Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities

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Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities Theatre has often served as a touchstone for moments of political change or national definition and as a way of exploring cultural and ethnic identity. In this book Wilmer selects key historical moments in American history and examines how the theatre, in formal and informal settings, responded to these events. The book moves from the Colonial fight for independence, through Native American struggles, the Socialist Worker play, the Civil Rights Movement, and up to works of the last decade, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. In addition to examining theatrical events and play texts, Wilmer also considers audience reception and critical response. s . e . w i l m e r is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and formerly Director of the School of Drama. He has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the faculty of the International Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies, in Finland. He is editor of Portraits of Courage: Plays by Finnish Women (Helsinki University Press, 1997) and of Beckett in Dublin (Lilliput, 1992), among other works. Wilmer is also a playwright, with his works performed at the Manhattan Theatre Club and Lincoln Center.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN THEATRE AND DRAMA

General editor Don B. Wilmeth, Brown University Advisory board C. W. E. Bigsby, University of East Anglia Errol Hill, Dartmouth College C. Lee Jenner, Independent critic and dramaturge Bruce A. McConachie, University of Pittsburgh Brenda Murphy, University of Connecticut Laurence Senelick, Tufts University The American theatre and its literature are attracting, after long neglect, the crucial attention of historians, theoreticians and critics of the arts. Long a field for isolated research yet too frequently marginalized in the academy, the American theatre has always been a sensitive gauge of social pressures and public issues. Investigations into its myriad of shapes and manifestations are relevant to students of drama, theatre, literature, cultural experience and political development. The primary intent of this series is to set up a forum of important and original scholarship in and criticism of American theatre and drama in a cultural and social context. Inclusive by design, the series accommodates leading work in areas ranging from the study of drama as literature to theatre histories, theoretical explorations, production histories and readings of more popular or para-theatrical forms. While maintaining a specific emphasis on theatre in the United States, the series welcomes work grounded broadly in cultural studies and narratives with interdisciplinary reach. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama thus provides a crossroads where historical, theoretical, literary and biographical approaches meet and combine, promoting imaginative research in theatre and drama from a variety of new perspectives. books in the series 1. Samuel Hay, African American Theatre 2. Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama 3. Amy Green, The Revisionist Stage: American Directors Re-Invent the Classics 4. Jared Brown, The Theatre in American during the Revolution 5. Susan Harris Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art 6. Mark Fearnow, The American Stage and the Great Depression 7. Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 8. Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World 9. Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard 10. Michael A. Morrison, John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor 11. Brenda Murphy, Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television 12. Jorge Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth 13. Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906 14. Brooks McNamara, The New York Concert Saloon: The Devil’s Own Nights 15. S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities

Theatre, Society and the Nation Staging American Identities

S . E . W ILM E R Trinity College, Dublin

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © S. E. Wilmer 2004 First published in printed format 2002 ISBN 0-511-04152-7 eBook (netLibrary) ISBN 0-521-80264-4 hardback

Contents

Acknowledgements

page vii

Introduction 

1

From British colony to independent nation: refashioning identity

16

Federalist and Democratic Republican theatre: partisan drama in nationalist trappings

53

Independence for whom? American Indians and the Ghost Dance

80

The role of workers in the nation: the Paterson Strike Pageant

98

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Staging social rebellion in the 1960s

127



Reconfiguring patriarchy: suffragette and feminist plays

151



Imaging and deconstructing the multicultural nation in the 1990s

173

Notes

203

Select bibliography

250

Index

267

  

v

Acknowledgements

I want to thank my colleagues in the School of Drama at Trinity College, Dublin for allowing me generous study leave to research this book and the Academic Development Fund and the Arts and Social Sciences Benefaction Fund at the Trinity College, Dublin for financial help. I also want to thank my students at Trinity College, Dublin, Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley for the stimulating discussions concerning many of the topics in this book, and especially the faculty (Pirkko Koski, Bruce McConachie, Janelle Reinelt, Freddie Rokem and Bill Worthen) and students at the International Center for Advanced Theatre Studies (ICATS) at the University of Helsinki for commenting on several of the chapters of this book in draft form. Parts of this book, in different versions, have appeared in Acta Americana (vol. 7, no. 2, 1999, pp. 25–45), the Irish Journal of American Studies (vol. 8, 1999, pp. 119–179), Nordic Theatre Studies (vol. 12, 1999, pp. 94–103), Theatre Survey (vol. 40, no. 2, 1999, pp. 1–26) and Theatre Symposium (vol. 5, 1997, pp. 78–94). I am very grateful to the Department of Drama at Stanford University, especially Michael Ramsaur and Ron Davies, for accommodating me during my research visits to the United States, and I am particularly indebted to the series editor Don Wilmeth and to Vicki Cooper at Cambridge University Press for their guidance and encouragement, to the copy editor Maureen Leach for her careful work, and to Mary Ellen O’Hara at TCD for her help with the index. Lastly and most importantly I want to thank my family – Marja, Tania and Alex – for their support in spite of long and painful absences.

vii

Introduction

Ivarious n the historical development of the nation-state, forms of cultural expression have been instrumental in helping to construct notions of national identity. Recent works on cultural nationalism (such as Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, Homi Bhabha’s Nation and Narration and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities) have analyzed this process, but to a large extent they have undervalued the role of theatre. For example in Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson highlights the influence of print journalism and literature in establishing the concept of the nation, but hardly mentions the stage. This book attempts to widen the discussion on cultural nationalism by demonstrating the importance of drama and theatrical performance in having contributed to and in continuing to influence the process of representing and challenging notions of national identity. Theatre has often acted as a site for staging national history, folklore and myths and for formulating national ideology in many parts of the world. With its rhetorical and semiotic features, theatre has offered a particularly effective means of conveying notions of what is national and what is alien. Furthermore, because plays purporting to express national values can be performed in the actual presence of the community (in a public theatre), they can serve not only to make claims for a national identity, but they can also gain immediate communal support or rejection for that assertion.1 Unlike the solitary reader of a novel or a newspaper who reacts in isolation, the theatregoer is part of a community of spectators who can express their approval or disapproval to the performers and to each other. As Stephen Greenblatt has shown, theatre “is a collective creation,” both as “the product of collective intentions” and also because it “addresses its audience as a collectivity.”2 But theatre is, moreover, a place for interaction between performers and audience. In a manner consonant with Renan’s notion of 



THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

the nation as a “daily plebiscite,”3 the theatre can act as a public forum in which the audience scrutinizes and evaluates political rhetoric and assesses the validity of representations of national identity. The theatre can serve as a microcosm of the national community, passing judgement on images of itself. In the late eighteenth century, Goethe and Schiller wrote of the potential of theatre to galvanize the nation. After the French Revolution, Schiller went so far as to argue that the theatre could help not only to establish national values but also to create a new German nation. “If a single characteristic predominated in all of our plays; if all of our poets were in accord and were to form a firm alliance to work for this end; if their work were governed by strict selection; if they were to devote their paintbrushes to national subjects; in a word, if we were to see the establishment of a national theatre: then we would become a nation.”4 In Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, plays and theatre performances became important sites for expressing notions of national identity both in established nation-states and in emerging nations. German Romanticism (including the work of Klopstock, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist and Wagner) encouraged the rise of nationalist drama and opera in various European countries, such as the work of Oehlenschläger in Denmark, Victor Hugo in France, Katona and Kisfaludy in Hungary, Pushkin in Russia, Alfieri, Manzoni, Niccolini and Verdi in Italy, Ibsen5 and Bjørnson in Norway and Yeats in Ireland.6 Writing of the theatres in Northern and Eastern Europe, Laurence Senelick has emphasized the counter-cultural nature of much of this type of work. “Most national theatres arose in reaction to a dominant culture imposed from without; they were a means of protest as well as of preserving what were considered to be salient features of the oppressed group. Theatre was a catalytic factor in the formation of its identity.”7 Moreover, Marvin Carlson has suggested that this kind of nationalist theatre affected most of Europe. “Few of the emerging national/cultural groups of the post-Romantic period neglected to utilize the drama as a powerful tool for awakening a people to a common heritage and, not infrequently, encouraging them through an awareness of this heritage to seek both national identity and national liberty in opposition to the demands of dominant and external political and cultural influences.”8 In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson emphasizes this notion of “awakening from sleep”9 as a common trope for nascent nationalism, i.e. that the people of the nation are awakened to the call of their “natural” national allegiances. In the nationalist drama and the work of many national theatres

INTRODUCTION

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from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century, one can see the attempt to awaken the nation to its natural sense of nationhood. But how natural are these notions of nationhood? To what extent is the nation’s history fabricated? How common is the heritage? In how many ways might it be configured? Which voices are suppressed in order to create a national (and possibly univocal or homogenous) discourse? One could argue that notions of national identity are continuously being contested by different vying groups within the nation, seeking to assert or impose their own cultural values at various points in time. Andrew Higson has suggested that, “The search for a stable and coherent national identity can only be successful at the expense of repressing internal differences, tensions and contradictions – differences of class, race, gender, region, etc.” Higson also notes the importance of “historical shifts in the construction of nationhood and national identity; nationhood is always an image constructed under particular conditions.”10 Thus, one could propose that notions of national identity are constantly being reformulated, revised and reasserted in an ongoing battle to assert and maintain a hegemonic notion of the nation. Likewise, subaltern groups have confronted the homogenous image represented by the dominant group in asserting a more pluralistic or counter-hegemonic identity. This book demonstrates that theatre in the United States has often been used to define or challenge national values and the notion of the nation. The North American tradition of this type of drama predates German Romanticism. It was already manifest in the earliest drama of the English colonies, and it continues until today. Particularly at times of national crisis, the theatre has served as a political and ideological tool to help reconfigure the nation. The purpose of this book is to investigate important examples of this process from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in order to illustrate the role of the theatre and live performance in reformulating concepts of national identity. Rather than focusing on hegemonic nationalism, however, Theatre, Society and the Nation concentrates as much on counter-hegemonic and subaltern discourses. For example, it analyzes plays and performances that formulated a positive identity for marginalized or oppressed groups in society and that posited an identity for the nation that privileged rather than minimized the position of such groups. Divided into chapters relating to specific political and social movements, the book discusses representative plays and performances that emerged out of those movements. In addition to examining theatrical events and the printed text of plays and the messages implicit or explicit therein, it considers the audience and critical




response (both of the dominant and oppressed groups in society). In general the strategy of Theatre, Society and the Nation is, rather than seeking to cover every drama or theatrical performance within each social or political movement, to analyze a few of the more illustrative plays and performances in depth. The image of the United States has been evolving since the republic was founded in the eighteenth century. As in other countries, the concept of the nation has responded to social change and times of stress. Theatre and other media have contributed to the changing discourse about national values and national identity. As J. Ellen Gainor has written, “Our culture is always constructing and representing itself to itself.”11 Before the development of film, radio and television, theatre and live performance played an important role in staging the national character in front of a live public audience which could immediately indicate their acceptance or rejection of such images, for example by applause or booing or other forms of intervention. In the first century of the republic, the discourse that was circulating in other media (such as newspapers, novels, magazines and public speeches) could be converted for stage presentation. Equally, plays and performances could introduce new ideas and images that could take hold of the popular imagination, and be reinforced through their dissemination in other media. Unlike public speeches and literature, the theatre often works through live visual images that carry sub-textual or symbolic messages, and so the rhetoric is not only conveyed in the verbal dialogue and written text. More recently, the theatre and live performance have competed with radio, television, film and other media in this enterprise. This book does not try to cover the wide range of media but concentrates on the changing ideologies evident in drama and live performance that have presented various notions of national identity over the course of three centuries. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish, British, French and Dutch colonies were established on land belonging to American Indian tribes on the East Coast of North America that would later become part of the United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the British colonies dominated the territory that would encompass the initial expanse of the United States of America. Furthermore, although there were immigrants from different countries and of different religious faiths, the Englishspeaking white Protestant had gained a dominant position by this time. In 1740, an Act of Parliament enabled settlers in the American colonies to become British citizens after seven years of residency and after taking a Protestant oath. Jews and Quakers were exempt from the oath, but Catholics

INTRODUCTION

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were excluded. Non-English-speaking immigrants such as Germans were expected to learn English and their children to attend English-speaking schools.12 Enslaved Africans were imported as laborers and American Indians were pushed westward. Gradually the other competing European colonial forces were displaced by the British in much of North America. The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was taken over by the British and renamed New York in 1664, and the Spanish Floridas and French Canada were acquired under the Peace of Paris in 1763. (Other colonies would be acquired by the United States after it became independent such as the Louisiana Purchase from the French in 1803, the Spanish colony of Florida which had reverted to Spain after the War of Independence in 1819, and much of the Spanish territory in the west including Texas and California in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.) Thus, an English-speaking Protestant identity gained ascendancy in the territory that would form the first thirteen states of the new republic. A Native American performance tradition existed in North America long before European settlement. With the advent of Spanish, British, French and Dutch colonies, European styles of drama began to appear in North America including religious performances in the Spanish colonies as early as the 1520s.13 Because of the emphasis on national identity in the United States, this book begins with the period shortly before independence when the North American English colonies were manifesting their loyalty to the British Crown. The first chapter examines the period prior to independence from Britain, and the plays that either promoted a Loyalist or a Patriot stance. Until the Stamp Act of 1765, the few dramas written in the British colonies of North America supported British colonial policies and promoted the image of settlers as being loyal to the Crown. With the rebellion over the Stamp Act, colonial drama engaged in the debate about the identity of the settlers. Some dramas demonstrated continuing loyalty to the Crown while others expressed a new sense of national identity. These early plays, which were mainly written to be read rather than performed, presumably appealed to a literate elite rather than a mass audience. With independence, a new national identity was legally defined along racial, gender and class lines. The rights of citizenship were generally restricted to white property-owning males.14 In drafting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the founders of the new nation-state ignored the natural birthright of African Americans and American Indians, and in the 1790 Act of Congress made it clear that only white immigrants (“free white




person[s], who shall have resided within . . . the United States for the term of two years”) could gain citizenship.15 The Federalists argued for a strong central government as opposed to a loose confederation of states, and following the election of Washington as the first President, they favored their kinship and neocolonial-mercantile ties with Britain in formulating national values and a foreign policy. AntiFederalists argued for states’ rights and accused the Federalists of trying to ape British aristocratic values. Partly to suppress dissent, the Federalists introduced more stringent legislation in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that limited immigrant rights and freedom of speech, defined who was an alien and indicated on what basis immigrants could be deported. This legislation further determined who was to be included in the nation-state and who was to be excluded (e.g. those with pro-French and anti-Federalist sympathies.) The second chapter looks at the period in the 1790s, when the theatre became increasingly a site of confrontation between the two rival political factions. These groups staged performances that reflected partisan values (such as attitudes about class and social status and about loyalties to particular foreign governments), while endeavoring to posit these values as national and in the national interest. Federalists defended class distinctions and promoted strong links with Britain, while Democratic Republicans supported close ties with France and advocated the more egalitarian values of the French Revolution as reflecting the goals of the founding fathers of the American republic. Progressing from an elite to a middle-class art form, the theatre broadened its appeal by presenting more American material. Such performances as John Burk’s anti-Federalist Bunker-Hill attracted artisans as well as upper-class members of society. In the nineteenth century Americans increasingly questioned the cultural hegemony of Britain and encouraged American artistic efforts and images. The playwright James Nelson Barker urged his countrymen to support nationalistic plays and warned that otherwise they “must be content to continue the importation of our ideas and sentiments, like our woollen stuffs, from England.”16 Certain overlapping stereotypes of American character began to emerge in the theatre such as the American Veteran, the Yankee and the backwoodsman or frontiersman. These were white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male characters who, although sometimes comic, provided a positive image of an independent American spirit. The Yankee character in such plays as Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787), James Nelson Barker’s Tears and Smiles (1808) and A. B. Lindsley’s Love and Friendship (1810) spoke with a peculiar

INTRODUCTION



American dialect and exhibited a homespun wisdom unsullied by old world (e.g. British) decadence.17 In some examples, such as Dan Marble in The Vermont Wool Dealer (1838) or The Stage Struck Yankee (1845), the Yankee character adopted the dress of the figure of Uncle Sam.18 Of this character, Bruce McConachie has written, “Like several earlier stage symbols of the nation, Yankee stars played a large role in the social construction of whiteness . . . Although accommodating the values of republican simplicity and sentimental virtue, the stage Yankees actually advanced the cultural system of rationality and the whiteness it assumed.”19 Likewise, the rugged frontiersman conquering the American continent, taming the environment and fighting against American Indians in the name of civilization exuded the values of the individualist pioneer. Such plays as James Kirke Paulding’s Lion of the West (1830) which was adapted by William Bayle Bernard as The Kentuckian (1833), Louisa Medina’s Nick of the Woods (1838), W. R. Derr’s Kit Carson, the Hero of the Prairie (1850) and Frank Murdock’s Davy Crockett (1872) helped entrench this mythical hero into the public consciousness. They also promoted the concept of what Sacvan Berkovitch has called the “American jeremiad,” the spiritual mission of Americans to conquer the wilderness.20 The association of the frontiersman with a religious quest, or alternatively as an “American Adam” seeking his fortune in an American garden of Eden,21 also reflected an ongoing ethnic, religious and gender prejudice in the country that would encourage the notion that the country belonged to a specific type of person and that its fruits were for their benefit and should be denied to others. As Donald Pease has written, “Alongside the nexus of belongingness established for the national community, the national narrative represented other peoples (women, blacks, ‘foreigners,’ the homeless [and Native Americans]) from whom the property of nationness had been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of the universality of their norms.”22 President Andrew Jackson, who acquired the image of the individualist frontiersman and democratic yeoman, encouraged cultural nationalism in the theatre: “It is time that the principal events in the history of our country were dramatized, and exhibited at the theatres on such days as are set apart as national festivals.”23 Dramatists complied by writing melodramas featuring various types of Jacksonian figures in particular for the actor Edwin Forrest, who was closely associated with Jacksonian values, viz., Robert T. Conrad’s Jack Cade (1835), Augustus Stone’s Metamora; Or, the Last of the Wampanoags (1829) and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator (1831).24 The struggle




for cultural autonomy from Britain was perhaps most clearly displayed in the Astor Place riots of 1849 (in which twenty-two people died) when supporters of the American actor Edwin Forrest clashed with supporters of the visiting English actor William Charles Macready. With the increase of Irish immigration in the 1830s and 1840s, antiCatholic prejudice grew and the stage Irishmen and stage Irish immigrant figures emerged as popular comic stereotypes.25 As slavery became more of a contentious issue, abolitionist groups used the theatre to promote the cause of freedom. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted by many theatre groups and performed throughout the northern states. George L. Aiken’s adaptation received an unusually long run in New York and the New York Spirit of the Times commented that “the performance of this drama has made converts to the abolition doctrine many persons, we have no doubt, who have never examined the subject, and know nothing of its merits.”26 Other plays addressed the slavery issue, notably The Octoroon (1859) by the Irish immigrant Dion Boucicault, and The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom (1857) that William Wells Brown, as a former slave, wrote from personal experience and read in public to promote the abolitionist cause. In the south, the fear of northerners dramatizing Uncle Tom’s Cabin was expressed by the editor of the New Orleans Daily Picayune: “The gross misrepresentations of the south which have been propagated extensively through the press, with the laudations of editors, politicians, and pious fanatics of the pulpit, are to be presented in tableaux, and the lies they contain acted by living libellers before crowds of deluded spectators.”27 Southerners counterattacked with alternative versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that conveyed the superiority of southern life, such as Joseph M. Field’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or Life in the South As It Is, Dr. William T. Leonard’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Louisiana and George Jamieson’s The Old Plantation; or, Uncle Tom As He Is.28 While opposing the institution of slavery before the Civil War, Uncle Tom’s Cabin continued to be popular as entertainment after the abolition of slavery. As Jim Crow laws followed the newly won freedom of African Americans during the reconstruction era, “Tom Shows” by white actors in black face depicted demeaning stereotypes like the self-effacing Uncle Tom and the uncivilized Topsy. Likewise, other plays and minstrel shows (which had started as early as the 1820s by African Americans or white artists in black face and which toured the country during much of the nineteenth century) created demeaning stereotypes for African Americans, e.g. comic, dancing figures, tragic mulattos, brutes or Mammy caricatures.

INTRODUCTION



Other ethnic characters such as Irish Americans and Native Americans were particularly popular in the melodramas and comedies of the time, but the values and culture of Anglo-Saxon Americans remained dominant with members of other ethnic groups often being shown on the stage in comic roles. This became increasingly apparent following the gold rush, industrialization, the building of the railroads, the growth of the cities and the enormous increase in immigration especially from Europe and Asia. The threat to white Protestant hegemony because of immigration entered the subtext of numerous new plays, such as McCloskey’s melodrama about the railroads, Across the Continent. On the other hand, immigrants brought their own culture and performance traditions with them, and numerous immigrant ethnic groups performed theatre to their own communities usually in their native languages. Native Americans tried to preserve their cultures and their ways of life in the nineteenth century despite white settlers depriving them of their land, their language and their religions and confining them on reservations. In some cases they were pushed to the extreme and reacted aggressively, but the white settlers, reinforced by the government and the military, continued to insist on their right to take over the country. In early American drama such as Metamora, Native Americans were often portrayed as noble savages who were tragically disappearing from the landscape.29 However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, this image changed as settlers on the frontier wanted Native Americans to disappear more rapidly. For example, when Forrest presented Metamora in Augusta, Georgia in 1831 while the Georgians were in the process of evicting the Cherokees, the audience reacted angrily to the sympathetic treatment of Indians.30 Having been represented in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century as proto-Americans and even, in cultural nationalist parlance, as the American “volk,”31 Indians had become “un-American” or “anti-American” by the mid nineteenth century. Representations of Native Americans as tragic noble savages gave way by the 1850s to ridiculous comic portrayals on the stage as in the burlesques by John Brougham, such as Metamora; Or, The Last of the Pollywogs (1847), or to uncivilized and warlike predatory figures as in W. R. Derr’s Kit Carson, The Hero of the Prairie (1850) or Augustin Daly’s Horizon (1871). Such depictions provided the settlers with the moral justification to abrogate treaties and deprive the Indians of their lands. The third chapter explores the response of the Native Americans and more specifically the Lakota to their loss of sovereignty in the western plains. Although Native Americans sometimes performed in Wild West shows and




were often represented (and sometimes appeared) in playhouses, this chapter does not examine representations of Native Americans in the mainstream theatre or Native American performances for a paying public. It discusses a religious ritual that spread across the country and was interpreted by the Lakota in a particular fashion. The chapter demonstrates that the Lakota rendition of the Ghost Dance was a performative cultural and religious response to their loss of sovereignty and functioned as a demand for an independent Native lifestyle. The Ghost Dance, which spread across the United States, reflected a widespread belief that the millennium was near. The Native Americans were faced with the obliteration of their culture and the extermination of their people, but the Ghost Dance represented a dream that the whole process of white incursion could be reversed. The whites would disappear, the buffalo would return and the Indians would reunite with their ancestors. As such, the Lakota Ghost Dance redefined the notion of the nation that was being promulgated by the white settlers and the government in Washington. The Ghost Dance operated as a form of political theatre, similar in function to the pamphlet plays for the white population in the previous century. In spite of the increasing diversity of the United States in the nineteenth century with immigrants from many parts of the world in addition to the early white settlers and the indigenous and African American peoples, the dominant notion of the nation remained monocultural and united. This was particularly emphasized following the Civil War as a rhetorical means to express a common and undivided national identity. Unlike the nations of Europe that could claim the organic development of a national spirit through a common history, folklore, literature, ethnicity, language, etc., America’s common identity needed to be more artificially constructed because of its diversity of ethnicities, religions, languages and customs. Despite severe social prejudice, a hierarchical social structure and legalized forms of social discrimination, some of the factors that were represented as uniting the country were the English language, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and the common dream of prosperity founded on notions of liberty, equality and free enterprise. According to Frederick Jackson Turner, “To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength . . . that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends . . . that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil.”32 Likewise, David Huntington wrote, “It is a wondrous impulse to the individual, to his hope, his exertions and his final success, [thus] to be taught that there is nothing in his way; – that he stands fair

INTRODUCTION



with his comrades, on the same great arena, – with no social impediments, and that the prize is always certain for the fleetest in the race. This is the natural influence of the democratic principle of our Revolution.”33 The image of America as a land of opportunity for the hard-working individualist applied to immigrants and citizens alike and fostered the concept of a national community of individuals who could all prosper. Despite widespread anti-Catholicism, Jim Crow laws, the confinement to reservations of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and other forms of ethnic and religious discrimination, the image of a national homogenous population of white Protestants persevered and was reinforced by the metaphor of a national melting pot in which all the diverse elements could end up emulating the white Protestant archetype, bolstered by the national motto e pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” Furthermore, in spite of an increasingly forceful implementation of the Monroe doctrine, foreign wars with Mexico and Spain, and the acquisition of conquered territory such as parts of Mexico, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hawaii, the dominant image of the nation remained democratic and anti-imperialistic, encouraging freedom and self-determination.34 The Chautauqua movement helped solidify the notion that America was homogenous and rural, despite (and because of ) trends to the contrary. Like the cultural nationalism that spread through Europe in the nineteenth century and owed its origins to German Romanticism and the ideas of Herder and Rousseau, the Chautauqua gatherings emphasized rural rather than urban values as the distinctive virtues of the nation. The Chautauquas were annual cultural events that dated from the late nineteenth century and occurred in thousands of small towns and villages across the United States. From the early twentieth century, national touring organizations sent out packages of events lasting from three to seven days, consisting of public speeches, musical numbers, plays and other amusements. Although the shows were sold to the communities as morally uplifting rather than as commercial entertainment, the enterprise was hugely profitable for the organizers, with an estimated annual attendance of almost thirty million people at its peak in 1924. While professing such foundational ideas as freedom of religion and equality, the dominant values of the Chautauquas were white, Protestant and capitalist.35 The hard-working white American Protestant was idealized, and would be, according to Conwell’s ever popular “Acres of Diamonds” speech, rewarded financially.36 European immigrants could be transformed into model American citizens, as was shown in Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1908), which became a popular play on the Chautauqua circuit

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from 1914, if they denied their former values, adopted American ways and assimilated into the dominant culture.37 By contrast with the homogenous depiction of America by the Chautauquas, various marginalized and excluded groups used theatre to reverse the stereotypical images conveyed by the dominant discourse in the theatre and other media (including the budding film industry). The labor movement in the United States used the theatre to protest their subservient status under capitalism especially during the economic depression of the 1930s. Workers’ theatres organized a national infrastructure for performing plays around the country in order to increase class solidarity and participated in a popular front to express a wide coalition of leftist political opinions in the country. The Roosevelt government initiated the Federal Theatre Project which absorbed some of the radicalism of this movement and at the same time contained it within a government-funded institution. Chapter 4 considers the counter-hegemonic ideology of this movement and analyzes a seminal event in 1913 in which Paterson silk workers staged scenes from an industrial dispute for a massive and predominantly workingclass audience in Madison Square Garden. Rather than showing a united and homogenous population, the Paterson strike pageant depicted a nation polarized by class divisions with the workers, unhappy under the capitalist system, attempting to transform the structures of society. Likewise, the suffrage movement used the stage to alter the image of women as passive and dependent creatures. The “new woman” was represented as equal to men, capable of a career as a doctor, lawyer or political leader, and as entitled as men to the right to vote. In the 1920s African American playwrights in the Harlem renaissance began to write “race plays” that depicted African American characters from their own perspective and reversed the demeaning stereotypes of the nineteenth century. With the outbreak of the Second World War, leftist ideas were crushed under the national war effort. Japanese Americans were confined to concentration camps and social and industrial discontent was suppressed. Following the war, a new “reality” replaced the pre-war social turmoil.38 The white heterosexual male character returned as the dominant representation of American national identity in the media. The image of the American hero in war films was extended into cowboy-and-Indian films and television shows where white cowboys defended humanity and civilization against Indian savages. Film, television and the mainstream theatre projected the role model of the white heterosexual male as a universal value and marginalized the values and interests of others. Women played supportive roles, African

INTRODUCTION

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Americans appeared as comic characters, Asian Americans as evil men or lascivious women, and gays and lesbians were invisible. Counter-hegemonic images emerged in the theatre such as Arthur Miller’s challenge to the capitalist ethic in Death of a Salesman (1949) and his criticism of the McCarthy witch-hunt for un-American activity in The Crucible (1953). Similarly, in Edward Albee’s The American Dream (1961), the character of the young man who describes himself as a “clean-cut, midwest farm boy type” and is recognized by the grandmother as “the American dream,” has lost any sense of feeling or compassion and will do anything for money. He arguably symbolizes the loss of humanity in America under capitalism, while his twin brother who has disappeared seems to represent those who are rejected or rendered invisible by American society and unable to attain the American dream. From the 1960s, marginalized groups challenged the dominant discourse through the civil rights movement, student protests, demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the widespread rejection of dominant cultural values. Successful anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia encouraged ethnic pride and stimulated separate cultural nationalist movements amongst African American, Chicano, and Native American populations. Such groups used the theatre to write their histories in the face of historic misrepresentation, calling attention to the suffering that they had endured and the struggles in which they were engaged. They showed that the dominant discourse in America had served the purposes of certain privileged groups and had disenfranchised others. In the late 1960s many ethnic-based groups produced work within and for their own communities. Chapter 5 focuses on the Black Revolutionary Theatre headed by Amiri Baraka, the Teatro Campesino founded by Luis Valdez, and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War as significant groups that called for urgent social and political change and took their message to the people. Baraka’s cultural centres in Harlem and Newark produced drama, often in the streets, that reflected the Black Power movement and Black Nationalism. The Teatro Campesino created work that initially responded to the strike in California by the United Farmworkers and performed it on a flatbed truck in the fields. Gradually, they moved into a wider representation of Chicano identity and investigated their cultural heritage including the spiritual practices of the Aztecs and Mayans. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War mounted search-and-destroy enactments in the streets and country roads of the American hinterland to persuade the American public to abandon the war in Vietnam and recognize their responsibility for the atrocities that were being committed overseas in their name.

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The political turbulence in the 1960s encouraged women to reexamine their status in society. Initially their claims were largely ignored, not only by the establishment but also by male dominated counter-hegemonic political organizations. In the 1970s and 1980s the women’s movement provided a new discourse on gender and sexuality that interrogated the patriarchal norms in society. Likewise, the gay liberation movement used the theatre to challenge heterosexual norms with drag shows, camp theatre, as well as realistic plays such as Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979), Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1982) and William Hoffman’s As Is (1985), fantasy performances such as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992), and campaigning pieces such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) about the aids crisis and Tim Miller’s Glory Box (2000) that urged new legislation for gay partnerships. Chapter 6 draws links between the role of the theatre during the suffragist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century and the feminist movement towards the end of the millennium. It discusses the work of suffragists like Elizabeth Robins and the suffrage pageant in 1913 before turning to the second wave of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s which applied liberal, radical and materialist (socialist) strategies. It concludes with a discussion of a return to radical feminism in the enormously successful Vagina Monologues (1996) by Eve Ensler. In the late 1980s and 1990s, multiculturalism provided an answer to the accusations of essentialism embedded in identity politics, with artists, academics and policy makers urging a new attitude to American society that celebrated its pluralism and diversity rather than its uniformity. The final chapter examines the work from the 1990s of Anna Deavere Smith, Tony Kushner, Velina Hasu Houston, Brenda Wong Aoki, the Colorado Sisters and Guillermo Gómez-Peña that constructs various images of a multicultural, transnational and even postnational society. In the early days of the United States of America, writers used theatrical forms to present revolutionary values as national values. In the nineteenth century as America colonized the west, such values evolved to support entrenched privileged positions while the Protestant Anglo-Saxon figure of Uncle Sam came to represent the dominant image of American national identity. Justified under social Darwinism as survival of the fittest and by expansionists as “Manifest Destiny,” Americans conquered the continent, removing the indigenous peoples to reservations despite their protests. During the twentieth century marginalized groups used theatre and live performance to present counter-hegemonic values and promote more pluralistic and diverse notions of national identity for various types of audience.

INTRODUCTION

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They challenged the dominant white patriarchal archetype and the concept of a homogenous and unified country. In postcolonial fashion, as Homi Bhabha writes, “The peoples of the periphery return[ed] to rewrite the history and fiction of the metropolis.”39 As we move into a new millennium, contemporary American theatre artists continue to redefine the notion of the nation.

 From British colony to independent nation: refashioning identity

Iof nthethe second half of the eighteenth century, many settlements in North America underwent a major political and ideological transformation from isolated and dependent colonies to a united and independent nation-state. Writers with differing political perspectives and agenda used drama as a means to help define the values of the inhabitants of the territory and their political relationship with Europe. During this period, plays by Loyalist Americans and by the British military encouraged the loyalty of the settlers to the British crown. Whig or Patriot drama, on the other hand, inspired Americans to rethink their connection with the British government, and began to redefine the American colonies as potentially a separate and independent nation. This chapter will examine the changing constructions of identity in these plays and dialogues, from the early didactic plays in the 1760s that underlined the responsibilities of the American colonies to the British crown, to the drama of the 1770s that, in some cases, promoted a new notion of the nation as independent from Britain. In eighteenth-century America, prominent religious communities, such as the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Quakers in Pennsylvania and the Presbyterians in New Jersey, disapproved of the theatre. The Massachusetts legislature passed a bill in 1750 prohibiting theatrical performances because they “not only occasion great and unnecessary expenses, and discourage industry and frugality, but likewise tend generally to increase Immorality, impiety, and contempt of religion.”1 The Church of England, which dominated the southern states, was more tolerant of theatre, though the Reverend Samuel Davies of Virginia reprimanded his congregation because “plays and romances” were “more read than the History of the blessed Jesus.”2 Religious antipathy to theatre in the seventeenth and eighteenth century stunted the growth of American playwriting and performance. On the other hand, pamphlet drama had become important in the religious reformation 

FROM BRITISH COLONY TO INDEPENDENT NATION

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movement in Germany in the sixteenth century. The enormous dissemination of religious and political pamphlets from the sixteenth century in Europe manifested the power of printed material (often in dramatic or dialogue form) to educate, instruct and persuade. By the 1760s in the colonies, a history of writing plays as propaganda had already been established. Religious advocates printed dramatic dialogues as a means for teaching virtuous behavior to the young, such as “Dialogue Between Christ, Youth and the Devil” (published anonymously in 1735), or for resolving doctrinal disputes, such as Dialogue Between a Minister and an Honest Country-Man, Concerning Election and Predestination (published by John Checkley in 1741). Few American plays appeared before the end of the eighteenth century, and those that were written were often intended only to be read rather than to be performed. Possibly because so many of the colonists looked down on theatre as immoral and frivolous, drama tended to be used more as a means to instruct rather than to entertain. Accordingly, a high proportion of the plays written in America during the 1760s and 1770s were didactic. The Hallam family, who brought the first major professional touring company (the London Company of Comedians) to the colonies in 1752, resorted to disguising their plays as “moral tracts” in order to find favor with the local authorities.3 They met with receptive audiences in the southern towns and the prosperous West Indies but had to negotiate their way more carefully in the northern colonies, discovering that resistance was especially strong in New England and also at times in New York and Philadelphia. The play that they performed most often (other than Shakespeare) was George Lillo’s George Barnwell.4 Because of its moral instruction to young people, it was more acceptable to religious communities, especially during the Christmas and Easter seasons. In time the Hallam/Douglass company established permanent venues such as the Williamsburg Theatre in 1752 (where George Washington was a frequent member of the audience), the Chapel Street Theatre in New York in 1761 (and, after that was destroyed, the John Street Theatre in 1767), the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia in 1766, and the West Street Theatre in Annapolis and the Church Street Theatre in Charleston in 1773. They developed a touring circuit and performed regularly at these various sites (depending upon the climate of public opinion and such natural disasters as yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia) until the Continental Congress discouraged theatre performances in 1774, as the colonies prepared for war. Because they were public forums where large crowds gathered, the newly established theatres in important towns such as New York and Philadelphia

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soon became a focus for displays of political sentiment. At performances by the Hallam/Douglass troupe, the audience indicated their sensitivity to the ideological content of the plays.5 English plays reflecting a Whig perspective, such as Joseph Addison’s Cato (and even Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar), became especially popular during this period because of their speeches advocating freedom from imperial oppression.6 In some cases strong political feelings led to riots. The Sons of Liberty, for example, disrupted the activities of the Chapel Street Theatre in New York during protests associated with the Stamp Act. A crowd invaded the audience that was attending a performance, one person was killed in the melee and the rioters tore down and burned the theatre “to the Satisfaction of many at this distressed Time, and to the great Grievance of those less inclined for the Publick Good.”7 With the repeal of the Stamp Act, political protests quieted down. But in order to curry favor, the actors changed their name from the London Comedians to the American Company and introduced American pieces that would appeal to their local audience, such as Thomas Forrest’s The Disappointment (which had to be removed from the program because it threatened to cause a local scandal) and Thomas Godfrey’s The Prince of Parthia. Furthermore, the theatre company introduced politically relevant material to otherwise neutral performances such as at a Philadelphia performance of Hamlet in 1773, when they added a prologue which referred to the “sweets of Liberty.”8 The company also introduced other aspects of indigenous culture in their performances to gain local support. In 1767, after constructing a new theatre in New York at John Street to replace the one that had been destroyed, the American Company provided box seats to Cherokee Indian Chiefs (who were passing through on their way to Albany to negotiate a treaty and were being hosted by General Gage) for a performance of Richard III. The event turned into a major occasion. According to the local press, “The Expectation of seeing the Indian Chiefs, at the Play on Monday Night, occasion’d a great Concourse of People, the House was crowded, and it is said great Numbers were obliged to go away for want of Room.”9 On their return to New York after signing the treaty, the Indians agreed to perform a war dance on the stage following a performance of the play, The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret! Ostensibly to prevent a disturbance by those uncomfortable with Indians in war paint but obviously selling the event in the same stroke, the manager warned in his advertising, “It is humbly presumed, that no Part of the Audience will forget the proper Decorum so essential to all public Assemblies, particularly on this Occasion, as the Persons who have


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condescended to contribute to their Entertainment, are of Rank and Consequence in their own Country” (New York Journal, 7 April 1768). The unusual event, which included a piece “for the Entertainment of the Cherokee chiefs and warriors” about Harlequin, took place without incident. Again this performance was in a sense an attempt by the manager to develop the notion of Native American culture on the stage, in contrast to the English farces and tragedies that represented the bulk of their repertory. In the early 1770s members of the audience, particularly in the cheaper seats, continued occasionally to disrupt performances for political reasons. In Philadelphia in 1772, members of the gallery objected to the Tory sentiments of A Word to the Wise. A critic, commenting on the disturbances, chastised the gallery for requesting partisan songs from the performers.10 Such disturbances often reflected social and class differences. The artisans and mechanics tended to be the most vocal in announcing their anti-British feelings in the theatres.11 In December 1772 the Philadelphia theatre experienced a riot outside the gallery door, followed by a burglary in which the robbers removed “the iron spikes which divide the galleries from the upper boxes” in a symbolic act against the class divisions in the theatre (and society).12 The event indicates an attempt by American-Patriot demonstrators to use the theatre symbolically to redefine the nation, moving towards a more egalitarian notion of national identity. Other symbolic activity by the Sons of Liberty and like-minded Patriot agitators often took on a decidedly theatrical appearance, such as demonstrations in which they hanged British leaders in effigy and erected liberty poles. For example, the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party performed a symbolic act by disguising themselves as Tuscarora Indians, thereby identifying themselves as natives of America rather than as British settlers.13 In some cases, these events involved a certain amount of acting as well as set, costumes and props. For example, the press reported that in Wilmington in 1766 at the height of the stamp act crisis, a great Number of People again assembled, and produced an Effigy of liberty, which they put into a Coffin, and marched in solemn Procession to the Church-Yard, a Drum in Mourning beating before them, and the Town Bells, muffled, ringing a doleful Knell at the same Time; But before they committed the Body to the Ground, they thought it adviseable to feel its Pulse; and when finding some Remains of Life, they returned back to a Bonfire ready prepared, placed the Effigy before it in a large Two-armed Chair, and concluded the Evening with Rejoicings, on finding that liberty had still an Existence in the colonies.14

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In 1774, with the threat of war on the horizon and in order to concentrate the minds and energies of the Patriots, the Continental Congress declared its disapproval of theatrical entertainment in the colonies, resolving to “discountenance and discourage, every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock fighting, exhibition of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”15 The American Company emigrated to the West Indies where they remained for the duration of the war. For most of the war years American Patriots refrained from theatre performances and produced drama mainly in the form of pamphlet plays, to be read rather than staged.

Early dramatic propaganda: loyalty to King and country Political drama began early in the colonies. Androboros, the first play to be printed in the British colonies in America, was a Swiftian satire on the political intrigues of New York. Robert Hunter, the British-appointed Governor of New York, published his “biographical farce in three acts” in 1714 or 1715.16 The play, which satirized his political enemies and local government, is an amusing and irreverent picture of legislative assemblies and power politics, with thinly disguised portraits of the Governor himself, his political friends and his opponents. In an early scene, the legislative assembly (which seems to be located in a sort of mental institution) is shown to be in chaos as representatives try to overthrow the rules and laws in a spirit of anarchy. Coxcomb, one of the opponents of the Keeper (i.e. the Governor), moves and the House agrees “That neither this House, or they whom we Represent are bound by any Laws, Rules or Customs, any Law, Rule or Custom to the Contrary Notwithstanding” and Mulligrub (another opponent), resolves, “That this House disclaims all Powers, Preheminencies or Authoritys, except it’s own.” Solemn, a supporter of the status quo (and evidently representing a friend of the Governor), opposes the motions. Recalling the origins of the assembly, he attacks the delegates for their abuse of power and their disloyalty to the higher authority (i.e. the Governor and Britain): Here we are Maintain’d at their Charge with Food and Rayment suitable to our Condition, and the Fabrick kept in Repair at the no small Annual Expences of our Land-Lords. And what Returns do we make? Have not many of us from our private Cells thrown our Filth and Ordure in their Faces? And now in a Collective Body we are about to throw more filthy Resolves at them. (p. 4)


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For his pains, Solemn is expelled from the assembly, and Coxcomb proposes that the Keeper “ought to be dismiss’t from having any further Autho[rity over] us.” The Keeper enters and terminates the session by ordering the representatives, “To your Kennels, ye Hounds” (p. 8). Having been temporarily thwarted, the opponents of the Keeper then concoct a new scheme to gain independence by creating a religious organization. Fizle (another opponent) argues, “You see he can Dissolve our Senate with a Crack of his Whip, so there is nothing to be done that way. Let us incorporate our selves into a Consistory; That I believe He dare not touch, without being Reputed an Enemy to the Consistory; and if he does, we may hunt him down” (p. 9). Moreover, Fizle comes up with a plan to discredit the Keeper by falsely accusing him of befouling the holy vestments of the church. The conspirators finally decide to get rid of the Keeper by means of a trap door. In the denouement Androboros, an opponent who is temporarily blinded, falls down the trap that was intended to ensnare the Keeper. The conspirators, trying to save him, plunge in after him in slapstick comedy tradition, leaving the Keeper in control. The farce discredited the political opponents of the author, strengthened his position as the British Governor of New York, and reaffirmed the loyalty of the colony to the British Crown. No other play texts written in the English colonies of America have been discovered for the period from 1715 to 1764, but in 1764 two plays were published that similarly advocated the loyalty of American settlers to the British Crown. Both plays commented on the Paxton Rebellion, an uprising in western Pennsylvania in which settlers from the outlying districts displayed their anger at the inadequate provisions made by the colonial authorities to protect their interests. Following the first wave of Pontiac’s insurrection in which his and other tribes attacked British forts and settlements, the Paxton rebels attacked Indian villages and marched on Philadelphia in pursuit of Indians who had sought shelter there. The events obviously frightened the inhabitants of Philadelphia, and, without the skillful intervention of Benjamin Franklin, it seems that the riotous crowd might have attacked the local residents and/or been massacred by the British militia.17 Both The Paxton Boys and A Dialogue, Containing some Reflections on the late Declaration and Remonstrance, Of the Back-Inhabitants of the Province of Pennsylvania were published anonymously in the same year as the Paxton rebellion. The Paxton Boys, which was reprinted twice in the same year, derided the rebellion and the support given to it by the Presbyterians, and evoked sympathy for the Quakers, the Church of England and the

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British monarchy. The play ridiculed the local citizens of Philadelphia for their cowardice, the rebels for their divisive actions, and the Presbyterians for conspiring to aid the rebels. One of the main villains of the piece, a loudmouthed anti-monarchist Presbyterian whose ancestors supported the Cromwellian rebellion in England, claims, I would freely Sacrifice my Life and Fortune for this Cause, rather than [that] those Misecrants [sic] of the Establish’d Church of England, or those R[asca]ls the Q[uaker]s, should continue [any] longer at the head of Government. (p. 7)

The Presbyterian boasts that he has collected thousands of pounds in support of the rebels and that he had distributed money, powder and ammunition to them as they approached Philadelphia. He vows to attack the city, “Now we go on Triumphantly, let us Extipate [sic] those People, Root and Branch, and not leave one Soul alive . . .” (p. 8). A Quaker confronts him and discovers his plot to overthrow the government. But the Quaker, as a pacifist, is then faced with the moral dilemma of whether to resort to arms against the conspirator. When the Quaker accuses the Presbyterian of being a dissident, the Presbyterian identifies him likewise as a dissident because of his religion. The Quaker reacts angrily: But my Disenting [sic] does not proceed from any dislike to the King, or the Government, but from a Religious scruple of Conscience in bearing Arms, but thou art a Desenter [sic] from the wickedness of thy heart, like fallen Angels, and let me tell thee, that unless thou mends thy ways, thy condition may be like unto theirs. (p. 15)

The play ends with the arrival of the rebellious Paxton Boys in Philadelphia and the Quaker vowing to fight the Presbyterian, “’tis Time to Arm, and do thou attack me if thou dares, and thou shalt find that I have Courage and Strength sufficient, to trample thee under my Feet” (p. 15). The Paxton Boys focused on the responsibility of the citizens of the colony to defend themselves. Although the British militia was mentioned, the rhetoric of the play did not emphasize the obligation of the British government and British military to maintain law and order. The playwright clearly believed that it was the responsibility of the Philadelphia citizens to employ armed force to quash rebellion, and in the play he situated the Quaker in a pivotal position in order to make the case. The play outlined the duty of the citizens to take responsibility for ensuring their own safety, and it added a moral coda after the final speech to emphasize its message:


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Stir then good People be not still nor quiet, Rouze up yourselves take Arms and quell the Riot; Such Wild-fire Chaps may, dangerous Mischeifs [sic] raise, And se[e] unthinking People in a blaze. (p. 15)

In a sense, therefore, The Paxton Boys identified the civic responsibilities of Philadelphia citizens as British subjects. The author indicated that Philadelphians should show their allegiance to the British Crown, not as passive subjects reliant on the British military for their protection, but as active citizens ready to fight alongside the British military as a local militia. The play portrayed the Presbyterian rebel as the villain of the piece because he wanted to overthrow the colonial government and replace it with an antimonarchist government. The author used the Quaker as a protagonist with whom the readership could empathize, moving from a position of pacifism to militarism in defense of the colony. A Dialogue, Containing some Reflections on the late Declaration and Remonstrance, Of the Back-Inhabitants of the Province of Pennsylvania tackled the same events. The frontispiece of the text, which indicated that the author was “a Member of that Community,” underscored the rhetorical intention of the piece in its subtitle: “With a serious and short Address, to those Presbyterians, who (to their dishonor) have too much abetted, and conniv’d at the late Insurrection.” Unlike The Paxton Boys which contained some dramatic moments, A Dialogue . . . was little more than a political conversation about the rights and wrongs of the recent events. Three characters – Positive, Zealot and Lovell – speak their positions, with the author clearly siding with Lovell. Positive declares his support for the actions of the Presbyterians in attacking and killing the Indians, marching on Philadelphia and presenting their written demands. Zealot, who has participated with Positive in composing the rebels’ demands, expresses his concern that their document suffers from faulty reasoning and that their actions may be construed as traitorous to the government. Lovell denounces their actions and attacks their declared grievances, criticizing the rebel document point by point. The play develops into a discourse on the nature of good citizenship. Lovell attacks the Presbyterians for having persecuted both the Indians and the Quakers, and he argues that the Indians are becoming good Christian citizens and require government assistance. Positive opposes this: Christians! I swear it can’t be true; nor shall this, or any Thing you can advance in their Favour, alter my fix’d Opinion of them; nay, if I tho’t

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that any of their Colour was to be admitted into the Heavenly World, I would not desire to go there myself. (p. 9)

Discovering that Positive is too bigoted to accept that Indians might become Christians, Lovell changes tack to suggest that the Presbyterians have made government assistance to the Indians necessary by their rebellious actions: As to the great Expence you complain of, are not you yourselves the absolute Cause of it? . . . And did not you oblige them to take those distressed People under their fatherly Protection, to save a considerable Number from Destruction? And where could they be safer than here, from the Fury and Rage of an incensed, riotous and lawless Mob? You are the last that should complain of this Expence, as you yourselves are the Occasion of it. (p. 10)

Furthermore, Lovell argues that the actions taken by the Paxton Boys are no less than seditious and would have landed them on the gallows in England. He compares their professed loyalty to King George III to that of Judas when he kissed Jesus, and declares them to be “dangerous to the Commonwealth; and, if not nipt in the Bud, God only knows where such unwarrantable practices may end” (p. 11). When Zealot asks why their marching on Philadelphia was wrong since they did not harm anyone and “were very civil,” Lovell responds by calling the rebels worse than highway robbers. “Tumult, Sedition and Rebellion . . . are more inexcusable than [the activities of the highway robbers] who have sometimes a better Right to plead Necessity.” In a thinly disguised plea from the author, Lovell calls on the Presbyterians for a proper show of loyalty to the King, for a respect for law and order, and for civility towards all their neighbors. Androboros, The Paxton Boys, and A Dialogue, Containing Some Reflections . . . all essentially supported the status quo of British rule in America and denounced acts of disobedience or rebellion. All three plays ridiculed local political and religious figures who challenged the authority of the colonial government. Androboros lampooned rebellious local assemblies. The Paxton Boys and A Dialogue, Containing Some Reflections . . . criticized rebellious settlers and their supporters. The good citizen was shown to be a loyal British subject.

Transitional plays Following the French and Indian War which ended in 1763, the relationship between Britain and her American colonies began to deteriorate. The


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British government tried to place a greater share of the financial burden for running the colonies on the shoulders of the colonies themselves. At the same time the colonies sought greater provision for self-rule, resenting British interference in their political and economic affairs. The British introduced more stringent measures of control and taxation that met with numerous acts of civil disobedience such as the Stamp Act riots in 1765. In the wake of the dispute over the Stamp Act, the ideological discourse in American plays and dramatic dialogues began to change as settlers questioned the benefits of colonial dependency. The anti-colonial attitudes stimulated a chauvinistic pride in an American as distinct from a British identity, amidst a growing tide of nationalism. Ponteach; Or, the Savages of America, which has been attributed to the Massachusetts-born Robert Rogers and was printed in London in 1766, marked a transition away from the rhetoric of loyalty to the British Crown. The author had served as a major in the British army and had personally negotiated with Pontiac for the right of the British to cross his lands during the French and Indian War.18 Pontiac had conceded the right of passage on the agreement that his people would be treated with respect. When they were not, Pontiac organized other tribes to help him mount a war against the British-held forts and the surrounding settlements in the west in order to drive them back across the Allegheny Mountains. Like A Dialogue, Containing Some Reflections . . ., Rogers’s play portrayed Indians in a more sympathetic light than their adversaries. Despite the insurrection threatening the lives of the settlers, the five-act tragedy justified revenge by the Indians on the white settlements and outposts because of the poor treatment they were receiving. It depicted a frontier society ruined by personal greed and ambition. The first act demonstrated the ways in which traders, hunters, the military and the English administration all connived to take advantage of the Native American. McDole, a trader, sums up the attitude of the whites in boasting, “Our fundamental Maxim is this, That it’s no Crime to cheat and gull an Indian” (p. 4). The traders alter the scales to deprive the Indians of a just price for their goods and they get them drunk on rum. The hunters murder them and steal their pelts. The military ignore their complaints, and the representatives of the Crown steal their gifts to the King and the King’s gifts to them. Ponteach, the Indian chief whose characterization seems to have been influenced by the popular eighteenthcentury notion of the “noble savage” that Rousseau was articulating at the same time in Europe, warns the administrators: Tell your King from me, That first or last a Rogue will be detected,

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That I have Warriors, am myself a King, And will be honour’d and obey’d as such; Tell him my Subjects shall not be oppress’d, But I will seek Redress and take Revenge. (p. 24)

Subsequently, the clergy also come in for criticism when an immoral French priest, who resorts to conjuring tricks to impress the Indians with his religion, tries to rape an Indian princess. After Ponteach’s son intervenes and prevents the rape, the priest improvises a novel doctrine to justify his lustful actions: I have a Dispensation from St. Peter To quench the Fire of Love when it grows painful. This makes it innocent like Marriage Vows; And all our holy Priests, and she herself, Commits no Sin in this Relief of Nature: For, being holy, there is no Pollution Communicated from us as from others; Nay, Maids are holy after we’ve enjoyed them, And should the Seed take Root, the Fruit is pure. (p. 72)

The play justifies Ponteach’s rebellion as an act of retribution for all the mistreatment the Indians have received. However, the Indians seem only slightly more moral than their English oppressors because many of them, including Ponteach and his son Philip, hatch their own plots for personal gain. Some of the later scenes of revenge by the Indians undermine the audience’s sympathy that has been built up in the first scenes of the play. For example, in one scene the Indians play with the scalps of the white men that they have killed. Nevertheless, in criticizing the British treatment of the Indian, and ultimately justifying the rebellion, Ponteach represented an ideological transition in American playwriting. Rather than expressing an underlying loyalty to the government or the British Crown, the play justified greater Indian independence and, by implication, rebellious activity against the British government.19 At the end of the play, Ponteach has lost his lands but not his spirit of rebellion, and he continues to seek revenge: But witness for me to your new base Lords, That my unconquer’d Mind defies them still; And though I fly, ‘tis on the Wings of Hope. Yes, I will hence where there’s no British Foe, And wait a Respite from this Storm of Woe;


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Beget more Sons, fresh Troops collect and arm, And other Schemes of future Greatness form; Britons may boast, the Gods may have their Will, Ponteach I am, and shall be Ponteach still. (p. 110)

The Candidates; or, the Humours of a Virginia Election, a satirical farce on election practices by Robert Munford, indicated a different type of transition. While far from justifying rebellion, it implied a subtle discursive move towards responsible self-government. Munford, who owned one of the largest estates in Virginia and served in the House of Burgesses from 1765 to 1775, wrote from experience about the corrupt practices in local elections. He may have intended his play, which was written in 1770 or 1771, for the Hallam/Douglass troupe but, unlike his later play The Patriots, there is no evidence of a performance or publication during his lifetime, nor until his son published it in 1798.20 The play upheld the patrician values of the land-holding gentry and attacked self-serving politicians who deluded the voters by spreading rumors against upright candidates. Munford, like other Virginian landholders, regarded it as a moral duty for men of his class to serve the common people as elected representatives in the House of Burgesses, even though the position was without pay and interfered with the responsibilities of running an estate. Like George Washington, who often complained of the burden of public office, the central character Wou’dbe (the would-be representative) declares, “It surely is the duty of every man who has abilities to serve his country, to take up the burden, and bear it with patience” (p. 42). Alongside two virtuous political figures – Worthy (an incumbent representative who has decided not to seek re-election) and Wou’dbe – Munford juxtaposed Strutabout, a dandy, Sir John Toddy, an alcoholic, and Smallhopes, a gentleman interested in horses. Through the character of Wou’dbe, the author deplored the lack of suitable candidates for electoral office: strutabout. Sir, I am as capable of serving the people as yourself; and let me tell you, sir, my sole intention in offering myself is, that I may redress the many and heavy grievances you have imposed upon this poor county. wou’dbe. Poor, indeed, when you are believed, or when coxcombs and jockies [sic] can impose themselves upon it for men of learning. (pp. 34–5)

The play provides a remarkable picture of eighteenth-century election campaigns. Because alcohol features in many of the scenes, and because

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drunkenness is used for satirical effect, the playwright evidently wished his audience to recognize the importance of soberly electing their leaders. Strutabout employs liquor to buy votes, while Worthy (speaking on behalf of the playwright) laments, “I’m sorry, my countymen, for the sake of a little toddy, can be induced to behave in a manner so contradictory to the candour and integrity which always should prevail among mankind” (p. 45). At a campaign barbecue, Sir John Toddy and his friends Mr. and Mrs. Guzzle get so drunk that Sir John falls and cannot get up and Mrs. Guzzle passes out. Guzzle plays a trick on his wife and the disgraced politician by dragging her sleeping body on top of Sir John. In order to persuade her husband that she has not been unfaithful, the awakened Mrs. Guzzle beats Sir John (whom she does not recognize) shouting, “ I’ll learn you to cuckold a man without letting his wife know it” (p. 40). At the same time as amusing the audience, the playwright provided a serious insight into the hazards of alcohol abuse. The author also inserted another serious theme into the comedy – that elected representatives should act independently of their constituencies and maintain their right to make unpopular decisions. Wou’dbe at one point in the campaign is blamed for high taxation. He counters that it is the entire legislative body rather than one individual that should take responsibility for such actions. He refuses to make popular promises (such as lowering taxes) in order to get elected. In the playwright’s view, political leaders should be expected to make objective decisions rather than acting in their own or their constituents’ interests, and their re-election campaign should not be adversely affected by having to make unpopular decisions. At the end of The Candidates, Worthy reverses his decision to retire from politics and agrees to stand for re-election in order that Wou’dbe will also be elected. The play presents his action as one of admirable selfsacrifice on behalf of the interests of the community, rather than for selfaggrandizement. In a remarkable election scene in which the candidates are chosen by a voice vote with the candidates thanking each voter for his vote (which, rather than a secret ballot, was presumably the custom of the day), the electorate choose the right men and the play ends happily with expressions of self-congratulation, “We have done as we ought, we have elected the ablest” (p. 50). As in The Paxton Boys, the playwright added a moral coda to clarify his didactic intentions, Henceforth, let those who pray for wholesome laws, And all well-wishers to their country’s cause, Like us refuse a coxcomb – choose a man – Then let our senate blunder if it can. (p. 51)


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The play focused on the high moral responsibility that political representation entailed and the need for citizens to discriminate between worthy and unworthy politicians. In a sense, it is a perennial issue. The malaise of voters in the twentieth-first century perhaps mirrors Munford’s concerns in the eighteenth century that elected officials should not be elected on the basis of sectional and personal interests but for their integrity, their ability and their responsibility to the community as a whole. The Candidates also reflected the growing self-reliance of the colony on the leadership of their own elected representatives. Unlike The Paxton Boys, A Dialogue Containing Some Reflections . . ., or Ponteach, there is no mention of the British government or loyalty to the Crown. Munford favored the independence of the representatives in running the affairs of the colony. Assuming that the play was not altered between its date of original composition in 1770–1 and its publication in 1798, one can see implicit in The Candidates a subtle transition from advocating political dependence on the British Crown towards seeking a state of independence. Munford portrayed the growing sense of political responsibility that would ultimately lead to self-government. In a mood of self-congratulation at the end of the play that reflects the transition, Wou’dbe uses prescient words in thanking his supporters for electing Worthy and him. “You have in that, shewn your judgment, and a spirit of independence becoming Virginians” (p. 50).

College dialogues Another dramatic form that manifested the changing political discourse in the 1760s was the dramatic dialogue that was presented as part of college commencement exercises. Despite religious reservations, American colleges had occasionally staged theatrical events from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Students at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, for example, performed a “pastoral colloquy” in 1702, and by 1736 they were staging plays such as Addison’s Cato. By the middle of the century, college commencement ceremonies in the British colonies made use of dramatic dialogues. Although these were more exercises in rhetoric and public oratory than theatrical events, they used dramatic form to comment on current affairs at a public occasion and they manifested some of the changes in political thinking. In the early days these performances favored a loyalist stance. For example, at the 1761 commencement in the College of Philadelphia (later renamed the University of Pennsylvania), An Exercise Consisting of a Dialogue and Ode, Sacred to the Memory of his late Gracious

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Majesty George II glorified the reign of the previous King of England and expressed gratitude for his benevolent influence over the American colonies: Beneath his equal sway, Oppression was not; justice poiz’d her scale; No law was trampled, and no right deny’d; The peasant flourish’d, and the merchant smil’d. And oh! my friend, to what amazing height Of sudden grandeur, did his nursing care Up-raise these colonies. (p. 5)

This was followed in the next year by An Exercise Containing a Dialogue and Ode On The Accession of His present gracious Majesty, George III 21 that was again obsequious in its idolatry of the new monarch: Bound every Heart with Joy, and every Breast Pout the warm Tribute of a grateful Praise! For o’er the Realms of Britain reigns supreme, The darling of his People, George the Good. (p. 5)

Likewise at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), a musical tribute entitled The Military Glory of Great Britain was performed in 1762 to assert the might of the British war machine. Praising the military victories of the recent past in various parts of the globe, the piece predicted a glorious victory for Britain in the French and Indian War, and the punishment of her enemies: Ye Sons of War, pursue the Foe; Your Albemarle has struck th’auspicious Blow. See, Victory waits with laurel-Wreath to crown Your Temples; fondly hovering round Your glittering Arm. ‘Tis Courage fights, Courage conquers. Pour your Wrath abroad; With martial Sound The Foe confound; Assert your British Rights; And bid them feel the Weight of your avenging Rod. (pp. 13–14)

In the following year, the Dialogue in the commencement exercises at the College of Philadelphia praised the newly attained peace, and credited King George:


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George gave the word – and bade mankind repose – Contending Monarchs blush’d that they were foes. (An Exercise Containing a Dialogue and Ode on the Occasion of Peace, p. 75)

The ode re-emphasized the students’ loyalty to the British empire: May Britain’s glory still increase, Her fame immortal be, Whose sons make war to purchase peace, And conquer to set free. (p. 80)

In the wake of the Stamp Act controversy, loyalist pieces began to give way to expressions of incipient nationalism such as An Exercise containing a Dialogue and two Odes that was performed at the College of Philadelphia commencement in 1766. Although acknowledging allegiance to George III – “gracious George shall reign the Friend of Justice and of Man” (p. 6) – the piece used the American Indian enslaved by the Spanish22 as a symbol for the perceived loss of freedom amongst the colonies: Say, what are all the Joys Which vernal Suns, and vernal Scenes inspire Where sacred Freedom, from her native Skies, Deigns not to shed her more enlivening Rays? Ask the wild Indian, with the Chains opprest Of Spanish Slavery, Cruelty and Death – Can his Heart feel that Happiness replete, That glow of Transport, and that general Joy. (p. 4)

The piece indirectly criticized the British government by praising the Whig members of parliament who took the side of the Americans, and it underlined the importance of the concept of liberty in the colonies: Hail Heaven-descended, sacred Liberty! How blest the Land where thou shalt deign to dwell. (p. 5)

A similar approach was taken by A Poem on the Rising Glory of America being an Exercise delivered at the public Commencement at Nassau-Hall in 1771 written by two Princeton students – Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge – who would become well-known Patriot writers during the War of Independence. The characters in the dialogue compare the New World favorably with Europe, praising its geographical qualities and predicting scientific and literary greatness. While showing allegiance to the

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Crown, the piece emphasized the virtue of “freedom” rather than subservience. It justified the recent actions of settlers to protect their rights, and, moreover, it predicted that such heroic actions of the past would be surpassed by greater patriotic actions in the future: And here fair freedom shall forever reign. I see a train, a glorious train appear, Of Patriots plac’d in equal fame with those Who nobly fell for Athens or for Rome. The sons of Boston resolute and brave The firm supporters of our injur’d rights, Shall lose their splendours in the brighter beams Of patriots fam’d and heroes yet unborn. (p. 23)

Implicit in the poem was an emerging notion of a new nation, equal to the states of Europe and with a glorious future that would evolve from the actions of Patriots who would continue to fight for the legitimate rights of the settlers. By 1775 the academic exercises had grown more explicitly militant. The British government passed the “Intolerable Acts” in 1774 that closed Boston harbor and replaced the local government in the Massachusetts colony with direct military rule. With the encouragement of politicians from the Whig party in England who recommended greater liberty for the Americans, delegates of the thirteen colonies met at the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia to decide on a course of action. In the midst of the debate, Paul Revere arrived by horseback with the radical Suffolk Resolves of Massachusetts in his saddlebags. The Resolves, which called for an embargo on trade with Britain and for the Massachusetts colony to arm itself and behave like an independent state until the British government repealed the “Intolerable Acts,” were endorsed by the Congress. The British government and the colony of Massachusetts began to prepare for war. Settlers in Massachusetts and eventually in other colonies had to decide which side to take – whether to fight for independence or to remain loyal to the Crown, a difficult decision that in many cases divided friends and families. In April 1775 General Gage, who had been appointed military governor of Massachusetts during the previous year, dispatched 700 British soldiers to seize the military supplies that the Americans had been stockpiling in Concord. American minutemen fired on them as they marched through Lexington and into Concord and the War of Independence had begun.


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At the 1775 commencement of the College of Philadelphia, which took place shortly after the outbreak of the War of Independence, a dramatic exercise was “hastily thrown together to supply the Place of another Exercise” (p. 2). The lines of earlier dialogues and odes were interpolated and transformed in an attempt to bring them up to date with the changing sentiment in the country. Altering the 1761 exercise which had lamented the death of George II, the writer replaced the English monarch with Thomas Penn, a local man who had recently died, to give the piece much more of a nationalistic character. By contrast with the earlier lines which had praised George II for “his nursing care [to] / Up-raise his colonies,” the new piece eulogized Thomas Penn: And oh! my friend! to what amazing height Of sudden grandeur, did his nursing care Up-raise his country. (p. 5)

The dialogue commented on the recent outbreak of warfare, the British blockade of the harbors and the Americans’ boycott of English goods, and it lamented the deterioration in the relationship between the American colonies and the British government that had led ultimately to bloodshed: Yet other causes damp this festal day – When peace is fled – when sacred freedom mourns, And her fair sister commerce, by her side Sits bound in fetters – when untwisted lies The golden chord of mutual trust and love That should unite the parent and the child, And slaughter’d brethren strew th’ensanguin’d plain. (p. 5)

The piece also updated (from the 1766 commencement exercise) the list of Whig members of parliament who had supported the American cause, and, without explicitly recommending independence, encouraged Patriots to maintain their determination to stand up for their rights: Attend! be firm! ye fathers of the state! Ye chosen bands, who for your country weal With rigid self-denial, sacrifice your private ease, – let wisdom be your guide, And zeal enlightened see the ardent flame, Which yet shall purge and renovate the land. (p. 7)

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Loyalist propaganda plays As Patriot activity became more rebellious during the early 1770s, a pamphlet war developed in which ideologues of different political perspectives defined their notions of an appropriate future for the American colonies. Loyalist and Patriot writers employed satire and farce in pamphlet plays to comment on current events and to urge the settlers to remain loyal to the British crown or to agitate for open rebellion. In a style reminiscent of Androboros, several of the Loyalist writers ridiculed the democratic process of the representative assemblies in the colonies.23 Two Tories published dramatic dialogues to lampoon the Continental Congress of 1774: A Dialogue, Between a Southern Delegate, and His Spouse, on His Return from the Grand Continental Congress and Debates at the Robin-Hood Society in the City of New-York, On Monday Night 19th of July, 1774. The unknown author of the first dialogue, employing the pseudonym “Mary V.V.”, dedicated the piece “to the Married Ladies of America,” and demonstrated that the females left at home were wiser than their wayward husbands who had attended the Congress. Through a female protagonist, the author maintained that the Patriot politicians had arrived with a mandate to negotiate with the Crown but were swept away in a hysteria of rebellion.24 The dialogue begins as a comical argument between a timid delegate and his disapproving wife who argue over the alcohol-induced decisions by the Congress. But the tone of the debate becomes more serious as the wife warns of the possible consequences of endorsing the radical Suffolk Resolves. Asking rhetorically, “Can you hope, any State, will bear such Insult,” she warns that, “As sure as you are born, this will at last end in Blood.” Referring to a conspiracy theory that was prevalent at the time,25 she intimates that the Congress is acting under instructions from an antigovernmental “Cabal” which is “little short, of High Treason” (p. 10). She also predicts that the decision by the Congress to boycott English goods will only make the people of the colonies suffer. Your Non-Imports, and Exports, are full fraught with Ruin, Of thousands, and thousands, the utter Undoing; While, without daring to bite, you’re shewing your Teeth, You’ve contriv’d to starve, all the poor People to death. (p. 11)

While the delegate pleads impotence to influence his wife much less a whole assembly, she admonishes him for the arrogance of the Congress


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and its treatment of the British parliament and she prophesies dreadful consequences: Instead of imploring, their Justice, or Pity, You treat Parliament, like a Pack, of Banditti: Instead of Addresses, fram’d on Truth, and on Reason, They breathe nothing, but Insult, Rebellion, and Treason; Instead of attempting, our Interests to further, You bring down, on our Heads, Perdition, and Murder. (pp. 11–12)

The delegate’s wife also fears the establishment by Congress of the Courts of Inspection to monitor the embargo on trade with Britain and compares the Courts’ role to the tyranny of an inquisition.26 In her final words, which sum up the rhetoric of the piece as a whole, she exhorts her husband and other Patriots to show obedience to the British crown. Make your Peace: – Fear the King: – The Parliament fear, Oh! my Country! remember, that a Woman unknown, Cry’d aloud, – like Cassandra, in Oracular Tone, Repent! or you are forever, forever undone. (p. 14)

The Debates at the Robin-Hood Society, which lists 19 July 1774 as the date of the meeting, ridicules a local assembly where the Suffolk Resolves are also discussed and passed. Most of the participants in the debate are satirized as incompetent to deal with matters of state. They speak in exaggerated tones and bombastic phrases without understanding the meaning of the resolutions that they are debating. Mr. Silver Tongue, a Machiavellian Patriot who manipulates mass opinion, advises the moderator of the debate to humor them, “We must indulge these absurd Fellows for our own purposes” (p. 7). The piece ends with a serious note to the audience to retain their loyalty to the established government and to denounce the current rebellious actions of political figures who claim to represent their interests. This deluded country has been too much the prey of artifice and faction. – The affairs of this immense continent are now arrived at a crisis, when they are no longer to be sported with – and the virtue and good sense of its inhabitants must be rouzed [sic] to vindicate that honour, which has been so greatly sullied by the insidious arts of its pretended friends. (p. 15)

Perhaps the prize for the Tory dramatic tract with the longest title goes to The Americans Roused in a Cure for the Spleen; or, Amusement for a Winter’s

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Evening. Being the substance of a conversation on the times, over a friendly tankard and pipe between Sharp, a country parson, Bumper, a country justice, Fillpot, an inn-keeper, Graveairs, a deacon, Trim, a barber, Brim, a Quaker, Puff, a late Representative. Taken in short-hand by Sir Roger de Coverly. The author was probably Jonathan Sewall, a prominent Tory propagandist in Boston who supported the British government measures in Massachusetts and was one of the characters (Philalethes) satirized by Mercy Otis Warren in The Defeat (discussed in the next section). His house had been attacked by a Patriot mob, and with the outbreak of warfare he escaped to Britain. The Americans Roused in a Cure for the Spleen again satirized Patriot political assemblies, in this case the Massachusetts provincial council, for supporting the Suffolk Resolves and for sowing the seeds of rebellion. By contrast with The Debates at the Robin-Hood Society, which in the final address to the audience suggested that the Loyalists should rise up and take action in order to suppress the rebellious spirit in the assemblies, Sewall’s piece implied that the colony was really one big happy family which was being disturbed by a few misguided radicals. Patriots and Loyalists gather in a tavern where a convivial argument ensues on the direction in which the country is going. The Loyalists defend the status quo and suggest that politics should be left to the leaders of the country. Sharp, the Country Parson, advises, “I believe if we mind every one his own business, and leave the affairs of the state to the conduct of wiser heads, we shall soon be convinced that we are a happy people” (p. 4). The Patriots are satirized as not really believing in their cause. Trim, a barber, encourages sedition in order to attract clients into his barbershop where they can have lively discussions. I tell them how I would trim Lord North, and have the lords and commons (excepting the dissentients) the East-India company, Gov. Bernard, Gov. Hutchinson, &c. over head and ears in the suds, if I could get at them; and then I rattle away upon grievances, opposition, rebellion and so on, only for the innocent purpose of supporting the credit of my shop. (p. 5)

He goes on to scoff at the purported differences between Whig and Tory, suggesting that everyone is essentially the same and that the Patriot grievances are imaginary. The barman agrees. Puff, a Representative of the Provincial Council, in a bombastic and confused speech, attempts to assert the Patriots’ cause but gets tied up in knots and can only resort to threats of violence. The Deacon Graveairs tries to come to his aid with vague Patriot rhetoric, “all our charter rights and privileges are torn from


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us and we are made slaves, and the Lord send us deliverance” (p. 9). In a lengthy debate the loyalist position is promoted by Parson Sharp, Justice Bumper and Quaker Brim (all representing the author’s viewpoint) who refute the Patriots’ grievances against the British government and justify the government actions including the tea act and other forms of taxation and government revenue. For example, Pastor Sharp asserts that the Deacon is better off in America than he would be in England, “Turn your eyes to your brother Englishman in Great-Britain – see with what taxes and duties they are burthened – and you will find you enjoy liberty, freedom and ease in a degree so far superior to them . . .” (p. 9). The Loyalists also ascribe selfish motives to the rebels that will lead eventually to tyranny. In words that today bring to mind the results of the French and Russian Revolutions as well as the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, Justice Bumper warns that revolution will lead to anarchy which can only be controlled by the emergence of a dictator. “A long scene of war and bloodshed would despoil and depopulate this fertile, happy country, ’till some more fortunate villain, would rise superior to his comrades, and become alone the lordly tyrant over this now free people” (p. 28). Moreover, Parson Sharp intimidates the would-be Patriots with a portrayal of the invincible British army and bleak images of a defeated rebellion in which those fleeing from the British will “be sacrificed in the subsequent pursuit . . . taken prisoners, impaled and gibbetted from unavoidable necessity” (p. 26). By conjuring up a battle scene where a rebel lies dying, Sharp emphasizes the consequences of their seditious actions: Imagine to yourselves, an individual head of the family, mortually [sic] wounded in battle, but lingering in the pangs of death – what would be his bitter reflections, and how would he condemn his own rashness and folly in that awful interval; in some such plaintive moans as these, may we well suppose, he would breathe out his life – what have I done, foolish man that I was – why did I blindly rush upon certain ruin . . . I now die a traitor and rebel by the laws of my country – my estate is forfeited – my affectionate wife and our innocent babes . . . to what hardships, dangers and distresses have I abandoned them. (p. 26)

At the end of the play, Puff, the Patriot Representative, finally concedes, I begin to see things in a different light from what I did. Indeed I never liked the high proceedings of the provincial congress; this affair of seizing the King’s monies, and taking the militia out of the hands of the governor, I could never see through; it is against the King’s prerogative, and sounds

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too much like treason; and I’m resolved not to go to the next [Council meeting], if I am chosen. (p. 32)

As in a Brechtian lehrstück (teaching play), the protagonist Representative Puff learns through the debate that his previous actions have been wrong and discovers what the correct course should be. The playwright stressed the importance of loyalty to the crown and the benefits of British government rule and minimized the Patriot grievances so that the audience would more greatly appreciate the status quo in America and the wisdom of remaining a British colony. The Quaker emphasizes these values in a final peroration, Treason is an odious crime in the sight of God and men; may we none of us listen to the suggestion of Satan, but may the candle of the Lord within, lighten our paths; and may the spirit lead us in the way of truth, and preserve us from all sedition, privy conspiracy and rebellion. (p. 32)

Dramatic propaganda for an independent national identity Despite the Congressional resolution in 1774, American Patriots, as well as Loyalists, used drama in the propaganda battle. The American Patriots wrote plays to encourage their American readership to become self-reliant and to think of themselves as no longer subject to the British Crown. Like the Loyalist plays previously discussed, the American Patriot plays written in the 1770s were not normally intended for the stage. Although there is evidence that some of these plays were read in gatherings and were performed by college students (especially those produced during the War of Independence), they were mainly written for publication and were disseminated as part of the Patriot propaganda campaign. Radical republicans printed pamphlets to identify the rights of the settlers in America, to list their grievances against the British government, and eventually to rally support for a nationalist struggle to achieve political independence. Amongst the most influential political tracts of the decade were Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America in 1774 and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in January 1776, that argued for American independence and sold half a million copies. George Washington ordered that another pamphlet by Paine (beginning with the rousing cry, “These are the times that try men’s souls”) be read to all the troops during the difficult winter at Valley Forge in 1777–8. Like political tracts, printed plays became a useful method of disseminating radical ideas in the 1770s and encouraging revolution.27 Perhaps the


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most prolific American writer of pamphlet plays was Mercy Otis Warren.28 As the sister of the vocal Patriot James Otis and the wife of James Warren, a prominent political and military figure, Mercy Otis Warren was well placed to comment on the political grievances in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her close friends included John and Abigail Adams and Samuel Adams, and her home in Plymouth became a site for many important political meetings prior to and during the War of Independence. The first three plays attributed to Mercy Warren, The Adulateur in 1772, The Defeat in 1773 and The Group in 1775, were written before the commencement of warfare and attacked British officials as corrupt and self-serving, with little concern for the welfare of the colonies. In particular, she assailed Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who had been born in Boston in 1711 and had risen to the top position in Massachusetts politics. Because he had lived in Massachusetts all his life, Hutchinson became a target for Patriot abuse and was regarded as a traitor to the cause when he continued to remain loyal to the Crown in his successive appointments as Chief Justice, Lieutenant Governor and Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. During the Stamp Act riots in 1765 when Hutchinson was Chief Justice, a mob of Patriots ransacked and destroyed his house in Boston. In 1773 Samuel Adams published secret correspondence from Hutchinson (who was by then Governor) to Britain that called for a curtailment of liberty in the colonies. The Patriots also blamed Hutchinson for the Boston Massacre of 1770 and the decisions that sparked off the Boston Tea Party. In addition, they accused Hutchinson of nepotism because his extended family monopolized many of the most important positions in the colonial administration in Massachusetts. While Hutchinson was Governor, Foster Hutchinson, his brother, became Justice of the Common Pleas; Thomas Hutchinson, his son, became Judge of Probate; Andrew Oliver, his wife’s brother-in-law (and stamp master for Massachusetts during the Stamp Act protests) became Lieutenant Governor; and Peter Oliver, his daughter’s father-in-law, became Chief Justice. The Adulateur: A Tragedy As It Is Now Acted In Upper Servia, was published in the Massachusetts Spy in serial form in 1772, with the first part appearing in March and the second a month later. Before Warren completed the play, another anonymous writer published two more acts, which were written in the same flowery verse style, and contained a denunciation of the British for the Boston Massacre. The various parts were spliced together and anonymously published as a pamphlet in Boston in 1773. The Adulateur satirized Hutchinson and members of his family, giving them caricatured names like Rapatio (Hutchinson), Meagre (Foster Hutchinson), Limpit29

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(Andrew Oliver) and Hazlerod (Chief Justice Peter Oliver). By contrast, the Patriots were disguised as heroic anti-imperial Romans like Brutus ( James Otis) and Cassius (Samuel Adams).30 Warren’s dramatis personae of good and evil characters contained enough clues in the text so that the informed reader could guess their real identities. The Adulateur portrays a duplicitousdespot named Rapatio(Hutchinson), seeking to increase his authority while the people of Servia (i.e. the American Patriots) grow enraged by his violent military actions. At the end of the play Brutus ( James Otis) longs for retribution in words that anticipate the War of Independence: When will it be, When high-souled honor beats within our bosoms, And calls to action – when thy sons like heroes, Shall dare assert thy rights, and with their swords, Like men, like freemen, force a way to conquest Or on thy ruins gloriously expire. (p. 31)

In comparing the Patriots to the Roman senators fighting the oppressive imperial authority of Caesar, The Adulateur utilized a popular metaphor to justify American rebellion. In a tradition that went back to Joseph Addison and other Whig writers in Britain, Warren employed Roman republican characters to legitimize the demands for greater liberty. By associating the British government in the colony with Roman tyranny, she hinted that rebellion was not only justifiable but also necessary. Thus two years before the War of Independence, when few American Patriots were seriously considering military action against the colonial authorities, Mercy Otis Warren was already preparing the populace for armed insurrection. Testifying to the influence of her work, Mercy Otis Warren later wrote that the play “was deemed so characteristic of the times and the persons to whom applied, that it was honoured with the voice of General approbation.”31 Her next play, The Defeat, satirized Thomas Hutchinson again but went a step further by confidently predicting his downfall. She portrayed him as a selfish ruler with a vengeful intention to punish the common people because of his “shatter’d habitation” (p. 2) (evidently a reference to the ransacking of his house during the Stamp Act riots).32 In a soliloquy at the beginning of the play, he intends to tax the people of Servia and to increase his authority by bribing his subordinates with titles and money. For this I’ll squeeze the lab’ring Peasant’s brow And reap the ruin’d honest Traders spoils.


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The orphans tears shall lend their wretched aid, To rear a pile to glut my wild ambition. (p. 2)

However, while depicting Hutchinson as a villain who lusts after greater power and wealth, Warren also encouraged the Patriots’ cause by suggesting that Hutchinson regarded rebellion as inevitable. In the same soliloquy, she revealed Rapatio to be in constant fear of insurrection: The wooden latchet of my door ne’r clicks, But that I start – and ask does Brutus enter? Or comes a Mucius, in the form of Ludlow? (p. 2)

In scene three Senators – Proteus (William Brattle), Honestus ( James Bowdoin) and Hortensius ( John Adams) – collect to review the grievances against the oppressive state. The Senators display their different attitudes toward Rapatio (Hutchinson) and his government. Honestus and Hortensius defend the interests of the common people of Servia. But Proteus supports Rapatio to the consternation of the other two. The scene satirized the unpredictable conduct of William Brattle, who had sided with the Patriots in their actions against the Stamp Act but had then supported Hutchinson’s policies on high salaries for government officials in 1773. Warren used the play to label Brattle as a government tool, echoing the sentiments of John Adams who had also discredited Brattle. The name of Proteus (the Greek god of the sea that could adopt different guises) helped identify Brattle as a turncoat. Honestus (Bowdoin) denounces Proteus for acting in his own interest rather than in the interests of the people of Servia and orders Proteus to inform Rapatio that they see through the plan to buy off their country’s leadership with the trappings of high office: Shall Servia bleed, and shan’t her sons complain, While traitors revel o’er her children slain? Go dirtiest dupe of all the venal race Who sell their country for a pension’d place, Who barter conscience for a gilded straw, Riot on right, and trample on the law. (p. 4)

In this scene, Warren helped identify for her readership the heroes and the villains in the confusing and volatile political situation in Massachusetts in 1773. To make the message even clearer, Warren used the turncoat Proteus to denounce himself in a soliloquy. He reveals his duplicitous nature and his ambition to become a government appointee in the new mandamus council,

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which the British government was about to install and which would replace the elected representatives: I’ve shifted, trim’d and veer’d to either side, As changing fortune smiled on either party, ‘Till neither trusts, or can in me confide. My future game shall be to fawn on Pow’r, And gain a smile on which depends my fate. I’ll cringe and court each ministerial tool, With zeal redoubled, I’ll extol each measure, So keep my seat when a mandamus comes, Procur’d by serpentine manoeuvres of one man, To sort the sycophant, from men of worth. (p. 4)

The fanciful stage directions declare, “A Battle ensues, in which Rapatio, his Abettors and Creatures are totally defeated, after which Freedom and Happiness are restored to the Inhabitants of Servia, by the prudent and spirited Conduct of Honestus, Hortensius, Cassius [,] Rusticus – and others” (pp. 4–5). In the next scene, Rapatio, who is about to be executed for his misdeeds against the people of Servia, mourns his fate as he imagines himself plunging towards Hades, Oh the reverse, the sad reverse of fortune! Stript of my plumes, my plunder and my peace. Peace did I say! that gentle heavenly guest, Has not resided in my canker’d breast, Ee’r since my native Land, I basely Sold, For flattering Titles, and more sordid Gold. (p. 5)

The second half of The Defeat was printed some weeks later and in a surprising non sequitur, the audience discovered that Rapatio was still alive and was subject to further acts of retribution. As a point of departure for this second section, Warren featured the scandal of Hutchinson’s letters to Britain. Rapatio and Limpit (Andrew Oliver) discuss the effects of the public exposure (by Samuel Adams) of their secret correspondence. Their letters reveal that they had used additional taxation to create a standing army in order to protect the government. The publication of the letters has angered the people of Servia, who see their freedom being further jeopardized. Rapatio and Limpit conspire to hire Loyalist writers to defend their policies, and they identify such figures as Philalethes ( Jonathan Sewall) who can be bought to praise them. Limpit ends the scene warning that if this tactic of buying favorable publicity does not succeed, they will soon be hanged:


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If after all the lenient Hand of Time With Philalethes Aid should not compose The rising Storm, the madning People’s Rage That’s nigh wrought up to Fury and Despair, A lifeless Effigy won’t long suffice, But you and I as Forfeiture must pay, Our Hoary Heads to this much injur’d State. (p. 12)

The Defeat thus helped to further castigate Loyalist leaders like Hutchinson and Oliver and to question the activity of William Brattle. Furthermore, it defended the actions of John Adams and James Bowdoin, and celebrated certain characters that did not appear in the play but who are mentioned by Rapatio as unbribable, such as Brutus ( James Otis), Cassius (Samuel Adams), Helvidius ( John Winthrop) and Rusticus (the playwright’s husband James Warren). The Defeat portrayed such recent measures by the colonial administration as giving titles and payment to civic leaders and hiring journalists to write in favor of the government as corrupt and anti-democratic practices. Moreover, it ridiculed Loyalists and justified rebellion as the only honorable way forward. Following The Defeat, Warren wrote several poems in 1774 that further emphasized her position. In response to a request from John Adams for a poem about the Boston Tea Party in which he asked “to See a late glorious Event, celebrated, by a certain poetical Pen, which has no equal that I know of in this Country”,33 she wrote “The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs; or the Sacrifice of the Tuscararoes” which lampooned the British and lauded the rebellious actions of the Patriots. In this poem and in “A Political Reverie” also published in 1774, she referred to the American colonies as “Columbia” and hinted at the possibility of separate nationhood in the future: No bold destroyers of mankind I sing; These plunderers of men I’ll greatly scorn, And dream of nations, empires yet unborn.34

She also composed a poem in 1774, dedicated to John Winthrop, that concluded with ambivalent lines that hinted at armed struggle: “They’ll fight for freedom, and for virtue bleed.”35 Written at the time of the Patriots’ decision to boycott British goods, this poem originated from a request by Winthrop for Warren to draw up a list of women’s items that should continue to be imported from Britain. Her response in poetic form called for American women to forego the luxury of British goods in order to support the Patriots’ cause. Poking fun at women who would find it difficult to

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give up British fashion, she underlined the need to make sacrifices for the cause:36 Yet shall Clarissa check her wanton pride, And lay her female ornaments aside? Quit all the shining pomp, the gay parade, The costly trappings that adorn the maid? What! all the aid of foreign looms refuse! . . . For what is virtue, or the winning grace, Of soft good humour, playing round the face; Or what those modest antiquated charms, That lur’d a Brutus to a Portia’s arms; Or all the hidden beauties of the mind, Compar’d with gauze, and tassels well combin’d?37

Towards the end of 1774, Mercy Otis Warren became caught up in the preparations for armed conflict between Britain and the colony of Massachusetts. She wrote to her friend Hannah Winthrop in August 1774, echoing the sentiments expressed in her plays and anticipating a war that, in her view, had been provoked by the Tory leadership: Will not the infamy of a North and a Hutchinson be written in characters of blood, while the crimsoned stream will mark to future ages, the glory, and the virtue, of a patriotic race, who, (if necessary) will cheerfully sacrifice life and its enjoyments, to extricate posterity from the threatened bondage. Must not the feelings of humanity be totally eradicated from the bosoms of men, who for the temporary advantage of a dignified title or the imaginary happiness of accumulated wealth have sown the seeds of discord and will not cease to nourish the baneful growth, till the foundations of a mighty Empire are shaken, till the civil sword is drawn, and thousands of their fellow citizens may fall in a contest enkindled to gratify the selfish passions of some of the most worthless, and wicked instruments of power that America can produce?”38

Mercy Otis Warren’s third play, The Group, continued the political saga of her earlier plays with topical references to events after the departure of Thomas Hutchinson, who by this time had been called to London and replaced by a military Governor, General Thomas Gage. Rather than portraying characters from both sides of the conflict as in her previous plays, The Group focused almost exclusively on Loyalist and British military figures such as Foster Hutchinson, Peter Oliver and General Gage. The title refers to the mandamus council that was imposed by the British government to


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replace the elected representatives in the upper chamber of the colonial legislature. What is perhaps most remarkable about this satire is that it predicted and encouraged a war that would break out only two weeks after the full play was printed in Boston.39 The Group deliberately undermined the myth of the invincible British army. It portrayed the British military and colonial administration as generally incompetent, disagreeing over strategy, and frightened by the prospect of an American armed uprising. Sylla (General Gage) is seen “walking in great Perplexity” (p. 13) and asks his brigadier how he can prevent skirmishes if he sends his troops out of Boston. Brigadier Hateall (Timothy Ruggles), who is portrayed as unscrupulous, immoral and bloodthirsty, tells him not to worry about attack because such an action would lead to the “compleat destruction” of the enemy. Anticipating the events of Lexington and Concord, Hateall urges, ‘Tis now the time to try their daring tempers. Send out a few – and if they are cut off, What are a thousand souls, sent swiftly down To Pluto’s gloomy shades. (pp. 13–14)

However, after boasting of the superiority of British forces and the easy destruction of rebel forces if they rise up, Hateall is undermined by another advisor who tells Sylla that the Patriots may not be so easy to defeat: Be not so sanguine – the day is not our own, And much I fear it never will be won. Their discipline is equal to our own.

Although Thomas Hutchinson was by this time in England, Mercy Otis Warren could not leave her favorite target untouched. Emphasizing the concept that America and Britain were separate countries (as opposed to the colonies being part of one imperial nation), she called Hutchinson a “traitor” to his own country by making a deal with the British. Moreover, she identified Britain as the villainous “other” in the phrase “his country’s foes”: But mark the traitor – his high crime gloss’d o’er . . . He strikes a bargain with his country’s foes, And joins to wrap America in flames. (p. 10)

In a manner designed to encourage the Patriot side that their cause was just and that they could and should take armed military action against the

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British, Warren portrayed the British leaders in increasing uncertainty. She again hinted at the creation of a new and separate nation called Columbia, and implied that those who helped to establish it would be considered as heroes by their people, rather than traitors and rebels. After the Tories and military leaders utter successive bombastic threats and sniffling fears, a lady (the only female character in the play), who is described in stage directions as “nearly connected with one of the principal actors in the group” (p. 22), delivers an impassioned epilogue in which she predicts victory to the Americans over the British: Till British troops shall to Columbia yield, And freedom’s sons are Masters of the field; Then o’er the purpl’d plain the victors tread Among the slain to seek each patriot dead, (While Freedom weeps that merit could not save But conq’ring Hero’s must enrich the Grave) An adamantine monument they rear With this inscription – Virtue’s sons lie here! (p. 22)

The publication history of The Group gives an insight into some of the factors involved in writing pamphlet plays at the time. James Warren sent the play to John Adams in installments as Mercy wrote it. Enclosing the first two acts on 15 January 1775, Mercy’s husband asked in veiled terms if Adams thought it was publishable. “If you think it worth while to make any Other use of them, than a reading you will prepare them in that way and give them such Other Corrections and Amendments as your good Judgement shall Suggest.”40 His allusion to a “reading” of the play suggests that the custom with her work may have been for it to be read in clandestine gatherings rather than performed in public. Like her previous plays, The Group appeared anonymously. The first part was printed in the Boston Gazette on 23 January 1775, in the Massachusetts Spy on 26 January 1775, and in New York by John Anderson three months later. The full play was published as a pamphlet on 3 April 1775, only two weeks before the outbreak of war. Among the reasons for the delay was Mercy Warren’s concern as to whether her attacks on public figures were justified, and her fear that she was being publicly identified as the author of the already published first part of The Group. When Adams did not reply to a letter in which she expressed her worries, James Warren wrote again to Adams in February 1775 about her anxiety that she was being identified as the author.41 James Warren apparently sent the second part of the play to


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John Adams on 15 March 1775 for him to pass on to the publisher. He revealed that he had had difficulty persuading his wife to finish the piece without reassurance on the two matters: “With some difficulty I have Obtained the Inclosed. Some scruples which you have not resolved, and some fears, and Apprehensions from Rumors Abroad have Occasioned the delay, and reluctance.”42 Hinting that his wife might be in danger if she were identified as the author of the play, he cautioned, “do with it as you think proper, haveing as I dare say you will, a proper regard to prudence under present Circumstances.”43 Adams wrote at length to Mercy Warren on the same day, apparently in reaction to James Warren’s letter, encouraging her to continue her satirical attacks on public figures. He effusively congratulated Warren on her style of writing: “Classical Satyr, such as flows so naturally and easily from the Pen of my excellent Friend had all the Efficacy, and more, in Support of Virtue and in Discountenancing of Vice . . . Of all the Genius’s which have yet arisen in America, there has been none, Superiour, to one, which now shines, in this happy, this exquisite Faculty.”44 Two months later, while he was attending meetings of the second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Adams wrote to Warren’s husband of the popular success of the piece. “One half the Group is printed here, from a Copy printed in Jamaica. Pray send me a printed Copy of the whole and it will be greedily reprinted here.”45 It was subsequently published in the important cities of New York and Philadelphia.46 After the war began, American Loyalists and Patriots continued to write pamphlet plays to sustain morale and justify their positions. Also the British military produced theatre performances in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, including an afterpiece in Boston called The Blockade of Boston, purportedly by General Burgoyne, that satirized the American rebellion but whose performance was disrupted by the Americans’ attack on Bunker Hill.47 Perhaps the most significant play in support of the War of Independence was The Fall of British Tyranny; or, American Liberty Triumphant. Like Mercy Warren’s plays, The Fall of British Tyranny was a parody on the British government and military, and a defense of the actions by American Patriots. Written early in 1776 under the alias of Dick Rifle (and later attributed to John Leacock), the play reviewed the political and military events in Britain and the American colonies between 1774 and 1776, including the recent battles at Bunker Hill and Quebec. Like Warren, Leacock disguised the names of the British politicians and military figures, such as Lord Paramount for Lord Bute (the former British Prime Minister), Lord Boston for General Gage (the military Governor of Massachusetts), etc.,

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but in contrast he used the actual names of Patriot leaders like George Washington and Ethan Allen. The playwright blamed the problems in the American colonies on the Scotsman Lord Bute, who, he suggested, had contrived an elaborate plot to take over the British throne and convert England back to Roman Catholicism. According to the play, Lord Bute fomented the military conflict between Britain and America so that Britain would have to send troops and ships to America, thereby becoming vulnerable to an attack from an alliance of Scottish, Irish, French and Spanish soldiers. Using this somewhat far-fetched Catholic conspiracy theory, the playwright explained recent events and justified the American military response. He showed that not only American but also many British politicians opposed the new policy, and that the war for independence was the only option to avoid political and religious tyranny.48 The preface of the play asks what King Solomon would have done in such circumstances and answers that he would have been persuaded by the logic of Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s pro-independence pamphlet, which had just been published in January 1776. Would [Solomon] not have wondered at our patience and long-suffering, and have said, ‘Tis time to change our master! – ‘Tis time to part! – And had he been an American born, would he not have showed his wisdom by adopting the language of independency? Happy then for America in these fluctuating times, she is not without her Solomons, who see the necessity of heark’ning to reason, and listening to the voice of common sense. (p. 61)

Like Mercy Warren, the playwright identified America’s friends and enemies. He depicted Lord Bute as planning to overthrow the British monarch, buy off the clergy, and impose draconian law on the American colonies, and the first act ends with Bute plotting to become the next King of England. The second act portrays the Whig opposition in Britain (Lord Chatham, the Bishop of St. Asaph, Lord Camden, John Wilkes, Edmund Burke, and Colonel Barré) that supports the rights of the colonists. They justify American independence and predict that the Americans will win the war. Barré says, “I should not be at all surpris’d to hear of independency proclaim’d throughout their land, of Britain’s armies beat, their fleets burnt, sunk, or otherwise destroy’d” (p. 82). The third act moves to America and depicts the British blockade of Boston during which Americans are shown to be giving up the luxuries of British imports. Interestingly, a Protestant


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minister views the military struggle as a holy war and echoes the Catholic conspiracy theory in warning citizens of the dangers that lie ahead if they do not take up arms. Your estates are to be confiscated; your patrimony to be given to those who ever labor’d for it; popery to be established in the room of the true catholic faith; the Old South [meeting-house], and other houses of our God, converted perhaps into nunneries, inquisitions, barracks and common jails, where you will perish with want and famine. (p. 86)

After an amusing scene that shows a Whig “outing” a Tory because of his opposition to military action, the play moves to British army headquarters where Lord Boston, who has dispatched his troops to Concord, confidently awaits the arrest of John Hancock and Samuel Adams. When a messenger arrives to report that the British troops have been attacked and are in retreat, Lord Boston’s composure falls apart and he is shown to be incompetent and in fear for his life. The next scene portrays two American shepherds discussing the recent events at Lexington and Concord in metaphorical terms that cast the Americans as innocent victims. One shepherd tells the other of an attack by British wolves on American lambs, and how the shepherds took revenge. The two characters bask in their victory over the British as they recall the rout. “Well pleased, Roger, was I with the chase, and glorious sport it was: I oft perceiv’d them tumbling o’er each other heels over head; nor did one dare stay to help his brother – but, with bloody breech, made the best of his way – nor ever stopped ‘till they were got safe within their lurking holes [in Boston]” (p. 98). The scene ends with a song which demonstrates that the loyalties of the Americans have firmly shifted to their side of the Atlantic and compares the British symbols of authority unfavorably with those of the American Indians. The Sachem Chief Tammany is presented as a more legitimate saint and king than St. George, George III or Lord Bute. By contrast with the British who wish to impose unjust laws and measures upon the colonies, Tammany is lauded for his conciliatory approach to Pennsylvania settlers in the seventeenth century. He is also painted as a superhero in terms of his sexual and hunting prowess and his love of liberty. What country on earth, then, did ever give birth To such a magnanimous saint? (p. 100)

By depicting the Indian Chief as a hero and a saint, the play legitimizes America as an independent land with its own figures worthy of veneration,

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and shows its citizens to be no longer dependent on British symbols of authority. At the end of act iii, Clarissa the wife of General Joseph Warren is shown waiting for news of the battle of Bunker Hill and the fate of the males in her family. When she discovers that not only her husband but also her brother and her son have all been killed, she at first despairs but after being told of their bravery, she rallies and reflects on their sacrifice in the name of liberty. Act iv once again depicts the British officers as immoral, devious and incompetent. The action moves to Virginia where the British Governor Lord Kidnapper (Lord Dunmore) has taken refuge from rebellious Americans aboard a military vessel. Kidnapper, who is scandalously satisfied by two women below deck, takes on board runaway slaves to whom he promises freedom in return for fighting on the British side.49 Using the divide and rule tactic, he plans to use the slaves to attack their former masters and burn down their towns. He argues, These blacks are no small acquisition, them and the Tories we have on board, will strengthen us vastly; the thoughts of emancipation will make ‘em brave, and the encouragement given them by my proclamation, will greatly intimidate the rebels . . . this is making dog eat dog – thief catch thief – the servant against his master – rebel against rebel. (p. 113)

When the scene moves back to Boston, the British military leaders Lord Boston, Admiral Tombstone, Elbow Room and Caper (Gage, Graves, Howe and Burgoyne) argue amongst themselves, blaming each other for cowardice and incompetence. They are gloomy about the future of their Boston blockade, and hope to be recalled to London so that they do not have to stay and fight. Act v shifts the action to Montreal where the Patriot hero Colonel Ethan Allen has been taken prisoner after the battle of Quebec. The British General Prescot (whose name unlike the other British officers in the play is not disguised) is shown to mistreat Allen by casting him in a dungeon, by comparison to the civil treatment Allen had given to British prisoners that he had captured. Allen is portrayed as brave and generous, asking to be killed and for his fellow prisoners (who were only following his orders) to be released. He shows his frustration that he cannot die a hero’s death “as a patriot for the wrongs of my country,” (p. 122) but is confined to an ignominious dungeon where he predicts that he will be tortured. Significantly, Allen reacts bitterly when he is called a rebel by Prescott. Through him, the playwright once more affirms the righteousness of the Patriot cause:


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We despise the name of a rebel – With more propriety that name is applicable to your master – ’tis he who attempts to destroy the laws of the land, not us – we mean to support them, and defend our property against Paramount’s and parliamentary tyranny. (p. 122)

In the final scenes of the play Generals Washingon, Lee and Putnam confer about such recent events as the imprisonment of Allen and the death of General Montgomery at Quebec. By contrast with the British generals in Boston who wish to return to England, they are optimistic and predict victory in Quebec. Of the fallen Patriots, Putnam says, “Out of their ashes will arise new heroes” and Washington adds, “I have drawn my sword, and never will I sheathe it, ‘till America is free, or I’m no more” (p. 131). In the epilogue, a character named Mr. Freeman urges his fellow citizens to “proclaim independence” and not be intimidated by British proclamations, threats and force. He also hints at a new form of government that is not dependent on monarchy: “Kings are but vain! Let justice rule, and independence reign” (p. 132). Although The Fall of British Tyranny was probably most influential as a pamphlet play (having been published in Philadelphia, Providence and Boston in 1776), it is more stageable than many of the other pamphlet plays, and there is evidence that it was performed for a live and inspired audience. Claude Robin, a chaplain in the French army during the War of Independence, mentions it in his description of wartime performances at Harvard: Their pupils often act tragedies, the subject of which is generally taken from their national events, such as the battle of Bunkers-Hill, the burning of Charlestown, the Death of General Montgomery, the capture of Burgoyne, the treason of Arnold, and the Fall of British Tyranny. You will easily conclude, that in such a new nation as this, these pieces must fall infinitely short of that perfection to which our European literary productions of this kind are wrought up; but still, they have a greater effect upon the mind than the best of ours would have among them, because those manners and customs are delineated, which are peculiar to themselves, and the events are such as interest them above all others: The drama is here reduced to its true and ancient origin.50

Summary Although controversial from the early days of the British colonies for religious reasons, drama was developed into a political weapon that made didactic comments about current events in an attempt to clarify the self-image

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of the colonies. In the early 1760s settlers used dramatic forms to ensure loyalty to the British Crown and to encourage self-reliance in the suppression of rebellion in order to preserve the status quo. Towards the 1770s, anti-colonial nationalists began to use dramatic dialogues to highlight their legitimate rights and aspirations and redefine the status of the American colonies. The theatres, which had been established by a touring company of British actors, became politicized as the debate over the rights of the settlers versus the authority of the empire grew more intense. By the early 1770s, Americans were using drama to instruct settlers about their role in determining the future of the country. Loyalist plays reinforced the values of the status quo and urged Patriots to recant and remain loyal to the British Crown. Patriot plays and dialogues began to encourage settlers to see the British as an unjust and hostile “other,” and to justify rebellion and armed struggle. Before the war started, the prime exponent for using drama to foster the notion that the American colonies should oppose British rule was Mercy Otis Warren.51 Once the war started, other plays such as The Fall of British Tyranny justified American actions in the war and depicted the British as corrupt, devious and tyrannical. In portraying an image of Americans as an oppressed and victimized people whose only legitimate course of action was to revolt, such writers as Warren and Leacock helped formulate a new national identity and promoted a nationalist struggle for independence.52

 Federalist and Democratic Republican theatre: partisan drama in nationalist trappings

T he 1790s were an important decade for clarifying the values of the new nation. Following the establishment of a Federal constitution and the election of George Washington as the first President, political factions in America used the theatre to promote contradictory political agenda. Leading theatre scholars have described many of the plays from this era as nationalistic. However, rather than simply uniting the audience in proclaiming the virtues of their heritage, some of these plays were partisan and divisive. This chapter will look closely at the rhetoric of four of these plays and at their political and social context. By contrasting their rhetoric, it will become clear that each play contributed to a dynamic political discussion about the future of the country and helped to define the values of the nation in a particular manner.

Bunker-Hill John Burk’s Bunker-Hill; or, The Death of General Warren, which was performed in Boston and New York in 1797, ostensibly celebrates American bravery in the American War of Independence.1 During the course of the play, General Joseph Warren gallantly leaves home to take up arms against the British after the military incidents at Lexington and Concord. A great battle scene ensues, and Warren dies defending Bunker Hill and the American cause. The actors and manager accompanied President John Adams, who attended a performance of the play in New York, out of the theatre afterwards. Asked what he thought of the performance by the actor who played Warren, Adams replied tersely, “My friend, General Warren, was a scholar and a gentleman, but your author has made him a bully and a blackguard.”2 Likewise, William Dunlap, a Federalist theatre manager and playwright, described the play as “deplorable” and “execrable” when it played 

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successfully in his theatre in New York. To understand these two reactions to a seemingly nationalistic work, one has to investigate the political and cultural context.3 By the mid-1790s, political factions had formed to support either Federalist or Democratic Republican policies. These factions grew out of the discussions over the Federal constitution in the late 1780s, with many politicians averse to a constitution that would transfer power from individual states to a centralized national government. But in the 1790s these opposing camps, which essentially divided over states’ rights versus a powerful centralized national government, were affected by the repercussions from the French Revolution and the subsequent war between Britain and France. The Federalists of the 1790s would align with the British and support a strong central government modeled on the British constitution, whereas the Democratic Republicans would defend states’ rights, decentralized authority and the egalitarian principles of the French Revolution.4 John Adams, who spent much of the 1780s in Paris and London as an American envoy, was a leading Federalist who believed in a bicameral legislature patterned after the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Referred to as “the Duke of Braintree” by his detractors, Adams published a Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in 1787 which seemed aristocratic in tone, suggesting for example that the Senate should be composed of “the rich, the well-born and the able.”5 He also tried to establish pompous ceremonies in Congress, and to introduce the title of “his Elective Majesty” for the President.6 Mercy Otis Warren, a close friend who became an anti-Federalist, wrote in her History of the Revolution (published in 1805) that Adams became so enamoured with the British constitution, and the government, manners, and laws of the nation, that a partiality for monarchy appeared, which was inconsistent with his former professions of republicanism . . . After Mr. Adams’s return from England, he was implicated by a large portion of his countrymen, as having relinquished the republican system, and forgotten the principles of the American Revolution, which he had advocated for near twenty years.7

Alexander Hamilton, another prominent Federalist who believed in a strong central government, formulated constitutional plans in the 1780s for an American President who would serve for life and maintain an absolute veto over legislation (similar to a monarchy). He argued,

FEDERALIST AND DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICAN THEATRE

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All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government . . . Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.8

In the late 1790s Hamilton hatched a plan to conquer the Spanish in Florida, Louisiana and Mexico and return like a Napoleonic hero to become First Citizen of America.9 The Federalists represented American shipping and mercantile interests and encouraged the creation of a loyal plutocracy and close links with Britain. They feared democratic influences from the French Revolution of 1789, worrying that the accumulation of wealth and land in the hands of a small number of individuals would be threatened if the Democratic Republicans took power in America. Fisher Ames, one of the more outspoken Federalists, wrote of the dangers of the “barbarous, infuriated, loathsome mobs” of France.10 By contrast, Thomas Jefferson, a leader of the Democratic Republican faction, took a more egalitarian stance, supporting in 1791 Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Rights of Man, which defended the French Revolution. Jefferson called the French Revolution “the most sacred cause that ever man was engaged in”11 and, in an introduction to the pamphlet, denounced “the political heresies” of John Adams.12 The political divisions in the country became more pronounced during the mid-1790s when the British and French went to war. The Federalists attracted northern merchants, ship owners and professionals who depended on trade with Britain and who approved of Jay’s Treaty with Britain in 1794 and the establishment of a national bank. The Democratic Republican movement gained the support of the planters in the south, the farmers in the west, and the laborers and artisans in the north and called for closer ties with France.13 The Federalists under John Adams won the 1796 election, enforced Federalist principles of a strong central government, packed the judiciary with partisan supporters and in 1798 introduced the Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle Democratic Republican dissent. Such Federalist measures were regarded as oppressive, however, and they led to a groundswell of support for Jefferson, who replaced Adams as President in 1801.

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The 1790s were a significant decade in American history for formulating a national identity. During this period, Americans began to write plays to record and eulogize the heroic acts of their compatriots during the War of Independence. This early form of nationalistic theatre served to reinforce the legitimacy of the new nation-state, but some of the plays, rather than uniting the audience in proclaiming the virtues of their heritage, commented on the events in order to legitimate partisan viewpoints. This can be seen especially in the work of William Dunlap and John Burk who were on opposite sides of the political fence. Both the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans used the theatre as a public forum in the 1790s to expound their respective ideological positions. Often symbols of British or French allegiance on the stage caused disruption to theatrical events. Dunlap, for example, recalled that when the actor John Hodgkinson appeared in New York in Miss in her Teens as Captain Flash, dressed in an English military uniform, he: was hissed and called upon by the French party, who could not look at an English officer’s coat without being in a rage, to “take it off.” He came forward, and, to the satisfaction of the French partisans, said he represented a coward and a bully. Unfortunately, this was running on Charybdis to avoid Scylla, and the English partisans threatened vengeance on the actor.14

The theatres in Boston and New York that presented John Burk’s BunkerHill were particularly affected by political and socio-economic divisions, and in Boston so much so that, in the 1796–7 season, its two theatres competed in an intense battle for audiences. Theatre was outlawed in Boston from 1752, but in 1792 actors began to flout the law. In 1794, Federalist shareholders built the Federal Street Theatre, and, in order to attract a large audience, tried to cater to all tastes. As party divisions became more acrimonious, politics began to disrupt the performances. As in other theatres, the audience often asked the orchestra of the Federal Street Theatre to play popular songs at the start of an evening’s entertainment. However, this practice offered an opportunity for partisan songs that appealed to one faction or the other. In theatres in other towns, such as Philadelphia, a similar practice had occasionally led to riots.15 At the Federal Street Theatre, the display of factional loyalties caused disturbances.16 In 1795 the manager wrote a poetic address to the audience to leave their politics at home:


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Let mirth within these walls your souls employ, Like brothers worship at this shrine of joy; Let Feds and Antis to our temples come, And all unite firm Federalists in Fun; Let austere politics one hour flee, And join in free Democracy of glee!17

A rival theatre called the Haymarket was built in Boston in 1796 with financial help mainly from Democratic Republicans and those of a lower economic status, and the two theatres developed a concerted rivalry for audiences during the opening season.18 The Federal Street Theatre shareholders, who were members of the Boston elite, took pride in personally covering the expenses of the theatre for an evening and ensuring that the auditorium was full. If they were not able to sell all the tickets, the shareholders would apparently give the remaining tickets away on condition that the recipients would refuse to patronize the rival Haymarket Theatre.19 The shareholders also encouraged the manager of their theatre occasionally to present pieces that would annoy the Democratic Republicans, and they permitted the actors (who in most cases were from England) to make jokes at the expense of the French with whom England was at war. Such politically motivated actions led to serious disturbances in the theatre, such as during the run of Poor Soldier. According to “Dramatic Reminiscences,” The anti-federal, (or, as it was then called, the Jacobin) party, were so extremely sensitive, that they took great offence at the representation of the Poor Soldier – pretending that the character of Bagatelle was a libel on the character of the whole French nation. They were encouraged in this, by the French consul, then residing in Boston. A pretty smart quarrel was excited between him and the editor of the Boston Gazette; and the controversy, at last, became so bitter, that a mob, on one occasion, attempted to stop the performance of this farce, and did considerable damage to the benches, doors, and windows of the theatre.20

Subsequently, the manager deleted the character of Bagatelle when presenting the play.21 Later, during a performance of the comic-opera Lock and Key, a similar row occurred because of a song that praised the heroism of the English in a battle with the French. According to William Clapp, The song was encored, and repeated with general applause and partial hisses, which by the lively jealousies of party spirit, then dominant, was

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construed into mutual insult. The first night was only a first rehearsal; the second night more clamor occurred, and on the third night the heroes of the sock became passive spectators and the audience the principle actors, and presented a medley entertainment in its finished state, so far as disorder can approximate to perfection. The attempt to stop the song, was ineffectual; for the friends of the theatre prevailed.22

While the Federal Street Theatre encouraged some plays which annoyed the “Jacobins,” the Haymarket Theatre fostered a program to appeal to a broader audience. As the theatre was being built, it became clear that the people subscribing money for its construction expected a different policy from it than from the Federal Street Theatre.23 The Federal Street Theatre was regarded as catering to the Boston upper crust and looking askance not only at the French but also at local tradesmen and artisans. Many of the workmen involved in building the Haymarket Theatre provided their services for free in return for becoming shareholders and obtaining free tickets. According to William Clapp, “The Boston mechanics were not partial to the Federal Street, and favored the [new theatre] project . . . and those who were not able to pay the money, also subscribed for shares, and paid in labor, furnishing the material for constructing the building.”24 A “tradesman,” writing to the editor of the Boston Gazette on 9 May 1796, confirmed the expectations of certain members of the community that the theatre would cater to common people and accused the patrons of the Federal Theatre of personal abuse as well as immorality: I am highly pleased with the prospect of having a new Theatre established upon a cheap and liberal plan, that we Tradesmen can go with our families and partake of a rational and pleasing amusement for a little money, and not be hunched up by one [sic], and the nose of another Aristocrat turned up at us, because we are Tradesmen. The present theatre is an imposition on the Town – it is only a “School of Scandal” and Aristocracy, and of late the Slip Galleries are no better than Brothels.

During the Haymarket’s first season, the manager of the competing Federal Street Theatre hinted at the political and class divisions that affected the theatres, declaring that the “prevailing Jacobin spirit in the lower ranks” prevented the Federal Street Theatre from gaining a larger audience. After the first week of competition, the Federal Street Theatre lowered its prices for the pit and gallery seats in order to increase its audience. However, competition from the new theatre, particularly new American plays such as


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Burk’s Bunker-Hill, badly affected attendance and income.25 The Federal Street Theatre manager complained, They have brought out a new piece, called Bunker’s Hill, a tragedy, the most execrable of the Grub Street kind – but from its locality in title, the burning of Charlestown and peppering the British (which are superadded to the tragedy in pantomime), to the utter disgrace of Boston theatricals, has brought them full houses.26

The author of the play, John Burk, was a colorful figure. The son of a Protestant schoolteacher from County Cork in Ireland, he attended Trinity College, Dublin in 1792. Accused of republicanism and deism, he was expelled27 and became involved in the Irish rebellion (which would be aided by the French) to overthrow British rule in Ireland. Burk later claimed that he “attempted by every means in [my] power to effect [Ireland’s] emancipation.”28 After failing to rescue a rebel from execution, Burk was reputedly chased by the police through the city. He ducked into a shop where he was given women’s clothes by a young woman and, thus disguised, escaped to America.29 He held strong Democratic Republican views which he expressed increasingly as a newspaper editor in Boston and later in New York.30 In 1798 he was arrested under the Sedition Act along with other editors of Democratic Republican newspapers, and he was threatened with possible deportation under the Alien Act of the same year.31 He avoided prosecution by agreeing to leave the country, but with the help of Aaron Burr and James Monroe, he moved to Virginia where, for a while, he lived under an assumed name.32 He briefly became Principal of the new Jefferson College in Amelia County, but was accused of adultery and had to resign. In 1808, when he was still in his mid-thirties, having written several plays, a history of the Irish rebellion of 1798, and a three-volume history of Virginia, he was killed in a duel with a Frenchman. Burk’s adherence to Democratic Republican principles was clearly expressed in Bunker-Hill, which he dedicated to Aaron Burr (a leading Democratic Republican who became Vice President in 1801 under Jefferson). The rhetorical strategies that he employed in the play appealed to Democratic Republican sentiments. He depicted General Warren, the hero of the melodramatic tragedy, as an altruistic patriot who does not demand a privileged social position but wants to do whatever he can to help his countrymen. Called to serve in the revolutionary army, Warren offers to act in any capacity:

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Whether as private, or as leader rang’d; My post is honor and my country’s good. (p. 41)

Furthermore, when the battle commences, he stands in the front lines with his men rather than asserting the usual privilege of a commanding officer to stay behind the lines and away from the danger of combat. As his men retreat from battle, he bravely remains to supervise their exodus. I will not stir till every soul be safe, Who fought with me this day. (p. 74)

As he is ensuring their safe retreat, he is shot and mortally wounded by a British sniper. Within the political context of the day, it was clearly a Democratic Republican strategy to represent the British as adversaries.33 A spectacular battle scene, which lasted approximately fifteen minutes, was mounted in the theatre to depict the gallant struggle by the American patriots against the British military.34 In a letter to the manager of the John Street Theatre in New York requesting another production of the play, Burk described the effects in the Boston production: The English marched in two divisions from one extremity of the stage, where they ranged, after coming from the wings, when they come to the foot of the hill. The Americans fire – the English fire – six or seven of your men should be taught to fall – the fire should be frequent for some minutes. The English retire to the front of the stage – second line of English advance from the wing near the hill – firing commences – they are again beaten back – windows on the stage should be open to let out the smoke. All the English make the attack and mount the hill. After a brisk fire, the Americans leave works and meet them. Here is room for effect, if the scuffle be nicely managed. Sometimes the English falling back, sometimes the American – two or three Englishmen rolling down the hill.35

In addition to representing the British military as the enemy, Burk emphasized the difference between American and British values. For example, Burk used a scene in which a British officer tries to negotiate a truce with Warren as an opportunity to attack British justice. (Being a fugitive from British justice himself, Burk clearly had a vested interest in the subject.) Warren asks the officer, What are your boasted English laws to us, Or any laws, which sanctify injustice? Is it an English law, to rob the weak,


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To wring his pittance from the shiv’ring poor, To levy taxes like a Russian czar . . . (p. 60)

Moreover, Burk signaled to the audience, not simply American values, but more specifically Democratic Republican values. Earlier in the play, Warren asserts the political rights of all individuals: “Those sacred rights, which nature hath design’d / Alike, for all the children of this earth” (p. 39). Echoing contemporary Democratic Republican rhetoric, which identified the Federalists as monarchists and the Democratic Republicans as democrats, Burk used Warren to denounce monarchy as a political system. Warren asks: What are kings? Kings form a horrid junto of conspiracy, A Catilinian compact, ‘gainst the lives, The rights, the peace, the freedom of the world. (p. 61)

Furthermore, Burk availed of the emotional climax of the play as the moment to attack the notion of aristocracy. In his dying words, Warren pleads: O might I look into the womb of time And see my country’s future destiny: Cou’d I but see her proud democracy, Founded on equal laws, and stript entire, Of those unnatural titles, and those names Of King, of Count, of Stadtholder, and Duke, Which, with degrading awe, possess the world. (p. 79)

Warren’s funeral, performed with pomp and ceremony, also employed rhetorical emblems, with Democratic Republican slogans being carried beside Warren’s coffin, reminiscent as much of the French as the American Revolution, such as: “the rights of man,” “liberty and equality,” and “hatred to royalty” (p. 81). The play ends with a panegyric in which “two virgins” sing of Warren’s heroism and patriotism: You sons and daughters of the land, From all his virtues tears demand, You soldiers and you farmers, hear Your hero’s glories with a tear. And you of Boston, who have seen Oft in your streets his warlike mien, Join in the general song of grief, Which freedom gives to freedom’s chief. (p. 82)

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By referring to “farmers and soldiers” in the funeral audience (which by extension included the theatre audience), Burk again employed a rhetorical device that would appeal to the common people rather than the Boston elite. The play, however, was not narrowly partisan. By setting it during the War of Independence, Burk integrated his partisan politics into a nationalistic frame in order to appeal to a wide audience. Furthermore, by featuring a Massachusetts hero and a local historical event, he played on the chauvinistic sentiments of the Boston audience. Although the Democratic Republican symbols that were deployed in the staging of Warren’s funeral (such as “the Rights of Man”) were in a sense anachronistic (as they were associated with the French Revolution which occurred more than a decade after Warren’s death) and offensive to ardent Federalists, their effect was muted by the emotional moment of mourning for a local hero. By placing the rhetoric of the Jeffersonian faction of the 1790s within the era of the Revolutionary War, Burk sought to legitimize Democratic Republican principles as founding values of the nation-state. In retrospect one might view this political debate as a petty and transitory squabble between individuals who were ambitious for power, but it concerned major ideological differences over the system of government in the new country. In the 1790s it seemed quite possible that the United States would become a monarchy or an oligarchy, with repressive legislation such as the Sedition Act to stifle opposition. Adams, for example, informed friends that monarchy was inevitable for the United States. He wrote to Benjamin Rush in 1789 that monarchy and aristocracy were “the only institutions that can possibly preserve the laws and liberties of the people, and I am clear that Americans must resort to them as an asylum against discord, seditions and civil war, and that at no very distant period of time.”36 Jefferson recalled the period of the 1790s as involving “contests of principle between the advocates of republican and those of kingly government.”37 As a political strategy to thwart Federalist policies, it was important therefore for the Democratic Republicans not simply to appeal to a narrow factional following but to gain the support of the majority and win the next election. Furthermore, the political leaders of the day did not regard their factions as permanent oppositional forces in the political system (like political parties today), but believed that the temporary political divisions in the country would ultimately be reunited under one banner. Therefore it conformed to Democratic Republican policy to represent their views as national rather than factional. Arguably, Burk’s play employed such a


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rhetorical strategy. That Burk succeeded in Boston can be inferred from his letter to the John Street Theatre. In asking Hodgkinson to produce the play in New York, he downplayed any concerns that the play might be viewed as partisan, maintaining that it had succeeded in appealing not only to the gallery and pit but also to all sections of the audience: It was played seven nights successively, and on the last night was received with the same enthusiasm as on the first – it revived old scenes, and united all parts of the house. Mr. Powell [the manager] intends it for a stock play, and it will be represented on all festivals – such as 4th July, 19th June [the anniversary of the battle of Bunker Hill], etc. It will be played here in a few nights again, immediately after Columbus. . . . There will no doubt be some who will call in question your prudence in getting up this piece, as being not in favour of England. Those are blockheads, and know not the public opinion in America. Boston is as much divided as New-York – party was forgotten in the representation of it.38

The play successfully served as a patriotic reminiscence, which could unite the house (particularly in Boston) despite its Democratic Republican ideological coding. Even the Federalist newspaper, the Columbia Centinel, praised the play after its sensational first night performance. It recorded that Bunker-Hill was performed “to a larger and more respectable auditory than perhaps was ever contained in any other theatre on the continent. The numbers present on this occasion could only be determined by calculating the dimensions of the house; for there appeared to be hardly a nook or corner in it unoccupied.”39 The critic commented on the united response of the audience, who had been anxiously looking forward to the play because of its title: Approbation was universal and instantaneous – not merely the calm, deliberate sanction of judgment, it was expressed in a language of passion in a high degree of incitement – a language in which box, pit and gallery were perfectly concordant. Since the memorable event on which the plot of the piece is founded, we presume there has seldom been so unaffected an expression of the genuine American spirit of ‘75. For a moment the audience seemed lost in the fiction, and to have imagined the flames of Charlestown, and the death of W arren, something more than a delusive description of events that had passed.

In a spirit of patriotism, the reviewer concluded, “On the whole, it must be confessed, that Bunker-Hill is not less unrivalled as a play, than it has been in reality unequalled in the history of military glory.”

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After a relatively long run of four performances with full houses, the same Federalist paper predicted on 1 March 1797 that the play could run much longer with equal success and urged everyone to see it, suggesting it might be unpatriotic not to do so: The uncommon success attending the Bunker-Hill tragedy exceeds the expectations of the most sanguine. Four crowded houses have witnessed, by the loudest plaudits, to its excellence; and if given out for four times more will still fill the house. Not to have seen Bunker Hill tragedy will fix on the delinquent a want of taste, and a deficiency of patriotism.

When Burk approached the Old American Company at the John Street Theatre in New York about the possibility of performing it, the management (which included William Dunlap) turned it down. However, the French producer John Sollee40 later performed it when he was resident at the John Street Theatre in the autumn of 1797. This production played to substantial houses for several nights. Dunlap recorded an income of $500 for the first night and $200 for the second, compared with Sollee’s takings of $200 for the entire previous week. Despite having an interest in the success of the John Street Theatre, Dunlap resented the popularity of Burk’s play, especially amongst those of lower social status. Revealing his own political and social prejudices, Dunlap described the play in his diary as “deplorable,” and the audiences who came to see it as “mere rabble” as opposed to “the first and most respectable of our people” who attended a rival performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Greenwich Street Theatre by leading English actors.41 Dunlap recorded in his History of the American Theatre that the “fire and smoke” of Burk’s play “pleased the public” more than Romeo and Juliet, and so the Greenwich Street Theatre had to introduce a more American piece, Columbus, to compete with Bunker-Hill.42 In order to appreciate the historical significance of Burk’s play and its meaning to its contemporary audience, one needs to situate it in a complex series of national and international political controversies. Bunker-Hill was not simply a patriotic or nationalistic play. It affirmed Democratic Republican principles and attacked values held by the Federalists. Although patriotic, it was clearly putting across the views of the Democratic Republican faction. Arguably, when the play was staged away from the emotionally charged locality of Boston, its rhetorical strategy became more apparent. Certain members of the New York audience who were particularly sensitive to the political rhetoric of the day, such as John Adams and William Dunlap, criticized the play severely because they recognized the aims of the writer – that Burk was representing Democratic Republican egalitarian


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principles as the founding values of the nation, that he was recasting Britain as the enemy rather than the friend of America, and that he was attempting to reverse the drift towards aristocracy and monarchy.

André Before considering a second play by Burk, it is useful to contrast this first work with a play by William Dunlap during this same period. Dunlap’s father served with the British army in the French and Indian War and settled in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where William was born. During the War of Independence, the Dunlaps remained loyal to the Crown and moved to New York where William Dunlap saw numerous plays presented by British soldiers. (Major John André, who acted and designed sets for some of these productions, would later feature as the hero of Dunlap’s play.)43 After the war, William Dunlap studied to be an artist in England. He returned to New York to work in the theatre as a playwright and theatre manager, where he helped run the John Street Theatre and later the Park Theatre. After declaring bankruptcy in 1805, he continued to write plays, paint portraits, and work in theatres. He died in 1839, after writing an important twovolume History of the American Theatre. One of his early dramatic efforts, an interlude based on O’Keefe’s Poor Soldier called Darby’s Return (1789), gave an indication of his Federalist persuasion, with the eponymous hero mocking the French Revolution: I went to France. I always did love quiet, And there I got in the middle of a riot. There they cried “vive la nation,” and “liberty,” And all the bag and tails swore they’d be free; They caught the fire quite across the ocean, And to be sure, they’re in a nice commotion: (Down with the Bastile – tuck up the jailor. Cut off my lor’s head, then pay his taylor.) Oh bless their hearts, if they can but get free, They’ll soon be as fat and jolly as we; Some took the liberty to plunder others, Because equality is more like brothers. You may be sure I didn’t stay there long.44 (p. 12)

In 1797, when Burk’s Bunker-Hill was staged, Dunlap was working on a Federalist novel tentatively called “Anti-Jacobin” (which he never finished) while helping to run the John Street Theatre. He also wrote a satirical

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afterpiece called “Fractura Minimi Digiti” about a French surgeon living in New York that resulted in his being assaulted by the insulted Frenchman as he came out of church.45 On a visit to Boston to oversee his theatre company in November 1797, Dunlap made friends with ardent Federalists. In his diary, he described a political atmosphere that was reminiscent of the period prior to the American Revolution but oddly transformed, with Federalists performing the roles formerly played by Loyalists to the Crown. “Much political conversation, high federalists, much exasperated against the French . . . [Samuel] Cooper gave me an account of the party conflicts of the Town in which he was the Federal Champion, cutting down french flags & liberty poles at the risque of his life, fighting mobs &c &c and writing down Governor [Samuel] Adams in the News papers.”46 Dunlap’s most notable play at this time, André (1798), was a tragedy about the British officer John André who colluded with Benedict Arnold in an attempt to capture the American fort at West Point. The theatre scholar Gary Richardson has recently argued that “Dunlap’s political perspective in the play remains fundamentally nonpartisan”47 and that his “willingness to nudge the early Republican theater audience beyond its expectations and prejudices does demand our respect.”48 However, like Bunker-Hill, André was also engaged in a partisan debate, and lent support to the opposing faction. Although tackling a historical subject which could have displayed “gung-ho” American patriotism, Dunlap’s Federalist sympathies played a strong part in his writing, with the subtext of the play calling for reconciliation between England and America rather than (as in Bunker-Hill ), emphasizing past grievances between the two nations.49 The rhetoric of André suggests that there were errors on both sides, and that the British suffered as well as the Americans. In the final lines, M’Donald (who represents the voice of reason in the play) cautions against blaming the present generation for the misdeeds of the past: “Never let memory of the sire’s offence / Descend upon the son” (p. 108). M’Donald also hints at what Federalists saw as the danger of French influence on domestic politics. May, in times to come, no foreign force, No European influence, tempt to mistate, Or awe the tongue of eloquence to silence. (p. 108)

Dunlap also used M’Donald to echo the Federalist call for centralized government in America (especially because of the dangerous example of the French Revolution) with his rhetorical question


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Are other nations in that happy state, That, having broke Coercion’s iron yoke, They can submit to Order’s gentle voice, And walk on earth self-ruled? I much do fear it. (p. 90)

Instead of denouncing the treachery of Arnold and André and celebrating the American discovery of their plot (as one might expect in a nationalistic play), Dunlap emphasized the honorable character of André and his misfortune in being hanged for espionage. In the play, several characters visit General Washington to plead for mercy to no avail, and the play ends as André goes to the gallows. Dunlap represented André as a mistreated victim of war, and Washington as somewhat hard-hearted in his refusal to commute the death sentence. The most surprising character in the play is a passionate American officer and friend of André named Bland, who threatens to change sides and fight for Britain if he cannot obtain André’s pardon. In pleading with General Washington, Bland emphasizes the virtues of Englishmen: Yet, let not censure fall on André. O, there are Englishmen as brave, as good, As ever land on earth might call its own; And gallant André is among the best! (p. 96)

When Washington refuses to pardon André, Bland removes the American cockade (which represented the alliance between the American and French forces) from his helmet and throws it on the ground with the words, Thus from my helm I tear what once I proudly thought, the badge Of virtuous fellowship. (p. 97)

Given the political debate in the late 1790s, the cockade scene was clearly an attack on the ongoing alliance with France as well as an indication of support for closer links with Britain. By denigrating the “badge of fellowship” and emphasizing the worthiness of English gentlemen, Bland was implicitly questioning French and American egalitarian values and reinforcing notions of social hierarchy. Dunlap’s prologue, which appeared in the Commercial Advertiser on the day after the premiere (31 March 1798), underlined the didactic purpose of his play and appealed for a non-partisan audience response (presumably because he was afraid of a Democratic Republican reaction):

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O, may no party-spirit blast his views, Or turn to ill the meanings of the muse: She sings of wrongs long past; men as they were; To instruct, without reproach, the men that are.

Like Bunker-Hill, André created great interest as a new American drama about the recent War of Independence. According to an article in The Argus that appeared on the day after the performance, “there has no Theatrical performance appeared in New-York, which has attracted such general attention as that of Andre.” However, Dunlap misjudged his eager audience’s sentiments. The spectators reacted to the cockade scene with hisses on a crowded opening night and threatened mass action at the second performance.50 Observing in his diary, “I am told that the people are so offended at the Cockade business as to threaten to hiss off the play to night,”51 Dunlap rewrote the act to make it less controversial. He showed Bland in a subsequent scene apologizing for his actions, praising Washington and graciously retrieving the cockade. Nevertheless, the box-office takings dropped from $800 on the first night to $271 and $329 on the last two nights, and the play was removed from the repertory.52 A critic attacked the play in the New York Democratic Republican newspapers The Argus and The Time Piece.53 The Time Piece had been co-edited by the well-known Patriot writer Philip Freneau who resigned on 19 March 1798 (two weeks before the play opened) and was replaced after a short interim by none other than John Burk as chief editor.54 Its review, which was a slightly modified version of a piece that had appeared on 3 April in The Argus, began, Of all the dramatic pieces ever exhibited on the American stage, T he death of M ajor A ndr e, as performed on Friday night, the 30th March, is the most insulting. From the tenor of the piece it is evident that the author’s object was, not to perpetuate American greatness, American humanity – or American generosity. No: but, as far as in the small compass of his abilities lay, to depreciate it in public estimation, and convert one of the greatest characters that ever adorned the historic page into an unfeeling, obdurate monster.55

The review tore the play apart for political reasons and questioned the patriotism of the author. The eulogiums on major Andre are great indeed: It would seem a spy is to be looked upon as an honourable character . . . [André’s action] was a cool, deliberate, and well-digested plan, which had for its object the annihilation of liberty and the slavery of millions; and wonderful, this


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man, the instrument of so black a deed, is held up as a martyr whose every action was counted a virtue.

Both The Argus and Time Piece reviews ended with a threat to the actor playing Bland not to repeat the cockade incident which was made worse by the “zeal . . . evinced when trampling the insignia of liberty under foot.”56 It is expected he will hereafter forbear offering such insult to an American audience, for all those who fought and conquered in the American cause are not yet extinct; nor should such an insult, if again repeated, go unpunished.57

Dunlap rewrote his play several years later, retitling it The Glory of Columbia and changing the underlying political rhetoric for reasons that will be discussed at the end of this chapter.

Female Patriotism Clearly Dunlap and Burk were on opposite sides of the fence politically, and this had a significant effect on the types of plays that they wrote and on the audience response that their work received. As opposed to producing simply nationalistic work, they used their plays to some extent as political propaganda in support of particular ideological attitudes and evidently maintained an awkward personal relationship with each other while working at the same theatre. Burk apparently tried to circumvent Dunlap in attempting to stage his second major play, Female Patriotism, in New York. In his diary notes of 13 February 1798, Dunlap revealed his annoyance on discovering that Burk had avoided him and had persuaded his partner Hodgkinson to perform the play and a company actress to play the lead. “From this it is plain that Burke [sic] has been told that his play should be done, without consulting me and no obstacle presented but obtaining Mrs Johnson’s consent to play Joan.”58 Dunlap confronted Hodgkinson, saying, “I have never read his play, and do not know that I should approve of it.”59 Hodgkinson told him to “take it home and look it over.”60 Dunlap described in his diary how he “read it with much disgust”61 but later relented and allowed it to be performed two months later, after his own play André had been staged. Female Patriotism displays many of the same ideological concerns as Burk’s earlier play, but, although it is a better-crafted piece than BunkerHill, it failed to appeal to popular sentiment. Dunlap recorded that Female Patriotism “was not well attended on the first night and that it was laughed at

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and hissed.”62 To understand the very different audience response compared with the packed houses of Bunker-Hill in Boston, one needs to analyze the ideological content of the play and the changing political circumstances in the days leading up to its production. Although England is again the enemy, the circumstances of Female Patriotism are quite different. Essentially the play is a rewriting of Henry VI Part I from an anti-English and anti-monarchist standpoint. Burk borrowed thirty lines of Shakespeare’s play in the first act before he diverged into a very different portrayal of Joan of Arc.63 Unlike the sorceress of Shakespeare’s play, Burk’s Joan is an ordinary shepherdess with extraordinary political commitment and strength of character. Rather than practicing witchcraft and claiming noble parentage as in Henry VI, she is a populist, a strong proponent of Democratic Republican values, and proud of being a commoner. Bishop Beauvais64 assures Bedford, who is trying to determine the nature of Joan’s powers, that they are not of divine origin but have developed through diligent political study: Within my diocese this maid was born, And tho’ her father was a peasant swain, She had a kinsman who was deeply read In all the learning of the wisest times: This sage did much affect the young Pucella, And finding her of quick and ready genius, From time to time, he did enrich her mind With precepts good, and high conceptions Drawn from the Roman and the Grecian bards; And such effect hath this upon the maid, That she applied the tyranny of Tarquin To our invasion. (p. 21)

Not only has she used her study of social and political organization to understand the implications of England’s incursions into France, Burk’s version of Joan of Arc has also tried to politicize other peasants in order to rouse them to take up arms against the English. In a monologue that seems almost Brechtian, the Bishop describes her earlier political activity: Oft have I seen her e’er she join’d the foe, Collect the wond’ring peasants in a group, With reasoning most profound and sensible, Explain their rights and duties in society; Describe the crimes of tyranny and kings,


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And glories which await the patriot’s name, In language so sublime and forcible, That the rude throng seem’d borne above their level, And I myself did half incline to join The Dauphin’s standard. (p. 21)

Burk also used Joan to demonstrate what he considered to be one of the main lessons of the American and French Revolutions – that ordinary people can take power into their own hands and change society for the better. In so doing he wanted to undermine the notion that she had been guided by voices from God or that she was a saint. He represented her as a mere mortal who operates on her own volition without divine assistance. After winning a battle against the English, Joan confesses that she has invented the story about having divine visions so that people will have confidence in her and believe in her power to lead them: I am no more of heaven than yourselves; Nor inspiration do I feel, beyond The stretch and compass of the human mind, Develop’d by its own innate exertions, No visions had I more than one of you: I saw no sights but all of you did see: France torn by feuds and foul dissentions; France desolate beneath a stranger sword. I saw the fairest kingdom on the earth, The gallantest and proudest people, And these my country and my countrymen, Groan in the bondage of a meaner state. This only was my inspiration; And it was not enough – Forbid it heaven, The time should ever be, when France doth look For a more powerful, sacred call than this, To rouze her to resistance. (p. 19)

At the same time as he emphasized her humble background and secular powers, Burk portrayed Joan as a fierce fighter and a woman of great physical strength and stamina. By contrast with the sword duel in Henry VI in which the famed English warrior Talbot heroically forced Joan to retreat, Burk’s Joan humiliates Talbot by wounding him and pursuing him offstage. She returns to explain to her friend Chastel that she was prevented from killing him because others came to his aid:

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Wounded he lies within the English camp, And had been kill’d, but that a host of foes Rous’d by his danger came at once upon me, Just as my sword uplifted high to strike Thirsted to slake its fury in his blood. (p. 15)

When Chastel regrets that he was not there to prevent her from getting into danger, she answers combatively, “How! dost thou envy this poor deed to me?” (p. 15). But, lest she appear too bloodthirsty, Burk interposed a glimpse at her compassionate qualities, with her expressing regret at having to kill so many men and concluding, O Chastel ‘tis a dreadful state of things When tyranny doth force the good to battle. (p. 16)

Later, after she has been captured by the English and is about to be executed, she again demonstrates her enormous physical strength and courage when she tries to defend herself in prison. Realizing that she has no sword, she looks around for a weapon and yanks one of the metal bars out of the prison window with such force that, according to the stage directions, “brick, mortar and splinters of wood follow” (p. 31). Although Joan helps restore the French monarchy, Burk leaves the audience in no doubt that she does this as a necessary and temporary expedient in order to overthrow the British forces in France and in the belief that a more desirable form of republican government will ensue. In the procession scene (act 4 scene 1) to crown the Dauphin in Rheims as King of France, Joan makes a surprisingly anti-monarchist speech in front of the Dauphin and a detachment of the French army. After explaining that the crowning of the Dauphin is a necessary symbolic act to remove English sovereignty over France, she promises that a “golden age” of democracy will soon replace the inferior system of autocratic rule. Burk, moreover, interspersed the rhetoric of the French Revolution in the anachronistic crowd responses of “Liberty and equality” to Joan’s call for equal rights (p. 23). As a further demonstration of the hazards of monarchy, Burk depicted a transformation in the character of the Dauphin once he is crowned. At the beginning of the play the Dauphin seems somewhat egalitarian in outlook. He and Chastel agree that the lack of initiative from individuals to save France in its hour of need stems from the influence of monarchy. Chastel asserts that under monarchy personal ambition is stunted:


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In commonwealths alone, We find this soaring dignity of mind, That loves the vast and aims at the sublime. (p. 4)

Surprisingly, as an heir to the throne, the Dauphin agrees with these antimonarchist sentiments and suggests that man is reduced to a machine under autocratic rule. However, once he is crowned and the English capture Joan, the French king begins to display his true colors as a bigoted aristocrat. Burk heavily emphasized his tyrannical and “ungrateful” nature and his class attitudes in the final scene. When Chastel criticizes the monarch for not trying to save Joan by sending an emissary to ransom her life, the king replies that it would demean the crown to beg for the life of a peasant. Chastel then mocks the king by asking why he has accepted the crown from this same peasant, and accuses him of forgetting the common people of France: Art thou not he who late with cap in hand Did court the favour of the lowest kind? That strikes with wooden shoe the soil of France? Who woo’d all orders of the state with smiles? Who talk’d of freedom and the rights of man? Who eulogiz’d Republics by the hour? (p. 35)

When the Dauphin resorts to the ultimate weapon of monarchy, “Take him to execution,” (p. 35) Chastel mocks him and monarchy further, and the king is made to appear ridiculous when his courtiers refuse to carry out his orders. The final pronouncement of the play – denouncing monarchy, affirming democratic values and predicting the American and French Revolutions as well as eventual harmony amongst nations – arrives in the form of a message which Joan has written before she has been burned at the stake as a witch (p. 39). As in Bunker-Hill, Burk was seeking to project pro-Democratic Republican, pro-French, anti-English and anti-Federalist sentiments on the stage in the guise of a historical drama. He used the political conversion of the Dauphin (from professing egalitarian values in the early part of the play to becoming a hostile autocrat by the end) as an elaborate metaphor for the change of Federalist attitudes (such as those of John Adams) in the 1790s. He hinted that the Federalists “talk’d of freedom and the rights of man,” and “Did court the favour of the lowest kind” during the War of Independence and in order to gain office. But when the British

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were overthrown and they gained power for themselves, the Federalists (in the opinion of the Democratic Republicans) abandoned their concerns for the common people. Anticipating the Alien and Sedition Acts, Burk used the king’s threat to execute Chastel as a means of subtly warning the audience that the Federalist government might try to suppress the right of free speech and the freedom to criticize government policies. There were several major differences from Burk’s earlier play that reduced the popular appeal of Female Patriotism. First, it did not celebrate American heroic actions in the manner of Bunker-Hill, and therefore it could not easily play on the patriotic sentiments of a local audience. Second, it would have been presumably much harder for an American audience to identify with the cross-cultural archetype Joan of Arc, than with the local military hero General Warren. Furthermore, a female military heroine must have seemed somewhat alien to a society where gender roles were quite strictly defined. Moreover, the constant attacks on the English, the glorification of the French and the denigration of the concept of monarchy were designed to encourage a continuing liaison with France. However, in the week before the play opened, the support for the French dropped dramatically in the United States as a result of the X, Y, Z affair. On 3 April 1798, the Secretary of State released to Congress the dispatches from the American envoys that had been sent to Paris to reach a peace treaty with France. The dispatches revealed that the envoys had been badly treated; that the French had demanded an enormous loan at unreasonable rates before discussion of a treaty would be considered; that the US government would be expected to assume the private American claims against the French government for the seizure of ships; and that Talleyrand expected a personal bribe of £50,000 in order to facilitate negotiations. The American people were shocked by this news, and it caught the Democratic Republicans completely by surprise. Most Democratic Republican newspapers, not knowing what else to do, printed the correspondence without comment. The Time Piece, with John Burk as co-editor, tried to suggest that the dispatches were a forgery and a Federalist plot. But public support for the Democratic Republican faction dwindled, and the United States began to prepare for war with France. According to the historian John C. Miller, The publication of the X, Y, Z dispatches electrified the country as had no other event since the Revolutionary War. The champions of national rights against foreign aggression, the Federalists now reaped the reward for their long crusade against revolutionary France; they were acclaimed


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as patriots and heroes while their opponents, in the words of Fisher Ames, “were confounded, and the trimmers dropt off from the party like windfalls from an apple-tree in September.”65

Adams, who had been suffering from a lack of popularity, was suddenly lauded by the American public. When he entered into the Philadelphia theatre, “He brought down the house as audiences cheered themselves hoarse at the sight of the portly little man. ‘Adams and Liberty’ and ‘The President’s March’ became the popular songs of the day. Anyone who dared call for a French tune was likely to be ‘thrown out of the windows, or from the gallery into the pit.’”66 With that kind of hysteria sweeping the country, it is not surprising that Female Patriotism fared poorly. Dunlap in his History of the American Theatre, which he wrote thirty years later, suggests that the play did badly because of a poor male cast. But this explanation seems incomplete, and his diary is more revealing. It indicates that Dunlap was out of town at the time of the play, and he was informed that the final speech by Joan, in which she predicts the French Revolution and the harmony between nations, was hissed. Regardless of the acting, the audience was evidently not willing at that time to listen to pro-French sentiments. Amidst printing diatribes in his newspaper against the President and the Federalists for trying to put the United States on a war footing against France, Burk tried unsuccessfully to promote his play. In the same column as an article denouncing the warmongering of the Federalists – “Every artifice will be adopted to persuade the people into an opinion, that war is necessary”67 – advance publicity was inserted for Burk’s play: ’Tis whispered that a new play, entitled, “Joan of A rc,” is in study, and will make its appearance in a few nights. If we consider the grandeur of the subject, the noblest in French history; the generous sentiments and fine situations of which such a subject is susceptible, we confess our expectations are high . . . Such a drama ought to elevate the minds of the audience to enthusiasm, and literally drown the stage with tears. The gentleman said to be the author, we believe capable of making his play all we have supposed of it.68

After a lackluster premiere, Burk fought the changing tide of public opinion and promised more with a second performance a fortnight later. By that time, the clamor against the French had only grown worse. On the same page as an announcement that Congress was engaged in deciding whether to create a provisional army as a preparation for war, an advertisement for

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a revised version of his play appeared in his newspaper. As it was to be his benefit night, Burk had a vested interest in selling the performance and promised that it was “improved and amended from the experience of the first night.”69 The paper also advertised that the “play is published, and will be sold on the night in the boxes and ticket office.” However, according to Dunlap’s diary, Burk was unable to persuade a friend (who advised him “not to risque the rep[et]ition”) to provide financial backing to cover the costs of the evening, and so it was canceled.70 With the introduction of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 and the arrest of several Democratic Republican editors including Burk, support for the Democratic Republican faction reached a low point, but by 1800 it had returned. The French explained away the X, Y, Z affair as an unfortunate mistake. Furthermore, the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures questioned the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Federalists split over the handling of French policy. Much to the annoyance of Hamilton, who was in line to become the commander of the army in a war with France, Adams (who feared Hamilton’s ambitions) appointed a new delegation to France and discouraged the preparations for war. With popular support swinging back to the Democratic Republican faction, the election of a Democratic Republican President looked more likely. Burk’s play about Bunker Hill once again became a crowd-pleaser. When Bunker-Hill was staged in November 1800 to celebrate the anniversary of the evacuation of New York by the British, the Monthly Magazine commented that it was attended by “a very numerous audience.” The periodical added, “All the numerous defects of the play of Bunker-Hill were amply compensated by the enthusiasm of the audience.”71 After Jefferson’s election in 1800, Dunlap restaged it for 4 July 1802 with Hodgkinson playing the lead, and he reported that “the house overflowed to that vile trash . . . the receipts were the greatest ever known at that time, 1245 dollars.”72 BunkerHill became a rallying point for Americans, and it would be performed for decades all over New England on nationalist occasions such as 4 July.73

The Glory of Columbia Presumably because of the success of Burk’s play and the changing political climate in the country, Dunlap decided to revise André following Jefferson’s election. With Federalism in rapid decline, Dunlap rewrote his play using Democratic Republican rather than Federalist rhetorical devices and gave it a different title that emphasized its new Democratic Republican


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character – The Glory of Columbia: Her Yeomanry. He introduced new scenes and characters, emphasized the virtuous actions of American common soldiers and reduced André’s status from a martyr and victim to a man responsible for his own fate. In the earlier work, André’s noble character was constantly reaffirmed in spite of his mistaken action. His execution seemed a major injustice, particularly in view of Bland’s rhetorical question “Shall worth weigh for nought?” One could argue that upper class rhetoric pervades André, carrying with it the implication that an honorable gentleman such as André should have been merely reprimanded for his misdeeds. One could also argue that the execution of André in the earlier version of the play would remind Federalists of the public executions of the nobility in France in the early 1790s. In The Glory of Columbia: Her Yeomanry, Dunlap represents André as ignobly participating in espionage activities with Benedict Arnold and trying to bribe American soldiers when they capture him. Instead of ending the play with André’s noble march to his death, Dunlap replaced the final execution scene with an enactment of the battle of Yorktown, depicting General Washington and the common American soldiers heroically encircling the British and winning the war. Dunlap dropped the cockade incident, and, although there remained an underlying suggestion of reconciliation between the English and the Americans, he provided the French with a key role. In André, the French did not appear as characters and were indirectly criticized by M’Donald. However, in The Glory of Columbia, Dunlap credited the French General Rochambeau and the French common soldiers in the last battle scene as jointly responsible with the Americans for the final victory. Emulating Bunker-Hill, The Glory of Columbia was performed as a nationalist pageant for 4 July 1803.74 Like Burk’s play, the British were cast as the military enemy and the Americans (but also the French) as military heroes. Despite denigrating Burk’s battle effects in his earlier criticism of Bunker-Hill, Dunlap imitated them. The advance publicity, appearing in the New York Evening Post on 3 July 1803, predicted, A View of Yorktown. With the British lines, and the lines of the besiegers. Nearer the audience are the advanced battalions of the besieged. Cannonading commences from the Americans upon the town, which is returned. Shells thrown into the town. Explosion of a powder magazine. The French troops advance towards the most distant of the advanced batteries; the battalion begins to cannonade, but is carried at the bayonets

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point. (This is done by artificial figures in perspective.) While this is yet doing, the nearest battalion begins to cannonade, and the American Infantry rushing to the charge, they attack and carry it with fixed bayonets. (This is done by boys completely equip’d and of a size to correspond in perspective with the machinery and the scenery.) The British are seen asking quarter, which is given.75

Interestingly, Dunlap may have benefited from some of the criticism that appeared in the Democratic Republican newspapers in 1798. Decrying Dunlap’s one-sided treatment of the story, The Argus critic had argued, The brave and heroic veterans who apprehended [André], are carefully left out; men who preferred the sacred cause in which they embarked – the liberty of their country – to sordid Lucre – that demon to which some of the great men of the present day bow their knee with reverential awe, bartering the liberty of their country, purchased with the blood of patriots, for that accursed dross. Yes, I say that part of the scene was carefully avoided, for there the American character would shine in its native lustre, & the audience be gratified with the representation of an action unparallelled [sic] in the annals of history, for virtue, fame and honor.”76

Significantly, the individual hero of The Glory of Columbia is no longer André, but the common American soldier, the yeoman of the title. David Williams, one of several new characters in the play, uses his intuition and common sense to frustrate Arnold’s and André’s devious actions. Moreover, he displays a laudable sense of responsibility in looking after the welfare of his sister and his family farm while carrying out his duties as a soldier. Dunlap transformed his tragedy about a maligned English officer and gentleman (that included what the critic in The Argus [3 April 1798] had called a “panegyrick on British humanity! ”), into a eulogy on the virtuous American common soldier. As such it became a popular success, and it was revived for many years to come.

Summary Many of the new American plays of the 1790s retold history for ideological reasons. While major theatre scholars have categorized the work of Burk and Dunlap as patriotic and nationalistic, it is important to distinguish the underlying rhetoric and appreciate the partisan nature of these plays in order to understand their effect on the audience of the period. The American


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theatre spoke to a society that was dividing into two major political factions during the 1790s. In certain cases, such as Bunker-Hill, André and Female Patriotism, the theatre was used as a public forum to further the political principles of one faction over the other. It is also important to note the rapid political changes during this period, and to recognize that the timing of performances bore a crucial relationship with the audience reception. For example, Female Patriotism might have fared much better had it been staged in February 1798, when it was first scheduled by Burk and Hodgkinson, rather than when it was produced two months later. Furthermore, Dunlap’s revision of André as The Glory of Columbia was clearly aimed at capitalizing on a new political climate. While Burk was more ideologically consistent than Dunlap, both writers used the theatre to encourage particular social attitudes, to clarify the relationship of the United States with foreign countries, and generally to help construct a self-image of the new nation. Plays such as Bunker-Hill, André and Female Patriotism were designed, not just to foster a spirit of nationalism, but also to represent what the writers hoped would become the core values of the country.

 Independence for whom? American Indians and the Ghost Dance

F

or centuries, the indigenous people of North America have used their religious and performance traditions to help construct an image of themselves and their place in the world.1 When the advent of the white settlers began to affect their lifestyles, the American Indians devised numerous strategies to cope with their new circumstances. This chapter focuses on the Ghost Dance religion, which spread across the United States in the late nineteenth century, and examines especially the ways in which the Lakota (known also as the Sioux) practiced it. Although the Ghost Dance was far from theatre in the conventional sense, it can be considered as manifesting similar performative features. In anthropology and in the growing area of performance studies which attracts anthropologists as well as theatre specialists, scholars have studied rituals, religious ceremonies, plays, dance, carnivals and other kinds of public events for their common elements. For example, Richard Schechner has written, “Performance is no longer easy to define or locate: the concept and structure has spread all over the place. It is ethnic and intercultural, historical and ahistorical, aesthetic and ritual, sociological and political. Performance is a mode of behavior, an approach to experience; it is play, sport, aesthetics, popular entertainments, experimental theatre, and more.”2 Millennial cults like religious ceremonies and rituals have also been included in this field. The anthropologist Weston La Barre in The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion has shown that such phenomena arise out of the community in times of crisis.3 Victor Turner has theorized that they can be classed as examples of “social drama,” that result from conflicts ranging from family disputes to major problems in the community and are united by their quality of “liminality,” i.e., being on the “threshold between secular living and sacred living,”4 their improvisory aspects and their “reflexive metalanguages” (p. 32) which are not necessarily verbal and involve the community 

AMERICAN INDIANS AND THE GHOST DANCE

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looking back on itself. “The great genres, ritual, carnival, drama, spectacle, possess in common a temporal structure which interdigitates constant with variable features, and allows a place for spontaneous invention and improvisation in the course of any given performance. The prejudice that ritual is always ‘rigid,’ ‘stereotyped,’ ‘obsessive’ is a peculiarly Western European one . . . Anyone who has known African ritual knows better – or Balinese or Singhalese or Amerindian” (p. 26). Because he felt that Turner paid insufficient attention to the rhetoric of cultural performances, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz recommended Kenneth Burke’s notion of “symbolic action” as a means of examining the discourse embedded in such events.5 Analyzing such discourse involves, Ania Loomba suggests, “examining the social and historical conditions within which specific representations are generated.”6 Gananath Obeyesekere further clarifies that “discourse is not just speech; it is embedded in a historical and cultural context and expressed often in the frame of a scenario or cultural performance.”7 Thus religious rituals can be read as performance texts that are rooted in cultural practice and related to social and historical conditions and in certain cases help to redefine that society. Jean and John Comaroff have taken this idea further and have demonstrated that ritual can be “a site and means of experimental practice, of subversive poetics, of creative tension and transformative action; that, under its authorship and its authority, individual and collective aspirations weave a thread of imaginative possibilities from which may emerge, wittingly or not, new signs and meanings, conventions and intentions . . . Ritual is always a vehicle of history-in-the-making: at times it conduces to sustain and legitimize the world in place; at times it has the effect of changing more-or-less pervasive features of that world; at times it does both simultaneously.”8 In the case of the Ghost Dance, one can draw on such scholarship to understand the sudden spread of this religion not just as a “crisis cult” that was responding to a particular problem in society but also as a form of cultural performance that was conveying a complex message to the community. This chapter argues that, like some of the more conventional plays and theatre productions previously discussed in the first two chapters of this book, the Lakota Ghost Dance reconfigured the nation, but from a Lakota perspective and in a Lakota idiom. From an initial position of political independence, American Indian tribes became more and more hemmed in by US government legislation and settler expansion. From the 1780s, the US government negotiated treaties that initially recognized Indian tribes as independent and sovereign nations.

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But as the white population grew to outnumber the Native Americans and gradually pushed them further west, the US government reneged on many of the established agreements and in 1871 abolished the policy of issuing treaties.9 Despite the fact that the American colonies had rebelled against the oppressive legislation of the British Empire to establish an independent nation-state in the eighteenth century, the US government developed its own imperial policy in the nineteenth century. Justified later as its “Manifest Destiny,” the US government conquered new lands and employed the military to enforce oppressive measures against the native inhabitants. In 1865 General John Pope observed, “The Indian, in truth, has no longer a country. His lands are everywhere pervaded by white men; his means of subsistence and the homes of his tribe violently taken from him; himself and his family reduced to starvation, or to the necessity of warring to the death upon the white man whose inevitable and destructive progress threatens the total extermination of his race.”10 In the 1860s, many of the Lakota bands resisted the aggressive policy of territorial conquest and assimilation. When the US government tried to sign a treaty with the plains Indians in order to secure the Bozeman road through Lakota hunting lands to Montana, Red Cloud and certain other chiefs refused and went to war for several years to prevent white intrusion on their lands. However, the government eventually colonized their whole territory and subjected the Indians to its authority. The US government developed a program of restricting Indians to certain areas of the country and of transforming their way of life. Specifically, the government imposed a system of private property that atomized Indian communities and undermined their values.11 Indians, who in some cases had roamed the prairies and shared land, food and wealth, were forced to live in confined areas. After the Lakota began to be moved onto reservations in 1853 and 1854, a government agent summarized the policy as follows: The theory, in substance, was to break up the community system among the Sioux; weaken and destroy their tribal relations; individualize them by giving each a separate home and having them subsist by industry – the sweat of their brows; till the soil; make labor honorable and idleness dishonorable; or, as it was expressed in short, “make white men of them.” 12

The imposition of the settlers’ values affected many facets of Native American society. For example, in order to end the Indian practice of sharing goods, the Court of Indian Offenses (established in 1882) made the distribution of private property a crime. Likewise, Indian religious expression


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was prohibited from 1883 and the settlers sought to replace Indian spiritual practices with their own.13 The Lakota in particular were facing a cultural crisis, or what Clyde Holler has described as “cultural genocide.”14 The Lakota had originated from the head of the Mississippi River, but had been driven out of their homeland by the Chippewa who had been supplied with guns by the French in the early eighteenth century. The Teton Lakota (which consisted of a confederation of seven tribes: Oglala, Sicangu, Hunkpapa, Minneconjou, Itazipco, Oohinumpa and Sihasapa or Blackfeet) went west to become a nomadic tribe, basing their culture around hunting buffalo.15 The main annual ritual of the Lakota, the Sun Dance, brought numerous bands together for a physically and spiritually unifying celebration that lasted several days. When the US government banned the Sun Dance in 1883, it drove underground a pivotal event in their cultural calendar. According to Holler, The religious value of the Sun Dance was the attainment of power and strength for the community and the winning of divine favor for the continuance of the tribe and its food supply. Its social value was to publicly reaffirm solidarity with the tribe and band and to reward the behavior sanctioned by Dakota culture . . . In this sense, it could be said that the ban succeeded too well, by completely demoralizing the community . . . By removing the sanctioning mechanism for social control, the ban clearly contributed to social disintegration.16

In addition to banning the Sun Dance, the government prohibited the practice of giving away property to honor the dead. Short Bull later explained that this regulation forced the Lakota to impoverish their own Indian afterlife. Now the white people wish to make us cause the spirits of our dead to be ashamed. They wish us to be a stingy people and send our spirits to the spirit world as if they had been conquered and robbed by the enemy. They wish us to send our spirits on the spirit trail with nothing so that when they come to the spirit world, they will be like beggars . . . We give to the departing spirits what they need on the trail and in the spirit world. If we enrich the spirits with our gifts, they will go into the spirit world with pride and honor and all we give will be there for us when our spirits come there. If we give nothing to the dead, then their spirits will come into the spirit world with only shame.17

At the same time as restricting Indian religious expression, the whites were imposing their own religion on Indians, often in a demeaning manner.

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The daughter of a well-known spiritual leader Black Elk recalled a typically humiliating experience: In 1904 my father was called to doctor a little boy in Payabya . . . When he got there, he found the sick boy lying in a tent. So right away, he prepared to doctor him. My father took his shirt off, put tobacco offerings in the sacred place, and started pounding on his drum. He called on the spirits to heal the boy in a very strong action . . . My father was really singing away, beating his drum, and using his rattle when along came one of the Blackrobes, Fr. Lindebner . . . He took whatever my father had prepared on the ground and threw it all into the stove. He took the drum and rattle and threw them outside the tent. Then he took my father by the neck and said: “Satan, get out!” . . . then administered the boy communion and the last rites . . . After he got through, he came out and saw my father sitting there down-hearted and lonely – as though he lost all his powers.18

In addition to religious intolerance, the white settlers and the government expressed a general attitude of racial superiority that threatened not only the culture but also the lives of the Indians. In Montana in 1867, a local newspaper looked forward to the country being cleared “of every sign of Indians but their graves,”19 and in Colorado a mass meeting subscribed five thousand dollars “for the purpose of buying Indian scalps, and $25 each is to be paid for scalps with the ears on.”20 Rather than punishing this behavior, the government condoned it. The New York Times reported that “Gov. Hunt himself sanctions all this fiendishness, and in his orders authorizing the enrollment of cut-throats, he promises that each shall be allowed to retain whatever plunder he may secure.”21 The military leaders often expressed similar attitudes. General John Pope, who was sent by President Lincoln to suppress a Dakota uprising in 1862, instructed a fellow officer to show no mercy to the rebels: It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so . . . Destroy everything belonging to them . . . They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made.22

General William T. Sherman, fresh from burning Atlanta, also favored a policy bordering on genocide. Following the Fetterman Massacre in 1866, Sherman instructed General Philip Cooke that the Indians “should be punished with vindictive earnestness, until at least ten Indians are killed for each white life lost . . . It is not necessary to find the very men who committed the acts, but destroy all of the same breed.”23 The following year he ordered


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General Christopher Augur “to punish [all the Lakota near the Powder River and Yellowstone] to the extent of utter extermination if possible.”24 In trying to reach a peace agreement in 1867 with the Indians (who opposed the building of the Bozeman Road through their lands and had been fighting to prevent it), Sherman threatened that “this Commission is not only a Peace Commission but it is a War Commission also.” He warned the Indians that if it was not successful, “the Great Father, who, out of love for you, withheld his soldiers, will let loose his young men, and you will be swept away.”25 All the elements of a coercive program for assimilation converged on the Native American communities of the Plains, Plateau, and Great Basin during the 1880s. The government and settlers employed military, legal, religious and educational measures to impose their own values. In addition, the American buffalo, the traditional source of food and clothing for the Lakota, had been over-hunted and virtually become extinct. At a time when many tribes were facing the prospect of cultural and even racial genocide, the Ghost Dance religion appeared on the scene offering a way forward. James Mooney’s exhaustive four-year study (1890–4) describes how the Ghost Dance religion, which was disseminated by the prophet Wovoka from 1889, spread over thousands of miles.26 The religious practice of the Lakota had emerged from core religious concepts that formed a fundamentally open system of belief. By the late nineteenth century, if not before, a large contingent of Indian peoples of the Plains, Plateau, the Great Basin and elsewhere shared the basic elements that made up this open system. The ability to incorporate new ceremonies and visions into the existing tribal religious framework represented one component of this openness, and facilitated the borrowing of ritual forms throughout a wide region. The transmission of the Ghost Dance over huge distances to tribes from the Dakotas to California, like the borrowing of Sun Dance elements over an almost equally large area a century or so earlier,27 exemplifies this openness. Wovoka’s vision predicted a world in which the Indians would prosper and not be encumbered by white settlers.28 Representatives of numerous bands visited Wovoka, of the Paiute tribe in Nevada, and learned the divine prophecy and the Ghost Dance directly from him and then passed them on to their own people. The Ghost Dance religion tapped into a clearly felt need, particularly among the Lakota.29 Whereas the Paiute had remained self-sufficient after the incursion of white settlers and the introduction of reservation life, many

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of the Lakota had been reluctant to take up farming and had grown increasingly dependent on government rations. In 1889 the government broke up the Great Sioux reservation and removed 11,000,000 acres of the best land. At the same time, without first allocating parcels of land or farming implements to the potential farmers, the government reduced the size of the rations in order to encourage the Lakota to take up farming. The Lakota faced the prospect of starvation.30 Beard, a Lakota who was interviewed by James Walker five years after the massacre at Wounded Knee, recalled why the Ghost Dance attracted the interest of his family: The buffalo were gone and the Indians were hungry. I sat with my father in his tipi when a messenger came and told us that a Savior for the Indians had appeared to an Indian in the far land of the setting sun, and promised to come and bring again the buffalo and antelope and send the white man from all the land where the Indians hunted in the old times. This messenger was holy and told us that if we would dance and pray to this Savior he would appear and show us things that were sacred. My father said, “My sons, we will go and see this thing.” We went and saw the Indians dancing the ghost dance on the White Clay Creek and I and my father and all my brothers danced.31

The Ghost Dance religion spread widely and rapidly. It has been estimated that over thirty tribes (representing about a third of the entire Indian population, from the Missouri River to California and from southern Canada to Texas) adopted the ritual.32 Instead of it being performed for three or four days and repeated periodically, e.g. once every three months as Wovoka had suggested,33 some tribes performed it daily. For example, in September 1890, 3,000 Indians (including Arapaho, Cheyenne, Caddo, Wichita and Kiowa) attended a Ghost Dance in Oklahoma where, according to Mooney, they “remained together for about two weeks, dancing every night until daylight.”34 By encouraging Indians to return to Indian values through Indian religion (even though it contained syncretic features), Wovoka provided an important vehicle for resisting assimilation and asserting a separate Indian identity.35 On this level, the act of performing a Native American ritual was as important as the ritual content and significance of the specific religion. Moreover, as I will try to show, this Indian belief helped to create a social movement that contradicted the white settlers’ notion of the nation-state, countered the work of white missionaries and threatened the general assimilation project. Thus, the Ghost Dance represented a major challenge to the dominant society.


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The doctrine of the Ghost Dance varied from one tribe to another. Whereas Wovoka’s tribe, the Paiute, seem to have interpreted the religion as accommodating white settlers in the coming millennium, other tribes (notably the Lakota) predicted the demise of the whites and a return to pre-Columbian life.36 Mooney explained that among the Lakota, “already restless under both old and recent grievances, and more lately brought to the edge of starvation by a reduction of rations, the doctrine speedily assumed a hostile meaning.”37 Unlike the Paiute who apparently preached co-existence, the Lakota danced to rid themselves of the white settlers and to usher in a new independent nation in which the Indians would rule over a rich and plentiful land. This does not necessarily mean that the Lakota were intending to kill the white settlers and that the Ghost Dance was a kind of war dance. The Lakota seem to have been instructed that their dancing would eventually cause a miracle, and that by continuing to dance they would help to bring forward the date of this miracle. Kuwapi, a Yankton Lakota38 who was arrested for spreading news of the Ghost Dance to a neighboring band, expressed in an interview with William Selwyn, a Yankton Lakota who had arrested him, his vision of the coming millennium: q: You said something about the destroying of the white race. Do you mean to say that all mankind except the Indians will be killed? a: Yes. q: How, and who is going to kill the white people? a: The father is going to cause a big cyclone or whirlwind, by which he will have all the white people to perish.39

Moreover, a white man who visited the Standing Rock Agency in October 1890 observed that he was not threatened at all by the Lakota, despite the message implicit in their version of the Ghost Dance doctrine. According to a local newspaper, The Mandan Pioneer, he regarded this as evidence that the Indians believed that the destruction of the whites would occur as a result of “Divine mediation” rather than Indian actions.40 On the other hand, as time went on, the dogma preached by some of the Lakota leaders seemed to become more threatening to the whites. In a sermon given in December 1890, shortly before the massacre at Wounded Knee, Short Bull described a peculiarly violent scenario that would transpire as a result of the Lakota performance of the Ghost Dance: My father has shown me these things, therefore we must continue this dance. If the soldiers surround you four deep, three of you, on whom

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I have put holy shirts, will sing a song, which I have taught you, around them, when some of them will drop dead. Then the rest will start to run, but their horses will sink into the earth. The riders will jump from their horses, but they will sink into the earth also. Then you can do as you desire with them. Now, you must know this, that all the soldiers and that race will be dead. There will be only five thousand of them left living on the earth.41

Not only the dogma itself, but also the physical characteristics of the dance were ideologically meaningful, provided a sense of empowerment and varied from tribe to tribe. In listing the different names that were given to the dance, Mooney reveals some of its features which were accentuated by a particular tribe or which were significant to them: In its original home among the Paiute it is called Nänigükwa, “dance in a circle” (nüka, dance), to distinguish it from the other dances of the tribe, which have only the ordinary up-and-down step without the circular movement. The Shoshoni call it Tänä’räyün or Tämanä’rayära, which may be rendered “everybody dragging,” in allusion to the manner in which the dancers move around the circle holding hands, as children do in their ring games. They insist that it is a revival of a similar dance which existed among them fifty years ago. The Comanche call it A’p-an˘eka’ra, “the Father’s dance,” or sometimes the dance “with joined hands.” The Kiowa call it Mânposo’ti guan, “dance with clasped hands,” and the frenzy, guan ˘ a kak˘ı´mbawiút, “the aˆ ´dalka-i, “dance craziness.” The Caddo know it as A’˘ prayer of all to the Father,” or as the Nänisana ka au´-shan, “nänisana dance,” from nänisana, “my children,” which forms the burden of so many of the ghost songs in the language of the Arapaho, from whom they obtained the dance. By the Sioux, Arapaho, and most other prairie tribes it is called the “spirit” or “ghost” dance (Sioux, Wana’ghi wa’chipi; Arapaho, Thigu’nawat), from the fact that everything connected with it relates to ˆ the coming of the spirits of the dead from the spirit world, and by this name it has become known among the whites.42

One of the distinctive common features, as seen in this description, was the holding of hands.43 This characteristic was symbolically linked to the inter-tribal nature of the ritual. Like the Sun Dance, which was useful in reuniting the tribe and in joining with other friendly tribes, the Ghost Dance ceremony convened members of different tribes.44 The holding of hands could be seen as a reaching out not only to one’s immediate neighbor in the dance but to all Indian peoples.45 Thus the Ghost Dance of 1890 was an inter-tribal event as well as an inter-tribal phenomenon.


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Religious elements in Lakota belief traditionally functioned simultaneously on multiple levels: physical, symbolic and cosmological. The Sun Dance incorporated a myriad of physical and ritual details that interlocked to tie the human participants firmly to the event at countless junctures, and on symbolic and cosmological levels. Black Elk explained that in constructing the Sun Dance lodge, “we are really making the universe in a likeness,” as in the sweat lodge and bowl of the sacred pipe.46 The pole of the sacred tree in the center of the dance ground connected the “center of the sacred hoop” where pledgers “take upon ourselves much of the suffering of our people” to the prayers borne to Wakan Tanka by the smoke of the sacred pipe. As Bruce Lincoln observed, “In its pattern of spatial organization, and in the underlying intent that finds expression in this pattern, the Sun Dance thus closely resembles the smoking of the sacred pipe,” which also formed a crucial part of the ceremony.47 Like the Sun Dance, the physical configuration of the Ghost Dance was symbolically significant for the Lakota. The circle represented “the sacred hoop” of the nation and had echoes in various ceremonies and natural forms. According to Clifford Geertz, Again and again the idea of a sacred circle, a natural form with a moral import, yields, when applied to the world within which the Oglala lives, new meanings; continually it connects together elements within their experience which would otherwise seem wholly disparate and, wholly disparate, incomprehensible. The common roundness of a human body and plant stem, of a moon and a shield, of a tipi and a camp-circle, give them vaguely conceived but intensely felt significance. And this meaningful common element, once abstracted, can then be employed for ritual purposes – as when in a peace ceremony the pipe, the symbol of social solidarity, moves deliberately in a perfect circle from one smoker to the next, the purity of the form evoking the beneficence of the spirits – or to construe mythologically the peculiar paradoxes and anomalies of moral experience, as when one sees in a round stone the shaping power of good over evil.48

Many of the songs of the Ghost Dance (especially among the Lakota) were also ideologically significant, evoking, as they did, a sense of spiritual rebirth to a threatened Indian identity. Mooney recorded hundreds of Ghost Dance songs amongst the various tribes.49 The Lakota songs often contained an empowering message to replace the despair and loss of power that the Indians had experienced. One of the songs, which provides a specific image of the reconfiguration of the nation, was translated for Mooney as follows:

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The whole world is coming, A nation is coming, a nation is coming, The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe. The father says so, the father says so. Over the whole earth they are coming. The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming, The Crow has brought the message to the tribe, The father says so, the father says so.50

Other songs equally comforted the performers with an empowering sense of nation building, such as: I love my children – Ye’ye’! I love my children – Ye’ye’! You shall grow to be a nation – Ye’ye’! You shall grow to be a nation – Ye’ye’! Says the father, says the father. Haye’ye E’yayo’yo’! Haye’ye E’yayo’yo’! 51

In addition to nation building, certain songs reasserted a claim to the land and its resources (in contradiction to the US government laws of private property): This is to be my work – Yo’ yoyo’! This is to be my work – Yo’ yoyo’ ! All that grows upon the earth is mine – Yo’ yoyo’ ! All that grows upon the earth is mine – Yo’ yoyo’ ! Says the father – Yo’ yoyo’ ! Says the father – Yo’ yoyo’ ! E’ya Yo’ yoyo’ ! E’ya Yo’ yoyo’ !52

The Ghost Dance face-painting and regalia also provided a sense of empowerment, especially among the Lakota.53 The Lakota sometimes used red ochre paint that was issued by Wovoka and said to have special sacred properties. According to Mooney, the painting included numerous designs, “each design being an inspiration from a trance vision. Usually the dancer adopts the particular style of painting which, while in the trance, he has seen worn by some departed relative. If he has not yet been in a trance, the design is suggested by a vision of one who does the painting.”54 The Ghost Dance shirts and dresses likewise contained important images and messages for their wearers. While maintaining certain common


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features, they differed in design from one tribe to another. According to Mooney, Although the shape, fringing, and feather adornment were practically the same in every case, considerable variation existed in regard to the painting, the designs on some being very simple, while the others were fairly covered with representations of sun, moon, stars, the sacred things of their mythology, and the visions of the trance. The feathers attached to the garment were always those of the eagle, and the thread used in the sewing was always the old-time sinew. In some cases the fringe or other portions were painted with the sacred red paint of the messiah.55

The Lakota were careful not to carry implements of the white men with them when they danced, presumably as a signal that they were abandoning the white man’s ways.56 Furthermore, amongst the Lakota, the Ghost Dance regalia were said to have special powers. George Sword, an Oglala Lakota who served with the Indian police and became a judge of the Indian court, described the appearance and function of the Lakota regalia as follows: All the men and women made holy shirts and dresses they wear in dance . . . They paint the white muslins they made holy shirts and dresses out of with blue across the back, and alongside of this is a line of yellow paint. They also paint in the front part of the shirts and dresses. A picture of an eagle is made on the back of all the shirts and dresses. On the shoulders and on the sleeves they tied eagle feathers. They said that the bullets will not go through these shirts and dresses, so they all have these dresses for war.57

Whether the Indians were preparing to go to war or whether they saw the shirts as protection in case the military tried to interfere with their performance of the Ghost Dance is unclear. The invulnerability provided by the ghost shirt appears in numerous accounts relating to the Lakota. According to Mooney, When one of the women shot in the Wounded Knee massacre was approached as she lay in the church and told that she must let them remove her ghost shirt in order the better to get at her wound, she replied; “Yes; take it off. They told me a bullet would not go through. Now I don’t want it any more.”58

At what point these extra powers became associated with the Ghost Dance shirts, however, is somewhat open to conjecture. Mooney suggests

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that it was the Lakota who added the notion that they would stop bullets and would prevent the Indians from being harmed by the white man. Perhaps the Lakota Indians added this additional feature because they felt that the dance performed by other tribes was too passive.59 Other important empowering features of the ritual were the trance and vision. Those who fainted or fell into a trance reported on the visions that they achieved in that state. Their visions were important elements in the success of the dance and, as previously mentioned, became part of their face painting and their songs in subsequent performances of the ritual. Mooney indicated that the apostles of the religion were often factors in inducing the trance. According to him, an Arapaho religious figure named Sitting Bull induced the first trances amongst the southern tribes. At the great Ghost Dance in September 1890, Sitting Bull announced after two or three nights of dancing that he would perform a “great wonder in the sight of all the people.” Mooney recorded that on the following night, after some hours of dancing, Sitting Bull stepped into the circle, and going up close in front of a young Arapaho woman, he began to make hypnotic passes before her face with the eagle feather. In a few seconds she became rigid and then fell to the ground unconscious. Sitting Bull then turned his attention to another and another, and the same thing happened to each in turn until nearly a hundred were stretched out on the ground at once. As usual in the trances some lay thus for a long time, and others recovered sooner, but none were disturbed, as Sitting Bull told the dancers that these were now beholding happy visions of the spirit world. When next they came together those who had been in the trance related their experiences in the other world, how they had met and talked with their departed friends and joined in their oldtime amusements. Many of them embodied their visions in songs, which were sung that night and afterwards in the dance, and from that time the Ghost Dance was naturalized in the south and developed rapidly along new lines. Each succeeding dance resulted in other visions and new songs, and from time to time other hypnotists arose, until almost every camp had its own.60

The trance and the associated vision seem to have been a crucial factor in convincing the participants and observers of the authenticity of the religious message. The dancers were looking for a sign that a better life was coming. For example, Black Elk recalled in his first experience of the Ghost Dance, “As we started to dance again, some of the people would be laughing. And some would be crying. Some of them would lie down for a vision and we


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just kept on dancing. I could see more of them staggering around panting and then they would fall down for visions. The People were crying for the old ways of living and that their religion would be with them again.”61 Arguably, they were looking for knowledge and power, the kind of power that in 1890 could help their people out of their predicament, and bring about a more viable lifestyle. Beard, for example, described his disappointment when this search proved fruitless for him and his family: When we danced some Indians acted as if they died and some acted as if they were holy. When they did this they told that they saw mysterious things and some said they saw the Savior of the Indians and that he promised them to come and bring the good old times again. But I observed that it was bad Indians and Indians that no one used to pay any attention [to] and the medicine men who saw these things. The spirit would not come to me nor to my father nor to my brothers and my father said, “My sons, I hear that they dance the ghost dance better away from here. We will go to the camps of the Indians on the Cheyenne [River] Agency and we may see the Holy One there.” Kicking Bear also went with us, and my father and all his sons went to the camp of Big Foot who was on the Cheyenne [River] Reservation. The Indians were dancing the ghost dance there every day, but it was the same, and nothing mysterious [wakan] would come to any of my father’s family.62

The religious leader or hypnotist, who (like a priest at the oracle of Delphi) sometimes acted as an interpreter or intermediary for the dancer’s vision, held an important position in the ceremony and on the development of the dogma associated with it. The apostles or religious leaders could have a major influence on the ritual as it was being conducted. There is abundant evidence that Wovoka and his apostles were not merely passive observers of those entranced. They appear to have used various devices to increase their own credibility and the credibility of the religious message, and they often acted as interlocutors for those in trances. Furthermore, they could amplify or change the doctrine as a result of their own personal reflection or vision. Short Bull (who had received the wisdom directly from a trip to Wovoka) indicated that, because of local conditions, he would revise some of the divine message. In his sermon, he announced that the millennium would arrive earlier than previously prophesied. “I have told you that this would come to pass in two seasons, but since the whites are interfering so much, I will advance the time from what my father above told me to do, so the time will be shorter.”63

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Sitting Bull, the Lakota warrior who had fought at the Battle of Little Bighorn, seems to have used his role as religious leader and as interpreter of Ghost Dance visions as an effective means of retaining his authority over a disintegrating tribe. In the 1860s, Sitting Bull had fought with Red Cloud against white incursions. Following the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, Red Cloud accepted reservation life while Sitting Bull and others continued to resist it. The dissident Indians decided to suspend their custom of the autonomy of individual bands and choose a leader who would organize their fight against the whites. In 1869 Sitting Bull was elected “war chief, leader of the entire Sioux nation.”64 According to Robert Utley, “To him more than any other falls the distinction of holding together the coalition of tribes that stood firm against the United States for seven years.”65 Following his defeat of Custer in 1876, Sitting Bull fled to Canada. He surrendered in 1881 and was imprisoned and later released. Despite performing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show during the 1880s, Sitting Bull continued to maintain a hostile attitude towards the US government and to oppose the policy of assimilation, especially after the splitting up of the Sioux reservation in 1889. By the summer of 1890, Sitting Bull was looking for an opportunity to fight back and seems to have seized on the Ghost Dance as a vehicle. In October he invited Kicking Bear to his camp to introduce the Ghost Dance. According to Mooney, While the dance was being organized at his camp, Sitting Bull had deliberately broken the “pipe of peace” which he had kept in his house since his surrender in 1881, and when asked why he had broken it, replied that he wanted to die and wanted to fight.66

Although he initially reserved judgement about the Ghost Dance religion, Sitting Bull began to take an important role in the ritual and to agitate against the US government. The Mandan Pioneer of Mandan, North Dakota reported at the end of October that during the previous “four weeks Sitting Bull has been inciting the Sioux Indians . . . to an uprising.”67 McLaughlin, the government agent, believed that Sitting Bull was misleading his people by encouraging them to engage in the ritual day after day. He also did not approve of the manner in which Sitting Bull used his position as a religious leader to interpret the visions of those who fell into trances. In his autobiography, McLaughlin, who needed to justify his later actions, presented a very unsympathetic portrait68 of Sitting Bull interpreting the vision of a woman who had collapsed during the Ghost Dance.


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The woman, still in a swoon, was laid at Sitting Bull’s feet, and Bull Ghost announced in a loud voice that she was in a trance and communicating with the ghosts, upon which announcement the dance ceased, so that the dancers might hear the message from the spirit world. Sitting Bull performed certain incantations, then leaned over and put his ear to the woman’s lips. He spoke in a low voice to his herald, Bull Ghost, who repeated to the listening multitude the message which Sitting Bull pretended to receive from the unconscious woman. Sitting Bull had all the tricks of the fake spiritualist. Knowing his people intimately, he knew all about the dead relatives of the woman who had fainted, and he made a tremendous impression on his audience by giving them personal messages from the Indian ghosts, who announced with great unanimity that they were marching east to join their living kinsmen the following spring.69

According to McLaughlin, this activity by Sitting Bull in front of some 100 Indian dancers and 200 observers clearly enhanced his stature by demonstrating his access to the spirit world.70 It could be argued that it also allowed him to formulate prophecies that were politically useful to him. Moreover, Sitting Bull was not only using the Ghost Dance to empower himself but also to empower his whole band by enabling them to achieve the kind of spiritual power that Indians had experienced by piercing their bodies and appealing to Wakan Tanka in the Sun Dance. To the government agent, it seemed possible that Sitting Bull was using the Ghost Dance to prepare his band for a major act of rebellion. When McLaughlin urged him to stop the Ghost dancing, Sitting Bull refused and prepared to leave the reservation with his band to join other dissident Lakota who had left their reservations.71 McLaughlin ordered his arrest, and, in the struggle while resisting arrest, Sitting Bull was killed. Whether Sitting Bull was actually intending to mount an armed uprising or whether he was simply exploiting a new means to resist assimilation is debatable.72 In any case, Sitting Bull had consistently remained opposed to white rule and had used the Ghost Dance to reassert Indian independence. Shortly afterwards, the military engaged in the massacre of Big Foot’s band of Minneconjou Lakota at Wounded Knee. With Sitting Bull’s death and the massacre at Wounded Knee, the resistance by the Lakota lost focus.73 In the 1960s, with the growth of the Red Power movement (see chapter 5), the Lakota once again took concerted action against the US government and in 1973 at the second battle of Wounded Knee performed the Ghost Dance in an effort once again to liberate their land.

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Summary The US government had reversed its policy of regarding Indian tribes as separate and sovereign nations, and by the 1880s it was acting like an imperial power, forcing the aborigine population to submit to its method of colonial control. The Ghost Dance was a new Indian ritual that functioned on many levels but fundamentally served as a vehicle by which Indians could resist white cultural imperialism and perpetuate a Native American lifestyle. The religious leaders of numerous tribes adapted the religion and the religious ritual to their individual needs and cultures. Just as the Sun Dance did among Plains Indians before and during reservation life (until it was banned by the US government) and as powwows continue to do today, the Ghost Dance brought disparate Indian people together to revive their cultures, strengthen their notion of identity and increase their collective sense of self-importance. As the government agent at Rosebud summed up, the Ghost Dance had “the effect of binding [the Indians] to the customs of their ancestors from which the government was spending large sums of money to wean them away.”74 The performance history of the Ghost Dance indicates that it originated in the far west and moved eastward. Its specific features among the Lakota emanated from their social and religious beliefs, and the social and political context in which the dance was performed. The lifestyle and the very existence of the Lakota were threatened by the easterners moving westward, taking their land, criminalizing aspects of their culture and over-hunting the wild game on which they depended for their sustenance and clothing. Furthermore, the US government’s decision to divide the Sioux reservation and to encourage the Lakota to abandon their band-level organization and adopt the lifestyle of individual farming families smacked of the British colonial policy of divide and rule. The Ghost Dance was a performative response to reconfigure their increasingly endangered position in American society and reassert their identity. Some bands of the Lakota, who had resisted white domination during the 1860s and 1870s, adapted the dogma, the regalia and the songs in such a way as to make them more aggressive than other tribes. The nation-building lyrics of their songs, the invulnerability of their shirts, the doctrine that the whites would disappear, and the disregard of their religious leaders for the authority of government agents all worried the US government. The performance of the Ghost Dance implied a dangerous step by the Indians towards trying to regain their independence and their sovereignty over their former lands.


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Although the Ghost Dance was a religious ritual, it was also a political performance, especially for the Lakota. The ideology that permeated the ceremony called for a new nation to be created, a nation that would bring back the buffalo, that would reunite the Indians, and that would make the whites disappear. Religious leaders such as Sitting Bull used the occasion to foment a rebellious spirit. As in political theatre, the activities of the Ghost Dance were designed to confirm the faith of the believers and to convert the non-believers.75 Like Mercy Otis Warren’s plays, which urged American patriots to rebel against British colonial authority in the eighteenth century, the Ghost Dance encouraged Indian patriots to resist assimilation and assert their right to their own independence.

 The role of workers in the nation The Paterson Strike Pageant

D

uring the second half of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution spread across the United States, introducing mechanized farming and mining, huge industries and the transcontinental railroad. Immigration increased dramatically, not only from northern Europe but also from southern Europe and Asia (until checked by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882). Thirty-five million people immigrated into the United States from 1815 to 1920, and at the end of the nineteenth century gravitated to the cities in such numbers that overcrowding and unhealthy living conditions resulted. Jobs in industry frequently involved repetitive tasks and, particularly with the coming of the assembly line and the waning of craft industries, little sense of personal achievement. Laborers complained of low wages, long hours and poor conditions, but the ready supply of immigrant labor could be exploited to replace those who were dissatisfied. The giants of industry and banking such as Rockefeller, Morgan, Harriman, Gould, Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Ford acquired unprecedented wealth while workers often suffered in poverty. Labor unions, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) which concentrated on skilled workers within specific crafts, formed to demand shorter working days, decent conditions and an adequate wage. Strikes became frequent and industrialists resorted to scab labor and police intimidation to break them. Disputes often led to bloody battles such as the Carnegie steel plant strike in Homestead, Pennsylvania (1892) and the Pullman strike in Chicago (1894). Some political leaders representing the workers such as Eugene Debs advocated socialism as the answer to the excesses of capitalism and in 1911 seventy-three socialist mayors were elected.1 From 1905, the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organized workers throughout the country regardless of craft, level of skill, ethnicity or gender, and became involved in major confrontations at Lawrence, Massachusetts (1912), Paterson, 

THE ROLE OF WORKERS IN THE NATION

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New Jersey (1913) and Ludlow, Colorado (1914), until the government jailed many of their leaders amidst the patriotic fervor of the First World War and its aftermath. Because of the threat of socialism and working-class revolt, progressive legislation was introduced under Presidents Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson to curb some of the excesses of capitalism.2 Concurrent with the clash between capitalism and socialism, and between the rich employers and the poor white, African American and immigrant laborers of diverse religions and cultures, the Chautauqua movement helped reify the image of America as homogenous. The Chautauquas were annual cultural events that dated from the late nineteenth century and occurred in thousands of small towns and villages across the United States. From the early twentieth century, national touring organizations sent out packages of events lasting from three to seven days, consisting of public speeches, musical numbers, plays and other items. With an estimated annual attendance of almost thirty million people at its peak in 1924, the Chautauqua circuit was a hugely profitable enterprise for the organizers. However, the shows were sold to the communities as morally uplifting events rather than as commercial entertainment. While professing such foundational ideas as freedom of religion and equality, the dominant values expressed in the Chautauquas were Protestant and capitalist.3 A standard feature was the “Acres of Diamonds” speech by Russell Conwell that extolled the opportunities in America for people with initiative like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Astor, and assured the audience that the independent hard-working (white) American could be rewarded financially through his diligent efforts.4 A businessman turned Baptist minister, Conwell delivered this speech more than six thousand times in forty years, promoting a national stereotype reminiscent of the independent and individually resourceful pioneer and frontiersman. Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1908), which introduced the description of America as a “melting pot,” became a popular play on the Chautauqua circuit from 1914 and supported the dominant ideology by showing that European immigrants could be assimilated in America if they denied their former values, adopted American ways and melted into the dominant culture.5 Like the Chautauquas and Zangwill’s The Melting Pot, patriotic pageants became a popular form for promoting the assimilation of the immigrant into American society. Percy MacKaye’s 1915 pageant for the naturalization of citizens “ended with a stirring proclamation about the joys of labor during which a symbolic figure of Liberty unfurled the American flag above the nationalized immigrants’ heads.”6 Although there were occasional pageants

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that advocated a political program, such as the suffragette pageant The Allegory in Washington in March 1913 (see chapter 6), and William Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia about African American history in October of the same year,7 most pageants conformed to a particular pattern. Esther Willard Bates proclaimed in her 1912 instructive Pageants and Pageantry, “American pageantry will be so ordered as to possess a constructive influence on the people . . . The spectacle will stimulate pride in town, state and nation . . . there will be a definite educational aim to make real the great deeds of the fathers and to quicken the aspirations of the sons for right living and for devotion to country.”8 Contrasting with rural Chautauqua events and the historical pageants of the early twentieth century, American drama and theatrical productions increasingly responded to the agitation for improved working and living conditions, and following the crash of the stock market in 1929, featured the plight of the industrial and farming worker as a major theme on the stage. Rather than glorifying the American dream of the (usually male) individual attaining success on his own, many of the plays of the depression era represented the nation as consisting of working people uniting with one another to overcome the oppressive conditions created by the capitalist system. One of the best known examples was the 1935 performance of Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets that advocated strike action in a fictionalized version of a 1934 New York taxi dispute, of which Harold Clurman wrote: It was the birth cry of the thirties. Our youth had found its voice. It was a call to join the good fight for a greater measure of life in a world free of economic fear, falsehood, and craven servitude to stupidity and greed. “Strike!” was Lefty’s message, not alone for a few extra pennies of wages or for shorter hours of work, strike for greater dignity, strike for a bolder humanity, strike for the full stature of man.9

Likewise Black Pit (1935) by Albert Maltz, which was set in the coal mines of Appalachia, portrayed the struggle of immigrant coal miners attempting to improve their working conditions. Stevedore (1934) by Paul Peters and George Sklar created controversy and encountered censorship problems by advocating multi-ethnic class solidarity despite the racial antagonisms of the south. It depicted an African American longshoreman who tries to start a union and is wrongly accused of raping a white woman. After being pursued by a white lynch mob into the African American ghetto, he is helped by a white union organizer who calls out the white union members to join forces with the African American longshoremen. Similarly, Langston Hughes’s


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popular play Don’t You Want to be Free? (1937), a montage of Hughes’s poetry and African American history, also promoted interracial workers’ solidarity.10 This chapter focuses on a seminal event that heralded the power of theatre to promote the cause of workers’ democracy in America: the Paterson Strike Pageant of 7 June 1913. For the purposes of analyzing the startling impact of this event, it is useful to contrast it with a more normative pageant that occurred on the same day at the Henry Street Settlement in New York. Both pageants reflected social history, but one idealized American civic life while the other portrayed an urban battleground. The New York Tribune carried photos and commentaries of each event on the following day. In the Henry Street Settlement pageant photo, with a caption announcing, “Campfire of early colonial days,” actors were shown dressed in Indian and settler costumes, and smoking peace pipes, while the photo of the Paterson Strike Pageant depicted a funeral scene with the caption, “Strikers portraying funeral of man killed by policeman’s bullet during riot.”11 The Tribune report on the Henry Street event listed the moments in the history of Manhattan covered by the pageant, all of which were designed as positive and uplifting. In the first episode (which was photographed in the newspaper), Indians “welcomed the paleface strangers with gifts of wampum and skins. They received in return bright colored trinkets and strange garments from over the seas. The peace pipe went around and the hatchet was buried. Then, with a grave farewell, the chief left the Dutchmen in possession of the island of Manhattan.” The next episode depicted “the merry gambols of a Dutch strawberry picnic . . . [with] a bevy of comely maidens, tripping in to bleach their linen.” It ended with a series of dances and songs of various countries, reflecting “the cosmopolitan peoples who make up the present population of the great East Side.”12 Confrontational topics such as Indian/settler rivalry, the War of Independence, the Civil War, ethnic conflict, or housing and labor problems, were significantly absent. By contrast with the headlines “Henry Street Again Gay With Pageant” for the normative event, the Tribune’s headlines for the iconoclastic performance were in sharp contrast: “Paterson Silk Workers Portray Episodes of Fifteen Weeks’ Labor War.” The headlines emphasized that the Paterson pageant was not depicting peaceful unity but strife, and not over a dispute with a foreign enemy but with the internal oppressive force of the capitalist system. An editorial in the New York Times on 9 June 1913 that compared the two events welcomed the message of national unity projected by the Henry Street pageant, by contrast with the class warfare theme of the Paterson

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pageant. It juxtaposed the uplifting Henry Street spectacle in which “no discordant note was sounded, and the joy of living, of doing something worth doing, inspired the throng,” with the “sordid and cruel incidents” of the Paterson Strike Pageant. The Times found the nationalist spirit gratifying: “Such neighborhood pageants as this . . . exert a wholesome and a permanent influence on our municipal life. In this case the good work of Miss Wald and her Settlement House in uplifting and developing in body and mind the poor of the district, which was once the centre of Manhattan’s fashionable life.” The Henry Street pageant celebrated unity, and fostered the Cinderella myth of rags to riches for the immigrants. It was harmonious and full of nationalistic folklore: “Their own costumes from correct models, and music, illuminations, and richly blended colors enhanced the charm of the spectacle.” Lauding the underlying rhetoric of the superiority of American values expressed in the pageant, the Times patronizingly described the recent arrivals to the US as “Russian immigrants and their children, who have profited by the educational advantages offered to them, have acquired knowledge of the history of this country and the meaning of its institutions, and are [on] the way to overcome the obstacles of poverty and become good and thrifty citizens.” By contrast the editorial impugned the motives of the IWW whom it said, had “no more sympathy with laborers than they have with Judges and Government officers” and concluded, “In the Henry Street celebration the motive was to exalt progress, intellectual development, and the triumph of civilization. In the other the motive was to inspire hatred, to induce violence which may lead to the tearing down of the civil state and the institution of anarchy.”13

The preparation of the Paterson Strike Pageant The Paterson silk workers’ strike, which sought shorter working hours and higher pay,14 was organized under the banner of the IWW. After dragging on for several months in Paterson, New Jersey, during which two workers had been killed and almost 1,500 workers and supporters had been arrested, Bill Haywood, one of the IWW leaders, met with radical intellectuals in New York to discuss possible tactics. He expressed concern that assistance from New York workers was vital for the success of the strike, but that the strike was being ignored by the press because of threats of reduced advertising from the manufacturers. In her memoirs, Mabel Dodge, a rich New Yorker, recounts her suggestion to Haywood at the meeting, “Why don’t you hire a great hall and re-enact the strike over here? Show the whole


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thing: the closed mills, the gunmen, the murder of the striker, the funeral. And have the strike leaders make their speeches at the grave as you did in Paterson.”15 Although Dodge had no practical experience of this kind of event, she was actively involved in promoting avant-garde artistic work and had spent several hours with the theatre designer Gordon Craig a few years earlier discussing the possibility of staging a pageant in Florence, with no audience and with the inhabitants playing themselves in a former time.16 According to Dodge’s memoirs, John Reed immediately jumped to the idea: “We’ll make a Pageant of the Strike! The first in the World!”17 Reed was a left-wing journalist, who had recently graduated from Harvard and also possessed little theatrical experience. Arrested while reporting on the strike, he later explained its radicalizing effect on him: “That strike brought home to me hard the knowledge that the manufacturers get all they can out of labor, pay as little as they must, and permit the existence of great masses of the miserable unemployed in order to keep wages down; that the forces of the State are on the side of property against the propertyless.”18 (Reed witnessed the Russian Revolution in 1917, publishing his account as Ten Days that Shook the World, and helped found the American Communist Party in 1919.) After Haywood gained the agreement of the strike committee to the idea, Reed engaged Robert Edmond Jones, his classmate from Harvard, to design the set. Jones, a budding set designer who would introduce the staging ideas of Craig and Appia to America in the 1915 performance of The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife,19 conveyed early indications of an innovative style in the pageant. Jones opted for what Dodge called a “Gordon Craig” approach to the staging, erecting a massive bare stage with a huge (200 feet [60 meters] wide) painted backdrop depicting “life-sized” textile mills with a large doorway in the middle of the central mill. According to the New York Times, the scenery, which cost “$ 1,200 . . . showed a dozen Paterson silk mills, one big one taking up all the canvas on the Fourth Avenue side of the Garden. The other mills, all smaller ones, formed the wings.”20 He also designed a ramp down from the front of the stage into the center aisle of the auditorium so that the aisle could be used as a street which would bring the actors and spectators in closer proximity to one another.21 Reed rehearsed the strikers for three weeks in scenes that recreated moments that they had experienced in real life. As a former cheerleader at Harvard football games, he also added some idiosyncratic touches such as a strike song to the tune of “Harvard, Old Harvard.”22 Mabel Dodge enthused, “Imagine suddenly teaching [over 1,000] people of various nationalities how to present their

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case in a huge, graphic orderly art form! Imagine planning an event to fill Madison Square Garden, a whole city block, where we were used to going to see Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, with three rings and two bands going at once, and have it audible, visible, and composed enough to be convincing!”23 One of the most significant aspects of the Paterson Strike Pageant was the expression not just of the ideas of the Greenwich Village intellectuals about the working class but also of the strikers’ own ideas, voices and experiences. Rather than preparing the scenario in advance and imposing it on the strikers, Reed developed it with Haywood and the strikers, and shared some of the responsibility for directing with Haywood and Hannah Silverman, a seventeen-year-old Paterson textile worker who became one of the more militant agitators.24 Both local and national strike leaders delivered their own speeches in the pageant, and the strikers composed some of the songs that they sang.25 Moreover, Reed utilized their individual experiences rather than creating an undifferentiated mass action. In rehearsal he asked volunteers to try out a scene such as going to work and then asked for comments from others who disagreed with the performance. He then asked for new volunteers to show how it should be done until they were all satisfied. According to Edward Hunt, a classmate from Harvard who assisted Reed, “The strikers were actors, managers, critics, and public thrown into one. And they took to their roles like birds to the air.”26 Bill Haywood, for example, recalled the differentiation of the actions such that in the first scene the workers appeared “in groups, singly and by twos – an occasional one glancing at a newspaper, another humming a song, some talking, all with small baskets, buckets or packages of lunch in their hands or under their arms.”27 Commenting on the individuation that was evident in the production and in the faces and bodies of the actual strikers themselves, Bernadine Kielty Scherman later wrote, “No one who saw the Paterson strike pageant was likely ever again to think of the working class as an indefinable mass. It was the tragedies of individuals that were enacted before our eyes.”28 Nevertheless, the direction of mass actions, and particularly mass verbal abuse was a conspicuous dimension of the rehearsal process. The Globe and Commercial Advertiser reported, In Haledon the 800 women and children are being taught their parts in the great pageant. All of them have at least one speaking line, and they have had splendid opportunities for practising this during the past few weeks. It consists of the one word “Boo!” “Boo!” is the battlecry of the strikers. Paterson has rung with it these last few months. Strikebreakers’ ears have


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been deafened by the low, mournful (mournful or vindictive, according to the pathos or triumph of the moment) word, hissed or shouted at them as they have passed between double lines of bluecoats to work the looms left idle by the strikers. More meaning, more expression, say the strike leaders, can be put into “Boo!” by the wives and little children of idle workers than is possible in other words.29

John Reed sought to re-enact in the pageant the strike’s grassroots expression of the need for social change. In his view the hero of the piece was not an individual leader but the whole workforce.30 When Haywood announced the pageant and introduced Reed at a mass meeting, Reed told the audience, “‘Every man or woman who has been arrested is a hero, and he or she will be mentioned as such. This is the first labor war in the country . . . and the capitalists are beginning to know that fact.”31

The staging of the pageant On 7 June 1913, over 1,000 workers from the strike traveled from Paterson, New Jersey in a specially hired train and marched up Fifth Avenue to Madison Square Garden where they acted mass scenes on the huge stage in front of the sell-out crowd of an estimated 15,000 spectators. The first of six “episodes” started with the lights in the auditorium going out and the lights coming on the bare stage indicating early morning. The strikers’ band began playing, the whistles in the mills called the workers to their jobs and 1,000 people entered from the wings and down the aisles. According to the Times, “They walked as if they were ill fed. Some were reading newspapers and the pantomime showed that all were talking strike.” The Tribune described the laborers as “trooping sadly and reluctantly to . . . work.” After they disappeared into the mill, according to Bill Haywood, “The thump, chug, rattle and buzz of machinery was heard. Then the wide aisle – the street – was deserted. All were at work. Two hours were supposed to elapse, when voices inside the mill were heard shouting ‘Strike! Strike!’ The workers came rushing out pell-mell, laughing, shouting, jostling each other.”32 As the lights brightened to indicate morning (and symbolically the dawning of a new age), “The stage was crowded by a mob of excited men and women, all shouting the news that the big silk-mill strike had started. As a climax the band struck up the Marseillaise, and the strikers both on and off the stage joined in the singing.” The workers, “Shouting and dancing with the intoxication of freedom,”33 came down the front of the stage and into the main aisle of the auditorium. As the scene ended, “the strikers,

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still singing the Marseillaise, were seen marching away from the mills.”34 In the next scene the set appeared the same except the lights had gone out in the mills. Haywood described the mills as ominously silent. “No lights, not a sound. They stood like monstrous specters.”35 The workers appeared on picket duty, singing their strike songs, and an “exuberant Italian” strummed his guitar. According to the New York Times report, The strikers were marching up and down in front of the mills by twos and threes, their eyes searching the crowds that passed for a possible worker who was not of the IWW and who might want to stay at work. Such a person finally appeared. He was under police escort and was on his way hoping to earn a day’s pay. He was “booed” all the way across the stage, but the police managed to get him into the mill. Then the strike actors turned to the police and unmercifully “booed” the Captain in charge and the men under his command. The police – those in the show – got angry, and charged the crowd, beating men and women with their clubs, and when it was all over forty strikers [including Hannah Silverman] were under arrest. The prisoners were marched to the Paterson Police Headquarters, the strikers following, a thousand strong, cheering the prisoners and booing the police at every step.36

Haywood, remembering a moment in this scene that the New York Times surprisingly omitted from their report, wrote that, “Shots rang out. A Striker fell. The police had killed one. Another limped out of the crowd wounded. The dead man was carried away.”37 The shooting was of Valentino Modestino, an innocent bystander. (The program clarified that Modestino was “not a striker or a silk-mill worker” and was shot by “detectives hired by the manufacturers” while “stand[ing] on the porch of his house with one of his children in his arms.”38 ) The next scene re-enacted Modestino’s funeral. Several newspapers considered this to be the most impressive scene.39 With bowed heads, “the strikers in funeral procession to the strains of the Dead March,”40 followed the coffin covered with the red emblem of the IWW and carried by six men up the central aisle and onto the stage.41 Re-enacting a theatrical moment in Modestino’s actual funeral, the coffin was then opened, and “the mourners” filing past on either side, placed red carnations or ribbons and twigs of evergreen on the coffin, until it was buried (in the words of the program) “beneath the crimson symbol of the workers’ blood.”42 While the actors on stage gathered around the coffin facing the audience, Tresca (speaking in Italian) and Haywood then repeated their actual funeral orations. Tresca, according to the Tribune, “outdid Marc Antony’s funeral


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oration, with a repetition of his own famous ‘Blood for Blood’ speech that got him into jail in Paterson when he delivered the original.”43 Haywood told the audience that Modestino had been killed by the “bullet of a hireling of the capitalists,”44 and “pledged the IWW to care forever for Modestino’s widow and child.”45 The speakers also “call[ed] upon those present to remember the incident and for the sake of Modestino to stay out and fight until the bosses yield.”46 Afterwards the funeral procession formed again and carried the coffin off stage as the curtain fell. The following scene depicted a mass rally at the nearby town of Haledon (which allowed mass meetings because it had a Socialist Mayor who refused to be intimidated by the Paterson mill-owners).47 “The rally was introduced by the strikers’ 26-piece brass band marching up the aisle and featured different groups singing in Italian, German and English.”48 According to the Press, the scene “moved with unusual briskness because of the singing of an Italian bard, Toto Ferrazzano, who gave his verses in Italian with the choruses in English. The thousand strikers and as many more in the audience were carried away with the lilt of the song, that brought in inimical references to the mill-owners and praises for Haywood, Miss Flynn and the other organizers. There were more than a half dozen encores for Ferrazzano’s effort.”49 Strike leaders Lessig, Tresca, Flynn and Haywood again gave speeches. At Haywood’s request, the strikers voted to denounce the convictions of their strike leader Patrick Quinlan and the journalist Alexander Scott and also voted for the continuation of the strike, and the scene ended with a chorus of strike songs.50 This rally was followed by a May Day parade in Paterson which ended with an emotional scene in which the children of the strikers were sent away to safety. Dressed in red sashes or ties, the children were handed over by their parents to supporters from other cities, despite the orders of the authorities,51 so “that their parents might go on and fight and starve and struggle unhampered by their little ones.”52 After the parents had given their children away “with all the details of farewell embraces and tears, and finally shouts of enthusiasm breaking through the sadness of parting,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn “made a consoling speech to the weeping mothers, and roused their spirits once more to the blind determination to fight on.”53 She predicted that in their new homes the children would have “the roses put in their cheeks and class solidarity in their hearts.”54 Flynn, who played a large part in the scene, taking the “hundreds of boys and girls”55 from their parents and delivering them to “strike mothers,” remembered that “the children were enthusiastic over the adventure, the parents sad but resolute, willing to part with them because

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they knew they would have loving care, food, clothes and security with their adopted families.”56 The children departed, singing the “Red Flag.” The pageant concluded with the strikers marching down the aisle to a final meeting in Paterson where Bill Haywood explained the goals of the strike including the demand for an eight-hour working day. The strikers “swore to stay out on strike until the strike was won,”57 and the strikers (with the audience joining in) sang various songs including “Viva Tresca, Haywood and Flynn,” “The Internationale” and the Marseillaise to the band’s accompaniment.

The rhetoric of the pageant The Paterson pageant subverted the conservative pageant form for revolutionary purposes.58 By contrast with normal pageants emphasizing national unity and instilling national pride, the Paterson pageant dramatized class warfare. Comparing it to the normative pageant which was in its heyday,59 the Independent wrote: “Pageant? Oh, yes, you say. A pretty thing – antique costumes and gay palfreys, a picturesque procession winding across a leafy lawn, the most eligible young men and girls of the village presenting the stirring scenes of their great-grandfathers’ days. But this was a pageant of a different order. It was not pretty. There were no brilliant costumes . . . It was not a pageant of the past; but of the present – a new thing in our drama.”60 Rose Pastor Stokes, previewing the show for the socialist paper New York Call, wrote, “Here, then, is a pageant, oh Daughters of the Revolution, that will set forth in thrilling episodes, not the glory and courage, the aspirations and struggles of a dead past . . . but a pageant that gives us history fresh from the hands of its makers and – more thrilling marvel still – with the makers themselves as the actors in the play. Hail the new pageantry! Hail the red pageant – the pageant with red blood in its veins.”61 Class identity loomed much larger than national identity. Red flags and emblems decorated the inside of the arena, and the American flag was conspicuously absent.62 For example, the New York Times remarked that, although “There was not an American flag in the whole scheme of decoration, a scheme that covered every inch of the Garden except the floors and the roof, there were red IWW emblems everywhere.”63 The absence of American flags partly reflected an earlier incident in the strike when the manufacturers had, according to Haywood, “attempted a patriotic stunt” by displaying the American flag prominently at all the mills and in the local stores to show the strikers up as un-American. The strikers, who produced


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flag cloth in the mills, reacted by organizing a parade in which “every striker and his family wore a flag under which was printed: ‘We weave the flag. ‘We live under the flag. ‘We die under the flag. ‘But damn’d if we’ll starve under the flag.’”64

The performers sang inspiring songs irrespective of national origin such as the Marseillaise, the Red Flag (the Internationale) and Italian and German songs, instead of the American national anthem in the show.65 In so doing they indicated their adherence to a transnational rather than an assimilated nationalist identity. The songs in various languages also reflected the multilingual group on stage. At a rehearsal, one reporter testified to the presence of “more than twenty nationalities.”66 The program that was distributed to the audience reinforced the message of class solidarity and class-consciousness: “The Pageant represents a battle between the working class and the capitalist class conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) . . . It is a conflict between two social forces – the force of labor and the force of capital.”67 The pageant tried to project an image of class solidarity in order to preserve the strike’s strength in unity. One of the four scenes that was cut from the pageant (ostensibly for financial reasons), would have undermined the notion of class solidarity and may have been omitted partly to avoid revealing the disharmony amongst the unions. In announcing the idea of the pageant for the first time to the strikers, Bill Haywood described a proposed scene which “shows the meeting of the American Federation of Labor in Armory Hall, and you greet the speakers with yells for the ‘IWW.’ The Mayor is there, the police, and soldiers with guns and bayonets. There are also the manufacturers, and Mrs. Conboy and John Golden and John Matthews of the ‘AFL.’”68 This scene was to recreate a contentious moment in the strike when the AFL called a meeting that was supported by the manufacturers in order to try to settle the strike on a craft-by-craft basis and thereby undermine the influence of the IWW’s plan for a global settlement. Strikers who were members of the IWW attended the meeting in force and disrupted it so that the AFL had to abandon their efforts. Haywood described the actual meeting in an article in the International Socialist Review: “where John Golden and Sarah Conboy, of the American Federation of Labor, escorted by manufacturers and policemen, came to try to repeat the infamous strikebreaking tactics they attempted a year ago in Lawrence.” Haywood,

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recounting the event, wrote that the AFL leaders, “came heralded by the local press, by the civil authorities, by the clergy, and the employers as the instruments through which the great silk strike would be settled. The armory had been obtained for them through state officials. The state militia had been called out and stood in the ante-rooms with guns loaded for action. Chief of Police Bimson and his entire force were on hand. The fire department had been ordered to hold themselves in readiness and had their hose attached to hydrants in the immediate vicinity.” The IWW leaders had arranged that the strikers “would attend in a body and listen to what the A.F. of L. had to say, providing that they would be given a chance to reply to state the position of the strikers and the principles of the Industrial Workers of the World.” When the IWW organizers appeared, they were given a thunderous reception and, after ascertaining that they would not be allowed to speak, the crowd departed and a second crowd from outside came in and filled the hall. This time the IWW sympathizers drowned out the AFL speakers. “For an hour and three-quarters Golden and Mrs. Conboy tried to speak, only to be drowned down by the unceasing cheers that the audience sent up for the IWW. In desperation Mrs. Conboy tried the appeal-to-home-mother-and-patriotism stunt and seizing an American flag, waved it from the stage, which act was greeted by another outburst of derisive cheers. When Golden finally made himself heard about 300 persons stayed to listen, the hall having been cleared by police clubs.”69 Clearly, if such a scene had been presented on stage, it would have given a different complexion to the issue of workers’ solidarity and shown that there was an ongoing dispute between the AFL and the IWW over the tactics to win the strike.70 In addition to class and multi-ethnic solidarity, the pageant attested to a sense of solidarity between different ages and genders. The New York Tribune alluded to the age and gender differences of the workers as they came sadly to work in the first scene – “men, women and children; some mere tots, others decrepit old people”71 – which, in addition to signaling the diversity of the workforce, displayed for the audience the child-labor practices at the time. The status of women in the strike pageant was counternormative with the female strike organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the leading agitator Hannah Silverman, a teenage Paterson textile worker who had been arrested several times for picketing, playing important roles, and with 500 other women on stage signaling their importance as wage earners.72 Unlike the prevailing American stereotype of the hard-working and prosperous white male English-speaking Protestant individualist as featured in


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Chautauqua events, the immigrant workers in the strike pageant displayed an alternative vision of America as a multi-ethnic and multilingual mass of men, women and children cooperating to overcome oppressive conditions of employment. The solidarity of different ethnic groups was an important factor in sustaining the strike action and this aspect was clearly conveyed in the pageant. The IWW tried to maintain a united front of all workers, rather than allowing individual groups to settle separately with the management. The mill-owners on the other hand were constantly seeking ways of dividing the workers, and, for example, exploiting ethnic divisions.73 By contrast with the Paterson sheriff who described the foreigners “a lower order of animals, unfit for free speech,”74 The Survey commented on “the absence of race prejudice” in the strikers.75 In mass meetings, Bill Haywood called on strikers of various nationalities to tell their stories. At a meeting early in the strike, he encouraged speakers representing about twenty-five different nationalities to address the crowd, reminding the audience, when some of the speakers were less articulate than might have been hoped, “that the hardest workers are not the best talkers.”76 After the pageant, the organizing committee, proudly attesting to its value, boasted, “No such spectacle, presenting in dramatic form the class war in society, has ever been staged in America, and in its scope and the number of its actors and spectators, it is like most other American achievements – without parallel in the world.”77 Hutchins Hapgood stressed that “the unprecedented effort of thousands of workers not only to realize their ‘creative liberty’ in industry, but also to get it over into drama . . . is a democratic act of almost unexampled interest . . . which inspires one with the hope that a true, self-controlling, self-educating democracy is a possibility on earth.”78 The dream of democratic self-management of industry became an exciting prospect to the workers as well as a major threat to the manufacturers.79 Flynn later summarized the strike effort: “We have given them a class feeling, a trust in themselves and a distrust for everybody else . . . They have no more use for the state. To them the statue of liberty is personified by the policeman and his club.”80 The pageant constructed the identities of the workers (regardless of age, gender or ethnicity) as heroic and their employers and the police as the enemy. Resisting the notion that working-class culture was inferior, the pageant celebrated it in performance. Rather than staging patriotic values as liberating, they staged them as imprisoning, and showed that overthrowing the oppressive instruments of authority and power and conventional social structure led to a spirit of liberation.

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Fiction or reality In some ways the pageant overlapped and extended the reality of the strike rather than simply representing it. The rehearsals were conducted at locations where strike meetings also occurred, and, after rehearsing the songs for the pageant, the strikers used the same songs in other meetings to reinforce the commitment to the strike. As the strike meetings were designed partly to sustain morale, singing the songs were as much rehearsal for the pageant as they were part of uplifting the spirits of the strikers, and in at least one case the rehearsal occurred in the middle of a strike meeting.81 According to the press, the rehearsals of the picket scene sometimes took place in front of the mills so it became difficult to distinguish between the strikers who were picketing and those who were rehearsing as pickets.82 This seems to have caused difficulties for the police who were used to arresting pickets, but were not sure what to do about amateur actors rehearsing their parts as pickets. When the police tried to move them on, Haywood told them “there is nothing in even the New Jersey law that prohibits rehearsals of amateur presentations in the open.”83 Moreover, a boy who was arrested in Paterson for booing at the police defended his action in court by saying that he was only rehearsing for the pageant.84 The pageant also acted as an extension of the regular strike meetings in terms of clarifying the position of the strikers. What Hutchins Hapgood called, “Their growing understanding of themselves and their cause and their situation,”85 over the course of the strike, was further developed while they were preparing for and performing the pageant. In analyzing the history of the strike, simplifying it into the scenario of the pageant, and rehearsing and replaying the events, the strikers could put in perspective their role in the process of social change.86 When Haywood first suggested the idea of a pageant to a massive strike meeting in Haledon, he described how it would end with “the last and greatest scene which will be a stage picture of this great meeting at Haledon.”87 In that moment the present was underscored as historical, and reality merged with re-enactment. Obviously the actors looked the parts that they were playing since they were acting as themselves. The New York Press commented that by wearing their own “mill togs” as costumes, they achieved “the last word in verisimilitude.”88 But this effect was accentuated by the physical deprivation they had been suffering since the beginning of the strike. According to the International Socialist Review, in the absence of wages, the strikers were surviving on one meal a day, provided by the union soup kitchen in


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Paterson.89 When they arrived in New York for the pageant in which they sang the Internationale about “being prisoners of starvation,” it was clear to observers that they had been starving for weeks. Upton Sinclair remarked on how they ravenously disposed of the lunch that had been prepared for them.90 The New York Press commented that in performance, “under their smiles were the lines that had been drawn in by poverty, low wages, the privations of the strike and the necessity for finding food for their large families”;91 and the New York Herald described them in the first scene as “shivering and ill clad, and not a few of them ill fed.”92 Hapgood was not alone in acknowledging the significance that, rather than a performance about the strike by actors, “the strikers themselves are going to present the spectacle.”93 The Survey commented that the show was not transformed into a professional spectacle by the organizers with trained actors or with a Broadway production style but kept to a level of reality that would allow the strikers to emerge as real human beings rather than performers: “The pageant was without staginess or apparent striving for theatrical effect. In fact, the offer of theatrical producers to help in ‘putting it on’ was declined by those who wanted the workers’ own simple action to impress the crowd.”94 Actually, the performers were called on to act other parts as well. But because they were so caught up in their own positions in the strike, they were initially reluctant to play the roles of anyone from the other side of the struggle such as policemen, detectives and scabs.95 Ultimately they relented and in fact became so involved in acting the parts of policemen forcefully beating workers that many actors suffered bruises in rehearsal. A reporter visiting a rehearsal described how he saw “twenty or thirty stout men charging against a mass of men and women huddled in one corner, flinging them to right and left, knocking their heads together, striking women to their knees, yelling ferociously, while all the time those attacked gave vent to the long, anguished, scornful cry of ‘Boo!’” When he asked if the actors minded this treatment, he was told by an “emaciated young woman in a cheap print dress . . . ‘See what I got yesterday!’ . . . and [she] turned up her sleeves to above her elbow, where a big, ugly bruise could be seen. ‘Aw, that ain’t nothin’,’ she went on, ‘we expect to get knocked about in these here rehear[s]als, an’ we don’t care. It’s all for the cause.’”96 Both the strike leaders and the newspapers emphasized the authenticity of the cast. The Times reported that “Every man, woman, and child who appeared on [the stage] was, according to the strike management, a bona-fide Paterson silk mill striker or the child of a striker.”97 The New York Evening

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World commented on “the great meeting of desperate hollow-eyed strikers” and said that the pageant “unrolled with a poignant realism that no man who saw them will ever forget.”98 The New York World called the pageant “a review of their experiences within the last few weeks . . . They didn’t need to act, but merely to go about in their normal fashions.”99 Likewise, the International Socialist Review commented, “Nowhere was there a suggestion of ‘acting,’ of going through ‘a part.’ The people on the stage had long ago forgotten the audience. The audience had long ago forgotten itself. It had become a part of the scene. All simply lived their battles over again.”100 The Tribune indicated that, at the end of the show, fiction again merged with reality as the strikers “return to their places and the picket line, determined that no silk shall be woven in Paterson until their demands are granted. And from the way they brought the pageant to an end with this announcement, they meant it just as much in actuality as they made believe in the play.”101 The pageant served both as re-enactment of recent history and as a massive strike meeting with the strike leaders addressing the whole crowd (including the actors and audience) in their speeches, an effect that was enhanced in the final scene by the actors on stage turning their backs to the audience and surrounding a platform on which stood Bill Haywood for his final speech so that the whole of Madison Square Garden became one mass meeting. Moreover, by announcing that they were going to continue the strike, they were reaffirming their commitment to that action. The audience, being predominantly working class, created a strong sense of class solidarity and commitment to the ongoing strike as in a strike meeting.102 The unity between actors and audience was reinforced by the physical staging of the performance through the audience. Moreover, the presence of Mrs. Modestino and Paterson strikers in the audience as well as the strikers and union leaders on stage and in the center aisle blurred the normal distinction between spectators and actors. The New York Press reported that, “It was such a mixed grouping that at times they converged and actor became auditor and auditor turned suddenly into actor.”103 In the second scene when the police arrested forty strikers (including Hannah Silverman) and led them down the long center aisle, not only the actors but also the audience booed.104 When the funeral cortege passed her coming up the center aisle and on to the stage to the tune of the Dead March, Mrs. Modestino, who was sitting in a box seat, “became hysterical” and many others in the audience cried.105 Like the rally scene, the re-enactment of the funeral turned into a real event, a kind of memorial celebration for a


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friend or neighbor who had died in which, according to the New York Press, “the gruesomeness of the . . . scene left nothing to the imagination.”106 The Tribune commented that the scene “worked the actors themselves and their thousands of sympathizers in the audience up to a high pitch of emotion, punctuated with moans and groans and sobs.”107 The Press reported that “Many of the women in the march were weeping – real tears that dripped on their worn mill clothing . . . There was an impressiveness that made the Garden still as a tomb in that scene – the only sounds were those of intermittent sobbing . . . It was a scene too sacred for a spectacle ever of such poignancy as on the stage.”108 Dodge reflected, “They were one: the workers who had come to show their comrades what was happening across the river, and the workers who had come to see it. I have never felt such a high pulsing vibration in any gathering before or since.”109 The actuality of the pageant with the real life of the actors ghosting their performances on stage added a sense of drama and danger to the whole event.110 The visible presence of the chief of police in the front row and the onstage presence of prominent strike leaders who had been portrayed in the press as celebrated agitators (or notorious rabble rousers depending on one’s viewpoint) added to the high stakes involved and helped differentiate the performances. The newspaper reporters, who were obviously keen to pick out celebrities, commented that several of the speakers in the pageant were under indictment (such as Haywood, Gurley Flynn, and Lessig) or had been convicted (such as Tresca and Quinlan) and that others had been imprisoned, such as John Reed and Hannah Silverman (who, according to the New York Call, had been “jailed so often that she herself has lost track of the number and who was released from jail on Friday.”)111 That the audience was watching a performance given by “criminals and outlaws” (my quotes) added to the excitement, as did the popular perception that the IWW recommended violence as a tactic. This was heightened by the New York sheriff greeting the press with the words, “Just let anybody . . . say one word of disrespect to the flag and I will stop the sho[w] so [q]uickly it will take their breath away.”112 The Tribune, obviously impressed with the realism of the event, emphasized that in the funeral scene, “Tresca himself appeared” and gave his “Blood for blood should be your motto”113 funeral oration in Italian that had landed him in jail. Moreover, they hinted at the potential for violence. “Weeks of dreary fighting, privation and hope for victory deferred have made their marks on the faces of the strikers, and they are on the verge of desperate things, either of giving up in hopeless despair or of going out and tearing the town to pieces.”114

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While the rehearsals and performance echoed reality, the pageant also worked on a fictional and symbolic level. The workers did not simply present themselves on stage. As already mentioned, they not only impersonated themselves but also other characters. But in addition to this, by placing their actions on the stage, they framed them as a performance that held a wider significance than simply their own strike, and which was not just expressive but constitutive as well.115 The performance itself was an act of social resistance. By marching through the city, advertising the IWW inside and outside the building, and performing the events of their strike, the strikers were defying the norms of society. Moreover, in the performance, the strikers were acting out an alternative, carnivalesque behavior pattern and a different set of relationships from the normative hierarchy of boss and worker, policeman and citizen, male and female, citizen and foreigner. To the audience, they represented not only their own strike but the strength of the working class in general in trying to overthrow their oppressive conditions and to establish new rules and ways of working in society. Predicting this effect, Hapgood wrote that the pageant was designed “to give the whole of New York an idea of the meaning of the great industrial and social happenings which are taking place in Paterson and all over the country.”116 The performers represented not only the events of their strike, but also in a more symbolic sense the ability to strike, to take action and seek redress. Their re-staged actions not only referred backward to originary real actions but also forward to future possible actions and to similar situations. Their symbolic actions transformed the spectators into active participants in the same struggle for a new social order; the performance became what Jean and John Comaroff, in their analysis of ritual, have called a “vehicle of history-in-the making” and “a site and a means of experimental practice, of subversive poetics, of creative tension and transformative action.”117 Responding to this ritualistic or symbolic dimension, the International Socialist Review described how the performance engaged the sympathies of its audience and caught them up in a vicarious struggle for their own liberation. The lives of most of us are sordid and grey. So tightly are we tied to the petty round of toil to which our galley-masters bind us, that most of us probably are born, live and die without experiencing one deep-springing, surging, devastating emotion. We are either afraid to feel or we have lost the capacity. The Paterson pageant will be remembered for the sweeping emotions it shot through the atmosphere if for no other reason. Waves of almost painful emotion swept over that great audience as the summer


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wind converts a placid field of wheat into billowing waves. It was all real, living, and vital to them.118

Evaluating the success of the pageant The massive event created a sense of euphoria in the crowd that many commentators expressed as a liberating experience, a social revolution in the making by the workers invading New York’s prime location, Madison Square Garden, and taking over the means of cultural production from the establishment. An air of celebration of the workers’ cause abounded in the hall even before the event began. The Socialist Party New York City convention, meeting that day to select candidates for a municipal election, suspended business at six o’clock so that all 200 delegates could attend the pageant en bloc “to take their place on the firing line in behalf of people who have been mistreated.”119 According to their paper, the New York Call, they “marched into the Garden carrying the party’s banner and chanting the ‘International.’ They were recognized at once and greeted with tumultuous applause.”120 Likewise, during the pageant, the audience was deeply involved, “Enthusiasm ran high . . . practically everybody was on his feet all the time, men and women were humming – if they didn’t know the words – ‘The Marseillaise,’ when they weren’t humming or singing, the ‘International,’ . . . and many folks were gazing at nothing at all while the tears ran down their faces . . . The applause . . . was one chronic roar.”121 In several scenes there was considerable interactivity. For example, according to the New York Call, the boos received from the audience by “Police Chief Bimson and [his] squad” in the picketing scene were “simply awful. ‘Have pity,’ shouted one in the audience when Bimson’s ghost was given another ‘boo.’” Similarly, the New York Herald reported that in the rally at Haledon, “The stage was crowded with a cheering and singing multitude who sang the ‘Marseillaise’ with a fervor that evoked applause. The refrain ‘Do We Like the Bosses?’ and the reply ‘No, no!’ were cheered. Applause greeted the line, ‘Do we like the IWW?’ and the stentorian ‘Yes, yes!’ in which the strikers joined with great energy.”122 The spectators were not simply observing the action on stage as in a mimetic performance that tells a story, but they became involved in the action as in a public ritual, a process that Kimberly Benston has referred to as “methexis or ‘communally helping out’ of the action by all assembled. It is a shift from drama – the spectacle observed – to ritual, the event which

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dissolves traditional divisions between actor and spectator, between self and other.”123 Although the audience was generally united in sentiment for the show, it was not solely a working-class audience. For example, while the Times reported that, “It was an audience every man, woman, and child in which seemed to be enthusiastic for the Haywood organization and all that it stands for,” it also mentioned that “Every box was occupied, many of them by fashionably dressed men and women.”124 While the boxes which sold for $20 were generally occupied by rich “society people,” radicals, sociologists and others intellectuals also flocked to the unusual event.125 Thus there were at least two types of audience for the event – those who were basically insiders and who identified with the event because they were fellow strikers or fellow workers, and those who were outside sympathizers (non-working class) who came to watch it because it was a unique and unusual event. Neither group was a traditional theatre audience. They were not there to see an entertaining play. Neither group expected the strikers to be actors. In fact part of the significance of the event for both groups was the authenticity of the performers rather than their ability to act. The workingclass spectators wanted to see their fellow workers on stage and to participate in a communal event, and this spirit was enhanced by large working-class organizations arriving together for the event. The non-working-class spectators were attending something similar to an educational exhibition in which the authenticity of the performers was of greater interest than their talent. Thus the perceived criminality of the performers was an important dimension that added to the cultural capital accruing to this section of the audience.126 The event was read differently by these two audiences, as one can see from the newspapers and other reports. The socialist newspapers praised the pageant while the more conservative papers indicated reservations which ranged from fear about its dangerous nature and relief that it was performed with restraint and aesthetic taste. With the unusual thwarting of authority associated with the event, some of the spectators also anticipated a confrontation between the strikers and the forces of law and order. The newspapermen were particularly interested in the role in the audience of the New York Sheriff who, in their reports, became a character in the drama, and, according to the Times, “said he was present to see to it that no man or woman said or did anything that could in the remotest way be termed a desecration of the American flag.”127 The New York Press approved of the way that the promoters controlled the event without resort to police


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reinforcement.128 Likewise, the New York Tribune commented on the way that the IWW, which had been popularly perceived as violent anarchists, displayed such good judgement in performing the pageant: “The IWW has not been highly regarded hereabouts as an organization endowed with brains or imagination. Yet the very effective appeal to public interest made by the spectacle at the Garden stamps the IWW leaders as agitators of large resources and original talent.”129 To some extent this response reflects that the expectations of some of the audience in attending this show were similar to those attending a freak show or a nineteenth-century display of indigenous people in, for example, the Barnum and Bailey Circus, in which the audience were observers of “the other.” Union and strike activity was still generally regarded as dangerous and unlawful and threatening to the political, social and economic life of the country. Therefore in attending an event that celebrated such actions, the non-working-class part of the audience would have felt that they were venturing into unknown and dangerous territory and regarded those on stage to some extent as outside the natural order. But in this case, unlike the Barnum and Bailey Circus, “the other” were in charge of the event and were performing according to their own script rather than that of the promoters. Nevertheless, the editorial in the Tribune expressed relief that the strikers had been absorbed into the system like tamed primitives. “It is gratifying to know that the strikers have reached that stage of self-control at which they can look at their case objectively and present it to the public with the reasoned calculation of dramatic art. It takes coolness and self-restraint to act well, and even Sheriff Harburger is reported as admitting that the pageant was a successful and unobjectionable show.” The Tribune made it seem as if the strikers had been welcomed into the bosom of capitalism: “Elaborate stage settings, a literary book, special trains for the actors and a swarm of press agents all suggest the sophistication of the modern commercial drama.” To neutralize the effect of the strikers’ efforts further the Tribune quipped, “Here is a new vein opened to enterprising strike managers with their fingers on the pulse of the Great White Way. If their strikes fail they can take the strikers on the road.”130 Although dramaturgically the pageant was less didactic than the later agit-prop performances of the 1930s that exhorted the audience to social action such as to “vote communist,” the audience (both working class and non-working class) tended to read the performance not only as a historical retelling of events but also as an act of social resistance and, more specifically, as a call to action to support the strike. By their collective action, the strikers

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(and more generally the working class) were regarded as empowered by the event and the manufacturers (and more generally the ruling class) as threatened and challenged if not overtly disempowered. Given the reaction in the New York Times editorial, and the common perception that the IWW posed a danger to the status quo, the pageant received surprisingly good reviews from most of the press. The papers generally praised it from an artistic point of view. An editorial in the New York Tribune commended the innovative staging, “There was a startling touch of ultra modernity – or rather of futurism – in the Paterson strike pageant. . . . Certainly nothing like it had been known before in the history of labor agitation.”131 The socialist New York Call described it as “the greatest thing of the kind ever undertaken by a labor organization and one of the most successful events in the history of local labor affairs.”132 The IWW organ, the International Socialist Review, under its heading “The World’s Greatest Labor Play,” described it as “something new under the sun, a labor play in which laborers themselves were the actors, managers and sole proprietors, portraying by word and movement their own struggle for a better world.”133 An article in The Survey reported on the simple yet dramatic effect of the strikers representing themselves on stage. “The pageant . . . went the ‘human document’ one better; it gave a real acquaintance with the spirit, point of view and earnestness of those who live what a ‘human document’ tells; it conveyed what speech and pamphlet, picture and cartoon, fiction and drama fall short of telling. The simple movements of this mass of silk workers were inarticulate eloquence.”134 The Press reporter commented on the impressive staging of the first scene, “Now, William A. Brady has become so identified with stage mobs that the words mob and Brady are interchangeable, but never had Brady in his most ambitious moments schemed anything like the mob that flung itself from the mill at the word ‘Strike!’ Shouting the strains of ‘The Marseillaise,’ they rushed across the front of the stage and down into the main aisle of the building, rushing pell-mell, men and women alike, until they reached the lobby, where they assembled for the next episode.”135 The International Socialist Review exulted, “No spectacle enacted in New York has ever made such an impression. Not the most sanguine member of the committee which made the preparations for the pageant believed that its success would be quite so overwhelming. It is still the talk of New York, most cynical and hardened of cities, and will remain so for many days.”136 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn later recalled, “It was a unique form of proletarian art. Nothing like it had happened before in the American labor movement. Nor has it happened since, to my knowledge, until the recent moving-picture


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production, Salt of the Earth, in which Mexican-American mine workers and their families graphically portrayed what actually happened in their strike.”137 The Independent emphasized the effectiveness of the actors performing in the central aisle: “It is an unequalled device for clutching the emotion of the audience – this parade of the actors thru the center of the crowd. The dramatic liturgy of the Roman Church, in which our English drama had its rise, the processional in the Episcopal Church, too, and even the familiar wedding march, recognize its value. Rarely has it been used in New York theaters – in [Max Reinhardt’s production of ] ‘Sumurun’ last year, and in one or two other cases, but never with more effect than in this performance, where actors and audience were of one class and one hope.”138 The New York World also lauded the dramatic effect of the pageant: “It would have pleased any dramatic critic because of the sincerity with which its simple plot was carried out . . . On the whole, as viewed by a spectator unbiased either from the labor or capital standpoint, their pageant was rather in the nature of a tragedy than anything else.”139 Even the New York Times in its first report of the pageant, under the headlines “Biggest Cast Ever Seen in a New York Production Stages Its Own Show,” wrote, “It is doubtful if Madison Square Garden, even at the close of the bitterest of political campaigns, ever held a larger audience,”140 and called it “a spectacular production.”141 While many newspapers and periodicals emphasized its artistic innovation and success, others like the Times warned of its dangerous implications. The Times seemed threatened by the whole event and printed their damning editorial a day after their reasonably positive review. Claiming that the pageant had been staged by “a destructive organization opposed in spirit and antagonistic in action to all the forces which have upbuilded this republic,” and whose “aim is not to upbuild industry but to destroy the law,” the Times editorial described the event as having “the design of stimulating mad passion against law and order and promulgating a gospel of discontent . . . The motive was to inspire hatred, to induce violence which may lead to the tearing down of the civil state and the institution of anarchy.”142 Likewise, the New York Press began its front page story about the pageant “Hundreds of Industrial Workers of the World last evening stirred up class hatred” before going on to calling it “one of the most remarkable performances New York ever has seen.”143 Current Opinion alluded to both its artistic success and its dangerous implications, calling it “truly an artistic achievement, even tho it may be, as the Times has pointed out, a dangerous weapon for subversive propaganda.”144

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In addition to the direct effect on the 15,000 spectators at the one performance, New Yorkers became more aware of the strike because of the march through Manhattan and because of the four huge signs outside Madison Square Garden in red electric lights that spelled out IWW in ten-foothigh letters to announce the event “which could be seen from one end of town to the other.”145 The IWW organ, International Socialist Review, said this was “the first time those significant letters have ever been given so conspicuous a place.”146 The publicity achieved by the pageant was immense. Ewald Koettgen, a Paterson weaver, proudly told the IWW convention in September that the pageant “made more publicity for the IWW than anything ever attempted before.”147 Although the pageant was an artistic and initially a public relations success, it led to bitter recriminations because the anticipated revenue from the event did not materialize, and so the workers returned to work within two months without having gained any improvement in conditions. The pageant had been difficult to stage financially because the costs of building such a massive set and renting Madison Square Garden were high and the projected revenue from a working-class audience for a once-off event was low. However, two weeks before the pageant, the Paterson Evening News reported Bill Haywood as predicting that it would generate $100,000,148 and, immediately after the event, the press announced profits of between $6,500 and $10,000 for the strikers.149 Unaware of the facts, the workers, according to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, expected huge financial benefit from the strike, especially “with the papers clamoring that tens of thousands of dollars had been made.”150 There was even considerable discussion of whether to stage additional performances.151 Therefore, the strikers were very disappointed when the leadership gradually confronted them with the financial reality. Haywood reported a week after the pageant that they would be receiving only $348 from the pageant and apologized for his predictions of a large profit. At the same time he hinted that more money (about $5,000) would be following.152 When Reed informed them a week later that the pageant had made a financial loss, they were clearly despondent and refused to join him in song. The Paterson Evening News reported that “the announcement . . . took the heart out of them.”153 They were further disappointed when, dressed in new clothes, he announced that he was departing the next day for a summer vacation in Europe while they were left to carry on the strike with little food or other provisions.154 The New York Times highlighted the financial debacle by putting the financial news on the front page (unlike its other reports about the strike and the pageant) and sowed seeds of discord by implying that some irregularities


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must have occurred.155 The local Paterson press also exploited the news and exacerbated the suspicions of the strikers by questioning the various trips to Europe by members of the pageant executive committee.156 The executive committee eventually made a financial statement to the press that helped quell rumors of dishonesty, explaining that they had never been optimistic about the pageant making money, that they had predicted financial difficulties from the beginning, and that they had almost canceled the event on two occasions because of their worries. They had been persuaded to persist with the event because of its importance not only for financial reasons but also for its propaganda and publicity potential,157 and they had been given loans by sympathizers to enable them to continue. They also explained that, when a sell-out crowd attended the performance and the police closed the entrances (a half hour after the event was due to start) to prevent crowding in the standing-room areas, it appeared to the public that the financial success of the event had been secured. However, the cost of the more expensive seats in the front of the arena had been reduced from $1.50 to 25 cents at the last minute because they remained empty when the cheaper seats had all been sold, and the potential audience, many of whom had walked for miles to attend the event, could not afford them. In addition many IWW members had gained free entry on showing their cards, and so the box-office receipts were much lower than anticipated.158 Although their evidence helped quell the rumors, the IWW leadership lost credibility because of the financial problems, and it was the last major strike that the IWW organized in the eastern US.159

Legacy of the Paterson Strike Pageant Two years after the pageant, a journalist for the IWW paper Solidarity advocated a workers’ theatre and mentioned the pageant as an example of what could be done. “Did it not raise funds to continue the strike, break down prejudice, arouse sympathy and cement the ranks of the strikers?”160 Randolph Bourne (a Greenwich villager) also reflected, “Who that saw the Paterson Strike Pageant in 1913 can ever forget that thrilling evening when an entire labor community dramatized its wrongs in one supreme outburst of group-emotion. Crude and rather terrifying, it stamped into one’s mind the idea that a new social art was in the American world, something genuinely and excitingly new.”161 At the end of the 1920s, Bill Haywood praised the pageant in retrospect, calling it “the greatest labor pageant ever held in America.”162 John Reed also continued to believe firmly in the idea of the workers’ pageant. Not only did

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he encourage the Soviet Union to stage historical re-enactments after the Russian Revolution, but he also advocated workers’ pageants throughout the United States to tell their local struggles. According to Granville Hicks, Reed wanted to create a theatre of the working class. Plans to give plays for the workers, though he was interested in these, were not enough. Hiram Moderwell, Leroy Scott, and others had conceived a theatre that would produce, at reasonable prices, plays that workers would want or ought to want to see. Reed had a bolder scheme: labor groups would dramatize the principal events in their lives, just as the Paterson workers had dramatized their strike. The idea grew: the best dramatizations from all over the country would be presented once a year, on May Day, in New York. Reed’s friends caught his enthusiasm, and money for initial expenses was quickly raised, but he became absorbed in other things, and, since no one else would carry on the task of organization, the plan collapsed.163

With the demise of the IWW, the best immediate alternative seemed to be workers’ drama produced by Greenwich Village intellectuals in such venues as the Provincetown Playhouse. Many of the intellectuals and radical leaders involved in the pageant spent summers in Provincetown, including Reed, Dodge, Hapgood, Ashley, Margaret Sanger, and Bill Haywood and their presence directly influenced the development of the Provincetown Playhouse and its adoption of labor themes in its drama. Wilbur Daniel Steele, who wrote Contemporaries (about the strike leader Frank Tannenbaum), the first labor play for the Provincetown Playhouse in 1915, wrote to Mary Vorse after seeing the pageant, “I wish you could have been there. It was tremendous.”164 Susan Glaspell, one of the founders of the Provincetown Playhouse, also commented in her autobiography on the significance of the pageant and how afterwards, she “sat late and talked of what the theatre might be.”165 Although the Provincetown Players were never a workers’ theatre, they kept alive many of the radical ideas of the IWW during the 1920s, such as in Eugene O’Neill’s anti-capitalist play The Hairy Ape which portrayed the IWW in a positive light. One of the first major theatre companies with a distinct socialist bias was the New Playwrights Theatre formed in 1927 by left-wing writers Mike Gold and John Howard Lawson and funded by a leftwing banker named Otto Kahn. They tried to engage Eugene O’Neill but he turned them down. Although short-lived and largely unsuccessful, the New Playwrights Theatre presented working-class issues in an old musical


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hall on Broadway and used Soviet-style constructivist sets for some of their work. They presented such plays as The Centuries by Em Jo Basshe, that dealt with slum conditions in an urban tenement building and called on the poor to organize in order to better their conditions; The Belt by Paul Sifton that realistically depicted the conditions of workers on the assembly line; and Singing Jailbirds by Upton Sinclair about the imprisonment and death of a strike leader. With the stock-market crash and the Depression, the idea of a workers’ theatre resurfaced in force. The widespread loss of faith in the capitalist system encouraged the formation of agit-prop (agitation and propaganda) theatre groups, influenced by Russian and German prototypes, to promote communist and socialist performances. Numerous companies, employing such diverse forms as agit-prop and Broadway musicals, staged plays seeking a radical transformation of society. From the German-speaking ProletBuhne and the English-speaking Workers Laboratory Theatre that produced agit-prop pro-Communist material, to the Theatre Union that staged Popular Front plays on Broadway supporting class and racial solidarity such as Stevedore, to Langston Hughes’s Harlem Suitcase theatre company that produced his Don’t You Want to Be Free?, the 1930s witnessed a proliferation of political theatre, culminating in the Living Newspaper projects of the Federal Theatre Project, such as One-Third of a Nation (1938) about the need for decent low-income public housing. Many of the ideas in the Paterson Strike Pageant would be carried into the 1930s, such as the staging of strikes (real or fictional), the use of workers as amateur actors, the cultivation of a working-class audience, the incorporation of the audience into the action (as in Waiting for Lefty), the use of a current political issue (as in the Living Newspapers) and the promotion of multi-ethnic class struggle as in Stevedore and Don’t You Want to Be Free? It also anticipated many of the financial problems of working-class theatre in performing for a low-wage sector. Although the Paterson Strike Pageant failed to win the strike, it provided a new form for a revolutionary theatre and paved the way for the workers’ drama in the next decades.

Summary The Paterson Strike Pageant utilized a conservative theatrical form for radical purposes. By contrast with the normative pageant that appealed to patriotic images and icons and showed the transformation of the foreigner into the good, well-behaved American citizen, the Paterson pageant attacked

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American hierarchical values and the American capitalist system. It clarified that the various immigrant groups (especially the “inferior” southern Europeans) had not been assimilated into a nondescript melting pot, but still spoke and sang in their original languages and identified with class struggle rather than the capitalist system. The Paterson Strike Pageant helped forge a positive sense of social identity for those acting in the pageant and their supporters in the audience that challenged dominant national values. By analyzing and rehearsing their roles in a major industrial strike and re/presenting themselves on stage for thousands of others, the Paterson workers acknowledged their position as makers of history and their potential strength as part of a class that could transform the structures of society. Rather than just representing themselves, they served as powerful symbols for social action and social change. Rather than adhering to the capitalist notion of the individual bettering his position and rising above the masses, the pageant promoted pride in the working class and the communal effort to better their conditions collectively. Although in the long term the pageant failed to win the strike, it validated the struggle of the workers, provided insight into their situation and, before the financial result became clear, achieved great publicity and support for their efforts.

 Staging social rebellion in the 1960s

F ollowing the Second World War, various political and social forces came together to reinforce an orthodox attitude towards national identity. Notably the House Committee on un-American Activities and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Committees in the Senate clarified the danger of contesting a spirit of national consensus.1 To be labeled unAmerican in the late 1940s was to be considered a Communist, a subversive and potentially a spy for the Soviet Union. The conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 (for allegedly sending information about American nuclear technology to the Soviet Union) emphasized the danger of being accused of un-American activities. The American values that were sanctioned under this Cold War culture of containment privileged the position of white heterosexual males who were to be supported by women in domestic roles. Ethnic minorities were expected to remain subservient or invisible, and divergent political ideologies or lifestyles were discouraged. During the 1950s, American family life as represented in advertisements and in television shows such as Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver suggested an ideal sense of security, conformity and homogeneity. As Elaine Tyler May has written, “it was the values of the white middle class that shaped the dominant political and economic institutions that affected all Americans. Those who did not conform to them were likely to be marginalized, stigmatized, and disadvantaged as a result.”2 However, this supposed social consensus was challenged in the late 1950s by the civil rights movement that rebelled against the discrimination against and segregation of African Americans. Bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, demonstrations and protest marches advocated the integration of blacks into white society where previously they had been denied access. Such activities increased in strength leading to the 1963 March on Washington at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I have a dream” 

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speech in front of 100,000 people. While civil rights legislation and voter registration drives in the south as well as desegregated schooling measures heralded minor improvements for the status of African Americans, the civil rights movement, which under King’s leadership promoted a policy of nonviolence, encountered continual harassment and setbacks. Moreover, while it appeared that African Americans could improve their position in society if they adopted white values, habits and dress codes, their own values and physical characteristics were not fully accepted. In the mid-1960s a new wave of African American leaders questioned the civil rights movement’s policy of integration. Rather than promoting assimilation into the white culture, they advocated a separatist philosophy of Black Nationalism. Renouncing the non-violent tactics of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X broke away from Elijah Muhammad’s “apolitical” Nation of Islam in 1964 to form the Organization for Afro-American Unity (echoing the Organization of African Unity). He argued, “There is nothing that the white man will do to bring about true, sincere citizenship or civil rights recognition for black people in this country . . . They will always talk it but they won’t practice it.”3 He urged the need for human rights rather than civil rights, and alluding to the example of African liberation movements, called for freedom “by any means necessary.”4 Following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Huey Newton, Bobbie Seale and others formed the Black Panthers in Oakland, California where they openly challenged the non-violent tactics of the civil rights movement. Adopting the role of vigilantes to defend African Americans from police brutality, the Black Panthers appeared in public, visibly armed and aggressively dressed in black leather and dark sun glasses. Influenced by the rhetoric of African independence movements, the Black Panthers issued a manifesto which amongst other things called for a “United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony [of the United States] in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.”5 Stokely Carmichael, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a nationally organized students’ civil rights movement, announced in 1966, after being arrested in a freedom march, “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested – and I ain’t going to jail no more! . . . The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!”6 Carmichael later formed a short-lived alliance with the Black Panthers Party. Black Nationalists, according to SNCC

STAGING SOCIAL REBELLION IN THE

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activist Cleveland Sellers, argued that “black oppression cannot be eliminated without a full-scale revolution, probably a violent one.”7 From 1964 violent riots erupted regularly in major cities such as New York (Harlem, 1964), Los Angeles (Watts, 1965), Cleveland, Newark, Chicago, Atlanta and Detroit. Following the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, there were so many riots in one night that it seemed that the African American revolution had arrived. By the late 1960s, a split occurred between the Black Panthers, who believed in multi-ethnic class struggle, and the Black Nationalists, who favored a policy of racial separatism. “Neither faction,” according to Sellers, “received the same broad support that was lavished on SNCC, CORE, SCLC, the NAACP and the Urban League during the initial phases of the [civil rights] movement,” and by the early 1970s the government had managed to undermine both factions.8 Influenced by the civil rights and Black Power movements, other ethnic minorities protested against their inferior status in American society, notably Chicanos/as, Puerto Ricans and Native Americans. Chicanos/as formed “El Movimiento” to advance the cause of Mexican Americans living in the United States who suffered from discrimination, poor housing and working conditions, inadequate schooling, and harsh US immigration practices. One of the most visible actions was the 1965 farmworkers’ strike in California led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta to force ranchers to sign a contract with the United Farmworkers Union. Other prominent actions included the 1966 and 1969 occupation of the Kit Carson National Forest in New Mexico by La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (The Federal Alliance of Land Grants). Reies López Tijerina, who had studied the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, argued that part of the forest had been illegally taken from the local people. His group occupied the land twice until they were arrested each time.9 Native Americans, likewise, reopened the issue of broken treaties as part of increasing protests against their unfair treatment by the US Government. Many American Indians, taking pride in their heritage, moved back to their reservations from the cities. AIM (the American Indian Movement) became increasingly militant and, in order to demonstrate the seriousness of their grievances, seized such sites as Alcatraz (1970), the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington (1972) and Wounded Knee (1973), resulting in a second battle of Wounded Knee that lasted several months. Amidst protests by ethnic minorities, students questioned educational, social and governmental practices. In 1962 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was formed to agitate for democratic reform and participatory

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democracy. The Free Speech movement, which started at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, spread rapidly across the country. From the mid-1960s, opposition to the war in Vietnam gave further impetus to student and ethnic minority movements. In previous wars in which the United States had been involved (other than the Civil War), the nation had largely united behind the war effort. But the protests against the Vietnam War became so vociferous by the late 1960s that not only did public opinion turn against the government’s policy, but disillusioned veterans returning from the war formed a highly visible protest group, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). In front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran and future Senator of Massachusetts, demanded on behalf of the VVAW activists that the government end the conflict, pledging “our own determination to undertake one last mission – to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war.”10 Demonstrations against the war, military conscription and other related governmental policies frequently led to violent confrontations with the police such as at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. These confrontations reached a highpoint in the 1970 killing of four students by National Guardsmen at an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University. This event provoked student strikes at 350 universities, the closure of nearly 500 campuses and the demand by 225 student body presidents across the country for the impeachment of President Nixon.11 Parallel with the opposition to government policies, a counterculture of alternative lifestyles emerged that opposed normative social and cultural values. New social attitudes were expressed not only in political confrontations, but also in clothes, hairstyle, music, sexual permissiveness and the use of drugs. The counterculture movement interacted with the peace movement and organized such events as a 1967 demonstration in Washington at which draft cards were burned in record numbers and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Youth International Party (known as the Yippies), declared the Pentagon to be an evil monster, and attempted to levitate it.12 In 1969 the gay and lesbian liberation movement was energized by the Stonewall riot in which gay men fought back after being harassed by New York police. With so many forms of protest manifesting themselves in various dimensions of American society and intersecting with one another, the possibility of social revolution affected all of the various movements, instilling a greater awareness of the inadequacies of American society and government and making the movements more militant in their demands for


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change. Black Power, Chicano Power, Red Power, student activism, anti-war demonstrations, and countercultural practices sought to discredit and dismantle the structures of society, using both violent and peaceful means. Cultural representation became one of the key elements in such counterhegemonic strategies. African Americans, Chicanos, and other ethnic groups celebrated their distinct heritages, while the anti-war movement challenged the military culture. African Americans reversed repressive stereotypes by announcing that “black is beautiful,” wearing Afro-hairstyles, dressing in African garments, adopting African or Muslim names, and celebrating African American (especially musical and spiritual) traditions. Chicanos/as likewise venerated their Native American roots, especially their links with Aztec and Mayan cultures, as well as their Mexican traditions. War protestors rebelled against the short hair, clean shaven, clean living look of the military and the establishment. They grew long hair, beards and mustaches, flashed peace signs, placed flowers in the muzzles of guns, and urged people to “make love not war.” Drama and performance played an important role in creating and fostering such iconoclastic representations of identity in the mid-1960s.13 In particular the cultural centers run by Amiri Baraka in New York and Newark, the Teatro Campesino collective founded by Luis Valdez in California and the anti-militarist performances of VVAW exemplified this development. LeRoi Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka), worked as a poet and music critic in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s before becoming recognized as a major dramatist with his Obie winning play Dutchman (1964). Baraka increasingly aligned himself with the Black Nationalist movement and formed the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/ School in Harlem (with government funding from a government antipoverty program). After the Federal money ran dry, he moved to Newark where he established a second Black Arts center called Spirit House. These two institutions, which sponsored various types of cultural events as well as holding classes in African American culture, presented plays advocating Black Nationalism and the overthrow of white hegemony. Luis Valdez, whose parents were migrant farmworkers, wrote his first play (The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa) while studying at San Jose State College and joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe as an actor after graduating. When the United Farmworkers (UFW) launched their strike in 1965, Valdez left the Mime Troupe and, with the agreement of Chávez and Huerta, formed a theater company that would provide politicized entertainment for the farmworkers in order to strengthen the strike effort. From serving as

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the cultural wing of the UFW, the Teatro Campesino progressed into an independent theatre company, exploring and expressing Chicano cultural identity. Anti-war theatre took many forms, from street theatre to professional plays on Broadway. One of the most novel approaches was that of the VVAW. On a four-day march from Morristown, New Jersey to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania called “Operation Rapid American Withdrawal,” the Veterans enacted “search and destroy” scenes in towns and small communities to bring home the war to ordinary citizens and to challenge the popular image of the American war hero. Taking as their symbol the winter soldier from Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet (about the difficult winter at Valley Forge in 1777–8 that began, “These are the times that try men’s souls”), the Veterans reconfigured the image of the patriotic soldier into an anti-war soldier who fulfils his duty to his country by advocating the immediate termination of the war.14

Black Nationalist theatre Both Baraka and Valdez worked in close collaboration with their respective ethnic communities to present shows that were empowering and topical. Their work manifested an appreciation of the cultural traditions and history of their communities and also strongly reflected the political and social context in which they were written. Community drama in America had a long history of raising consciousness and instilling respect for individual ethnic groups. European American (especially Jewish, German, Finnish and Polish), African American, Asian American and Latino groups proliferated throughout the United States as early as the nineteenth century.15 For example, W.E.B. Du Bois, a leading figure in the Harlem renaissance, formulated a policy in 1926 of presenting African American plays “about, by, for, and near” their community. 16 What distinguished the ethnic theatre of the 1960s, was a new sense of urgency that reflected the volatile social context.17 Baraka felt the need for “a group of black revolutionaries who were artists to raise up the level of struggle from the arts sector.”18 In Dutchman and The Slave, he had already indicated the potential for Black Nationalist violence. In Dutchman he juxtaposed Clay, an African American male poet, with Lula, a young white woman who goads him for trying to assimilate into white society. He reacts by telling her that she and her race do not understand black people and their culture, and that much of African American


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music and writing is based on the antagonism felt towards whites. Clay argues that artists like Charlie Parker and Bessie Smith would not have expressed themselves as they did if they had taken direct action and murdered those who were oppressing them. He threatens Lula with images of an interracial battleground in which blacks who have become assimilated as “half-white trusties . . . will murder you. They’ll murder you, and have very rational explanations” (p. 391). In The Slave, Baraka depicted an urban insurrection that he had anticipated in Dutchman in which a black leader (loosely modeled on himself ) returns to his home to kill his white wife and her white lover and, possibly, his mixed race children. In 1964, Baraka became increasingly angry and abusive in his public pronouncements against white hegemony, and formed a secret organization called Black Arts with “paramilitary pretensions”19 that he later described as “probably a little too fanatical.”20 Its members adopted military ranks and armed themselves. Immediately following the assassination of Malcolm X, he left his white wife and children in Greenwich Village and moved to Harlem with his Black Arts group, in his words, “seeking revolution.”21 Commenting later on the cultural nationalist implications of promoting the Black Arts in Harlem, he argued that “black people themselves had first moved to a political unity, despite their differences, that they were questioning the US and its white racist monopoly capitalism.”22 They were joining others in “a militant affirmation of the African American national identity.”23 Larry Neal, a fellow Black Nationalist, reflected, “Implicit in the Black Arts Movement is the idea that Black people, however dispersed, constitute a nation within the belly of white America. This is not a new idea. Garvey said it and the Honorable Elijah Muhammed says it now. And it is on this idea that the concept of Black Power is predicated.”24 Baraka described himself, in his move to Harlem, as a “fanatical [black] patriot!,” coming “back to [my] countrymen charged up with the desire to be black, uphold black, &c.”25 Linking his own efforts in Harlem with the independence struggles in Africa, he wrote, The emergence of the independent African states and the appearance of African freedom fighters, fighting guerrilla wars with white colonialism, was destined to produce young intellectuals (and older ones too) who reveled in the spirit of defiant revolution and sought to use it to create art. An art that would reach the people, that would take them higher, ready them for war and victory, as popular as the Impressions or the Miracles or Marvin Gaye. That was our vision and its image kept us stepping, heads high and backs straight.26

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In his provocative 1965 essay “The Revolutionary Theatre,” Baraka advocated a “political theatre” that “should force change: it should be change.” He suggested that “white men will cower before this theatre because it hates them.” Criticizing previous work such as his own Dutchman and The Slave for portraying victims of a racist society, he predicted that the “Revolutionary Theatre . . . will soon begin to be peopled with new kinds of heroes” and would create a “theatre of assault.”27 An example of this kind of play was Charles Patterson’s Black Ice, which was staged by the Black Arts on the streets of Harlem as well as indoors in 1965. The play shows the kidnapping of a white Congressman by four black revolutionaries who hope to ransom him for one of their jailed comrades who is about to be executed. Their escape plan goes awry when “a brother,” a ship captain who is supposed to transport them out of the country, informs on them, and the police kill all of the gang except Martha, the only female member, who has been left behind to guard the Congressman. While he pleads for her to release him, saying that he’ll “fix everything” (p. 565), she coolly shoots him on the grounds that his death “should step up the pace of the revolution” (p. 560). The play ends as she brutally informs him, “You didn’t die very well!” (p. 565). By contrast, Baraka’s Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself! shows a fight between two African Americans over whether to use violent methods to protect themselves from police violence. While they are fighting with each other, a female character tries unsuccessfully to persuade them to join together against the police. The white policemen arrive and shoot all three of them, with one saying, “Dumb niggers . . . we oughtta send ’em all to the goddam gas chamber” (p. 10). His play JELLO which he says was “seen by more Black People than most plays . . . because this was one of the plays we took out into the streets in harlem and in other streets across the country”28 parodied the famous television personalities Jack Benny and Rochester from the Jack Benny Show. In JELLO, Rochester refuses to play Jack Benny’s amiable servant any longer or tolerate his patronizing attitude. Benny fires him and Rochester proceeds to take revenge by abusing and robbing him. When another character from the show, Don Wilson, enters, Don thinks it is all a joke and laughs at Jack with Rochester until he realizes that the tables have been turned. He, Mary and Dennis, the other characters on the show, are all eventually robbed and Rochester departs in triumph. According to Baraka, it was usually sufficient for his group to set up for the performance in the streets of Harlem to attract a crowd. “We performed in projects, parks, the streets, alleys, playgrounds. Each night a different location, five nights, sometimes six, a week.”29 In one instance, to attract an


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audience for Black Ice, Baraka sent one of the workers in Black Arts running through the streets “with a pistol chasing one of the characters in Black Ice. The bloods seeing a brother with a gun chasing somebody who looked like a white man made a crowd instantly, and the show began!”30 After moving back to his birthplace in Newark, Baraka established a second cultural center, called Spirit House, where he produced plays, organized musical and other community events and started a basement press called Jihad Productions (using the Muslim term for struggle which has popularly been translated as “holy war”) that produced cheaply stenciled publications including his own plays and poetry. His own play Black Mass, which was produced in Newark in 1966, presented a Frankenstein-style experiment in a prehistoric age when Africans were the only human beings. Yacoub, an African scientist, is engaged in an experiment to create a new kind of human being, against the advice of his colleagues. The experiment goes badly wrong as the newly invented creature, who is a psychopathic white beast, turns on his creator and kills him and his associates. At the end of the play, the beast, on his way to the northern caves, invades and threatens the audience as he exits the theatre. A final voice-over urges the spectators to engage in a revolutionary struggle against him and his descendants: “And so Brothers and Sisters, these beasts are still loose in the world . . . Let us find them and slay them. Let us lock them in their caves. Let us declare the Holy War. The Jihad. Or we cannot deserve to live.”31 Larry Neal in 1968 called this Baraka’s “most important play.” Based on the Muslim myth in which “Yacub [sic], a Black scientist, developed the means of grafting different colors of the Original Black Nation until a White Devil was created,” Neal argued, “It is informed by a mythology that is wholly the creation of the Afro-American sensibility.” 32 In addition to its cultural nationalist stance, the play also raised questions about the practical role of art in society and the need for politically driven work. In Yacoub’s dismissal of his colleague’s admonitions, Black Mass signaled the danger of creativity for its own sake rather than for a political purpose, and it demonstrated the hazard of using one’s creative gifts without sufficient concern for the welfare of one’s fellow humans. Similarly, Baraka’s Slave Ship, which he first directed at Spirit House in 1967, was a cultural history lesson about oppression and rebellion. Set on a slave ship in which the slaves suffer in darkness while the white seamen laugh at them from above deck, vignettes of African American history are shown, such as an attempted slave rebellion and a more contemporary rebellion of African Americans against white supremacy. At the end of the

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play the African Americans kill an Uncle Tom type of preacher and his white boss and then invite the audience to join them in dancing on the stage. In the midst of this celebration, according to the stage directions, once the “audience [are] relaxed, somebody throws the preacher’s head into center of floor,” (p. 16) leaving the audience to contemplate this image. Not all the plays produced by Black Arts or Spirit House were grim. In Ben Caldwell’s Prayer Meeting; or, The First Militant Preacher, a burglar who is trying to rob a black preacher’s house is interrupted by the entrance of the preacher. The preacher, not noticing the burglar, starts to pray and seek guidance because his congregation are beginning to challenge his nonviolent stance. The burglar scoffs at him and intends to confront him “man to man.” But the preacher assumes the burglar’s voice to be the voice of God, and so the burglar goes along with the illusion, ordering the preacher to change his message and not condone police violence any more. “I want my people to be ready when they come. The shit you preachin’ gon’ get my people hurt!” (p. 421). He accuses the preacher of living comfortably while the people are suffering. “Ain’t nobody afraid of dyin’ but you. And those like you who’re so comfortable they’ve forgot they’re victims.” When the preacher asks if the “black people [are] your ‘chosen people,’” the burglar answers: “You goddamn right! and you and everybody else better ack like it!” By the end of the burglar’s tirade, the preacher is ready to change his tune and gets out his gun, which he places next to his Bible. The play finishes with him rehearsing a revolutionary sermon: “Brothers and sisters, I had a talk with God last night. He told me to tell you that the time has come to put an end to this murder, suffering, oppression, exploitation to which the white man subjects us. The time has come to put an end to the fear which, for so long, suppressed our actions. The time has come . . . ” (pp. 421; 422). Although it is a comic farce because of the mistaken identity of the burglar as God and because of the coarse dialect that he uses, the play succeeds in making a number of serious points, such as revealing the self-interest of the black clergy in maintaining their position of nonviolence. Furthermore, while the burglar comically continues to steal the preacher’s property at the same time as acting as God, the preacher’s decision to renounce nonviolence, registers as deadly serious because of the social context in which it was staged. The Black Revolutionary Theatre influenced numerous writers and artists such as Ed Bullins, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange and August Wilson. Similar theatre groups and cultural organizations developed around the country like the Muntu reading group in Philadephia (with Larry Neal and Charles Fuller, author of the 1981 Pulitzer prize-winning A Soldiers’


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Play), Black Arts/West, later renamed Black House, in Oakland (with Eldridge Cleaver and Ed Bullins), the Dashiki Project Theatre in New Orleans, Concept East in Detroit, Black Arts/West in Seattle, and Studio Watts Workshop in Los Angeles.33 By the late 1960s, a rift had emerged between the various Black Nationalist organizations. While some Black Nationalists maintained a policy of black separatism, the Black Panthers moved towards a Marxist–Leninist position, making political alliances with other radical groups including whites. A further split divided political nationalists who, according to Cleveland Sellers, “advocated immediate confrontation” from cultural nationalists “who contended that armed warfare should come after the people were educated and united.” 34 The symbols of the Black Panthers and other political nationalist organizations “were the tools of warfare: rifles, bombs, bandoliers and pistols” while the cultural nationalists “adopted certain symbols that they considered representative of ‘negritude’ . . . African [or Arabic] names, hair styles, family organization and art. They opened small shops in nearly every major city in the nation during 1968 and 1969, which sold a wide variety of items imported from Africa.”35 Ron Karenga for example, a cultural nationalist who influenced Baraka,36 wrote in Negro Digest in 1968, “The battle we are waging now is the battle for the minds of Black people, and that if we lose this battle, we cannot win the violent one.”37 Karenga in defining Black Art supported the kind of work that Baraka was doing. It “must expose the enemy, praise the people and support the revolution. It must be like LeRoi Jones’s poems that are assassins’ poems, poems that kill and shoot guns and ‘wrassle cops into alleys taking their weapons, leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.’”38 According to Sellers, “Political nationalists were generally scornful of their Cultural counterparts. They were convinced that the great amount of attention being lavished on art and culture was dysfunctional and misleading. They were in favor of armed confrontation. They frequently contended that ‘the obligation of the revolutionary is to make revolution.’ They also said that the most revolutionary act possible at the time was taking up a gun and going down on the ‘pigs.’”39 However, neither the cultural nationalists nor the political nationalists ever achieved as widespread backing as the civil rights movement. By 1969, with the election of Nixon, repressive police measures and the FBI’s counter-intelligence program had undermined the various factions and put most of the leadership out of action.40 Baraka himself later moved towards a Marxist–Leninist position. His play The Motion of History (1976) retells American history as a series of rebellions by the poor white and black

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populations who have been kept separate by the establishment and need to come together to win the class struggle. In his autobiography Baraka criticized his earlier racist, sexist and essentialist approach. “There was a deep anti-white feeling I carried with me that had grown deeper and deeper since I left the Village. I felt it was a maturing, but in some aspects it was that I was going off the deep end. To the extent that what I felt opposed white supremacy and imperialism, it was certainly correct. But to the extent that I merely turned white supremacy upside down and created an exclusivist black supremacist doctrine, that was bullshit.”41

El Teatro Campesino The Teatro Campesino, although less aggressive than the Black Revolutionary Theatres in Harlem and Newark, equally stressed the urgent need for action and fostered a positive (and equally essentialized) identity for Chicanos/as. In an article originally published in 1966, Valdez argued that the UFW strike was not simply economic but concerned the deeper issue of cultural identity: “Beyond unionization, beyond politics, there is the desire of a New World race to reconcile the conflicts of its 500-year-old history. La Raza is trying to find its place in the sun it once worshiped as a Supreme Being.” The Raza or race, according to Valdez, had been disabled by the intermarrying of Spaniards with Native Americans “creating a nation of bewildered halfbreeds in countless shapes, colors and sizes . . . we mestizos solved the problem [of identity] with poetic license and called ourselves la raza.” Emphasizing the importance of unity and a sense of common nationhood as demonstrated in the 280-mile UFW march from Delano to Sacramento, Valdez suggested, “The unity of thousands of raza on the Capitol steps [of Sacramento] was reason enough for our march. Under the name of HUELGA we had created a Mexican American patria, and Cesar Chavez was our first Presidente.”42 Like Baraka, Valdez predicted dynamic social change: “There are millions more where we came from, across the thousand miles of common border between Mexico and the United States. For millions of farmworkers, from the Mexicans and Filipinos of the West to the Afro-Americans of the South, the United States has come to a social, political and cultural impasse. Listen to these people, and you will hear the first murmurings of revolution.”43 Initially, the Teatro Campesino presented comic bi-lingual skits (called actos) that reflected important issues in the strike. Developed through improvisation, the actos were accompanied by live music and used strong visual


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images and a very physical and presentational style of acting. The small collective of actors consisted mostly of farm workers, and, like the Paterson Strike Pageant, their authenticity as such and as members of the same community as their audience, was initially as important as their message. Moreover, like Baraka’s Black Revolutionary Theatre, El Teatro Campesino did not wait for an audience to come to the theatre but often took their shows directly into the fields on a flatbed truck, entertaining the farmworkers where they worked and encouraging them to support the strike. Las Dos Caras del Patroncito (Two Faces of the Boss, 1965), which showed a farmworker swapping roles with his employer, was a light-hearted piece about the conditions of the Mexican American farmworker. The boss, who has been exploiting the farmworker, wears a pig’s mask and complains about the responsibilities of his wealthy lifestyle. When he suggests changing places with his employee, the farmworker hesitates but reluctantly agrees. The farmworker, now wearing the pig’s mask, begins to enjoy his power and exploits the boss. When the boss wants to change back to his former status, the farmworker refuses. In exasperation the boss seeks help from the other farmworkers and the union, and ends by finally calling for a strike – “Huelga” (strike). 44 Similarly, La Quinta Temporada (The Fifth Season, 1966) represented, via an allegory reflecting ancient Aztec beliefs, how the farmworker could win the strike by depriving the employer of his earnings during the harsh winter months. At the end of the play, after the employer has conceded defeat and signed a contract with the worker, the character of Winter removes his sign and declares himself to be the fifth season – the season of Social Justice (“La Justicia social”) – and kicks the labor contractor off the stage.45 By the time of the 1966 UFW march to Sacramento, El Teatro Campesino had built up a repertoire of short plays to entertain UFW supporters in some twenty towns along the way. Their efforts culminated in a performance in Freeport, just outside the state capital, at which “August´ın Lira, wearing a huge fake paunch,” impersonated Edmund Brown, the Governor of California. He arrived at the rally amidst blaring sirens and flashing lights, climbed out of his car and was helped onto the stage by the “growers” who coached him to speak Spanish by teaching him such phrases as, “No Huelga” and “no boycoteo.” Not only did Lira (as the governor) manage to speak Spanish, but, according to Valdez, “he spoke so ardently that he turned into a Mexican” and was finally dragged off the stage shouting “Huelga! Huelga” much to the delight of the audience.46 Although Newsweek in 1967 quoted Valdez as saying, “We shouldn’t be judged as theater, we’re really part of a cause,”47 the Teatro Campesino

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became increasingly prolific and professional, and they launched their first national tour in 1967, receiving an Obie award “for creating a worker’s theatre to demonstrate the politics of survival.”48 In the same year they separated from the UFW to create a cultural center in Del Ray, California. As they became nationally known, they spawned a host of other Chicano theatre companies around the country which were mainly student-based, such as Teatro de la Esperanza formed in 1969 and Teatro de la Gente in 1970. In 1971 the various teatros founded an organization called TENAZ, El Teatro Nacional de Aztlán, to coordinate the activities of the different groups in both the United States and Mexico, and to facilitate communication and organize annual events. As El Teatro Campesino progressed towards an independent professional theatre company, their work developed in scope, with longer and more complex plays. Rather than focusing on the immediate problems of the strike, they produced plays about Chicano identity and a wide variety of grievances. Influenced by “El Movimiento,” they represented Chicanos/as as anti-assimilationist. Valdez explained, After years of isolation in the barrios of Great Valley slum towns like Delano, after years of living in labor camps and ranches at the mercy and caprice of growers and contractors, the Mexican American farmworker is developing his own ideas about living in the United States. He wants to be equal with all the working men of the nation, and he does not mean by the standard middle-class route. We are repelled by the human disintegration of peoples and cultures as they fall apart in this Great Gringo Melting Pot, and determined that this will not happen to us.49

In his earlier play The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, which he revised for performances by the Teatro Campesino from 1968, Valdez depicted a Chicano family divided over the question of assimilation. Domingo, one of the sons, denies his heritage in order to progress in Anglo-American society. He speaks proper English, changes his name to “Sunday,” dresses in Anglo clothes, buys a fancy car and makes money as a labor contractor, living off the earnings of his neighbors. By the end of the play he has become a social worker and he announces, “Now I’m middle class! I got out of the poverty I lived in because I cared about myself. Because I did something to help myself ” (p. 204). His selfishness allows him to forget his home and family, and he is prepared to turn his brother Joaqu´ın over to the police. By contrast, another brother Belarmino, the hero of the play, has a revolutionary head (that of Pancho Villa) but no body, while Joaqu´ın has


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a tough “pachuco” (gangster) body, but loses his head. In the closing lines, Belarmino reassures the audience that the head and body will soon unite to lead the next revolution: “Pancho Villa will pass among you again” (p. 207). Similarly, El Teatro’s production of Los Vendidos (1967) parodied the US government policy of assimilation. Los Vendidos (The Sell-Outs) is set in a store selling Mexican Americans stereotypes. The salesman shows his wares to, Miss Jimenez, who, denying her ethnic identity, wants to buy a safe type of Mexican American for the Governor who needs “a brown face in the crowd” at his luncheon. The salesman shows her his various products such as the farmworker, the revolutionary and the pachuco all of which she rejects until he demonstrates his assimilationist model Eric who can “function on boards.” She is persuaded to make the purchase when she hears him deliver a “patriotic” speech: “The problems of the Mexican stem from one thing and one thing only: he’s stupid. He’s uneducated. He needs to stay in school. He needs to be ambitious, forward-looking, harder-working. He needs to think American, American, American, American, American! God bless America!”50 As she hands over the money to the salesman, the models show their true colors and attack her, and, after chasing her out of the shop, they split the proceeds. When the play was adapted for KNBC television in 1973, the Teatro changed the ending, because of criticism that it was simply a revenge play.51 They added a new ending that indicated that the episode was part of an elaborate plot by Chicanos to place their people in significant points around the country to defend their interests.52 In addition to plays about assimilation, El Teatro Campesino portrayed grievances with the Vietnam War. By 1970, over 27,000 Chicanos had been sent to Vietnam of whom about a third (more than 8,000) had died, and many Chicanos (including veterans) were beginning to protest against the war. A Chicano veteran described how he became a member of the VVAW, While I was in basic training and when I went to Vietnam . . . I really thought we were doing something for our country. I really believed we were stopping communism . . . I wasn’t aware until after I got out how I was used and how we all were used and what a lost cause it was . . . It took . . . four months after I was out to really understand what was happening. It was in that period of time I joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and I was in every protest . . . on Vietnam while I was in college. 53

At the National Chicano Moratorium, an initially peaceful anti-war rally in Los Angeles’s Laguna Park in the summer of 1970 at which approximately 25,000 people gathered, 1,200 police in riot gear dispersed the crowd with

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tear gas and killed the popular Chicano journalist Rubén Salazar, who had been critical of police violence.54 The anti-war plays by El Teatro Campesino depicted the effects of the war on the Chicano population. In Vietnam Campesino (1970) General Defense, a Vietnam veteran at the Pentagon and Butt Anglo, a major agricultural producer, plot how to work together to their mutual advantage. General Defense agrees to buy Butt’s lettuce crop with government money and turn it into cigarettes for the troops, and later to soak it in ddt and drop it on the Vietnamese. Meanwhile, the Chicanos are coerced into supporting the war effort. General Defense boasts, “Mexicans are pouring into the army. We just give ‘em a pretty little uniform, a few pesos, a blessing from mamacita, and wham-o, they’re on the frontlines. Those boys are just dying to show their machismo.”55 The play makes clear that the war effort is not in the interest of Chicanos/as and it exploits their sense of loyalty to the American government. Furthermore, the military conscription policies are shown to discriminate against the poor and the minorities. An anthropomorphic figure of the draft (dressed as a skeleton with an American flag for a shroud) conscripts a helpless campesino against his will. But when the draft threatens to conscript Butt Anglo’s son, General Defense comes to his aid and tells the draft, “What’s the matter with you, Draft? Haven’t I told you to stick to the minorities? Go draft some Mexicans, some Indians, some Blacks, some Asians, some Puerto Ricans.”56 Vietnam Campesino implied that the Chicano/a farmworkers had more in common with the Vietnam peasantry than with the American government. The war, whose purpose is vague, endangers the peasantry in both countries. General Defense, comparing the Vietnamese peasants on one side of the stage and the Chicano/a farmworkers on the other, points at the Vietnamese peasants and says, “Farmworkers just like them farmworkers . . . Campesinos just like them campesinos . . . Poor people just like them poor people . . . And we’ve been killing them for ten years . . . They aren’t people, they’re gooks.” Then indicating the Chicanos/as, he adds, “And these are greasers, spics, chilli-ass taco benders. They deserve to die.”57 The play also parallels the use by the growers of pesticides on American agriculture that harms the health of the farmworkers and the use by the American military of chemical warfare in Vietnam such as napalm and Agent Orange (all of which were being supplied by the American petro-chemical industry and whose ill effects had still not been investigated adequately by 2000.)58 The government authorities display a similar lack of concern for humanity in dropping chemical weapons on peasants in Vietnam as do the growers in


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crop dusting by plane while the farmworkers are working in the fields.59 By the end of the play it becomes clear to the Chicano/a characters that they have more in common with the Vietnamese peasants than with the US military industrial complex and that both peoples have been subjected to inhumane treatment by the American government. The Chicano farmworkers begin to recognize that their real enemies are not the Vietnamese but the authorities in their own country. padre: (To his wife.) Oye, vieja, esas gentes son iguales que nosotros. [Listen, dear, those people look just like us.] madre: ¿ Verdad que s´ı? Y a ellos también les dicen comunistas. [Isn’t it true? And they call them communists, too.] padre: Pero nomás son pobres campesinos. [But they’re just poor farm workers.] (To Vietnamese.) ¡Oye, Vietnam! [Hey, Vietnam!] (Vietnamese turn toward campesinos. PADRE and MADRE give them the peace sign.) (p. 115)60

At the end of the play, the Vietnamese and Chicano peasants indicate that they should both oppose the war and support each other’s struggle for self-determination. The Chicano soldier announces, “The war in Vietnam continues, asesinando familias inocentes de campesinos. Los Chicanos mueren en la guerra, y los rancheros se hacen ricos [assassinating innocent farmworker families. The Chicanos die in the war, and the growers get rich], selling their scab products to the Pentagon. The fight is here. Raza! En Aztlán.” Both the Chicanos and Vietnamese peasants join together in shouting, “En Aztlán,” and the final stage directions read, “They all raise their fists in the air, in silence” (p. 120). This ending which implied a Marxist ideological position by hinting at an international class struggle of workers against capitalism, promoted solidarity between Chicanos and Vietnamese in a fight for self-determination. It also implied a rejection of American national values through the creation of an alternative cultural nationalism based around the notion of the Raza and the symbol of Aztlán, the ancient kingdom of the Aztecs. The play raised the hackles of some of the community and after suffering red-baiting,61 the Teatro Campesino produced a less controversial play called Soldado Razo (1971), about a young Chicano who wants to fight in Vietnam and is accompanied by the figure of Death as he says goodbye to his family and his girlfriend before departing for the war. He returns shortly thereafter in a coffin. When El Teatro Campesino moved again and settled permanently in San Juan Bautista in 1971, Valdez encouraged the actors to explore more

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deeply the cultural heritage of the Chicano people. In his poetic treatise Pensamiento Serpentino, Valdez outlined the importance of Mayan beliefs: In order to fully evolve (evolucionar con la serpiente) [to evolve with the serpent] the Chicano Movement must move con el movement of the Cosmos with the nahui ollin el quinto sol, sol de movimiento . . . [the four solar movements (i.e. seasons), the fifth sun, sun of movement]. As Chicanos As Neo Mayas we must re-identify with that [cosmic] center and proceed outward with love and strength amor y fuerza and undying dedication to justice . . . Jesucristo is Quetzalcóatl The colonization is over La Virgen de Guadalupe is Tonantz´ın The suffering is over The universe is Aztlán The revolution is now.62 Departing from the acto style and the quasi-Marxist political stance, Valdez began to conduct ritual ceremonies with the actors and develop plays called mitos (myths) which emphasized the links with Native American spirituality. The actors, initially skeptical of the new spiritual practices that Valdez introduced, came to accept them. 63 But when the company produced El Baile de los Gigantes (The Dance of the Giants), a re-creation of a centuries-old ceremony, at the TENAZ festival outside Mexico City in 1974, members of other theatre companies (especially the more politically oriented groups from Latin America) criticized their new direction, with the result that Teatro Campesino withdrew from the TENAZ organization.


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In the mid-1970s, the company transformed their style again towards plays in the folktale tradition called corridos, such as La Carpa de los Rasquachis (The Tent of the Underdogs) and Fin del Mundo (End of the World). Beginning with a series of images from Chicano cultural history, including Tonantz´ın (the Aztec earth mother goddess), the Virgen del Guadalupe, Pancho Villa, and Aztec dancing, La Carpa tells the story of a young Mexican farmworker who is enticed to come to America by figures representing the devil and death. He is forced to work long hours for little pay because he is an illegal immigrant. He marries a fellow farmworker, and they rapidly produce a large family and take up residence in the barn of a grower. When he is asked to go on strike he refuses and with no prospects, he finally dies in poverty and despair. However, Tonantz´ın reappears to him and enables him to return to the moment of decision. This time he chooses to go on strike and the play ends happily.64 In 1978 El Teatro Campesino moved towards the mainstream, hiring outside actors for their production of Valdez’s Zoot Suit and downgrading the importance of operating collectively. As a result of the commercial success of Zoot Suit, which reached Broadway and was made into a film, Valdez spent most of the next twenty years working in Hollywood while the Teatro became a producing house in a converted warehouse that Valdez bought for the company with the proceeds from Zoot Suit. At the end of the millennium, the enthusiasm of his three sons reinvigorated the Teatro Campesino (especially after one of them had suffered the indignity of arbitrary arrest by the police), and they produced energetic renditions of earlier plays, such as Mundo Mata (2001) based on Fin del Mundo (and rewritten for them by Valdez) and La Carpa de los Rasquachis (2001) that reflected the historical and ongoing struggle for social justice for Chicanos/as.

Anti-war theatre In addition to El Teatro Campesino, theatre companies around the country such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Living Theatre, the Bread and Puppet Theatre, and the Open Theatre staged anti-war performances. The war also spawned a host of significant plays that called into question America’s role in Vietnam and challenged the dominant image of the military, such as Vietnam veteran David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1968), Sticks and Bones (1969) and Streamers (1976), and Daniel Berrigan’s Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1969), a docu-drama about civil disobedience as an anti-war strategy. Even Vietnam veterans took part in

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anti-war performances, such as the street theatre organized by the VVAW in their 1970 Operation Rapid American Withdrawal, “a four day searchand-destroy operation.”65 The VVAW in their performances created an alternative vision of the American war hero. Rather than representing the clean-cut soldier fighting for a moral cause, the VVAW showed the brutal tactics of American soldiers in their victimization of innocent civilians. Likewise, they themselves played a new role in society: that of the anti-war soldier. William Crandell, one of the VVAW who participated in the fourday protest march, described their form of street theatre: “Along the route, while veterans of other wars denounced our long hair and our message, we staged typical Vietnam War incidents with members of the Philadelphia Guerrilla Theater and Nurses for Peace. They played civilians whom we roughed up, rounded up, and took away.”66 The VVAW filmed the proceedings and interviewed the veterans en route from Morristown to Valley Forge. One of the VVAW explained, “What we’re doing with these incidents is we’re trying to let these people know what it feels like to be Vietnamese trying to show them by not playing with yellow people, [but] playing with white middle American people, let them know what it’s like to have no political freedom and have someone come and impose their will on you.”67 The New York Times reported, While passing through this rural Somerset County [of New Jersey] community, the marchers attempted to dramatize what they said it was actually like when American soldiers passed through a South Vietnamese village. In a series of staged incidents, the marchers seized a private home just north of here and in a mock enactment of a combat operation, terrorized its occupants, all of whom had agreed earlier to participate in the demonstration. Less than an hour later, a ‘search-and-destroy patrol’ moved ahead of the main column into the downtown section here [in Bernardsville, NJ] While a state police helicopter whirred overhead and dozens of townspeople looked on, the patrol seized a young woman who had been planted there earlier by the marchers and dragged her away, shouting obscenities and abuse at her.68

The scenes recorded in the VVAW documentary film Different Sons look horrific. The soldiers, wearing combat uniforms and carrying realisticlooking toy M-16 rifles, threatened people in small communities and towns, captured planted actors who were threatened with knives, and strung up from trees and “tortured,” or “shot,” their clothes soaked in “blood.” Brutally interrogating one man who was strung up, the soldier shouted, “What


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have you got in that barn . . . If you’re lying, you’re gonna die, pappa san.” To another who was tied up, a soldier shouted, “get on your feet, gook.” After stringing him up, one of the soldiers took his sharp knife and held it against his neck and ran it along his stomach, shouting, “How many V.C.? Beaucoup V.C.?” To another one who was blindfolded and tied up, a soldier announced, “This guy is wasting our time. We’ve gotta move it. We better get rid of him.” To a fellow soldier, indicating that the prisoner was about to be murdered, he shouted, “All yours sweetheart.” In another incident, the soldiers took prisoner a “bystander” who objected to their “killing” his friend in the street. They tied and blindfolded him and dragged him away, shouting, “cut his belly open. Cut his belly open.” Interrogating him and putting a knife to his throat, a soldier repeatedly shouted, “Who you working for . . . Who are you with.” To which he answered, “I’m with nobody.” Another soldier ordered, “Kill him!” At the end of one of the incidents, a VVAW spokesman announced to the crowd, “What you have just seen is something that Vietnamese people experience every day. Absolute repression. An infringement on all civil liberties and it’s done in your name. They are murdered and butchered . . . by guys like us who are carrying out the policy of this government that you are allowing to continue.”69 Not surprisingly, one of the spectators commented, “I think it is well done. It doesn’t feel like a simulation, [it] feels like the real thing.”70 Another spectator commented, “It was very effective. I got scared seeing all those guns on main street.”71 By contrast, an opponent of the demonstration, commented, “Respect for law and order, respect for the military has broken down completely.”72 The scenes were not only realistic for the spectators but also for the soldiers-turned-actors. Occasionally they evoked psychological flashbacks for the ex-soldiers. William Crandell recalled, During one frightening moment we realized that an ex-marine who was using his old K-Bar knife to simulate torturing a prisoner had lost control and was not simulating any more. His brother vets calmed him down before he harmed anyone. Some of the “detainees” in our staged incidents were treated more roughly than we intended, and I remember very clearly my shock at how concerted an effort I had to make to keep my finger off the trigger of my dummy submachine gun.73

As they passed through towns on the way to Valley Forge, the veterans distributed leaflets indicating that the American conduct in Vietnam had fallen short of the John Wayne image in Second World War films,

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A US infantry company just came through here. If you had been Vietnamese, we might have burned your house . . . shot your dog . . . shot you . . . raped your wife and daughter . . . turned you over to your government for torture. If it doesn’t bother you that American soldiers do these things every day to the Vietnamese simply because they are “Gooks,” then picture yourself as one of the silent victims. Help end this war before they turn your son into a butcher or a co rps e.74

When they arrived at Valley Forge, the VVAWs met with other supporters, some in wheelchairs with limbs missing, as well as a small counter demonstration of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). One of the counter demonstrators justified the continuation of the war, saying of the Vietnamese: “They’re not people, they’re animals . . . Any communist – I don’t care what his nationality, color, or what . . . if he’s a communist – he is a beast – he is a godless beast!”75 Another spectator, wearing a Veterans of Foreign Wars hat, commented, “I think these are a bunch of younger boys who have been duped by higher ups . . . by reds . . . communists . . . [in] high places . . . They know what they’re doing here today is wrong. They should be standing here with us.” A chaplain for the Veterans of Foreign Wars announced that the VVAW were influenced by Satan and called the demonstration “another plot to divide America.”76 At the end of the march, after a body bag with the label “your son?” written across it was hauled into a truck, one of the VVAW said of their actions, “I think we’ve raised some questions. I don’t think we’ve converted anyone. I think we’ve caused them to think a bit. And I think that’s all we set out to do, to make them think.” The VVAWs, including some with missing limbs, ended their protest action with a ritual breaking of their weapons followed by shouts of “Peace Now.” The following year the VVAW staged their own war crimes tribunal at which William Crandell testified, We went to preserve the peace, and our testimony will show that we have set all of Indochina aflame. We went to defend the Vietnamese people and our testimony will show that we are committing genocide against them. We went to fight for freedom and our testimony will show that we have turned Vietnam into a series of concentration camps. We went to guarantee the right of self-determination to the people of South Vietnam and our testimony will show that we are forcing a corrupt and dictatorial government upon them. We went to work toward the brotherhood of man and our testimony will show that our strategy and tactics are permeated with racism. We went to protect America and our testimony will show why our country is being torn apart by what we are doing in Vietnam.77


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Summary The 1960s were a time of deep social unrest with widespread protest against government policies and normative social attitudes by ethnic minorities, students, anti-war activists and counter-culturists. Theatre and performance were used by many groups to redefine social mores and provide counterhegemonic notions of national identity. African American and Chicano theatre staged cultural nationalist images that redefined their image in line with the Black Power and Chicano movements. They formulated notions of ethnic identity that helped induce strong feelings of community, and utilized trans-coding strategies by transforming formerly negative images (such as the names Black and Chicano) into positive ones. Although later criticized for being sexist, racist and homophobic, these essentialized social constructions challenged normative values and empowered African American and Chicano groups. More recently, such essentialist constructions have been justified on the grounds that essentialism is necessary, for example, in nationalist and anti-colonial struggles, to increase solidarity and political power.78 Baraka’s Black Arts and Black Revolutionary Theatre staged performances that celebrated African American history and culture. Fomenting revolution and urging the overthrow of the white establishment, the Black Revolutionary Theatre played a strong part in the Black Nationalist movement of the 1960s.79 After the movement split, Baraka adopted a Marxist– Leninist stance that called for a multiracial coalition in a class struggle. El Teatro Campesino in the late 1960s and early 70s created a large body of work that helped solidify a notion of Chicano identity. Responding to the impetus of the Chicano Movement, their cultural nationalist stance was anti-assimilationist and based on the self-contradictory notion of Chicanos as a separate race (Raza) of mixed people (mestizos/as.)80 They promoted a reinvestigation of Mexican and Native American cultural heritage, particularly Aztec and Mayan spiritual beliefs. They instilled audiences with a strong sense of pride in their cultural identity, contributed to the success of the UFW strike and raised questions about US government and military policies. Anti-war plays and performances also challenged normative attitudes of national consensus about the war and created counter-hegemonic representations of the American war hero. Plays such as Sticks and Bones and Streamers by David Rabe showed confused and disillusioned American soldiers who were asked to fight in a war in which they did not believe. Likewise,

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the actions of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in performing anti-war skits through American towns on the way to Valley Forge created a strong counter image to Thomas Paine’s original winter soldier or the heroic figure of chauvinistic Second World War films. The VVAW demonstrated that “the times that try men’s souls” are not only the difficult moments on the battlefield but also the moral decisions that soldiers must sometimes make.

 Reconfiguring patriarchy: suffragette and feminist plays

Imovement n the 1960s, concomitant with the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War protests, women grew more conscious of their disadvantaged position in society. The feminist movement agitated for a variety of social improvements: advancement in employment, equal wages for equal work, childcare facilities, measures to curb violence against women, the right to abortion (and in some countries for contraception and divorce), etc. The movement also mobilized around women’s health issues, and it organized consciousness-raising groups across the country to discuss women’s experiences and concerns with the body (health, body image, femininity and hygiene, etc.), and to increase awareness of the need for reform. Feminist theatre provided support for the feminist movement, adopting various strategies and modes for critiquing the hegemonic structures of society. Theatre like most professions was a male-dominated medium. Male directors and playwrights tended to gravitate towards male themes and male characters and so the imbalance tended to perpetuate itself. Women directors and playwrights experienced difficulty in being taken seriously. Women actors were expected to play characters within certain stereotypes – the seducing, corrupting or enslaving woman who limits the male’s freedom, the doting wife or girlfriend, or the irrational, unstable female who cannot cope with reality. From the 1960s feminists tried to transform this situation by demanding more work for women directors, writers, actors and designers; insisting that more plays by earlier women playwrights be performed; publishing anthologies of work by women past and present; creating theatre companies dedicated to performing new work by women and about women; and calling attention to the inferior status of women in society as well as in the theatrical works of male writers. A surge of activity resulted and, according to Linda Walsh Jenkins, writing in 1987, “Approximately 150 feminist groups . . . produced theatre events in the US since the 60s, and 

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in the mid-80s more than 30 were still active with new groups forming as older ones closed.”1 When Julia Miles requested plays by women in 1978 for her Women’s Project at the American Place Theatre, she was inundated with scripts, thirty of which she presented in readings and seven in small productions between 1978 and 1980.2 This chapter will discuss the role of women theatre artists in attempting to de-center male dominance in society. First, it will consider the historical origins of these ideas and discuss the suffrage movement at the turn of the century, and then it will examine some of the plays and performances in the second wave of feminism from the 1960s. According to Linda Gordon, feminism provides “a critique of male supremacy, formed and offered in the light of a will to change it, which in turn assumes a conviction that it is changeable.”3 Feminist ideas in American drama date back at least as far as the American Revolution. Mercy Otis Warren and her friend Abigail Adams both supported women’s civil rights.4 Abigail wrote to her husband John Adams in 1776 encouraging a declaration of independence as well as a provision for women’s rights. I long to hear that you have declared an independency – and by the way, in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.5

In her play The Group, Warren exhibited early feminist sentiments by using the physical and psychological abuse of women by their British husbands as a metaphor for the British government’s attitude towards its colonies and as means of vilifying the British. Describing his marriage as an example for others, Hateall recounts,

SUFFRAGETTE AND FEMINIST PLAYS

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I broke her spirits when I’d won her purse; For which I’ll give a recipe most sure To ev’ry hen-peck’d husband round the board; If crabbed words or surly looks won’t tame The haughty shrew, nor bend the stubborn mind, Then the green Hick’ry, or the willow twig, Will prove a curse for each rebellious dame Who dare oppose her lord’s superior will. (p. 15)

Mercy Warren implied that American men would (or at least should) treat their wives with greater equality than the British. But women were denied the legal privileges of men in the new nation-state. During the American War for Independence, only the state of New Jersey granted women (who owned property) the right to vote, and rescinded it in 1807. Not until 1890 would the newly admitted state of Wyoming permit that right again (followed in 1893 by the already existing state of Colorado, where women suffragists campaigned effectively to change the law); and in spite of the advancement of women’s suffrage in the west, the eastern and southern states (including Massachusetts, where Susan B. Anthony went to jail for voting in the 1872 election) displayed great reluctance to change their suffrage laws until the twentieth century.6 In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, American theatre increasingly drew attention to the conditions of women and their legal and social subservience to men. Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1845) posed awkward questions about the position of women in society but provided a conventional ending in which male patriarchy reasserted itself.7 European immigration helped foster plays about the New Woman. Theofilia Samolinska, an early feminist Polish actor, wrote The Emancipation of Women, the first Polish play performed in Chicago in 1873.8 The work of Henrik Ibsen found an early audience in America, both in the original language (because of the sizeable Scandinavian immigration) and in translation. For example, numerous productions of A Doll’s House (that justifies a woman walking out on her husband and children) were staged from 1882 onwards. Although sometimes diluted with a happy ending, A Doll’s House became a favorite vehicle for some of the leading women actors, including Helena Modjeska in 1883, Mrs. Fiske in 1894, Ethel Barrymore in 1905 and Alla Nazimova in 1907. Rachel Crothers, an American playwright with twenty-seven Broadway productions in the 1920s and 30s, wrote consistently about the status of women in the early twentieth century.9 In 1912 she told a journalist, “If you

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want to see the signs of the times, watch women. Their evolution is the most important thing in modern life.”10 Such plays as A Man’s World (1909) and He and She (1912) depicted the improving status of women and the resistance by men to that change. Crothers portrayed the new independent career women of the period such as Frank Ware, a feminist writer who adopts a child whose mother has died, in A Man’s World and Ann Herford, a successful sculptor who competes with and surpasses her husband, in He and She. In 1931 she reflected: “With few exceptions every one of my plays has been a social attitude toward women at the moment I wrote it . . . I [do not] go out stalking the footsteps of women’s progress. It is something that comes to me subconsciously.”11 Likewise Susan Glaspell questioned the position of women in such plays as Trifles (1916). Co-founder with her husband George Cooke of the Provincetown Players that promoted new American drama from 1915, Glaspell contributed numerous plays to their theatre. Trifles portrayed two women, who are ridiculed by the sheriff and his men, and solve a crime that the men cannot. However, rather than handing over the evidence, the women destroy it, preferring to maintain solidarity with the female culprit because they consider her murder of her husband as justifiable. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the women’s suffrage movement, which was launched with the Seneca Falls declarations in 1848, used drama and performance as vehicles to advance their cause. This was a natural development for several reasons. First, the theatre was one of the few areas of work where women attained a sense of independence. An 1897 editorial in the New York Dramatic Mirror, while admitting that occasionally women (due to the increasing availability and acceptability of higher education for them), won distinction as doctors or lawyers, “The theatre alone of all the institutions of civilization offers to her sisters a field in which they may and do stand absolutely on an equality with men.”12 Actresses such as Mrs. John Drew and Helena Modjeska ran their own companies and individual performers could command staggering salaries such as Lillian Russell receiving $3,000 per week in 1906.13 As a taxpayer without a vote, Russell was fond of quoting the slogan, “No taxation without representation.” In offering to run for mayor of New York in 1915, she acknowledged her economic independence but political impotence, “If I were mayor I would do my best to give the city a businesslike administration, conducted on lines of strict economy. As a business woman myself I know what that means. The chief reason why I want to vote is because I pay three kinds of taxes – on my property, my income and my business – and I think I ought to have something to say


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about what is done with my money.”14 In addition to economic independence, actresses obtained greater social freedom than most other women. Although often the material of gossip columns, they frequently traveled around the country un-chaperoned and formed relatively free liaisons with men.15 Moreover, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Victorian attitude of denigrating the acting profession abated somewhat, especially as a result of Henry Irving’s knighthood in 1895. It became more acceptable for women of high social status to join acting companies, and the social standing of all actors rose accordingly.16 Secondly, the theatre attracted publicity and glamour to the cause of women’s suffrage. Prominent actresses who identified with the movement added enormously to its credibility and popularity. For example, when Ethel Barrymore attended a suffragist meeting in 1910, the headlines of the Morning Telegraph blared: “Ethel Barrymore is a suffragist.”17 Similarly when Lillian Russell marched in a suffragist parade in 1912, a newspaper commented, “Even Lillian Russell who was accustomed to riding in handsome cabs walked the long route for the glory of womanhood.”18 Mary Shaw, a prominent actor who pursued the cause more fervently and addressed women’s organizations in cities around the country where she toured, could be assured an audience for her suffragist and feminist stance because of her glamour as a Broadway star. Even vaudeville performers used their stages to agitate for women’s rights as well. The famous Victoria Theatre in New York presented a “Suffragette week” in 1909 that proved so popular that the Colonial Theatre and the Fifth Avenue Theatre emulated it.19 Some of the suffragette parades introduced theatrical conventions to promote their cause. For example, in 1913 Alice Paul, of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), organized a parade on the day preceding Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in Washington that attracted a crowd of 250,000 people. Mobilizing thousands of marchers as well as floats depicting countries where women’s suffrage had been legalized, the NAWSA staged a pageant on the steps of the Federal Treasury Building called The Allegory, which portrayed Columbia dressed as the goddess Minerva, and the five virtues associated with women – Justice, Charity, Liberty, Peace and Hope.20 Unlike most pageants that featured women in domestic roles, the parade featured women workers carrying banners indicating their many professions. Hazel MacKaye, the author of this pageant as well as three other suffrage pageants – The American Woman: Six Periods of American Life (1914), Pageant of Susan B. Anthony for the National Women’s Party in 1915, and the Equal Rights Pageant (1923) – explained this innovation,

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“Women are becoming more alive to the fact that the working world is manmade, and that women will have to put up a good fight to get a fair share as bread-winners . . . Through pageantry, we women can set forth our ideals and aspirations more graphically than in any other way.”21 An angry crowd attacked the parade and 300 women were hospitalized, but the event upstaged President Wilson’s arrival in Washington for his inauguration and provided important publicity for the movement.22 Thirdly, the British suffragists, who introduced militant tactics earlier than in America, and the British feminist actors who formed the very successful Actresses Franchise League, writing and staging their own suffragist plays, influenced the American movement. Fola LaFollette, the daughter of a famous US Senator, presented Cicely Hamilton’s How the Vote Was Won (which had been performed first in London in 1909 and toured to suffrage meetings around Britain) in a marathon series of public readings across the United States.23 A farce reminiscent of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, How the Vote Was Won lampoons the notion that women are dependent on men. In a mass action the women descend on their male relatives and refuse to do any work unless they are granted the right to vote. The men, of course, concede defeat by the end of the play.

Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women One of the earliest and most influential suffragist plays imported from London was Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women. Elizabeth Robins was an American who left her medical studies at Vassar College for the stage. She joined a stock company where she played (in her estimation) 300 parts in two years and then toured with James O’Neill and later Edwin Booth, the leading actors of the day.24 After her husband, a fellow actor, ventured into the Charles River wearing a suit of armor and drowned, she emigrated to London. Rather than depending on the actor-managers of the day for work, she and Marion Lea (another American exile) obtained the performing rights to Hedda Gabler and produced the play themselves at the Vaudeville Theatre in 1891.25 Scheduled for only five matinees, the production was so successful that it ran for five weeks with Robins and Lea acclaimed for their interpretations of Hedda and Thea respectively. William Archer called Robins’s performance “the finest piece of modern tragedy within my recollection. Sarah Bernhardt could not have done it better.”26 Their success stimulated the two women to form their own repertory company. Elizabeth Robins explained,


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We had come to realize how essential to success some freedom of judgment and action are to the actor . . . But we had further seen how freedom in the practice of our art, how the bare opportunity to practise it at all, depended, for the actress, on considerations humiliatingly different from those that confronted the actor. The stage career of an actress was inextricably involved in the fact that she was a woman and that those who were masters of the theatre were men.27

Taking advantage of her attempt to establish a professional relationship with him, for example, George Bernard Shaw sexually harassed Robins in a carriage, and, in his own words, was “flung out of the vehicle into the mud with wheels flying over me this way and that and horses dancing and stumbling on my countenance.”28 In revenge he refused her the rights to his play Candida.29 “We dreamed of an escape,” wrote Robins, “through hard work, and through deliberate abandonment of the idea of making money – beyond what would give us the wages of going on. We would organize a season – leading up to future seasons – of that Lea-Robins Joint Management, so dear to our hearts, that had already seen ‘Hedda’ through.”30 In 1892 they produced Karin by a Norwegian woman, Alfhild Agrell, about a woman who fights for the security of her family while her husband squanders his money on mistresses and ultimately kills their child through neglect. Robins next secured the rights of The Master Builder from Ibsen, receiving the play act by act as he wrote it. It proved to be, according to Robins, “my greatest triumph.”31 She felt that the play had been written about her relationship with Ibsen. The old artist, Solness, in the play receives a visit from a young woman, Hilda Wangel, who invites him to create a masterpiece which inspires him but eventually leads to his death. “Hilda Wangel is me,” exclaimed Robins on reading the play.32 Also in 1893 Robins attempted a play of her own, Alan’s Wife, which was co-written with Gertrude Bell and staged at J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre. Based on a short story about a widow who kills her handicapped child, Alan’s Wife proved to be as shocking to British critics as Ibsen’s Ghosts. Votes for Women, written in 1906 and staged at the Court Theatre in London in 1907, was Robins’s second play. Set in London and Hertfordshire following the launching of militant tactics by the British suffragette movement, the play focuses on Vida Levering, an activist campaigning for the rights of women to vote, as well as to work and to obtain decent housing. Surrounding her, the author juxtaposes an array of Edwardian characters of differing political complexions including her former lover, Geoffrey Stonor,

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a Unionist MP who abandoned her when she became pregnant. Impressed with Vida’s politics when she addresses a rally in Trafalgar Square in the second act, Jean Dunbarton asks Stonor, her fiancé, to make amends for his past wrong-doing. In the end Stonor agrees to support women’s suffrage in Parliament. Significantly the play dealt not only with middle-class characters but also showed working-class women agitating for the vote as well as for decent wages and working and living conditions. Vida Levering calls for justice for all classes of women, in particular for those at the bottom of society who are abused by men. In her maiden speech at Trafalgar Square, she reports a touching news story, echoing her own past experience, about a young woman who was being tried for leaving a dead infant on the steps of her master’s house: This, as you’ll remember, was about a little working girl – an orphan of eighteen – who crawled with the dead body of her new born child to her master’s back door, and left the baby there. She dragged herself a little way off and fainted. A few days later she found herself in court, being tried for the murder of her child. Her master – a married man – had of course reported the ‘find’ at his back door to the police, and he had been summoned to give evidence. The girl cried out to him in the open court, “You are the father!” He couldn’t deny it. The Coroner at the jury’s request censured the man, and regretted that the law didn’t make him responsible. But he went scot-free. And that girl is now serving her sentence in Strangeways Gaol. (p. 71)

Vida proceeds in her speech to question the fairness of an all-male British justice system that tries and convicts women. Men make boast that an English citizen is tried by his peers. What woman is tried by hers? . . . A woman is arrested by a man, brought before a man judge, tried by a jury of men, condemned by men, taken to prison by a man, and by a man she’s hanged! Where in all this were her “peers”? (p. 72)

Votes for Women inspired a wave of suffragist dramas as well as the Actresses Franchise League, formed in 1908 in Britain. Robins also rewrote it as a novel called The Convert, which was published in 1907. Two years after its London production, Votes for Women premiered in New York in 1909 under the auspices of the Actors Alliance of America to great enthusiasm. According to the theatre historian Robert Schanke, the New York opening night was


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more like a political rally than a theatrical premiere. Suffragettes representing the Interurban Council of Women Suffrage Clubs, the Union Club, and the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women crowded the theatre. Members of the American Suffragettes were conspicuous with yellow buttons pinned to their lapels. Banners flew from the balcony. Women from the Harlem Equal Rights League marched during intermission with placards reading “Women vote in 4 Western States. Why not in New York?” Frequent bursts of applause accompanied entrances and exits, the rise and fall of the curtain, and emotion-filled lines of dialogue added to the excitement.33

While criticizing the dogmatic nature of the play, the New York Times praised the performance of Mary Shaw, who played the heroine, Vida Levering, and particularly commended her speech at the Trafalgar Square suffrage rally: In the character she is assuming it is necessary for Miss Shaw to convey a sense of a woman shriking [sic] at an unusual task, an impulse to throw herself heart and soul into the movement in which she believes, and, at the same time, a natural reticence in the face of conditions she has not learned to meet. The crowd jeers and yells, for every word of encouragement there is a catcall of disgust, and yet, slowly but surely, the speaker is able to win the attention. Ultimately the dissenting voices are silenced, and she proceeds without interruption to the end. The speech is beautifully written, and it contains passages of exquisite tenderness, made exquisitely tender, too, by Miss Shaw.34

Like Elizabeth Robins, Mary Shaw also jeopardized a lucrative stage career in order to present activist plays. After great success in Ibsen’s Ghosts in 1899, she chose provocative roles in Hedda Gabler, Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Candida and played the heroine in the New York premiere of Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, in which she played the brothel keeper who uses her immoral earnings to improve her social position and educate her daughter at Cambridge University, was closed after one night of its try-out run in New Haven because of public disapproval. When the play moved to New York, it caused a scandal and the entire company was arrested.35 Undaunted, Mary Shaw obtained the rights to the play and toured it in 1907 and 1908. Despite frequently negative critical feedback, she persisted with feminist and suffragist drama, writing and producing her own pieces – The Parrot’s Cage and Impressionistic Sketch of the Anti-Suffragists – under the aegis of the

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Gamut Club which she had helped establish to further “the appreciation of the individual struggle every woman is making in her particular line of endeavor.”36 She later unsuccessfully tried to raise enough money to establish a Woman’s National Theatre. “No matter what an author says,” Shaw argued, “The play is remodeled and whipped into shape by those men in charge, who cause heroines to talk not as real women would but as men think that women ought to talk and act.”37 Other suffragist plays such as On to Victory by Hester Johnson (1915) – that shows suffragettes as attractive young women wanting to get married, as opposed to the negative stereotype of them as man-haters – and Melinda and Her Sisters (1916), an operetta by the millionaire Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont and her collaborator Elsa Maxwell, as well as pageants, tableaux vivants and street parades all lent support to the struggle for women’s suffrage that was eventually won in 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.38 Despite important work by such Broadway playwrights as Sophie Treadwell and Lillian Hellman, and Harlem renaissance writers such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, the feminist movement lost momentum with the right-wing backlash in the 1920s and divisions over the equal rights amendment.39 After the Second World War, the dominant ideology of the 1950s projected men as war heroes and women as homemakers and beautiful objects, and the gains of the New Woman from the turn of the century became less visible. In the 1960s a second wave of feminism emerged that would produce new forms of theatrical expression. Because they considered that voting rights for women had brought little reward, leaders of the feminist CounterInaugural March on Washington in 1969 asked Alice Paul, a leader of the suffragist movement at the turn of the century, to join with them in burning their voter registration cards. Alice Paul refused for good reasons. The struggle for women’s suffrage had been a long fight. During the latter part of the struggle in the early twentieth century, Alice Paul, as the head of the National Women’s Party, had personally organized rallies and parades, picketed the White House, suffered physical attack, and endured imprisonment, hunger strikes and forced feeding. While she sympathized with the concerns of the organizers of the Counter-Inaugural March in 1969 (and had organized a similar protest in Washington at the time of President Wilson’s inauguration), Paul refused to burn her voter registration card saying that she had suffered too much to obtain that right to willingly sacrifice it.40 However, in asking her to do so, the organizers of the event seemed to be indicating that the second wave of feminism was virtually starting again


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from scratch, that women’s suffrage had achieved little to disturb male privilege. The feminist movement that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s challenged the white male patriarchy and the roles for women prescribed by the dominant culture. The movement gained strength as a result of numerous grievances that became more visible as a result of the general politicization of the population during the civil rights movement, student agitation, the Vietnam War protests, the enthusiasm for alternative lifestyles and the gay and lesbian liberation movement. Women argued that their rights as citizens were severely limited, but men were generally dismissive of their concerns. Feminists articulated their complaints and formed organizations and consciousness-raising groups to generate awareness and solidarity and to advocate that the “personal is political.” In the theatre the roles for women on and off the stage were manifestly insufficient. A study by Action for Women in Theatre determined that “only 7 per cent of the playwrights and 6 per cent of the directors in funded non-profit theatres during 1969–1975 were women.”41 Furthermore, according to Patti Gillespie, the roles for women in theatre were “too few, and too inconsequential . . . An analysis of Broadway and Off-Broadway plays produced between 1953 and 1972 reveals that only one-third of the available roles in the some 350 plays were for women.”42 This imbalance would be slow to change. By the mid-1980s, despite enormous activity by women on the margins, conditions remained fairly constant in the mainstream. Helen Chinoy reported that in 1986 only one new play by an American woman was staged on Broadway – Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice – and that, out of some two hundred regional theatres in the 1984–5 season, a quarter of those theatres not specifically dedicated to women’s work had produced no plays by women and 40 percent of those theatres had produced only one play by a woman in their season.43 The main ideological lines of feminism and feminist theatre divided along three strands: liberal (bourgeois), radical (or cultural) and materialist.44 Liberal feminism and liberal feminist theatre challenged the domination by men economically, socially and politically, and sought ways in which women could achieve parity with men in those areas. According to Jill Dolan, the general purpose of liberal feminism was “to insert women into the mainstream of political and social life by changing the cultural perception of them as second-class citizens.”45 Liberal feminism promoted a variety of issues such as “the fight to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, the effort to gain equal pay for equal work, a woman’s right to control

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over her body and to choose abortion, childcare, and affirmative action.”46 By contrast, radical feminism conceived of women as separate and distinct from men, and superior rather than inferior. Their “notion of a women’s culture” which is “different and separate from the patriarchal culture of men” emphasized the biological differences between the sexes.47 In the 1970s women’s consciousness-raising groups were formed to explore women’s experiences and to articulate their concerns and sense of identity. Often, theatrical material developed out of these discussions. Materialist feminism (also known as socialist feminism in the early days), on the other hand, challenged the socio-economic power relations affecting gender, class, race and sexual orientation, emphasizing the structural similarity of and links between gender oppression and class oppression. It called attention, for example, to the invisible and unpaid labor of women engaged in childcare, cooking and cleaning. It also assumed that gender is a social construct, and that patriarchal society has provided essentialized social roles and ways of dressing and behaving that are oppressive both to men and women and can be broken. Rather than regarding women as forming a separate and distinct community from men, materialist feminism recognizes issues that separate women from each other. Thus, as Audré Lorde, Cherr´ıe Moraga, bell hooks and others pointed out, women of other ethnicities or working-class women or lesbians might have less in common with white middle-class women than had been previously assumed.48 In particular materialist feminism emphasizes the relationship between sexuality and social norms, suggesting that the predominance of heterosexuality (and aggressive male and submissive female sexuality) is a conditioned response to the material conditions of dominant culture. Thus, materialist feminism “attempts to denaturalize the dominant ideology that demands and maintains such oppressive social arrangements.”49 Feminist theatre pursued all three strands – liberal, radical (cultural) and materialist (socialist) – by attempting to achieve recognition and jobs for female artists, representing the difference and superiority of women, deconstructing gender identity and demanding the transformation of social structures that perpetuate class, gender and racial oppression. Consequently it has presented a variety of forms and themes. While liberal feminists wrote in a similar manner to male playwrights in order to gain acceptance within the male dominated theatre where they had been neglected, radical (cultural) feminists frequently experimented with form as critics developed the notion of a “feminine morphology.”50 In the mid-1970s the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey theorized traditional dramatic structures as sadomasochistic


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with the female character generally playing the masochist who is conquered by the male. “Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end.”51 The French playwright Hélène Cixous developed a notion of an “écriture féminine,” which has been elucidated by Jill Dolan: “Writing with the female body allows for an excessive flow of blood, birth, and sexual metaphors in a nonlinear, florid, stream-of-consciousness style that inscribes sexual difference as the content and form of cultural feminist theatre.”52 Consequently, women theatre artists often avoided a logocentric, hierarchical structuring of material, replacing linear with circular narratives and avoiding closure. Rather than a single male protagonist, feminists often introduced “communal female protagonists,”53 as in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1976), or a split self, as in Marsha Norman’s Getting Out (1977) or Cherr´ıe Moraga’s Giving up the Ghost (1986). Martha Boesing of At the Foot of the Mountain recalled this formal development as evolving for empirical as well as theoretical reasons: “We questioned the notion of a single or static personality as we began to notice that each of us is really made up of many different images, feelings, attitudes and styles that are constantly changing depending on who we are with and what is expected of us. And we tried to create theatre that reflected this multitude of personalities within. We moved away from linear plays to ones built like mosaics or patterns on a quilt.”54 Rosalyn Drexler, in differentiating female from male art, argued that “the female aesthetic is to be unaesthetic. When I think of aesthetic, I think of something too finely placed, too much in good taste. Women are trying to be a little sloppier, changing forms, getting stronger, letting ideas come in – and that is unaesthetic.”55 Feminist theatre thus encompassed a variety of approaches that overlapped and intersected. At the liberal end of the spectrum, writers and groups produced plays focusing on more realistic women characters but otherwise largely indistinguishable from plays by men. They also tended to concentrate on the practical problems of the employment for women artists and the showcasing of the work of women writers.56 Such enterprises as Interart in New York and the Los Angeles Feminist Theatre promoted female artists in the best artistic and financial conditions that they could muster in order to introduce them to the mainstream. To other more radical groups, the emulation of male production values and style was tantamount to selling out. Radical feminists preferred to transform the work method, the

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subject matter, the style and the message to create a distinctly feminist perspective. Women frequently formed theatre groups of leaderless collectives with productions conceived by the ensemble out of material that reflected their experiences as women. Groups like It’s All Right to be Women chose styles, themes and production methods which identified them as separatist. According to Patti Gillespie, The radical theatres tend to reject traditional (scripted) plays, normal patterns of organization, accepted critical standards, polite language. The specific characteristics chosen as replacements depend, of course, on whether the theatre strives to promote lesbianism, explore the black experience, raise consciousness, or name the enemy. But in every instance radical theatres select strategies which cultivate solidarity among adherents while encouraging antagonism, or at least apathy, toward previously accepted social norms. They do not practice persuasion of the many by the few; instead they organize themselves into leaderless groups which strive to break down traditional distinctions between the leader and the led, the actor and the audience. They do not strive to adjust their presentation to the expectations of an audience; rather they jolt the audience into new perceptions, new ways of looking at the world. They do not promote a single program of change nor answer the question, “What do women want?” They present instead the different experiences of many women without attempting to resolve the consequent contradictions.57

The themes of these personal explorations in radical feminist theatre (many of which tended to marginalize men or were presented in such a way as to upset male dominance) included transformation, matriarchy, female divinities, violence against women, strong women from the past, reclaiming the female body from its objectification by men, female religious figures, abortion, childbirth, child-rearing, female relationships and solidarity, female–male relationships, separatism, lesbianism, eroticism, menstruation, menopause, prostitution, stereotyping, role playing, female rituals, as well as, according to Vivian Patraka, “mourning, rage, empowerment, celebration and their ritualized expressions.”58 Transformation or the potential for women to change was a central theme of radical feminist drama. It is implicit in less radical plays such as Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles but specifically emphasized in the work of groups influenced by Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre such as At the Foot of the Mountain. As in the Open Theatre’s Mutation Show (which


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explored character transformation and involved Roberta Sklar, who cofounded Women’s Experimental Theater, and Muriel Miguel, who founded Spiderwoman), women’s theatre groups investigated the many roles that women play and showed characters transforming in mid-scene as well as actors recalling the changes they have undergone in their past. Transformation in the life of a female character often occurred as a result of the death of a husband, parent or child resulting in the liberation of the female. Karen Malpede’s A Lament for Three Women, Honor Moore’s Mourning Pictures, Corinne Jacker’s Bits and Pieces and Alice Childress’s Wedding Band all focus on the loss of a parent or a husband that results in a new role for the surviving woman. Likewise, Letters Home by Rose Leiman Goldemberg (which dramatizes the letters of Sylvia Plath to her mother and depicts Sylvia Plath’s suicide when she was at the height of her powers as a poet) culminates in the empowering of her mother, Aurelia. Rather than being destroyed by her daughter’s suicide, Aurelia reads from Sylvia’s diary at the end of the play, echoing Sylvia’s sentiment when she was seventeen: “I still am not completely molded. I am strong. My life is just beginning!”59 According to Martha Boesing, Transformational theatre became the aesthetic format of many women’s theatres in the seventies. Plays were often layered, imagistic, nonsequential. Companies of five or six actors were called upon to play twenty to thirty roles in an evening. We gathered across the nation in consciousnessraising groups to tell our stories and talk about the many facets, the many roles we had been asked to play – wife, daughter, mother, lover, colleague, nymph, crone. We were “getting our feelings out” – some of us for the first time. And we were finding friends, sisters, who shared these feelings – anger, grief and a common sense of having been silenced.60

The theme of matriarchy was sometimes invoked as an answer to the oppressive force of patriarchy. The Daughters Cycle, a loose adaptation of the Oresteia by the Women’s Experimental Theatre, enacted “a ritual that moves through themes of birth, the ambivalent and interchangeable nature of mother/daughter roles, the underlying contracts negotiated between mothers and daughters, the commonality of all women as daughters, and a naming and reclaiming of our matrilineage.”61 In a ritualized recitation, each of the actors named her own mother, grandmother and greatgrandmother (or surrogate mothers). They then repeated the recitation with little details, adding positive values to their relationship culminating with Roberta Sklar:

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I am Roberta daughter of Rose when my mother died five years ago as the rabbi spoke a eulogy for her he named her repeatedly as Rose daughter of Aden, her father he never mentioned her mother since that time I have had the opportunity to name my mother publicly Rose the daughter of Golda, her mother the daughter of Ruchel, her grandmother the daughter of a woman from Odessa whose name I don’t know.62

Likewise, women questioned patriarchal religious structures and theatre companies such as Spiderwoman, Coatlicue, and Foot of the Mountain staged plays featuring ancient goddesses in Native American and other cultures. Gloria Steinem has discussed the survival of such goddesses and female religious symbols in the last five thousand years despite their marginalization by male patriarchal religions. “Gnostic Christians worshiped Sophia as the female Holy Spirit and considered Mary Magdalene the wisest of Christ’s disciples; Tantric Buddhism still teaches that Buddhahood resides in the vulva; the Sufi mystics of Islam believe that fana, or rapture, can be reached only through Fravashi, the female spirit; the Shekina of Jewish mysticism is a version of Shakti, the female soul of God; and even the Catholic church included forms of Mary worship that focused more on the Mother than on the Son.”63 Feminist theatre often depicted strong or famous women from the past. Plays detailing the lives of female activists, adventurers, artists, etc. demonstrated to contemporary women the possibility of succeeding in a maledominated society. A theatre group that particularly adopted this approach was Little Flags, originally based in Boston. Headed by Maxine Klein, who won an Obie in 1970 for her direction of Megan Terry’s Approaching Simone (about the French political activist Simone Weil), Little Flags produced plays about female political activists in the labor movement such as Mother Jones (The Furies of Mother Jones), Emma Goldman (Emma), Haydee Tamara Bunke Bider, a guerilla soldier who fought with Che Guevara (Tania), as well as plays about strong contemporary women, such as Marx on her Mind “about a fast-food waitress who is a union organizer and


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writes jazz.”64 Martha Boesing’s Antigone Too: Rites of Love and Defiance (1983), an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, added famous female dissidents, such as Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Margaret Sanger and Rosa Parks.65 Similarly, Cherr´ıe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992) depicts a contemporary heroine without a body who impersonates the Virgen de Guadalupe and leads a popular protest against the use of pesticides in California, sacrificing herself for the health and well-being of her people. Cultural and material feminists as well as radical feminists also investigated representations of sexuality, considering the male fantasization of the female body and the objectification of women, lesbian representation, sexual violence, pornography and female sexual pleasure. Laura Mulvey analyzed the dominance of the male gaze as the organizing principle in film.66 Teresa de Lauretis and Jill Dolan, amongst others, examined the lesbian protagonist as a means for subverting normative representation in theatre.67 Performance artists Carolee Schneeman and Karen Finlay performed nude to de-fantasize the female body and reclaim it as their own. Schneeman in her Interior Scroll (1975) read from a minutely folded scroll that she pulled from her vagina, listing grievances against the male dominated film profession and her dismissal by a fellow film artist whom she quoted as saying to her, “We think of you as a dancer.”68 Karen Finlay, who earned her way through college by working in strip clubs, disrupted the erotic image of her nude body (which she smeared with chocolate or honey or other substances) in such performances as The Constant State of Desire (1986), with a text replete with scatological description and invective against men. Rather than a stripper who meakly offers herself to the male viewer, Finlay attacked male oppression and highlighted themes of female degradation, sexual abuse, incest, etc. in her stage persona of an “unsocialized woman” or “banshee.”69 Martha Rosler had her body carefully measured by two males in Vital Statistics (1973) after which she and other women listed forms of female degradation and then proceeded to purify their bodies. According to Jeanie Forte, “Countless others perform in the nude, not as actresses providing anonymous titillation for an audience, but actual women simultaneously revealing their vulnerability and their sexuality. They literally expose the female body as a sign while also reclaiming it as their own, in defiance of the oppressive system of representation and patriarchal encoding.”70 Another common focus for feminist theatre was violence, either physical or psychological, against women. Public rituals and demonstrations such as Take Back the Night (initially in New York in 1978 and subsequently on a variety of sites including college campuses), Three Weeks in May

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(Los Angeles, 1977), In Mourning and in Rage . . . (Los Angeles, 1977) and We Fight Back (Portland, 1978) were organized by women to call attention to the danger from rapists and pornography.71 At the initial Take Back the Night march, Andrea Dworkin summed up the sentiment: Tonight we are going to walk together, all of us, to take back the night, as women in other cities all over the world, because in every sense none of us can walk alone. Every woman walking alone is a target . . . Only by walking together can we walk at all with any sense of safety, dignity or freedom. Tonight, walking together, we will claim to the rapists and pornographers and women batterers that their days are numbered and our time has come.72

A number of plays dealt with rape such as Raped: A Woman’s Look at Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule (1976) by At the Foot of the Mountain and the more recent Until Someone Wakes Up (1992) by Carolyn Levy. One of the problems in addressing this topic was how to avoid creating an erotic masochistic act on stage. Often, the solution was to avoid representing the male character, and so the rape scene emphasized the effect of rape on the female character (or, as in the case of Spiderwoman’s Power Pipes, the responsibility of another female in the situation), rather than showing the rape physically on stage. Eleanor Johnson of Emmatroupe, a shortlived New York women’s theatre group formed in 1975, explained that in their production of A Girl Starts Out . . . A Tragedy in 4 Parts (1978), “The scenario is one of female persecution, but in its mode it steps outside of the pornographic: the female character is victimized as women in life are victimized, but the actor’s body is not sexualized for a male viewer and the rape is never sentimentalized, romanticized, or glorified. Instead it is shown for what it is, what it does, and what it means.”73 Other types of violence against women such as sexual abuse and incest were often treated in feminist theatre, as in Maria Irene Fornes’s The Conduct of Life (which shows a man kidnapping a young woman for sexual purposes), Marsha Norman’s Getting Out (about an ex-con who tries to escape her former life as a prostitute) and the more recent Pulitzer Prize winning play by Paula Vogel, How I Learned to Drive (1997, about a young girl who is sexually abused by her uncle). Perhaps the most horrific aspect of this subject was depicted by the English playwright Sarah Daniels in Masterpieces, which portrays a female protagonist who happens to watch a snuff movie in which the female actor (as opposed to the character she is playing) is sawed into pieces by a man with a chain saw. She is so appalled that men could use women for such a


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purpose that, when a man indecently assaults her at a subway station, she throws him under the approaching train. Materialist (socialist) feminist writers and groups particularly in Britain used Brechtian staging techniques to investigate the overlap between class and gender oppression. Red Ladder’s Strike While the Iron is Hot (1972) documented the oppressive conditions for women both at home and in the workplace. Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom (1985) showed parallels between the victimization of women as witches in the seventeenth century and the modern depreciation of women, and her Top Girls considered the difficult choices made by successful career women. Materialist feminists also often inverted the genders of characters in order to demonstrate them as social constructions. This was done with particular effectiveness by Caryl Churchill in Cloud Nine in which the casting against gender was used to expose Victorian conventions of gender and sexual behavior. Similarly the French playwright Simone Benmussa showed the constructedness of gender in The Singular Life of Albert Nobs (1977) about a woman who disguised herself as a man. In Home of the Brave (1984) performance artist Laurie Anderson dressed in male attire with closely cropped hair and, using electronic devices, altered her voice from male to female to confound gender expectation. Split Britches, based at the WOW Café in New York, dressed alternatively in male and female attire to call attention to the way their appearance determined attitudes toward gender. Lois Weaver of Split Britches described the aims of their work: “We just tried to tell our stories the best way we could and . . . we wanted to reclaim a lot of roles that had been denied us – to be fat if we wanted to be fat, and to be a country western singer even if we couldn’t sing, and to be Juliet if we were sixty.”74 In particular Split Britches presented lesbian actors on stage parodying heterosexual roles, and dressing in gender-stereotyped costumes, which they would inhabit and alienate. Linda Jenkins described the effect of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver alternating roles of butch and femme by dressing in a variety of costumes: In some of their plays, these costumes remain on the actor, overlaid with other costumes, until the audience perceives layers and layers of differing gender-wear, differing period pieces, differing ages and differing class and ethnic accoutrements . . . At one point [in Beauty and the Beast], the butch is wearing the dress of the old lady, the cape of the Beast, and Perry Como’s sweater, while the Jewish actress is wearing the clothes of the rabbi, a tutu, and at one point, a dress hanging around her neck on a hanger.75

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In Belle Reprieve (1991), Split Britches combined with the gay British group Bloolips in a re-gendered adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. The gay males of Bloolips impersonated Mitch and Blanche while Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw of Split Britches performed Stella and Stanley. Thus at the climax of the play, Peggy Shaw, a lesbian, was playing Stanley about to rape Blanche played by Bette Bourne, a drag queen, with Weaver and Precious Pearl dressed as lanterns. In the middle of the rape scene, Bette Bourne broke off to complain that he wanted “to be in a real play.” Weaver dropped her lantern to reply, “Now we all talked about this, and we decided that realism works against us.”76 After discussion, they return to ironizing their roles as rapist and victim. stanley: If you want to play a woman, the woman in this play gets raped and goes crazy in the end. blanche: I don’t want to get raped and go crazy, I just wanted to wear a nice frock, and look at the shit they’ve given me! (p. 181)

Ironically, after the feminist movement seemed to have ground to a halt under the conservative policies of Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s and because of an ideological impasse between materialist feminists (who recognized divisions between women on grounds of class, ethnicity and sexual orientation) and radical feminists (who emphasized the commonality of women), feminist theatre returned with considerable force in the 1990s. Not only did Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive win the Pulitzer prize, but The Vagina Monologues (1996) by Eve Ensler became one of the most visible feminist pieces at the end of the twentieth century, being performed all over the United States and abroad and launching a grassroots political movement. Ensler, author of Depot (about nuclear disarmament) and Necessary Targets (about the rape of women in Bosnia), initially performed The Vagina Monologues as a one-woman show. Based on interviews that she had conducted with over 200 women about their vaginas and using only a high stool, a microphone and index cards as an aide-memoire and set against a background of delicate red drapes subtly reminiscent of labia, Ensler recounted personal stories of denial, discovery, exploration, masturbation, physical abnormalities, medical examinations, heterosexual and lesbian sex, orgasms, genital mutilation, rape and birth. Between the stories, she supplied facts both about the virtues of female genitalia and their violent abuse. Beginning with the acknowledgement that many women have been made to feel ashamed about their vagina, the piece proceeds to emphasize its extraordinary structure and attributes. On one level the piece serves the


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function of upbeat sexual education, celebrating the various features of the vagina. As such it acts as a riposte to Sigmund Freud’s notion of “penis envy,” countering it with “vagina envy” and providing the females in the audience with feelings of recognition, relief, satisfaction and solidarity.77 On another level, the piece provides valuable insight into the violence that is commonly perpetrated against women. Despite the graphic explicitness of some of the material, The Vagina Monologues maintains audience empathy by conveying its message mainly through the personal and poignant experiences of the various women that Ensler interviewed. Ironically, Vagina Monologues, in achieving its success, was returning to the radical feminist position: the essentialized and universalized perspective of “a woman’s culture, different and separate from the patriarchal culture of men.”78 The stories are by turn touching, disturbing, and uplifting, and culminate with the celebratory enactment of a triple orgasm followed by a description of the birth of Ensler’s own grandchild.79 (Although she was sexually abused by her father and has a lesbian partner, Ensler adopted a young man as her son, and attended the delivery of his and her daughterin-law’s child.) Describing her daughter-in-law in the hospital, screaming with contractions, she recalls: I was there when her vagina changed from a shy sexual hole to an archaeological tunnel, a sacred vessel, a Venetian canal, a deep well with a tiny stuck child inside, waiting to be rescued. I saw the colors of her vagina. They changed. Saw the bruised broken blue the blistering tomato red the gray pink, the dark; saw the blood like perspiration along the edges saw the yellow, white liquid, the shit, the clots . . . and there as her vagina became a wide operatic mouth singing with all its strength; first the little head, then the gray flopping arm, then the fast swimming body, swimming quickly into our weeping arms. (pp. 123–4)

Arguably Ensler was adopting the strategy of strategic essentialism. After performing The Vagina Monologues in small New York venues and winning an Obie award, she founded V-Day, “a non-profit grassroots movement dedicated to ending violence against women around the world.”80 Raising millions of dollars for rape crisis centers and other women’s organizations

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out of the profits from the play, V-Day echoed the goals of the earlier Take Back the Night movement.81 Its first major event was a benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues in New York for Valentine’s Day 1998 with a star-studded cast (including Glenn Close, Winona Ryder and Lily Tomlin) who divided up the monologues amongst themselves. Subsequent events included brief appearances in the long-running show by film stars and other celebrities (such as Whoopi Goldberg and Donna Hanover, the estranged wife of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani) in New York, as well as similar events in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities, and a massive Valentine’s Day performance in Madison Square Garden in 2001. In addition V-Day organized simultaneous performances of The Vagina Monologues on hundreds of college campuses to coincide with the annual celebration of Valentine’s Day from 1999 as a means of empowerment and to raise awareness about violence against women. Many of these events organized support activities (in addition to a performance of Vagina Monologues), such as the Clothesline Project (which originated in Massachusetts in 1990) where women personally inscribed stories of their own sexual abuse onto T-shirts that they hung on a publicly displayed clothesline.82 Thus, from a small show without props, Ensler had built a multi-million dollar fundraising campaign by 2001 to help reclaim female sexuality and call attention to violence against women.

Summary Feminist theatre during the twentieth century interrupted dominant male discourse with a variety of tactics. It blossomed in the early part of the century in allegiance with the suffragist movement and re-emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the women’s liberation movement, using liberal, radical and materialist feminist approaches. By the 1990s the second wave of feminism began to wane. Nevertheless, before the end of the millennium there were important successes such as Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer prizewinning How I Learned to Drive and Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues as well as the ongoing work of such companies as Split Britches and Spiderwoman that demonstrated the resilience of feminism and its continued ability to provide challenging material for the stage.

 Imaging and deconstructing the multicultural nation in the 1990s

I1960s n the wake of the various political movements of the and 1970s such as the civil rights, Black Power, Red Power (AIM), Chicano, anti-Vietnam War, feminist, gay and lesbian movements, the period of the late 1970s and 1980s emphasized a preoccupation with individual rather than collective concerns. While the publication of Alex Haley’s Roots in 1976 and its broadcast on television in 1977 prompted an investigation into cultural origins and ethnic identities, celebrating difference, the era of the Reagan Presidency of the 1980s became known as the “me” generation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a considerable thaw occurred in geopolitics with Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika from 1985, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain in 1989, the dismantling of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War. Likewise, the emphasis on separatist and essentialist political and cultural identities moderated, as multiculturalism became a catchword in society. Jesse Jackson, who ran for President in 1984 and 1988, helped stimulate multicultural alliances and formed the National Rainbow Coalition in 1986 that aimed to unite various groups in American society under one umbrella, such as racial minorities (people of color), gays, the poor, peace activists, and environmentalists. From the late 1980s, rather than unity or separatism, activists celebrated diversity and multiculturalism as a strategy of resistance and progressive change. Political correctness (p.c.) entered the discourse, supporting affirmative action and “hate speech” regulations, and the politics of difference. Universities introduced required courses in American cultures (rather than the American culture) in the hope that students would become more tolerant of others if they understood their differences and appreciated the contribution that various cultures had made.1 Multicultural canons were developed on university campuses that celebrated the positive aspects of difference rather than focusing on the negative history of discrimination. In the art world, 

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multicultural shows were mounted to display the creativity of different cultures. Of this movement, Holland Cotter wrote, “Multiculturalism . . . will define the 1990s in the history books as surely as Pop defined the 1960s.”2 It is clear from the 2000 census that the population in the United States is becoming increasingly diverse,3 and that non-Hispanic whites, who formed the majority in the past are now a minority in California, the most populated state of the country, as well as in half of the one hundred largest cities.4 Moreover, as Cotter points out, the census showed that “ever-increasing numbers of people are unwilling to identify themselves by a single, ethno-racial category. They are Asian-American, plus AfricanAmerican, plus white, or some other multipart mix.” Furthermore, as the demographic profile shifts it also becomes more complex. “Interracial marriage in the United States is at an all-time high, producing children who are able to choose, theoretically at least, among a range of racial affiliations.”5 Some optimistic commentators even suggested that, despite the presence of segregated ghettos in most large American cities, the new millennium marked a break with previous racial thinking and an end to concepts such as multiculturalism as America entered a period of “postethnicity.”6 Although politicians have tried to accommodate the increasingly multicultural society within the traditional values of the hegemonic state, theorists and artists of multiculturalism in the 1990s questioned the relationship between multiculturalism and assimilation, and indeed asked whether multiculturalism represented an advance in social policy or not. Some critics looked back to the political strength achieved by essentializing racial difference. On the other hand, poststructural theorists and cultural historians suggested that the notion of race was simply a social construct, motivated by racism – thus a matter of perception rather than fact. With regard to multiculturalism in academia, Hazel Carby asked whether multiculturalism was a euphemism for race, and a form of tokenism aimed to mask the failure of desegregation. “Have we, as a society, successfully eliminated the desire for achieving integration through political agitation for civil rights and opted instead for knowing each other through cultural texts?”7 Rustom Bharucha argued in a discussion on the relationship of multiculturalism to such concepts as interculturalism and intraculturalism that the term multiculturalism is vague and redundant. “No culturalism, to my mind, has been more obsessively prefixed by qualifying adjectives like ‘liberal’, ‘authoritarian’, ‘corporate’, ‘insurgent’, ‘boutique’, ‘critical’, ‘aggregative’, ‘universalist’, ‘essentialist’, ‘paradigmatic’, ‘modular’: a veritable

THE MULTICULTURAL NATION IN THE

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shopping-list of seemingly differentiated multiculturalisms that ultimately resonate a disturbing sameness . . . Multiculturalism is the most overinscribed catch-word of seeming change in the polities of the developed world. Tellingly, it exemplifies that old truism: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose [the more things change, the more they remain the same].”8 Bharucha, however, favored the approach of Shohat and Stam in Unthinking Eurocentrism that advocated “polycentric multiculturalism” as the most equitable objective, an approach that decenters hegemonic cultural traditions and privileges no single group, providing a just system for all.9 On the other hand, this does not imply total utopian harmony, according to Shohat and Stam, because, “Multiculturalism has to recognize not only difference but even bitter, irreconcilable difference. The Native American view of the land as a sacred and communal trust . . . is simply not reconcilable with a view of land as alienable property. The descendants of the slave ships and the descendants of the immigrant ships cannot look at the Washington Monument, or Ellis Island, through exactly the same viewfinder.”10 Moreover, the deep-rooted core of some value systems in America are fundamentally exclusionary and will inevitably conflict with other beliefs in society. In an article entitled “Boutique Multiculturalism, or, Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Stanley Fish contentiously argued that multiculturalism is a demographic fact but a philosophical impossibility.11 He suggested that liberals who wish to tolerate all groups in society find themselves in an untenable position because certain groups are intolerant of others and their exclusiveness and hate speech ultimately alienate those who try to accept them. According to Fish, people have a limit to their level of toleration of other cultures, and in any case intolerance is embedded in certain cultural attitudes, such as in fundamentalist religions. Theatre artists in the 1990s produced multicultural theatre as an attempt at mapping the multicultural topography of American society and revealing many of its points of friction. This chapter will examine various approaches to multicultural theatre. (Although I will be discussing plays and performances that juxtapose different cultures, I will avoid the more common term “intercultural theatre” because it normally refers to a combination of different styles and traditions of theatre, and also because it frequently refers to western productions integrating “oriental” performance styles.) Patrice Pavis has defined multicultural theatre as involving “the cross-influences between various ethnic or linguistic groups in multicultural societies . . . Meaning arises from the clash of contexts, not from the

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coexistence or multiplicity of cultural sources.”12 Although he goes on to confine his definition to “performances utilizing several languages and performing for a bi- or multicultural public,” this chapter does not limit the concept to multilingual work but also includes performances that use phrases from other languages or dialects but which are otherwise almost exclusively in English. According to Pavis, multicultural theatre is dependent on a “political system . . . [that] recognizes . . . the existence of cultural or national communities and encourages their cooperation, without hiding behind the shibboleth of national identity,”13 and he cites Germany and France as countries that rarely experiment in such performances. In the United States, the “shibboleth of national identity” in the 1990s includes the notion that the United States maintains a special identity because of its cultural diversity. This chapter, however, will demonstrate that multicultural performances in the 1990s helped to question the dominant concept of a unified nation. It examines four different approaches to multicultural theatre in the US, all of which deconstruct and destabilize the notion of a unified nation state. Anna Deavere Smith in her work on urban riots paints a grim picture of a divided and alienated community of warring tribes. Tony Kushner in Angels in America constructs a more optimistic image of a culturally divided American society moving towards greater harmony in a spirit of pluralism. Such artists as Velina Hasu Houston and Brenda Wong Aoki have represented multiculturalism as physically and emotionally embedded in the body and mind of individuals of mixed ethnicity with emotional and family ties to other countries. Lastly, the work of the Colorado Sisters and Guillermo Gómez-Peña provides a postmodern approach that emphasizes not only multicultural but transnational hybridity, exposing the complex positionality of mestizas/os who psychologically straddle the Mexican/American border. All of these artists contribute to what Cherr´ıe Moraga has termed a “force of ‘disloyal’ americanos who subscribe to a multicultural, multilingual, radical restructuring of América.”14

Anna Deavere Smith and the warring tribes In her performances about urban riots in the 1990s, Anna Deavere Smith demonstrated the intolerance in American society. She subverted hegemonic nationalistic values by putting the nation on stage in all its discordant resonance. She undermined the simplistic rhetoric of the nation-state as a uniform culture and ideology and represented the disharmony engendered by hate speech. Her oral histories implicitly challenged the appropriateness


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of the American national motto e pluribus unum and the de facto Federal policy of monolingualism. Anna Deavere Smith presented one-person shows in which she impersonated various members of a community, such as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. Under the collective title “On the Road: A Search for American Character,” her numerous pieces since 1982 included among others Building Bridges Not Walls (1985), Voices of Bay Area Women (1988), Gender Bending: On the Road Princeton University (1989); On Black Identity and Black Theatre (1990); From the Outside Looking In (1990), Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992), Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and House Arrest (1997), a play about the Washington press corps.15 In a sense Anna Deavere Smith’s work calls to mind Benedict Anderson’s description in Imagined Communities of nation-building novels in which the “solitary hero” travels “through a sociological landscape” imaging the nation.16 She used the real words of community figures whom she interviewed, selecting, editing and structuring the words of the interviewees and presenting these individuals as characters in her one-person show. A single authorial voice can be perceived through the selection, composition, manner, tone and texture of presentation, and through the phantom presence of the actor/interviewer who is always ghosting the characters she presents.17 Unlike the omniscient authorial presence in a novel, however, Anna Deavere Smith does not provide a synthesis or a single viewpoint to bring the work together as a unified statement.18 Furthermore, the characters and society are not fictionalized; and rather than helping to reinforce the “imagined community” of the nation, she presents the nation as falling apart. She presents discordant voices that continue to claim their right to be heard and who continue to disagree. They are the voices representing the views of different classes, genders, religions, ideologies, age and ethnic groups and they demonstrate the disunity rather than homogeneity of the community. Often she has been commissioned to present a piece that focuses on a divisive issue in a community so that the community can better understand the social dynamics involved (e.g. the position of women in the Princeton University community). However, rather than presenting solutions, she highlights the differences; and, as Patrice Pavis suggests in his definition of multicultural theatre, “meaning arises from the clash of contexts.”19 Although her solo performance helps to unify the discordant voices by encompassing them all within her own and thereby partially neutralizing them,20 at the heart of the work is an attempt to convey the complex social dynamics and destructiveness in America’s multicultural society.

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In general, the individuals that she portrays in Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, two performances about urban violence in the 1990s, rather than appearing in the events themselves, recount their versions of the events.21 Their history is not uniform or even compatible but clearly originates from specific biased perspectives. In Fires in the Mirror (whose full title is Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities), Anna Deavere Smith impersonates various members of the community during the New York riots of 1991. Crown Heights includes large Caribbean-American and African American populations and also a sizeable Hasidic Jewish community. The groups were polarized by an incident in which a Hasidic driver swerved out of control and killed a seven-year-old Guyanese American boy on a sidewalk. Several hours later a visiting Hasidic student was stabbed and killed by a group of African Americans. These events led to four days of riots, fire-bombings and demonstrations. Anna Deavere Smith portrays various members of the community, from the father of the young boy to the brother of the killed Hasidic Jew. Significantly, she juxtaposes two mutually exclusive views of moral authority. As a local Rabbi, she recalls the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust and as an African American follower of Farrakhan, she recounts the physical and psychological torture of slavery in an implicit competition for images of victimization. The Farrakhan supporter accentuates the exclusivity of the competing cultural claims by announcing, “We are the chosen of God. We are those people that Almighty God Allah has selected as his chosen, and they are masquerading in our garment – the Jews” (p. 58). Anna Deavere Smith does not appear to be interested in depicting a resolution to the conflict. She underlines the differences in the community and, as the Pastor of a local church, she intones, “It’s gonna happen again and again” (p. 77). Ironically, the piece was being performed in New York’s Public Theatre in 1992 when riots broke out in Los Angeles, and these riots led to a second piece on urban violence called Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. The Los Angeles riots were caused by the acquittal of four white policemen who had been videotaped beating an African American named Rodney King. With the use of video material displayed on a large screen, Smith’s performance recalls many appalling incidents, such as the policemen beating Rodney King, a Korean shopkeeper shooting an African American girl, and a group of African Americans beating a white truck driver named Reginald Denny. In the commentaries on the events by observers and participants whom she impersonates, the violent acts are recalled as spontaneous, unpremeditated actions. They reveal the underlying stress in a community that seems to


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be living not only on a geological but also on a sociological fault-line that threatens a new earthquake or volcano daily. The hurt, hatred and other pent-up emotions that erupted into street violence had been seen earlier in Los Angeles in the Watts riots of 1965. The nation, rather than solving its social problems, seems only to perpetuate them, and despite governmental efforts to analyze social disruption such as the Kerner Commission report into the riots of 1967, the same manifestations of disunity repeat themselves. The nation has clearly not learned from the lessons of its own history, not only cultural but also economic lessons, including James Madison’s observation in the tenth Federalist Paper that disputes have always arisen from “the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”22 Anna Deavere Smith steps away from the riots at the end of Twilight,23 and, like the omniscient authorial perspective in a novel, indicates through the words of Twilight Bey (an African American organizer of a gang truce) that she remains in a kind of no man’s land, a form of purgatory or, as she phrases it, “limbo”: Twilight Bey, that’s my name. When I was twelve and thirteen, I stayed out until, they say, until the sun come up. Every night, you know, and that was my thing. I was a watchdog. (p. 253)

Because she is an outsider as an interviewer and therefore exists only on the fringes of the event and because of her complex ethnic make-up and social class,24 she is not wholly identifiable with one part of the community and is able to replay the cacophony of voices around her, each with its own separate logic. On the one hand, she has been criticized for exaggerating or ironizing some of the characters that she impersonates. On the other hand, she has been accused of failing to show her own opinions in the performance.25 But one of her strengths is that she does not provide easy answers or confine herself to a specific ideological or sociological position. By standing on the fringes of the community and selecting representative voices, she suggests its various borders or boundaries and implies what is typical or idiosyncratic about the various communities within the community, or

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nations within the nation, or as she calls them in Fires on the Mirror, the “tribes.” In both Fires in the Mirror and Twilight, Smith conveys differing ideological and experiential perspectives in a “series of oppositions,”26 utilizing the characters’ own distinct language and their idiosyncratic speech and body rhythms. Rather than a single national voice, Smith presents a polyphony of different ethnic, religious, class and gender voices in America that do not remain static but constantly migrate and evolve. In Twilight, unlike the Watts riots of 1965 or the Crown Heights riots where the conflict pitted white against black, she bears witness to the expanding Asian and Latino/a populations in the Los Angeles community, seeking, as she says, to “express something about the change in American identity.”27 At the same time hers is not a passive or objective portrayal. Because she presents the characters of both pieces in often heightened states of emotion, her work is a passionately involved and disturbing account that raises difficult questions about multiculturalism and social justice. Is, for example, the concept of America as a melting pot a form of cultural imperialism in which the white, Christian, English-speaking middle class of America expect all other ethnic, religious and linguistic groupings to conform to their hegemonic norms? Is multiracialism only a disguise for multi-racism? Is multiculturalism, as Stanley Fish has argued, a philosophical impossibility? Sandra Richards has suggested that tolerance of other cultures is not a natural priority. “Human species survival depends upon our being socialized through the ‘enchantment’ of symbolic discourse into desiring a particular mode of being; thus, each culture must create, as it were, necessary lies or an order of discourse that presents itself as the true narrative in opposition to all others in order to function systematically as a behavior regulatory mechanism.”28 Employing such a discursive practice, Anna Deavere Smith as Rabbi Shea Hecht proclaims in Fires in the Mirror, Number one, we are different, and we think we should and can be different. When the Rebbe said to the Mayor that we were all one people, I think what the Rebbe is talking about is that, that common denominator that we’re all children of God and the respect we all have to give each other under that banner. But that does not mean that I have to invite you to my house for


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dinner, because I cannot go back to your home for dinner, because you’re not gonna give me kosher food. And I said, so, like one Black said, I’ll bring in kosher food. I said eh-eh. We can’t use your ovens, we can’t use your dishes, it’s, it – it’s not just a question of buying certain food, it’s buying the food, preparing it a certain way. We can’t use your dishes, we can’t use your oven. (pp. 110–11)

The various identities that emerge through Anna Deavere Smith’s voice and body, as she moves as “a solitary hero through the sociological landscape,” represent not the united but the divided nature of the nation. In an interview Smith said, “I’ve been wondering how to find the tools for thinking about difference as a very active negotiation rather than an image of all of us holding hands. There are too many contradictions, problems and lies in American society about the melting pot. You’re invited to jump into the hot stew but you’re not wanted.”29 By contrast with the national motto e pluribus unum, her performance serves as a metaphor for a new national or even post-national identity – out of one, many. Out of one voice, many voices; out of one nation, many nations.

Tony Kusher and a utopian vision By contrast with the discordant and seemingly irreconcilable voices of Anna Deavere Smith’s work, Tony Kushner represents the tapestry of American multicultural society as moving towards a harmonious future.30 In Angels in America, the image of the Bethesda angel in Central Park, who seems to bless the aids-afflicted gay men with “more life,” augurs a cure not only for the physical ailments of the characters but also for their mental state, and it symbolizes a hopeful prospect for the whole US community. As opposed to the gritty realism of Smith’s riot plays, Kushner employs a whimsical, fantastic and fundamentally optimistic approach. Although he includes historical figures such as Roy Cohn ( Joseph McCarthy’s legal counsel) and Ethel Rosenberg (who, with Cohn’s help, was convicted of

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spying for the Soviet Union and sentenced to the electric chair), Kushner deploys mostly fictional characters, who often appear in dream sequences, hallucinations or fantastic scenes. Even the historical character of Ethel Rosenberg appears as a ghostly presence, haunting Roy Cohn; and by the end of the second part of the play, Cohn himself has died and serves as an afterworldly legal counsel to God, who is being sued by his angels for abandoning the world. Thus, by contrast with the work of Anna Deavere Smith, Kushner presents a highly fictionalized version of the United States. His magical realist style31 allows him to explore various dimensions of the coming 2000 millennium – not only as conjuring up the possibility of an apocalypse, but also as representing the end of a social and political era and the potential for spiritual renewal and social progress. Angels in America is a complex work of epic proportions. Lasting more than five hours if played together, the two parts (Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika), like Anna Deavere Smith’s work, provide a panoply of diverse characters and cultures: Jewish, Protestant, Roman Catholic and Mormon religions; gay and straight lifestyles; Caucasian and African American ethnicities; metropolitan and regional environments, etc. Although the play favors certain groups (especially gay males) and minimizes others (e.g., the female characters tend to be crazy or otherwise marginalized, and Belize, the main African American character, tends to serve as a helper rather than having an independent life), the range of American identities that are acknowledged within the play represents a broad cross-section of society. The play draws parallels between the migration of various communities in America (such as the Native Americans, Puritans, Jews, Mormons, etc.) and comments on the “painful” process of social change. Emphasizing the country as a land of immigrants, Kushner opens the play with a funeral for a Lithuanian Jewish woman, during which the Rabbi implicitly questions whether America has any core identity or culture.32 He tells the congregation, “you do not live in America. No such place exists” (1.10); and he adds that the woman who died had come from an “ancient, ancient culture” and had “carried the old world on her back across the ocean . . . and she put it down in Flatbush . . . and she worked that earth into your bones” (1.10). As an echo of this reference to Jewish immigration, Kushner stages a later scene in a Mormon visitor’s center, where the diorama voice-over recalls the great nineteenth-century trek of the Mormons across the plains in search of “the Kingdom of God.” This story of Mormon migration across America to a promised land, which is reminiscent of the biblical quest for a promised


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land, is, likewise, juxtaposed with the reference to Prior Walter’s ancestors who came to America on the Mayflower and with Belize’s ironic comment on the enslavement and deportation of Africans to the US: “Some of us didn’t exactly choose to migrate” (2. 47). It is also counterpointed with allusions to the displacement and disappearance of the Native Americans. For example, Harper ironically offers to sell Manhattan to Joe for “the usual cheap trinkets” (2.100); the Rabbi in the funeral calls the dead Lithuanian Jew “the last of the Mohicans” (1.11); and Louis claims that in America “no indigenous spirits exist – only . . . Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past . . .” (1.92). In Angels, we see that migration has produced dire consequences including wars, death, disenfranchisement and disease, thereby justifying the appearance of a heavenly angel who delivers a Tome of Immobility to Prior, a gay WASP dying of aids. The angel predicts disaster and calls on mankind to stop migrating until God, who has abandoned the earth, returns. Forsake the Open Road: Neither Mix Nor Intermarry: Let Deep Roots Grow: If you do not MINGLE you will Cease to Progress: Seek Not to Fathom the World and its Delicate Particle Logic: You cannot Understand, You can only Destroy, You do not Advance, You only Trample. Poor blind Children, abandoned on the Earth, Groping terrified, misguided, over Fields of Slaughter, over bodies of the Slain: Hobble yourselves! . . . Turn Back. Undo. Till HE returns again. (2.45)

Prior rejects the reactionary proposals of this hermaphroditic angel as well as the attempt to install him in the role of a prophet. He also refuses to accept her/his mission as an angel of death and wrestles with her/him to prolong his life. Despite the angel’s apocalyptic vision of the future, Prior exhorts her/him pathetically: “Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do. I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much much worse . . . We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do.” (2.133). Unlike Anna Deavere Smith’s bleak portrayal of warring tribes in society, hope and forgiveness abound in Kushner’s play. Even Roy Cohn

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(who is categorized by Louis, as “the polestar of human evil, he’s like the worst human being who ever lived, he isn’t human even”), is forgiven (2.93). Despite Roy’s raging insults – “Move your nigger cunt spade faggot lackey ass out of my room . . . Mongrel. Dinge. Slave. Ape”(2.56–7) – Belize justifies saying the Kaddish for him on the grounds that everyone deserves to be forgiven. “A queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn’t easy, it doesn’t count if it’s easy, it’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet” (2.122). At the heart of the play is Louis’s (and Kushner’s) “neo-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress towards happiness or perfection” (1.25). While alluding to the disasters of the twentieth century and fantasizing that God abandoned the world at the time of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, Angels in America conjures up the vision that mankind is moving towards a better future. At the beginning of the play (as in Smith’s work), disaster appears everywhere: aids is attacking gays who are treated like pariahs by the rest of society, New York is equated with hell, the ozone layer is failing, and the polar ice cap is melting. Belize, who refers to himself as “trapped in a world of white people” (2.91), characterizes the nation as racist, and freedom as a distant dream, or, as in the national anthem, an impossibly high note to reach (2.95). Louis regards America as homophobic, referring to the “monolith of White America. White Straight Male America” (1.90). Prior echoes this, calling the funeral of a drag queen “a parody of the funeral of someone who really counted. We don’t; faggots; we’re just a bad dream the real world is having, and the real world’s waking up” (2.34). Furthermore, Roy Cohn advises that the only way for a homosexual to get ahead is to stay in the closet and to deny that he is gay. “Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout” (1.45). The play also denounces the American judicial system. Cohn reveals it to be corrupt – as evident especially in his coercion of the judge to execute the Rosenbergs (1.107–8), and Louis argues that legal judgements (such as Joe’s) are unjust (2.107–8). Moreover, Roy Cohn predicts a reactionary Republican agenda dominating the next decades: We’ll get our way on just about everything: abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment climate. We have the White House locked till the year 2000. And beyond. A permanent fix on the Oval Office? It’s possible. By ’92 we’ll get the Senate back, and in ten years


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the South is going to give us the House. It’s really the end of Liberalism. The end of New Deal Socialism. The end of ipso facto secular humanism. The dawning of a genuinely American political personality. Modeled on Ronald Wilson Reagan. (1.63)

By contrast, at the end of the play, the future looks much rosier from Kushner’s ideological perspective. San Francisco is characterized by Prior as an “unspeakably beautiful” (2.120) heaven on earth (which arguably it is for gay men compared to the rest of the country), and aids is no longer the death sentence that it first seemed. Hannah predicts a social purging: “The fountain of Bethesda will flow again . . . We will all bathe ourselves clean” (2.145). Moreover, at least in Harper’s mind, even the hole in the ozone layer seems reparable. In her dream, she imagined that, Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. (2.141–2)

She adds optimistically, “Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress” (2.142). This positive vision is coupled with a new approach to communitarian values, which redresses the selfish, irresponsible, uncaring attitude expressed by Roy Cohn. Angels in America ends with three gay men – a white Anglo Saxon Protestant, a Jew, and an African American drag queen – and a straight Mormon woman sitting around the Bethesda fountain in Central Park in 1990 speculating on the future. Rather than the normative couple and marriage vows that usually ends a Shakespearean comedy, they are an unusual quartet who seem to represent a new and more complex social grouping rather than the dominant image in society of heterosexual couples producing the next generation. They indicate the “queering of America,” which, according to David Savran, seeks “to produce a counterhegemonic patriotism that militates for a redefinition of the nation and simultaneously for the recognition of the always already queer status of American culture (from Whitman to Madonna).”33 As they reflect on the ongoing aids epidemic, the fall of the Iron Curtain, the restructuring of the Soviet Union and the unresolved Palestinian/Israeli conflict, the queer quartet exude a relaxed harmony with one another, enhanced by Prior’s schmaltzy

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monologue to the audience, reminiscent of the stage manager’s curtain speech in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The ending of Angels emphasizes communitarian rather than nuclear family values and a pluralistic inclusiveness of diversity. Prior turns down the volume on their conversation as he discusses with the audience his plans to live longer and his vision that gay people will become fully integrated into society. “This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come” (2. 146). Like the work of Anna Deavere Smith, Kushner destabilizes dominant notions of national identity. However, despite showing the nation falling apart because of migration, disease, and religious, racial, class and gender antagonisms, he (unlike Smith) predicts a novel way forward that allows for a new set of values and enables the disenfranchised and marginalized gay community to become fully integrated into society as equal “citizens.” He also allows for his characters to shift from essentialized ethnic, gender and religious identities.34 Unlikely coalitions, which give the individual more power, have formed because of the aids crisis. Because of witnessing Prior’s condition, Hannah, for example, has progressed from a Mormon bigot to an open-minded New Yorker, warning Prior, “You don’t make assumptions about me, mister; I won’t make them about you” (2.102). Although Prior replies, “I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough,” Kushner clearly signals her changed attitude as a significant harbinger for a more sympathetic and accommodating society in the future. Nevertheless, the harmony that is projected does not imply a loss of cultural distinctiveness in a future multicultural society. Just as Richard Schechner has argued that “fusion is the opposite of multiculturalism,”35 Angels demonstrates that cultural diversity implies difference and yet it allows for the possibility of cooperation. In a scene of redemption towards the end of the play, we see an executed communist, an African American drag-queen nurse who expresses a “Roman Catholic” spirit of forgiveness,36 and a Jewish gay man (who feels guilty for having deserted his aids-ridden partner), gathered around the body of Roy Cohn, saying the Kaddish in a ceremony of reconciliation. Likewise, in the final scene, Louis and Belize continue to disagree, but in a spirit of mutual respect. The prospect for social change and for the creation of new coalitions of difference is enhanced by the characters moving beyond the expectations of their own cultural borders such as Hannah accepting Prior’s gay


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lifestyle, Louis forgiving Roy Cohn, and, potentially, Joe acknowledging his gay sexuality, and Harper overcoming her agoraphobia and dependency on valium.37

Houston and Aoki undermining normative cultural taxonomies By contrast with the work of Smith and Kushner that tended to polarize ethnic, gender, sexual and religious differences, some theatre artists in the 1990s featured the complexity of mixed or hybrid identities and moved away from identity politics. For example, the work of such Asian American writers as Velina Hasu Houston and Brenda Wong Aoki, and such mestizo/a performers as the Colorado sisters and Gómez-Peña, differed from Smith’s portrayal of the separate “tribes” of the nation, and Kushner’s representation of gay or straight, Mormon or Jewish, WASP or African American characters, by exploring multi-ethnic identities. By invoking their own ethnically mixed personalities, these artists reveal another dimension of diversity and multiculturalism whereby ethnicities and religions are combined or integrated rather than separated into essentialized categories. Rather than expressing relatively distinct cultural positions as in the work of Smith and Kushner, characters in the work of these artists register as multi-ethnic and multi-religious, and perform their hybridity, rather than allowing themselves to be clearly defined by cultural, and even national, borders. As May Joseph writes of the post-civil rights era in the United States, “hybridity emerges as a democratic expression of multiple affiliations of cultural citizenship.”38 Velina Hasu Houston’s trilogy – Asa Ga Kimashita (Morning Has Broken), American Dreams and Tea – traces the history of the relationship between Setsuko Shimada, a Japanese woman, and Creed Banks, her African American husband (who is part American Indian). The couple meets while Creed, “the color of – soy sauce,” (p. 177) is stationed as a soldier in Japan at the end of the Second World War, and Asa Ga Kimashita shows the difficulty of Setsuko’s family (especially her father) accepting him as a future son-inlaw. American Dreams, the second play in the trilogy, continues the narrative, revealing the difficulties that the couple encounter when they move to the United States, especially the hostility of Creed’s family to his Japanese wife. Tea, the third play, takes place after the suicide of Himiko Hamilton, another Japanese woman who married a serviceman, and it depicts Setsuko and three other women with similar marriages drinking tea, reminiscing, and acting out their husbands and children, as the ghost of Himiko looks on.

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In Tea, the five women, although part of the same community, have not socialized together, partly because of the nature of their mixed marriages. Teruko and Himiko married white men from Texas and Oklahoma, Atsuko a Japanese American, Chiz a Mexican, Setsuko an African American. Consequently, despite some similar experiences, their social lives have been quite distinct. Creed and Setsuko have encountered racial prejudice. Atsuko and her Japanese American husband have lived as Japanese Americans; Gustavo died immediately upon returning to America leaving Chiz to cope on her own; Teruko has felt isolated because of being a Japanese woman married to a white man; and Himiko has been confined to her house by a violent husband. At the same time they have all suffered prejudice as Japanese in America. As Himiko says, “Our dignity was tied to a tree and left hanging for strangers to spit on” (p. 192). By contrast with the women’s difficulties, their children represent a new multi-ethnic generation of “hybrid Japanese” (p. 187) who are “between two worlds” (p. 188). Setsuko says proudly of her daughter, “She doesn’t look Japanese . . . and she doesn’t look Negro. And I am glad because I have created something new, something that will look new and think new” (p. 187). On the other hand, Himiko’s daughter has not fared so well. Himiko murdered her husband, apparently because of an unhappy marriage (during which her husband bit off part of her lip), and the daughter left home, hitchhiking and was raped and killed. Houston, whose parents were the model for Setsuko and Creed in the trilogy, reveals that the trilogy does not deal with an isolated phenomenon. During the American occupation of Japan (between 1945 and 1960), over 100,000 American soldiers married Japanese women. When the soldiers returned, they were normally “exiled” to remote bases in the US (such as Fort Riley in Kansas), as Himiko says, “because they were married to ‘Japs’” (p. 169). Like Anna Deavere Smith, Houston relied heavily on personal interviews during the developmental stage of her work. Houston began the research for the plays, according to Roberta Uno, as “an oral history project, interviewing some fifty women who reluctantly consented to speak with her and then only because she was a member of their community. But unlike Smith, who edited and juxtaposed selected interviews which she performed, Houston “decided to abandon the content of the interviews, preserving the emotional intensity, and turning instead to her own knowledge of women she had grown up with, including her mother.”39 Moreover, by focusing on multi-national and inter-ethnic family relations and multi-ethnic (and transnational) children, Houston highlights a different aspect of America’s multicultural identity than Anna Deavere Smith and Tony Kushner. But like


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Anna Deavere Smith, Houston is not so much interested in the blending or melting of cultures but the clash of cultures and the individuated results of that disharmony. “It is the native Japanese woman in America who fascinates me; culturally I feel very close to her. I relate to her struggle – their cultural struggle is my cultural struggle.”40 Houston herself does not fit into a standard ethnic category.41 Rather than Asian American (or Pacific Asian), which would imply that she was of Asian ancestry and living in America, she calls herself “Amerasian” because of her American father and Japanese mother. Houston has encountered resistance to her type of multicultural work because of its multi-ethnic subject matter, and “her refusal to choose a single aspect of her heritage over another.”42 Her comments bring to mind Benedict Anderson’s analysis of census forms in colonial states that used arbitrary and inaccurate classifications to codify the population, sometimes in terms of religion and sometimes in terms of ethnicity and sometimes combining the two. Such taxonomies did not reflect the actual racial or religious mix of the population because they did not allow for mixed ethnicities. “These ‘identities,’ imagined by the (confusedly) classifying mind of the colonial state” reflected “the censusmakers’ passion for completeness and unambiguity. Hence their intolerance of multiple, politically ‘transvestite,’ blurred, or changing identifications. Hence the weird subcategory, under each racial group, of ‘Others’ – who, nonetheless, are absolutely not to be confused with other ‘Others.’ The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one – and only one – extremely clear place. No fractions.”43 Houston suggests that ethnic exclusion on the grounds of traditional ethnic classifications does not only emanate from the dominant culture but also from ethnically based theatre groups. “Too often I have heard the artistic director of an Asian American or an African American theater tell me that one of my plays is either ‘too Japanese’ or ‘not African American enough’ for their theater.”44 Houston feels oppressed by this failure to respect the work of “multiracial people who defy traditional racial categories personally and in their work.”45 Like Velina Hasu Houston, Brenda Wong Aoki also stresses her own mixed ethnic identity in her work. Aoki is a theatre artist who writes and performs her own material such as Obake (1988), a piece based on Japanese ghost stories; The Queen’s Garden (1992), an autobiographical show about growing up in Los Angeles; and Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend (2000), a play about a Japanese great uncle who caused a huge controversy in 1909 by marrying a white woman in San Francisco.

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In The Queen’s Garden Aoki portrays her journey in search of identity as an unsuccessful escape from the tough gang-warfare lifestyle in Los Angeles.46 Early in the play, she explains that “my mom’s family’s from China, Mexico and Scotland and my dad’s family’s from Japan and Salt Lake,” to which her “Aunty” Mary, who boasts she has “da only rose garden in da Westside,” replies, “You all mix up! Chop suey!” (p. 17). In The Queen’s Garden Brenda paints her early life in the Westside (South Central Los Angeles) as harmonious. She works in her father’s pharmacy after school and develops a strong friendship with a Hawaiian boy named Kali. Her identity becomes more complicated when she gets bussed to high school and is placed in an advanced (“Lit. 1.A”) class with white kids, while Kali is relegated to a class for “losers.” When Brother Brown announces that “the Black Panthers have liberated this High School,” the students become racially polarized: “On this side: frat boys, cheerleaders, Lit. 1.A – all white. On this side: wood shop, Twelve O’clock High, Westside Warriors – all the rest” (p. 21). Reminiscent of Anna Deavere Smith’s work, riots break out between what Aoki also calls “the tribes.” But Brenda is able to negotiate her culturally mixed identity to her advantage. Smoke, Kali’s friend, marks her hand with a WS for Westside, and warns her, “Flash dis to any homies who try an’ mess wif you.” Steven, her white friend from her advanced Lit. 1.A class, gives her his fraternity ring and advises, “Show this to any white people who try and bother you.” With these two protective signs, she manages to “walk through the quad. I’m cool . . . Westside. I’m a soc . . . Phi Gam. Westside. Phi Gam. (Mimes repeat of line as flashes ring or palm)” (p. 22). By associating more with whites, she begins to view her family differently, as “looking like a bunch of refugees” (p. 22). Moreover, her teacher encourages her to look beyond the dynamics of Los Angeles’s tribal life, assigning utopian literature and urging: “If there’s one thing I want us all to learn, it’s how to live together in peace” (p. 19). Influenced by her teacher and desiring something more than to marry Kali and become a “fat mama in a muumuu waiting for a welfare check,” Brenda goes to college and drifts further from the Westside. But she feels out of place, regarded by her fellow students as representing the “Third World” (p. 23). She drops out and returns to the Westside to teach the “losers” class in her old school, hoping to inspire them with such radical literature as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (p. 24). Even though she has come through the same school, the reality of life shocks her when she discovers that all the girls in her class are pregnant.


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Hai, her Vietnamese flatmate, surprises her further by intimating what she had to do to survive the war: hai:

When I left Viet Nam, there was not enough room on the boat for both my sister and me. (Pause) But the captain liked me and I had to make sure he kept liking me. brenda: What happened to your sister? hai: These teacups are all that’s left of my family.

Brenda’s life becomes still more complicated when she tries to comfort Hai, and Hai proposes a lesbian relationship: brenda: hai: brenda: hai:

Oh God, Hai. I’m so sorry. I’ll be your family. I love you, Brenda. I love you too, Hai. I do not mean it like that. I mean . . . I love you. (p. 25)

Brenda receives further jolts to her identity as she struggles against the violent society around her. Her relationship with her family breaks down over her father’s support of the Vietnam War. He tries to appear like a loyal American, while she refuses to condone the killing of “people who look just like us!” (p. 25). She also tries and fails to help her student Rosie, who is married to a gang member and wants to be able to take her baby to the park without “getting blown away” (p. 26). Finding her husband a job outside the community only results in his being killed and Brenda being blamed for his death. Gang warfare entwines Brenda, as Kali, now a drug dealer, returns into her life. She tries to escape to San Francisco, but he finds her and uses her apartment as a safe house while Smoke, his old friend whom he has informed against, seeks to gun him down. Sherry, Smoke’s wife and Brenda’s old high school friend, manipulates her to intervene: You’re not gonna help us? Your ole man and my ole man are blowing up the whole Westside. Maybe in Frisco they don’t have drive-bys, stray bullets. It could be your mom coming home from work, my kid coming home from school. Oh, but that has nothing to do with you! That’s not your “responsibility!” Oh Brenda, how white of you. (p. 30)

Brenda fails to reconcile Kali and Smoke and to stop the gang war, and a bloody shoot-out ensues in Aunt Mary’s rose garden. Because of the violence, Brenda retreats back to San Francisco but still regards the Westside, despite its violence, as her home: “My mom, dad, sisters and little bro still

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live on the Westside. And even though I live in San Francisco, the Westside is here. (Points to chest)” (p. 31). Like Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, The Queen’s Garden depicts urban society as explosive and self-destructive, and like Anna Deavere Smith, Aoki argues that her performance is not just about an idiosyncratic city. “The reality is that the conditions that spawned the LA riots exist all over this country. I wrote The Queen’s Garden in an effort to humanize that experience because it is only ten minutes from Beverly Hills to South Central. And there are South Centrals springing up all over this country.”47 Both use the term “tribes” to explain the relationship between the warring elements in urban society, and both perform the distinctive positions of various real characters who represent opposing cultures.What is strikingly different between Smith’s and Aoki’s work, however, is that while Smith represents a kind of social watchdog, looking on from the outside, Aoki remains an insider trying to survive. Her family home in the midst of the violence makes it impossible for her to escape permanently from or avoid being implicated in the gang warfare. She tries to renegotiate her social position, but her family home and sense of identity draw her back into a web of gangland violence.48 In the simplicity of her performance, with no costume changes, and only one prop (a stool), lights, live music and a city landscape backdrop against a cyclorama to convey a theatrical atmosphere, she creates a mood of increasing alarm as the “out of control” social forces overwhelm her.49 Although the characters in her monologue are fictionalized, there is a strong sense of immediacy and reality about her having lived through the experiences that she recounts. Commenting on the verisimilitude of her show to real life, she has said, “Everybody’s based on real people or composites of real people, or real situations.” 50 Moreover, there is an ongoing element of danger in that the social problems she depicts have not eased but are “getting deeper and deeper.” Commenting in 1992 on the danger that she felt in performing her show close to Los Angeles, she mentioned that consultants on the film American Me had been killed and “you feel very vulnerable as a soloist. You’re a real clean shot up there,” adding that it was unlikely that someone from the gang culture would try to kill her, although members of the audience occasionally carried guns.51 Asked by an interviewer if she could “live a safer life,” she replied that her family all lived on the Westside and that she needed to keep close to them. “Ohana . . . It’s the Hawaiian word for family, extended family, and friends that you just couldn’t live without. Plus all the old people who have died who are still with you to help you go through this life. That’s your Ohana. And that’s what you need


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to get by in this life.” Despite the violence and urban decay, she says that there is a strong sense of community in her old neighborhood. “That’s one thing about poor people, if you don’t have much money, you have each other.”52 In Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend, Aoki explores family history and the source of family shame.53 She discovers a hidden secret that her great uncle, who had come from Japan to San Francisco with his brother, had caused a huge controversy by marrying Helen Emery, the daughter of the Episcopalian archdeacon of Grace Church (later Grace Cathedral). Her great uncle Gunjiro was threatened with being tarred and feathered and run out of town for wanting to marry a white woman. California passed a law forbidding Japanese (in addition to Chinese) from marrying whites. Gunjiro and Helen then tried Portland, Oregon where the Deputy District Attorney declared, “If she parades the streets with her Jap lover I’ll jail them both” (p. 21). They fled towards the Canadian border but finally the mayor of Seattle allowed them to marry under the protection of an armed guard. Helen lost her citizenship, her parents split up, Gunjiro’s brother (Aoki’s grandfather) lost his job as head of the Japanese Episcopal mission in San Francisco and the two Aoki families moved separately to Utah where their economic circumstances grew much worse. Her grandfather and grandmother died after working as sharecroppers, leaving their children to look after themselves. Her great uncle Gunjiro and his wife Helen produced five children but the oldest son asked Uncle Gunjiro to leave the family during the depression because his Japanese countenance made it impossible for them to assimilate. Gunjiro departed, leaving a love letter for his wife, and apparently committed suicide. During the Second World War when Japanese Americans were removed from their homes and interned in camps, her great uncle’s family disguised themselves as American Indians and fled to the hills to escape internment while a neighboring Mormon family protected Aoki’s father and his siblings. In Gunjiro’s Girlfriend, Aoki plays the various roles of male and female, whites, Japanese and those of mixed ethnicity, telling a love story marred by racial prejudice. She traces the journey of her Japanese ancestors who came from a distinguished Samurai clan, the decision of Gunjiro and Helen to break with social convention, and the disgrace encountered by her grandfather who respected their decision to marry and consequently lost his own job in the church. On a sparse “neo Noh stage,” she employs slides of news clippings and photos of her family, and live music composed by her husband dressed in a Japanese ceremonial costume.54 She dons a multi-colored

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robe, appearing, according to the stage directions, like “a Shinto priestess, a European cardinal, or a grande dame a la Japonisme” (p. 4). As in The Queens’s Garden, her performance exhibits a mixture of Japanese and American techniques and movements to reflect the mixed ethnicity and transnational character of her story, and, in a scene that combines Oriental and Western forms (e.g., Christian redemptive drama and the pacifying of a troubled ghost in Noh drama), absolves the minister of the Japanese mission of the unfair treatment to her grandfather. Unlike Anna Deavere Smith, who does not represent her own identity in her shows but performs a variety of others, Aoki puts her own past and present on the stage and identifies the opposing ethnic groups or “tribes” as not only external to herself but also as internally constituted within her own body. In The Queen’s Garden she impersonates whites, African Americans, Hawaiians, Vietnamese, Japanese and others from her community, male and female, gay and straight. In Gunjuro’s Girlfriend she represents the Japanese and white people of her grandparent’s society, as well as herself in her quest to track down her family’s history by locating relatives and researching in the library. As in The Queen’s Garden, she presents her own mixed identity as a central focus of her work and ends by calling attention to the mixed cultural background of her own seven-year-old son, dressed in a Samurai outfit on a San Francisco beach performing traditional Samurai movements: “Now we’re even more mixed with the Chinese, the Spanish, the Scots, the Greek, the Samoan, the Portuguese, the African! . . . We are the people of the new world” (p. 35). Like Houston, she challenges the standard categories of cultural divisions by calling attention to her “chop suey” multi-ethnic and transnational persona. Destabilizing normative concepts, she emphasizes her multicultural individuality rather than staging essentialized cultural types.

´ ˜ – transnational identities Coatlicue and Gomez-Pe na Like Houston and Aoki, the Colorado sisters’ Coatlicue Theatre Company presents a combination of identities – Native, Mexican and US – from the point of view of their own personal experiences and traditions. Their work reflects the background of the two sisters – Elvira and Hortensia Colorado – growing up in Chicago with their mother, who was born in Mexico (and who hid her Native roots), and their grandmother who was steeped in Native tradition. They were taught by their mother to call themselves Spanish, rather than Mexican or Native American, but later


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investigated their ancestral roots and developed performances that, like Spiderwoman Theatre Company, wove stories about their mestiza background. The sisters move in and out of their stories, in and out of characters, and reclaim traditional mythology in their stage performances, invoking various goddesses including Coatlicue. According to Anzaldúa, Coatlicue is the mountain, the Earth Mother who conceived all celestial beings out of her cavernous womb. Goddess of birth and death, Coatlicue gives and takes away life; she is the incarnation of cosmic processes. Simultaneously, depending on the person, she represents: duality in life, a synthesis of duality, and a third perspective – something more than mere duality or a synthesis of duality . . . Coatlicue depicts the contradictory. In her figure, all the symbols important to the religion and philosophy of the Aztecs are integrated.55

By invoking the name and image of the goddess and embracing this symbol of ambiguity, the members of Coatlicue Theatre Company since the mid1980s have told stories and explored the contradictions in their personal experiences. In La Llorona – The Wailing Woman which they developed in 1986, they portrayed the age-old struggle of woman on both sides of the border whose “origins date back before Christianity.” According to their publicity, La Llorona is Malinche, Cortez’s mistress, interpreter and mother. She is Cihuacoatl, Aztec deity, protector of women who died in childbirth and who became warriors. She is a witch/sorceress/seer, who possessed supernatural powers. She is Matlacihuatl, who appeared to men at night, dressed in white, frightened her children, transforming and changing with the times, holding on to our culture and traditions. Her cry is one of liberation/celebration. Her cry, wail, song, represents the voices of all women – our pain and our joy as we empower ourselves.56

In 1992, for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to America, the Colorado sisters produced 1992: Blood Speaks which, in addition to song and dance and a comic birthday party for Columbus, depicted the mayhem caused by the Spanish conquistadors in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, in whose “human butcher shop . . . rather than cut the chains, they would sever the head of pregnant slaves . . . and rip out the fetus to save its soul.”57 In 1993 the Colorado Sisters collaborated with Spiderwoman to produce Power Pipes that combined the invocation of Aztec goddesses with contemporary personal stories such as a rape on a New York subway and a lesbian affair in Amsterdam.

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Frequently in their work, they have called attention to the way in which the international border between Mexico and the United States bisects their culture and identity. In Chicomoztoc Mimixcoa – Cloud Serpents (1996), they represented their search for their Native American relatives, and related the problems of discovering an ancestry that had been deliberately obscured and buried. They recalled that in researching their roots for the show, “we were laughed at when we told the border guards we were Indian.”58 In the show they relate the denial of Native American identity by their families and community, the influence of Roman Catholic religion and teaching, and the violence against women in contemporary society. Encouraged to emulate the values and characteristics of convent-educated, confirmation-dressed children and Mexican debutante girls, the Colorado Sisters portray their collusion in the denial of their own identities and their later interrogation of their cultural heritage. In their stories, they repeatedly emphasize and then overcome the “shame” imposed by the contradictory elements in their cultural inheritance. Eventually, after a great deal of searching, they discover that not only their grandmother but even their own sister spoke Otomi. Only late in life are they able to celebrate the traditional values of their Chichimec/Otomi culture as well as the success of the Zapatista campaign for the rights of indigenous people in Mexico. Like much of their work, Cloud Serpents weaves stories of the present and the past, the modern and the traditional, and shows the sisters negotiating cultural borders that have been erected by intolerant or ashamed relatives. Mixing Nahautl, Spanish and English in their dialogue and dressing in Native, Mexican and Roman Catholic costumes, they present various facets of their backgrounds and demonstrate the pre-colonial and colonial legacies that have informed their characters. As Gloria Anzaldua has observed, “The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode – nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned.”59 Ultimately the Colorado Sisters invoke their prenational and transnational indigenous culture as a means of resisting contemporary neocolonial values and destabilizing the national border between Mexico and the United States.60 Like the Colorado Sisters and Velina Hasu Houston, Guillermo GómezPeña presents characters who transgress cultural and national borders, and, like Kushner, his vision is somewhat utopian. Moreover, like Anna Deavere Smith and Brenda Wong Aoki, his one-person shows present a variety


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of personae with opposing ideological outlooks. Growing up in Mexico where “multiculturalism is the very spinal cord of our personal and collective biography,”61 Gómez-Peña became a performance artist in the 1970s, first in Mexico and later in the United States. In words reminiscent of the Rabbi’s comments in Angels, Gómez-Peña says that by crossing the border, he and his friends “became citizens of nowhere, or better said, of everywhere, we were condemned to roam around the foggy and unspecific territory known as border culture.”62 In 1985 he co-founded the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo in the “transfrontier metropolis” of San Diego/Tijuana. According to Claire Fox, this workshop “responded critically to border issues such as immigration, human rights violations, and racism, and they were utopian in that they asked their audiences to ‘imagine a world in which this international boundary has been erased.’”63 Located geographically on the border, their work was site specific, but it was “concerned less with the phenomenal and geological aspects of [the] place than with the cultural, historical, ethnic, linguistic, political, and mythological dimensions of [the] site.”64 Thus the border represented not only a physical space in these shows but also a mental condition. The specific site, however, did lend a sense of danger to their performances as well as attracting international attention. Gómez-Peña recalls that End of the Line, which would have been a rather benign artistic event had it been staged further inland, became an international news story when it was performed in 1986 on the coastal border between Mexico and the US. Dressed as “border stereotypes,” the members of the workshop and friends sat in a huge binational table bisected by the borderline. The Mexicans were in Mexican territory, and the Chicanos and Anglos were on the US side. We began to “illegally” hold hands and exchange food across the line. At one point we turned the table 360 degrees and entered “illegally” into each other’s countries. The three carabelas [ships] of Columbus made out of flammable material were set on fire on the seascape. The national Mexican media reported the events as news, and we became aware of the political power of site-specific performance.65

After breaking with the Border Art Workshop in 1989, Gómez-Peña continued to focus on US–Mexico border issues but more in a psychological rather than a site-specific way. In Border Brujo, a one-man show, which he performed from 1988 and filmed in 1990, Gómez-Peña demonstrates the various influences from both sides of the border, visually, linguistically, musically and textually.66 He slips in and out of different personae including Native Americans, Mexicans, border guards, tourist salesmen, etc. His

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costumes are festooned with eclectic collages of artifacts and decorations, as he positions himself inside an extravagant altar that combines pop culture with religious symbols. He employs a microphone and megaphone for extra emphasis and a ghetto blaster for music reflective of and contrapuntal to different cultural contexts. He speaks English, Spanish, Spanglish, and “tongues” which he explains as “a personal ‘Esperanto’ that experiments with the phonetic structures of indigenous language, and sounds like shamanistic tongues.”67 His performance is deceptive and disarming, confronting the audience with direct address. Having lived on both sides of the border, Gómez-Peña reflects a transnational approach in his work, revealing the cultural complexity of border life on the individual as well as more generally on the two countries. Rather than simply complaining about the treatment of Mexicans and Chicanos in the US, he expresses the liminal state in which border people find themselves, with one foot in one country and one in the other, influenced by US commercial values, Roman Catholicism, and a mixture of Native American, Mexican, and US customs and ways of speaking. The border becomes a “metaphor as a means to address general issues of cultural imperialism.”68 In the voice of a Tijuana border salesman, he exhorts in a spirit of ironic excess, Here everything can take place for a very very reasonable fee anything can change into something else Mexicanos can become Chicanos overnite Chicanos become Hispanics Anglo-Saxons become Sandinistas & surfers turn into soldiers of fortune here, fanatic Catholics become swingers & evangelists go zen at the snap of my fingers for a very very modest amount I can turn your pesos into dollars your “coke” into flour your dreams into nightmares your penis into a clitoris you name it . . . it’s fun, it’s fast it’s easy, it’s worthwhile you just gotta cross the border. (p. 80)


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According to Gómez-Peña, being a Mexican means “being crucified by the East, the West, the North and the South.”69 He performs, in his words, to “exorcise the demons of dominant cultures.”70 Echoing the words of Gloria Anzaldúa, he writes ironically, “We are a syncretic blend of Amerindian and European cultures, of folkways and imported technology, immersed in the past but always welcoming the new, the other, the foreign, no matter how dangerous it is. (Didn’t we welcome Columbus, Cortez, and the American multinationals? Don’t we still welcome all tourists, impressarios, and burn-outs from Europe and the US?) Our sensibility is the sum of these contradictions.”71 In Border Brujo Gómez-Peña does not simply accept these influences, but also raises questions about capitalist exploitation, and while assuming a multicultural audience, addresses many of his remarks at Anglo Americans: I am here ’cause your government went down there to my country without a formal invitation & took all our resources so I came to look for them just to look for them nothing else . . . has anyone seen my stolen resources? has anyone seen my coffee, my copper, my banana, my gas, my cocaine, my wrestling mask? (p. 81)

Gómez-Peña rejects the grievous insults from the dominant culture in the US and, like the final scene of Angels in America, envisages the possibility of a border-less zone, in which Chicanos/as and Mexicanos/as can freely participate with Anglo Americans as “full citizens, not exotic minorities.”72 He suggests that, “Border culture can help dismantle the mechanisms of fear. Border culture can guide us back to common ground and improve our negotiating skills. Border culture is a process of negotiation towards utopia, but in this case, utopia means peaceful coexistence and fruitful cooperation.”73 In his later show 1992, which, like Coatlicue’s, coincided with the 500th anniversary and commented on the devastation caused by “the discovery of America,” Gómez-Peña combined fictitious personae with personal biography. 1992 represented a voyage of personal discovery in which he developed a character called “the warrior for Gringostroika,” whom he

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described as “a hybrid of a mariachi and a disc-jockey; and his alterego [as] a cross between a conchero, a Mexican wrestler, and a lowrider.”74 The show recounted his experiences as a performance artist in Mexico and the US, which were interwoven with the exploits of Columbus and the conquistadors. He says of this work, “I zigzag from the past to the future and from the personal to the historical, in hopes of shedding light on our contemporary experience as multi-, inter-, and trans-cultural citizens of a country that has ferociously resisted accepting its mestizo condition and multiracial soul.”75 Gómez-Peña describes Columbus’s convoy as consisting of La Pinta for the prisoners La Niña for the child molesters y la Santa Mar´ıa for the religious fanatics Columbus arrived in America without papers don’t we all secretly wish he had been deported right away? (p. 99)

Like Border Brujo, 1992 is utopian. In the show, Gómez-Peña ironically imagines some future restructuring of national borders which are the effects of Gringostroika (that also echoed the ongoing dissolution of the Soviet Union): New Spain now encompasses the old territories of Guatemala, México & the United States of Aztlán the Tortilla Curtain no longer exists Spanglish has become the official language Puerto Rico, Hawaii & Panama have finally seceded from the new Federation of US Republics. ( p. 107)

Despite international success, Gómez-Peña says that his work finds opposition in a “tripartite debate about separatism,” in which Chicano nationalists “feel threatened by the perspective of intercultural dialogue,” members of the Mexican intelligentsia fear a “disguised form of integration,” and Anglo Americans are panicking at the “irreversible borderization of the United States.”76 All three groups, according to Gómez-Peña, “prefer to defend ‘their’ identity and culture rather than dialogue with the cultural other.” While Gómez-Peña opens up transnational and cross border possibilities, “The three parties would like to see the border closed. Their intransigent views are based on the modernist premise that identity and culture are closed systems, and that the less these systems change, the more ‘authentic’ they are.”77


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While performing a complex profusion of identities, Gómez-Peña does not try to reduce them to an undifferentiated multicultural melange, but emphasizes their distinct characteristics and oppositional tonalities, creating an ironic and subversive pastiche. He abhors a multicultural approach that allows for “a kind of Esperantic Disney World, a tutti-fruiti cocktail of cultures, languages, and art forms in which ‘everything becomes everything else,’ and nothing is really indispensable.” He warns that such an approach “strongly resembles the bankrupt concept of the melting pot with its familiar connotations of integration, homogenization, and neutralization.”78 On the contrary, Gómez-Peña combines a Eurocentric critique within a multicultural embrace that approximates Shohat and Stam’s “polycentric multiculturalism.”79 Rejecting the separatist rhetoric of Chicano cultural nationalism, his artistic vision advocates “a cultural pluralism in which the various ethnic groups collaborate and dialogue with one another without having to sacrifice their particular identities to the Big Blob.”80 From his earliest days in the US, he has sought images to transgress the hegemonic norm and promote a transnational identity. During his first performance in the US in 1979 called The Loneliness of the Immigrant, he lay wrapped in an Indian cloth on the floor of a public elevator in Los Angeles and remained for hours with a message on the wall which read inter alia, “Surely one day we will be able to crack this shell open, this unbearable loneliness, and develop a transcontinental identity.”81

Summary The work of Anna Deavere Smith, Tony Kushner, Velina Hasu Houston, Brenda Wong Aoki, the Colorado sisters and Gómez-Peña presents various approaches to representing a multicultural society, all of which destabilize conventional notions of national identity. Anna Deavere Smith represents the warring tribes in society pulling the country apart. Tony Kushner presents utopian possibilities, queering the nation and anticipating the acceptance of gay lifestyles as an integral feature of American (and international) society. Houston and Aoki reject the conventional taxonomies of cultural identity by staging multi-ethnic personae with divided and transnational loyalties. The Colorado sisters and Gómez-Peña position themselves as straddling the Mexican–US border and absorbing influences from both sides. As opposed to the concept of e pluribus unum, these artists proffer an image of “the divided states of America,”82 looking for a different form of comm/unity. Cherr´ıe Moraga writes,

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I hold a vision requiring a radical transformation of consciousness in this country, that as the people-of-color population increases, we will not be just another brown faceless mass hungrily awaiting integration into white Amerika, but that we will emerge as a mass movement of people to redefine what an “American” is. Our entire concept of this nation’s identity must change, possibly be obliterated. We must learn to see ourselves less as US citizens and more as members of a larger world community, composed of many nations of people and no longer give credence to the geopolitical borders that have divided us . . . Call it . . . an identity that dissolves borders.83

Notes

Introduction 1. Many plays which are now regarded as contributing to a nationalist movement offended their original target audience, e.g. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and much of J. M. Synge’s work. 2. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 4–5. 3. Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?,” in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (eds.), The Nationalism Reader (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995), p. 154. 4. Schiller elaborated, “Now, if poets would be patriotic they could do much on the stage to forward invention and industry. A standing theatre would be a material advantage to a nation. It would have a great influence on the national temper and mind by helping the nation to agree in opinions and inclinations. The stage alone can do this, because it commands all human knowledge, exhausts all positions, illumines all hearts, unites all classes, and makes its way to the heart and understanding by the most popular channels.” Frederick Ungar (ed.), Friedrich Schiller: An Anthology for Our Time (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1959), p. 279. Some of this discussion has appeared previously in my “Reifying Imagined Communities; Nationalism, Post-Colonialism and Theatre Historiography,” Nordic Theatre Studies, 12 (1999), 94–103. 5. Ibsen was recruited by the Norwegian nationalist Ole Bull as stage director and playwright-in-residence for the first professionalNorwegian company, the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. Although influenced by the nationalist movement in his early plays, he later satirized it in Peer Gynt. Ironically, Peer Gynt became a nationalist icon largely because of Grieg’s music that was added to it. See for example Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, A History of Scandinavian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 131–61. 6. Marvin Carlson, “Nationalism and the Romantic Drama in Europe,” in Gerald Gillespie (ed.), Romantic Drama (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1994), pp. 139–152. 7. Laurence Senelick, “Recovering Repressed Memories: Writing Russian Theatrical History,” paper presented at International Federation for Theatre Research

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

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colloquium at Helsinki University in 1997 on “Re/Writing National Theatre Histories.” Unpublished, p. 12. Carlson, “Nationalism,” p. 152. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. edn. (London: Verso, 1995), p. 195. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen, 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1989), 43–4. Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (eds.), Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 9. See David M. Reimers, Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn Against Immigration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 8. See Felicia H. Londré and Daniel J. Wattermeier, The History of North American Theater (New York: Continuum, 1998), p. 39. See James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1978), pp. 287–333. Quoted in Michael LeMay and Elliott R. Barkan (eds.), US Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), p. 11. Quoted in Gary A. Richardson, “In the Shadow of the Bard: James Nelson Barker’s Republican Drama and the Shakespearean Legacy,” in Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt (eds.), When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare: Essays on Nineteenth-Century British and American Theatre (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 128. See Walter J. Meserve, An Outline History of American Drama (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams and Co., 1965), p. 73; and Maura Cronin, “The Yankee and the Veteran: Vehicles of Nationalism,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 13, no. 2 (Spring, 2001), 51–70. See Joseph Jefferson, The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson, edited by Alan S. Downer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 20. Bruce McConachie, “American Theatre in Context, from the Beginnings to 1870,” in Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), i, pp. 154–5. See Sacvan Berkovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 164–5. See R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1955). Donald E. Pease, “National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives,” in Donald E. Pease (ed.), National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 4. Stanley Richards (ed.), America on Stage: Ten Great Plays of America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), p. xi. See Bruce McConachie, “The Theatre of Edwin Forrest and Jacksonian Hero Worship,” in Fisher and Watt (eds.), When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare, pp. 3–18. Irish workers were suffering from victimization at this time, and a common notice was put on job and housing advertisements that “no Irish need apply.” Prejudice against Catholicism had been evident in the first generations of settlers in America in the seventeenth century with some Protestants referring to them as the “anti-Christ”

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26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

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and trying to bar them from immigrating. See Reimers, Unwelcome Strangers, p. 6. This prejudice continued into the nineteenth and even the twentieth century. In 1911 for example, a periodical called The Menace that labeled Catholicism as a threat to American values was launched by William Franklin Phelps and within three years it had a circulation of over a million people. However, by this time, Irish immigrants had become more settled and prosperous, especially in the big cities, and plays began to reflect their new status, focusing especially on their role as city firemen, and later as political and labor leaders in New York such as The Man of the Hour by George Broadhurst in 1906 and The Boss by Edward Sheldon in 1913. For a discussion of how they improved their image, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). Quoted in James H. Dorman, Jr., Theater in the Ante Bellum South:1815–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), p. 278. According to Dorman, the furthest south it was performed was in Baltimore in 1854 in a “watered down version” with the manager playing the part of Uncle Tom in case of trouble. See p. 278, note 61. However, according to William Stanley Hoole, the Aiken version was presented in Charleston, South Carolina in 1854. See Joseph P. Roppolo, “Uncle Tom in New Orleans: Three Lost Plays,” New England Quarterly, 27 (1954), 215. Quoted in Roppolo, “Uncle Tom in New Orleans,” p. 213. See Roppolo, “Uncle Tom in New Orleans,” 213–26. Gerald Vizenor has argued that the image of the vanishing Indian was an aesthetic pose. In his view, the settlers were hoping for the Indians to disappear and that the tragic image that they concocted of a dying race represented a wish fulfillment. Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). See Jeffrey D. Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 58. For a discussion of the influence of German Romanticism on the appreciation of Native American Culture, see Anne-Christine Hornborg, “Kluskap – As Local Culture Hero and Global Green Warrior: Different Narrative Contexts for the Canadian Mi’kmaq Culture Hero,” Acta Americana, 9, no. 1 (2001), 17–38. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Richard D. Heffner (ed.), A Documentary History of the United States, rev. edn. (New York: Mentor, 1961), p. 185. Quoted in Berkovitch, American Jeremiad, p. 165. See Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 11–13. Charlotte Canning has observed, “Despite the circuit Chautauqua’s official claim to a multi-denominational platform, a claim they buttressed by the appearance of rabbis and Catholic priests, the Chautauqua platform was one of the most prominent promoters of what Handy calls ‘the national religion, a religion of civilization’ presented simply as universal moral values and the American way of life.” Charlotte Canning, “The Most American Thing in America,” in Mason and Gainor (eds.), Performing America, p. 102.

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36. Conwell, who was a businessman turned minister, delivered his “Acres of Diamonds” speech over six thousand times in forty years, extolling the virtues and opportunities of the Protestant capitalist. See Canning, “The Most American Thing,” pp. 102–3. 37. Charlotte Canning has argued, “A reassuring, stable, and moral representation was repeatedly performed year after year, both creating and fulfilling the spectators’ views and beliefs about the United States. This United States bore little resemblance to the heterogeneous, unstable, and complex nation that actually existed outside the comfortable confines of Chautauqua, and it was that United States that people wished to be reassured did not exist. Chautauqua relentlessly performed the dominant values of white Protestants of British descent, even as their influences were waning in the face of increasing immigration and religious diversity.” Canning, “The Most American Thing,” p. 104. 38. According to Jackson Lears, “‘Reality’ is what coincides with the ruling groups’ worldview.” Jackson Lears, “A Matter of Taste: Corporate Cultural Hegemony in a Mass-Consumption Society,” in Lary May (ed.), Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 50. 39. Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 6.

1 From British colony to independent nation: refashioning identity 1. Jared Brown, The Theatre in America during the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5. 2. Paul N. Ford, Washington and the Theatre (New York: Publications of the Dunlap Society, 1899), p. 2. 3. See Hugh F. Rankin, The Theater in Colonial America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), especially chapters 6 and 7. 4. Rankin, Theater in Colonial America, p. 192. 5. Ralph Culp has examined the plays performed in the colonies before the Revolution and has classified 70 percent of the non-Shakespearean plays performed as Whig as opposed to 15 percent that were Tory and 15 percent that did not favor one side or the other. Brown, Theatre in America, pp. 11–12. Although the accuracy of this research might be questioned and one might ask if Whig sentiment in England was as responsible for these choices as Whig sentiment in the colonies, nevertheless it seems clear that the theatre was favoring Whig rather than Tory material. The need to cater to the desires of the colonial audience was certainly apparent. 6. Rankin, Theater in Colonial America, pp. 139, 169, 193. 7. New York Gazette, 12 May 1766. 8. Rankin, Theater in Colonial America, p. 182. 9. New York Journal, 17 December 1767. 10. For the link between Whig antagonism in England to A Word to the Wise and its negative reception in Philadelphia in 1770 see Rankin, Theater in Colonial America, pp. 170–1. 11. For a discussion of the influence of class divisions on theatre riots, see Richard Butsch, “American Theatre Riots and Class Relations, 1754–1849,” in Theatre Annual 48 (1995), 41–59.

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12. See reward notice in Pennsylvania Packet, 14 December 1772. 13. See Bruce McConachie, “American Theatre in Context, from the Beginnings to 1870,” in Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), i, pp. 127–8. 14. New York Mercury, 13 January 1766. 15. For a facsimile of the resolution, see Ford, Washington and the Theatre, following page 24. 16. The date of publication appears as 1714 on the only extant copy of the play, but recently Peter Davis has suggested that the actual publication date was 1715. Peter Davis, “Determining the Date of Robert Hunter’s Androboros,” Theatre Survey, 25, no. 1 (May 1984), 95–7. 17. The confrontation arose out of the growing resentment in several colonies where the westerners felt under-represented and neglected by the assemblies that met in the coastal towns such as Philadelphia, Charleston and New Bern (North Carolina). It led to other insurrections such as those by the North and South Carolina associations of “Regulators” who refused to pay taxes until they received fair government. The Regulators in North Carolina threatened to attack the Governor’s mansion but were easily defeated by the local militia at the Battle of Alamance in 1771. Several of the Regulators were killed and six were hanged for treason, and the Governor rode around the colony afterwards demanding an oath of allegiance. Insurrections after independence such as Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 and the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 resulted from similar disagreements. 18. Rogers later took the side of the British in the War of Independence and settled in England. 19. Bruce McConachie has recently criticized Rogers for having “stuffed his Indian chief with patriarchal European virtues, effectively erasing genuine Native American culture.” However, I think he somewhat exaggerates by including Rogers’s play as one that helps “justify [the English colonials’] continuing oppression of both [the Native American and African American] races.” McConachie, “American Theatre in Context,” p. 125. 20. Wou’dbe’s first lines in the play are, “I am very sorry our good old governor Botetourt has left us. He well deserved our friendship, when alive, and that we should for years to come, with gratitude, remember his mild and affable deportment” (p. 17). Jay B. Hubbell and Douglass Adair in their introduction to The Candidates give the date of Governor Botetourt’s death as 15 October 1770 to justify their assertion that the play was written in 1770. Robert Munford, A Collection of Plays and Poems by the late Colonel Robert Munford, of Mecklenberg County in the State of Virginia (Williamsburg: 1948), p. 6. It seems that Munford’s son hoped for a performance in 1792 (and may have written the prologue to the play at that time). He wrote from Richmond, “The players are in town, and I intend to get them to bring a farce of my father’s writing upon the stage this winter.” Whereas Hubbell’s and Adair’s introduction (p. 5) states that The Patriots was written in 1775 or 1776 and published in Philadelphia in 1776, Walter Meserve asserts that it was based on an event in 1777 and written between 1777 and 1779, and not published until 1798. Walter Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment:

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21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

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The Drama of the American People to 1828 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). p. 86. The ode was written by Francis Hopkinson, who later signed the Declaration of Independence and designed the American Flag. It is noteworthy that many of the dialogues and plays from this era portrayed the America Indian in a sympathetic light. One of the most remarkable examples was “A Dialogue between an Englishman and an Indian” that was performed at the 1779 commencement at Dartmouth College, which was founded to educate the Indians. In the dialogue, an Englishman and an Indian (who was in fact acted by an Indian) debated the character of Indians in front of “a numerous auditory.” New-Hampshire Gazette, 5 October 1779. At the beginning of the piece, the Englishman accuses the Indian of being from a “savage, cruel race” but, after the Indian counters with examples of European savagery, concedes that he has been “too much prejudiced.” John Smith, “A Dialogue between an Englishman and an Indian,” 1779, manuscript held by Dartmouth College Special Collections. In a letter to James Madison on 4 January 1775, discussing the efforts of the Tory printer James Rivington to undermine the credibility of the Continental Congress, William Bradford wrote, “Rivington is encouraging the Cause of Administration there with all his might: he is daily publishing pamphlets against the proceedings of the Congress & the Cause they are engaged in. Some of them are grossly scurrilous, particularly ‘A Dialogue between a Southern Delegate & his Spouse on his return from the Congress.” Quoted in Norman Philbrick (ed.), Trumpets Sounding (New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1972), p. 32. While it might be tempting to read feminist rhetoric into the dialogue, the dramatic choice of a superior woman in the play was probably made to further ridicule the male members of the Congress. See Philbrick, Trumpets Sounding, p. 37. Munford’s The Patriots would raise this issue from a Patriot perspective during the war. For a discussion of the effectiveness of such political tracts and pamphlet plays, see Philbrick, Trumpets Sounding, pp. 6–13. It was normal at this time that pamphlet plays were published anonymously, partly because of their dangerous political views. Printers were subjected to abuse for publishing controversial material. A Patriot mob stormed the office of James Rivington, the Tory printer of the New York Gazette, and wrecked his press in 1775. Likewise, the Whig printer Isaiah Thomas, who published the Massachusetts Spy in which Mercy Otis Warren’s The Adulateur first appeared, secretly moved his press from Boston to get out of danger. At least five pamphlet plays are ascribed to Warren (who continued to write after the war), but, because most plays were published anonymously, it is difficult to determine whether she or someone else wrote certain plays such as The Blockheads, Or the Affrighted Soldiers published in 1776 and The Motley Assembly in 1779. Recent scholars have argued that Mercy Otis Warren probably wrote all the plays ascribed to her in this chapter. See, for example, Jeffrey H. Richards, Mercy Otis Warren (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), pp. 84–108. This name is spelled in various ways in the text.

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30. Jeffrey Richards has shown that the characters of Brutus and Cassius and whom they represented in real life are not consistent and vary from one text to the next. Richards, Mercy Otis Warren, p. 165, note 13. 31. Mercy Warren Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, drama folder, p. 5. 32. There are no page numbers in the facsimile text published in Franklin and presumably in the original, and so I have numbered the pages. 33. John Adams, Papers of John Adams edited by Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline and Gregg L. Lint (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), ii, p. 3. 34. Benjamin Franklin (ed.), The Plays and Poems of Mercy Otis Warren (New York: Delmar, 1980), p. 189. 35. Franklin (ed.), Plays and Poems of Warren, p. 212. 36. This issue would continue to be addressed in (and helps therefore to substantiate the authorship of ) Warren’s later plays, such as The Blockheads and The Motley Assembly. 37. Franklin (ed.), Plays and Poems of Warren, 208–9. 38. Warren papers, reel 1, 61–2. 39. The play was advertised as on sale in the Boston Gazette of 3 April 1775. The Group was printed by Edes and Gill in Boston on April 3, 1775, and reprinted in Jamaica and Philadelphia by James Humphreys in 1775. 40. Adams, Papers of John Adams, ii, p. 214. 41. Adams, Papers of John Adams, ii, pp. 394–408. 42. Adams, Papers of John Adams, ii, p. 408. 43. Adams, Papers of John Adams, ii, p. 408. 44. Adams, Papers of John Adams, ii, pp. 407–8. 45. John Adams, Papers of John Adams edited by Robert J. Taylor, Gregg L. Lint and Caleste Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), iii, p. 11. 46. Franklin (ed.), Plays and Poems of Warren, p. xiii. 47. See Philbrick, Trumpets Sounding, pp. 138–9. 48. The conspiracy theory also indicated the predominant favoring of Protestantism over Catholicism that would become part of the national hegemonic discourse. 49. Lord Dunmore used this tactic successfully during the War of Independence and it represented a significant threat to the Patriots. See Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (London: Longman, 1980), p. 81. 50. Claude Robin, New Travels through North-America (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 18. 51. Thomas Paine is credited with two anonymous dialogues from this same period. A Dialogue Between General Wolfe and General Gage in a Wood Near Boston (printed in the Pennsylvania Journal on 4 January 1775) appeared at about the same time as Mercy Warren’s The Group. Paine, who had only recently arrived in America and would not write Common Sense (in which he argued for American political independence from Britain) for another year, did not go as far as Mercy Otis Warren in justifying armed struggle and separate nationhood. On the contrary, in this dialogue he envisaged the continuation of the American colonies within the empire. He used the device of resurrecting a dead British military hero to argue the just cause of

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the American Patriots. The ghost of Wolfe remains loyal to King and country and suggests that by resigning, Gage will “restore perpetual harmony between Britain and her colonies” (p. 118). However, Paine went further in his second dramatic piece A Dialogue Between the Ghost of General Montgomery, Just Arrived from the Elysian Fields, and an American Delegate, in a Wood Near Philadelphia. Published in the Pennsylvania Packet on 19 February 1776, Paine explicitly encouraged independence in this second dialogue. 52. After the war Mercy Otis Warren wrote stage plays as well as a three-volume history of the United States and justified her use of the dramatic form on didactic grounds. “Theatrical amusements may, sometimes, have been prostituted to the purposes of vice; yet, in an age of taste and refinement, lessons of morality, and the consequences of deviation, may perhaps, be as successfully enforced from the stage, as by modes of instruction, less censured by the severe; while, at the same time, the exhibition of great historical events, opens a field of contemplation to the reflecting and philosophic mind.” Warren, introduction to Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous in Franklin (ed.), Plays and Poems of Warren, p. 11. For a discussion of the didactic purposes of her later plays such as The Sack of Rome and The Ladies of Castile, see Richards, Mercy Otis Warren, pp. 107–20.

2 Federalist and Democratic Republican theatre: partisan drama in nationalist trappings 1. Writing in the 1960s and 70s, leading American theatre scholars Richard Moody and Walter Meserve discussed Burk’s Bunker-Hill at some length in their books, but they categorized it simply as a patriotic piece and did not discuss its political subtleties. See Walter Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 1828 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 119–25 and Richard Moody (ed.), Dramas from the American Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), pp. 61–9.) Although more interested in the political and cultural context of theatre, Gary Richardson more recently has helped to perpetuate the image of the play as nationalistic by highlighting its “romance and theatrical spectacle” rather than its partisan political rhetoric. Gary Richardson, American Drama from the Colonial Period through World War I (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), p. 56. 2. William W. Clapp, A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1853), p. 55. 3. Meserve suggested that Adams’s strident reaction to the play stemmed from a strong scene in which Warren goes into battle. “Warren and Prescot prepare for war with the rallying cry, ‘Liberty or Death.’ It is probably this scene, in which Burk made Warren act with strong determination for victory, that offended John Adams. Warren draws his sword and makes the following speech: ‘Now savage strife and fury fill my soul – / And when my nature yields to self-compassion / Let Boston’s injuries rise before my view / And steel my heart to pity’ (iv, ii),” Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment, p. 123. Meserve may be partly right in proposing that these words made Warren out to be more savage than he was in real life, but in addition there is an important underlying rhetoric and a partisan quality to which Adams was very sensitive. For

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4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

54 – 56

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example, Adams may have been more aggrieved by Warren’s denunciation of social inequalities and aristocratic titles. Meserve also expressed difficulty in explaining the early critical response to Burk’s play: “The odd part of the response to Bunker-Hill is the conscientious effort on the part of most early historians and critics to deplore it, particularly when the play was certainly no worse than many of the plays being produced at that time and even better than a substantial number. Although no one would contend that the play is great drama, the ardor with which some of the early condemnations seem to single out this play suggests a confluence of criticism for whatever reasons may be imagined,” p. 122. Later, he suggested surprisingly that the continuing success of the play might have caused critics to attack it. “Perhaps its repetition simply gave critics more opportunity to express their views,” p. 123. Rather than placing Dunlap’s comments in the context of a partisan reaction to the play, Richard Moody discussed their financial implications, “Perhaps Dunlap’s later failure as a theatre manager resulted from such fanciful disregard for the box office,” Moody (ed.), Dramas from the American Theatre, p. 65. There was, of course, a fundamental contradiction in the position of many Democratic Republicans (including Jefferson) who promoted the egalitarian principles of the French Revolution while engaging in the practice of slavery. John Adams, The Political Writings of John Adams, edited by George A. Peek, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1954), p. 115. Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 184. Adams managed to push through the Senate the title “His Highness the President of the United States of America and the Protector of the Rights of the Same” but it foundered in the House of Representatives. See Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager and William E. Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), i, p. 285. Mercy Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1970), iii, p. 392. Quoted in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Longman, 1980), p. 95. Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1982), p. 346 and Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg, Growth of the American Republic, i, p. 327. Quoted in Curti, Growth of American Thought, p. 184. Quoted in Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg, Growth of the American Republic, i, p. 300. See Merrill D. Peterson, Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 58. Richard Butsch, in his valuable article “American Theatre Riots and Class Relations, 1754–1849,” tends to imply that the two factions divided along class lines, i.e. rich employers and professionals against artisans. While there is some truth in this, the alliances were more complex. For example, the rich planters in the south tended to favor the Democratic Republican position because they opposed a strong central government and because they feared having to repay their debts to Britain. Richard Butsch, “American Theatre Riots and Class Relations, 1754–1849,” in Theatre Annual, 48 (1995), 41–59.

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14. William Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), i, p. 214. 15. According to the theatre historian Arthur Hobson Quinn, “In 1798 the Chestnut Street Theatre was nightly a scene of rivalry between the two parties as to which could stir up more enthusiasm for its favorites,” Arthur Quinn, History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1923), p. 130, note 1. William Dunlap also refers to a disturbance in the New York Theatre when the orchestra leader was not “ready with a popular air when called upon” by Democratic Republicans. Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, i, p. 210. 16. William W. Clapp, A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1853), pp. 22–3. 17. Quoted in Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, p. 26. 18. After the intense rivalry during the first season had virtually bankrupted the two theatres, John Hodgkinson was brought from New York to perform with his company in the summer at the Haymarket and the winter at the Federal Street Theatre. He recommended that the shareholders of the Federal Street Theatre secretly buy out a majority of the shares in the Haymarket (as well as its scenery) so that the theatres would not have to compete because Boston was not big enough to sustain two theatres. He also argued that the Haymarket proprietors would not try to start another theatre because of the disastrous financial consequences in the previous season. “Fatal experience will cry out to each attempt ‘remember’!!! party will be destroy’d.” Hodgkinson to Thomas Bartlett, Secretary of the Trustees of the Federal Street Theatre, 13 March 1798, Federal Street Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library. 19. John Burk, Bunker-Hill; or, The Death of General Warren (New York: Publications of the Dunlap Society, no. 15, 1891), p. 12; Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, pp. 50–1. 20. New England Magazine, 1832, iii, 38–9. 21. Arthur Hornblow, A History of the Theatre in America (Philadelphia: Lippincott Company, 1919), vol. i, p. 237. 22. Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, pp. 74–5. 23. Charles Powell, the manager of the Haymarket Theatre, had been fired as manager of the Federal Street Theatre and had used the animosity between the social and political divisions within the city to promote the creation of a rival theatre. According to historian William Clapp, Powell “availed himself of the strong political antagonism which prevailed between the Federalists and so-called jacobins to induce the latter to believe that the old theatre was managed with a view of promoting political animosities,” William Clapp, “The Drama in Boston” in Justin Winsor (ed.), The Memorial History of Boston (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1881), iv, p. 363. It may also have been partly to appeal to Democratic Republican tastes that Powell hired French and Irish and not just English actors for his company. The actor who played the heroic figure of General Warren, for example, was an Irishman. 24. Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, pp. 36–7. 25. According to the accounts of the Federal Street Theatre, weekly income was normally in excess of $1,000 in 1796 before the Haymarket Theatre opened, and exceeded $1,200 for three weeks. In the three months after the opening of the Haymarket, the box-office income of the Federal Street Theatre never reached $1,000 and was often

NOTES TO PAGES

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

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below $700. See Manager’s Accounts, 1796–7, Federal Street Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library. John Williamson, the manager of the Federal Street Theatre, kept the theatre going with promissory notes and had to be bailed out by the trustees at the end of the season. See Williamson’s letters to Trustees of theatre, April to July, 1797. Federal Street Theatre Collection, Boston Public Library. Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, i, p. 312. Polar Star and Daily Advertiser, 26 October 1796. Polar Star and Daily Advertiser, 9 January 1797. Burk, Bunker-Hill, p. 1. Burk claimed impartiality for his Polar Star and Daily Advertiser, but it was clearly pro-French, anti-British and anti-monarchist. During the 1796 election campaign between Adams and Jefferson, Burk hinted at his support for Jefferson. The Time Piece, which he edited in 1798, was much more outspoken about its Democratic Republican sympathies. (See The Time Piece, April–July 1798.) Burk’s arrest was an ironic comment on his first editorial in The Polar Star in which he wrote to his readership after recently arriving from Ireland, “ I call you f e l l o w c i t i z e n s! for I too am a citizen of those states – from the moment the stranger puts his foot on the soil of America, his fetters are rent in pieces, and the scales of servitude which he had contracted under European tyrannies fall off, he becomes a f r e e m a n; and though civil regulations may refuse him the immediate exercise of his rights, he is virtually a Citizen . . . This I take to be the way in which all strangers are affected when they enter those states” (6 October 1796). At the same time as he negotiated for Burk’s case to be dismissed on condition that Burk leave the country, Burr wrote to James Monroe asking him to help Burk. “Mr. Burk who will present you this, is a young Gentleman in whose Welfare I feel much interested – His enthusiasm in the cause of liberty, his talents, and his literary acquirements, very uncommon at his period of life, entitle him to respect, attention and patronage,” Aaron Burr, Political Correpondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr edited by Mary-Jo Kline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), i, p. 361. Bruce McConachie has observed that “bashing the Brits played a large role in defining republican nationalism,” Bruce McConachie, “American Theatre in Context, from the Beginnings to 1870,” in Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), i, p. 135. Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, i, p. 314. Quoted in Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, i, pp. 313–14. Quoted in Peterson, Adams and Jefferson, pp. 54–5. Adams corresponded at length with Rush about the need for titles and social distinctions in America. Rush evidently maintained that they should be unnecessary, but Adams, quoting Roman and Greek examples, argued that elevated titles gave the populace a respect for officials. He was also clearly less sanguine than Rush that the division of power between the three branches of government would work. “I agree with you that hereditary Monarchy and hereditary Aristocracy, ought not yet to be attempted in America – and that three ballanced [sic] Branches, ought to be at Stated Periods elected by the People. This must and will and ought to continue, till Intrigue and Corruption Faction and

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

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Sedition Shall appear in those Elections to Such a degree as to render hereditary Institutions, a Remedy against a greater Evil,” Adams to Rush, 24 July 1789, Ms. Am.229 (31), Boston Public Library. Quoted in Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 13. Quoted in Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, i, pp. 313–14. Columbia Centinel, 22 February 1797. Sollee’s name was often also spelled “Solee.” William Dunlap, The Diary of William Dunlap (New York: New York Historical Society, 1931) i, p. 144; see also Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, i, p. 313. Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, i, pp. 371–2. Major John André acted and helped in the staging of British military plays from 1777 until he was captured and hanged by the Patriots for espionage in 1780. See Dunlap, History of American Theatre, i, pp. 94–5 and Jared Brown, The Theatre in America During the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), passim. Although Dunlap admitted in the preface to the play that it was a slight piece, it was printed many times apparently with the encouragement of his friends. See Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, i, p. 160. Oral S. Coad, William Dunlap (New York: Dunlap Society, 1917), pp. 49–50. Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, i, p. 175. Richardson, American Drama, p. 57. Richardson, American Drama, p. 60. Dunlap looked at William H. Brown’s Westpoint Preserv’d, Or the Treason of Arnold, which was apparently an anti-Federalist version of the same story that was performed at the Haymarket Theatre in April 1797. Although Brown’s play was not printed and has apparently disappeared, the emphasis on “treason” in the title clearly implies a different ideological orientation from Dunlap’s play. See Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, i, p. 225. A review defending the play in The Argus on 3 April implied that the performance was well received until the cockade incident: “The representation was attended by a crowded audience who gave continued testimony of their approbation by plaudits, and in many instances more unequivocal tributes to the Authors’ power by their tears. One incident, viz. a young fiery officer tearing out his cockade and disclaiming the service of his country, met with pointed disapprobation from a part of the audience.” The article went on to argue that the author of the play had shown that the actions of the character were misguided and that the audience should not have interrupted the action of the play before it understood the author’s point of view. “If in every play, the audience made it a custom to shew their disapprobation of such [s]entiments and actions as are continually put into the mouths of characters which the author intends to expose either as rash or villainous, Theatrical representation could not go on, nor could actors be found to represent such characters . . . If in the conclusion they find that the author has not done what is called poetical justice, then it belongs to the audience to do justice on him.” Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, i, p. 237. Coad, William Dunlap, p. 62.

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53. The Argus printed two articles about the play that appeared side by side on 3 April 1798, one in defense of the author and the other attacking the play. Two days later, The Argus printed a lengthy reply to the negative review by a correspondent who defended the play against some of the political criticism. On 7 April 1798, the original critic defended his opinions in the same paper, reinforcing his position that André was a traitor and did not deserve such positive treatment in a play. This sort of correspondence was highly unusual and reflected the political rivalry of the time as well as the fact that the play was an original American work about an important and controversial subject. By contrast with The Argus, The Time Piece merely edited the original critical review and did not include the positive review or any correspondence. The review included a note at the bottom of the article indicating that it had been received on 31 March but that it had been too late for the edition of 2 April and was therefore printed in the next edition on 4 April 1798. 54. According to Burk’s biographer Joseph Shulim, the other co-editor Matthew Davis probably carried out the editorial duties until Burk took charge from 11 April 1798. Joseph I. Shulim, John Daly Burk: Irish Revolutionist and American Patriot, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 54, part 6 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, October 1964), p. 22. This would mean that the advance publicity for Female Patriotism (quoted in the text) appeared in The Time Piece on the same day as Burk took over as editor. 55. Time Piece, 4 April 1798. 56. Time Piece, 4 April 1798. 57. Time Piece, 4 April 1798. 58. Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, i, p. 221. 59. Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, i, p. 221. 60. Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, i, p. 221. 61. Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, i, p. 226. 62. Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, i, p. 244. 63. Burk quoted the scene in which Joan La Pucelle recognizes the king in disguise and introduces herself. Burk used the same name for Joan of Arc as Shakespeare. Pucelle means young virgin. 64. “Beauvais” is spelled “Beuvais” for the first half of the play. 65. John C. Miller, The Federalist Era: 1789–1801 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), p. 212. 66. Miller, The Federalist Era, pp. 212–13. 67. Time Piece, 11 April 1798. 68. Time Piece, 11 April 1798. 69. Time Piece, 25 April 1798. 70. Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, i, p. 251. 71. Monthly Magazine, 3, no. 6 (December 1800), 455. 72. Quoted in Dunlap, History of American Theatre, ii, p. 163. 73. Bunker-Hill continued to be performed successfully in New York and elsewhere through the Jacksonian era. It was printed in 1797 and reprinted in 1808 and 1817. Charles Blake attested to its ongoing success, observing that the play “has proved very remunerative to the theatrical treasury in Boston. It was very well received

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here [in Providence when it was first produced] and the company then left town, to produce it in Newport. Miserable as the play was it survived many dramas superior to it in every respect, and is now sometimes brought out on the fourth of July in New England cities for the benefit of visitors from the rural districts.” Quoted in Burk, Bunker-Hill, p. 12. 74. Because 4 July 1803 was a Sunday, the play was performed on the following day. 75. Quoted in Coad, William Dunlap, pp. 74–5. 76. The Argus, 3 April 1798.

3 Independence for whom? American Indians and the Ghost Dance 1. In developing many of the ideas in this chapter, I am indebted to an extremely fruitful collaboration with Dr. Ross Frank in the Department of Ethnology at the University of California, San Diego. 2. Richard Schechner, “General Introduction to the Performance Studies Series,” in Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1987), p. 4. 3. See Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 32. 4. Turner, Anthropology of Performance, p. 25. 5. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 29–30. 6. Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 97. 7. Quoted in Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism, p. 103. 8. Jean and John Comaroff, Modernity and its Malcontents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. xxix. 9. A Congressional Act in 1871 abolished treaty making. See Francis Paul Prucha (ed.), Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1990), p. 136. 10. John Pope to Colonel R. M. Sawyer, Military Division of the Mississippi, 1 August 1865, War of the Rebellion, Official Records, Ser. i, xlviii, Pt. 2, 1149. Quoted in James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 3. 11. The General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) of 1887 established the policy of allocating parcels of reservation land to individual Indians in order to break up tribal relations. See Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, pp. 171–4. 12. Thomas J. Galbraith to Clark W. Thompson, 27 January 1863, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, serial 1182: 398. Quoted in Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), i, p. 439. 13. Paul Steinmetz, Pipe, Bible, and Peyote among the Oglala Lakota (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 28. 14. Clyde Holler, Black Elk’s Religion: The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), p. 113. 15. See Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 6–8.

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16. Holler, Black Elk’s Religion, p. 134. 17. “Sending Spirits to the Spirit World,” Short Bull, 11 February 1898, in James R. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Elaine A. Jahner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), pp. 141–2. This regulation, which was introduced in 1883, was not enforced until 1892. See Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, pp. 161 and 187. 18. Despite having converted to Catholicism, Black Elk during his lifetime forged a vision of Christianity that meshed with traditional Lakota religion, and published a significant account of this. See Black Elk and Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe; Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), passim. 19. New North-West, Deer Lodge, 20 August 1869. Quoted in Olson, Red Cloud, p. 89. 20. New York Times, 23 June 1867. 21. New York Times, 23 June 1867. 22. Pope to Sibley, 28 September 1862, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: GPO), series i, 13: 686. Quoted in Prucha, The Great Father, i, p. 443. A recent review of the military’s reaction to the Ghost Dance phenomenon suggests that General Miles and other important western army officials saw action against the Lakota in South Dakota as an opportunity to demonstrate to politicians and bureaucrats in Washington that military solutions were superior to civilian ones when it came to solving the “Indian Question.” See Jeffrey Ostler, “Conquest and the State – Wounded Knee,” Pacific Historical Review, 65, no. 2 (May 1996), 217–48. 23. Sherman to Cooke, 28 December 1866, NARS, RG 98, LR, Dept. of the Platte. Quoted in Olson, Red Cloud, p. 52. 24. Sherman to Augur, 19 February 1867, NARS, RG 98, LR, Dept. of the Platte. Quoted in Olson, Red Cloud, p. 53. 25. New York Times, 27 September 1867. Sherman argued that the road could not be stopped but that the Indians could claim compensation. The military representatives in the Peace Commission concluded their work by recommending that the policy of making treaties with the Indians should be abandoned and that Indians should be forced onto reservations and made individually liable to the laws of the US. See Olson, Red Cloud, p. 78. 26. An earlier version of the Ghost Dance appeared in 1870. See James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Washington DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report 14, 1896), part 2, pp. 701–4. 27. A considerable amount of literature at the beginning of this century discussed the similarities of Sun Dance traits among Plains tribes and theories of chronology and transmission. See George Amos Dorsey, The Arapaho Sun Dance; the Ceremony of the Offerings Lodge (Chicago: Field Columbian Museum, 1903); George Amos Dorsey, The Ponca Sun Dance (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1905); Ralph Linton, “The Comanche Sun Dance,” American Anthropologist, 37 (1935), 420–8; Robert B. Lowie, “Sun Dance of the Shoshone, Ute, and Hidastsa,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 16, no. 1 (1919), 387–431; and Clark Wissler, The Sun Dance of the Blackfoot Indians (New York: The Trustees, 1918).

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28. Hittman discusses the scholarly debate as to whether Wovoka prophesied that the millennium would occur in this life or in the afterlife. Michael Hittman, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance (Carson City: Grace Dangberg Foundation, Inc., 1990), p. 1. 29. According to Mooney, Paiute messengers preached to the Navaho about the new belief but “the Navaho were skeptical, laughed at the prophets, and paid but little attention to the prophesies [sic].” Mooney speculates that because the Navaho were quite rich, they “felt no special need of a redeemer.” However, he gives certain examples that indicate that the Navaho were affected by the religion. Mooney, Ghost Dance, pp. 809–11. 30. For an elaboration of this argument, see Brad Logan, “The Ghost Dance among the Paiute,” Ethnohistory, 27, no. 3 (Summer 1980), 278–9. 31. James R. Walker, Lakota Society, edited by Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 157. 32. See Hittman, Wovoka, p. 90 and Mooney, Ghost Dance, pp. 926–7. 33. In a letter to the Cheyenne, Wovoka explained: “When you get home you have to make dance. You must dance four nights and one day time.” Quoted in Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 781. 34. Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 898. 35. Mary Crow Dog has recently reflected on the importance of Indian religion in maintaining a notion of Indian identity. “Up to the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Indian religion was forbidden. Children were punished for praying Indian, men were jailed for taking a sweat bath. Our sacred pipes were broken, our medicine bundles given to museums. Christianizing us was one way of making us white, that is, making us forget that we were Indians. Holding onto our old religion was one way of resisting this kind of slow death. As long as people prayed with the pipe or beat the little water drum, Indians would not vanish, would continue to exist as Indians,” Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), pp. 92–3. 36. There is considerable scholarly dispute concerning the initial teaching of Wovoka and whether his message was misinterpreted, misrepresented or reinterpreted by his disciples. Ethnologists, including Mooney, have argued that Wovoka may have changed his teaching over time and that some of the recorded testimony concerning his prophecies may not give the full picture. See Hittman, Wovoka, pp. 63–105. 37. Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 787. 38. The Yankton Lakota were a separate but related group that lived generally to the east of the Teton Lakota. See Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, pp. xxiv–xxv. 39. Quoted in Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 799. 40. Mandan Pioneer, 26 September 1890. Quoted in Ostler, “Conquest and the State,” p. 222. 41. Quoted in Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 789. 42. Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 791. 43. Hittman suggests that the Paiute version was based on their traditional round dance in which men and women held hands and danced in a circle. Hittman, Wovoka, p. 93. 44. The meeting with other tribes could be useful in times of crisis. For example, following the break up of the Fort Laramie Treaty negotiations, the occasion of a Sun

NOTES TO PAGES

45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

88 – 93

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Dance in 1867 was used by the Lakota and the Cheyenne to discuss a common war strategy. See Olson, Red Cloud, p. 131. Mary Crow Dog emphasized this aspect of the ritual when the Ghost Dance was revived during the AIM occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. “For Leonard [Crow Dog], dancing in a circle holding hands was bringing back the sacred hoop – to feel, holding on to the hand of your brother and sister, the rebirth of Indian unity, feel it with your flesh, through your skin. He also thought that reviving the Ghost Dance would be making a link to our past, to the grandfathers and grandmothers of long ago,” Dog and Erdoes, Lakota Woman, p. 153. Elk and Brown, The Sacred Pipe, pp. 80–5. Bruce Lincoln, “A Lakota Sun-dance and the Problematics of Sociocosmic Reunion,” History of Religions, 34, no. 1 (1994), 6–7. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 128. Mooney reports that the songs were so numerous partly because those who fell into a trance produced a song for the next dance that reflected on their mystical experience. Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 953. Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 1072. Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 1065. Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 1065. Mooney indicates that the ghost shirt did not originate with Wovoka and that the Paiute did not wear it. He suggests that the ghost shirt with its special powers of invulnerability may have owed its origin to the Mormon religion and their sacred undergarments. Mooney, Ghost Dance, pp. 790–1. See also Hittman, Wovoka, pp. 65–6. Mooney, Ghost Dance, pp. 919–20. Mooney, Ghost Dance, pp. 789–90. See Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 915. Quoted in Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 798. Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 790. It is difficult, a hundred years later, to determine whether their intention in reinterpreting the costumes as being invincible in battle carried an implication of aggression (bearing in mind that Beard suggests that they were praying for the Savior to “send the white man from all the land”) or whether it was a religious ritual which called for the disappearance of the whites but was closer in dynamic to a form of passive resistance. Beard recalls his father saying to the medicine man, “Give up your gun. Your ghost shirt will be all you need” and implies that the medicine man refused because he replied, “My friend, I am afraid.” Quoted in Walker, Lakota Society, p. 164. But again this might be explained away as a means of self-defense rather than as an act of aggression, and that it would not have been a matter of concern had the soldiers not been threatening them with guns and demanding that the Indians hand over theirs. Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 899. Raymond J. DeMallie, The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings as given to John G. Neihart (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p. 260. Quoted in Walker, Lakota Society, pp. 157–8. Quoted in Mooney, Ghost Dance, p. 788.

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94 – 99

64. One Bull, box no 104, One Bull, folder no. 11, Campbell Collection. Quoted in Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), p. 87. 65. Utley, Lance and the Shield, p. 88. 66. Mooney, Ghost Dance, pp. 854–5. 67. Quoted in Ostler, “Conquest and the State,” p. 222. The Bismarck Daily Tribune also reported on Sitting Bull’s agitational activities. See Ostler, “Conquest and the State,” p. 223. 68. Arguably McLaughlin’s portrayal of Sitting Bull was deliberately negative to justify the actions taken by McLaughlin, the Indian police and the government troops in December. 69. James McLaughlin, My Friend the Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 203–4. 70. Like the Sun Dance which normally attracted far more observers than dancers, the Ghost Dance was a ritual which allowed for both performers and observers. For some reason, Utley gives the figures as 100 watching and 100 dancing, although he presumably was basing his description on McLaughlin’s description of 200 watching and 100 dancing. Utley, Lance and the Shield, p. 287. McLaughlin explains that he was careful to approach the dance from a seldom-used road so that his presence would not be noticed as he observed the dance. However, it was not uncommon for whites to attend such ceremonies. In addition to ethnologists, journalists, and military and government personnel, it seems that local settlers also watched them occasionally. A local newspaper reported that “the new dance among the Indians is said to be worth going many miles to see.” See Ostler, “Conquest and the State,” p. 222. 71. The government agents at the neighboring agencies were all planning to arrest the religious leaders in their areas. See Ostler, “Conquest and the State,” p. 225. 72. General Nelson Miles argued that Sitting Bull was trying to agitate other tribes, urging them to “obtain arms and ammunition and be prepared to meet the warriors near the Black Hills in the spring.” Quoted in Ostler, “Conquest and the State,” p. 236. Ostler maintains that Miles was fabricating this story in order to necessitate military intervention. 73. See Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 5. 74. E. B. Reynolds to CIA, 25 September 1890, Special Case 188, RG 75, NA. Quoted in Ostler, “Conquest and the State,” p. 226. 75. See Alexander Lesser, The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game: Ghost Dance Revival and Ethnic Identity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 105.

4 The role of workers in the nation: the Paterson Strike Pageant 1. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (London: Longman, 1980), p. 346. 2. See Zinn, People’s History, pp. 340–4. 3. Charlotte Canning has pointed out that, “Despite the circuit Chautauqua’s official claim to a multi-denominational platform, a claim they buttressed by the appearance of rabbis and Catholic priests, the Chautauqua platform was one of the most prominent promoters of what Handy calls ‘the national religion, a religion of civilization’

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presented simply as universal moral values and the American way of life,” Charlotte Canning, “The Most American Thing in America” in Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (eds.), Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 102. 4. See Canning, “The Most American Thing,” pp. 102–3. 5. According to Canning, “A reassuring, stable, and moral representation was repeatedly performed year after year, both creating and fulfilling the spectators’ views and beliefs about the United States. This United States bore little resemblance to the heterogeneous, unstable, and complex nation that actually existed outside the comfortable confines of Chautauqua, and it was that United States that people wished to be reassured did not exist. Chautauqua relentlessly performed the dominant values of white Protestants of British descent, even as their influences were waning in the face of increasing immigration and religious diversity,” Canning, “The Most American Thing,” p. 104. 6. Linda Nochlin, “The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913,” Art in America, 52 (May/June 1974), 68. 7. See David Krasner, “The Pageant is the Thing” in Mason and Gainor (eds.), Performing America, pp. 106–22. 8. Quoted in Nochlin, “Paterson Strike Pageant,” p. 68. 9. Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties (London: Dennis Dobson, 1946), p. 147. For a discussion of plays in the 1930s about industrial conditions, see for example, Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage: American Drama and the Theater of the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 10. Hughes was a political radical who believed in solidarity between the races. As he himself was a mixture of races, he believed that America likewise should come together rather than be split by prejudice. In a poem called “Let America be America Again” which he wrote on a train trip while recovering from the bad press notices for his play Mulatto, he expressed his belief in ethnic harmony for all groups in America: I am the poor white fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek – And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak . . . O, let America be America again – The land that never has been yet – And yet must be – the land where every man is free. The land that’s mine – the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, me – Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.

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101 – 104

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose – The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives, We must take back our land again, America!

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

in Arnold Ramersad and David Roessel (eds.), The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 190–1. New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, pp. 6, 4. New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, p. 6. New York Times, 9 June 1913, p. 8. The IWW demanded an eight-hour day (rather than the fifty-five-hour working week that was in practice). See Gregory Mason, “Industrial War in Paterson,” Outlook (7 June 1913), 286–7. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers: Volume Three of Intimate Memories (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), p. 188. (Mabel Dodge published her memoirs after marrying a second time and changing her name to Mabel Dodge Luhan.) Robert Rosenstone questions Dodge’s account in his biography of John Reed but his arguments do not seem convincing. Robert Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 126. Moreover, corroboratory evidence appeared in an article by Hutchins Hapgood (who was present at the meeting) in the Globe and Commercial Advertiser: “The idea of the play was conceived by Mrs. Mabel Dodge, at a gathering some weeks ago in New York at which Reed, Haywood, a former member of parliament, writers, radicals, etc., were present. Reed and Haywood took up the idea with enthusiasm and since then many people have become interested.” Hutchins Hapgood, “Strike Pageant in the Garden,” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 21 May 1913. Lois Rudnick (ed.), Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), p. 134. Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 189. John Reed, “Almost Thirty, “in Groff Conklin (ed.), The New Republic Anthology: 1915–1935 (New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1936) p. 70. Although Reed’s article was written in 1917, it was shelved by the publisher until 1936, long after his death. See Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), iii, p. 514. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. The New York Call reported that the mill in the center of the set “represented . . . Henry Doherty’s, where the four-loom system [which doubled the responsibilities of the workers] was first put in operation and which was practically the cause of the now famous struggle.” New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 1. Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 204. Martin Green suggests that this ramp was inspired by Craig’s ideas. See Martin Green, New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), p. 201. Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 204. Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 204.

NOTES TO PAGES

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24. The newspapers and journals also acknowledged various other authors who may have been part of the discussions. For example, “The Paterson Strike Pageant,” Independent, 74 (19 June 1913), p. 1407 reported that Reed and Lincoln Steffens were “responsible for the idea” and the Tribune alleged that “The pageant was written for [the strikers] by Thompson Buchanan, the playwright; Ernest Poole, the Socialist and writer; Emilie [sic] Dodge and ‘Jack’ Reed, the poet-Socialist.” The International Socialist Review also mentioned that Buchanan and Poole “arranged and staged” the scenes and that Reed rehearsed them. Phillips Russell, “The World’s Greatest Labor Play: The Paterson Strike Pageant,” International Socialist Review, 14 ( July 1913), 9. The Paterson Evening News (7 June 1913, p. 7) reported that “The staging will be done by Ernest Poole, Mabel Dodge, John Reed, Edward Hunt and Arturo Giovannitti.” Partly to reduce expenses, Reed decided to cut out four scenes. See Anne Huber Tripp, The IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 143. For a description of the original scenario for the pageant, see the Paterson Evening News, 19 May 1913, p. 10. 25. “Program of the Paterson Strike Pageant,” printed in Brooks McNamara (ed.), “Paterson Strike Pageant,” Drama Review, 51 (Summer 1971), 63. 26. Letter presumably from Edward Hunt, 12 June 1913, John Reed Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bms Am 1655 (95). 27. William Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood (New York: International Publishers, 1929), p. 263. 28. Bernadine Kielty Scherman, Girl from Fitchburg (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 72. 29. Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 27 May 1913, p. 7. 30. In an article for The Masses about his imprisonment for four days with the strikers in Paterson, Reed emphasized that the ordinary workers, like the ones he had met in prison, were as important as the leaders of the strike. “They were the strike – not Bill Haywood, not Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, not any other individual. And if they should lose all, their leaders, other leaders, would arise from the ranks, even as they rose, and the strike would go on!” John Reed, “War in Paterson,” The Masses ( June 1913) quoted in Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 198. Although the IWW leaders tried to steer the strike in certain directions, they responded to local conditions. See speech by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, on 31 January 1914, to the New York Civic Club Forum, printed in Joyce L. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, revised edition (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1998), pp. 215–16. 31. Paterson Evening News, 19 May 1913, p. 10. The same article described the first rehearsal for the pageant which occurred in the same meeting where “he trained their voices for them to sing a song. The song is called the ‘Haywood Thrill.’ The speaker this morning stated that the strains of the music when it reached the ears of the manufacturers, it would make them feel that the ‘terror of death’ was on them. It is a very catchy air, and has no words. While giving the first lesson today he got so enthused that he took off his coat.” Reed wrote later how much he admired the commitment and ideology of the IWW leadership. “I liked their understanding of the workers, their revolutionary thought, the boldness of their dream, the way immense crowds of people took fire and came alive under their leadership. Here was drama, change, democracy on the march made visible – a war of the people,” Reed,

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

NOTES TO PAGES

105 – 107

“Almost Thirty,” p. 70. Likewise, Hutchins Hapgood wrote of “the realization of our much abused conception of democracy” and “the dawn of a hope that they may be co-operators in their own destiny, that they may work out for themselves a larger life, may be vital factors in the creation of an industrial democracy.” Hutchins Hapgood, “Sees No Sign of Strike’s Loss,” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 26 May 1913, p. 5. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 263. New York Times, 8 June 1913; New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, p. 1. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 263. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 263. It is interesting to speculate why the Times failed to mention the shooting. Because the cast were not allowed to use firearms by the authorities, this may have made it more difficult to spot the event when there was so much other activity on the stage. However, the Independent (74 (19 June 1913), p. 1406) reported that “the shooting by the police of a bystander, Modestino [was] not staged.” Although Haywood may have mis-remembered, it seems more likely that the shooting was staged but perhaps not heard, given that several other papers also mentioned it, including the New York Call. See “12,000 People Cheer Paterson Pageant,” New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 1. “Program of the Paterson Strike Pageant,” in McNamara (ed.), “Paterson Strike Pageant,” p. 63. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn recalls that Modestino “lived opposite one of the dye houses. One afternoon, after he returned from work, he was sitting on his steps with his young child in his arms. Deputies came out of the plant, escorting a few strikebreakers. Pickets assembled there began booing and hooting at the scabs. The deputies started shooting. The man on the stoop grabbed his child and started through his doorway, when he was shot in the back. His wife grabbed the child and her husband fell and died at her feet.” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography: My First Life (1906–1926) revised edition (New York: International Publishers, 1973), p. 168. See New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 1, and New York Herald, 8 June, 1913, p. 4. “Program of the Paterson Strike Pageant,” in McNamara (ed.), “Paterson Strike Pageant,” p. 63. Flynn remembers that the strikers sang the “‘Funeral March of the Workers’ which Reed had taught them.” Flynn, Rebel Girl, p. 169. The press reports disagreed about the number of pallbearers, some indicated four and others, e.g. the New York Call, six. See New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 1. “Program of the Paterson Strike Pageant,” in McNamara (ed.), “Paterson Strike Pageant,” p. 63. New York Tribune, 8 June, 1913, p. 4. New York Herald, 8 June, 1913, p. 4. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. Rosenstone quotes Tresca’s lines in Italian: “Occhio per occhio, dente per dente, sangue per sangue!” Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary, p. 125. The Independent, 74 (19 June 1913), p. 1407, as well as other newspapers, says that only Haywood and Tresca spoke at the funeral, although Flynn was also mentioned in some reports, presumably erroneously. New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 2.

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47. A Grand Jury in Paterson asked William Brueckmann, the Mayor of Haledon, to stop the meetings in his borough, but Brueckmann refused. See New York Call, 25 May 1913. By contrast with the large police presence in Paterson, only one policeman attended the mass meeting of approximately 25,000 people in Haledon on 25 May 1913. 48. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. The International Socialist Review described one of the songs in detail: “There was a chorus leader who sang in a clear, musical voice that reached the uttermost parts of the Garden, and how his people did respond to him with their lyric replies! Again and again the audience demanded repetitions of these strange, wonderfully musical chants, composed and sung by the strikers themselves. The words, meaningless without the voices, went as follows: Now friends and fellow workers; this strike we shall win! (Chorus: this strike we shall win, this strike we shall win! Let us all join in the chorus: Hurrah for Miss Flynn! [(] Chorus): Hurrah for Miss Flynn hurrah for Miss Flynn! Italian, French and German, Hungarian, Jew and Polish; wi’ll [sic] make all together one nationality. Llallara’, llallara’, llallara’, lla’. Stu sciopero fa conoscerre ca nuie nce [sic] mantenimmo uniti e cumpattimmo cu forza e abilita’ E llilliri’ llilliri’ lla’ Vivi Tresca Haywood e Flynn, notte e ghiuorno ‘imm’allucca’, (coro) repeat.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

Russell, “The World’s Greatest Labor Play,” p. 9. The New York Call (8 June 1913) wrote that the United German Singing Societies sang the Socialist march during this same scene. New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 2. New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, p. 4. According to Haywood, many Paterson children had earlier gone on strike in their school because the teachers had called the strikers “Anarchists and good-for-nothing foreigners,” Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 264. New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, p. 4. Independent, 74 (19 June 1913), p. 1407. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2.

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56. Flynn, Rebel Girl, p. 169. The Independent, 74 (19 June 1913), p. 1407 mentions that “The youngsters . . . were given again to the New York women who had been caring for them.” It is interesting to speculate whether the same actual strike mothers were on stage and whether the real children, who were sent away, were used in the performance. It seems likely because those that were sent to New York would have been able to rehearse on the day of the performance. Furthermore, the New York Call indicated that many of them were in the front of the audience. “About 100 kiddies, accompanied by their ‘strike parents,’ occupied the first few rows of seats. Most of them were dressed in red and joined in the singing of the ‘International’ and the other revolutionary airs,” New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 2. 57. New York Times, 8 June 1913. 58. Linda Nochlin argues that, “Reed may be said to have turned the patriotic rhetoric, the well-meaning ‘melting pot’ psychology of the do-gooder civic-theater leaders, back upon itself, revealing its idealistic vision of the immigrant workers’ place in their new land for the sentimental cant it was. The patriotic pageants were all too often merely spectacular rationalizations of the status quo, filling the workers with false promises and false consciousness at the same time. In the Paterson Strike Pageant, it was made dramatically clear that the ‘new citizens’ were contributing more than their dances, their songs and their folk traditions to this country; they were being forced to contribute their health, their hopes, their honor and their children – forced to live lives of wretchedness and squalor – in order that WASP capitalist society might flourish,” Nochlin, “Paterson Strike Pageant,” p. 68. 59. Linda Nochlin observes that in 1913, “The whole country was in the throes of a vigorous pageant renaissance, often referred to as the ‘New Pageant Movement,’ sometimes as ‘community’ or ‘civic’ theater. The year of the Paterson Pageant saw the founding of the American Pageant Association, an organization with a Bulletin, a series of conferences and a solid educational program. The bulletin listed almost 50 performances coast to coast in 1913 in addition to Reed’s, including such varied fare as the Pageant of the Nations in Newburyport, Mass., the Pageant of American Childhood in Worcester, the Historical Pageant at Carmel, Calif., the Suffrage Allegory and Pageant Parade in Washington, DC, a Greek Festival in Nashville and, perhaps particularly significant given Reed’s Harvard background, both the Hollis Hall Pageant at that university (organized by George Pierce Baker, a strong proponent of ‘civic theater’) and Sanctuary, A Bird Masque, directed by Percy MacKaye, Harvard ‘97, leader of the ‘civic-theater’ movement and pageant-master extraordinary,” Nochlin, “Paterson Strike Pageant,” p. 67. 60. Independent, 74 (19 June 1913), pp. 1406–7. 61. New York Call, 7 June 1913 quoted in Tripp, IWW, p. 144. 62. According to the New York Call, “There were red Socialist banners hanging from the balconies, red shoulder sashes on the white gowned girls selling the ‘cause’ pamphlets and newspapers, red carnations in strikers’ buttonholes, little daughters of the strikers dressed all in red, even to the shoes; red hair ribbons, and the red, red ribbons and rosettes of the IWW flaunting everywhere,” New York Call, 8 June, p. 2. The New York Times observed that, “There were many flags, most of them the fiery red ones of the IWW, not to mention many banners on which short, pithy paragraphs

NOTES TO PAGES

63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

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in bright golden letters told the story of the alleged sufferings of the strikers at the hands of the authorities of Paterson and the silk millowners,” New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 262. See Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, p. 201. A similar patriotic event was organized by the manufacturers during the strike in Lawrence during the previous year. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 252. Before the show started, according to the New York Herald, the striker’s “band played the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ ‘Marseillaise’ and other airs, all of which were cheered,” New York Herald, 8 June 1913, p. 4. Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 6 June 1916, p. 5. “Program of the Paterson Strike Pageant,” in McNamara (ed.), “Paterson Strike Pageant,” p. 62. New York Times, 19 May 1913, p. 2. Hapgood described another scene, which was omitted, in his report on 21 May. “The forty strikers brought before the judge. The policeman’s story. Strikers attempt to answer. ‘Tell it to the next fellow! Held for Grand Jury on the charge of Unlawful Assembly; five hundred dollars bail.’ Strikers: ‘Fill up de jail! We take no bail! To hell with the AFL Horray [sic] for the IWW,’” Hapgood, “Strike Pageant in the Garden,” p. 4. International Socialist Review, 13 ( June 1913), 849–850. Likewise, behind the scenes, it is clear that the rehearsal process was not completely amicable, egalitarian and harmonious. A sympathetic report in the New York Call portrayed Reed as an exhausted dictator in the final rehearsal: “When he wasn’t megaphoning from the stage of the Garden to the 2,000 and more he was striking, really striking, the maps of people who positively would get in the way. ‘I’m the boss of this show,’ said Jack Reed, who long before had thrown away his coat (this is the dress rehearsal that’s now being discussed), and while megaphoning was ripping off his collar. ‘If I don’t say “move this way, don’t move this way.” I don’t want to hurt the feelings of any lady or gentleman taking part in this pageant – shut up – stop that talking – do you hear me? – stop that talking! – but if any white livered, low browed son of a gun don’t get into his bean the elementary fact that I’m the whole boss of this show there’s going to be a whole lot of trouble around here. Do you make me? Pay a lot of attention to the boss of this show – or – well, pay a lot of attention or there won’t be any show,” New York Call, 8 June 1913, p.2. New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, p. 1. New York Times, 19 May 1913, p. 2. For example, the New York Call reported on 25 May 1913 that “Frank Palleria, grand venerable of the Order of the Sons of Italy of New Jersey, denied that a meeting had been called for tomorrow to advise its members to return to work, and that the organization intended to withdraw its support from the striking dyers and weavers. He denounced the report as a malicious attempt of the bosses and press to create strife and a break among the strikers, and to stampede them back to work,” New York Call, 25 May 1913. Daniel McCorkle letter to the Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 24 May 1913, p. 6. “Pageant of the Paterson Strike,” The Survey (28 June 1913), 428.

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76. André Tridon, “Haywood,” New Review, 1 (May 1913), 504. At their large strike meetings, according to Steve Golin, “Bilingual individuals in the crowd quietly translated Italian, Yiddish, German, Polish, Dutch, or English speeches for the benefit of those around them,” Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 153. The Survey reported that “One German striker, when asked how those of his nationality got along with the Italians, said, ‘We’re all brothers and sisters’ – and it certainly seemed so, for the Italian singer [in the funeral scene] was reinforced by a hearty chorus of German women,” The Survey (28 June 1913), 428. Although the IWW (unlike most other unions) encouraged the membership of all ethnic groups, no African Americans were involved in the strike because the mills would apparently not hire them. However, the IWW brought Hubert Harrison, an African American socialist from New York, to speak at two strike meetings. While the local newspaper derided this, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn defended him. See Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 145. John Reed also advocated solidarity between African Americans and other workers. Later in Russia, he told a meeting attended by Lenin that in the northern and southern parts of the United States “the one aim must be to unite the Negro and the white laborer in common labor unions; this is the best and the quickest way to destroy race prejudice and develop class solidarity.” Quoted in Granville Hicks, John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 392. 77. “Paterson Pageant financial statement,” quoted in Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 211. 78. Hutchins Hapgood, “Creative Liberty,” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 7 June 1913, p. 7. 79. As in the Lip strike sixty years later, where French workers in the Lip watch factory seized control of the factory and produced the watches themselves, the ability of workers to do more than carry out the orders of their employers was transparent. See Wilmer “The Lip Affair,” New Society (21 March 1974), 696–7. 80. Speech by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, on 31 January 1914, to the New York Civic Club Forum, printed in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, p. 226. Steve Golin in Fragile Bridge (pp. 157–78) argues that the strike was designed to gain publicity rather than to raise money and, because this was achieved, the strike was successful. He points out that all historians of the pageant save one (Linda Nochlin) support Flynn’s argument that it caused the failure of the strike, and he argues that they have given Flynn’s comments too much credit in coming to that conclusion. Although his argument has merit, he seems to overplay his hand, however, by underestimating the effect on morale of the financial disappointment. 81. See Luhan, Movers and Shakers, pp. 202–3. 82. The Globe reported, “In order to get local color into their rehearsals and so that[,] while rehearsing[,] the actors and actresses may also be ‘working for the cause,’ the preliminary tutelage of the workers is taking place outside the Price and other mills in Paterson. One thousand pickets are rehearsing the ‘picket scene’ ten hours a day there.” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 27 May 1913, p. 7. 83. Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 27 May 1913, p. 7. Likewise, the police chief allowed them to use the halls in Paterson that had been denied for strike meetings presumably because he did not wish to outlaw an amateur drama society. Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 6 June 1916, p. 5.

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84. Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 139. 85. Hapgood, “The Strikers’ Pageant,” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 9 June 1913, p. 6. 86. See Nochlin, “Paterson Strike Pageant,” p. 67. 87. New York Times, 19 May 1913, p. 2. 88. New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. 89. “On One Meal a Day!,” International Socialist Review 13 ( June 1913), 851. 90. See Golin, Fragile Bridge, pp. 163 and 168, and Upton Sinclair, American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1932), p. 263. 91. New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. 92. New York Herald, 8 June 1913, p. 4. 93. Emphasis added. Hapgood, “Strike Pageant in the Garden,” p. 4. 94. The Survey (28 June 1913), 428. 95. For example, the Paterson Evening News reported, “Considerable difficulty has been experienced in securing any of the strikers to play the roles of strike-breakers and policemen. It may be necessary for Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffins, Temple Graves, Jr., Hutchins Hapgood, Ernest Poole, Leroy Scott and others of the committee to appear as policemen and scabs in the great drama,” Paterson Evening News, 3 June 1913, p. 5. 96. Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 6 June 1916, p. 5. In performance the actors playing policemen suffered from audience participation. According to the New York Herald, “Scores of strikers wore policemen’s uniforms and to keep up the realism of the scene all were lustily booed, as is done daily by the pickets in Paterson. The policemen smiled grimly, waved their clubs and explained that their parts ‘were the hardest and most distasteful of the entire performance,’” New York Herald, 8 June 1913, p. 4. 97. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. 98. New York Evening World [n.d: 9 June 1913], quoted in Russell, “World’s Greatest Labor Play,” p. 8. 99. New York World, 9 June 1913, p. 6. 100. Russell, “World’s Greatest Labor Play,” p. 9. 101. New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, p. 4. 102. The New York World commented on the relative homogeneity of the audience: “Few except labor unionists, Socialists and members of the Industrial Workers of the World attended it,” New York World, 9 June 1913, p. 6. 103. New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 1. 104. See Golin, Fragile Bridge, pp. 166–7. 105. Quoted from a news report in Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 207. The press, who were clearly interested in her reaction as no doubt were many of her acquaintances in the audience and on stage, disagreed as to how Mrs. Modestino reacted to the scene. The New York Herald, which featured her in their headlines – “Fifteen Thousand Persons in Madison Square Garden See Coffin Borne at Head of Long Procession – Widow of Slain Paterson Striker Among the Spectators” reported that she was “seated in a box near the stage” and “viewed the grewsome representation of the tragedy of her husband’s death and burial without a trace of emotion.” New York Herald, 8 June 1913, p. 4. The Press said that she “sat with head buried through the whole scene.” New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. The New York Call reported,

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106. 107.

108. 109. 110.

111.

112.

113. 114.

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“Mrs. Modestino, who occupied a box, broke down and the committee had its hands full to revive her.” New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 2. The International Socialist Review also said that she “buried her head in her hands,” Russell, “The World’s Greatest Labor Play,” p. 9. New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, p. 4. According to Solidarity, the IWW organ, the funeral scene was “enacted with a repressed intensity on the part of both players and audience.”Solidarity, 14 June 1913, p. 3. Quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 167. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Mabel Dodge also remembered the emotional impact of the funeral scene in unifying the audience with the actors. Flynn wrote that the scene “moved the great audience tremendously.” Flynn, Rebel Girl, p. 169. New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 204. In a sense the strikers were celebrities whose offstage personas were as visible as their roles on stage. For a discussion of the effect of celebrity actors on their audience, see Michael Quinn “Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting,” New Theatre Quarterly, 6, no. 22 (May 1990), 154–61. New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 2. The New York Times had earlier reported Silverman’s controversial sentencing, which made her even more of a celebrity: “Hannah Silberman, who, with Carrie Carella, led the girls on the picket line, said: ‘Thank you, your Honor.’ The Recorder, not liking the tone of sarcasm, replied: ‘You’re welcome, sixty days.’ The other girls were sentenced to jail for ten days each.” With some difficulty, she was released in time for the pageant. Partly as a result of this incident, the Tribune printed a large photo of her next to their report of the pageant, with a caption describing her as “The ‘Little Firebrand’ of the strike.” New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, p. 4 (“Silverman” was also spelled “Silberman” by the press). The New York Herald reported that among those acting in the picket scene were “the original forty-five, including Miss Hannah Silberman, seventeen years old, a recognized leader, all of whom served ten days in the Passaic county jail.” New York Herald, 8 June 1913, p. 4. In an article in June, Bill Haywood mentioned the “coming trial of Gurley Flynn, Tresca, Lessig, Quinlan and myself on indictments charging ‘incitement to assault,’ riot, disorderly assemblage, and other high crimes.” International Socialist Review, 13 ( June 1913), 851. The New York Call quoted Bill Haywood’s statistics that “of the actors at least 800 had served jail sentences.” See New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 2. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. The New York Herald commented on the irony that the actors had “intended to use firearms” in the picket scene but that “the police regulations forbade, so that this feature had to be dispensed with,” New York Herald, 8 June 1913, p. 4. Tripp, IWW, p. 110. New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, p. 4. The paper softened their insinuation that violence was imminent by adding, “But the speeches of ‘Bill’ Haywood and the others banished the first possibility, while the second was curbed into the increased determination to fight on as peacefully as might be until the fight is won.” Ironically

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116. 117. 118.

119.

120. 121. 122.

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the speeches by the strike leaders were criticized by the press as lackluster compared to the acting of the workers. In the funeral scene, Tresca, who “was supposed to put all the fire of his warm Italian nature in his ‘blood to blood’ speech . . . delivered it in a wearied tone, with one hand in his pocket,” and Haywood spoke “in a monotonous voice.” Also in the scene giving away the children, Flynn “failed to inspire any sense of loss, and the episode went flat.” New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. According to André Tridon, Haywood was not normally a dramatic or eloquent speaker. “The platform from which he speaks never becomes a stage, and when he speaks from a stage, that stage becomes a platform . . . Haywood is simple. His speech and manner are simple,” André Tridon, “Haywood,” New Review, 1 (May 1913), 502–3. Stuart Hall writes, “How things are represented and the ‘machineries’ and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, afterthe-event, role. This gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation – subjectivity, identity, politics – a formative, not merely expressive, place in the constitution of social and political life.” Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” Black Film: Black Cinema, ICA Documents 7 (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988), p. 29. Hapgood, “Strike Pageant in the Garden,” p. 4. See Harry J. Elam, Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 11–13. Russell, “World’s Greatest Labor Play,” p. 9. Emma Goldman ‘s anarchist journal Mother Earth expressed disappointment that the symbolic aspect of the performance was not taken further, complaining that it was “too locally photographic.” Presumably wanting something more universal and militant, the report called the performance “too lacking in the revolutionary spirit of active resistance to tyranny, which is the living breath of the struggle of the international proletariat for emancipation.” Mother Earth, 8, no. 4 ( June, 1913), 102. New York World, 9 June, 1913, p. 6. The pageant obviously heightened the awareness of the Socialists to the strikers’ cause. Before suspending business, the convention agreed to send a telegram to President Wilson asking that he “‘institute an inquiry into the state of public affairs and the condition of government in the city of Paterson, NJ, and to ascertain whether the Federal Constitution was abrogated by the authorities of Paterson during the strike of the silk workers.’ The telegram states that ‘all impartial observers testify to the peaceable character of the strike and the quiet and peaceful manner in which the strikers are conducting themselves.’ It accuses the municipal authorities and local courts of Paterson of ‘having declared their determination to crush the strike by all means, regardless of law and constitutional guarantees,’ and further states that the Paterson authorities are acting ‘in pursuance of their lawless conspiracy to arrest without lawful ground.’ It cites the convictions of Haywood, Hannah Silverman, Patrick Quinlan, Alexander Scott, editor of the Weekly Issue, and others as examples of what ‘false and inadequate testimony can accomplish.’” New York World, 9 June 1913, p. 6. New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 1. New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 1. New York Herald, 8 June 1913, p. 4.

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123. Kimberly Benston, “The Aesthetic of Modern Black Drama,” in Errol Hill (ed.), The Theater of Black Americans (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), i, p. 62. 124. New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. 125. The New York Press mentioned that in addition to the working class were “those who are interested in all labor troubles, social workers, college students, settlement workers, sociologists of high and low degree, and here and there a few manufacturers – even from the maligned Paterson. In the boxes were the elite of the Socialist set, those who give friendly aid and vocal impetus to every Socialistic movement. For instance, there were Mrs. Rose Pastor Stokes, Mrs. Anna Strunsky Walling, Ellis O. Jones, Lincoln Steffens, Art Young, Julius Hopp and others of the ultra type. Then there were the ‘mere Socialists,’ those who preach from the backs of wagons and on soap boxes,” New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. According to the Globe, the pageant attracted not only national but also international visitors. “Among those who are expected to be present are . . . Jack London . . . and Upton Sinclair. Elbert Hubbard may be there also, while hundreds of lesser socialists from every section of the country and a few from England are reported to have written asking for reservations. The pageant is obtaining international notice,” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 4 June 1913, p. 4. 126. In fact one of the reviewers complained of “tricks” by the IWW which undermined the effectiveness (i.e. the authenticity) of the event. New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. 127. New York Times, 8 June, 1913, p. 2. The New York Call reporter, who attended the afternoon rehearsal in Madison Square Garden, wrote that the sheriff had called up in the middle of the rehearsal and asked for a seat “right on top of the stage during the performance to ‘see that the American flag was not insulted’ . . . ‘Tell the Sheriff that he can’t sit up on the stage,’ said Haywood over his shoulder, he being too busy at the moment to answer the telephone call personally.” The reporter, presumably anxious to exploit this conflict, appears to have phoned Sheriff Harburger in his office and was told, “If necessary, I’ll come to the Garden tonight armed. I am the chief peace officer of this community and my office goes back into antiquity. You newspaper boys – you’re my friends – can elaborate this as you see fit. Harburger will stand for no monkey business by anarchists. It is Harburger’s pledge to the people of this great county to suppress riot and duress. I give warning that I will be among you newspaper boys in a front seat tonight, wearing my badge, and armed if necessary.” When he entered the hall a half hour before the show began, he spotted a “No God—No Master” banner and announced, according to the New York Call, “That . . . is a sacr[i]ligious banner, newspaper boys. Have a cigar . . . While ‘Chulius’ was lighting the cigar, the Arrangements Committee had the sign removed and when the greatest Sheriff this great county ever has seen, sees and ever will see noted what had happened he settled down among the newspaper boys and let the proceedings proceed. Later when the collection basket came around, the Sheriff pitched in a dollar bill.” See New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 2. 128. The Press wrote, “Instead of asking for the patrolling of the Manhattan police – which they feared would be a constant challenge to their restraint-hating adherents – they put their own men in police uniforms. From their own kind the strikers were willing to take and obey orders for quiet. Only one embodiment of local authority

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131. 132.

133. 134. 135.

136. 137. 138.

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was present, the ubiquitous Sheriff Harburger, armed to the teeth, ready to defend the Flag, interrupt an incendiary speaker or do anything else that is included in his oath of office. The little Sheriff had no opportunity to demonstrate his fiery zeal; not a single chance came his way – and that ought to be sufficient indication of the orderliness of the crowd.” New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. New York Tribune, 9 June 1913, p. 6. New York Tribune, 9 June 1913, p. 6. The newspapermen were as curious about what was happening offstage as on since the social circumstance of the IWW having taken over Madison Square Garden was so unusual and provocative. Several reporters wrote of the incident of the rogue poster in the hall carrying the slogan “No God, No Master poster” which was torn down by one of the IWW leaders, both as an incident that signaled a threat to conventional morality but also as an indicator that the IWW could be regarded as a safer and more responsible organization than might previously have been expected. For example, the Press wrote, “For a few moments before the pageant opened there was an expression from a few hotheads in the upper gallery. Those persons glorying in their atheism, hung out a long banner: ‘No God, No Master.’ At once from many parts of the vast auditorium there came shouts. It remained for Quinlan [an IWW organizer] to assert his native reverence and compel the removal of the objectionable placard.” New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. Reporters also remarked on the numerous personnel collecting money for the strike and selling (dangerous) political literature. New York Tribune, 9 June 1913, p. 6. The paper also praised the performance standard: “The strike-actors, though they only had only one rehearsal, enacted their parts well and many showmen who were in the audience admitted that they could not have done better after only one drill,” New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 1. Russell, “World’s Greatest Labor Play,” p. 7. (This was evidently written before news of the financial debacle.) The Survey (28 June 1913), 428. New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 3. Similarly, the International Socialist Review asked, “Who could sit quietly in his seat when that mill, wonderfully portrayed on canvas in the first scene, suddenly ceased its grinding whirr and shot from its belly that mass of eddying, struggling human beings loudly chorusing their exultant war songs as they proclaimed themselves on strike? Stage managers annually spend months of toil on a ‘mob scene’ that the Paterson strikers outclassed with a single rehearsal. As a spectacle it was perfect.” Russell, “World’s Greatest Labor Play,” p. 9. Russell, “World’s Greatest Labor Play,” p. 8. Flynn, Rebel Girl, p. 168. The Independent also praised the simple yet effective staging, “In its own fashion it was as simple as the primitive drama of the sixteenth century . . . The stage, unlocalized save for the drop, became in turn the street, Haledon (a nearby village) and Turn Hall in Paterson, quite as freely as a pre-Elizabethan inn-yard.” It also commended the unpretentious performances, “There was no play-acting. The strikers

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140.

141. 142. 143. 144.

145. 146.

147. 148.

149.

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were simply living over, for their fellows to see, their most telling experiences. No stage in the country had ever seen a more real dramatic expression of American life – only a part of it, to be sure, but a genuine and significant part.” Independent, 74 (19 June 1913), pp. 1406–7. New York World, 9 June 1913, p. 6. Although commenting on its tragic quality, the reporter also revealed its sense of optimism: “They were workers, plodding in the gray morning into the mills. They were strikers, emerging from the same mills, singing the ‘Marseillaise.’ They were pickets, trying to dissuade others from taking the jobs they had laid down. They were police victims, pushed, clubbed and even shot. But they were still fighters, as they showed in the final act of their play, and were still hopeful of winning their battle against the owners of the factories.” New York Times, 8 June 1913, p. 2. The New York Call was less cautious, quoting one of the managers of the Garden as saying, “This was the largest crowd that ever turned out to the Garden, and even beat the great political meetings that were held under the roof of this hall.” New York Call, 8 June 1913, p. 1. New York Times, 8 June, 1913, p. 2 New York Times, 9 June 1913. New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 1. “The Pageant as a Form of Propaganda,” Current Opinion, 50 ( July, 1913), 32. Similarly, the Paterson Evening News announced that “the era of a social revolution is approaching.” Paterson Evening News, 9 June 1913, p. 7. Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 203. Russell, “World’s Greatest Labor Play,” p. 7. Dodge explained, “This brilliant idea was kept secret until the moment came to turn on the electricity, and then it was too late to get the heavy municipal machinery in motion to have the Seditious Blaze turned off. By the time the red tape was unwound, the show was over!” Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 203. Proceedings of the Eighth IWW Convention, September 15 to 29, 1913, stenographic report (Cleveland, Ohio, n.d. ), 39. Quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 175. Paterson Evening News, 19 May 1913, p. 1. This information was repeated in the same newspaper on 21 May 1913, p. 13. In the Globe and Commercial Advertiser on 21 May Hutchins Hapgood wrote that it “is not a money-making idea, although admission will be charged to a part of the building,” Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 21 May 1913. The New York World concluded, “As the gigantic company started back for Paterson at 12.30 o’clock this morning, they were happy with the knowledge that they had created a lot of sentiment for their cause, and, incidentally, had added to the fund that is keeping them alive, while they are fighting the mill-owners.” New York World, 9 June 1913, p. 6. The New York Press announced that the “‘the cause’ benefited more than $10,000 at one swoop.” New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 1. According to the Times, “it was announced at the Garden last night that, after paying the rent of the Garden, paying for the special train, the painting of the scenery, and feeding the Paterson ‘players,’ the ‘IWW’ cleared $6,500.” Similarly, the Herald reported that “the receipts aggregated $10,000, and the expenses of the production $3,500.” New York Herald, 8 June 1913, p. 4. Likewise, the Tribune on the same day reported that

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“the admissions, ranging from $1.50 down to 10 cents, had wiped out the expenses and left a fat surplus for the strike war chest,” New York Tribune, 8 June 1913, p. 4; and the New York World printed the headlines, “Money Raised Exceeds Expectations.” New York World, 9 June 1913, p. 6. The New York World suggested that, before the show, the financial situation of the pageant had been quite precarious but they managed to achieve their goals. “They didn’t know, when they came, exactly how they were going to pay for the rental of the Garden. The management wasn’t sure, either, and at one time, barred the doors so that they couldn’t have got out if they wanted to. The strikers rehearsed . . . and then waited – and hoped – for a crowd of sympathizers, fellow-workers to come and pull them out of their financial hole. They gambled – that was all. But they won! For a crowd came to the Garden last night that filled it to its capacity and something over 12,000 persons paid in at the doors enough money to cover the expenses of moving the great cast, of renting the hall, and then to leave in the treasury which is being expended to keep the strikers alive a sum above $5,000. And at least 6,000 others were turned away from the doors.” New York World, 9 June 1913, p. 6. According to the Paterson Evening News (7 June 1913, p. 7), “the press committee consists of Lincoln Steffins, W.E. Walling, Upton Sinclair, Inez Haynes Gillmore, Hutchins Hapgood, Thompson Buchanan and Rose Pastor Stokes.” The New York Call reported that Upton Sinclair was responsible for predicting, on the night of the performance, large profits from the pageant. New York Call, 8 June 1913. 150. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, six months after the event, outlined its dispiriting effect. Unlike Haywood, Flynn had always been skeptical of the event. But after, in her own words, “the flood of criticism about the strike” that was “becoming more vicious all the time and involving as a matter of course the policies and strike tactics of the IWW,” she made a long speech to the New York Civic Club Forum, evaluating the strike including the pageant. Flynn, obviously on the defensive, criticized some of her critics (especially socialist intellectuals in New York) whom she described as “people who stayed at home in bed while we were doing the hard work of the strike . . . who never went to Paterson, or who went on a holiday; who did not study the strike as a day-by-day process.” She maintained that the pageant, while being “a beautiful example of realistic art . . . [and] splendid propaganda for the workers in New York” had distracted the workers from their duties on the picket line, thus enabling the first workers to enter the mill. This seems to have been a slight exaggeration because the pageant showed that some workers were already entering the mill in the early days of the strike. However, she was probably referring to large numbers rather than isolated individuals. With greater justification, she also argued that the apparent financial success of the pageant had raised expectations of large financial support that did not materialize. It is evident from newspaper reports that, once the financial results of the pageant were announced in mid- June, the pickets seem to have lost enthusiasm for their duties. Flynn also suggested to her critics that the pageant was divisive because many of the workers were jealous that they were not chosen to perform. “There were only a thousand that came to New York. I wonder if you ever realized that you left 24,000 disappointed people behind? . . . Between jealousy, unnecessary but very human, and their desire to do

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152. 153.

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something, much discord was created in the ranks.” Speech by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, on 31 January 1914, to the New York Civic Club Forum, quoted in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 215–22. For other criticism by socialists and anarchists of the strike, see Golin, Fragile Bridge, pp. 170–1. The New York Press wrote that Madison Square Garden had been “engaged for the week beginning June 16, when the strikers will simulate the passions and the pangs that flowed spontaneously last night,” New York Press, 8 June 1913, p. 1. The New York Herald also indicated in their report on the next day that “It may be duplicated at an early date,” New York Herald, 8 June 1913, p. 4. Similarly, under their headlines “Show to Run All Next Week,” the socialist newspaper New York Call reported that Upton Sinclair had announced, “plans were being outlined for the presentation of the pageant for the week beginning June 16,” New York Call, 8 June 1913. The Times later reported, “Haywood and the others in charge were seriously considering hiring Madison Square Garden for a week to give two performances daily for the benefit of the ‘Paterson Strike Relief Fund,’” New York Times, 24 June 1913, 1. The Paterson Evening News also reported, “There is some talk of repeating the pageant, but no definite action has been taken as yet.” 9 June 1913, p. 7. Tripp, IWW, pp. 148–9. Paterson Evening News, 18 June 1913, p. 8. Adolph Tressig, trying to put a positive face on it, announced that although the strikers had not benefited financially from the performance directly, the national publicity that the event had generated had “resulted in donations coming in to the relief fund from all over the country, and there is now plenty of money on hand.” Paterson Evening News, 24 June 1913, p. 9. The Paterson Evening News described his new clothes which included a Panama hat. Paterson Evening News, 18 June 1913, p. 9. Reed wrote to his mother on 17 June, “When I told them I was going away, ten thousand people asked me not to. Don’t tell this around because it sounds ridiculous. But I led the singing again, and when I came down they crowded around me saying, ‘We have been so lonesome for to sing – you come tomorrow,’ and ‘You make the people to be happy.’” Quoted in Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary, p. 131. New York Times, 24 June 1913, p. 1. The Times asked, “What has become of almost $7,000 profit that the Industrial Workers of the World agitators, who had charge of the recent Strike Pageant in Madison Square Garden, New York, are said to have made as a result of the show given by the Paterson silk strikers in the Garden on the night of Saturday, June 7, last? So far, according to the information received, the amount turned over to the Strike Committee is exactly $348. It is openly charged in this city [of Paterson] today that the Paterson strikers have been exploited by the IWW. That trouble was brewing in the ranks of the strikers who for eighteen weeks have followed blindly the leadership of William D. Haywood, the national head of the IWW movement, and his s[u]bordinate agitators, has long been apparent to those who are familiar with the situation in this strike-ridden municipality.” Pouring salt into the wounds, it mentioned that Reed had told the strikers that he was sick and was going to Europe to recover, adding, “Among the passengers who sailed for Europe on the Hamburg-American liner Amerika at 10 o’clock last Thursday morning was a man who was listed among the saloon passengers as John Reed.”

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156. Mabel Dodge Luhan later recalled, “Fearful of the immediate sympathy that we had raised, orders had been given to the write-up men to take away the glory . . . They wrote all kinds of rumors and sought to spread them as best they could.” Apparently quoting the headlines of several newspapers, she continued, “They said variously, ‘Claim Is Now Made That Pageant Lost Money . . . Fuss Over Pageant Finances . . . Strikers Look in Vain for Report from IWW Leaders . . . Deficit of $1,996 from Strike Show . . . Instead of Making Rumored $6,000 Profit, Paterson IWW Lost by Pageant at Garden . . . Many Loans Still Unpaid . . . Strike Pageant Was Money Loss . . . Backers of One Night Stand Are out $3,000 . . . Now It Is Explained That the Big Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden Was Run at a Loss and 25,000 Local Strikers Who Hoped to Share the Profits Will Have to Whistle for Their Money . . . ‘etc.” Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 210. The Times reported that on the day after Haywood’s $348 announcement, “The Paterson newspapers went after Haywood. One of the papers referred to the Haywood pageant as one of many ‘lemons’ handed to the strikers by the ‘IWW,’ and added, with reference to the show, ‘but this last one is the biggest and sourest of the lot.’” New York Times, 24 June 1913, p. 1. 157. Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 161. 158. The Pageant financial committee justified their admittance: “Many of them had walked from Paterson, West Hoboken, Astoria, College Point, the Bronx and Brooklyn. The pageant was theirs more than anybody else’s.” Quoted in Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 211. The press estimated that about 5,000 or 6,000 people were turned away at the doors. See New York Herald, 8 June 1913, p. 4, and the New York World, 9 June 1913, p. 6. 159. The first major signs of the loss of morale came on 23 June when the pickets did not show up for duty and, according to the Times, “at least 1,000 weavers, who have been on strike, returned unmolested to their looms, and it is said that double this number will return in the next few days. Next week no one here will be surprised if every silk mill in Paterson is in operation again.” “‘That pageant did it,’ said a police officer, who has been on strike duty for eighteen weeks. ‘After that “measly $348” that was handed in for the strike relief fund, watch for a stampede back to the mills.’” The Times added, “that this is the general opinion among the authorities is indicated by the fact that the Police Department kitchen and dining room service, which has been maintained for the last three months because of the excessive strike duty the police were called upon to perform, was discontinued to-day. The police said that practically no pickets were at the silk mills this morning, and that the 1,000 or more weavers who returned to their looms were not molested in any way whatever.” New York Times, 24 June 1913, p. 1. 160. Solidarity, 28 June 1915, p. 4. Quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 175. 161. Randolph Bourne, “Pageantry and Social Art,” unpublished ms, quoted in Arthur F Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908–1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. 56. 162. See Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 262. 163. Hicks, John Reed, pp. 213–14. According to Hicks, Reed saw a huge pageant in Petrograd after the Bolshevik revolution: “On the steps of the old stock exchange,

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which had become a club for sailors, five thousand actors presented a pageant of the revolution from the Paris Commune to the worldwide triumph of the proletariat. Reed, watching it with the most intense excitement felt that one of his greatest dreams had come true. Here was the revolutionary art for which he had longed, since the Paterson pageant, seven years before, had given him his first glimpse of the possibilities of mass dramatic expression.” Hicks, John Reed, p. 391. 164. Wilbur Daniel Steele to Mary Heaton Vorse, 14 June 1913. Quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 176. 165. Susan Glaspell, The Road to the Temple (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, Co., 1927), p. 250. During this same period, the silent film industry also became interested in labor issues. Such films as The Jungle (1914) based on an Upton Sinclair novel, Intolerance by D. W. Griffith (1916), The Struggle (1913), The Strike Leader (1913), The Great Mine Disaster (1914), Why? (1913), The Strike at Coaldale (1914), and Rags to Riches (1913), among many others, put labor problems on the screen. However, many of these films were anti-labor and painted strikers as un-American and undemocratic and out for revenge. One issue that often provided support for the labor movement was child labor. Films such as Children Who Labour in 1912 and Children of Eve in 1915 showed the exploitation of children in mines and factories and encouraged support for legislation to deal with child labor. For example, although the Children Who Labour ends happily with a little girl working in the factory being returned to her family, the last title provided a warning for the audience. “The condition called ‘child labor’ . . . still exists and demands our attention.” Quoted in Kay Sloan, The Loud Silents (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 71.

5 Staging social rebellion in the 1960s 1. For a discussion of the theatre, film and television productions that reacted against the social repression of the McCarthy era, see Brenda Murphy, Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 2. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (Basic Books: New York, 1988), p. 13. 3. Quoted in Hazel Carby, “Multicultural Wars,” Radical History Review 54 (Fall 1992), 13. 4. Quoted in Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Black Panthers Speak (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. x. 5. Foner (ed.), Black Panthers Speak, p. 4. 6. Quoted in Cleveland Sellers and Robert Terrell, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1973), p. 166. 7. Sellers and Terrell, River of No Return, p. 254. 8. Quoted in Sellers and Terrell, River of No Return, p. 257. 9. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, third edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1988), pp. 340–1. 10. Quoted in Andrew Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 109.

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11. Hunt, The Turning, p. 42. 12. See Abbie Hoffman, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), pp. 126–36. 13. A similar development followed in the film industry in the 1970s with portrayals of “bad-ass black men, with attitude” in such films as Shaft. Stuart Hall wrote of this era, “The first fruit of this counter-revolution was a series of films, beginning with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasss Song (Martin Van Peebles, 1971), and Gordon Parks’s box-office success, Shaft. In Sweet Sweetback, Van Peebles values positively all the characteristics which would normally have been negative stereotypes. He made his black hero a professional stud, who successfully evades the police, with the help of a succession of black ghetto low-lifers, sets fire to a police car . . . What marked Shaft out, however, was the detective’s absolute lack of deference towards whites.” Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1998), pp. 270–1. 14. See Richard R. Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996), p. 1. 15. For a history of ethnic theatre, which unfortunately omits certain groups such as Asian American theatre, see Maxine Seller, Ethnic Theatre in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983). 16. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” in James Hatch and Leo Hamalian (eds.), Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance 1920–1940 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), p. 447. 17. See Harry Elam, Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 28. 18. Imamu Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), p. 197. 19. Baraka, Autobiography, p. 200. 20. Baraka, Autobiography, p. 198. Baraka later reflected, “I guess during this period I got the reputation of being a snarling white-hating madman. There was some truth to it, because I was struggling to be born, to break out from the shell I could instinctively sense surrounded my own dash for freedom. I was in a frenzy, trying to get my feet solidly on the ground.” Baraka, Autobiography, p. 194. 21. Baraka, Autobiography, p. 201. 22. Baraka, Autobiography, p. 204. 23. Baraka, Autobiography, p. 204. 24. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (eds.), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), p. 1972. 25. Baraka, Autobiography, p. 202. 26. Baraka, Autobiography, p. 204. 27. Describing it as “a weapon to help in the slaughter of these dimwitted fatbellied white guys who somehow believe that the rest of the world is here for them to slobber on,” Baraka argued that “Americans will hate the Revolutionary Theatre because it will be out to destroy them and whatever they believe is real.” Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1979), pp. 131, 132.

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28. LeRoi Jones, Four Black Revolutionary Plays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969), p. 89. 29. See Baraka, Autobiography, p. 212. 30. See Baraka, Autobiography, p. 212. 31. Jones, Four Black Revolutionary Plays, p. 39 32. Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” p. 1968. 33. See Mike Sell, “The Black Arts Movement: Performance, Neo-Orality, and the Destruction of the ‘White Thing’” in Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner (eds.), African American Performance and Theater History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 56–80. 34. Sellers and Terrell, The River of No Return, p. 256. The Black Panthers, according to Sellers, was “the most prominent exponent of Political Nationalism. The party possessed a hodgepodge ideology jerry-built from numerous sources: Mao Tse-tung, SNCC, Marcus Garvey, Fidel Castro, North Korean Communists, Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx. They generally called themselves Marxist–Leninists. The Panthers adamantly claimed that they had managed to bridge the age-old ideological chasm between conventional Marxist analyses of class oppression and traditional Black Nationalist analyses of racial oppression. They claimed that their ideology permitted them to speak to race and class oppression at the same time.” Sellers and Terrell, The River of No Return, pp. 255–6. 35. Sellers and Terrell, The River of No Return, p. 255. 36. See Baraka, Autobiography, p. 255. 37. Ron Karenga, “Ron Karenga and Black Cultural Nationalism,” Negro Digest ( January, 1968), 5. 38. Karenga, “Ron Karenga and Black Cultural Nationalism,” p. 6. 39. Quoted in Sellers and Terrell, The River of No Return, p. 255. 40. Sellers and Terrell, The River of No Return, pp. 257–8 and Foner (ed.), Black Panthers Speak, pp. xiv-xvi. For a discussion of the FBI’s activities, see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, corrected edition (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 37–99. 41. Baraka, Autobiography, p. 245. 42. Luis Valdez, “The Tale of La Raza,” in Ed Ludwig and James Santibañez (eds.), The Chicanos: Mexican American Voices (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 98. 43. Valdez, “The Tale of La Raza,” p. 100. 44. Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990), p. 27. 45. Valdez and Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works, p. 39. 46. Luis Valdez, “El Teatro Campesino – Its Beginnings,” in Ludwig and Santibañez (eds.), The Chicanos, p. 118. 47. “New Grapes,” Newsweek, 31 July 1967, p. 79. 48. Quoted in Yolanda Broyles-Gonzáles, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 242. 49. Valdez, “The Tale of La Raza,” pp. 99–100. 50. Valdez and Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works, p. 49.

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51. Jorge A. Huerta, Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1982), p. 66. 52. Los Vendidos, created and written by Luis Valdez, directed by George Paul, produced by Jose Luis Ruiz, 1991. 53. Quoted in Moser, New Winter Soldiers, p. 111. 54. See Albert Herrera, “The National Chicano Moratorium and the Death of Ruben Salazar,” in Ludwig and Santibañez (eds.), The Chicanos, pp. 235–41; and Acuña, Occupied America, pp. 345–9. 55. Valdez and Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works, p. 101. 56. Valdez and Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works, p. 109. 57. Valdez and Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works, pp. 110–11. 58. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “During the war, US planes in Operation Ranch Hand dropped about 18 million gallons of herbicide, more than half of it Agent Orange, to kill vegetation that concealed Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers. Vietnam says that as a result, more than 1 million of its 76 million inhabitants, including 150,000 children, suffer from exposure to toxins.” In addition “about 100,000 [American] veterans have sought compensation for defoliant-related diseases.” The article also suggested that the effects of the pollution had not been investigated because of the fear of compensation liability, and that the toxins had entered the food chain, with such crops as rice being widely exported back to the US that could be carcinogenic. “Victims of a War Without End,” San Francisco Chronicle, 11 September 2001, p. a7. 59. This issue has also been addressed in Cherr´ıe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints. 60. I am grateful to Professor Jorge Huerta for translating some of the passages from Spanish in this chapter. 61. In interviews with this author, Luis Valdez and Lupe Valdez mentioned that Mel O’Campo, a journalist, Ben Wilson, a local teacher and member of the John Birch Society, and others were strongly critical of Vietnam Campesino. According to Lupe Valdez, Wilson suggested that Cuba was no longer ninety miles away from the US but just next door in San Juan Bautista. Interview with Luis Valdez, 16 September 2001 and with Lupe Valdez, 20 September 2001. 62. Valdez and Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works, pp. 176–7. 63. See Elam, Taking it to the Streets, p. 105. 64. La Carpa de los Rasquachis was revised several times between 1974 and 1978. The play has not been published. This description is based on the 2001 production, which recreated the 1976 version. 65. William F. Crandell, “They Moved the Town: Organizing Vietnam Veterans Against the War,” in Melvin Small and William Hoover (eds.), Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Anti-War Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), p. 143. 66. William F. Crandell, “They Moved the Town,” p. 144. 67. Different Sons, a VVAW documentary directed by Jack Ofield, produced by Arthur Littman, Bowling Green Films, 1971. 68. New York Times, 5 September 1970, p. 4. 69. Different Sons.

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70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

Different Sons. Different Sons. Different Sons. William F. Crandell, “They Moved the Town,” p. 144. Quoted in Hunt, The Turning, pp. 50–1. Different Sons. Different Sons. Quoted in Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, p. 111. See Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym (London: Routledge, 1990). 79. In a poetic introduction to Four Black Revolutionary Plays, published in 1969, LeRoi Jones predicted, the cities of the continent will change hands the power on the continent will change hands . . . i am prophesying the death of white people in this land i am prophesying the triumph of black life in this land, and over all the world we are building publishing houses, and newspapers, and armies and factories we will change the world before your eyes. ( Jones, Four Black Revolutionary Plays, pp. vii–viii)

80. Luis Valdez wrote in 1966, “That we Mexicans speak of ourselves as a ‘race’ is the biggest contradiction of them all. The conquistadores, of course, mated with their Indian women with customary abandon, creating a nation of bewildered halfbreeds.” Valdez, “The Tale of La Raza,” p. 95.

6 Reconfiguring patriarchy: suffragette and feminist plays 1. Helen Chinoy and Linda Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, revised edition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987), p. 276. Charlotte Canning points out that many of these groups did not last long and that only three groups from the 1970s survived into the 1990s: Spiderwoman, Split Britches and Horizons: Theatre from a Woman’s Perspective. Charlotte Canning, Feminist Theaters in the USA: Staging Women’s Experience (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 209–10. 2. See Julia Miles (ed.) The Women’s Project (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1980), pp. 10–11. 3. Quoted in Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), p. 3. 4. Phyllis Lee Levin, Abigail Adams (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 84. 5. Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March 1776 in L. H. Butterfield, M. Friedlander and M. Kline (eds.) The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762–1784 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 121. 6. Wyoming and Utah allowed the vote from 1869 and 1870 but were not admitted into the Union until 1890 and 1896 respectively. 7. For a discussion of feminist aspects of this play, see Sally Burke, American Feminist Playwrights: A Critical History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), pp. 21–7.

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8. See M. S. Seller (ed.), Ethnic Theatre in the United States, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. 9. Miles (ed.), The Women’s Project, p. 9. 10. Quoted in Burke, American Feminist Playwrights, p. 39. 11. Quoted in Burke, American Feminist Playwrights, p. 39. 12. Quoted in Albert Auster, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theatre, 1890–1920 (New York: Praeger, 1984), p. 6. 13. Auster, Actresses and Suffragists, p. 36. 14. Quoted in Auster, Actresses and Suffragists, pp. 109–10. 15. See Auster, Actresses and Suffragists, pp. 57–8. 16. Auster, Actresses and Suffragists, p. 51. 17. Quoted in Auster, Actresses and Suffragists, p. 134. 18. Quoted in Auster, Actresses and Suffragists, p. 111. 19. See Auster, Actresses and Suffragists, p. 86. 20. For photos of the pageant, see Naima Prevots, American Pageantry: A Movement for Art and Democracy (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1990), p. 50. 21. Quoted in David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 135. 22. Karen Blair, “Pageantry for Women’s Rights: The Career of Hazel MacKaye, 1913–1923” in Theatre Survey, 31 (May 1990), 23–46. 23. Auster, Actresses and Suffragists, p. 86. 24. Elizabeth Robins, Ibsen and the Actress (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), p. 12. 25. Robins also performed Hedda Gabler in New York in 1898 for a single performance. The Critic commented, “It was, on the whole, the most satisfactory representation of an Ibsen play ever given in this city.” It called Robins’s interpretation of Hedda “in every way a remarkable achievement.” Quoted in Michael Meyer’s introduction to Henrik Ibsen, Plays: Two (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), p. 240. 26. Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: Volume 1, 1856–1898: The Search for Love (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), p. 311. 27. Elizabeth Robins, Theatre and Friendship (Freeport: Books for Libraries, 1969), pp. 33–4. Other women who followed her example were Florence Farr, Edie Craig, Lena Ashwell, Annie Horniman, Lady Gregory, and Lillian Baylis. 28. Quoted in Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (London: Virago, 1981), p. 30. 29. Holledge, Innocent Flowers, p. 30. 30. Robins, Theatre and Friendship, p. 34. 31. Quoted in Holledge, Innocent Flowers, p. 39. 32. According to Michael Meyer, Ibsen modeled Hilda Wangel on Emilie Bardach, an eighteen-year-old Viennese girl whom he had met in 1889. Ibsen, Plays: Two, p. 227. 33. Robert Schanke, “Mary Shaw: A Fighting Champion,” in Chinoy and Jenkins, (eds.) Women in American Theatre, p. 103. 34. New York Times, 16 March 1909. 35. Auster, Actresses and Suffragists, p. 79. 36. Schanke, “Mary Shaw,” p. 104. 37. Quoted in Schanke, “Mary Shaw,” p. 106.

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38. For a discussion of American suffragette drama, see Bettina Friedl, On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987). 39. See Sarah Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 175–196. 40. See Canning, Feminist Theaters, p. 3. 41. Miles (ed.), The Women’s Project, p. 10. 42. Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, p. 283. 43. Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, p. 345. 44. See Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983). Of this differentiation, Jill Dolan has remarked, “There are many gradations within and among these categories – some of which are socialist feminism, lesbian feminism, spiritualist feminism – but I find these three most inclusive and most useful for clarifying the different feminist ways of seeing,” Dolan, Feminist Spectator, p. 3. 45. Dolan, Feminist Spectator, p. 4. 46. Dolan, Feminist Spectator, p. 4. 47. Sue Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 64. 48. See bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 65–77, 89–102; Audré Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” and Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers” in Cherr´ıe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981), pp. 94–101, 165–73. 49. Dolan, Feminist Spectator, p. 4. 50. Case, Feminism and Theatre, p. 127. 51. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16, no. 3 (1975), 14. 52. Dolan, Feminist Spectator, p. 8. See also Sue Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre, pp. 128–9. 53. Janet Brown, Taking Center Stage: Feminism in Contemporary US Drama (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1991), p. 3. 54. Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, p. 320. 55. Quoted in Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, p. 349. 56. Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, p. 283. 57. Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, pp. 285–6. 58. Vivian Patraka, “Notes on Technique in Feminist Drama: Apple Pie and Signs of Life,” Women and Performance 1, no. 2 (Winter 1984), 58. 59. Rose Leiman Goldemberg, Letters Home in Julia Miles (ed.) The Women’s Project (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1980), p. 176. 60. Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, p. 322. 61. Clare Coss, Sondra Segal, and Roberta Sklar, “Separation and Survival: Mothers, Daughters, Sisters – The Women’s Experimental Theater,” in Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (eds.), The Future of Difference (Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980), p. 193. 62. Coss, Segal and Sklar, “Separation,” pp. 200–1. 63. Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues, V-Day edition (New York: Villard, 2001), p. xii.

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64. Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, p. 384. 65. See review of Antigone Too: Rites of Love and Defiance in Women and Performance, 1, no. 2 (Winter 1984), 142. 66. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure.” 67. See Teresa de Lauretis, “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation” in Theatre Journal, 40, no. 2 (May 1988), 155–77; and Jill Dolan, Feminist Spectator, pp. 115–17. 68. Carolee Schneeman, “Interior Scroll,” in Carolee Schneeman, More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings, edited by Bruce McPherson (New Paltz, NY: Documentext, 1979), p. 239. 69. C. Carr, “Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: The Taboo Art of Karen Finlay,” in Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan (eds.), Acting Out: Feminist Performances (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 141, 144. 70. Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, p. 379. 71. See Canning, Feminist Theaters, pp. 153–9. 72. Quoted in Canning, Feminist Theaters, p. 155. 73. Quoted in Karen Malpede (ed.), Women in Theatre: Compassion and Hope (New York: Drama Book Publishers, 1983), p. 251. 74. Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, p. 313. 75. Chinoy and Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, p. 313. 76. Split Britches, Belle Reprieve in Sue-Ellen Case (ed.), Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/ Feminist Performance (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 178. 77. See Ensler, Vagina Monologues, p. 168. 78. Case, Feminism and Theatre, p. 64. 79. The order of scenes varied and new material was added to the performance. A performance at the San Francisco Alcazar Theatre, 6 July 2001 used the order described here. 80. Quoted from V-Day website, www.vday.org. 81. According to the V-Day website in July 2001, “V-Day has raised over 3 million dollars which it has given to organizations fighting for the rights of women in Afghanistan, to stop genital mutilation in Kenya, and rape crisis centers in Bosnia, Chechnya, as well as hundreds of domestic programs to combat rape and abuse. 82. Ensler, The Vagina Monologues, pp. 139, 164.

7 Imaging and deconstructing the multicultural nation in the 1990s 1. Tony Platt, “Desegregating Multiculturalism: Problems in the Theory and Pedagogy of Diversity Education,” Notes for presentation at the annual conference of the Sociology of Education Association, Pacific Grove, California, 24 February 2001, privately held. 2. Holland Cotter, “Beyond Multiculturalism, A Way to a New Freedom,” New York Times, 29 July 2001, section 2, p. 1. 3. According to a report by Terry Eastland in USA Today, 21 March 1996, p. a11 “The state’s non-Hispanic white population is now 57% but is expected to decline – mainly as a result of immigration but also of racial intermarriage – to 50% by 2000 and to 46% by 2010.” The census of 2000 showed that “non-Hispanic whites” were no longer a majority in California (New York Times, 30 April 2001, p. a15.)

 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

NOTES TO PAGES

174 – 179

New York Times, 30 April 2001, front page. Cotter, “Beyond Multiculturalism,” p. 28. See Cotter, “Beyond Multiculturalism” p. 28. Hazel V. Carby, “The Multicultural Wars,” Radical History Review, 54 (Fall 1992), 17. Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globilization (London: Athlone Press, 2000), p. 10. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism:Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 359. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, p. 359. Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism, or, Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry, 23, no. 2 (Winter 1997), 378–95. Patrice Pavis, The Intercultural Performance Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 8–9. Pavis, Intercultural Performance Reader, p. 8. Cherr´ıe Moraga, “Art in América con Acento,” in Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (eds.), Negotiating Performance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 32. For a discussion of the historical development of her work, see Carol Martin, “Anna Deavere Smith: The Word Becomes You,” The Drama Review 37, no. 4 (Winter 1993), 45–62; and Sandra Richards, “Caught in the Act of Social Definition: On the Road with Anna Deavere Smith,” in Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan (eds.), Acting Out: Feminist Performances (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 35–53. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1995), p. 30. Tim Brennan suggested that her role at the time as a Stanford professor also ghosts her performance. See Tim Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 110. For a discussion of this point, see Charles R. Lyons and James C. Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on her Performance within the Context of Critical Theory,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall 1994), 45. Pavis, Intercultural Performance Reader, p. 9. Janelle Reinelt, for example, argues that Smith bridges social differences by using “the authority of the discourses of news and documentary combined with the liberal humanist view of the artist’s empathetic capacities,” Janelle Reinelt, “Performing Race: Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror,” Modern Drama, 39, no. 4 (Winter 1996), 615. This is not true for Reginald Denny whom she impersonated and whom she also showed being beaten in a film. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers edited by Roy P. Fairfield, second edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 18. I am referring here to the Berkeley Repertory production, which I saw in San Francisco in February 1996. I understand that in the earlier Los Angeles and New York productions, she did not step out of character and costume during this final speech.

NOTES TO PAGES

179 – 186

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24. Although categorised by American society as African American, she is so light skinned that her acting agent told her to go for Spanish parts. Her brother has blond hair and blue eyes. Stanford Daily, Intermission, 29 February 1996. 25. See, for example, reviews by Sandra Tsing Loh, Joyce Guy and Judith Hamera in Theatre Journal 46 (1994), 113–17. Joyce Guy (an African American living in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles) further criticized the performance as too “safe”. Recalling that she “left the theatre feeling slighted,” she wrote that the riots were caused by “prolonged, complex, societal issues that the production glossed over and needed to address” (p. 116). For a rebuttal of these critiques see Janelle Reinelt, “The Politics of Location” in Theatre Forum 6 (Winter/Spring 1995), 54–5 and Alice Rayner, “Improper Conjunctions: Metaphor, Performance, and Text,” Essays in Theatre/Etudes Théaˆ trales, 14, no. 1 (November 1995), 3–14. 26. Richards, “Caught in the Act,” pp. 37–40. 27. San Francisco Chronicle, Datebook, 2 January 1994. 28. Richards, “Caught in the Act,” p. 50. 29. Martin, “Anna Deavere Smith,” pp. 53–4. 30. It is interesting to note that Tony Kushner worked with Anna Deavere Smith and George C. Wolfe on revising Twilight in order, according to Smith, to “try to create a section of the play, which was kind of a multicultural dream. We looked very hard through all the material to find a really positive, good-thinking Asian American, Latino, white, black. And we constructed that.” Smith, however, then revised the play again following such events as the Million Man March, the O. J. Simpson verdict and the devisiveness over affirmative action because she thought that such an optimistic approach was inappropriate. “I thought it wasn’t realistic anymore to put out all well thought-out, positive platforms . . . the multicultural dream maybe has to be reconceived . . . In terms of hope you look and you go, ‘Doesn’t look good at all.’ . . . I would say that’s what I would have to offer,” Robert Vorlicky (ed.), Tony Kushner in Conversation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998) pp. 251–2. 31. Although some of the fantastic moments are understandable as emanating out of the dreams and nightmares of drugged characters under great emotional stress, the coincidental connection between characters such as Harper and Prior or the appearance of Louis in the Mormon diorama are impossible to consider simply as dream sequences. As Harper tells Joe, “It’s just . . . the magic of the theatre or something” (2.65). 32. In the opening performance of the play at Eureka theatre in San Francisco in 1991, the scene with Roy Cohn on the telephone preceded this one, which was played in tandem with the scene of Harper and Mr. Lies. (Video recording of Angels in America held in the PALM library, San Francisco.) 33. David Savran, “Queering the Nation,” in Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (eds.), Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 216. 34. Kushner clearly plays favorites here with those whose politics accord with his own. Joe, whose politics are clearly too far to the right for Kushner, suffers in isolation at the end of the play. As a gay Mormon, Joe defies his religious heritage but is deserted by Louis because of his political and personal allegiance with Roy Cohn.

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NOTES TO PAGES

186 – 195

35. Richard Schechner, “An Intercultural Primer,” American Theatre (October 1991), 30. 36. The Rabbi says, “Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews believe in Guilt” (1.25). 37. Although it is not clear whether Joe will come out of the closet or whether Harper’s plane flight is real, it is arguable that they have made some progress in these directions. 38. May Joseph and Jennifer Fink (eds.), Performing Hybridity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 5. 39. Roberta Uno (ed.), Unbroken Thread (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 158. 40. Quoted in Uno, Unbroken Thread, p. 159. 41. Terry Eastland quotes California’s state law about the definition of minorities “as any citizen or legal alien who is ‘an ethnic person of color and who is: black (a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa); Hispanic (a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Spanish or Portuguese culture or origin regardless of race); Native American (an American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut or Native Hawaiian); Pacific-Asian (a person whose origins are from Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Samoa, Guam or the United States Trust Territories of the Pacific including the Northern Marianas); Asian-Indian (a person whose origins are from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh),” USA Today, 21 March 1996, p. a11. 42. Uno (ed.), Unbroken Thread, p. 159. 43. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 165–6. 44. Quoted in Uno (ed.), Unbroken Thread, p. 159. 45. Uno (ed.), Unbroken Thread, p. 159. The 2000 census, for example, was the first national census to allow Americans to indicate more than one ethnicity. 46. Brenda Wong Aoki, The Queen’s Garden in Kathy A. Perkins and Roberta Uno (eds.), Contemporary Plays by Women of Color (London: Routledge, 1996). 47. Perkins and Uno (eds.), Contemporary Plays, p. 14. 48. When she asked her father why he continues to live there with the mounting violence, he answered, “We were here first. This is our neighborhood,” San Diego Repertory Theatre News (November–December 1992), 8. 49. These staging arrangements are evident in a video held by Aoki and recorded at Life on the Water Theatre, San Francisco, 18 October 1992. 50. San Diego Repertory Theatre News (November–December 1992), 6. 51. Personal interview with Brenda Wong Aoki, 29 June 2001. 52. San Diego Repertory Theatre News (November–December 1992), 8. 53. Brenda Wong Aoki, Uncle Gunjiro, unpublished typescript dated 17 May 2001. Personal collection. 54. These effects are evident in the video of her performance of Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend which was produced by First Voice in 2000. Personal collection. 55. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands La frontera = the New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Luke, 1987) p. 46. 56. ”Coatlicue Theatre Company,” press release (2001), 4. Personal collection. 57. Elvira and Hortensia Colorado, 1992: Blood Speaks, in Perkins and Uno (eds.), Contemporary Plays, p. 84. 58. Steve Elm, “Coatlicue,” Coatlicue press packet, n.d. Personal collection. 59. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands, p. 79.

NOTES TO PAGES

196 – 202

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60. See Alicia Arrizón, “Mythical Performativity: Relocating Aztlán in Chicana Feminist Cultural Productions”, Theatre Journal, 52, no. 1 (March 2000), 36–7. 61. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “A Binational Performance Pilgrimage,” The Drama Review, 35, no. 3 (Fall 1991), 27. 62. Gómez-Peña, “Binational Performance Pilgrimage,” p. 30. 63. Claire Fox, “The Portable Border: Site-Specificity, Art, and the US-Mexico Frontier,” Social Text, 41 (Winter 1994), 63. 64. Quoted in Fox, “The Portable Border,” p. 63. 65. Gómez-Peña, “Binational Performance Pilgrimage,” pp. 38–9. 66. Border Brujo was frequently altered in performance over the years. Several textual versions have been printed. Textual references in this paper are taken from Gómez-Peña, Border Brujo, in Warrior for Gringostroika (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1993). 67. Gómez-Peña, 1992 in Warrior for Gringostroika, p. 98. 68. Fox, “The Portable Border,” p. 62. 69. Gómez-Peña, “Binational Performance Pilgrimage,” p. 25. 70. Quoted in Fox, “The Portable Border,” p. 64. 71. Gómez-Peña, “Binational Performance Pilgrimage,” p. 25. 72. Gómez-Peña, “The Multicultural Paradigm,” in Warrior for Gringostroika, p. 52. 73. Gómez-Peña, “Multicultural Paradigm,” p. 47. 74. Gómez-Peña, “Binational Performance Pilgrimage,” p. 42. 75. Gómez-Peña, 1992, p. 98. 76. Gómez-Peña, “The Multicultural Paradigm,” p. 47. 77. Gómez-Peña, “The Multicultural Paradigm,” p. 47. 78. Gómez-Peña, “The Multicultural Paradigm,” p. 52. 79. Shohat and Stam argue, “Multiculturalism without the critique of Eurocentrism runs the risk of being merely accretive – a shopping mall boutique summa of the world’s cultures – while the critique of Eurocentrism without multiculturalism runs the risk of simply inverting hierarchies rather than profoundly rethinking and unsettling them.” Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, p. 359. 80. Gómez-Peña, “Multicultural Paradigm,” p. 52. 81. Gómez-Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika, p. 125. 82. Quoted from the final song in Michael P. Premsrirat’s play The Clouds, the Ocean and Everything in Between, premiered at New Langton Arts, May 2001. 83. Cherr´ıe Moraga, “Art in América con Acento,” in Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (eds.) Negotiating Performance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 36.

Select bibliography

The dates of play publications listed below often differ from the dates of first performances which are given in the text.

Plays /dialogues /performances / videos Aiken, George L., Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Daniel C. Gerould, ed., American Melodrama: New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983. Albee, Edward, The American Dream, London: Samuel French, 1961. Anderson, Laurie, Home of the Brave (videorecording), produced by Paula Mazur, Burbank, Ca.: Warner Reprise Video, 1986. Anon. (“An Enquirer after Truth”) [ John Checkley], Dialogues between a Minister and an Honest Country-Man Concerning Election and Predestination, Philadelphia: Andrew Bradford, 1741. [ Jacob Duchâe. The ode was written by Francis Hopkinson], An Exercise Containing a Dialogue and Ode On the Accession of His present gracious Majesty, George III, Philadelphia: W. Dunlap, 1762. [Philip Morin Freneau and H.H. Brackenridge], A Poem on the Rising Glory of America; Being an Exercise Delivered at the Public Commencement at Nassau-Hall, September 25, 1771, Philadelphia: Joseph Crukshank, 1772. [Thomas Hopkinson], An Exercise Containing a Dialogue and two Odes. Performed at the public Commencement in the College of Philadelphia, May 20th, 1766, Philadelphia: W. Dunlap, 1766. [ John Leacock], The Fall of British Tyranny in Norman Philbrick (ed.), Trumpets Sounding, New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1972. [Thomas Paine], Dialogue between General Wolfe and General Gage in a Wood Near Boston in Daniel Wheeler (ed.), Life and Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. ii, New York: Vincent Parke and Co., 1908. [Robert Rogers], Ponteach: Or, the Savages of America, London: J. Millan, 1766. [ Jonathan Sewall], Cure for the Spleen, or, Amusement for a Winter’s Evening [later in 1775 published as The Americans Roused in a Cure for the Spleen, or, Amusement for a Winter’s Evening. New York: James Rivington] Boston, 1775. [William Smith], An Exercise, Consisting of a Dialogue and Ode, Sacred to the Memory of His late Gracious Majesty George II, Philadelphia: Andrew Steuart, 1761.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY



[William Smith], An Exercise; containing a Dialogue and Two Odes set to music for the Public Commencement in the College of Philadelphia, May 17th, 1775, Philadelphia: Joseph Crukshank, 1775. (“Mary V.V.”), A Dialogue between a Southern Delegate and His Spouse on His Return from the Grand Continental Congress, Boston: Mills and Hicks, 1774. (“Member of that community”), A Dialogue Containing Some Reflections on the late Declaration and Remonstrance of the Back-Inhabitants of the Province of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: Andrew Steuart, 1764. Debates at the Robin-Hood Society, in the City of New-York, On Monday Night 19th of July, 1774, New York: Printed by order of the Robin-Hood Society, 1774. “A Dialogue between Christ, Youth, and the Devil” in The New England Primer Enlarged, Boston: Printed by S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1735. An Exercise containing a Dialogue and Ode On Occasion of the Peace. Performed at the Public Commencement in the College of Philadelphia, 17 May 1763. In Nathaniel Evans, Poems on Several Occasions: With Some Other Compositions. Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1772. The Military Glory of Great-Britain, An Entertainment given by the late candidates for bachelor’s degree, at the close of the anniversary commencement, held in Nassau-Hall, New Jersey, September 29th, 1762, Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1762. The Paxton Boys. A Farce Translated from the original French, by a Native of Donegall, Philadelphia: Anthony Armbruster, 1764. Aoki, Brenda Wong, The Queen’s Garden in Kathy A. Perkins and Roberta Uno (eds.), Contemporary Plays by Women of Color, London: Routledge, 1996. “Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend,” unpublished typescript, 2000. Arent, Arthur (ed.), One-Third of a Nation in Pierre du Rohan, Federal Theatre Plays: Prologue to Glory, New York: Random House, 1938. Aristophanes, Lysistrata and Other Plays, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973. At the Foot of the Mountain, Raped: A Woman’s Look at Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule, 1976. Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), The Motion of History in The Motion of History and Other Plays, New York: William Morrow, 1978. Barker, James Nelson, Tears and Smiles in Paul Howard Musser, James Nelson Barker, 1784–1858; with a Reprint of his Comedy Tears and Smiles, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929. Basshe, Emanuel Jo, The Centuries; Portrait of a Tenement House, Freeport, NY.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971. Belmont, O. H. P. and Elsa Maxwell, Melinda and Her Sisters in Bettina Friedl (ed.), On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. Benmussa, Simone, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs in Benmussa Directs: Portrait of Dora by Hélène Cixous; Tranlated from the French by Anita Barrows. The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs by Simone Benmussa; Adapted for the Stage from George Moore’s Short Story “Albert Nobbs”; and Translated from the French by Barbara Wright, London: John Calder, 1979. Berrigan, Daniel, Trial of the Catonsville Nine, Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bird, Robert Montgomery, The Gladiator in Clement E. Foust, The Life and Dramatic Works of Robert Montgomery Bird, New York: B. Franklin, 1971. Boucicault, Dion, The Octoroon, Or Life in Louisiana in Arthur Hobson Quinn (ed.), Representative American Plays: From 1767 to the Present Day, seventh edn., New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953. Brougham, John, Metamora; Or, The Last of the Pollywogs in Don B. Wilmeth (ed.), Staging the Nation: Plays from the American Theater, 1787–1909, Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. Brown, William Wells, The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom in James V. Hatch and Ted Shine (eds.), Black Theatre USA: Forty-Five Plays by African Americans, 1847–1974, New York: Free Press, 1974. Burk, John, Female Patriotism, or The Death of Joan D’Arc, New York: Printed by R.M. Hurtin, 1798. Bunker-Hill; or, The Death of General Warren, New York: Publications of the Dunlap Society, no. 15, 1891. Caldwell, Ben, Prayer Meeting; or, The First Militant Preacher in James V. Hatch and Ted Shine (eds.), Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans: The Recent Period: 1935-Today, rev. edn., New York: Free Press, 1996. Childress, Alice, Wedding Band in Honor Moore (ed.), The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Churchill, Caryl, Cloud Nine, London: Pluto Press, 1979. Top Girls, London: Methuen, 1982. Vinegar Tom in Caryl Churchill, Plays: One, London: Methuen, 1985. Conrad, Robert T., Jack Cade, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1918. Coss, Clare, Sondra Segal, and Roberta Sklar, The Daughters Cycle (excerpts) in Clare Coss, Sondra Segal, and Roberta Sklar, “Separation and Survival: Mothers, Daughters, Sisters – The Women’s Experimental Theater,” The Future of Difference edited by Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980, pp. 195–235. Crothers, Rachel, He and She in Arthur Hobson Quinn (ed.), Representative American Plays: From 1767 to the Present Day, seventh edn., New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1953. A Man’s World in Judith E. Barlow (ed.), Plays by Women: The Early Years, New York: Avon Books, 1981 Daly, Augustin, Horizon in Augustin Daly, Plays, edited by Don B. Wilmeth and Rosemary Cullen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Daniels, Sarah, Masterpieces, London: Methuen, 1984. Different Sons, a VVAW documentary directed by Jack Ofield, produced by Arthur Littman, Bowling Green Films, 1971. Du Bois, W.E.B., “The Star of Ethiopia. A Pageant,” in Herbert Apthecker (ed.), Pamphlets and Leaflets by W.E.B. Du Bois, White Plains, NY.: Kraus-Thomson, 1983. Dunlap, William, Darby’s Return in Paul L. Ford (ed.), Washington and the Theatre, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1899. André in Arthur Hobson Quinn (ed.), Representative American Plays: From 1767 to the Present Day, seventh edn., New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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The Glory of Columbia: Her Yeomanry in Richard Moody (ed.), Dramas from the American Theatre 1762–1909, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. Durivage, O.E., The Stage-Struck Yankee (also known as Our Jedidiah: or, Great Attraction), New York: Samuel French, n.d. Ensler, Eve, Necessary Targets: A Story of Women and War, New York: Villard, 2001. The Vagina Monologues, V-Day edition, New York: Villard, 2001. Fierstein, Harvey, Torch Song Trilogy in Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song Trilogy: Three Plays, New York: Villard, 1983. Fornes, Maria Irene, The Conduct of Life in Plays: Mud, The Danube, The Conduct of Life, Sarita, New York: PAJ Publications, 1986. Fuller, Charles, A Soldier’s Play, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Glaspell, Susan, Trifles in Susan Glaspell, Trifles and Six Other Short Plays, London: E. Benn, 1926. Goldemberg, Rose Leiman, Letters Home in Julia Miles (ed.), The Women’s Project, New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1980. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 1992 in Warrior for Gringostroika, St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1993. Border Brujo in Warrior for Gringostroika, St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1993. Hamilton, Cicely, How the Vote Was Won in Dale Spender (ed.), How the Vote Was Won and Other Suffragette Plays, London: Methuen, 1985. Hoffman, William M., As Is, New York: Vintage, 1985. Houston, Velina Hasu, Asa Ga Kimashita in Velina Hasu Houston (ed.), The Politics of Life, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Tea in Roberta Uno (ed.), Unbroken Thread, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Hughes, Langston, Mulatto in Langston Hughes, Five Plays edited by Webster Smalley, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Don’t You Want to be Free? in James V. Hatch and Ted Shine (eds.), Black Theatre USA: Forty-Five Plays by African Americans, 1847–1974, New York: Free Press, 1974. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Ramersad and David Roessel, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Hunter, Robert, Androboros, “Printed at Monoropolis since August, 1714,” New York: William Bradford, 1714. Ibsen, Henrik, Ghosts in Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts and Other Plays, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1964. The Master Builder in Henrik Ibsen, The Master Builder: and Other Plays, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. Hedda Gabler in Henrik Ibsen, Plays: Two, London: Eyre Methuen, 1980. Plays: Two, London: Eyre Methuen, 1980. A Doll’s House in Henrik Ibsen, Plays: Two, London: Eyre Methuen, 1980. Peer Gynt in Henrik Ibsen, Plays: Six, London: Methuen, 1987. Jacker, Corinne, Bits and Pieces in Honor Moore (ed.), The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Johnson, Hester, On to Victory in Bettina Friedl (ed.), On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jones, LeRoi, Dutchman in LeRoi Jones, Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays, New York, Morrow, 1964. The Slave in LeRoi Jones, Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays, New York, Morrow, 1964. Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself !, Newark: Jihad Publication, no date (1967?). Black Mass in LeRoi Jones, Four Black Revolutionary Plays, Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill Co., 1969. Four Black Revolutionary Plays, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969. Slave Ship, Newark: Jihad Publication, 1969. JELLO, Chicago: Third World Press, 1970. Kramer, Larry, The Normal Heart, London: Methuen, 1987. Kushner, Tony, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes Part One: Millennium Approaches, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes Part Two: Perestroika, rev. edn., New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996. Lindsley, A. B., Love and Friendship, or, Yankee Notions, New York: D. Longworth, at the Dramatic Repository, Shakespeare-Gallery, 1809. Logan, C.A., The Vermont Wool Dealer, New York: Samuel French, n.d. Maltz, Albert, Black Pit, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935. Mann, Emily, Execution of Justice in Emily Mann, Testimonies: Four Plays, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997. McCloskey, James J., Across the Continent; Or, Scenes from New York Life and the Pacific Railroad in Isaac Goldberg and Hubert Heffner (eds.), Davy Crockett and Other Plays, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Medina, Louisa, Nick of the Woods, Boston: Spenser’s Boston Theatre, n.d. Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman in Arthur Miller, Plays: One, London: Methuen, 1988. The Crucible in Arthur Miller, Plays: One, London: Methuen, 1988. Miller, Tim, Glory Box, unpublished, 2000. Moore, Honor, Mourning Pictures in Honor Moore (ed.), The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Moraga, Cherr´ıe, Giving up the Ghost in Cherr´ıe Moraga, Heroes and Saints and Other Plays, Albuquerque: West End Press, 1994. Heroes and Saints in Cherr´ıe Moraga, Heroes and Saints and Other Plays, Albuquerque: West End Press, 1994. Munford, Robert, A Collection of Plays and Poems by the late Colonel Robert Munford, of Mecklenberg County in the State of Virginia, Petersburg: William Prentiss, 1798. Murdock, Frank, Davy Crockett in Isaac Goldberg and Hubert Heffner (eds.), Davy Crockett and Other Plays, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Norman, Marsha, Getting Out (1977) in Marsha Norman, Four Plays, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988. Odets, Clifford, Waiting for Lefty in Clifford Odets, Six Plays, London: Methuen, 1982. O’Neill, Eugene, The Hairy Ape in Eugene O’Neill, The Collected Plays of Eugene O’Neill, London: Jonathan Cape, 1988.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Open Theatre, Mutation Show in Karen Malpede and Joseph Chaikin (eds.), Three Works by the Open Theatre, New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1974. Patterson, Charles, Black Ice, in LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (eds.), Black Fire, New York: William Morrow & Co., 1968. Paulding, James Kirke, John Augustus Stone and William Bayle Bernard, The Lion of the West, edited by James N. Tidwell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954. Peters, Paul and George Sklar, Stevedore, New York: Covici, Friede, 1934. Rabe, David, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel in David Rabe, The Vietnam Plays, New York: Grove Press, 1993. Sticks and Bones in David Rabe, The Vietnam Plays, New York: Grove Press, 1993. Streamers in David Rabe, The Vietnam Plays, New York: Grove Press, 1993. Red Ladder, Strike While the Iron is Hot in Michelene Wandor, Strike While the Iron is Hot: Three Plays on Sexual Politics, London: Journeyman Press, 1980. Robins, Elizabeth, Votes for Women in Dale Spender (ed.), How the Vote Was Won and Other Suffragette Plays, London: Methuen, 1985. Robins, Elizabeth and Florence Bell, Alan’s Wife, London: William Heinemann, 1893. Rosler, Martha, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, Video Data Bank Preservation Program, Chicago: Video Data Bank, 1996. Schneeman, Carolee, Interior Scroll in Carolee Schneeman, More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings, edited by Bruce McPherson, New Paltz, NY: Documentext, 1979. Shange, Ntozake, for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf: A Choreopoem, New York: Macmillan, 1977. Shaw, Mary, Impressionistic Sketch of the Anti-Suffragists in Bettina Friedl (ed.), On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. The Parrot’s Cage in Bettina Friedl (ed.), On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. Sherman, Martin, Bent, New York: Avon Books, 1980. Sinclair, Upton, Singing Jailbirds, Long Beach, California: 1924. Smith, Anna Deavere, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, New York: Anchor Books, 1993. Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines [includes excerpts used in House Arrest], New York: Random House, 2000. Smith, John, “A Dialogue between an Englishman and an Indian,” 1779, manuscript held by Dartmouth College Special Collections. Spiderwoman, Power Pipes in Mimi d’Aponte (ed.), Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays, New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1999. Spivak, Gayatri, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym, London: Routledge, 1990. Split Britches, Beauty and the Beast in Sue-Ellen Case (ed.), Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance, London: Routledge, 1996. Belle Reprieve in Sue-Ellen Case (ed.), Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance, London: Routledge, 1996.

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Steele, Wilbur Daniel, Contemporaries in Barbara Ozieblo (ed.), The Provincetown Players: A Choice of the Shorter Works, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994. Stone, Augustus, Metamora; Or, the Last of the Wampanoags in Eugene R. Page (ed.), Metamora and Other Plays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941. Terry, Megan, Approaching Simone, Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1973. Tyler, Royall, The Contrast in Don B. Wilmeth (ed.), Staging the Nation: Plays from the American Theater, 1787–1909, Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. Uno, Roberta (ed.), Unbroken Thread, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Valdez, Luis, “Mundo Mata,” 2001, unpublished. The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa in Jorge Huerta (ed.), Necessary Theater: Six Plays about the Chicano Experience, Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1989. Los Vendidos, created and written by Luis Valdez, directed by George Paul, produced by Jose Luis Ruiz, 1971. Zoot Suit in Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit and Other Plays, Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1992. Valdez, Luis and El Teatro Campesino, “El Baile de los Gigantes,” unpublished, 1974. “El Fin del Mundo, 1976,” unpublished. Las Dos Caras del Patroncito in Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino, Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. “La Carpa de los Rasquachis,” 2001, unpublished. La Quinta Temporada in Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino, Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. Soldado Razo in Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino, Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. Los Vendidos in Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino, Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. Vietnam Campesino in Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino, Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. Vogel, Paula, How I Learned to Drive in Paula Vogel, The Mammary Plays, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998. Warren, Mercy, The Adulateur, The Defeat and The Group in Benjamin Franklin (ed.), The Plays and Poems of Mercy Otis Warren, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, New York: Delmar, 1980. Wasserstein, Wendy, The Heidi Chronicles in Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Wilder, Thornton, Our Town, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962. Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire London: Methuen, 1984. Yeats, W.B., The Countess Cathleen in W. B. Yeats, Collected Plays, second edn., London: Macmillan, 1952. Zangwill, Israel, The Melting Pot, New York: Macmillan, 1912.

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Manuscript collections John Reed Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bms Am 16555 (95).

Serials /newspapers Argus (New York), 1798. Boston Gazette, 1796–8. Columbia Centinel (Boston), 1797–8. Globe and Commercial Advertiser (New York), May–June 1913. New York Call, April–June 1913. New York Herald, May–June 1913. New York Press, May–June 1913. New York Times, May–June 1913. New York Tribune, May–June 1913. Paterson Evening News, April–June 1913. Polar Star and Daily Advertiser (Boston) 1796–7. Time Piece (New York), 1798.

Articles Arrizon, Alicia, “Mythical Performativity: Relocating Aztlán in Chicana Feminist Cultural Productions,” Theatre Journal, 52, no.1 (March 2000), 23–49. Benston, Kimberly, “The Aesthetic of Modern Black Drama” in Errol Hill (ed.), The Theater of Black Americans, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980, vol. i, pp. 61–78. Blair, Karen, “Pageantry for Women’s Rights: The Career of Hazel MacKaye, 1913–1923” in Theatre Survey, 31 (May 1990), 23–46. Butsch, Richard, “American Theatre Riots and Class Relations, 1754–1849,” in Theatre Annual, 48 (1995), 41–59. Canning, Charlotte, “The Most American Thing in America” in Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (eds.), Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, pp. 91–105. Carby, Hazel V., “The Multicultural Wars,” Radical History Review, 54 (Fall 1992), 7–18. Carlson, Marvin, “Nationalism and the Romantic Drama in Europe” in Gerald Gillespie (ed.), Romantic Drama, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1994, pp. 139–52. Carr, C., “Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: The Taboo Art of Karen Finlay” in Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan (eds.), Acting Out: Feminist Performances, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 141–51. Clapp, William W., “The Drama in Boston” in Justin Winsor (ed.), The Memorial History of Boston, Boston: J.R. Osgood and Company, 1881, vol. iv, pp. 357–82. Cotter, Holland, “Beyond Multiculturalism, A Way to a New Freedom,” New York Times, 29 July 2001, Section 2, p. 1. Crandell, William F., “They Moved the Town: Organizing Vietnam Veterans Against the War” in Melvin Small and William Hoover (eds.), Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Anti-War Movement, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992, pp. 141–54.

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Cronin, Maura, “The Yankee and the Veteran: Vehicles of Nationalism,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 13, no. 2 (Spring, 2001), 51–70. Davis, Peter, “Determining the Date of Robert Hunter’s Androboros,” Theatre Survey, 25, no. l (May 1984), 95–7. De Lauretis, Teresa, “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation” in Theatre Journal, 40, no. 2 (May 1988), 155–77. Du Bois, W.E.B., “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement” in James Hatch and Leo Hamalian (eds.), Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance 1920–1940, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996, pp. 446–8. Fish, Stanley, “Boutique Multiculturalism, or, Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry, 23, no. 2 (Winter 1997), 378–95. Fox, Claire, “The Portable Border: Site-Specificity, Art, and the US-Mexico Frontier,” Social Text, 41 (Winter 94), 61–82. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, “A Binational Performance Pilgrimage,” The Drama Review, 35, no. 3 (Fall 1991), 22–45. Hall, Stuart, “New Ethnicities,” Black Film: British Cinema, edited by Kobena Mercer, ICA Documents 7, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988, pp. 27–31. Herrera, Albert, “The National Chicano Moratorium and the Death of Ruben Salazar” in Ed Ludwig and James Santibañez (eds.), The Chicanos: Mexican American Voices, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971, pp. 235–41. Higson, Andrew, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen, 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1989), 36–46. Hornborg, Anne-Christine, “Kluskap – As Local Culture Hero and Global Green Warrior: Different Narrative Contexts for the Canadian Mi’kmaq Culture-Hero,” Acta Americana, 9, no. 1 (2001), 17–38. Kaplan, Amy, “ ‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture” in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 3–21. Karenga, Ron, “Ron Karenga and Black Cultural Nationalism,” Negro Digest, January, 1968, 5–9. Krasner, David, “The Pageant is the Thing” in Jeffrey Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (eds.), Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, pp. 106–22. Lears, Jackson, “A Matter of Taste: Corporate Cultural Hegemony in a MassConsumption Society” in Lary May (ed.), Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 38–57. Lincoln, Bruce, “A Lakota Sun-dance and the Problematics of Sociocosmic Reunion,” History of Religions, 34, no. 1 (1994), 1–14. Linton, Ralph, “The Comanche Sun Dance,” American Anthropologist, 37 (1935), 420–8. Logan, Brad, “The Ghost Dance among the Paiute,” Ethnohistory, 27, no. 3 (Summer 1980), 267–88. Lowie, Robert B., “Sun Dance of the Shoshone, Ute, and Hidastsa,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 16, no.1 (1919), 387–431. Lyons, Charles R. and James C. Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on her Performance within the Context of Critical Theory,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall 1994), 43–66.

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Martin, Carol, “Anna Deavere Smith: The Word Becomes You,” The Drama Review, 37, no. 4 (Winter 1993), 45–62. McConachie, Bruce, “The Theatre of Edwin Forrest and Jacksonian Hero Worship” in Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt (eds.), When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare: Essays on Nineteenth-Century British and American Theatre, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1989, pp. 3–18. “American Theatre in Context, from the Beginnings to 1870” in Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol. i, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 111–81. McNamara, Brooks (ed.), “Paterson Strike Pageant,” Drama Review, 51 (Summer 1971), 61–72. Moraga, Cherr´ıe, “Art in América con Acento” in Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (eds.), Negotiating Performance, Durham: Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 30–6. Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16, no. 3 (1975), 6–18. Neal, Larry, “The Black Arts Movement,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (eds.), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997, pp. 1960–72. “New Grapes,” Newsweek, 31 July 1967, p. 79. Nochlin, Linda, “The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913,” Art in America, 52 (May/June 1974), 64–8. Ostler, Jeffrey, “Conquest and the State – Wounded Knee,” Pacific Historical Review, 65 no. 2 (May 1996), 217–48. Patraka, Vivian, “Notes on Technique in Feminist Drama: Apple Pie and Signs of Life,”Women and Performance, 1, no. 2 (Winter 1984), 58–72. Pease, Donald E., “National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives” in Donald E. Pease (ed.), National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, Durham: Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 1–13. Platt, Tony, “Desegregating Multiculturalism: Problems in the Theory and Pedagogy of Diversity Education,” Notes for presentation at the annual conference of the Sociology of Education Association, Pacific Grove, California, 24 February 2001, unpublished. Quinn, Michael, “Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting,” New Theatre Quarterly, 6, no. 22 (May 1990), 154–61. Rayner, Alice, “Improper Conjunctions: Metaphor, Performance, and Text,” Essays in Theatre/Etudes Théaˆ trales, 14, no. 1 (November 1995), 3–14. Reed, John, “Almost Thirty” in Groff Conklin (ed.), The New Republic Anthology: 1915–1935, New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1936, pp. 57–73. Reinelt, Janelle, “Tracking Twilight: The Politics of Location,” Theatre Forum, 6 (Winter/Spring 1995), 52–7. “Performing Race: Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror,” Modern Drama, 39, no. 4 (Winter 1996), 609–17. Renan, Ernest, “What is a Nation?” in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (eds.), The Nationalism Reader, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995, pp. 143–55. Richards, Sandra, “Caught in the Act of Social Definition: On the Road with Anna Deavere Smith” in Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan (eds.), Acting Out: Feminist Performances, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 35–53.

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Richardson, Gary A., “In the Shadow of the Bard: James Nelson Barker’s Republican Drama and the Shakespearean Legacy” in Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt (eds.), When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare: Essays on Nineteenth-Century British and American Theatre, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1989, pp. 123–36. Joseph P. Roppolo, “Uncle Tom in New Orleans: Three Lost Plays,” New England Quarterly, 27 (1954), 213–26. Russell, Phillips, “The World’s Greatest Labor Play: The Paterson Strike Pageant,” International Socialist Review, 14 ( July 1913), 7–9. Savran, David, “Queering the Nation” in Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor, Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, pp. 210–29. Schechner, Richard, “An Intercultural Primer,” American Theatre (October 1991), 28–31, 135–6. Sell, Mike, “The Black Arts Movement: Performance, Neo-Orality, and the Destruction of the ‘White Thing’” in Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner (eds.), African American Performance and Theater History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 56–80. Senelick, Laurence, “Recovering Repressed Memories: Writing Russian Theatrical History,” paper presented at FIRT colloquium at Helsinki University on “Re/Writing National Theatre Histories,” unpublished, 1997. Tridon, André, “Haywood,” New Review, 1 (May 1913), 502–6. Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” in Richard D. Heffner (ed.), A Documentary History of the United States, rev. edn., New York: Mentor, 1961, pp. 178–86. Valdez, Luis, “El Teatro Campesino – Its Beginnings” in Ed Ludwig and James Santibañez (eds.), The Chicanos: Mexican American Voices, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971, pp. 115–19. “The Tale of La Raza,” in Ed Ludwig and James Santibañez (eds.), The Chicanos: Mexican American Voices, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971, pp. 95–100. Pensamiento Serpentino in Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez – Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino, Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990, pp. 168–99. Wilmer, S.E, “The Lip Affair,” New Society, 21 March 1974, pp. 696–7. “Reifying Imagined Communities; Nationalism, Post-Colonialism and Theatre Historiography,” Nordic Theatre Studies, 12 (1999), 94–103.

Books Acuña, Rodolfo, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, third edn., New York: Harper Collins, 1988. Adams, John, The Political Writings of John Adams, edited by George A. Peek, Jr., Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1954. Papers of John Adams, edited by Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline and Gregg L. Lint, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977, vol. ii. Papers of John Adams, edited by Robert J. Taylor, Gregg L. Lint and Celeste Walker, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979, vol. iii.

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Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, rev. edn., London: Verso, 1995. Anthony, Katharine, First Lady of the Revolution: The Life of Mercy Otis Warren, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958. Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands = La frontera: the New Mestiza, San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987. Appiyah, Kwame, In my Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Auster, Albert, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theatre, 1890–1920, New York: Praeger, 1984. Banning, Lance, The Jeffersonian Persuasion, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Baraka, Imamu Amiri, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, New York: Freundlich Books, 1984. Berkovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Bhabha, Homi K. (ed.), Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 1990. Bharucha, Rustom, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, London: Athlone Press, 2000. Brennan, Tim, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Brown, Alice, Mercy Warren, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896. Reprinted 1968, Massachusetts Heritage Series, no. 3. Brown, Janet, Taking Center Stage: Feminism in Contemporary US Drama, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1991. Brown, Jared, The Theatre in America during the Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Broyles-Gonzáles, Yolanda, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Burke, Sally, American Feminist Playwrights: A Critical History, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Burr, Aaron, Political Correpondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr, edited by MaryJo Kline, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, vol. i. Butterfield, L. H., M. Friedlander and M. Kline (eds.), The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762–1784, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. Canning, Charlotte, Feminist Theaters in the USA: Staging Women’s Experience, London: Routledge, 1996. Case, Sue Ellen, Feminism and Theatre, London: Macmillan, 1988. Chinoy, Helen and Linda Jenkins (eds.), Women in American Theatre, rev. edn., New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987. Churchill, Ward and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, corrected edn., Boston: South End Press, 1990. Clapp, William W., A Record of the Boston Stage, Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1853. Clurman, Harold, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties, London: Dennis Dobson, 1946.

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Coad, Oral S., William Dunlap, New York: The Dunlap Society, 1917. Comaroff, Jean and John, Modernity and its Malcontents, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Conwell, Russell H., Acres of Diamonds, rev. edn., New York City: Modern Eloquence Corporation, 1901. Curti, Merle, The Growth of American Thought, New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Dog, Mary Crow and Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman, New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. Dolan, Jill, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. Dorman, James H. Jr., Theater in the Ante Bellum South: 1815–1861, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Dorsey, George Amos, The Arapaho Sun Dance; the Ceremony of the Offerings Lodge, Chicago: Field Columbian Museum, 1903. Dunlap, William, History of the American Theatre, London: Richard Bentley, 1833, vols. i and ii. The Diary of William Dunlap, New York: The New York Historical Society, 1931, vol. i. Elam, Harry J., Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Elk, Black and Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe; Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953. Evans, Sarah, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, New York: Free Press, 1989. Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography: My First Life (1906–1926), rev. edn., New York: International Publishers, 1973. Foner, Philip S. (ed.), The Black Panthers Speak, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. Ford, Paul N., Washington and the Theatre, New York: Publications of the Dunlap Society, 1899. Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, rev. edn., New York: Continuum, 1993. Friedl, Bettina (ed.), On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973. Local Knowledge, New York: Basic Books, 1983. Geiogamah, Hanay and Jaye T. Darby (eds.), American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader, Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2000. Glaspell, Susan, The Road to the Temple, New York: Frederick A. Stokes, Co., 1927. Glassberg, David, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Goldstein, Malcolm, The Political Stage: American Drama and the Theater of the Great Depression, New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Golin, Steve, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Green, Martin, New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988. Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

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Haley, Alex, Roots, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Hall, Roger A., Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hall, Stuart (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1998. Hamilton, Alexander James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers, edited by Roy P. Fairfield, second edn., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Hatch, James and Ted Shine (eds.), Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans 1935-Today, rev. edn., New York: Free Press, 1996. Haywood, William, Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood, New York: International Publishers, 1929. Hicks, Granville, John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary, New York: Macmillan, 1936. Hittman, Michael, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance, Carson City: Grace Dangberg Foundation, Inc., 1990. Hoffman, Abbie, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980. Holledge, Julie, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre, London: Virago, 1981. Holler, Clyde, Black Elk’s Religion: The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Holroyd, Michael, Bernard Shaw: Volume 1, 1856–1898: The Search for Love, London: Chatto and Windus, 1988. hooks, bell, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Boston: South End Press, 1990. Hornblow, Arthur, A History of the Theatre in America, Philadelphia: Lippincott Company, 1919, vol. i. Huerta, Jorge A., Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms, Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1982. Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hunt, Andrew, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, New York: New York University Press, 1999. Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White, New York: Routledge, 1995. Jaggar, Alison, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Totowa, NY: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983. Jefferson, Joseph, The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson, edited by Alan S. Downer, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. Jones, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi, Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, New York: William Morrow and Co., 1979. Joseph, May and Jennifer Fink (eds.), Performing Hybridity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Kettner, James H., The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Kornbluh, Joyce L. (ed.), Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, rev. edn., Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1998.

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La Barre, Weston, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. LeMay, Michael and Elliott R. Barkan (eds.), US Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999. Lesser, Alexander, The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game: Ghost Dance Revival and Ethnic Identity, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Levin, Phyllis Lee, Abigail Adams, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Lewis, R.W.B., The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1955. Londré, Felicia H. and Daniel J. Wattermeier, The History of North American Theater, New York: Continuum, 1998. Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London: Routledge, 1998. Luhan, Mabel Dodge, Movers and Shakers: Volume Three of Intimate Memories, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936. Malpede, Karen (ed.), Women in Theatre: Compassion and Hope, New York: Drama Book Publishers, 1983. Marker, Frederick J. and Lise-Lone Marker, A History of Scandinavian Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mason, Jeffrey D., Melodrama and the Myth of America, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Mason, Jeffrey D. and J. Ellen Gainor (eds.), Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Basic Books: New York, 1988. McDonald, Forrest, Alexander Hamilton, New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1982. McLaughlin, James, My Friend the Indian, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Meserve, Walter J., An Outline History of American Drama, Totowa, N.J: Littlefield, Adams and Co., 1965. An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 1828, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. Miles, Julia (ed.), The Women’s Project, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1980. Miller, John C., The Federalist Era: 1789–1801, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. Moody, Richard (ed.), Dramas from the American Theatre, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. Mooney, James, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, Washington DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1896, Annual Report 14, part 2. Moraga, Cherr´ıe and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back, Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981. Morison, Samuel Eliot, Henry Steele Commager and William E. Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, vols. i and ii. Moser, Richard R., The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY



Murphy, Brenda, Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film and Television, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Olson, James C., Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Pavis, Patrice, The Intercultural Performance Reader, London: Routledge, 1996. Peterson, Merrill D., Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Philbrick, Norman (ed.), Trumpets Sounding, New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1972. Prevots, Naima, American Pageantry: A Movement for Art and Democracy, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Prucha, Francis Paul, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984, vol. i. Prucha, Francis Paul (ed.), Documents of United States Indian Policy, Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1990. Quinn, Arthur Hobson, History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1923. Rankin, Hugh F., The Theater in Colonial America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960. Reed, John, Ten Days that Shook the World, New York: Modern Library, 1960. Reimers, David M. Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn Against Immigration, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Richards, Jeffrey, H., Mercy Otis Warren, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. Richards, Stanley (ed.), America on Stage: Ten Great Plays of America, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Richardson, Gary A., American Drama from the Colonial Period through World War I, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Robin, Claude, New Travels through North-America (reprint of 1783 text), New York: Arno Press, 1969. Robins, Elizabeth, Ibsen and the Actress, London: Hogarth Press, 1928. Theatre and Friendship, Freeport: Books for Libraries, 1969. Rosenstone, Robert, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Rudnick, Lois (ed.), Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage (Random House), 1994. Scherman, Bernardine Kielty, Girl from Fitchburg, New York: Random House, 1964. Schiller, Friedrick, Friedrich Schiller: An Anthology for Our Time, edited by Frederick Ungar, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. 1959. Seller, Maxine S. (ed.), Ethnic Theatre in the United States, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Sellers, Cleveland and Robert Terrell, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC, New York: William Morrow & Co., 1973. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, London: Routledge, 1994.



SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shulim, Joseph, I., John Daly Burk: Irish Revolutionist and American Patriot in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society (October, 1964), vol. 54, part 6. Sinclair, Upton, American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences, New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1932. Sloan, Kay, The Loud Silents, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Steinmetz, Paul, Pipe, Bible, and Peyote among the Oglala Lakota, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Tripp, Anne Huber, The IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Turner, Victor, The Anthropology of Performance, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1987. United States. Kerner Commission, Report, New York: Dutton, 1968. Utley, Robert M. The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. The Lance and the Shield, New York: Ballantine Books, 1993. Vizenor, Gerald, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Vorlicky, Robert (ed.), Tony Kushner in Conversation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Walker, James R., Lakota Belief and Ritual, edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Elaine A. Jahner, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Lakota Society, edited by Raymond. J. DeMallie, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Warren, Mercy, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1970, vol. iii. Wertheim, Arthur F., The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908–1917, New York: New York University Press, 1976. Wilmeth, Don B. and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998–2000, vols. i–iii. Winsor, Justin, The Memorial History of Boston, Boston: J.R. Osgood and Co., 1880–81, vol. iv. Wissler, Clark, The Sun Dance of the Blackfoot Indians, New York: The Trustees, 1918. Zinn, Howard, A People’s History of the United States, New York: Longman, 1980.

Index

abolition, 8 abortion, 151, 162, 164, 184 Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (aids), 14, 181, 183–186 “Acres of Diamonds” speech (Conwell), 11, 99 Across the Continent (McCloskey), 9 Act of Congress (1790), 9 Action for Women in Theatre, 161 actor-managers, 156–157 Actors Alliance of America, 158 Actresses Franchise League, 156, 158 Adams, Abigail, 39, 152 Adams, John, 39, 41, 43, 46–47, 152 Adams, Samuel, 39, 40, 42, 43, 49 Addison, Joseph, 18, 29, 40 Adulateur, The (Warren), 39–40 Aeschylus, 165 affirmative action, 173 African American, 5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 99, 100, 101, 127–129, 131, 132, 133–138, 149, 174, 178–181, 182, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 194 agit-prop, 119, 125 Agrell, Alfhild, 157 aids, see Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Aiken, George L., 8 Alan’s Wife (Robins), 157 Albee, Edward, 13 Alfieri, Vittorio, 2 Alianza Federal de Mercedes, La (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), 129

Alien and Sedition Acts, 55, 74, 76, 99 Alien Act, 99 Sedition Act, 59, 62 Allegory, The (MacKaye), 100, 155 Allen, Ethan, 48, 50 American Communist Party, 103, 119 American Company, see London Company of Comedians American Dream, The (Albee), 13 American Dreams (Houston), 187 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 98, 109–110 American Indians, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25–26, 31, 49, 65, 80–97, 101, 129, 131, 138, 144, 149, 166, 175, 182, 183, 187, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199 American Indian Movement (AIM), 129 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 129 Court of Indian Offences, 82 Red Power (see American Indian Movement), 131 religious intolerance, 83–84 Tribes: Arapaho, 86, 88, 92; Caddo, 86, 88; Cherokee, 9; Cheyenne, 86, 93; Chichimec, 196; Chippewa, 83; Comanche, 88; Kiowa, 86, 88; Lakota, 80–96: Teton Lakota: Hunkpapa, 83, Itazipco, 83, Minneconjou, 83, 95, Oglala, 83, 89, 91, Oohinumpa, 83, Sicangu, 83, Sihasapa or Blackfeet, 83;



 American Indians (cont.) Yankton Lakota, 87; Mohican, 183; Otomi, 196; Paiute, 85, 87, 88; Sachem, 49; Shoshoni, 88; Sioux (see Lakota); Tuscarora, 19, 43; Wichita, 86 “American jeremiad” (Berkovitch), 7 American Me (Almos), 192 American Place Theatre, 152; see also Women’s Project American Revolution, 5, 11, 38–40, 47, 51, 53, 56, 62, 68, 73, 74, 101, 152 American Woman: Six Periods of American Life (MacKaye), 155 Americans Roused in a Cure for the Spleen, The (Sewall), 35–38 Ames, Fisher, 55, 75 Anderson, Benedict, 1, 2, 177, 189 Anderson, Laurie, 169 André (Dunlap), 65–69, 76–79 André, Major John, 65–69, 76–79 Androboros (Hunter), 20–21, 24, 34 Angels in America (Kushner), 14, 176, 181–187, 199 Antony, Marc, 106 Anthony, Susan B., 153, 155 Antigone (Sophocles), 167 Antigone Too: Rites of Love and Defiance (Boesing), 167 anti-war demonstrations, 130, 131, 141–142, 145–148, 149 anti-war performances, 132, 142–143, 145–148, 149–150 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 195, 196, 199 Aoki, Brenda Wong, 14, 176, 187, 189–194, 196, 201 Appia, Adolphe, 103 Approaching Simone (Terry), 166 Argus, The, 68–69, 78 Aristophanes, 156 Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself ! (Baraka), 134 Arnold, Benedict, 51, 66, 67, 77, 78 As Is (Hoffman), 14 Asa Ga Kimashita (Houston), 187 Ashley, Jessie, 124

INDEX

Asian American, 13, 132, 174, 187, 189 assimilation, 82, 85–86, 94, 95, 97, 128, 132, 133, 141, 174, 193 anti-assimilation, 94, 95, 97, 140, 149 Astor Place Riots, 8 At the Foot of the Mountain, 163, 164, 168 Augur, Gen. Christopher, 85 Aztecs, 13, 131, 139, 143, 145, 149 Baile de los Gigantes, El, 144 Baptists, 99 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 13, 131, 132–139, 149 Barker, James Nelson, 6 Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, 104, 119 Barré, Isaac, 48 Barrymore, Ethel, 153, 155 Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, The (Rabe), 145 Basshe, Em Jo, 125 Bates, Esther Willard, 100 Battle of Little Bighorn, 94 Beauty and the Beast, 169 Beauvais, Bishop (Pierre Cauchon), 70–71 Bedford, Duke of, 70 Bell, Gertrude, 157 Belle Reprieve (Split Britches and Bloolips), 170 Belmont, Mrs. O. H. P., 160 Belt, The (Sifton), 125 Benmussa, Simone, 169 Benny, Jack, 134 Benston, Kimberly, 117–118 Bent (Sherman), 14 Berkovitch, Sacvan, 7 Bernard, William Bayle, 7 Bernhardt, Sarah, 156 Berrigan, Daniel, 145 Bhabha, Homi, 1, 15 Bharucha, Rustom, 174–175 Bider, Haydee Tamara Bunke, 166 Big Foot, 93, 95 Bill of Rights, The, 5 Bimson, Chief of Police, 110, 117 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 7

INDEX

Bits and Pieces ( Jacker), 165 Bjørnson, Bjornstjerne, 2 Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem, 131, 134–135 Black Arts/West, Oakland, California (Black House), 137 Black Arts/West, Seattle, Washington, 137 Black Elk, 84, 89, 92–93 Black House, 137 Black Ice (Patterson), 134, 135 Black Mass (Baraka), 135 Black Nationalists, 13, 128–129, 133–134, 137, 149 Black Panthers, 128, 129, 137 Black Pit (Maltz), 100 Black Power, 128, 129, 131, 133, 149, 173 Black Revolutionary Theatre, 13, 134, 136, 138, 139, 149 Blockade of Boston, The (Burgoyne), 47 “Blood for Blood” speech (Tresca), 107, 115 Bloolips, 170 Boesing, Martha, 163, 167 Booth, Edwin, 156 Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, 197 Border Brujo (Gómez-Peña), 197–199, 200 Boston Gazette, 46, 57, 58 Boston Massacre, 39 Boston Tea Party, 19, 39, 43 Boucicault, Dion, 8 Bourne, Bette, 170 Bourne, Randolph, 123 Bowdoin, James, 41, 43 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 31 Brady, William A., 120 Brattle, William, 41, 43 Bread and Puppet Theatre, 145 Brecht, Bertolt (Brechtian), 38, 70, 168, 169 Broadway, 113, 125, 132, 145, 153, 155, 160, 161 Brougham, John, 9 Brown, Gov. Edmund, 139

 Brown, William Wells, 8 Building Bridges Not Walls (Smith, A.), 177 Bullins, Ed, 136 Bunker-Hill; or, The Death of General Warren (Burk), 6, 53, 59–65, 66, 68, 70, 73, 76, 77, 79 Burgoyne, General, 47 Burk, John, 6, 53, 54, 56–57, 59–65, 68, 69–76, 77, 78, 79 Burke, Edmund, 48 Burke, Kenneth, 81 Burr, Aaron, 59 Caldwell, Ben, 136 Camden, Lord (Charles Pratt), 48 Candida (Shaw, G. B.), 157, 159 Candidates; or, The Humours of a Virginia Election, The (Munford), 27–29 capitalism, 11, 12, 13, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 107, 109, 119, 124, 125, 126, 133, 143, 199 Carby, Hazel, 174 Carlson, Marvin, 2 Carmichael, Stokely, 128 Carnegie steel plant strike, 98 Carnegie, Andrew, 98, 99 Carpa de los Rasquachis, La (Valdez and Teatro de Campesino), 145 Catholics, 4, 8, 11, 48, 49, 121, 166, 182, 186, 195, 196, 198 Cato (Addison), 18, 29 Centuries, The (Basshe), 125 Chaikin, Joseph, 164 Chapel Street Theatre, 17, 18 Chautauquas, 11–12, 99–100, 111 Chatham, Lord William, 48 Chávez, César, 138 Checkley, John, 17 Chicano Power, 131 Chicanos/as, 13, 129, 131–132, 138–145, 149, 173, 198–201 Chicomoztoc Mimixcoa – Cloud Serpents (Colorado Sisters), 196 child-labor, 110 Childress, Alice, 165 Chinese Exclusion Act, 11, 98

 Chinoy, Helen, 161 Christians, 23, 24, 166, 180, 194, 195; see also separate denominations Church of England, 16, 21, 22 Church Street Theatre (Charleston), 17 Churchill, Caryl, 169 Cihuacoatl (goddess), 195 Civil Rights Movement, 127–129, 137, 151, 161, 173, 174, 187 Civil War (American), 8, 10, 101, 130 Cixous, Hélène, 163 Clapp, William, 57, 58 Cleaver, Eldridge, 137 Close, Glenn, 172 Clothesline Project, 172 Cloud Nine (Churchill), 169 Clurman, Harold, 100 Coatlicue (goddess), 195 Coatlicue Theatre Company (Colorado Sisters), 166, 194, 199 Cold War, 127, 173 College of New Jersey (Princeton University), 30 College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), 29–31, 33 College of William and Mary, 29 Colorado Sisters, 14, 176, 187, 194–196, 201 Colorado, Elvira, 194 Colorado, Hortensia, 194 Columbia Centinel, 63–64 Columbus (Morton), 63–64 Columbus, Christopher, 195, 197, 199, 200 Comaroff, Jean and John, 81, 116 Common Sense (Paine), 38, 48 “communally helping out” (“methexis”), 117 Communists, 103, 119, 125, 127, 141, 143, 148, 186 Conboy, Sarah, 109–110 Concept East, 137 Conduct of Life, The (Fornes), 168 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 129 Conrad, Robert T., 7 Constant State of Desire, The (Finlay), 167 Constitution of the United States, 5, 53, 54, 76, 160

INDEX

Contemporaries (Steele), 124 Continental Congress, 17, 20, 32, 34–35, 38, 47 Contrast, The (Tyler), 6 Convert, The (Robins), 158 Conwell, Russell, 99 Cooke, George, 230 Cooke, Gen. Philip, 84 Cooper, Samuel, 66 Cortez, Hernando, 195, 199 Cotter, Holland, 174 counterculture movement, 130, 131, 149 Counter-Inaugural March, 160 Court Theatre, 157 Courts of Inspection, 35 Craig, Edward Gordon, 103 Crandell, William, 146–148 Cromwellian rebellion, 22 cross-dressing, 169–170 Crothers, Rachel, 153–154 Crown Heights (New York) riots (1991), 178 Crucible, The (Miller, A.), 13 “cultural genocide” (Holler), 83 cultural imperialism, 96, 180, 198 Current Opinion, 121 Custer, General George, 94 Daily Picayune, 8 “daily plebiscite” (Renan), 2 Daly, Augustin, 9 Daniels, Sarah, 168 Darby’s Return (Dunlap), 65 Dashiki Project Theatre, 137 Daughter’s Cycle, The (Women’s Experimental Theatre), 165 Davies, Reverend Samuel, 16 Davy Crockett (Murdock), 7 De Lauretis, Teresa, 167 Dead March (tune), 106, 114 Death of a Salesman (Miller, A.), 13 Debates at the Robin-Hood Society in the City of New-York, On Monday Night 19th July, 1774, 34, 35, 36 Debs, Eugene, 98 Defeat, The (Warren), 36, 39, 40–43

INDEX

Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (Adams), 54 Democratic National Convention, 130 Democratic Republicans, 54, 55–56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 70, 74, 76, 78 Denny, Reginald, 178 Depot (Ensler), 170 Depression, the Great, 12, 100, 125, 193 Derr, W. R., 7 Dialogue, Between a Southern Delegate, and His Spouse, on his Return from the Grand Continental Congress, A (Mary V. V.), 34–35 Dialogue Containing Some Reflections (anon.), 21, 22, 23–24, 25, 29 Disappointment, The (Forrest, T.), 18 Dodge, Mabel, 102–104, 115, 124 Dolan, Jill, 161, 163, 167 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 153 Don’t You Want to be Free? (Hughes), 101, 125 Dos Caras del Patroncito, Las (El Teatro Campesino), 139 Douglass, David, 17, 18, 27 Drew, Mrs. John (Louisa Lane), 154 Drexler, Rosalyn, 163 Du Bois, W. E. B., 102, 132 Dunlap, William, 53, 56, 64–69, 75, 76–79 Dunmore, Lord John, 50 Dutchman (Baraka), 131, 132–133, 134 “écriture féminine” (Cixous), 163 El Movimiento, 140 Emancipation of Women, The (Samolinska), 153 Emma (Little Flags), 166 Emmatroupe, 168 End of the Line (Gómez-Peña), 197 Ensler, Eve, 14, 170–172 Episcopal Church, 193 Equal Rights Amendment, 160, 161 Equal Rights Pageant (MacKaye), 155 Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, 159

 Escape; or, A Leap from Freedom, The (Brown), 8 essentialism, 138, 149, 173, 174 strategic essentialism, 171 Execution of Justice (Mann), 161 Exercise Consisting of a Dialogue and Ode, Sacred to the Memory of his late Gracious Majesty George II, An, 29–30 Exercise Containing a Dialogue and Ode, on the Accession of his Present Gracious Majesty George III, An, 30 Exercise Containing a Dialogue and Ode, on the Occasion of Peace, An, 31 Exercise Containing a Dialogue and Two Odes, An, 31 Fall of British Tyranny, The (Leacock), 47–51, 52 Farrakhan, Louis, 178 Fashion (Mowatt), 153 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Street Theatre, 56, 57, 58, 59 Federal Theatre Project, 125 Federalist Papers, The, 64, 179 Federalists, 6, 53, 54–56, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65–67, 73–74, 75, 76, 77 Female Patriotism (Burk), 69–76, 79 “feminine morphology” (Case), 162 feminism, liberal (bourgeois), 161, 162, 163, 172 radical (or cultural), 161, 162, 163, 164, 167, 170, 171, 172 materialist (or socialist), 161, 162, 167, 169, 170, 172 Ferrazzano, Toto, 107 Fetterman Massacre, 84 Field, Joseph M., 8 Fierstein, Harvey, 14 Fifth Avenue Theatre, 155 Fin del Mundo, 145 Finlay, Karen, 167 Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (Smith, A.), 177, 178, 180–181 Fish, Stanley, 175, 180

 Fiske, Minnie Maddern, 153 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 107–108, 110, 111, 115, 120, 122 for colored girls . . . (Shange), 163, 164 Ford, Henry, 98 Fornes, Maria Irene, 168 Forrest, Edwin, 7, 8, 9 Forrest, Thomas, 18 Fort Laramie Treaty, 94 Forte, Jeanie, 167 Fox, Claire, 197 Fractura Minimi Digiti (Dunlap), 66 Franklin, Benjamin, 21 Free Speech Movement, 130 Freire, Paulo, 190 French and Indian War, 24, 25, 30 French Revolution, 2, 6, 54, 55, 62, 65, 66, 71, 73, 75 Freneau, Philip, 31, 68 Freud, Sigmund, 171 From the Outside Looking In (Smith, A.), 177 Fuller, Charles, 136 Furies of Mother Jones, The (Little Flags), 166 Gage, Gen. Thomas, 18, 32, 44, 45, 47, 50 Gainor, J. Ellen, 4 Gamut Club, 160 Garvey, Marcus, 133 gay, 13, 14, 130, 161, 170, 172, 181–187, 194, 201 Gaye, Marvin, 133 Geertz, Clifford, 81, 89 Gender Bending: On the Road Princeton University (Smith, A.), 177 George Barnwell (Lillo), 17 George II, King of England, 30, 33 George III, King of England, 24, 30, 31, 49 Getting Out (Norman), 163, 168 Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, The (La Barre), 80 Ghosts (Ibsen), 157, 159 Gillespie, Patti, 161, 164

INDEX

Girl Starts Out . . . A Tragedy in 4 Parts, A (Emmatroupe), 168 Giuliani, Mayor Rudolph, 172 Giving Up the Ghost (Moraga), 163 Gladiator, The (Bird), 7 Glaspell, Susan, 124, 154 Globe and Commercial Advertiser, 104–105 Glory Box (Miller, T.), 14 Glory of Columbia: Her Yeomanry, The (Dunlap), 69, 76–78, 79 Gnostics, 166 Godfrey, Thomas, 18 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2 Gold, Mike, 124 Goldberg, Whoopi, 172 Goldemberg, Rose Leiman, 165 Golden, John, 109–110 Goldman, Emma, 166, 167 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 14, 176, 187, 194, 196–201 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 173 Gordon, Linda, 152 Gould, George Jay, 98 Greenblatt, Stephen, 1 Greenwich Street Theatre, 64 Grein, J. T. ( Jacob Thomas), 157 Group, The (Warren), 39, 44–47, 152 Guevara, Che, 166 Hairy Ape, The (O’Neill, E.), 124 Haley, Alex, 173 Hallam, Lewis, 17, 18, 27 Hamilton, Cicely, 156 Hamilton, Alexander, 54–55, 76 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 18 Hancock, John, 49 Hanover, Donna, 172 Hapgood, Hutchins, 111, 112, 113, 116, 124 Harburger, Sheriff, 115, 118, 119 Harlem Equal Rights League, 159 Harlem Renaissance, 12, 132, 160 Harlem Suitcase Theatre, 125 Harriman, Edward H., 98 Harvard University, 51, 103, 104 Haymarket Theatre, 57, 58

INDEX

Haywood, William, 102–109, 111–112, 114, 115, 118, 122, 123, 124 He and She (Crothers), 154 Hecht, Rabbi Shea, 180–181 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 156, 159 Heidi Chronicles, The (Wasserstein), 164 Hellman, Lillian, 160 Henry VI Part I (Shakespeare), 70, 71 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 11 Heroes and Saints (Moraga), 167 heterosexual, 12, 14, 127, 162, 169, 170, 185 Hicks, Granville, 124 Higson, Andrew, 3 History of the American Theatre (Dunlap), 65 History of the Revolution (Warren), 54 Hodgkinson, John, 56, 63, 69, 76, 79 Hoffman, Abbie, 130 Hoffman, William, 14 Holler, Clyde, 83 Holocaust, the, 178 Home of the Brave (Anderson), 169 Homestead strike, 98 homosexuality, see gay and lesbian hooks, bell, 162 Horizon (Daly), 9 House Arrest (Smith, A.), 177 House Committee on un-American Activities, 127 House of Burgesses, 27 Houston, Velina Hasu, 187–189, 194, 196, 201 How I Learned to Drive (Vogel), 168, 170, 172 How the Vote Was Won (Hamilton), 156 Huerta, Dolores, 129, 131 Hughes, Langston, 100–101, 125 Hugo, Victor, 2 Hunt, Edward, 104 Hunt, Gen. Washington, 84 Hunter, Robert, 20 Huntington, David, 10 Hutchinson, Foster, 39, 44 Hutchinson, Gov. Thomas, 36, 39–45 Hutchinson, Thomas (son of Governor), 39

 “I Have a Dream” speech (King), 127 Ibsen, Henrik, 2, 153, 157, 159 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 1, 2, 177, 189 immigration, 4–5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 98, 99, 100, 102, 111, 126, 153, 175, 182, 197, 201 Impressionistic Sketch of the Anti-Suffragists (Shaw, M.), 159 Impressions, The, 133 In Mourning and in Rage . . . , 168 Independent Theatre, 157 Independent, 108, 121 Indians, see Native Americans Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 98, 102, 106–111, 115, 116, 117, 119–124 Interart, 163 Interior Scroll (Schneeman), 167 International Socialist Review, 109, 112, 114, 116, 120, 122 Internationale, The (song), 108, 109, 113 Interurban Council of Women Suffrage Clubs, 159 “Intolerable Acts”, 32 Irving, Henry, 155 It’s All Right to be Women, 164 Jack Benny Show, 134 Jack Cade (Conrad), 7 Jacker, Corinne, 165 Jackson, President Andrew, 7 Jackson, Reverend Jesse, 173 Jamieson, George, 8 Japanese internment, 12, 193 Jay’s Treaty, 55 Jefferson College, 59 Jefferson, President Thomas, 38, 55, 59, 62, 76 JELLO (Baraka), 134 Jenkins, Linda Walsh, 151, 169 Jesus Christ, 16, 24, 166 Jews, 4, 132, 166, 169, 178, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187 Jihad Productions, 135 “Jim Crow” laws, 8, 11 Joan of Arc, 70–74, 75

 John Street Theatre (New York), 17 Johnson, Eleanor, 168 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 160 Johnson, Hester, 160 Jones, LeRoy, see Amiri Baraka Jones, Mother, 167 Jones, Robert Edmond, 103 Joseph, May, 187 Judas, 24 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 18 Kaddish, 184, 186 Kahn, Otto, 124 Karenga, Ron, 137 Karin (Agrell), 157 Katona, Jozsef, 2 Kent State University, 130 Kentuckian, The (Bernard), 7 Kerner Commission report, 179 Kerry, Senator John, 130 King, Martin Luther Jr., 127–128, 129 King, Rodney, 178 Kisfaludy, Karoly, 2 Kicking Bear, 93, 94 Kit Carson, the Hero of the Prairie (Derr), 7 Klein, Maxine, 166 Kleist, Heinrich von, 2 Klopstock, Friedrich, 2 KNBC television, 141 Koettgen, Ewald, 122 Kramer, Larry, 14 Kushner, Tony, 14, 176, 181–187, 188, 196, 201 Kuwapi, 87 La Barre, Weston, 80 labor unions, 98, 100, 109, 112, 114, 119, 129, 138–139, 166; see also IWW and UFW LaFollette, Fola, 156 Lament for Three Women, A (Malpede), 165 Lawson, John Howard, 124 Lea, Marion, 156–157 Leacock, John (alias Dick Rifle), 47–51 Leave It to Beaver, 127

INDEX

Lee, Gen. Charles, 51 lehrstücke, 38 Leonard, Dr. William T., 8 lesbian, 161, 162, 164, 167, 169–170, 171 Lessig, Adolph, 107, 115 Letters Home (Goldemberg), 165 Levy, Carolyn, 168 liberals, 175 Lillo, George, 17 Lincoln, President Abraham, 84 Lincoln, Bruce, 89 Lindsley, A. B., 6 Lion of the West (Paulding), 7 Little Flags, 166 Living Newspaper, 125 Living Theatre, The, 145 Llorona, - The Wailing Woman, La (Coatlicue), 195 Lock and Key (Hoare), 57 London Company of Comedians, 17–18, 20 Loneliness of the Immigrant, The (Gómez-Peña), 201 Loomba, Ania, 81 Lorde, Audré, 162 Los Angeles Feminist Theatre, 163 Louisiana Purchase, 5 Love and Friendship (Lindsley), 6 Loyalists, 5, 29, 31, 34–38, 42, 43, 44, 47, 52, 66; see also Tories Lysistrata (Aristophanes), 156 MacKaye, Hazel, 155–156 MacKaye, Percy, 99 Macready, William Charles, 8 Madison, President James, 179 Madonna, 185 Magdalene, Mary, 166 magical realism, 182 Malpede, Karen, 165 Maltz, Albert, 100 Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, The (France), 103 Man’s World, A (Crothers), 154 Mandan Pioneer, The, 87 Manifest Destiny, 14, 82

INDEX

Mann, Emily, 161 Manzoni, Alessandro, 2 Marble, Danforth, 7 March on Washington, 127 Marseillaise (tune), 105, 106, 108, 109, 117, 120 Marx on her Mind (Little Flags), 166 Marxist, 137, 143, 144, 149 Massachusetts Spy, 39, 46 Master Builder, The (Ibsen), 157 Masterpieces (Daniels), 168–169 Matthews, John, 109 Maxwell, Elsa, 160 May, Elaine Tyler, 127 Maya, 13, 131, 144, 149 McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 13, 127, 181 McCloskey, James, 9 McConachie, Bruce, 7 McLaughlin, James, 94–95 Medina, Louisa, 7 Melinda and Her Sisters (Belmont and Maxwell), 160 Melting Pot, The (Zangwill), 99 Metamora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs (Brougham), 9 Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (Stone), 7, 9 “methexis”, 117 Mexican American, 121, 129, 138, 139, 140, 141 Miguel, Muriel, 165 Miles, Julia, 152 Military Glory of Great Britain, The, 30 Miller, Arthur, 13 Miller, John C., 74–75 Miller, Tim, 14 minstrel shows, 8 Miracles, The, 133 Miss in her Teens (Garrick), 56 Moderwell, Hiram, 124 Modestino, Mrs., 107, 114 Modestino, Valentino, 106–107 Modjeska, Helena, 154 Monroe Doctrine, 11 Monroe, President James, 59 Montgomery, Robert, 7

 Monthly Magazine, 76 Mooney, James, 85–92, 94 Moore, Honor, 165 Moraga, Cherr´ıe, 162, 163, 167, 176, 201–202 Morgan, J. P., 98 Mormons, 182, 185, 186, 187, 193 Morning Has Broken (see Asa Ga Kimashita), 187 Morning Telegraph, 155 Motion of History, The (Baraka), 137–138 Mourning Pictures (Moore), 165 Movimiento, El, 129, 140 Mowatt, Anna Cora, 153 Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Shaw, G. B.), 159 Muhammad, Elijah, 128, 133 multiracialism, 180 Mulvey, Laura, 162–163, 167 Mundo Mata (Valdez), 145 Munford, Robert, 27–29 Muntu Reading Group, 136 Murdock, Frank, 7 musicals, 125 Mutation Show (Open Theatre), 164–165 Nation of Islam, 120 National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 155 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 129 National Chicano Moratorium, 141 National Rainbow Coalition, 173 National Women’s Party, 155, 160 nationalism, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 25, 31, 33, 38, 52, 53, 54, 56, 62, 64, 67, 69, 76, 77, 78, 79, 133, 135, 137, 143, 149, 176, 200, 201; see also Black Nationalists nation-state, 1, 2, 5, 6, 16, 56, 62, 82, 86, 153, 176 Native Americans, see American Indians Nazimova, Alla, 153 Neal, Larry, 133, 135, 136 Necessary Targets (Ensler), 170 Negro Digest, 137 New Playwrights Theatre, 124

 New York Call, 108, 115, 117, 120 New York Dramatic Mirror, 154 New York Evening Post, 77–78 New York Evening World, 113–114 New York Herald, 113, 117 New York Journal, 19 New York Press, 107, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121 New York Spirit of the Times, 8 New York Times, 84, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 113, 118, 120, 121, 122, 146, 159 New York Tribune, 101, 105, 106–107, 114, 115, 119, 120 New York World, 114, 121 Newsweek, 139 Newton, Huey, 128 Niccolini, Giambattista, 2 Nick of the Woods (Medina), 7 1992: Blood Speaks (Colorado Sisters), 195–196 Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution (ratification), 160 Nixon, President Richard M., 130, 137 Normal Heart, The (Kramer), 14 Norman, Marsha, 163, 168 Nurses for Peace, 146 Obake (Aoki), 189 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 81 Obie awards, 131, 140, 166, 171 Octoroon; or, Life in Lousiana, The (Boucicault), 8 Odets, Clifford, 100 Oehlenschlager, Adam, 2 off-Broadway, 161 O’Keefe, John, 65 Old American Company, 64 Old Plantation; or, Uncle Tom As He Is, The ( Jamieson), 8 Oliver, Andrew, 39, 40, 42, 43 Oliver, Peter, 39, 40, 44 On Black Identity and Black Theatre (Smith, A.), 177 “On the Road: A Search for American Character” (Smith, A.), 177

INDEX

On to Victory ( Johnson), 160 One-Third of a Nation, 125 O’Neill, Eugene, 124 O’Neill, James, 156 Open Theatre, 164 Operation Rapid American Withdrawal (Vietnam Veterans Against the War), 146 Oresteia (Aeschylus), 165 Organization for Afro-American Unity, 120 Organization of African Unity, 120 Otis, James, 39, 40, 43 Our Town (Wilder), 186 Ozzie and Harriet, 127 Pageant of Susan B. Anthony (MacKaye), 155 Pageants and Pageantry (Bates), 100 Paine, Thomas, 38, 48, 55, 132, 150 pamphlet plays religious, 17 political, 20, 34–51 Park Theatre, 65 Parker, Charlie, 133 Parks, Rosa, 167 Parrot’s Cage, The (Shaw, M.), 159 Paterson Evening News, 122 Patraka, Vivian, 164 Patriots, 5, 16, 19, 20, 31–52, 68; see also Sons of Liberty Patriots, The (Munford), 5, 16, 19, 20, 31–52, 68 Patterson, Charles, 134 Paul, Alice, 155, 160 Paulding, James Kirke, 7 Pavis, Patrice, 175–176, 177 Paxton Boys, The, 21–23, 24, 28, 29 Paxton Rebellion (Paxton Boys), 21–24 peace movement, 130, 131, 146–148; see also anti-war demonstrations; anti-war performances Peace of Paris, 5 Pearl, Precious, 170 Pease, Donald, 7



INDEX

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 190 “penis envy” (Freud), 171 Penn, Thomas, 33 Pensamiento Serpentino (Valdez), 144 Peters, Paul, 100 Philadelphia Guerrilla Theatre, 146 Plath, Sylvia, 165 Poem on the Rising Glory of American Being an Exercise Delivered at the Public Commencement of Nassau-Hall, A (Freneau and Brackenridge), 31 “Political Reverie, A” (Warren), 43 Ponteach; or, The Savages of America (Rogers), 25–27, 29 Pontiac (Ponteach), 21, 25–27 Poor Soldier (O’Keefe), 65 Pope, Gen. John, 82, 84 Popular Front plays, 125 postmodernism, 176 Power Pipes (Spiderwoman Theatre Company), 168, 195 Prayer Meeting: or, The First Militant Preacher (Caldwell), 136 Presbyterians, 16, 21–24 Prescot, Gen. William, 50 President’s March, The, 75 Prince of Parthia, The (Godfrey), 18 Princeton University, 30, 31, 177 Prolet-Buhne, 125 Protestants, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 14, 48, 59, 99, 110; see also separate denominations, 182, 183, 185, 187 Provincetown Playhouse, 124, 154 Public Theatre (New York), 178 Puerto Ricans, 129, 142 Pulitzer Prize, 136, 168, 170, 172 Pullman strike, 98 Puritans, 16, 182 Pushkin, Alexander, 2 Putnam, Gen. Israel, 51 Quakers, 4, 16, 21–24, 36, 37, 38 Queen’s Garden, The (Aoki), 189, 190–192, 194

Quinlan, Patrick, 107, 115 Quinta Temporada, La (El Teatro Campesino), 139 Rabe, David, 145, 149 Raped: A Woman’s Look at Bertolt Brecht’s ‘The Exception and the Rule’ (At the Foot of the Mountain), 168 “raza, la”, 138, 143, 149 Reagan, President Ronald, 170, 173, 185 Red Cloud, 82, 84 Red Flag, The (song), 108, 109 Red Ladder, 169 Reed, John, 103–105, 115, 122, 123–124 Reinhardt, Max, 121 religious rituals, 80–81, 96, 97 Renan, Ernest, 1–2 Republicans, 184; see also Democratic Republicans Revere, Paul, 32 “Revolutionary Theatre, The” (Baraka), 134 Richard III (Shakespeare), 18 Richards, Sandra, 180 Richardson, Gary, 66 Rifle, Dick (Leacock), 47 right to vote (women), 12, 153, 156 Rights of Man (Paine), 55 riots (theatre), 8, 18, 19, 56 Robin, Claude, 51 Robins, Elizabeth, 14, 156–159 Rochambeau, Gen. Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, 77 Rockefeller, John D., 98, 99 Rogers, Robert, 25 Roman Church, see Catholics Romanticism, 2, 3, 11 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 64 Roosevelt, President Franklin, 12 Roosevelt, President Theodore, 99 Roots (Haley), 173 Rosenberg, Ethel, 127, 181–182, 184 Rosenberg, Julius, 127, 184 Rosler, Martha, 167

 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11, 25 Rubin, Jerry, 130 Ruggles, Timothy, 45 Rush, Benjamin, 62 Russell, Lillian, 154, 155, 160 Russian Revolution, 37, 103, 124 Ryder, Winona, 172 sadomasochist (masochist, sadist), 162–163, 168 Said, Edward, 1 Salazar, Ruben, 142 Salt of the Earth, 121 Samolinska, Theofilia, 153 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 131, 145 San Jose State College, 131 Sanchez, Sonia, 136 Sanger, Margaret, 124, 167 Savran, David, 185 Schanke, Robert, 158 Schechner, Richard, 80, 186 Scherman, Bernadine Kielty, 104 Schiller, Friedrich, 2 Schneeman, Carolee, 167 Scott, Alexander, 107 Scott, Leroy, 124 Seale, Bobbie, 128 search-and-destroy enactments, 132, 146 Sellers, Cleveland, 129, 137 Selwyn, William, 87 Senelick, Lawrence, 2 separatism ethnic, 128, 129, 137, 173, 200, 201 gender, 164 Sewall, Jonathan, 36, 42 Shakespeare, William, 17, 18, 64, 70, 185 Shakti (goddess), 166 Shange, Ntozake, 136, 163, 164 Shaw, George Bernard, 157, 159 Shaw, Mary, 159–160 Shaw, Peggy, 169–170 Shekina (goddess), 166 Sherman, Gen. William T., 84–85 Sherman, Martin, 14 Shohat, Ella, 175, 201

INDEX

Short Bull, 83, 87–88, 93 Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, The (Valdez), 131, 140 Sifton, Paul, 113, 125 Silverman (Silberman), Hannah, 104, 106, 110, 114, 115 Sinclair, Upton, 125 Singing Jailbirds (Sinclair), 125 Singular Life of Albert Nobs, The (Benmussa), 169 Sitting Bull (Arapaho), 92 Sitting Bull (Lakota), 94–95, 97 Sklar, George, 100 Sklar, Roberta, 165–166 Slave, The (Baraka), 132–133, 134 Slave Ship (Baraka), 135–136 Smith, Anna Deavere, 14, 176–184, 186–190, 192, 194, 196, 201 Smith, Bessie, 133 social Darwinism, 14 socialism, 14, 98, 99, 108, 118, 120, 124, 125, 162, 169, 185 Socialist Party, 98, 107, 117 Soldado Razo, 143 Soldiers’ Play, A (Fuller), 136–137 Solidarity, 123 Sollee, John, 64 Solomon, King, 48 Sons of Liberty, 18, 19; see also Patriots Sophia (goddess), 166 Sophocles, 167 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 129 Southwark Theatre (Philadelphia), 17 Spiderwoman Theatre Company, 165, 166, 168, 172, 195 Spirit House, 131, 135, 136 Split Britches, 169–170, 172 Stage Struck Yankee, The (Marble), 7 Stam, Robert, 175, 201 Stamp Act (riots), 5, 18, 19, 25, 31, 39, 40, 41 Star of Ethiopia, The (Du Bois), 100 Steele, Wilbur Daniel, 124 Steinem, Gloria, 166

INDEX

stereotypes African American, 8–9, 12, 131 American character, 6–7, 99, 110 American Indian, 9 gender, 151, 160, 169 Irish, 8 Mexican American, 141 Stevedore (Peters and Sklar), 100, 125 Sticks and Bones (Rabe), 145 stock market, crash of 1929, 100, 125 Stokes, Rose Pastor, 108 Stone, Augustus, 7 Stonewall riot, 130 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 8 Streamers (Rabe), 145 street theatre, 132, 146 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), 170 Strike While the Iron is Hot (Red Ladder), 169 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 129 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 129 Studio Watts Workshop, 137 Suffolk Resolves of Massachusetts, 32, 34, 35, 36 suffragists (suffragettes), 14, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158–160, 172 suffragist theatre, 12, 14, 154, 156–160, 161 Sufis, 166 Summary View of the Rights of British America, The ( Jefferson), 38 Sun Dance, 83, 85, 88, 89, 95, 96 Sword, George, 91 Survey, The, 111, 113, 120 “symbolic action” (Burke), 81 tableaux vivants, 160 Taft, President William, 99 Take Back the Night, 167, 168, 172 Talbot, Lord John, 7 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 74 Tammany, Chief, 49 Tania (Little Flags), 166

 Tannenbaum, Frank, 124 Tantric Buddhism, 166 Tea (Houston), 187–188 Tears and Smiles (Barker), 6 Teatro de la Esperanza, 140 Teatro Campesino, El, 131, 132, 138–145, 149 Teatro de la Gente, 140 Teatro Nacional de Aztlán, El (TENAZ), 140 Ten Days that Shook the World (Reed), 103 Terry, Megan, 166 Thatcher, Prime Minister Margaret, 170 Theatre Union, 125 Three Weeks in May, 167 Tijerina, Reies Lopez, 129 Time Piece, The, 68, 69, 74 Tomlin, Lily, 172 Tonantz´ın, 144, 145 Top Girls (Churchill), 169 Torch Song Trilogy (Fierstein), 14 Tories (see also Loyalists), 19, 34–36, 44, 46, 49, 50 Treadwell, Sophie, 160 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 5, 129 Tresca, Carlo, 106, 107, 108, 115 Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Berrigan), 145 Trifles (Glaspell), 154 Trinity College Dublin, 59 Turner, Fredrick Jackson, 10 Turner, Victor, 80 Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (Smith, A.), 177, 178–179, 180, 192 Tyler, Royall, 6 Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend (Aoki), 189, 193–194 Uncle Sam, 7, 14 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 8 Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Louisiana (Leonard), 8 Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or Life in the South As It Is (Field), 8

 Union Club, 159 Unionists, 158 United Farmworkers Union (UFW), 129, 131, 132, 138, 139, 140, 149 University of California, Berkeley, 130 University of Pennsylvania (College of Philadelphia), 29, 30, 31, 33 Uno, Roberta, 188 Unthinking Eurocentrism (Shohat and Stam), 175, 201 Until Someone Wakes Up (Levy), 168 Urban League, 129 Utley, Robert, 94 “vagina envy”, 171 Vagina Monologues, The (Ensler), 14, 170–172 Valdez, Luis, 13, 131, 132, 138–145 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 98 Vassar College, 156 Vaudeville Theatre (London), 156 vaudeville, 155 V-Day (Victory, Valentine’s and Vagina Day), 171–172 “vehicle of history-in-the-making” (Comaroff ), 116 Vendidos, Los (Teatro Campesino), 141 Verdi, Giuseppe, 2 Vermont Wool Dealer, The (Marble), 7 Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), 148 Victoria Theatre, 155 Vietnam Campesino (Teatro Campesino), 142 Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), 13, 130, 131–132, 141, 146–149, 150 Vietnam War, 13, 130, 141, 142–143, 145–150, 151, 161, 173, 191 Vinegar Tom, (Churchill), 169 Virgen del Guadalupe, 144, 145, 167 Vital Statistics (Rosler), 167 Vogel, Paula, 168, 170, 172 Voices of Bay Area Women (Smith, A.), 177

INDEX

Vorse, Mary, 124 Votes for Women (Robins), 156, 157–159 Wagner, Richard, 2 Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 100, 125 Walker, James, 86 War of Independence, see American Revolution Warren, James, 39, 43, 46–47 Warren, Joseph, 50, 53, 59, 60–62, 63 Warren, Mercy Otis, 36, 39–47, 48, 52, 54, 99, 152–153 Washington, President George, 6, 17, 27, 38, 48, 51, 53, 67, 68, 77 Wasserstein, Wendy, 164 Watts riots, 129, 179, 180 Wayne, John, 147 We Fight Back, 168 Weaver, Lois, 169–170 Wedding Band (Childress), 165 Weil, Simone, 166 West Street Theatre (Annapolis), 17 Whigs, 16, 18, 31, 32, 33, 36, 40, 48, 49 White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), see Protestants Whitman, Walt, 185 Wild West shows, 9, 94 Wilder, Thornton, 186 Wilkes, John, 48 Williams, Tennessee, 170 Williamsburg Theatre, 17 Wilson, August, 136 Wilson, President Woodrow, 99, 155, 156, 160 Winthrop, Hannah, 44 Winthrop, John, 43 Woman’s National Theatre, 160 Women’s Experimental Theatre, 165 Women’s Project, 152; see also American Place Theatre Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret! A (Centlivre), 18 Word to the Wise, A (Kelly), 19 Workers Laboratory Theatre, 125 World War I, 99



INDEX

World War II, 12, 127, 147, 150, 160, 187, 193 Wounded Knee, massacre at, 86, 87, 91, 95 second battle of, 95, 129 Wovoka, ( Jack Wilson), 85, 86, 87, 90, 93 WOW Café, 169

X, Malcolm (Malcolm Little), 128, 133 X, Y, Z Affair, 74, 76 Yeats, William Butler, 2 Youth International Party (Yippy), 130 Zangwill, Israel, 99 Zoot Suit (Valdez), 145

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