages to identify, although briefly, with a great white chicken farmer and poultry protector named jasper Smith. In the end, Willie proves the subversive "white trash" hero who transcends class and racial boundaries to assist his fellow black man, and in the process of upholding law and order, this walking negation of white supremacy undermines nineteenthcentury racial logic. Not coincidentally, A Trip to Coontown also marked Bob Cole's emergence as a first- rate comedian on par with the best of late nineteenth- century American entertainers. His whiteface act prompted j. Harry jackson, a reviewer with the New York Sun, to laud Cole as "capable of playing any white part far better than most Negro comedians play black ones."38 Cole's identification with and against the dominant culture embraced a performative tradition which is not entirely new, as David Krasner suggests, but continues an established convention of black folks performing white folks. As the star of an independent black musical, the first of its kind, Cole ushered whiteface minstrelsy onto America's most commercial stage and authored a multifaceted character who simultaneously renegotiated whiteness, blackness , lower- classness, and middle- classness. What could be more messy, accommodationist, musical, and resistant?

38 This New York Sun review was reprinted in a 16 April 1898 edition of the Indianapolis Freeman.

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CONTRIBUTORS

DAVID SAVRAN is Professor of Theatre at The Graduate Center, City His major publications include: University of New York. Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group (1 988); In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (1 988); Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (1 992); Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (1998); The Playwright's Voice: American Dramatists on Memory, Writing, and the Politics of Culture (1 999); The Masculinity Studies Reader (co-editor, forthcoming); The Unnatural Intercourse of High and Low: Theatre, Sexuality, and Middlebrow Culture (forthcoming). He is associate editor of Theatre journal. BRANDl WILKINS CATANESE holds a bachelor's degree from the University of California at Berkley and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at Stanford University.

HEATHER S. NATHANS is Assistant Professor of Theatre at The University of Maryland and specializes in early American theatre history. Her upcoming book is titled A Democracy of Glee: The Early National Theatres of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.
RAY ScHULTZ is Assistant Professor of Theatre at University of Minnesota Morris and is a professional actor and director. His research examines the effects of AIDS on gay dramatic literature.

is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has lectured at UC-Davis, College of William & Mary, the Catholic University of America, and UC- Berkeley. Professor McAllister is a specialist in 19th, 20th , and 21st century American and Afro- American performance.
MARVIN McAwsrER

The Spring 2002 issue of The journal of American Drama and Theatre will be a special issue with materials provided by the American Theatre and Drama Society, as supervised by its President, Robert Vorl icky, who is a member of the JADT Editorial Board.