THE .

jOURNAL OF
AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 7, Number 2 Spring 1995
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THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 7, Number 2 Spring 1995
Contents
JEANE LUERE, Objectivity in the Growth of a Pulitzer:
Edward Albee's Three Tall Women 1
KAMAL BHASIN, "Women, Identity, and Sexuality":
An Interview with Edward Albee 18
MELANIE N. BLOOD, The Neighborhood Playhouse's
Salut au Monde: A Theatrical Vision
Of 1920s America 41
LARRY FINK, From "Madness" to "The Cosmos":
Gay/Lesbian Characters in the Plays
Of Lanford Wilson 57
TINA REDO, Stevedore in Seattle: A Case Study
In the Politics of Presenting Race on Stage 66
FRANCES DIODATO BZOWSKI, "Torchbearers of the Earth":
Women, Pageantry, and World War I 88
CONTRIBUTORS 112
journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Spring 1995)
Objectivity in the Growth of a Pulitzer:
Edward Albee's Three Tall Women
JEANE LUERE
Surely a newborn piece of art, like any living wonder, needs a
discerning incubation by its creator. Only unsophisticated viewers
would assume that a Pulitzer play-or any masterpiece-springs curry-
combed from its creator with the immediacy of a flipped switch. To
believe differently does not lessen our awe of genius; it increases our
appreciation for the intricate evolution of art. In theory, a play's
nurturing by its author remains crucial during performance interpreta-
tions, for its script warrants shelter, like the score in another perfor-
mance area, music: "The interpretation is not the most important; the
music ITSELF is. The greatness of the music transcends all the interpre-
tations."1 Surely the score wills it so.
Yet herein lies a classic rub. For with subjective authority as a
given, a playwright still needs an objective mind-set to lift a fledgling
script to theatrical heights. Even with authority and objectivity, a play's
journey may be "as circuitous as it is serendipitous."
2
Edward Albee
directed his Three Tall Women alone for its June 1991 premiere at
Vienna's English Theatre, then worked with another director, Lawrence
Sacharow, for subsequent productions in New York before the play's
Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Albee's objective approach with Sacharow
indicates a willingness to adjust his staging to emphasize and clarify for
his audience his views on our culture's aged and their thwarted ties to
offspring.
1
ln "The Endless Critical Tug of War in Opera ... ," Opera News (16 Apr il
1994) 58:15, 9-11, Dale Harris argues that extraordinarily accessible operas have
been "imitated, plagiarized," "performed by screaming orchestras," " treated as
cafe-music," and often " plugged in non-operatic circumstance" (1994 World Cup's
Three Tenors Concert); yet this level of interpretation hardly denies "the extraord i-
nary quality and artistic seriousness of the music itself. "
2
Patrick Pacheco, "Standing Tall," Playbill, The National Theater Magazine (31
July 1994) 10:38.
2 LUERE
Three Tall Women's subject matter required Albee's discerning
involvement in its staging. Like other transformational drama with roots
in what Matthew C. Roudane considers our "American Theatrical
Renaissance,"
3
the script abandons Joseph Wood Krutch's concept of
an identifiable and continuous self. Albee's mix of virtual reality with
magical real ism calls for three actresses in Act II to portray the play's
composite mother-figure at different ages and to appear on stage
simultaneously. Two of these actresses will already have portrayed the
young law clerk and middle-aged caregiver of the mother-figure in Act
I. The use of mystical characters intermingled in spirit or body with
more usual beings has long been one of this playwright's enthusiasms,
e.g. the van driver in American Dream, the mythical son in Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or Alice/Miss Alice in Tiny Alice.
To make functional and conceptual adjustments in a stylized work
such as Three Tall Women, a playwright needs time, alone or with cast
and director, to confront the text on stage. At performances, Albee
often stands at the back of a theatre to see if viewers are catching his
intentions on stage. If their reaction tells him a scene is not working,
he may spot and correct the difficulty; to do so is more akin to
"hearing" than to "pandering" to an audience.
4
This "hearing" helps
authors stage their intentions clearly during a script's performance-
interpretations. In notes and comments from 1965 to 1994, Albee
has said that he makes these adjustments even though whatever play
3
1n two critical volumes, Matthew C. Roudane discusses Albee's thrust of
non-traditional theatre at audiences. Public Issues, Private Tensions: Contemporary
American Drama, (New AMS Press, 1993) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:
Necessary Fictions, Terrifying Realities (New York: G.K. Hall, 1990). Also please
see his review of The Man Who Had Three Arms in Modern Critical Views: Edward
Albee, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 163.
4
Director Sidney Berger writes, "I can, often, see from an audience whether
something is not clear, is not clear enough, is obscure, or whether the actor is
missing moments and the audience is reacting .... That's telling me something,
and to ignore that is foolhardy. But there's a thin line between hearing what they're
telling me and pandering to an audience .. . . When the author or director hears
the audience saying, ' This moment is not working,' he can try to adjust the
situation." In Playwright versus Director: Authorial Intentions and Performance
Interpretations, eds. Sidney Berger and Jeane Luere, (Westport, CN: Greenwood
Press, 1994), 43.
Three Tall Women
3
he puts down on paper "is usually complete before rehearsals."
5
Although he dislikes "second guessing" himself by rewriting, . his
willingness to do so can be seen in his author's note to the published
text of. Tiny Alice in 1965 describing changes he made for one
production: "I made them myself, and quite cheerfully, realizing their
wisdom in the particular situation;" but he reinstated them later "with
even greater enthusiasm."
6
Recently he again stressed his readiness to
adjust texts for performance: "I make one draft, and then a few
penciled revisions, and then we make changes in rehearsal.'
7
' Three
Tall Women received similar objective revision by its playwright for its
second and third productions as Albee gave Sacharow guidance as to
"the nature of the play, the rhythms, the mood, everything."
8
The
ensuing adjustments to style of delivery and focus of staging brought
audiences a clearer reflection of Three Tall Women's subtext.
For the Vienna production in 1991, Albee had needed to adjust the
play only minimally because he had begun rehearsals with a through-
composed script. Albee says, "I direct a lot of my plays first time
around because I have a very clear vision of what I want."
9
Vienna's
audiences received the play well, though its media reviews were
mixed. Most critics knew that Albee's play was "still in progress" and
5
At a forum in 1992, Albee said, "When I write a play on paper, I have spent
a lot of time with it in my mind; and I know what it looks like and sounds like as
a performed stage piece. So I see it as I write it as a piece which is performed by
actors on a stage in front of an audience .... I claim that my plays don't change
very much in rehearsal; I lie a little when I say that. I cut my plays because I over-
write-! get infatuated with the sound of my own voice and I put in all sorts of
scenes and speeches that I am very fond of and that I will probably use in another
play if I take them out of the play that they are in. From Playwright versus Director,
24.
6
Edward Albee, Author's Note, Tiny Alice (New York: Dramatists Play Service,
1965), 5.
7
James Brady, Interview with Edward Albee, " In Step with Edward Albee, "
Parade Magazine (14 August 1994), 12.
8
Steven Samuels, " Yes Is Better Than No," American Theater (September 1994)
38.
9
Samuels, 38.
4 LUERE
looked forward to viewing it again.
10
In the months back in New
York after its Vienna premiere, Albee further developed the play's
materi al alone before seeking a fresh view of the play with Sacharow,
who directed the next production "in consultation with Albee" at
1992's Woodstock Festival.
11
Albee has said, in another context, "I
am interested in finding out if there's a relationship between my view
of (a play) and anyone else's,"
12
and has expressed his pleasure at
working with Sacharow in Woodstock's-congenial environment.
13
Albee's collaboration with Sacharow reflects his own fusion of
subjectivity with objectivity. In theory, Albee sees "a fine line between
creat ive interpretation and distortion,"
14
saying with a smile that if
directors or actors diminish his intention "They screwed up," but if
they enhance his text by their creative efforts, "I take the credit."
15
Albee says that he and Sacharow "work very closely together," and that
his own "clear vision" for Three Tall Women is "really not very
different from what's on the stage now."
16
Though the playwright
gave Sacharow "a free hand" with the Woodstock production, the
director and cast feel "the pressure of [the playwright's] presence" at
rehearsals and at conferences.
17
Members of the cast say that Albee
never gives them notes directly; he talks to Sacharow, who then tells
the cast what Albee has indi cated; at rehearsals, Albee "is still adding
lines and making cuts" since the play is "in an experimental stage."
18
Sacharow approves, saying, "As a matter of fact, [Albee] is phoning in
1
Konrad Kramar, rev. of Three Tall Women, "Vienna's Engl ish Theater: Neuer
Edward Albee: Hozernes Stuck Theater," Neuer Kronen Zeitunq (16 June 1991 ):36.
11
Pacheco, 39.
12
Samuels, 38.
13
Rebecca Daniels, rev. of Three Tall Women, "The Illusion of Complexity,"
Woodstock Times (30 July 1992) 2:12.
14
Daniels, 2:12.
15
/bid.
16
Samuels, 38.
17
Mark Abramson, rev. of Three Tall Women, " What' s It All About, Albee?",
Woodstock Times, (30 July 1992) 2:12.
18
Quoted in Abramson, 2:12.
Three Tall Women
5
today with additional cuts"-which Sacharow and the cast agree is
"proper and correct procedure when working on an Albee play.
19
In
past years, Albee had been one of theatre's most independent play-
wrights; of the cooperative/workshop method of play development, he
once said to playwright Terrence McNally that he is not a proponent
of "working through a play with the actors and directors and audiences
and critics . . . ."
20
Wisely, Albee still gives not an inch to critical
carping on his style nor to audiences' reputed preference for lighter
drama. Even so, with Three Tall Women, Sacharow and cast find him
the least dictatorial of authors, the most considerate and sensitive in
interactions with the company.
21
After Woodstock and more of his
own objective nurturing of text, Albee and Sacharow, in 1994, took the
play to Manhattan with the same cast. There, the Vineyard Theater
Company mounted it twice, first in lower Manhattan, then uptown at
the Promenade Theater, where it earned its author the Pulitzer Prize for
1994.
Albee and Sacharow's consultation brought quick functional adjust-
ments to the set though it stays within Albee's prior vision for the
bedroom of its invalid dowager. At Vienna's English Theater, the room
had been small yet elegant, its walls covered with blue moire; its
furnishings included two upholstered chairs, end table and lamp. A
doorway at either side provided exits. At Woodstock, playwright and
director keep the set much the same; but at lower Manhattan's
Vineyard Theater, their designer, James Noone, needed to adjust the set
to the thrust-stage with audience seated around three sides. Uptown
at the spacious Promenade Theater, alcoves at each side of the set
replace the simple doors, furnishings are more resplendent than before,
an oversized bed and its coverings become ostentatious, and brass
lamps, tables, and sterling tea service reflect more appropriately the
status of the invalid occupant.
While these functional shifts in setting required little objective
interaction between playwright and director, an imposing factor in the
play's text needed a careful approach by Albee and Sacharow; and the
19
/bid.
20
"Edward Albee in Conversation with Terrence McNally," Conversations with
Edward Albee, ed. Philip C. Kolin, Uackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1988),
207. See also Albee's comment on rewriting on the basis of critics' suggestions: "I
don' t believe in second guessing myself." James Brady's "In Step with Edward
Albee," Parade Magazine (14 August 1994) 12.
21
Abramson, 2:12.
6 LUERE
readiness of the two to adjust the performance was an incredible boon
for their audiences. In Vienna, Albee's text had taken viewers for a
heroic leap from Act l's virtual time and space to Act ll's surrealistic
realm of existence. With his popular play of the 1960s, Who's Afraid
of Virginia Woolf?, Albee had, except for his child-myth, observed old,
classical strictures on unity of time and situation. For Three Tall
Women, however, he has foresworn such limits. The consequent lack
of bounds was a hurdle to critics in Vienna-though to Albee only a
challenge to be addressed at later venues by his and Sacharow's
theatrical vision. One critic in Vienna had called the play's form
convoluted: " It forces us to figure out which of two worlds he is
drawing us into, the naturalistic world of Act I or the stylized world of
Act Two."
22
As Albee brought up the lights on that first production's
second act, audiences had instantly recognized the still-familiar faces
of the first act's invalid, caregiver, and law clerk-but with consterna-
tion heard the younger two deliver lines disconnected from their
previous identities. Where were those characters? Audiences
unfami I iar with the "Open Theater" of the 1960s, where actors "shifted
freely and suddenly from one character, situation, time, to another,"
23
were uncomfortable. The uneasiness remained at Woodstock, even
with those who had already seen the play in Vienna. Two years later,
however, canny adjustments by the team of author and director smooth
our transition from Act l ' s reality to Act ll's fantasy. One clever shift in
staging has the actress playing the attendant walk with a stoop
throughout Act I, then enter as the middle-component of the mother
with a straight spine and faster gait for her Act II identity. A second
nudge toward clarity is the shrewd rethinking of the actresses' costum-
ing for their new roles as three separate components of the composite
mother. The playwright now links his second act's surreal characters
to each other through harmoniously-colored gowns and similar pearl
necklaces. The actresses themselves, in interviews, speak of Albee's
insightful personal selection of their gowns for Act 11.
24
This ploy
vaguely apprises viewers who, though only dimly alerted, now suspect
that the characters are related in some new but slippery fashion and
begin to disconnect the roles from their Act I moorings. Albee also
22
jeane Luere, rev. of Three Tall Women, in Theatre journal 44 (1992) 251.
23
June Schleuter, " Keep Tight ly Closed in a Cool Dry Place: Megan Terry's
Transformational Drama and the Possibilities Self," Studies in American Drama
7945-Present (11:1987) 59.
24
Abramson, 2:12.
Three Tall Women 7
helps us here by his characters' more pronounced shifting of personal
pronouns at the later venues as the older two tell the younger of trials
to come to her. They may address a sentence to her using the
second-person pronoun "you will," but in the same breath shift to
first-person "I did." Soon we, like the younger one, see their common
identity, when she admits to them, "You have things to tell me, I
suppose."
25
With their combined objectivity in Manhattan, Albee and Sacharow
also lift us smoothly across the acts' different worlds by their solid
reach into the play's subtext. What results is a depth of feeling staged
with dignity and stateli ness that one New York critic calls "a kind of
studied majesty."
26
Together, author and director bring up more of
the majestic passion that has been I urking in the playwright's pages.
Albee has referred in lectures to the importance of "subtext," of its
"emotional coloring," of what he considers "implicit directions-those
that are contained within the essence and nature of the character."
27
Now, particularly in Act II, Albee's actresses "play the sense of their
lines."
28
Like Eugene O'Neill, who "turned to monologues, solilo-
quies, and asides for his characters' solitary outpourings," Albee gives
intense emotions to the three women through soliloquies "not so much
heard as overheard."
29
Accordingly, this production's more pro-
nounced reliance on Albee's subtext lets us overhear Act ll's fervent
"private thoughts" more deeply or personally than three years ago in
Vienna; hence we note more readily the overlaps in the women's tales,
make swifter guesses at connections in their lives. We are, of course,
still aware that here, as in Vienna, Albee has mystically altered these
roles between acts without spelling it out for us. Yet now we suspend
rather quickly our disbelief in author-magic that gives us a dowager
25
Aibee, Three Tall Women, 47.
26
Vincent Canby, "A Season of Albee, Obsessions Safely Intact," New York
Times (20 February 1994) H:S.
27
At seminars, Albee has spoken of the "emotional coloring in a text," found in
an author's "implicit directions," which "contained within the essence and nature
of each character." Of emotion, Albee stresses that "The GOOD director translates
what is already there in the play; he does not have to create [emotion] in a first-rate
play. It's in the subtext." In Playwright versus Director, 50.
28
Canby, H:S.
29
5elected Plays of Eugene O'Neill, (New York: Random House, 1967), xx.
8 LUERE
lying on the bed while standing upright near the others. In the throes
of similar bits of imposing fantasy, we still grasp Albee's intent: the
commonality of the three. The playwright gets his intentions across to
both sides of the footlights by his "interpretive directions."
30
One
critic has said, "It is hard to imagine that cast and director ever deviate
from his word"
31
-or "subtext," one can add. In Manhattan, cast and
director have found the author's emotional coloring deep in his script,
and the audience quickly reacts. To whatever we credit our easier
awareness of Albee's design in Manhattan-to hints from costuming, to
a shift in posture, to a gift from the subtext-we admit that Albee,
indeed, interrelates his tall women for us.
The objective interaction between playwright and director also
brought pivotal adjustments to the cast's delivery of text after the
Vienna production. The actresses at the first production had delivered
monologues in an interesting presentational fashion, clearly avoiding
extremes of the confrontational technique that Paris's Theater de
L'Oeuvre had popularized early in the century, wherein "[The actors]
have a continual ecstatic air of perpetually being visionaries .... As if
hallucinatory, they stare before them, far, very far .... "
32
Albee's
customary preference has been for a far less sty I ized though sti II direct
delivery of monologues, one more like that of Samuel Beckett's
"Winnie" in Happy Days or of Tennessee Williams's "Tom" for
memory scenes in The Glass Menagerie. When the play moves from
Vienna to its New York venues, the playwright, director, and actresses
achieve the less rigid style Albee approves. One scene in particular
shows thei r altered delivery of text. In Vienna, Albee's blocking placed
his youngest actress (Cynthia Bassham) downstage early in Act II, facing
out over the footlights for a monologue on her naivete as a girl. Her
rhetorical ski II would have earned high marks in a Diction-for-Theatre
class. The actress (portraying the play's mother-figure at age 26) took
the audience into her confidence, but not the two actresses playing the
mother at age 54 (Kathleen Butler) and at 92 (Myra Carter) . She might
shift her body slightly to show her long gown swirl ing at a dance or in
a fashion show. Yet her monologue had cued all audience attention
upon her while the other two actresses were decidedly out of the
30
Syd M., rev. of Three Tall Women, "Premier Premiere," in Woodstock Times
(6 August 1992) 11:7.
31
/bid.
32
0scar Brockett, "Beginnings of the Modern Theater, 1875-1914," in History
of the Theater, 4th Edition (Boston: Al lyn Bacon, 1982), 590-91 .
Three Tall Women
9
picture. Some Vienna reviewers, who, though drawn by Three Tall
Women's philosophical thrust, were not fond of classical drama's
presentational modes (or perhaps were unfamiliar with them), found the
staging "stiff and confrontational . .. appropriate for statues,"
33
and
called the actresses' eloquent delivery "out-moded and wooden."
34
One wishes the same critics could have seen the play again, a year or
two further on, when the same scene fits the playwright's intent more
closely. For at Woodstock, with Alee and Sacharow consulting, the
actress Uordan Baker) adopts a less elocutionary style and tone, and
moves freely toward or away from the other two women as she speaks.
She includes them as well as us in her account; they in turn react to
her. By the time the play moves from Woodstock River Arts to
Manhattan's Vineyard Theater and then to the Promenade, Albee
sanctions even more movement.
35
When the actress (again, jordan
Baker) dances or models her gown crossing the stage in large, graceful
circles, the middle-span of Albee's mother-figure (Marian Seldes) moves
a few feet beh,ind her, equally gracefully, following her movements
around the area, body-miming her. The scene becomes alive,
pulsatingly theatrical, the effect one of movement rather than stasis,
providing an unforgettable theatre moment.
Besides softening the delivery of many monologues, the play-
wright's willingness to make adjustments as he observes successive
performances moves him to adjust pieces of dialogue for clarity or
emphasis. Although Vienna critics enjoyed the wealth of specific detail
in the plai
6
and found "a reward in the conjugal anecdotes and bits
of eroticism,"
37
the playwright himself may have thought the aged
heroine's reiteration of past ordeals too imprecise. In an extended
monologue in Vienna, the dowager's use of the word "surcease" (to
describe a let-up in life's anxieties) had been ubiquitous; but by
33
Wolfgang Herles, rev. of Three Tall Women, "Cosi son Tutte-Oder:
Tschechow und der Feminismus," Der Standard (17 1992), 12.
34
Kramar, 36.
35
Aibee, Three Tall Women (New York: William Morris Agency Inc., 1992-94).
Published by Audrey Skirbaii-Kenis Theatre Inc., Playwright Series, in American
Theatre (September 1994) 47.
36
Linda Zamponi, "Von der Tragodie des Altwerdens," Die Presse (19 June
1991).
37
Kramar, 36.
10 lUERE
Manhattan, "surcease" disappears totally from her lines, replaced by
more usual phrases for our supposedly "happiest times of" life-"when
it's all done," or "when we can stop."
38
Her monologue becomes
tighter as it shows her growing sensation of detachment from body as
she thinks of herself in third person-(one of Albee's motifs in previous
plays like Marriage Play and Fragments). Critics soon find her rambling
reiteration of thought natural and tie it to "the very familiar struggle of
the aged with encroaching senility."
39
Albee also attends to the
middle-span mother's catalogue of what parents should impart to
offspring. In Vienna we had heard sweeping prods from the 52-year-
old on how parents fail in their duty to teach us that we are not the
center of the universe, nor are we owed a lifetime of happiness by
having been born. In Manhattan, in contrast, Albee is more exact in
the same harangues: now we hear this mother-component add that as
children grow up, parents "go out of their way to hedge, to qualify, to
evade" rather than give them "the alternatives to the 'pleasing pros-
pects."'40 While in Vienna we heard her advise us of weaknesses of
men who would be our Prince Charmings, in Manhattan she gives
details of their "sewer-rat morals" and warnings that men at their
Club's stags "probably nail the whores to the billiard tables for easy
access."
41
In the later productions, Albee also scatters more vulgar
and obscene language {from the "F" word to scatological terms) at six
spots in this actress's lines, perhaps to vivify her disenchantment with
life and her guilt at her own marital infidelity.
42
Interestingly, this
particular category of unrefined language seldom appears in the 92-year
old's vocabulary from the play's first to last production-though she
does indulge in crudities like "wop," "kike," and "coloreds" both in
early and late scripts.
43
Even for her references to men's genitals or
the need to urinate, Albee scripts the innocent phrases "pee-pee" or
38
Aibee, Three Tall Women, 53.
39
Ben Brantley, " Edward Albee Conjures Up Three Ages of Woman," rev. of
Three Tall Women, New York Times (14 February 1994) C:13.
40
Aibee, Three Tall Women, 50.
41
/bid.
42
/bid., 51, 53.
43
/bid., 44.
Three Tall Women 11
" have to go."
44
Albee's studied adjustment to the play' s diction
confirms his critical acclaim for depicting character through dialogue.
As Albee and Sacharow consult on the play's trip to the Pulitzer,
their objective attention to stagi ng deepens for us the relevance of
Albee's three women to the process of aging in our culture. Though
the Vienna production had generated an emotional impact on many
viewers through Albee's testy dowager,
45
several critics had expected
more five-dimensional depth in her and i n the women's roles. The
critic for Neuer Kronen Zeitunq, an Albee fan for decades, recalled
plays of the 1960s in whi ch the playwright had drawn all roles in
depth.
46
Oer Standard' s critic likened the format of Three Tall
Women to the superficial substance one finds in a "Letters to the
Editor" page;
47
other comments recalled the disquiet of critic Walter
Kerr in the 1980s over what he testily classified as Albee's cold,
"exceptionally-cerebral plays."
48
But these critics were apparently
missing what the playwright had inscribed for his aging woman from
the play's inception, especially what lies in the oldest: tiers of rancor,
blasts at minorities, and snivels at those who attend her. At subsequent
venues, Albee and Sacharow push the dowager' s voicing of her lines
beyond vexing, so that she sounds "wickedly imperious" and talks
"I ike a horrible racist pig,"
49
refuting these critical descriptions of her
in Vienna as one lacking in color and no more than a sore trial to
caregiver and lawyer. Now, the staging induces the actress portraying
the invalid to confess that she finds the role wrenching, particularly
Albee's call to shift her emotions and vocal tones as instantly and fully
as he wishes. "It's the hardest role I've ever done," Myra Carter says;
"I'd rather play Medea.
5
Carter's difficulty may have grown along
with the expanding intentions of author and director for her character.
44
/bid., 40, 46.
45
jeane Luere, rev. of Three Tall Women, Theatre journal 44 (1992) 251 .
46
Kramar, 36.
4 7
Herles, 12.
48
David Richards, "Edward Albee and The Road Not Taken," New York Times
(16 june 1991) 2:19.
49
Pacheco, 39.
50
/bid.
12 LUERE
For certain, the media in general read Albee's dowager fully after
Vienna, calling her selfish, thorny, comic, coquettish, mawkish infantile,
willful, bossy, gauche, chilly.
51
With his cast and director's encouragement from Vienna to Manhat-
tan, Albee also thickens the oil on the portraits of his other two
principals. In Vienna, Der Standard's Wolfgang Herles had objected
to what he thought were stereotyped portraits: "It is as though Albee
crossed Chekhov with the feminism found in women's entertainment
magazines."
52
Herles' reaction to the two women was a throwback
to sporadic 1980 columns harping at supposedly "thinnish and
familiar" material in Albee's works of the time, of a lessening of
" lacerating power."
53
But at Woodstock, the play's caregiver (Marian
Seldes) jolts Act l's viewers with a bolder image than before. Seldes
finds new depth in Albee's intentions for her character, plays her as "a
hardened woman, stern in voice and appearance, yet with the slightest
touch of softness to her-a rock with soft cream center."
54
By the
Vineyard-Promenade's Act I, Albee, Sacharow, and actress have
hardened the attendant's "center" to rock-or, if not her "center," her
back, for she comes on stage stiff and forward-slanted now, with bent
spine, and a strident voice that exposes her "attitude" toward her aged
employer. In Vienna, while she registered irritation at her invalid
charge by a sigh or a roll of her eyes, she quickly regained her humor.
In contrast, in Manhattan the role allows less comic relief on her face
as she complains about the boring rituals of sick-care. (Her repeated
comment about the monotony and frustrations of her daily lot, "And so
it goes," was Albee's first title for the play.
55
) Even with Albee's
hardening of her stance and language, Manhattan audiences remain
51
From The Woodstock Times review (6 August 1992) to New York Times
coverage (14 February 1994), Myra Carter received pervasive high acclaim from all
major media reviewers.
52
Herles, 12.
53
Richards, 19.
54
Syd M., 2:7.
55
Aibee, Three Tall Women, 41, 42, 47, 52, 53.
Three Tall Women 13
empathetic toward the caregiver-as only two of Vienna's critics had
been.
56
With this depth in text and staging by Albee and Sacharow,
New York City's critics night after night for weeks thereafter, call
Marian Seldes's performance stunning, "droll and delightful," Myra
Carter's "huge" and "heroic," and broadcast the word that their
performances are the most riveting in town."
57
The role of the youngest of Albee's women also grows with Albee
and Sacharow's collaboration on the play's winding journey. In
Vienna, Albee's actress (Cynthia Bassham) had seemed ingenuous as
she told of her first sexual encounter; her shy eyes and hesitant tone
showed surprise and distress at a dance to feel her partner's body
pressing hers. At Woodstock, Albee and Sacharow parley a shift in
staging; the actress (now, Jordan Baker) delivers the same tale with cal-
culation-less faltering and more design. Then, in the Manhattan
stagings, more sensuality (and less innocence) appear.
58
Viewers hear
the actress repeat the same lines with sophistication, see pride on her
face, hear delight in her voice, and note a swaying of her hips as she
revels in her sexuality. (Has Albee given us a Martha-in-the-making?)
The actress's demeanor elsewhere in the play also takes on both over-
-confidence and coarseness. In Vienna, Albee had only called for her
to be insensitive toward the invalid and to contradict her on occasion.
By Woodstock and Manhattan, reviewers see an increase in the young
clerk's brashness and bossiness. 5
9
She follows her ridicule of the old
one's comments with snide under-the-breath replies and is so rude to
her employer that, ashamed of herself, she asks contritely, "Why can't
56
linda Zamponi, rev. of Three Tall Women, "Von Der Tragodie des
Altwerdens." Die Presse (19 june 1991}, 37. See also Luere review in Theatre
journal, 252.
57
" Around Town," The New Yorker Magazine, (5 September 1994), 14. [Also,
from The Woodstock Times review (6 August calling the play a "Premier Premiere,"
to The New York Times coverage (14 February 1994} vowing that "Edward Albee
Conjure Three Ages of Woman," major media reviewers lauded the performances
of Myra Carter and Marian Seldes; Carter had played her role from Vienna through
Woodstock and on to the Promenade, Seldes from Woodstock on. The third actress,
Jordan Baker, who had joined the cast in Woodstock and received mixed reviews,
won high praise for her acting at the Vineyard and the Promenade.
58
Aibee, Three Tall Women, 47-48.
59
Canby, H5; Brantley, C13.
14 LUERE
I be nice?"
60
Yet when the tired and pained old invalid speaks in a
bitter tone,
61
the young one's voice sti II remains sh ri II and sarcastic.
Here, Albee's preoccupation with sound-with tone of voice-parallels
that of Samuel Beckett, who called his own work "a matter of
sound.
62
Sacharow suggests that Albee's interest in sound, particularly
the tones of the human voice, developed from his love of opera and
finds his interpretive directions as precise as musical notations.
63
Playing the concisely-drawn role with zest, Jordan Baker, like Seldes
and Carter, soon collars media attention;
64
with Albee's multi-dimensi-
onal depiction of all three characters, the columns of the New York
Times TheaterWeek, Playbil/, Time, Newsweek and Parade, again
without exception, praise the Pulitzer committee's choice of Three Tall
Women for its 1994 award.
Equally effective are Albee and Sacharow in consultation on Act ll's
ancillary, mystical figure; the focus that ensues brings audiences a
better look into a wilful mother's mind, hence to a clearer understand-
ing of thwarted ties between parents and offspring in our culture.
Three Tal/ Women's fourth character is the dowager's prodigal son,
who "materializes" midway into Act II. Through this character, Albee
examines the thwarting of love between parents and offspring. In
Vienna, Albee centered on the son (Howard Nightengall) but slightly.
His blocking brought the actor briskly on stage to step to the sickbed
where a surreal figure lay with oxygen mask covering nose and mouth.
The son leaned to kiss the hands, remained by the bed, attentive to the
figure though aware of three women standing apart, and then exited.
Though the script does not specify how long the actor will remain on
60
Aibee, Three Tall Women, 40, 42, 44.
61
/bid, 45.
62
The passage on sound (in Beckett's letter of December 195 7 to A I an Schneider)
is: "My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully
as possible and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have
headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide own aspirin." Quoted in
Keir Elam, "Not 1: Beckett's Mouth and the Ars(e) Rhetorica," Enoch Brater, ed.,
Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 124.
63
Abramson, 13.
64
5yd M., in "Premier Premiere," writes that Baker "holds her own against these
sterling actresses," 2:7.
Three Tall Women 15
stage or if he will exit at all,
65
later productions keep him present
throughout most of the scene, and I ighting and blocking imprint him
on viewers' consciousness. By Manhattan, the actor (Michael Rhodes)
strides. across the large room, attends to the figure on the bed, but at
times steps a few inches away from his chair by the bed to move for a
moment toward the three,
66
where his presence pierces the audience
as he stares at each of the virtually real onlookers. As the son hears the
mid-life mother blast his past conduct and order him to leave, he
shudders; when the oldest approaches, he reaches to touch her though
she shrinks from him.
67
We can see his face more sharply than at
earlier stagings, and we want him to reach out again-want him to ask,
"Forgive me? . . . I've come back!"
68
Albee, practiced dramatist,
keeps him wordless-what words could suffice for the welling emotion
in his eyes and mouth? We know that in the real world the son did
come back, bringing fresia and candied orange peel, her favorites,
seeing to happy hours for her. But Albee, at all venues, still keeps him
silent in the theatre world. (Is Manhattan's staging meant to heighten
our awareness of a son's love, or his sting-a mother's care, or her
spite? The author's bent for ambivalence lets us choose.)
Viewers who have seen Three Tall Women from Vienna to Manhat-
tan note a zenith in the gains Albee and Sacharow achieve in the last
venue's staging of the closing scene. In Vienna the play had ended
with its three principals clearly visible at separate points in the
bedroom; yet Albee had guaranteed the self-absorbed invalid's hold on
the audience with her monologue on the irony of what the end of
misery and of life-surcease-was now bringing her. He had locked
our minds on what a woman in her in dotage was preaching to us,
69
a message that she made explicit: Joy comes only after strife-although
one critic commented that "when and where the truly happy moments
65
Aibee, Three Tall Women, 53.
66
/bid., 52, 53.
67
/bid., 52.
68
At all stagings of Three Tall Women, the young man's role remained a silent
one; audiences learn of the boy's kindness to the mother from her remarks earlier
in the play.
69
Richards, 2:19.
16 LUERE
of life are is left a question by the author."
70
But Albee may hint at an
answer to "when and where" at the Vineyard-Promenade where play-
wright and director block the three women in a striking triptych
downstage. The actresses's arms are linked and their hands clasped.
This triptych-blocking makes us consider not the elder alone but each
of the three, close yet separate, whereupon we marvel at what each-in
life's actual time, alone-had experienced during her one slice of a life.
Only after we leave the theatre, through a delayed catharsis, do we
draw together our thoughts, our understanding, and I ike the dowager,
assimilate three women's views. Then we see all as a whole-in the
play's metaphor, we perceive a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree
circle-the totality of life with all its complexity. One might say that
Manhattan' s finish, rather than simply pointing out "Ah, the lady's
shrewd!", makes us ponder the how-when-where of her seasoning.
(Or, depending on what a viewer brings to the viewing, Albee and
Sacharow's production leaves us not with "Ah, she's contemptible!"
but with how she became so.) Her wisdom, and ours, has accrued
from a reconsideration of three discrete layers of I ife.
In sum, mystery shrouds our perception of minds that create art of
this caliber. A crystal moment may account for the dawn of a master-
piece. Edward Albee says, "I find that I am with play."
71
Yet after
that dawning, the author's verbal acuity and determination, plus a full
measure of objectivity-his and/or a director's-all undoubtedly affect
the text's actualization as theatre. Manuscripts of literary giants, their
letters and diaries, suggest this possibility, as do renovated canvases of
artists with thick underlay of form and color. Asked if he "rewrites/'
Albee replies, "I don't make notes for posterity."
72
Yet aspiring
authors and linguists want to hook creative writers to computers to
learn from what Albee calls "setting down my play on paper" how a
70
James G. Shine, "Albee Play Meets Tall Expectations," Kingston Freeman
News, (15 August 1992) 2:7.
71
When Mr. Albee was asked how he conceives a play, he said, "How does the
material come? I don't know. All of a sudden I discover that I have been thinking
about a play." Conversations with Edward Albee, ed. Philip C. Kolin. Uackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 1988), 22. Also, Albee's comment, "I find I am with
play," recorded in class session at School of Theater, University of Houston, 20
April 1992, and in a lecture at Michener Hall, University of Northern Colorado,
Greeley, Colorado, 10 March 1983.)
72
Steven Samuels, "Yes Is Better Than No," (An interview with Edward Albee),
American Theater Magazine (September 1994), 38.
Three Tall Women 17
playwright unfolds a vision. Does it matter? what we see is that after
a play's conception and gradual gestation inside the creative mind,
authors still shelter the text during performance interpretations-again,
alone or with a director. After all, theatre history shows that Shake-
speare didn't drop off a fresh manuscript at the Globe's rehearsals, then
disappear. Though directors in America's theatres early in our century
could oust authors from rehearsals/
3
that tactic, almost defunct by the
1960s, has not kept Albee out. He has stayed by his scripts-alone or
with a trusted director from Alan Schneider to Lawrence Sacharow.
Apostles of Albee are pleased that Three Tall Women keeps him
out front in theatre critics' fame games. Vienna's reviewers may have
been less enthusiastic than Manhattan's, where the play captured the
Pulitzer Prize for its author. For that matter, how does one explain
erratic critical response to plays, and what does it determine? Art
historians write that critics make better popularizers of art than
predictors of what will endure as art.
74
The critical reputation of
Shakespeare, today considered the most sensitive and theatrically
effective playwright of his century, often fell below that of Jonson or
Beaumont and Fletcher in his lifetime. But his place in theatre history
seems secure. With Edward Albee's Pulitzers, Tony Award, New York
Drama Critics Awards, London Evening Standard Award, American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal, he has critical
and popular acclaim-and better yet, the prospect of Art that endures.
73
Piaywright versus Director, 33.
74
See John Canaday's discussion of Oskar Kokoschka' s " The Tempest" (1914)
and Pierre Auguste Cot's "The Storm" (1880) in "What Is A Painting," What Is Art?
(New York: Random House, 1988), 31.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Spring 1995)
"Women, Identity, and Sexuality":
An Interview with Edward Albee
KAMAL BHASIN
This interview took place Saturday, 21 May 1994, in New York
City.
Kamal Bhasin: Mr. Albee, this year's Pulitzer Prize for your play Three
Tall Women
1
puts you in the hallowed company of Eugene
O'Neill, who won four Pulitzers.
2
How do you feel about this
achievement?
Edward Albee: Well, I've written what, 20 plays, spanning 35 years.
I suppose every once in a while someone gives you a prize. That's
always a nice thing to happen. Sometimes, when I see people win
Pulitzer Prizes, I think they deserve them, sometimes they don't.
It would be bad taste for me to say which ones don't deserve them.
As it is with most prizes, for example, the Nobel Prize in Literature,
there are many people who've won it who I don't think are any
good. I think there are two writers in this century who are
extraordinary writers who have not won the Nobel Prize-Nabokov
and Borges-two writers who certainly deserve much more than a
number of them who have won it. I think it is best not to com-
1
Three Tall Women (unpublished), had its premiere at the American Theatre in
Vienna in 1991. In February 1994, the Vineyard Theatre Company, an Off-
Broadway company, staged the play. The play was well-received by the critics, and
the production moved in early April to the Promenade Theatre and was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize on 12 April 1994.
2
Eugene O'Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times, receiving his fourth
posthumously for Long Day's journey Into Night. Albee actually has won only three
Pulitzers. However, he has been recommended for the award by the Pulitzer jurors
four times. He was first recommended in 1963 for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
but was denied by the Board of Directors for the Pulitzer Committee-a fact that
Albee discusses in detail in this interview.
Edward Albee Interview 19
menton prizes beyond saying, since they are giving them, it is nice
to win them.
KB: Mr. Albee, the play which made you very popular, also,
ironically, kicked up a row among members of the Pulitzer jury.
As I recall, they denied you the award because some of them
considered the language of the play "fi I thy."
EA: Well, let me be precise about it. In 1962, when I wrote
Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the Pulitzer jurors voted to award
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the prize. They were qualified
drama critics-John Mason Brown, John Gassner, and, I believe,
Richard Watts, all knowledgeable theatre critics. Their vote was
presented before the Board of Directors of the Pulitzer Committee,
which was made up of newspaper publishers. And they said, "No.
This play was too violent, too obscene, too this, too that." The
thing about that was that the New York Times telephoned the
fifteen editors and publishers who had said "No" to the Pulitzer
Prize, and discovered that out of the fifteen who had made the
decision, eight of them had never seen or read the play. This was
extraordinary. These things occur. There is nothing to be done
about it. You go back to your business.
KB: Have you, since then, mellowed in your use of language or
expressions?
EA: I don't think I'm any different now than I was, or that my
writing is that different. Maybe I am a little more skillful. I do
think there is very I ittle violent language in Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? The emotions were quite violent, but the emotions are sti ll
violent in all of my plays. No, I haven't mell owed.
KB: How do you view your evolution as a playwright?
EA: I don't think about it. I never think about myself in the thi rd
person. I can't get that distanced. After a certain period of time,
you lose absolute contact with what you' ve done. I can' t recall the
emotional state that I was in when I wrote The Zoo Story, for
example. I know exactly the look of the room in which I wrote it,
the table I wrote it at, the nature of the typewriter, which I stole
from Western Union Company, and the very cheap yellow paper,
which I also stole from Western Union, on which I wrote the play.
But I can't remember why f. wrote it. I can ' t remember the
20 BHASIN
gestation of it. It is very difficult. Since so much of the creative act
comes from the unconscious anyway, those are hard things to
recall.
KB: You have likened creativity and the creative act to pregnancy.
EA: And you don't necessarily know how you got pregnant! And
by whom!
KB: Looking at the women protagonists in The American Dream,
The Death of Bessie Smith, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A
Delicate Balance, one feels that there is a change in your per-
ception of women characters.
EA: They are different people in each play, of course. I don't write
very many plays about people who are placid, plays about people
who are very happy. There is always conflict. And I don't write
about the same character in each of my plays. They are all
different people, so they all have their own problems and their
own resolutions of those problems. They are very highly individual
people.
KB: Sometimes I felt in your portrayal of character A in Three Tall
Women that I heard echoes of Mommy in The American Dream
and The Sandbox.
EA: Did you really? How interesting! That's possible since, of
course, character A in Three Tall Women is based a great deal on
the character of my adopted mother and the character of Mommy
in The American Dream was very much more loosely based on the
same woman. That's interesting. I haven't considered those
echoes. I must look at that.
KB: In some of your plays the women characters are castrating and
imperious; yet, towards the end of the plays, there is a kind of male
assertion.
EA: Haven't you noticed that women sometimes can be quite asser-
tive, can be quite dominating in relationships? I guess if, in some
of the plays, women seem less so, it is because the balance has
been destroyed in their relationships, that the men have abdicated
their responsibility. The balance is no longer equal and delicate.
Edward Albee Interview
21
KB: Another thing that I noticed in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
the exorcism.of the child takes place and in Three Tall Women,
you speak of the play as "a kind of exorcism."
EA: All plays are an attempt to exorcise demons. Examine
O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. There is an attempt to
exorcise demons in a majority of serious plays. It used to be an
exorcism of demons played on stage in Greek drama, and you find
it there. But there is always an exorcised demon, of course. All
plays do or are a kind of general exorcism or an attempt to make
sufficient change so that the same demons don't exist after the
experience is played.
KB: Isn't Tobias in A Delicate Balance also exorcised of his prefer-
ence for his friends over his own family?
EA: I don't think A Delicate Balance is about the responsibility
of/toward friendship. A Delicate Balance is about the fact that if
we go through our life and wait too long, when the time comes for
us to make a definitive action, we are too rigid to do so. That is
really what it is about.
KB: Does Tobias do that?
EA: He comes to an understanding of himself, and he still regrets
that he has stayed the way that he has stayed. He takes action only
when he knows the action will have no effect.
KB: And he gets the affirmation of his action from the women
characters?
EA: Yes.
KB: You have contradicted autobiographical interpretations of your
plays. However, your own comments about Mommy and Grand-
ma in The American Dream and The Sandbox, and now about
Three Tall Woman, grant room for such an interpretation.
EA: What I object to is people insisting on finding too much
connective issue between the life of the artist and the work. If the
work is so private that it only has to do with those sources, then it
does not transcend it. It remains too hermetic and too private. I
very seldom write about myself. The majority of my plays are
22 BHASIN
written through me but they are not about me. They are about
other people. There is a danger in being too autobiographical in
interpretation.
KB: I sometimes wonder if complete objectivity is possible, because
each author has his own imagery, his own diction, his own
language, syntax, etc.
EA: There are some writers who write about themselves very
specifically all the time, which, obviously, I do not. The best
writers transcend the source.
KB: Do you think Three Tall Women is an autobiographical play?
EA: No, it is not autobiographical. It is, to a certain extent,
biographical .
KB: Don't you think that it also has an undercurrent of the autobio-
graphical element in the sense that O'Neill's Long Day's journey
Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten have? O'Neil l also
wanted to come to terms with his relationships with his family
members.
EA: Oh, I did not mean to argue between autobiographical and
biographical. Yes, I suppose you are right.
KB: Did you feel a similar urge to unburden yourself, unburden
your heart, in this play?
EA: I don't understand terms like that. Obviously, I wanted to
write a play about that relationship. So I did. Unburden! I don't
think I sat down and said that I must unburden myself.
KB: In an interview you stated that, possibly, you wanted to have
some kind of reconci I iation with yourself.
EA: Yes, that's quite possible. I merely know that I wanted to write
a play about that woman. Whether that resulted in catharsis, or
exorcism, or reconciliation, whatever, that's fine. That's a result of
it. But I did not, in the beginning, sit down and say that I must
now effect reconci I iation, catharsis, and exorcism. No. I wanted
to write a story about that woman.
Edward Albee Interview
23
KB: This brings me again to your women characters. I feel that,
over the years, there is some kind of development taking place in
your attitude toward women characters.
EA: I don't see that. They are all different. I may, in my next play,
write about a woman very much like the Nurse in The Death of
Bessie Smith. I might revert to that. I don' t know. But, again, I
don't observe my plays the way you and other students and critics
observe them. I don't think about them in those terms, so I can
hardly talk about them that way. This what you perceive. I don't
perceive these things because I don't think about my work that
way.
KB: Do you think your attitude toward women characters remains
almost identical to what it was in the beginning?
EA: No, because each one is different and therefore my attitude is
different toward them. You may find some gradual development
over the 33 years of my writing. I don't think that way, so I can't
talk about that. It is important to remember that each character I
write is a different person. They are not all part of the same
person; it's very important to keep that in mind.
KB: You have said that one learns certain things at the knees of the
parents as one grows. How much of an influence on your depic-
tion of female characters was or is your relationship with and
memories of your mother?
EA: She is one of the many women I have known in my I ife. I had
known her for a very long time. I don't think it affected the way
I look at other women. No, I can't say for sure. No, she was
merely one woman out of many that I have known. Every time I
see anybody or I talk to anybody I am influenced. I react to them.
Yes, she was a profound influence but not the only woman.
KB: When you say you could not have written Three Tall Women
while your mother was still alive, why is that?
EA: That was merely an act of generosity on my part. She was very
old and becoming senile; she would have been very hurt by it.
KB: What exactly is it about that play that would have made it diffi-
cult for you to write if she had been alive?
24 BHASIN
EA: As I have said, it would have been hurtful to her. I could have
written it anytime, I suppose.
KB: Does the portrayal of women characters in your plays have to
do with your own sexuality?
EA: I don't know. Would I write the same way if I were a woman?
I don't know. I can't imagine that. I think it is a playwright's
responsibility, whether he is male, female, heterosexual, homo-
sexual, to be able to inhabit any character he wants to write-male
or female-and become that character. That's a writer's responsi-
bility. Some writers can do it, I suppose, and successfully. Other
writers have great trouble. I have always found that Ibsen had
difficulty penetrating the female psyche. Chekhov was brilliant at
it. Beckett wrote about very, very few women. Very interesting.
Tennessee Williams wrote beautifully about women. Arthur Miller
writes less well about women. It depends upon the ability of the
writer. But, ideally, a writer should be able to inhabit any
character. I have written about men and women, people much
older than I. I've written about black people. I've not been black.
I've not been a woman. I have not been 88 years or 91 years old.
So, it is my responsibility to be able to become those things while
I am writing.
KB: Is that because artists by nature are more sensitive, and are
able to empathize with people?
EA: It is not that we are more sensitive; it is just there is a quirk in
our nature that allows us to do that.
KB: What's that?
EA: A quirk in our nature, a peculiarity. Writers have a peculiarity
in their nature that allows them to inhabit characters rather the way
actors do.
KB: How do you view the sexuality of a person as a mode of
achieving one's identity?
EA: I suppose one's sexuality is a part of one's identity. One's
position in one's society whi ch differentiates us from the soci-
ety-the economic, the social, the political, moral mores of the
society-that determine or undetermine all this. But all of these
Edward Albee Interview
25
things affect the individual, and since no two people are the same,
everybody's reactions to all of these outside forces are slightly
different.
KB: And how about female sexuality? How do you view that?
EA: Explain what you mean.
KB: Female sexuality: What it was in the earlier times, and what
it is today? Or, about thirty years ago. Or, do women use their
sexuality as an instrument to assert their individuality?
EA: I find that my female characters are very seldom passive. They
very seldom sink into the roles that are expected of them. In A
Delicate Balance, for example, Agnes is forced tb assume the male
prerogative and responsibility because Tobias has abdicated his
responsibility. Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is
fighting for what, I don't quite remember. If all of my female
characters or all of my male characters were perfectly content with
their lives, then I wouldn't have a play to write about.
KB: As a gay man, do you feel you understand women better?
EA: I don't know whether I understand them better. I've absolutely
no idea. I suppose perhaps I may have a certain removal from the
entire heterosexual world, which allows me more objectivity, I'm
not sure. I don't know about that. I don't find that much differ-
ence between the straight world and gay world. I don't find that
much difference between the way people approach reality.
KB: Some of the greatest female characters in American drama
have been created by gay playwrights, especially you, Williams,
and lnge. Is this just a coincidence?
EA: Probably not. It's probably because the male homosexual does
not have to indulge in all of the rol e playing that a heterosexual
has to. We are not trapped into the role of male, and we don't
have to behave that way. We don't have to think in those terms.
But then again, as far as we know, Chekhov was heterosexual, and
he wrote very nicely about women. I am not too worried about
him. Shakespeare did okay too.
26 BHASIN
KB: Do you think sexuality is a major aspect of the strength of your
strong women characters?
EA: No. I don't think it is necessarily true. I doubt it.
KB: Do you think gay playwrights view women differently?
EA: Some may. You have to ask them all. I don't know. I can't
answer this question. You have got to ask a psychologist, an
intelligent psychologist, who cares something about the drama and
you might get an answer. You might get a different answer from
a male than from a woman psychologist. I know a number of
psychologists and psychotherapists who tell me that my insight into
(these are all women who tell me this) the female psyche is quite
profound. I think that is quite interesting.
KB: In your mind, is female sexuality employed differently from
male sexuality?
EA: In what way?
KB: I mean the sexuality of Martha and the sexuality of George, or
Tobias and Agnes.
EA: Different from what?
KB: From each other.
EA: They are heterosexual . Are they not?
KB: They are. I thought they use sexuality against each other, as
female characters.
EA: I don't think that's so much different. In the sense of homo-
sexual relationships, they have exactly the same tensions, exactly
the same pressures. Only one possibly good thing about the
homosexual relationship is that it does not have a number of the
terrible things that we find in heterosexual relationships that have
gone bad, to hold them together-economic relationships, children,
the pressures of society and things I ike this. So homosexual
relationships can exist more completely, as they need to, without
outside pressure.
Edward Albee Interview 27
KB: In most of your plays, familial relationships form the back-
ground.
EA: . Everywhere. All animals.
KB: Including the human.
EA: Including the human.
KB: That reminds me of Williams. He said [of the animal
world/sexuality], "It [sexuality] is spontaneous, it is emanating, so
it is with me."
EA: True. But we create so many conventions, so many structures.
One interesting thing is that we have many more heterosexual
relationships now when people don't bother to get married. They
may I ive together for long periods of time. They don't get
married. They have children, they don't get married. Interesting
experiments are taking place.
KB: And that is affecting the familial relationships also?
EA: I think so. If you examine the rise of divorce in this country
over the past 30 years, over half the marriages that take place in
this country now end up in divorce. Earlier, it used to be that
everybody stayed together for children, for social conventions, and
for everything else. So there is not necessarily progress, but stuff
going on.
KB: That means the idea of the Earth Mother, as Martha talks about
it, will undergo a change.
EA: She is doing a certain amount of self-mockery.
KB: I think the image of the mother in plays and in literature will
also undergo a lot of change.
EA: I suppose, yes. There is always a change. I don' t even know
what my next three women characters are going to be like. I' m not
sure about that.
KB: In Three Tall Women, is sexuality viewed differently by A, B,
and C?
28 BHASIN
EA: By the same person. In Act II, they are the same person. After
all, Cis anticipating a mature life, B is in the middle of it, and A is
remembering it. And, of course, that is why everything is a I ittle
bit different, in some way. They remember differently, they
anticipate differently, they participate differently. But it is all the
same thing viewed in a rather rational manner, I suppose.
KB: And that is the evolution.
EA: Yes, I guess it is.
KB: Their viewpoint changing, and developing, and growing.
EA: But the viewpoint of the same person. Though I'll always be
the same person, perhaps I'll be evolving into different people.
KB: In your plays is it so that you tend to look at sexuality nega-
tively?
EA: No. Negatively? Define sexuality.
KB: Mommy, talking about " bumping the uglies, " and things like
that.
EA: Examine some of the women who are quite contented in their
own sexuality in my plays. Look at the two women in Seascape,
for They are quite happy, those who have good rela-
tionships. Don't always assume all of my women characters are
discontented. Look at The Lady from Dubuque. I think, certainly,
Jo has had a good relationship with her husband. In All Over, both
Wife and Mistress have had very good relationships.
KB: I think the same is true of both the couples in Seascape.
EA: Yes, both couples in Seascape.
KB: You said that you view people di fferently, and I thought,
maybe, over the years you have evolved or changed your attitude
towards man-woman, husband-wife relationships.
EA: I don' t know. I'll have to look at all of my work, when I' m
done with my work and then start thinking about that. I' ve only
written twenty plays.
Edward Albee Interview
29
KB: You've a long way to go.
EA: I've a long way to go. Another twenty plays.
KB: That reminds me that you said that you wanted to write forty
plays.
EA: I'm getting on.
KB: Looking at the plays of Williams and Miller, do you see them
giving different emphases from each other and from you in their
treatments of female characters?
EA: I hope they are; we are very different from each other. I've
much more empathetic involvement with Williams than I do with
Miller. I appreciate Miller's social and political involvement. I
think they are quite important. But I don't find that I can relate to
his characters, male or female, as well as I do with Williams's;
because everything that Miller does is basically didactic, lbsen-
esque. Williams comes much more from Chekhov. They are both
socially involved, in totally different ways, and I relate much more
to Williams than to Miller.
KB: Is it, again, because of your identical sexual inclination?
EA: I doubt it. Again, Chekhov is heterosexual.
KB: In your opinion, which one of your women characters emerges
as the ideal?
EA: I don't know. I don't know what ideal means, to begin with.
That's another question I can only answer 20 plays from now. The
next one, maybe.
KB: To me, Claire in A Delicate Balance, appears to be one such.
She brought back to my mind characters like Leona Dawson in
Williams's Small Craft Warnings. She is a woman character who
is different, but she has a strong undercurrent of practical wisdom.
Is it so?
EA: Oh, she does, yes. But, again, I find it difficult to answer these
questions. I don't think about my work or my characters in the
terms that you are asking. I don't think about them that way. I
30 BHASIN
write them; they are real people. And when I finish with them, I
forget them. That's it. You write a character, you finish with him.
It's very real while you are writing it, then you forget about it.
KB: When people send you the interpretations or books they have
written about your plays, you find new light thrown on them, and
you think, "Oh yes, it could be like that"?
EA: Sometimes I find new light thrown on them. Sometimes I find
these books total fiction.
KB: In an interview, you speak of having achieved your own
"identity." How is it that you have not created a male or female
character who achieved an identity of his or her own?
EA: I don't th ink what you say is true at all. Jerry in The Zoo Story
achieves his own identity. George in Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? achieves his own identity. All of my characters achieve
their own identity, I suppose. Even Tobias has achieved his
identity; his identity is based on passivity, and ignoring responsi-
bility, withdrawing.
KB: Can you say something about women characters achieving
identities in your plays?
EA: I don't think I have ever written a character who doesn't
achieve some kind of identity.
KB: What kind of identity does Martha achieve?
EA: Again, you're talking in terms I'm not sure I can answer.
don't know what you mean by identity, I suppose. Identity 1s
awareness of self.
KB: Exactly.
EA: All of my characters have an awareness of self. They are not
stupid. They are not uninformed about themselves. The problem
is they all know who they are, but, sometimes, they don't want to
be who they are. It is not that they have not achieved their
identity. They, sometimes, don't want to participate in their
identity. It is a very different matter. They all achieve their
identity, or I wouldn't bother to write about them. They all
Edward Albee Interview 31
achieve their identity. Some of them don't want to participate.
They are very different concerns, very different matters.
KB: You have said that as an orphan one doesn't have forbears.
EA: No. As an orphan you have no idea were you came from.
You do have to build the structure not on the past, but merely on
the present.
KB: Well, that is what humanist psychologists also talk about, about
people who have actualized themselves, who suffered some kind
of trauma in their childhood. I remember having read about your
anger against your natural parents.
EA: I suppose. I don't think about it. I was puzzled when I was
quite young as to why my natural parents, whoever they were,
should have abandoned me. I am sure they had pretty good
reasons to do so, social, economic, whatever. I probably resented
the fact that my natural parents could not, or did not want to keep
me. But I stopped thinking about it after a whi I e.
KB: Do you think this resentment, which was deep within you, was
some kind of impetus to achieve an identity, and actualize
yourself?
EA: It probably made it easier. Since I did not have any baggage
with me, I could mold myself to be who I was, rather than be
limited by responsibilities to my past. You just build on what
materials you have-your intelligence, your sensitivity, your
reactions. You start creating-part defense, part offense.
KB: As a gay bachelor, how is it that most of your plays, at one
level, deal with familial relationships?
EA: I am not a bachelor.
KB: Well, that is what I thought.
EA: No, I've been in a relationship, a very happy relationship, for
24 years.
KB: Do you have any children of your own?
32 BHASIN
EA: No.
KB: In one of your interviews you talk of introducing a drama
course-! am talking about plays and films-to freshmen with the
help of films based on plays.
EA: Well, this was one occasion, where I was teaching at a city
college in New York, during a period called open admissions.
That means anybody who graduated from high school could get to
college. And people were graduated from high school, because
they were pushed on from class to class, whether they could read,
or write, or anything. The New York City public school system is
dreadful. It is terrible. People are not educated very much. I was
teaching a course in twentieth-century drama and I discovered
almost all of my students had never seen a play and had never read
a play. I had to teach drama. So, I showed films based on plays.
They thought they were going to the movies, so they participated
and had a good time.
KB: Do you find some advantage in film over theatre as a medium
to introduce drama to students?
EA: No, that was merely a need for that particular time. I mean,
there are some fairly decent films of plays. But to see a drama and
a film are a different experience. One is so passive, the other is so
active. No, it is not an ideal situation. But if that is the only way
to do it, then you do it that way.
KB: Do you think film could be a more effective medium to make
your intent clear?
EA: I don't think so, no. I'm a playwright. Film is fantasy; theatre
is reality. I am very interested in reality, the interaction between
the characters and the audience. Everybody goes to films and
knows it is a fantasy. It is not happening and it is safe. Film is
safe, drama is dangerous. That's why I prefer drama.
KB: Have you acted?
EA: No, I do readings from my plays. I acted when I was very
young. But I'm a good actor.
Edward Albee Interview 33
KB: Because you have viewed drama in all of its facets, which one
of them do you feel enables you to communicate with people the
best?
EA: As what?
KB: As a director, as a playwright, and as an actor?
EA: Oh, playwright first, of course. That's what I fundamentally am,
a playwright. The only reason I became a director was to be able
to direct a play of mine exactly as I saw it when I wrote it, saying
to an audience, "Look this is what he saw when he wrote the
play." I can be more precise, more accurate to my intentions, than
any other director can be. That's why I became a director. Alan
Schneider taught me a great deal about directing, as did Peter Hall
and other directors.
KB: Otherwise, do you think it is the printed play that conveys
itself the best?
EA: A Beethoven string quartet exists on the page that Beethoven
wrote on. Anybody who is trained, any trained musician, can read
that string quartet on the page that it appears on. Anybody who is
trained to read a play can read it and see it clearly. Most audien-
ces don't read music, most audiences don't read plays. That's why
we perform music and we perform plays. Most people don't read
music; that is why string quartets are performed. They sound good
too. The plays are nice on the stage. They don't become some-
thing different. They merely become another version of what they
already are.
KB: As a director, you claim your attempt is to make your intent
clear. Don't your plays make your intent amply clear?
EA: Yes, but I think my directing them makes it even clearer. It
sets guide posts for other directors to understand what I'm doing.
Also, I like to direct my plays because during the rehearsal I can
make quicker and more intelligent changes.
KB: That makes writing plays a collaborative art, something which
you deny.
34 BHASIN
EA: Between me and myself. I don't allow other directors to make
changes.
KB: Don't you think when the actors are rendering certain lines,
which you've written, and how they are coming out they also,
thus, contribute to make your intent clear? They then compel you
to revise certain parts of your plays for the desired effect.
EA: If the actor is doing his job properly, he has become the
character that I've written and is saying the lines the way my
character was saying them.
KB: Well, he should echo what you feel he should echo.
EA: No. It must be there, it must be inherent in the writing.
Sometimes, as a director, I can merely guide the person closer to
the character.
KB: Were you influenced by European drama and thinking?
EA: I've been influenced by everything I have ever experi-
enced-literature, drama and painting.
KB: Yet you have not mentioned in your writings or dealt with,
either in your plays or in your interviews, the feminist movement
and thought which has grown in Europe and America during the
past thirty years.
EA: I haven't discussed much of the twentieth-century social and
philosophical movements. They turn up in my work. I don't
discuss them specifically. There are other things we are influenced
by but we don't talk about, like the weather, for example. These
things influence us, wherever we are. Some things we know, some
things we don't know, things and experiences that don't turn up
specifically. It's a big world. There's so much information coming
in, all sorts of information: political, social, economic, creative.
One can't spew all of that out.
KB: I viewed Martha and Honey in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
creating a "fictive" child as some kind of wish-fulfillment, fulfilling
one's maternal instinct and sense of motherhood.
Edward Albee Interview
35
EA: I think all female creatures have that instinct, that motherhood
feeling. Cats and dogs are able to birth their own, and eat their
own afterbirth. We don't ask our women to eat the afterbirth, for
exqmple, and we take care of the umbilical cord for them. Most
animals, most female creatures, have instinctive reactions built into
the brain. Women have that too.
KB: Is that what affirms Honey's desire to have a child?
EA: She is a complicated person. Oh, yes, she realizes by the end
of the play, she has changed. She does want a child. But she has
spent most of her life till that point avoiding having a child.
KB: But there is a dawning of a realization?
EA: By the end of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when Honey
says, "I want a child. I want to have a child," she thinks she does.
But I am not convinced that she really does. She has spent too
much of her time aborting, and making sure that she doesn't have
a child. She may have wanted one. But I don't trust her. I think
she may be lying to herself.
KB: This kind of thing comes up in Agnes's wish to be a grandma,
julia not having a child.
EA: There is, I think, a sense of continuation that people want to
have. I have noticed that.
KB: Earlier, you were hailed as an angry artist.
EA: I hope I'm still angry.
KB: What is your anger against?
EA: Against incompleteness, against non-participation, against cyni-
cism, against hypocrisy, against, as Tennessee Williams says in a
phrase, "intentional cruelty." But, basically, against people not
participating fully and dangerously in their own lives.
KB: Participating dangerously means?
EA: Living completely. Parti cipate fully in your own lives. If you
walk right along the edge of the precipi ce, if you get too safe, then
36 BHASIN
you don't participate. You relax too much. Life becomes too easy
and too soft. Then you withdraw from your responsibilities, your
social responsibilities, and all the rest. One should live dangerous-
ly. I tell my playwriting students, "Whenever you write a play,
when you start to write a play, try to fail. Try to do more than you
think you can. " That's the way people should live their lives, not
being safe. And participate, even when it is unpleasant, participate
more in your life. People withdraw. People become comfortable
and lazy. And that is dangerous.
KB: Like Tobias?
EA: Yes. Because then you come to the end of your life, as Agnes
says at the end of A Delicate Balance, " When you hear the battle
going on, and you, finally, too late, do go up the hill. It is all
over." How awful for people to come to that point, the end of
their lives, and realize that they have missed out.
KB: No time, really to go back all over again.
EA: You have become so rigid that you can't, and that is terrible.
KB: That gives a sense of incompleteness.
EA: Of course, yes, and regret, terrible regret. There is nothing
wrong with regretting things you've done. There is something
wrong, something terrible about the stuff you haven't done.
KB: Not having attempted at all.
EA: That's right. Well, that's the same anger. Take The Zoo Story.
Why is Jerry so angry at Peter? Because Peter is not participating
in his own life. And Jerry teaches Peter what it is to be alive by
self-sacrifice. That's exactly the same thesis that I've been dealing
with all along, with various modifications of course.
KB: Man has to pay such a heavy price to be able to achieve that
kind of identity, that kind of individuality, doesn't he?
EA: I don' t think it is a heavy price. I think it is an exciting
participatory pri ce.
Edward Albee Interview
37
KB: Do you think that social circumstances are conducive for an
ordinary human being to be able to participate in life as such?
EA: The same way as no two of my characters are the same, no
two people in the world are of the same intell igence, same
sophistication, same opportunity. But I do think that anybody and
everybody can participate more. Being shown how to, anybody
can. There are limits to everybody. Somebody intensely stupid is
not going to be as aware as somebody who is intensely intelligent.
KB: Do you think, over the years, you have achieved a more
comprehensive vision of I ife?
EA: I think, I am, maybe, developing one. I'll let you know twenty
years from now.
KB: Well, I'm reminded of an essay by G.K. Chesterton, "On the
Pleasures of No longer Being Very Young. "
EA: By whom?
KB: By G.K. Chesterton.
EA: Well, I think you should always enjoy whatever age you are at.
I'm 14 years old, you see . . . I might be, may be, heading toward
15 or 13. I don't know. I'm not quite sure.
KB: Some of your plays tend to focus on "reality" against " i llu-
sion." Do you view reality as a philosophical concept, or as an
attitude of maturity in one's relationships?
EA: You mustn't ask me these questions. I never have the answer.
There is nothing wrong with illusion. There is nothing wrong with
kidding yourself, as long as you are aware you' re doing it. In
O' Neill's The Iceman Cometh, he comes to the conclusion, his
characters come to the conclusions, which means O' Neill comes
to the conclusion for these characters, that false illusions are
essential. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which, I think, was
written as a reply to that play, there is nothi ng wrong with false
illusions as long as you know they are false. Nothing wrong wi th
living falsely, if you know you' re living falsely. So, there is goi ng
to be some false illusion in every life. We're all kidders a little bit.
38 BHASIN
So long as we remain able to be aware that we are kidding
ourselves it is all right.
KB: Don't you think if we accept the realities of life, or the
difficulties and harsh realities of life, if I may put it so, then one
would succumb to [life]? If one has an illusion, a mirage, in life,
if one keeps going towards it, then one develops also somewhat.
EA: Well there is a danger in setting goals too soon, because goals
change. If we decide when we are twenty years old, "This is the
goal that I'll follow all my life," that could have been wrong. That
could have been dangerous.
KB: Goals keep changing.
EA: So long as goals keep changing, fine.
KB: I'll ask you one last question. Do you propose to write your
memoirs?
EA: I don't think I will . My mind is not very good, never has been.
I don't remember anything. I do find there have been a number of
people during the past few years asking me a number of questions,
and they can dig these things out of me. But I don't think I'll do
it myself. But maybe I will. You know, everybody likes to tell that
final book of I ies.
KB: It will take some Louis Sheaffer 16 years to piece together your
life [history], as it did in the case of Eugene O'Neill.
3
EA: I'm not concerned about that. I'm much more concerned with
people. I talk a lot. People get some of my ideas in essays,
interviews, and conversations. I think my characters are more
interesting. I think their dilemmas are more important than mine.
KB: You correspond with people. Do you preserve your letters?
EA: I don't preserve my letters.
3
Louis Sheaffer wrote the two-volume biography O'Neill: Son and Playwright
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968) and O'Neill: Son and Artist (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1973).
Edward Albee Interview 39
KB: I mean letters you receive from people.
EA: Oh, yes, sure. From good people, yes. Yes, I've a huge file.
All scholarly correspondence. Stuff written about me, reviews.
They are all filed away.
KB: I hope you don't go the Auden way. Because Auden burnt his
letters, I have read somewhere. [Your papers] will be a precious
possession for posterity.
EA: I might want to do it, but I'll probably forget it.
KB: Mr. Albee, you've been very, very kind. It is, for me, some
kind of a dream come true. For a humble person like me, having
come from India, it is a once-in-a-life-time opportunity for me.
EA: I'm planning to go to India. I understand about India that I
must not try to do too much in one trip. So, my first trip, I hope
will take place in November, maybe, after the rainy season. I want
to go to Bombay first, especially, to Ellora and Ajanta. That's going
to be my first visit to India.
KB: Have you given interviews to other Indians?
EA: Yes, there were two other gentlemen who came during the
past ten years. I'm terrible with names. I can't remember. But
they weren't as extensive as you've been.
KB: So I complete the trinity.
EA: Yes, you complete the trinity. Symbolism again.
KB: I don't know how well I fit in that trinity, but I feel much too
honored.
EA: Well, just don't try to be too doctrinaire in your thesis. Some
of your questions lead me to the conclusion that you want answers
that fit your thesis, rather than modulate and change your conclu-
sions based upon the answers that you get. Sometimes, I get the
feeling that you want my answers to relate to the conclusions
you've come to. I know it will be a problem. That's why I
contradicted a number of your expectations during the course of
our conversations.
40 BHASI N
KB: That was intentionally done! If I were not a Ph.D. student then
your answers would have been different?
EA: Probably, yes. Not much, a little bit. I was always keeping in
mind that you asked certain questions because you needed certain
answers to fit into your thesis. That's why some of my answers
were somewhat ambiguous. I never I ied, you understand.
KB: Your plays, too, are ambiguous at times. Ambiguity only
enriches things.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Spring 1995)
The Neighborhood Playhouse's Salut au Monde:
A Theatrical Vision of 1920s America
MELANIE N. BLOOD
All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia indifferent of place.
All you on the numberless islands of the archipelagoes of the sea.
And you of centuries hence when you listen to me;
And you each everywhere whom I specify not, but include just the
same!
Health to you! Good will to you all, from me and America sent!
1
The character of Walt Whitman spoke these lines while a proces-
sion representing the peoples of the world disappeared behind the false
proscenium in the Neighborhood Playhouse's 1922 festival production
of Salut au Monde. Although it is not yet "centuries hence," the
meanings of "me" and "America," and of the departing procession,
must be read substantially differently not only across the years but also
across the vari ous subject positions of the participants and viewers.
The culmination of three years of work, the Neighborhood
Playhouse's Salut au Monde was a lyric drama based on Walt
Whitman's 1860 poem by the same name.
2
Salut was cited in later
Playhouse literature as being the most successful example of lyri c
drama, an experimental genre created by the Playhouse. The impor-
tance and success of the production parallels that of the Playhouse in
general : It used innovative artistic concepts to express an overall vision
concerning a contemporary social issue, and the choices made by the
producing staff in the production process reflect its social commitments.
Like many Playhouse productions, Salut au Monde draws on pre-
1
5a/ut au Monde, ts, Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, New York
City, 3:3.
2
Whitman published a first draft of his poem in the second edition of Leaves of
Grass in 1856 as "Poem of Salutation," but it appeared in the 1860 thi rd edition in
its final form with its French title, "Salut au Monde!."
42 BLOOD
modern and Oriental
3
sources; however, unlike most other anti modern
productions, Salut explicitly ties this source material to a vision of
American society. In his No Place of Crace, historian T.J. Jackson Lears
explains the fundamental tension in antimodernism between past and
current values, and claims that ultimately anti modern dissent in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was reinscribed into the
dominant culture's ideology and eased a transition of American culture
rather than posing any radical revision. The Playhouse's Salut au
Monde demonstrates how the transition of values occurring in the early
1920s was eased for both dominant and marginalized groups by
playing off of both Oriental/premodern and American sources.
Before turning to an artistic and a political analysis of the 1922
Salut au Monde, I will briefly sketch the Neighborhood Playhouse's
history, define lyric drama, and discuss the inspiration and development
of Salut. The Neighborhood Playhouse opened its doors in February
of 1915 as a semi-independent unit of the Henry Street Settlement on
the Lower East Side of New York, but the four artistic and managerial
forces behind the theatre had been collaborating on productions,
classes, and pageants at the Settlement for several years. AI ice and
Irene Lewisohn, who funded the theatre, performed, directed, and
served on the producing staff; artistically, Alice's talents were in acting
and Irene's in dance and choreography. Helen Arthur was a lawyer
who had worked as a personal manager, an assistant to the Shuberts,
and a free-lance theatre critic. At the Playhouse she worked primarily
in business and promotion and was a member of the producing staff.
The fourth member of the producing staff was Agnes Morgan, a student
in George Pierce Baker's first theatre training classes at Radcliffe, who
wore the varied hats of playwright, adaptor, translator, director, and
technical specialist for the Neighborhood Playhouse. All four women
shared a dedication to artistic experimentation and to a progressive
political agenda. They met as volunteers at Henry Street, where they
worked with immigrants primarily of Eastern European Jewish parent-
age, and involved themselves to varying degrees with such issues as
pacifism and women's rights. Between 1915 and 1927 the Neighbor-
hood Playhouse continuously expanded its operations, offering more
classes, producing more shows, adding a professional company in
3
My references to the "East" or "Orient" in this text follow the usage of the
1920s, but are informed by current theory which, following Edward W. Said in
Orienta/ism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), recognizes that the use of
"Eastern" and "Oriental, " including their application to cultures and art forms, is an
imposition of western tradition and its need to construct an opposing category for
its own definition.
Salut au Monde
43
1920, and extending their season through the summers. In june 1927,
the producing staff surprised their audiences by closing the Playhouse's
doors and splitting into several splinter organizations.
4
Lyric drama was used by the producing staff to refer to both a
genre and an aesthetic ideal. Irene Lewisohn wrote more on the
subject than the other three women, and from her essays and lectures
I have derived five essential aspects.
5
First, lyric drama sought to unify
and equalize all elements of theatrical production. This aspect was
clearly influenced by the new stagecraft, but lyric drama went beyond
the new stagecraft to include the elements of music and dance, and,
unlike the new stagecraft, lyric drama used a written text as merely one
of many equal elements. Second, lyric drama proposed rhythm as the
central unifying element, common to and underlying all the constituent
art forms. Third, content should control form: Salut au Monde, like
many lyric dramas, began with an idea and the various theatrical
elements were manipulated to serve the central idea. Fourth, lyric
drama should strive to break out of traditional Western theatrical forms.
Finally, lyric drama looked to premodern and Oriental cultures for
alternative forms and subjects, with the ultimate goal of creating a vital
4
ln 1927, Morgan and Arthur formed the Actor/Managers with several prior
Neighborhood designers and performers. The Lewisohns and other artists formed
the Neighborhood Playhouse School for the Theatre. Irene continued her
experiments in lyric drama with the orchestral drama, geared more to dance. Alice,
who had married in 1924, retired from the stage. Children's lyric productions
continued out of Settlement classes. The theatre building, with its shops and class-
rooms, was given to the Henry Street Settlement and continues to be used by Lower
East Side residents. For general information on the Neighborhood Playhouse, see
Alice Lewisohn Crowley, Leaves From a Theatre Scrapbook, (New York: Theatre
Arts Books, 1959), Doris Fox Benardete, The Neighborhood Playhouse in Grand
Street, Ph.D. diss. New York University 1949, Melanie N. Blood, The Neighborhood
Playhouse 7915-7 927: A History and Analysis, Ph.D. di ss. Northwestern University,
1994. Biographical material on the producing staff is collected in my dissertation,
as is a guide to the extensive archival holdings on the Neighborhood Playhouse at
the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.
5
1rene Lewisohn's speeches and essays are collected in The Neighborhood
Playhouse, (New York: The Neighborhood Playhouse, 1930?), and many short
essays are also available in programs and in manuscript collections at the New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts. Linda Tomko' s 1991 dissertation, (Women,
Artistic Dance Practices, and Social Change in the United States, 1890-1920, Ph.D.
diss. UCLA, 1991) which includes a chapter on Irene Lewisohn, uses the term lyri c
drama only as a genre, but thi s restri cts its usefulness to few productions, possibly
only Salut. Also, Lewisohn's own writing often uses the term as an aesthetic ideal.
For a more complete discussion of the genre, see my di ssertation, Chapter 5.
44 BLOOD
American theatre art. To fit the needs of Playhouse lyri c dramas,
performers needed to be versed in speech, song, and dance, and
rehearsal periods were often extended to allow for development of a
production from an original idea.
Salut au Monde was first performed by the Festival Dancers in a
workshop format in June 1919: It evolved as a response to the end of
World War I and the United States' decisive role in the war. Whereas
the onset of the war had tended to divide immigrant communities by
countries of origin, the end of the war healed such rifts and brought
greater feelings of American patriotism. Whitman's poem ends by
saluting people around the globe from America, but the Playhouse
production celebrated peace not only globally but also within ethnically
diverse America. Alice Lewisohn explains the importance of the timing
of Salut:
It was inspired by a feeling of at-oneness that swept from land
to land at the end of World War I. . . . The appeal of the
poem lay in his [Whitman's] concept of America not only as a
harbor but as a unifying influence for peoples of the world. In
it Whitman saluted the new spirit of enfranchisement for all
nati onalities composing America, a burning problem at the
time, and he envisaged a way to such liberation through his
perception of a widened consciousness.
6
After the workshop, the producing staff commissioned the young
American composer Charles T. Griffes to score a full-length version of
Salut. Griffes died that fall and Edmund Ricketts took on the task of
finishing and orchestrating Griffes's score, which proved to be a two
year process. Alice Lewisohn [Crowley] indicates in her monograph on
the Playhouse that design decisions for Salut were cumbersome due to
its scope and the length of its development period, but that dancers,
actors, and musicians remained dedicated to the piece throughout its
three-year incubation.
7
Salut au Monde premiered in the spring of
1922 and was so successful that it ran an extra three weeks and
received an offer to tour. From the many contemporary reviews,
6
Crowley, 121 .
7
Crowley, 125-26.
Salut au Monde 45
photographs, and manuscript scenarios,
8
plus Alice's account in The
Neighborhood Playhouse, it is possible to reconstruct much of Salut au
Monde. Drawing on this evidence, I will interpret the Neighborhood
Playhouse artists' ideas on immigrants' contributions to American
culture and on the role of art in American society.
The set for Salut au Monde consisted of a huge, circular false
proscenium surrounded by brown fabric, an empty space behind, a
cyclorama at the back, and a rock on which Whitman stood. (See
Figure 1.) Many lighting effects were created on the cyclorama with
Thomas Wilfred's color organ, which projected patterns of colored light
in symphonic variation. Whitman, played by tan Maclaren, stood
downstage of the brown curtains and looked into the "globe" at the
action. The lyric drama was divided into a prologue and three parts;
Griffes composed the music for the prologue, first, and third parts for
seven wind instruments, two harps, timpani, piano, and chorus, while
the music of the second section consisted of ritual music from Hebrew,
Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Greek traditions. The orchestra and
singing chorus were positioned in the pit under the stage, and the
speaking chorus was dispersed throughout the house to give the effect
of echoes ringing through the. theatre.
During the musical prelude, light slowly appeared evoking dawn
and the shape of Whitman was barely visible; the scenario describes
the intended effect:
Man's spiritual being, synthesized in the poet, stands outside
to view and yet becomes one with the cosmic universe. On
his spiritual journey he experiences in turn the sense of
groping, questioning, doubt, fear, awe,-and ultimately
achieves comprehension.
9
The poet's inner response to the music was continued in terms evoking
religious enlightenment of a more Eastern than Judeo-Christian
character. This led into the prologue, when the front curtain opened
to disclose the huge sphere. Voices called out to the Poet "Oh take
my hand Walt Whitman" as he stood "head bowed in contemplation."
8
Reviews are collected in scrapbooks at the New York Public library for the Per-
forming Arts, catalogued as Alice lewisohn Crowley Gift, nos. 9664-9665.
Photographs, programs, and manuscripts are located both at the New York Public
Library and the Neighborhood Playhouse School for the Theatre.
9
Salut au Monde, ts, Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, New York
City, 1:1.
46 BLOOD
Figure 1. lan Maclaren as Walt Whitman on the set of Salut au Monde. (From
the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library of the
Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.)
Salut au Monde
47
Colors passed across the sphere and he responded in the opening lines
of Whitman's poem, expressing wonder at the cosmos and the diversity
of human life on earth.
Maclaren as the Poet continued "I see a great round wonder rolling
through space," and Part one, Scene one, began, depicting "Genesis
in the Making," probably using the color organ. The action withi n the
sphere began with "The Shaded Side of the Sphere," showing ugliness
and brutality in stylized movement, then moved to "The Lighter Side
of the Sphere," which culminated in what many reviewers saw as the
most emotional and effective part of the evening. The lines: "I see the
constructiveness of my race,/1 see the results of the perseverance and
industry of my race," introduced the Festival Dancers in a mime/dance
of various labor activities. One reviewer described the section:
All the patterns of husbandry and industry were convent ional-
ized into a kind of fierce and joyful dance for which the music
supplied superb and heroic rhythms, suggesting triumphant
effort. Then, beautifully, to the words of the poet, "I hear the
workman singing and the farmer's wife singing, I hear in the
distance the sounds of children and of animals early in the
day," the rigid patterns of "Constructiveness" broke down and
a crowd of children ran onstage, while the workers, taking
hands with the children, danced a festive dance of pagan
ecstasy.
10
Without reference to any specific nationality, Part one described human
progress as a linear path from original chaos to a nameless preindustrial
society. It ended with a utopian, universal vision of the premodern.
Part two departed from Whitman's text and Griffes's score and,
after a prelude uniting the spiritual drive in all people, depicted five
major world religions in music, dance, and movement. Some
reviewers liked this part best for its authenticity and tight organization.
In Scene one, to the "Kol Nidre," priests of Israel brought the Tablets
of the Law before the Holy of Holies, and the High Priest received a
prophetic vision. A Yogi, veiled in incense, chanted in Sanskrit for
Scene two, as the chorus chanted "om." The third scene consisted of
the "Hymn to Apollo" and dances representing the worship of
Dion'ysus. An Islamic scene followed which moved from a "Mullah"
10
"Seen on the Stage: Walt Whitman' s "Salut au Monde!" at the Neighborhood
Playhouse," Review, Neighborhood Playhouse Gift, MWEZ + n.c. 9665, New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts, n. p., n. d. , n. pag.
48 BLOOD
leading chanted prayers to a Dervish dance. Finally, Gregorian chants
accompanied a Christian processional and ended in a burst of
Hallelujahs as the pilgrims followed a star offstage and a second shaft
of light turned the star's tail into a cross. All the religious vignettes
depict images and sounds centuries old, some of which were still in
use in 1922, suggesting both that spirituality is timeless and that it
existed in a purer form in premodern Europe or the Orient.
11
Part three returned to Whitman's verses, taking up his catalogue of
all the peoples of the earth. While Maclaren recited the lines in front
of the circular opening, a parade of allegori cal figures such as military
power, law, and government, followed by representations of many
cultures, processed slowly by behind the circular arch bearing banners
of universal brotherhood. The lyric sung to the procession was
remembered by many critics:
Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless-each of us with. his or her right upon the
earth,
Each of us allow'd the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
Whitman's I ines, spoken by Maclaren: "Toward you all, in America's
name,/1 raise high the perpendicular hand .. .. "ended the evening by
reinscribing all of the diverse Oriental ism and premodern ism portrayed
into a contemporary American context. All the action took place
within the spherical false proscenium, on the far side of Whitman from
the audience. This framework suggests Whitman as a mediator
between the premodern and Oriental images and the spectators: His
physical position and narration of the action kept the action within the
sphere at a safe and contained distance from the audience.
Press coverage of Salut au Monde was extensive and generally
positive. Many reviewers focused on the specific element that drew
them to the performance in the first place, such as Griffes's music, or
the embodiment of Whitman' s poetry. Most had trouble describing the
11
The choice of the five religious traditions represented is typical of the
Neighborhood Playhouse in what it includes and in what it leaves out. African,
African American, and Native American traditions are rarely included in the
Playhouse's work, though Whitman's poem does not make the same omi ssions. I
ascribe the Playhouse' s overlooking of these cultures to the producing staff' s
fascination with "oriental" traditions, a fascination shared by many of thei r
contemporary artists and scholars.
Salut au Monde 49
genre of Salut, which the program labeled a "festival." The New
Republic's critic was the only one to comprehend the intent of lyric
drama, including its attempts to make rhythm the central production
element and to allow form to follow content:
It is an experiment in terms of poetic idea interfused with and
commented upon by light, music, and dance forms; it
attempts, in sum, to establish a rhythm out of a synthesis of all
these elements. And in more or less the same way it has a
social implication, a rhythm of groups of human beings,
enthusiasms, worship, creation, struggle, love.
12
Several reviewers compared and contrasted the production elements of
Salut with those of pageants. The Greenwich Villager critic, in one of
the more negative reviews, linked the pageant form to the audience's
need to respond creatively in order to find meaning:
There is no drama, and the inner march of symbolism which
takes its place, to the accompaniment of suggestive, fragmen-
tary music, and waver ing light and color, must be largely the
work of the listener.
13
A second common response among critics was to interpret the
symbolism of Salut: The spherical proscenium represented the planet
earth, for example. A letter to the editor by Frank E. Law described the
symbolic progression of humanity depicted in the lyric drama:
If I conceive of art rightly, its true purpose is to awaken, to
stimulate, to feed, to purify and to elevate the emotions .. . .
The festival is in the deepest sense religious. It may properly
be described as having for its subject the passion of mankind.
just as the lily grows out of the mud, so mankind, out of grime
and slime, through pain and suffering and struggle and arduous
labor, has grown up to nobility of character, to love, and will
12
"Forward and Backward," Review of Salut au Monde, The New Republic, 10
May 1922: 316, Neighborhood Playhouse Gift, MWEZ + n.c. 9665, New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts.
13
E.B., "Salut au Monde," Review, Greenwich Villager, 29 April1922, Neighbor-
hood Playhouse Gift, MWEZ + n.c. 9665, New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts, n. pag.
50 BLOOD
continue to grow. We should not speak of the descent of man
but of the ascent of man.
14
After this Darwinian and progressive hymn, Law's next paragraph refers
to Whitman's thoughts, which the Neighborhood Playhouse has
"successfully striven" to make applicable to post World War I America.
The most common criticisms of Salut au Monde surrounded the
unfamiliarity of the lyric drama form: Many reviewers were clearly
looking for narrative and conflict. For most critics, the high points of
the production were the emotional power of the final moments, in
which Whitman saluted the parade of nations, and the dances,
especially the dance representing Constructiveness. One reviewer,
familiar with the Neighborhood's lyric bills, wrote: "The Festival
Dancers of the organization who, on previous occasions, seemed
always a little crude and wavering in their work, have here passed from
promise to performance,"
15
while another said that "the spontaneity,
freshness and freedom of expression of the 16 dancers sent a thrill over
the audience."
16
No critic, however, matches the eloquence of the
typescript, which reads:
At a signal they all group themselves about a huge chain which
they begin to drag in syncopated rhythm. The movement
grows faster and faster until they are running in a circle. The
sudden clang of a gong is heard, the workers pause, then draw
together for a final effort-with all their force they tug at the
mighty chain and at last in triumphant achievement, push
across the stage the huge wheel which turns unceasingly the
cogs of industry. Meanwhile the starlit sky has faded into
14
"To the Dramatic Editor," New York Evening Post, 28 April 1922, and New
York Times, 30 April 1922, Neighborhood Playhouse Gift, MWEZ + n.c. 9665,
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, n. pag. This letter to the editor
may have been placed by Helen Arthur, the manager of the Neighborhood
Playhouse. She was known to use such publicity tactics. Clues that suggest this are
references to the performance as a "festival," never a "pageant," and the name
"Law." Arthur was a lawyer.
15
"The Highbrow," Review, Neighborhood Playhouse Gift, MWEZ + n.c. 9665,
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
16
'"Salut au Monde' is Staged in New York," Review., Christian Science
Monitor, 27 April 1922, Neighborhood Playhouse Gift, MWEZ + n.c. 9665, New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts, n. pag.
Salut au Monde
dawn .... They now behold dancing by, silhouetted against
the sky, a youthful, joyous band.
17
51
h ~ final and perhaps most important aspects of critical response
to Salut au Monde are the reception of its Oriental ism and premodern-
ism and the implicit construction of America created by the combina-
tion of antimodern aspects and the Whitman poem. Most critics
commented on the "authentic" rituals, music, and dances that made up
the second part of the festival. Like the Constructiveness dance, which
idealized premodern society, this mostly Oriental section was pointed
out by several reviewers as being the most effective. The Greenwich
Villager singled out Part two and asked:
But who has heard the Hindu's strange continuous high song,
I ike flowing water-intervals so new and magical to our
Western ears that they enchant us like music heard in a dream?
or the call of the Muezzin, flat, labial, yet withal so distantly
echoing? These sounds, these rhythms, are so infinitely subtle,
so removed from our own music, that they seem barbaric to
the untrained ear.
18
The reviewer's use of such words as "magical," "dream," "distantly,"
"removed," and above all "barbaric" point to the western tradition's
constructed stereotypes of the Orient more than to the experience of
the scenes themselves. This critic also says that the Neighborhood
Playhouse is the only New York organization capable of representing
these foreign sights and sounds. Since the Playhouse's opening in
1915, critics had consistently complained of the long trek down to
Grand Street to see Playhouse shows and the . foreign atmosphere
created by the immigrant neighborhood. They also consistently refer
to the Neighborhood as an amateur group, drawing on its settlement
roots, even after the introduction of a professional company in 1920.
The Lower East Side location and connection with the Henry Street
Settlement clearly influenced the reception of the Oriental sections of
Salut au Monde, allowing audiences to see any form of Oriental
material, even the five disparate religions represented in Section two of
the festival, as more authentic.
'
7
Salut au Monde, 10-11.
18
E.B., "Salut au Monde," Review, Greenwich Villager, 29 Apr il 1922.
52 BLOOD
The Lewisohns and Morgan certainly did strive for "authenticity"
in their representations of the five major world religions. For the
Oriental sections, they incorporated music and musicians from the
source cultures: Local synagogue cantor Sol Friedman sang the Kol
N idre for the Hebrew section; Basante Koomar Roy-a native of
Bengal-impersonated a Yogi singing an ancient Hindu chant; and
Persian medical student Bakhtiar led a crowd of faithful in an intoned
prayer from the Koran, which inspired a Dervish dance.
19
Throughout
the 1921-22 season, the Playhouse held lectures by native scholars and
religious figures on the various faiths included in the production.
20
One reviewer most interested by the authenticity of the Oriental
sections mentions that a scholar from Columbia's Oriental department,
Professor V. H. Kalendarian, gave "assistance and advice" on the
production.
21
The third and fifth scenes of Part two, those of the Greek ritual" and
Christian pilgrims, made a simi lar appeal to the Oriental scenes through
premodern images; I ike the Constructiveness dance, they demonstrated
premodern communities bound together through idealized spiritual and
labor images. The Greek scene began with a "Hymn to Apollo" and
continued with a procession of people costumed like characters in
classical art, chanting to Dionysus and bearing thyrse and wine,
"Moving in rhythmic measures of strophe and antistrophe," and the
scene ended with a dance of Maenads, "waving torches and lashing
whips."
22
Isadora Duncan's attempts to recreate Greek dance, not as
an historical project but as a way to capture the beauty of natural
human movement to create a contemporary art of the body, were
known to Playhouse audiences through the visits of her adopted
daughters to their stage and to more general audiences through her
19
The Dervish's dance was presumably created by Irene Lewisohn, though no
documentation exists of her having seen the dance performed "authentically" until
her trip to Egypt the following year. The dance reappears in what appears to be a
similar form in An Arab Fantasia, performed in 1924, following Lewisohn's trip to
Egypt.
20
Crowley, 124.
21
"Griffes Airs for Whitman," Review, New York Times Music section, 30 April
1922, Neighborhood Playhouse Gift, MWEZ + n.c. 9665, New York Public Library
for the Performing Arts, n. pag.
22
Salut au Monde, Part 2, Scene 3, 6.
Salut au Monde 53
international reputation. A 1922 reading of this section by a Neighbor-
hood Playhouse audience would have been influenced by Duncanism.
Although authenticity was important to Oriental representations at
the Neighborhood Playhouse, the implicit comparison with America
was more important. Like its parent, Henry Street Settlement, the
producing staff of the Playhouse was aware that it was contributing to
the construction of a new America, and I ike other little and art theatres
of the period, it was self-conscious about its search for an American
theatre art. No production demonstrates so clearly the producing staff's
view of America through the incorporation of Oriental and premodern
elements as Salut au Monde. The text of the poem itself depicts a
harmonious, interdependent world that Whitman salutes from his small
American corner before the Civil War. The form of the Playhouse
festival represents a subtle ideological shift from Whitman's day to
1922. Part one could be seen as embodying the progressive world
view: the direct, linear growth of humankind. Part two depicted
timeless spiritual strivings through Oriental or premodern imagery. The
third part gave an ideal vision of an American future: the diverse
peoples of the earth joining in one procession framed by the gaze of
the Whitman character. Whereas the poet Whitman, writing in the
mid-nineteenth century at the beginning of a huge influx of immigrants,
saluted other cultures as part of an interdependent world, in the 1922
Playhouse production other cultures were not so much saluted from
afar as welcomed within America, distinct yet subsumed in a single
country. Implicit within the form of this festival is American inclusion
of people of various immigrant groups and inscription of them in a
new, broader concept of America. The significance of this broader
conception could be read variously, however, depending on an
audience member's specific subject position.
Few reviewers discussed the view of America represented by the
festival, probably because the production's ideological bent was
consistent with contemporary social settlement and Progressive Party
values. Celebrating America was none the less a theme of the evening:
Several critics discuss Whitman as the quintessential American poet;
others, who focus on the music, mention Griffes as one of America's
greatest composers; and even the most negative review, in the Evening
journal, states that an American poem requiring a French title "reveal[s]
its provincial and naif qual ity."
23
From the Playhouse's staging, it is
23
" Last Work of C. T. Griffes Performed," Review, Evening journal , Apri l 1922,
Neighborhood Playhouse Gift, MWEZ + n.c. 9665, New York Publi c Library for the
Performing Arts, n. pag.
54 BLOOD
possible to analyze what most newspaper critics saw as unworthy of
comment in the construction of "America" in the festival. In this Salut
production, the Whitman figure embodied an established, white-
European-patriarchal America. English actor lan Maclaren played Walt
Whitman, associating America with Puritan roots in England. Implicit
in the lyric drama's form was the transcendence of the Whit-
man/American figure's benevolent ways: He was outside the frame and
unchanging, and he was positioned between the audience and the
other cultural representations as a kind of mediator. One reviewer
mentioned that the actor looked like a cross between Whitman and
God; perhaps Uncle Sam would also be an appropriate connection to
make. (See Figure 1.) In other words, the positioning of the static
Whitman in the Playhouse production suggested that incorporating
foreign cultures will not change the underlying values of America.
A strikingly different construction of the meaning of "America" is
reflected in an interview with Basante Koomar Roy, the Hindu musician
who sang in Part two. Under the heading "East meets West in 'Salut
au Monde"' in the Evening Globe, he described his response to
working in the drama.
Especially in the epic grandeur and robust morality of "Salut au
Monde" I discovered a reflection of the soul of America. Here
a new race of humanity is being born from the mingling of
almost all races and peoples of the earth. A new cultural unit
is being evolved .... Whitman's humanism is nothing short
of a crowning fruition of the destiny of mankind.
24
Although from the East, Roy's statement draws on the progressive
philosophy associated with the West, specifically the American myth
of manifest destiny. He claimed to have been drawn to Whitman for
years because of Whitman's physical likeness to an ancient Hindu sage.
Roy, as a foreigner from "Oriental" Bengal, was caught up in the
festival's inclusive vision of America, and, in his view, Irene Lewisohn's
stated goal of using aspects of Eastern traditions to revitalize the West
was becoming a reality both on the stage and in American society.
Roy's emphasis on the festival's vision of America's future-when most
American critics do not discuss the subject-suggests that the ideas
represented were common enough to be taken for granted rather than
24
"East Meets West in 'Salut au Monde' ," Review, New York Evening Globe, 28
April 1922, Neighborhood Playhouse Gift, MWEZ + n.c. 9665, New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts, n.pag.
Salut au Monde
55
controversial within American culture, but also that they held an
important promise to such recent immigrants as Roy, or the performers
and audience from the Lower East Side.
In the production process the Playhouse's Salut practiced the same
inclusion of immigrants-within limits-that the production advocated.
The producing staff, which made all major decisions, was made up of
established Americans, though its members were all women and
progressive activists who represented a diversity of religious back-
grounds. The production was performed by a diverse ensemble of sixty
people that included the Playhouse's professional company, its amateur
actors and dancers, young people enrolled in arts classes, and other
New York artists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. The amateur
and child performers were mostly immigrants of Eastern European
Jewish descent, representative of the Lower East Side neighborhood:
The festival and its creative process also suggest the role of art within
American society: By including the artists of a variety of ethnic
backgrounds, the production suggests that American art be shaped by
the various constituent cultures within America. At the same time, the
central device of Whitman's poem, the ever-present figure of Maclaren
as Whitman, and the power represented by the Playhouse's producing
staff seem to represent limitations on the extent of immigrants' cultural
contributions to the larger American society.
Two radically different readings of the performance and the process
of Salut au Monde were possible. The position of Whitman as
mediator between the audience and immigrant cultures reassured
established Americans that the dominant American culture would
continue in spite of heavy immigration. Immigrant spectators could
read the same production as Roy did: They could see Salut as
representing an inclusive American society to which they and their
traditions would contribute. Drawn in broadly emotional gestures and
progressing primarily through music and dance, the plot created a kind
of evolution of human civilization, culminating in an inclusive America.
But since lyric drama intentionally deprivileged text, exactly what the
lyric drama meant was open to interpretation by individual participants
or spectators.
Contemporary political events also demonstrate that immigration
and immigrants' roles in American society were sites of ideological
crisis. When the Neighborhood Playhouse produced Salut au Monde,
first in 1919 and then in 1922, the United States legislature was closing
down its open-door immigration policies: Tensions over the high
numbers of recent immigrants, most from outside western Europe,
resulted in the passage of significant restrictions on immigration in
1917 and farther tightening in 1924. Dominant trends in American
56 BLOOD
popular thought in 1922 are exemplified by the more conservative
political climate after World War I, typified by a 1920 list of the most
dangerous people in America, which named most influential reformers
of the Progressive Era including Henry Street Settlement founder Lillian
Wald. The production of Salut au Monde eased tensions felt by both
older Americans and immigrants over the changes in American society
caused by heavy immigration. Historian Lears's thesis, that anti modern-
ism eased a transition in American culture, is not only exemplified by
the educated elite whom he discusses in his No Place of Grace but, in
the case of Salut au Monde, anti modern sources soothed tensions over
the changing American society for both established Americans and
immigrants.
Participants and audiences viewed Whitman's welcoming salute to
the rest of the world, that ended the lyric drama, as a gesture toward
human unity, which could be literally enacted in the United States.
Years later, Alice Lewisohn Crowley described the relationship between
unity and diversity intended by the Playhouse production:
The Salut au Monde still holds for us the vision of unity
formed out of diversity, a wholly different concept from that
pressed into the rubber stamp slogan of freedom; for it involves
the acceptance of that which is other, strange, even question-
able.25
Alice's description encompasses both possible readings detailed above,
depending on the interpretation of such key terms as "acceptance."
Although the native-born Americans in the audience might have taken
the positive vision of America's future for granted, immigrant partici-
pants and audience members saw a promising future in America, in
contrast to their current economic and social marginalization. Older
Americans saw a future way of I ife not radically different or challenging
to their values and newer Americans saw a hope for inclusion of
themselves and their cultural differences in America's future.
25
Crowley, 121-22.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Spring 1995)
From "Madness" to "The Cosmos":
Gay/Lesbian Characters in the Plays
Of Lanford Wilson
LARRY FINK
In America today, "gay" is in and "lesbian chic" is a commonly
used term. Gay and lesbian influences on fashion, art, music, and
general popular culture are readi ly acknowledged. Roseanne kissed a
woman on prime-time television, and the actress who plays AI and Peg
Bundy's neighbor on Married With Children "came out" in an
interview in The Advocate. There are openly gay rock-n-rollers, sports
stars, and politicians. The last decade has seen an explosion in gay
publishing, and a large number of independent films explore everything
from lesbian dating, to gay men's sex, to time-tripping transgenderers,
to love with the proper drag queen. PBS's most highly rated miniseries
told the tres-gay story of San Francisco in the late seventies and early
eighties. Only Hollywood, ever-frozen in homophobia, seems to have
missed the gay bandwagon. Unless, of course, one considers the
barely daring Threesome or Three of Hearts or the lesbian-revenge
mess of Basic Instinct.
American theatre, on the other hand, is currently "The Great Gay
Way." The last few years have witnessed an abundance of gay plays
both on and Off-Broadway. Whether it be the borderline stereotype-
reinforcing spectacle of Kiss of the Spider Woman, the charm-the-pants-
right-off-me wit and wisdom of Jeffrey, or the epic, biting social critique
of Angels in America, gay persons' presence and gaze is heavily
represented in today's theatre. John Clum says that "in the past twenty
years, homosexuality in drama has moved from shame-filled hints and
indirection to proud assertion."
1
So, until Hollywood decides to
acknowledge the gay world's existence in images other than limp-
wristed wedding planners, or knife-wielding man-haters, the theatre will
continue as the primary forum for exploration and definition of gay and
1
john M. Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), xvi.
58 FINK
lesbian identity. In the words of gay American playwright Lanford
Wi I son, "The theatre is really the only public forum a gay writer has."
2
Among American playwrights, Lanford Wilson has been unusually
prolific. In the past thirty years, he has written and received production
of more than forty works.
3
His sty I istically varied plays have been
both commercially and critically successful. Wilson has also received
numerous distinctions and awards for his work in the theatre: a
Pulitzer Prize, two New York Drama Critics Awards, two Outer Critics
Circle Awards, two Obie Awards, the Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award,
two Guggenheim Fellowships, two Rockefeller Grants, an American
Institute of Arts and Letters award, an ABC-Yale Fellowship and an
honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Missouri .
4
Throughout the development and growth of Wilson's drama, a
change is seen in the types of characters he portrays. This study will
deal with the appearance and the evolution of the gay/lesbian character
in Lanford Wilson's plays. This type of character undergoes radical
change as Wilson's dramas develop. The homosexual character first
encountered in The Madness of Lady Bright (1964) fits "many
stereotypes: He is effeminate, promiscuous, haughty, affected, and
lonely."
5
He is also a transvestite. The male lovers in Fifth of july
(1978) are radically different from their predecessor. The loving
relationship between Ken and Jed has been the subject of much
praise-mostly because it is never discussed in the play.
6
The
relationship is a given fact. Thus, we see the completed evolution of
homosexuality as a defining stereotypic character type, to homosexuali-
ty as one of many traits in psychologically and emotionally complex
characters. To date, no study has dealt with this evolution in Wilson's
plays.
2
Robert Massa, interview with Lanford Wilson, Village Voice 28 June 1988, 38.
3
Martin J. Jacobi, "A Lanford Wilson Bibliography," in Lanford Wilson: A
Casebook, ed. jackson R. Bryer, (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1994).
4
Bryer, ix.
5
Laurence Douglas Meyers, Characterization in Lanford Wilson's Plays, Ph.D.
diss. Kent State University, 1984, (Ann Arbor, Ml : University Microfilm Internation-
al, 1984), 24.
6
Richard Hall, "The Transparent Closet: Gay Theatre for Straight Audiences,"
in Three Plays for a Cay Theatre (San Francisco: Gray Fox, 1983), 171.
Lanford Wi I son Plays 59
A study of this nature illustrates the disappearance of one of a
number of negative stereotypes from the stage. For the most part, the
stereotypical queen has gone the way of the miserly Jew, the lazy
Black, the subservient woman, and the stupid foreigner. Rarely do cast
lists call for set dressing that includes "a black, a junkie, a prostitute,
an alcoholic, and a gay man and/or lesbian."
7
The character has
progressed from a satirical exaggerated caricature to an individual who
is warm, human, and compassionate.
8
Richard Hall, an author and playwright of gay theatre essays and
plays, divides the history of gay theatre into three distinct phases: the
Monstrous, the Agitprop, and the Suburban.
9
These phases mirror gays
and lesbians' standing in society. In the first phase, the Monstrous, the
gay or lesbian character is presented for shock value, often portrayed
as lonely, depraved and deprived, an outcast, and, quite often, better
off dead. The fascination or titillation of the extreme freak of nature is
often the focus of the play. The gay/lesbian characters of the second
phase, the Agitprop (an abbreviation for Agitation/Propaganda), are
often present in plays with a "coming out" theme. These characters
usually confess their difference, hoping to find love and acceptance.
Many of these plays plead for tolerance of difference, often with
statements that gays/lesbians are just like everybody else, only different
in bed. Whether or not a character is homosexual is often the focus of
these works. Plays of this second phase often are directed at a
specifically gay/lesbian audience, "preaching to the converted," as it
were. Dramas of Hall's third phase, the Suburban, often leave the gay
ghetto and move into the commercial theatre. These plays present
gay/lesbian characters as fully-realized people whose gayness is
accepted and is part of a multi-dimensional personality. The characters
are comfortable members of society, and the focus of the plays is
usually on issues much larger than a character's sexuality.
Written at the beginning of the 1980s, Hall's essays could in no
way predict what the decade would hold. The ravages of AIDS drastic-
7
Terry Helbing, introduction, Cay Theatre Alliance Directory of Cay Plays, ed.
Terry Helbing (New York: JH Press, 1980) 1.
8
Donald L. Loeffler, An Analysis of the Treatment of the Homosexual Characters
in Dramas Produced in the New York Theatre from 7950-7968 (New York: Arno
Press, 1975), 29.
9
Hall, 176.
60 FINK
ally changed the gay/lesbian community and moved its theatre in
unforeseen directions. Two more periods of gay drama must be added
to Hall ' s three phases. The fourth phase of gay drama is the AIDS-era
plays. These are the dramas of most of the 1980s. In them, gay men
feel the impact of AIDS, see themselves and their community decimat-
ed, and often feel powerless against the bastions of leadership, the
church and the government. Many of these dramas fi nd gay men as
victims, paralyzed by fear and/or by disease.
By the end of the 1980s, however, gay male characters take action,
and it is this action that moves gay drama into the Angels-era plays, a
fifth phase of gay drama, so named for Tony Kushner' s socio-political
artistic, critical, and commercial successes. The gay/ lesbian characters
of these dramas refuse to be complacent about the activity or inactivity
of the nation's leaders. The characters find strength in assertion, are
proud of their sexuality, and critique general society with a gay eye.
They mirror the "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" sensibility of
the late 1980s and early 1990s. As Cl um says, these dramas "focus on
how gay people see the society which denies them an equal space
rather than how that society sees and polices them."
10
"The sissy
image is gone and pity and tolerance are not enough.''
11
Plays of Lanford Wilson reflect and illustrate the above five phases.
Leslie Bright is the central character in The Madness of Lady Bright.
Wilson describes him as "a screaming preening queen, rapidly losing
a long-kept 'beauty."'
12
Bright is stranded in his New York City
apartment on an extremely hot Saturday afternoon. In an extended
monologue, the one-act play chronicles Bright's mental breakdown.
Ghost-like characters named Boy and Girl act more as stage managers
to his collapse than as separate characters. They occasionally comment
on the action or Bright's loneliness as he tries to no avail to reach
friends by phone. His vain attempt at communication acts as a parallel
to his attempt at preserving his youth. Leslie laments:
I have varicose veins in my legs. I can't wear hose. I have
hideous, dreadful legs. I have blue, purple, BLACK veins in
my legs. They give me pain-they make me l imp, they ache,
10
Cium, 279.
11
Cium, 289.
12
Lanford Wilson, The Madness of Lady Bright, Eight Plays from Off-Off
Broadway, ed. Nick Orzel and Michael Smith (New York: Bobbs-Merri ll, 1966), 59.
Lanford Wilson Plays
they're ugly. They used to be beautiful and they are bony and
ugly. Old veins.
13
61
A second example of a Wi I son play with Monstrous gay characters
is Balm in Gilead (1965). The cast of characters lists four male hustlers
and two
11
almost transvestite boys-very beautiful, very feminine."
14
Although these characters are not the main focus of the play, they
function importantly in the atmosphere. Wilson attempts to establish
a mood similar to that of Gorki's The Lower Depths: one of portraying
the
11
highest human aspirations springing from the lowest forms of
humanity."
15
His gay characters are a very sordid lot. Wilson even
includes the song
11
Men on the Corner" to be sung by the hustlers.
Later the same year Wilson provided a third example of Monstrous
characters with his one-act Sex Is between Two People (1965). This
play, which remains unpublished, shared the bill with Days Ahead,
another one-act. The setting is the St. Mark's Baths in New York City.
The plot deals with two young men who meet there. When it comes
to shock value, the setting of the bathhouse is just as important as the
characters.
Lemon Sky (1968) provides an example of the second type of play:
the Agitprop. As already mentioned, this type is concerned with
"coming out," or admission/acceptance of a character's homosexuality.
It is here that the character passes from stereotypic outcast or set
dressing into a state of relatively complex characterization.
Lemon Sky relates the story of nineteen-year-old Alan's journey
from the Midwest to California for a reunion with his estranged father.
Alan attempts to establish a relationship with his father and his father's
new family. Numerous problems arise and culminate in Alan's father
using Alan's homosexuality to throw him out of the house.
I'm saying you're through around this house. Not with my
kids-not-you're not going to make sissies out of my two
13
Wilson, Lady Bright, 76.
14
Lanford Wilson, Balm in Gilead and Other Plays, (New York: Hill and Wang,
1965), 5.
15
Ann Crawford Dreher, "Lanford Wilson," in Twentieth Century American
Dramatists ed. John MacNichols (Detroit: Gale Research, 1981), 355.
62
boys, and you're not going to breathe in my house-not my air
any more!
16
FINK
This accusation of bothering the boys is ungrounded and serves to
present Alan in a sympathetic light. Thus, Wilson accomplishes an
agitprop end in Hall's terms-a reinforcement of the knowledge of the
audience of the fact of homosexuality as only a part of a charac-
ter/person's total complex whole.
The same end is accomplished in The Great Nebula in Orion
(1971 ). In this play, two ex-schoolmates of a fashionable East Coast
girls' school are reunited by chance one afternoon in New York City.
One of the women is a happily married suburban housewife and
mother, while the other woman has never been married and is a
successful clothing designer. The women had been close friends in
school and spend much of the play catching up at the designer's
apartment.
Wilson keeps the play light-humored by one-liner asides to the
audience. The women get drunk and discuss lost school chums,
including Phyllis Trahount, who was rumored to have been a lesbian.
The mood becomes somber as both women admit that they are less
than pleased with their lives. When Carrie starts to leave later, she
glances into Louise's bedroom. She sees a photo of Phyllis and realizes
that Louise has loved Phyllis and lost her. They both cry and, in their
mutual misery of unfulfilled lives, become again the friends they once
were.
17
The third phase of gay theatre development, the Suburban, i s very
well-illustrated in Wilson's Fifth of july.
In it, two of the major characters are gay men who are lovers.
But like so many of Wilson's plays, all of the eight characters
in the play are major characters, and the gayness of the two is
given the same treatment accorded the other characters' age,
height, hair color, or profession. That is, their gayness is not
an issue, a problem, or a subject of the play-it is simply taken
for granted.
18
16
Lanford Wilson, Lemon Sky, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), 107.
17
Dreher, 362.
18
Helbing, 2.
Lanford Wi I son Plays 63
In fact, the relationship between Ken and Jed is portrayed as the most
stable relationship among the characters.
In Fifth of july, Wilson's homosexual characters are no longer
stereotypes. Nor are they mouthpieces for liberation. They simply are.
They are relatively comfortable, relatively functioning, and relatively
healthy members of society (which is just about what anyone could
wish for). The reference in the title to a post-independence era can be
applied to the way in which the gay characters are portrayed, free of
the societal and prejudicial images of the past.
By the time Burn This appeared a decade later, AIDS was a fact of
life, if not in the everyday life of middle America, then certainly in the
art/dance/theatre world of New York City. Burn This illustrates the
fourth phase of gay theatre, the AIDS-era plays where gay men are
either dead or paralyzed. The drama focuses on Anna, a dancer and
artist, and her decisions regarding art and love. As the play begins, she
has just returned from the funeral of her roommate and dear friend
Robbie, who, along with his lover, was killed in a boating accident.
Robbie is the classic young man cut down in his prime, an event that
was a weekly, if not daily, occurrence in the AIDS-affected arts world
of the mid-1980s. Wilson began writing the play in 1985, and saw it
staged in 1987. He describes it as "a play about the loss of a dear,
important and talented gay dancer, a play I'd been agonizing over for
two years in response to the almost weekly loss of some of the most
beautiful people I'd known."
19
The other gay character in the play,
the I iving one, is Larry, a retired dancer now working in advertising.
Larry is an observer of the action of the play, and, indeed, of life. He
is not a participant. He is flagrantly gay and self-assured, but at the
same time he is paralyzed. He is emotionally unattached, except for
a few remaining friends, Anna being one of them. Larry is bitter and
caustic, with a rather raunchy wit, and longs for "the innocence and
freedom of yesterday."
20
AI OS is never but its presence
is heavily acknowledged. So much so that when Anna's angry
boyfriend expresses a "Buzz off" attitude, and then attributes it to "my
immune system defending me," Larry replies that "it's a handy thing
to have."
21
Larry's sex life is also restricted, l imited to fantasy of
another time and place.
19
Lanford Wilson, author's note, A Poster of the Cosmos, 21 Short Plays,
(Montpelier, VT: Capital City Press, 1993), 242.
20
Lanford Wilson, Burn This, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 63.
21
/bid, 93.
64 FINK
A Poster of the Cosmos premiered only a year later, but reflects a
very different gay sensibility. Written for an evening responding to
AIDS in the art world, the play illustrates the fifth phase of gay theatre:
the Angels-era plays. The characters of these plays are past victim-
ization, and move to action, trying to make sense of the crisis and/or
to leave their mark on the world. The theme of the pursuit of love in
wartime is also recurrent The characters' actions, personifying the
AIDS activists' slogan ACTION = LIFE, reflect the mobilization of gay
politics and social change in reaction to the AIDS crisis.
A Poster of the Cosmos is a one-character play originally written for
an actor friend of Wilson's, and it provides the audience with a
character hardly considered a typical gay male. Tom is a hulking man
in his thirties. He is working class, a baker, and he does not frequent
gay bars or parks. He and his lover, Johnny, have carved out a life
atypical of that of other gay couples. They have travelled to Florida, to
St. Pete's which was a disappointment, and to Key West and that was
worse. In his extended monologue, Tom relates that Johnny was HIV
positive and began to show signs of AIDS. The audience realizes that
Tom, who has tested HIV negative, is under some kind of interrogation,
and begins to assume that it is for the murder of his lover. Tom mimics
the invisible police who have detained him: "'You don't look like the
kinna guy .. . . You don't look like the kinna guy'd do something like
dat.' What kinna guy is that?"
22
Tom ultimately confesses, but not to the murder of his lover.
Indeed, Johnny died of AIDS in Tom's arms at the hospital. After the
death, Tom continued to hold johnny and then slowly cut holes in the
body, lapping up the blood as it seeped from the wounds. In the
world of the play, "the kinna guy" refers to the act of mutilation but
can also be applied to the character's sexuality. Tom cannot under-
stand why he is HIV negative, "No way I wasn't exposed to that like
three times a week for three years,''
23
and experiences what has
become known as survivor guilt. His blood-letting is a last-chance
effort to share life and death with his lover. Whether the audience
does or does not agree with the action of the character is not important.
What is important is that the character, no longer paralyzed, acts in
some manner, takes some kind of charge, makes a difference in some
way.
22
Wilson, A Poster of the Cosmos, 244.
23
/bid, 249.
Lanford Wi I son Plays
65
Wilson's plays reflect America. His locales are as varied as his
characters. His plays have been said to "document America ... (to)
chronicle Americans at their best and worst."
24
In doing so, Wilson
also documents the place of gays and lesbians in American life. But his
plays are rarely only "about" being homosexual. The Madness of Lady
Bright explores loneliness and frustration. Lemon Sky explores
father/son/family relationships. The Great Nebula in Orion explores
disillusionment and unfulfilled l ives. Fifth of july explores family,
commitment to ideals, and the importance of roots. Burn This explores
the meaning of passion, love, and art. A Poster of the Cosmos explores
commitment, love, and death. At the same time that Wilson's plays
illustrate five distinct phases of gay drama, they also employ homosexu-
al characters as a means to explore larger issues, issues that involve not
only what it means to be gay or lesbian, but also what it means to be
human. And isn't that the issue of theatre?
24
Gene Barnett, Lanford Wilson, (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 149.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Spring 1995)
Stevedore in Seattle: A Case Study in The
Politics of Presenting Race on Stage
TINA REDD
To be able to specify the intersections among class, gender, family,
nationality, and race makes generalizations difficult but might be one way
to move the conversation forward ... .
-Rena Fraden
1
When one attempts to negotiate the somewhat uncertain terrain of
class, gender, family, nationality, and race in the 1990s, the Negro
units of the Federal Theatre Project can provide historical examples of
how the theatre has navigated that same territory. On 6 May 1936, the
Negro unit in Seattle, Washington, opened the second production of its
first season with the Peters and Sklar play, Stevedore. A history of the
formation of Seattle's Negro Repertory Company (NRC) and of its
production of Stevedore not only outlines the difficulties, not yet
resolved, of staging race in American theatre, but also serves as a very
useful site for investigating the new directions that Rena Fraden, in the
above quote, suggests are possible. By looking back, it is hoped that
the conversation specifically about race and class, and especially about
the intersections of the two, can be moved forward.
The tension between race and class was actually the focus of
Stevedore from its inception. By the time Theatre Union's production
of Stevedore opened in April 1934 at the Civic Repertory Theatre in
New York City, to the approval of even "bourgeois" critics, the play
had come a long way from Paul Peters's initial1930 work titled Wharf
Nigger. In its transformation from the 1930 version, the play was
revised three times, for Peters "had found political enlightenment, and
felt that the play dealt inadequately with the 'real social forces' behind
the racial conflict" and set out with George Sklar "to show that the
1
Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935-1939 (Cambridge:
University Press, 1994), 205.
Stevedore 67
Negro question was not a racial issue at all, but an economic one."
2
The result was a play that united its black and white working-class
characters, pitting them against the "real" enemy-capitalist exploita-
tion. This shift in focus, from race to class, while certainly intended as
a strategy toward correcting the inequities that existed between whites
and blacks, attempted to circumvent the issue of race, subsuming
blackness withi n the realm of a greater evil; and it worked. Stevedore
was the Theatre Union's biggest success. "After 111 performances, the
company took a month's respite and then returned for another 64
performances. After the New York closing, the play went on the road,
visiting Phi !adelphia, Washington, Detroit, and Chicago."
3
In the history of American pol itical theatre, Stevedore exemplifies
what might be the most successful intersection of progressive politics
and theatre i n the depression era where issues of race are concerned.
As the actors involved in the Seattle Negro Unit were quick to point
out, many of the plays available to black casts at the time depicted their
race by using stereotypes that they found to be oppressive. In a
"whispering campaign" against Porgy during the play selection process
of the newly created NRC, a committee consisting of African-Americans
from the Citizen's Committee and the King County Colored Progressive
Democratic Club made written protest.
The play [Porgy] is something that really is not wanted in
Seattle or any other place. It is too degrading to be put on at
this time. Any play that is elevating to the race, we have no
obj ections to, but any play that is not elevating .... There is
nothing to be gained from it.
4
The committee went on to submit a list of plays it felt would appro-
priately serve the needs of Seattle's African-American community, and
at the top of that list was Stevedore. Stevedore was listed as the second
production after Porgy by NRC organizers at the Seattle Repertory
Playhouse (hereafter Playhouse) . This is not to say that Stevedore was
preferred by African-Americans and Progressive whites for the same
1
Gerald Rabkin, Drama and Commitment: Politics of the American Theatre of
the Thirties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 54.
3
Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage: American Drama and Theatre of the
Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 69.
4
Seattle Repertory Playhouse Log, page 46, in Seattle Repertory Playhouse
Collection, Manuscript and Archives Section, University of Washington at Seattle.
68 REDO
reasons. In fact, by comparing the playwrights' motives and the com-
ments from the Seattle committee, it is clear that their objectives were
very different. Progressive whites, I ike Florence and Burton james, who
directed Seattle's Negro Unit, were hoping to bring racial issues into
the white-dominated political realm, while the African-American
community was concerned with the representation of African-Americans
on stage. Strategically, th.ese two concerns certainly overlap, but in
practice Seattle's production history shows how Progressive concerns
ultimately took priority over the African-American desire to uplift the
race through representations that would disrupt the stereotypes that
white audiences had become accustomed to.
The race/class connection had already established itself in the labor
history of Seattle. The uneasy relationship between organized labor
and African-Americans dates back to the turn of the century in Seattle,
and the significance of the Negro unit's production of Stevedore cannot
be divorced from the local history of the relationship between African-
Americans in Seattle and Seattle's commercial shipping industry, which
by the turn of the century was that city's largest employer.
5
While the
historical tensions between struggles for racial equality and for
economic opportunities, especially during the Popular Front, share
certain commonalities across the nation, the NRC's production reveals
certain socio-political nuances specific to the region.
By 1916, Seattle was the largest commercial seaport on the Pacific
coast and the longshoremen's strike that year was the impetus for the
recruitment of 1,400 strikebreakers, four hundred of whom were
African-Americans brought in from New Orleans, St. Louis, and Kansas
City.
6
Quintard Taylor, in his history of Seattle's African-American
community, notes that "the 1916 strike was particularly bitter because
of the racial conflict introduced by the arrival of the largest number of
black strikebreakers in the city's history" and supports this claim with
the personal narrative of one of the local "blacks" hired on the docks
who recalls an experience on a trolley car:
Three [strikers] went directly to the two Negroes [strikebreak-
ers] sitting just in front of me .... "Get up, you black son of
a bitch. We'll teach you to break a strike and take the food
out of our kids' mouths." The biggest of them said to the
5
Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District
from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1994), 50.
6
/bid., 50-53.
Stevedore
Negro sitting on the aisle, "Didn't you hear me, nigger?" Still
the man didn't move. With that the striker swung his cargo
hook and caught him in the neck just below the ear, pulling
him to his feet like a half of beef. "We should burn you alive
like they do down south."
7
69
This reference to the South indicates a certain awareness on the part of
the aggressor of a regional identity conflict between being a Northerner
and a racist. This point becomes an interesting marker since Stevedore
was produced only in Northern states in this country.
As a result of the 1916 dock workers' strike, the International
Longshoremen's Association admitted blacks into membership, but
racial tensions continued as white longshoremen continued to receive
job preference over African-Americans. Major strikes followed in 1921
and 1934, with African-Americans incrementally increasing within the
union ranks as an effective means of combatting their recruitment as
strikebreakers, so that by the 1936-37 strike, which was in full swing
when Stevedore opened, employers were forced to abandon the
practice altogether.
8
While the Longshoremen's Association has
particular relevance to the subject matter of Stevedore, the connection
between organized labor and Florence and Burton James/ the directors
of the NRC, can be documented as early as 1932 when the Washington
State Labor News informed its readers that the Playhouse was "strictly
a union house ever since its inception ... employing union stage
employees and musicians from the beginning."
10
Burton James
1
Stevedore's director, then, was predisposed to a play that examined
class conflict; he was not, however, particularly concerned with how
African-American characters would be represented on stage.
Prior to their efforts to organize the NRC, Florence and Burton
James had approached Seattle's African-American community. In her
unpublished autobiography, Fists Upon a Star, Florence James says that
7
/bid., 53.
8
Richard C. Berner, Seattle 1921-1946: From Boom to Bust (Seattle: Charles
Press, 1992), 348.
9
The Jameses operated the Seattle Repertory Playhouse from 1928-1951. For a
history of the theatre, see Ronald West, Left Out: The Seattle Repertory Playhouse
and the Problem of Leftist Theatre During the Depression Era, Ph.D. diss., University
of Washington, 1993.
10
Washington State Labor News, 30 September 1932, 5.
70 REDO
she and Burton "had gone into the Negro Community of Seattle and
found concealed there talent that exceeded" all their expectations,
11
and in September 1932 she read the script of In Abraham's Bosom to
a group of interested people, many of whom would make up the cast
of the production of. that play. The success of In Abraham' s Bosom
rested largely on the appeal of the gospel choir that served as a chorus
for the production. This chorus was so popular, in fact, that promotion-
al preview concerts were arranged for subscribers and their guests and
an over-the-air concert was broadcast on local radio station KOMO for
the public at large.
12
The success of In Abraham's Bosom was still in
the mind of the Playhouse's secretary, Albert Ottenheimer, four years
later when, commenting on the NRC's first production, Noah, he said,
The acting in this production is not on the same high level of
general excellence as was IN ABRAHAM'S BOSOM or, it's my
guess, that STEVEDORE wi II be.
13
Ottenheimer's remarks have to do with his notions of what the
"Negro" cast is capable of "grasping," since Noah, a text originally
intended for white actors, was, to him, "farther outside" the cast's
"experience."
14
It was also with the production of In Abraham's Bosom that many
of the actors who would later make up the core of the NRC were
introduced to the professional stage, allowing them to list that as
occupation so that they were eligible for the Federal Relief Program.
Most notable of the returning actors was Theodore Browne, who would
later turn playwright. His john Henry play, Natural Man, ultimately
became the vehicle enabling him to move to Chicago and then to
New York to work. Yet even with the connection to African-American
community that In Abraham's Bosom established, the jameses still had
considerable difficulty demonstrating to project directors that these ties
were sufficient to establish a Negro unit in Seattle. One of the first
hurdles the jameses were to encounter in their proposal for the unit is
noted on 14 November 1935:
11
Fiorence James, Fists Upon a Star, ms. in Seattle Repertory Playhouse
Collection.
12
Piayhouse Log, 31 October 1935.
13
Piayhouse Log, 26 April 1936.
14
/bid.
Stevedore
Mr. Sampson of the W.P.A. called Mr. james today. It seems
that to have proof of the availability of the Negroes for our
project, it is necessary for them to enter a second choice on
their registration. Most of them naturally registered under their
professions. Now they'll have to indicate singing or acting as
second choice and they'll have to do it themselves, so it'll be
up to us to get word around through Joe Jackson at the Urban
League, Ted Browne, joe Staton, Alberta Walker .. . .
15
71
Browne, Staton, and Walker were all part of the cast of In Abraham's
Bosom, and joe jackson, along with a labor organizer, had actually
been the first to propose a Negro unit to federal officials. They were
turned down.
The Jameses' intent was to put on plays about Negroes. As their
proposal to open the Negro unit with Porgy illustrates, however, they
were not concerned with the stereotypes deeply embedded within the
representations of African-Americans in those productions. Plays such
as Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom urge white spectators to sympa-
thize with the plight of African-Americans but leave the stereotype of
the static and singular black identity intact. Rena Fraden points out that
even before the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was created, African-
Americans were concerned with the representation of that identity:
The short-lived four-year history of the FTP was part of a much
longer attempt by blacks to negotiate a greater freedom of
expression on the American stage that had been so severely
marked by racist assumptions.
16
Yet within the bureaucracy and even within the aims of the FTP
there was little room to negotiate such uncertain terrain. Given the
economic stress the nation as a whole was undergoing and the project's
ultimate goal to provide employment, the race issue was subsumed
under more palpable themes. Hallie Flanagan reports about the Seattle
Unit in Arena:
Ted Browne, a member of the Negro group .. . explained in
a letter to the Washington office the principles of their choice,
"In Lysistrata, Stevedore, and Noah we present plays whose
15
Piayhouse Log.
16
Fraden, 18.
72 REDO
universal theme remams the same regardless of race or
creed."
17
In attempting to look back on the activit ies that led to the formation
of the NRC, we must understand that one goal of the FTP was to
provide a means of expression for African-Americans, but we must also
recognize and bring to light the very assumptions about African-
American identity that kept that expression from being realized. We
can begin with the events that led up to Seattle's production of
Stevedore to illustrate how this conflict played itself out.
African-Americans were not in a position to take charge when the
decision was made to create Negro units within the FTP. According to
Hallie Flanagan, Rose McClendon suggested that the Harlem Unit begin
under the leadership of John Houseman in order to give black actors
professional leadership in the areas of directing and design;
18
in
Seattle a proposal by African-Americans joseph Jackson and Frederick
Darby "was rejected because they could not provide adequate space,
and could identify no experienced black performers."
19
This despite
the fact that jackson had been the lead in the Playhouse's production
of In Abraham's Bosom and would be called upon immediately to help
the jameses organize their proposal , and that the early auditions for that
production had taken place at and had cast its chorus from a local
African Methodist Church where "dramatic activities" had previously
taken place. Although it cannot be documented, Evamarii johnson
suggests, in her dissertation about the Seattle Negro Unit, that it was
the jameses' connection to joseph jackson that was the impetus for
their subsequent application to the project.
In her early formulations about the Negro units, Flanagan describes
one of the project' s goals: "While every effort was made to find and
develop Negro Playwrights, the Federal Theatre did not limit produc-
tions by Negro groups in any way. "
20
Considerable research remains to be done on African-American
playwrights such as Zora Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes that
17
Hallie Flanagan, Arena (New York: Dusel, Sloane and Pearce, 1940), 304.
18
/bid., 63.
19
Evamarii Alexandria johnson " A Production History of the Seattle Federal
Theatre Project Negro Repertory Company, 1935-1939," Ph.D. diss., University of
Washington, 1981, 24.
2
Fianagan, 63.
Stevedore
73
would document the plays that were written and not produced. The
very idea that Negro playwrights needed to be "developed" and Negro
actors needed to be found ignores the substantial history of African-
American drama, particularly in the period just prior to the formation
of the FTP. In Seattle, the ways in which African-Americans were
"limited" were not only inherent in FTP pol icy, as in the prerequisites
for starting a Negro unit, but were also the result of deeply embedded
stereotypes about African-American identity that the whites who were
in charge used as the foundation for their decisions regarding the Negro
unit.
Once the proposal for the Seattle Negro Unit was submitted by
Burton james in April 1935, there was little activity concerning the
project until six months later when james was called in to discuss his
plans with H.C. Sampson, then the Assistant Supervisor of Professional
and Service Projects of the WPA. By 1 November, a detailed proposal
was in the Playhouse staff's hands and stipulated "employing about 65
Negroes in two productions, Porgy and Stevedore over a five-month
period."
21
By 4 November, racial tensions were already beginning to
surface. An entry in the Playhouse log summarizes the first of the
many conflicts to come:
Mr. james told me today that he had received confidential
information that the chief obstacle to our WPA project is a man
by the name of Fucher, a Southerner, who has previously
objected to projects mixing blacks and whites. He is said to
be quite powerful and there is a possibility that the fate of the
project will rest with him. This is unofficial but from a source,
Mr. james says, to be relied on.
22
Again the foregrounding of racism as a "Southern" concern surfaces,
yet as a later log entry shows, Ottenheimer, the Playhouse's secretary,
plays against certain givens regarding race in his description of
Theodore Browne's performance in a mixed-race production called
Black and White.
Theodore Browne, in full evening dress, white ties and tails, is
a handsome figure of a man and a credit to his race. He
makes a very believable famous Negro singer, Paul Robeson or
21
Piayhouse Log, 1 November 1935.
22
Piayhouse Log, 4 November 1935.
74 REDD
Roland Hayes. . . . He has dignity and distinction m the
part. 23
While a very progressive description for 1935, the focus on race as
"difference" conflicts with the notions of universality under which the
Seattle Negro Unit, in Theodore Browne's own words quoted earlier,
was supposed to operate and toward which it was to strive.
On 27 November, Glenn Hughes, who was then the Regional
Director of the FTP, submitted his proposal for the committee that
would set up the Seattle Negro Unit. The members included George
Hood, "well-known Northwest theatrical manager," Basi I Gray,
"business representative of the Seattle Stage Employees," Harry
Pelletier, "technical director" of the University of Washington's
Division of Drama, and Harry Pfeil, "producer of light operas."
24
Given that it was a Negro unit that was being organized, the fact that
no "Negroes" were included is indicative of a covert racism that would
continue to guide decisions regarding the unit.
On 12 December 1935, Ottenheimer said, "The project seems to
have definitely gone through, because interviews of the Negroes for the
cast and chorus have been called for tomorrow."
25
He goes on to
outline his own personal philosophy of the benefits of involvement
with the project.
Although The Playhouse will not gain financially and may
actually be out of pocket if the project shows draw trade away
from our own productions, we will profit immeasurably in
prestige, will likely have created something of lasting artistic
value, may have given the Negro theatre a real start in Seat-
tle.26
Ottenheimer's position seems in line with Burton and Florence jameses'
as it is stated in Fists Upon a Star:
23
Piayhouse log, 21 November 1935.
24
letter from Glenn Hughes to H.C. Samson, dated 27 November 1935. Box
70, library of Congress Archives.
25
Piayhouse log, 12 December 1935.
26
/bid.
Stevedore
For a long while they had endeavored to find an outlet so that
these people could develop their talents and gain a measure of
equality with their neighbors. The Federal Theatre Project
seemed to answer that purpose.
27
75
And the Jameses were apparently not the only people interested in
the welfare of their Negro neighbors, for at the first audition, represen-
tatives of the Democratic Committee were "on hand to look out for
party interests."
28
This was, after all, a New Deal project. The ends
toward which all part ies were working-equality for Negroes and the
development of their talent-are not so much at issue here as the
means. Music and dance were to serve as the means of including
Negroes in the project and of expressing their identity, which the white
organizers understood to be stable and "Southern."
From the benefit of a perspective almost sixty years after the fact,
claims that the practices of the Playhouse staff seem to carry on a
tradition of negative stereotyping of African-American actors are easy
to accept given the fact that many of these very same problems remain
to be resolved today. Before we move on to examine some of these
claims, however, it is necessary first to put these practices in the
context of the attempt to organize an artistic endeavor within what
Ottenheimer describes as the "pick and shovel work" the WPA's
system of personnel management was designed to accommodate. It
should become clear after a description of the initial casting process
that no critique of the shortcomings of the activities surrounding the
NRC can be detached from the tremendous amount of energy,
patience, and paperwork required from the theatre artists, who believed
the taxing amount of commitment worthwhile.
Two letters, the first dated 27 January 1936/
9
and the response
dated 28 January 1936,
30
can put the amount of work to which
Burton James and his staff had committed themselves in a frame
familiar to most theatre artists-casting a show. The 27 January letter
was written by Ottenheimer on behalf of the Playhouse's Executive
Committee and was addressed to George T. Hood, the State Director
27
Fists, 9.
28
Piayhouse Log, 13 December 1935.
29
Piayhouse Log, 27 January 1936.
30
Letter from George T. Hood, Manuscript and Archives Section, University of
Washington at Seattle.
76 REDD
of the FTP, in order to express frustration over not receiving a reply to
a request to raise the percentage of non-rei ief workers from ten to
twenty-five percent. Ottenheimer says, "Unless the following details
relative to theatre project 814-(1) Negro Plays are ironed out before
February 1st, The Seattle Repertory Playhouse wishes to withdraw its
sponsorship."
31
In addition, the Playhouse was concerned with the
length of time (five months) that the original contract with the FTP
stipulated; it was already january and the staff had intended to close the
season by the end of May. They had also reached no agreement with
the government over ticket prices and the dispersal of whatever funds
were received from admissions. The cause of the most frustration,
however, was the perception that the WPA had no idea of what theatre
production entailed. The following, taken from the longest paragraph
in the letter, iII ustrates this:
It is obvious that the production of the plays as contemplated
is a specialized, complicated piece of work and bears no
relationship to the unskilled labor of grading and digging
ditches. The Playhouse has held for its own information eight
auditions of singers and actors, these in addition to the official
auditions of the committee .... May I remind you again that
in casting a play one needs certain types of people as well as
certain specific abilities. . . . As it stands today we have an
excellent chorus director assigned and a chorus which is
comprised of all soprano voices.
32
Later we will return to these notions of "certain types of people" and
"certain specific abilities" but for now it suffices to note the tone of the
letter as it I ikely reflects weeks of effort and ordeal.
In response to this letter, George T. Hood said, "Replying to yours
of January 27; please advise the Executive Committee ... that Burton
James verbally stated that he had knowledge of talented colored folk,
on relief."
33
Hood continues with a list of eligible actors, all of whom
he was able "to visit ... and help to get their relief status established."
And finally, he extends his sympathy for the obstacles the Playhouse
staff faced:
31
Piayhouse Log, 27 January 1936.
32
/bid.
33
Hood letter.
Stevedore
Being professional myself I am fully aware of the fact that the
production of the plays contemplated is specialized and
com pi icated work and requires talent of a unique nature,
which is one of the reasons for delay, I presume.
34
77
But as someone familiar with the paperwork process, Hood reminds
Ottenheimer of the official necessity of keeping the flow going.
You state that the Playhouse had held, for its own information,
eight auditions for singers and actors in addition to the official
auditions of the theatre committee. I presume that you, or Mr.
James, have submitted the names of desirable applicants as a
result of your auditions, to this office.
35
This is just one example of the difficulties that all Federal Theatre
workers faced In coordinating with government officials. The number
of productions mounted is a staggering example of sheer tenacity on
the part of the artists involved. We who choose to look back are,
ironically, aided in our endeavor by the vast amount of paperwork that
the project produced.
Following this two-day exchange between the organizers of the
project came the 31 january letter from the African-American communi-
ty in resistance to the proposed opening of the Seattle Negro Unit with
Porgy.
36
And given the amount of work the Playhouse staff had
already invested, it is not difficult to understand how this resistance was
interpreted as an ungrateful gesture on the part of those who were seen
as the beneficiaries of Playhouse labor. When Ottenheimer received
news of the "Colored Committee" and their letter, he remarked "I
should have received a copy ere this, but have not. Dorothy's husband,
jim, had a copy made of it because it struck him as so funny."
37
In
many ways the Seattle Negro Unit reflects the coming together of two
worlds that were for the most part historically in opposition. As Rena
Fraden points out, this is true of the formation of the Negro units
nationwide. As an equalizing strategy for giving a marginalized race a
voice on the American stage, "the rhetoric of inclusion or 'giving'
35
/bid.
36
Seattle Repertory Playhouse Collection, University of Washington Archives.
37
Piayhouse Log, 4 February 1936.
78 REDO
opportunities to others did not take into account history, that which
was already there."
38
The history to which Fraden refers is that of
negative images of African-Americans on stage.
These negative images of African-Americans date back to the
beginnings of minstrelsy when whites in blackface and then blacks in
blackface represented the Negro as the singing and dancing "coon"
who spoke nonsensical English with a big-lipped smile on his face.
39
Removing negative African-American stereotypes obviously was not one
of the objectives of the Federal Theatre and, in fact, while plans were
being made for the opening of the Seattle Negro Unit at the Playhouse,
Work Project No. 818-(1 )'s Negro Minstrels were already performing
in the area. By june the Minstrel Unit had given 33 performances to
8,515 people, attesting to the continued popularity of the form during
this same period.
40
The popularity of minstrelsy might also explain
the addition of music in the form of a gospel-type chorus to the
otherwise realistic format of Stevedore. In fact, the necessity of a
chorus never seemed to be questioned by the Playhouse staff, who had
drawn large white audiences by using a gospel chorus to back up the
"Negro" actors in the Playhouse's production of In Abraham's Bosom.
Once the Seattle Negro Unit was established and rehearsals began,
music remained the overriding concern of Burton James as he put the
production together.
While Ottenheimer, whose notes make up the primary source for
establishing the Playhouse objectives, does not necessarily reflect the
opinions of others, particularly those of Burton James, the following
comments do give us a sense of how African-American identity was
being constructed in the minds of whites, both in the audience and
behind the scenes:
The Negro, somehow, brings something peculiarly his own to
the stage. I don't mean by that an echo of the universal
mistaken notion that all negroes are just natural-born singers,
dancers and actors. Many of them, I ikely a much greater pro-
portion than other races, have natural aptitudes for these
things, but by no means all of them and even those who do
38
Fraden, 23.
39
For a detailed analysis of African-American stereotypes, see Donald Bogle
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Gay Bucks (New York: Continuum, 1990).
40
Project Report from the State of Washington. From Walter Krimont to William
P. Fansworth, 15 June 1936, p. 780, Box 70, National Archives.
Stevedore
must learn how. But they have a native quality, a relaxation,
a use of the body and the like which many other peoples have
lost, I imagine, in a longer veneer of civilization.
41
79
As Ottenheimer was a key player in Seattle's most progressive theatre
establishment, it seems that the African-Americans had a considerable
burden to carry in their quest for realistic representation on stage.
Then again, there is little evidence to support the conclusion that
the African-Americans had such a quest in mind. Quintard Taylor
optimistically suggests that "the African American community accepted
these caricatures and no doubt obtained ironic satisfaction from playing
theatrical roles Seattle whites naively assumed remained central to
black life.
42
But the more likely reason for irony was the $80 a month
salary,
43
for just as the Harlem Negro Unit was the biggest employer
in Harlem, so the salary offered by the Seattle Negro Unit was consider-
ably higher than many African-Americans could otherwise expect to
receive. In addition to the campaign against producing Porgy, another
instance of documented resistance in Seattle came in the Children's
Unit when an actress was "to be costumed in an Aunt Jemima red
kerchief" and refused.
44
But our access to these moments of resis-
tance relies on documentation that very often did not focus on and was
not intended to describe the interpersonal nuances of the Negro
personnel. Yet as in the "whispering campaign" that ultimately
developed into a formal written letter that was taken as "funny," it
would be difficult for African-Americans to organize against the best
opportunity in theatre they had been offered to date.
By early April the Negro unit's first production, Andre Obey's
Noah, was in rehearsal. Noah replaced Porgy, but from the informa-
tion available it is difficult to ascertain whether this was because of the
protest made by the African-American community or because the
Playhouse simply couldn't obtain the rights to Porgy. Ottenheimer
remarks that "Porgy was not available, because the opera based on it,
Porgy and Bess, will go on the road."
45
Whatever the reasons for the
41
Piayhouse Log, 26 April 1936.
42
Taylor, 152.
43
/bid.
44
Fraden, 178.
45
Piayhouse Log, 26 April 1936.
80 REDO
change, the cast of Noah was not given the reprise from negative
stereotypes that it had hoped for. In a tradition that had already been
established with the success of The Green Pastures
46
on Broadway,
the jameses "used Negro music and introduced Negro dancing to
express the jubilation of Noah and his family when the flood re-
cedes."47 Evamari i johnson describes the jameses' intent.
A sense of naivete, whimsy and simple faith was the effect
james wanted the production to create. He wrote, " In
producing the play with negro cast, the Biblical characteriza-
tions were followed as nearly as possible .. . . Every effort was
made to present the play in a simple, unstilted manner,
comparable with the negro method of expression."
48
Again, we see in this account the presumption of a certain Negro
identity in terms of which the director was shaping his staged repre-
sentation. johnson also notes that in the FTP production report the
original musical arrangements for the show were "typical southern
work and church songs."
49
When the .Playhouse had produced In
Abraham's Bosom, the cast had had to train to learn Green's Southern
dialect; the same may have been true of these typical Southern songs.
While many argue that the plays of O'Neill, Green and Connelly
moved characterizations of African-Americans away from the minstrel
caricatures, the insertion, by the Playhouse directors, of dance and
music into even such realistic plays as In Abraham's Bosom and
Stevedore is an example of representation folding back on itself. The
singing and dancing Southern Negro now becomes the model through
which Negro authenticity, even in the Northwestern corner of the
country, is constructed on stage.
While Noah lent itself to the gospel choir renditions both during
the action and between the scenes, the addition of music to the plot of
Stevedore exemplifies the lengths to which it was possible to go to
preserve the idea that singing and dancing was as essential to African-
American identity as it was entertaining to whites. In the production
46
For a detailed description of this production see Walter C. Daniel, De Lawd:
Richard B. Harrison and The Green Pastures (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).
47
Fists, 190.
48
johnson, 42.
49
/bid.
Stevedore 81
report for the week ending 4 April 1936,
50
James reports that while
the actors were off book, experimentation in developing music for the
funeral scenes was actively being pursued. The chorus was "working
out .. . suitable work songs, prison songs, etc." and preparat ions were
under way for three public performances at Seattle's Press Club,
Roosevelt Democratic Club, and the Jefferson Day Banquet. All this
was before the rights for the play had even been requested.
51
There
is no doubt that the music was seen as the authenticating factor in this
product ion.
They needed "work" songs for "Stevedore," but no one knew
any. After a long search, a man swinging a pick was finally
found who know [sic] some such songs. They had never been
heard by the Repertory group before, and they were written
down for perhaps the first time. The ditchdigger-songster was
transferred to the FTP.
52
In a handwritten note in the original copy of Fists Upon a Star is the
additi onal information that this "songster" had worked as a stevedore
on the docks in Louisiana and was completely illiterate. Thus the
realism of Peters and Sklar's play was turned into what director Valerie
Curtis-Newton
53
terms "New Minstrelsy," and the poetical thrust of
the production was couched in acceptable terms for representing
African-Americans on stage.
In mid-April, Negro music was making the rounds in Seattle while
Negro actors were being replaced. Two of the actors in Noah "were
not progressing as rapidly as the remainder of the cast," and these parts
were replaced with less than a month left before opening. The two
actors, Old Mr. Green (as described by Ottenheimer), who played
Noah, and Mabel Smalley, who was cast as "Mama," were replaced by
Theodore Browne and Sara 01 iver, both from the Stevedore cast where
50
Seattle Repertory Playhouse Collection.
51
letter from Guy Williams to Leland Hayward Inc., dated 5 April 1936.
Manuscript and Archives Section, University of Washington at Seattle.
52
Fists, 9 .
53
Curtis-Newton, an MFA directing student at the University of Washington,
pl ans to bring Stevedore back to the Playhouse for her thesis project in 1996.
82
REDO
Browne was the lead character, Lonnie Thompson.
54
Meanwhile, the
chorus was making several public appearances. In addition to the
Playhouse chorus appearances, Guy Williams, in a letter to Hallie
Flanagan, was happy to report that,
The Negro Minstrels are pleasing under Claude Myrick's super-
vision. They are offering standard song and dance and comedy
which is bringing in constant letters of appreciation from the
CCC Camp people.
55
It was the song and dance that would make both Noah and Stevedore
successes, too. In describing dress rehearsals for Noah, Ottenheimer
remarks, "The production is uneven as to acting, but the production is
a splendid and significant beginning .... The music, save for occasion-
al deficiencies, alone makes it worthwhile."
56
It never seemed to
occur to anyone related to the production that perhaps the uneven
acting was as much a perceptual problem as it was performance
related. The focus remained on the desire to see these actors play their
parts naturally, as defined by the dominant culture, so that the only
moments when this happened were when the "Negroes" were doing
what comes "natural"-singing or dancing.
Finally, on 26 April 1936, the NRC opened with its production of
Noah. This first production was received favorably by the local press,
including the black press. The Northwest Enterprise ran a full page
picture of Theodore Browne on the front page in addition to its
commentary expressing delight over the Playhouse's commitment to
producing "All-Negro" shows.
57
Ottenheimer was also pleased with
the results:
What Mr. and Mrs. James have done is as fine an example of
creative direction as may be found. Without altering the text,
they have transformed NOAH into a dramatized Negro
spiritual. The inclusion of the songs by the chorus, sitting on
specially-built benches in the pit, at the opening and closing of
each scene and sometimes within the body of the scene, is one
54
Piayhouse Log, 26 April 1936.
55
Gary Williams to Hallie Flanagan, 13 April 1936, National Archives.
56
Piayhouse Log, 26 April 1936.
57
The Northwest Enterprise, 1 May 1936, 1.
Stevedore
thing. But they have so worked up the business, with the
occasional inclusion of purely Negro dancing, that it is now a
purely Negro play.
58
83
This "pureness" that can be found only in singing and dancing
provides the core of African-American representation in all the
Playhouse' s Negro productions. The first production featured a Negro
quartet for Uncle Tom's Cabin, and this initial connection led to the
chorus for In Abraham's Bosom, many of whom were the same singers
featured in Noah.
59
It was hardly then an illogical leap for the
Jameses to assume that Stevedore would have the singing so essential
to capturing the " real" Negro presence on stage.
One would have to be completely uninformed to miss the Marxist
leanings in the text of Stevedore regardless of the musical interludes
that might soften the message. The very short opening scene begins
with a disagreement between a white woman and her illicit lover and
ends in the man beati ng the woman in rage over her threat to disclose
their affair to his fiance. When neighbors rush to the scene in response
to her screams and ask what had happened, the scene ends with her
response: "It was-'weeping desperately'-a nigger."
60
Scene two
opens with a voice from a police radio: "Calling car 34. Calling car
34. Woman attacked at Poidras and Magazine Street. Pick up all
suspicious Negroes in neighborhood."
61
Once this driving force for
the plot is established, the play attempts to draw connections between
the plight of working class blacks and whites on the New Orleans
docks, as the black protagonist, Lonnie Thompson, a stevedore, is one
of the men jailed in the police sweep. In the following scenes we are
introduced to the other black dock workers and some of the women of
this community at a local diner. We also come to understand the
deeper implications of Thompson's incarceration through the sympa-
thetic white union organizer, Lem Morris.
58
Piayhouse Log, 26 April 1936.
59
Piayhouse Log, 27 April 1936.
60
Paul Peters and George Sklar, Stevedore, (New York: Covici-Friede, 1934), 15.
61
Stevedore, 16.
84 REDD
LEM: Listen you know damned well, the only reason they ar-
rested him was to keep him from organizing the Stuyvesant
Dock.
62
In response to another union member who "never did savvy the idea
of blacks and whites in one union anyway," Lem responds with a line
that was sure to resonate with the labor community that received
special invitations to opening night in Seattle.
LEM: We've had this out before. The only way we can tie
up this river front is by organizing these black boys, and
you know it. There are three of them to every white man
on these docks. And if you think you're going to pull a
strike in two weeks without them, you're crazy. Now,
what do you want them to do? Stick with us, or scab
for Walcott?
63
In the end the white union men and the black dock workers unite to
hide Thompson from the police. In the final scenes the blacks, who
have gathered for a secret funeral for one of the dock workers ki lied in
the struggle, decide to stand together and fight an approaching white
mob. Thompson is heroically shot while fighting from behind a
barricade made from chairs, tables and other furnishings pulled from
the workers' homes. And while Thompson lies dead in the arms of his
would-be wife, Ruby, Lem Morris and his men arrive, sending the
white mob running.
Peters and Sklar's text has been called melodramatic by some
critics,
64
but, as the Playhouse set shows, the attempt at realism is
unmistakable. Scenery and props were constructed for both interior
and exterior scenes, including a lunch counter inside the diner and
platforms for the alleys, and barrels and burlap sacks for the wharf
scenes. The properties list for the production included items as
"practical" as four candles and two dishtowels, stools for the diner, and
62
Stevedore, 60.
63
5tevedore, 61.
64
The Federal Theatre News, June-July 1936, 1, called it "melodrama with an
idea."
Stevedore 85
a coffin for the funeral scene.
65
The realism is likely the cause for the
resignation of one of the Playhouse's board members. His protest is
quoted in Fists Upon a Star: "Education's wonderful, but not this kind
of education."
66
It is also likely that the addition of music was on
some level intended to ward off this kind of response from audience
members at large, for the music had the effect of softening the political
message.
The production report gives us the titles of the songs used between
scenes: "St. Louis Blues," "Careless Love," "Bound to Go," and
others, including "A contemporary Negro burial song 'Shall We Meet"'
wh.ich "was sung by the entire cast as part of the funeral scene."
67
These musical interludes likely made transitions between scenes more
interesting, but the point is that the addition of music to this play was
a given from the beginning without any indications from the text and
was motivated completely by the Jameses' own notions of what
authentic Negro drama entailed. Unlike such political musicals as The
Cradle Will Rock, in which the songs were the political message,
Stevedore's work songs commented on the identity of the Negro actors
and intended to tie them to the roots of that identity. The songs were
a psychological device, not aimed at carrying the poetical message of
the play forward but instead acting to unify the Negro experience,
creating authenticity through that experience. The "natural" state of
the Negro, as related in these songs, was as an oppressed race, which
is a very different message from the text, which attempts to examine the
structure that creates that oppression.
The publicity campaign for Stevedore, like the play itself, focused
on bringing together two communities, labor and African-American.
The 13 May preview was an invitational performance for Negroes and
labor leaders.
68
The emphasis on the labor community, however, is
evidenced by the advertising campaign, which called for handing
notices to metropolitan and district labor papers, contacting labor
unions, and distributing hand bills through labor meetings, with
65
FTP Production Bulletin for Stevedore. The Research Center for the Federal
Theatre Project, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
66
Fists, 10.
67
FTP Production Bulletin Music List.
66
Memo from Guy Williams to Burton W. James and Albert Ottenheimer dated
29 April 1936, Manuscript and Archives Section, University of Washington at
Seattle.
86 REDD
speaking engagements at those meetings when possible.
69
The
campaign seems to have been enthusiastically received, as cast member
Joe Staton's comments on one of the performances illustrate:
Boy, those longshoremen came out there one night and they
bought out that show and I'm telling you, it kind of shook us
up. Oh boy! It kind of shook us up because those guys, they
were all for it. . . . People became so engrossed in that last
scene that they came up on stage and helped us build a
barricade. That was really something! Really something.
70
By 23 May, Guy Williams was writing to Hallie Flanagan praising the
production.
The Negro company is currently very successful in Stevedore
which Burton James has done with a briskness just this side of
hysteria, throwing a Negro male choir of twenty-four in the pit
yammering out work songs.
71
In fact, Stevedore proved so popular that it was decided it would run
in repertory through the summer months with Noah and the Negro
unit's next production, Swing Gates Swing, all of which used the same
"yammering" chorus.
In her study of the Negro units, Rena Fraden makes the following
point:
Although the FTP acknowledged the importance of regional
and ethnic differences and accommodated varying tastes for
entertainment from the classical to experimental to minstrelsy,
too often the institution forgot about difference and appealed
to Americans, the people, the Negro as if they were single
identities.
72
69
/bid.
70
Johnson, 53 .
71
Letter from Guy Williams to Hallie Flanagan dated 23 May 1936, Manuscript
and Archives Section, University of Washington at Seattle.
72
Fraden, 5.
Stevedore 87
What is more, in actual practice, such as that in the Seattle Negro Unit
productions, difference was drawn from and expressed as images of
African-Americans that were not far removed from minstrelsy, even
when the play itself, such as Stevedore, was supposed to be social-
real ism. Both labor history and theatre history as they relate to African-
Americans during the depression era in Seattle help to situate this play.
Stevedore, in fact, provides a nexus for the merging of these histories,
but much of the analysis remains to be wrested from the wealth of
information available. In a somewhat discouraging letter more than
two years after the Seattle Negro Unit's inception, a new State Director
of the Project, Edwi n O'Connor, writes "I have lived in every section
of the United States but nowhere, not even in the south, have I encoun-
tered so much anti-negro feeling."
73
Yet another reference to the South, suggesting that somehow the
Pacific Northwest should be different, emerging as it has in history
without the direct burden of slavery. So we must ask why, then, would
African-Americans in this remote Northwest corner of the country, who
had never been to the South, be represented in this particular frame-
work? Similar contradictions make the prospect of further study of this
particular Negro unit, the responses to it, the strategies for its produc-
tions, and the history of a city that perceived itself as liberal in
comparison with the "racist" South, so promising for finding the
intersections that might increase our understanding of the connection
between racism and stage representations. Seattle's production of
Stevedore embodies 'the contradictions of North and South, the
conflicted interest of labor organizers and black union members, and
the tension between progressive ideals and existing racist attitudes
about African-American identity. The conversation is just beginning
and the history of the formation of Seattle's Negro Repertory Company
and its early production of Stevedore illustrates just how fruitful
examining past attempts at
11
Staging race" might be in discovering the
assumptions behind African-American representation in order to move
the conversation forward.
73
Letter from Edwin O'Connor to Howard Miller dated 29 October 1938,
Manuscript and Archives Section, University of Washington at Seattle.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Spring 1995)
"Torchbearers of the Earth":
Women, Pageantry, and Worl d War I
FRANCES DIODATO BZOWSKI
During the first decades of the twentieth century, America
experienced a phenomenon that it had not encountered before that
time and that it would rarely repeat in future years-the community
pageant. Originally an import from England and copied particularly
from the historical pageants of Louis Napoleon Parker, American
pageantry soon developed its own style and format. It also provided
a theatrical opportunity for American women, who came to dominate
the genre as writers, directors, producers, dancers and as the leaders of
civic organizations that produced the pageants. In fact, women were
so prevalent in pageantry that Percy MacKaye, a nationally known
pageant master himself, called it "a new profession for women."
1
Women found in pageantry an acceptable channel for their interests
in community involvement and artistic endeavors, as well as an
excellent medium to present their ideas and values. And best of all,
pageantry, unlike the theatre, was accepted as a proper endeavor for
respectable middle- and upper-class women. Throughout the teen
decade women molded the pageant into an instrument of both national
and personal usefulness as they wrote and directed pageants for both
pacifist and patriotic causes and as they used the genre to illustrate their
own specific gender concerns about militarism and patriarchy.
1
Percy Mac Kaye, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure
(New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1912), 68, quoted in David Glassberg, American
Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 109. In addition to Glassberg, the
most useful general sources on pageantry are Martin S. Tackel , "Women and
American Pageantry: 1908-1918" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1982)
and Naima Prevots, American Pageantry: A Movement for Art & Democracy (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990).
Women, Pageantry, and WWI 89
PREWAR P AG.EANTRY
Pageantry in America actually had a local ancestry as well as a
British one. Its American parent was the civic and historical celebra-
tions of the late nineteenth century. From 1870 to 1890 the number
of state and local historical societies more than doubled, as communi-
ties in this country openly expressed pride in their local history and in
their American past. Often these celebrations were a part of Fourth of
July activities and included parades, consisting of marchers and wagons
carrying tableaux vivant, allegorical representations of the State, Justice,
Liberty and Columbia. Usually these allegorical figures were female,
allowing women to participate in a very public display normally denied
them.
2
In 1905 Louis Napoleon Parker staged the Sherbourne Pageant in
Great Britain to celebrate the 1200th anniversary of the town. Parker
presented eleven episodes of the town's history, staged outdoors and
including six hundred local residents. This was the beginning of the
modern community historical pageant. Its appeal to American "genteel
intellectuals,"
3
artists, and patriots was immediate. In 1906 the
Playground Association of America was founded. From its beginning,
the Association showed an awareness of the importance of pageantry
to provide a palatable means of presenting national and local history,
as well as a way of diverting some of the Fourth of July energy to
constructive activities instead of the increasing use of fireworks.
4
But even more important than providing a safer and saner
celebration for civic holidays, pageantry was recognized as a means to
an end. Here was a way to reinforce traditional American values,
educate and assimilate new immigrants to this country, and instill hope
for a better future. Pageantry appeared to be a perfect means for the
growing reform elements in the country to present their progressive
views on the improvement of American life. As reformers adopted .the
genre for their purposes, they changed and expanded the techniques to
meet their needs. Many of these changes were initiated by women.
For instance, the first pageant that clearly promoted a progressive
agenda was written and staged by Lotta A. Clark, a history teacher from
2
For women's involvement in public activities in the nineteenth century see
Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1990).
3
The term is Glassberg's.
4
5ee "Pageants Better Than Gunpowder," Century, n.s., 58 Uuly 1910): 475-6.
90 BZOWSKI
Boston, with assistance from Virginia Tanner for the dances. Called
The Pageant of the Perfect City: From Cave Life to City Life, it was
performed in 1910 by a cast of 1,200 in Boston. This was the first
pageant in America to use symbolic dance interludes, which later
became an integral part of pageantry. It was also the first to consider
present day problems faced by a community-industrialism, immigra-
tion, education-instead of just glorifying its past. Most important of
all, it was the first to present a dramatic vision of the future. Parker's
English model had dealt only with past events of the community.
Indeed, Parker himself, noting Clark's addition of a future episode,
commented that, "England talks of the good old times and America of
the good times that are to come."
5
By the early years of the teen decade the American pageant had
shaped itself into a form of entertainment with some generally accepted
rules. It depicted a community's past, present, and often future through
a series of episodes that were self-contained but that also contributed
to a central theme or idea. The performance drew upon large numbers
of local people, from hundreds to thousands, from all walks of life, who
were directed by a professional pageant master, very often a woman.
Most pageants were presented outdoors, before a seated audience, but
many were also performed in civic buildings, schools and churches.
Pageants incorporated, often as transitional interludes, both symbolic
dance, folk dance and music. Although scenery was minimal, usually
I ittle more than the natural setting, costumes and color were important
parts of the presentation and the theme. A minimum of speaking parts
were used, but there was usually a spoken prologue, possibly poetry,
and some dialogue in the episodes. Finally, pageants ended with a
colorful march including all the participants.
- In the years just preceding the war in Europe, pageantry reached its
apex in America. As Adelia B. Beard wrote in American Homes and
Gardens in 1912, America was going "pageant mad."
6
Everyone-from
members of the ultra conservative Daughters of the American Revolu-
tion to members of the socialistic International Workers of the World,
from reform-minded settlement workers to staid civic leaders-praised
the importance of the pageant to entertain, instruct and influence. The
growing popularity and importance of pageantry was evident in 1913
when the American Pageant Association (APA) was formed. Although
5
Quoted in Tacke!, 56.
6
Adelia B. Beard, "The American Pageant," American Homes and Gardens 9
Uuly 1912): 239.
Women, Pageantry, and WWI 91
William Chauncy Langdon was elected President, women such as
Hazel MacKaye, Lotta Clark, Margaret Eager, Mary Beegle, Constance
D' Arcy Mackay, and Esther Bates, who were already recognized as
leaders of pageantry, held many of the offices of the APA. In fact,
women were so prominent in the American pageantry movement that
Ralph Davol complained that the art form was "dominated by a
handful of men and several hundred women. It is a demonstration of
the fermenting feminist movement."
7

Indeed, Davol was not really wrong. Pageantry was fast becoming
the province of women, particularly the New Woman of the 191 Os
who demanded equality, suffrage and a special role for women in
America and throughout the world. Perhaps no one better represented
this New Woman using pageantry to promote her views than did Hazel
Mac Kaye. Daughter of Steele MacKaye, actor, playwright and inventor,
and sister of pageant master, Percy MacKaye, Hazel came to her
interest in acting and drama almost from birth. Historians of pageantry
recognize her as a major influence on the direction of American
pageantry just before the war years. She is credited with some
important innovations in the art form, particularly with creating the
pageant of ideas and using the pageant for political purposes rather
than simply community history. An active suffragist she created stirring
pageants for several suffrage organizations, particularly her Suffrage
Allegory, Washington, D.C., 1913, and The American Woman: Six
Periods of American Life, New York, 1914. Her Pageant of Susan B.
Anthony, commissioned by the National Woman's Party in 1915, was
the first to focus on a single individual instead of a community. It was
considered so radical in style that the APA was reluctant to consider it
a pageant at all.
Because MacKaye was as much a feminist and a pacifist as she was
a dramatist, she realized the opportunity for women to use pageantry
for their own purposes. In an unpublished manuscript titled "Wake
Up, Women!-to this Man Made World/' she expressed her belief that
pageantry could be a tool for women in their struggle for equality and
peace. "Through pageantry, we women can set forth our ideals and
aspirations more graphically than in any other way."
8
7
Ralph Davol, A Handbook of American Pageantry (Taunton, Mass.: Davol
Publishing Co., 1914), 94.
8
Ms. in the MacKaye Family Papers at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. For
more on Hazel MacKaye's pageants see Tackel, and Karen J. Blair, "Pageantry for
Women's Rights: The Career of Hazel MacKaye, 1913-1923, " Theatre Survey 31
(May 1990): 23-46.
92 BZOWSKI
Thus, by the beginning of the war in Europe women in America
dominated the popular art of pageantry, not only through sheer
numbers but also through the creation of new forms and new uses for
the genre. The techniques designed by such women as Clark and
MacKaye were embraced by women in pageantry during the years of
the war as they created pageants that they hoped would promote, first,
American pacifism and non-involvement and, later, American prepared-
ness and service.
PAGEANTRY DURING THE WAR
Probably no event in American history provided women with a
greater opportunity to write and direct pageants than World War I. In
the early years of the war in Europe they began by writing anti-war and
pacifist pageants. Most of the peace organizations that formed in the
latter part of the nineteenth century and the many that sprang up in the
early years of the twentieth included large numbers of women. As the
"mothers of humanity"
9
and as the ostensibly passive feminine gender,
women were expected "naturally" to oppose all forms of violence and
destruction that would endanger their homes and families. Peace was
definitely a women's issue. And women were not reticent about
locating the cause of war in the excess of masculine power and the
denial of the female voice in the nation's government. Many women
of the time probably agreed with Charlotte Perkins Gilman when she
wrote in The Man-Made World that:
9
From the preamble of the constitution of the Woman's Peace Party. Probably
the earliest statement of the connect ion between female nature and pacifism was
William Ladd's On the Duty of Females to Promote Peace (Boston: American Peace
Society, 1836; Garland reprint, 1971). Much has been written on this theme in
recent years. See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books,
Inc., 1987); Sharon MacDonald, Pat Holden, and Shirley Ardener, eds., Images of
Women in Peace and War (london: Macmillan Education, 1987); Sara Ruddick,
" Preservative Love and Military Destruction: Some RefleCt ions on Mothering and
Peace," in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, N.
J.: Rowman & Allenheld, 1983), 231-62; Ruth Roach Pierson, ed., Women and
Peace: Theoretical, Historical and Practical Perspectives (london: Croom Helm,
1987); Pam McAllister, ed., Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Non-
Violence (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1982); Anne E. Hunter, ed., On
Peace, War and Gender (New York: The Feminist Press, 1991); and Margaret
Higgonet et. al., eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). joan Scott's introductory essay in the last
collection is a particularly astute analysis of the implications of gender imagery.
Women, Pageantry, and WWI
In warfare, per se, we find maleness in its absurdist extremes.
Here is to be studied the whole gamut of basic masculinity,
from the initial instinct of combat, through every form of
glorious ostentation, with the loudest possible accompaniment
of noise.
10
93
It is not surprising, then, that the first peace pageants were written
by women. As early as 1913 in Chicago, Florence Holbrook, the
principal of Forrestville School, directed "One Hundred Years of
Peace." Little more than a processional of children, it was typical of
so many peace pageants and plays that women wrote in later years
because the message was made more compelling through the use of
children. As one reporter explained it:
The war spirit among the people is kept alive by being
frequently fanned into a flame by military parades, by spectacu-
lar demonstrations, by brilliancy of the uniform and the
marching. Peace needs to be promoted by pageants and festi-
vals as bri II iant and even more attractive because of the
enlistment of the children.
11
When war did begin in Europe in 1914, many of the spokespeople-for
pageantry were quick to realize its inherent value to promote peace
and to keep the United States out of the battle. Women such as
MacKaye, Clark, and Charlotte Rumbold joined the Committee for
Encouragement of Artists, Musicians, and Writers to Productions
Promoting Peace. Violet Oakley, another well-known pageant director,
was active in the peace movement. Percy MacKaye, who had earlier
recognized pageantry as a "substitute for war," felt that pacifists could
use pageantry to counteract the military's manipulative use of music, art
and imagery:
Yes, the designers of war are masters of imaginative appeal. Of
the realism of war-of death, mutilation, hate, hunger, rape,
stench, disease, bonded generations, and national debt-they
are purposely uneloquent. Instead-and wisely, for their
10
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture
(New York: Charlton Co., 1911), 211. See also Margaret Hobbs, "The Perils of
'Unbridled Masculinity': Pacifist Elements in the Feminist and Socialist Thought of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman," in Pierson, Women and Peace.
11
"Make Peace Brilliant," journal of Education 77-8 (August 1913): 152.
94 BZOWSKI
ends-they exalt war's self-sacrifice, heroism, solidarity; and for
these they create impassioned symbols of color and grandeur.
He further urged that:
the "moral equivalent of war" can be made fascinating and
effectual by utilizing (and perhaps only by utilizing) the
dynamic arts of the theater to give it symbolical expression.
(MacKaye's italics)
12
The year 1915 was a banner year for women, the peace movement
and the peace pageant. In January of that year, women gathered in
Washington under the leadership of Jane Addams, the director of Hull
House in Chicago, and formed the Woman's Peace Party (WPP), thus
institutionalizing what was generally believed to be women's special
affiliation with peace. The platform of the WPP, particularly the
preamble written by Anna Garlin Spencer, a minister and a professor
of sociology and theology at Unitarian Meadville Seminary in Pennsyl-
vania, accentuated women's pivotal role in establishing peace, "as the
custodians of the I ife of the ages" and as "the mother half of humani-
ty."B
In one of the most ambitious efforts to promote peace through
pageantry in 1915, the Christian Women's Peace Movement presented
a pageant in many U.S. cities, believing that:
_
12
Percy MacKaye, "A Potential Substitute for War," North American Review 201
(May 191 5): 7 21, 72 2.
13
For more about the Woman's Peace Party see jane Addams, Peace and Bread
in Time of War (New York: Macmillan Co., 1922); Marie Louise Degen, The History
of the Woman's Peace Party (Baltimore: johns Hopkins Press, 1939); Jill Conway,
" The Woman's Peace Party and the First World War," in War and Society in North
America, eds. j.L. Granatstein and Robert D. Cuff (Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons,
1971), 52-65; Barbara J. Steinson, American Women's Activism in World War I
(New York: Garland Pub. Inc., 1982); and Linda Schott, "The Woman's Peace Party
and the Moral Basis for Women's Pacifism," Frontiers 8 (1985): 18-24.
For more on women's activity in the peace movement see Amy Swerdlow,
"Peace and Women: A Tradition of Vigilance," Ms 6 (April 1978): 104; Harriet
Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Woman's Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for
Peace and Women's Rights (Syracuse: University Press, 1993); and Joyce Berkman,
" Feminism, War and Peace Politics: The Case of World War 1, " in Jean Bethke
Elshtain and Sheila Tobias, eds., Women, Militarism and War: Essays in History,
Politics, and Social Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman & Litt lefield, Inc., 1990).
Women, Pageantry, and WWI
A nation-wide historical-and therefore educational-presenta-
t ion of pictures of peace and its opposite will have a tremen-
dous effect not only upon the rising generation of Americans
but upon the nation as a whole."
14
95
Composed of six scenes, the spectacle showed the evolut ion from war
and the general acceptance of military action to revulsion of war
because of the suffering of women and children. The pageant included
praise for historical figures of peace, such as Wil l iam Penn and
Commodore Perry, as well as unnamed volunteers and missionaries.
One of the most effective scenes was that of Peace leading children
represent ing twelve nationalities found in the United States. Because
this was a Christian missionary effort, the final scene was of the birth
of Christ, the Prince of Peace. The first performance of the pageant was
in San Francisco and included a cast of 500; however, the pageant was
designed so that it could be done on a much smaller scale in cities
throughout the nation. To make the pageant readily adaptable to all
communities, familiar songs were used but were given new words, and
there were no speaking parts except for one short speech.
Also in 1915, other pageants and allegories set the tone and style
of most of the peace pageants that were written by women throughout
and after the war. In these pageants there is a clear gender bias. War
is male and Peace is female. And powerful as Man and War may be,
they are no match for Peaceful Womanhood, who, strangely enough,
is often a very mi I itant figure, armed w ith the sword and shield of
justice. In fact, few pageants represented the view of an absolute
pacifist; most exemplified the attitude that Peace must fight War in
order to establ ish a better world order.
In May 1915, Beulah Marie Dix, a Radcliffe graduate and wri ter of
ant i-war plays, wrote A Pageant of Peace for the American School
Peace League. In Dix's pageant, War, with his followers-Famine,
Pestilence, and Crime-is vanquished by the working people-farmers,
carpenters, teachers, scientists, artists, writers, and artisans-who are
praised because, "they do not tear down, they build up. They do not
destroy. They save." In the end they unite with Justice, Peace,
Wisdom, and Social Service. Peace is described as tough and
determined, not "soft and girlish" as some had thought, and she
teaches the workers how to become her soldiers and how to I ive
always in peace through the formation of a World Court modeled after
14
New York Times, 27 june 1915, 12. The following description of the pageant
is from the same article.
96 BZOWSKI
the U.S. Supreme Court. Peace leads the grand recessional followed by
Arts and Crafts, Woman, Heroes and Heroines, Nations and States.
15
Hazel MacKaye's pageant, The Awakening: Ten Tableaux on War
and Peace, performed june 1915, in Washington, D.C., at the foot of
the Washington Monument, was advertised as "A Protest Against War
by Woman to the People of Washington." Written for the WPP, just
formed that year, the pageant linked masculinity with capitalism,
militarism, and destruction and traced the fatal flaw in the male sex
back to childhood when boys were given war toys and encouraged to
be aggressive by their mothers. In later scenes, however, women are
appalled by the barbarity of war and strive to change the young men's
attitudes. Powerless because of the law of the land (After all, MacKaye
was a fervent suffragist!) Woman must appeal to justice, which finally
grants her the power (presumably the vote) to establish peace. Clearly,
unless men gave women equal rights the world would be destroyed by
the masculine I ust for war.
16
In October 1915, a "Peace Pageant," written by Cora Mel Patten
and Elm a C. Erlich was produced in Sioux City, Iowa, under the
auspices of the Sioux City Women's Club,
not for money-making purposes, but for purposes of presenting
an educational and inspiring performance in the interest of
peace, which through its spectacular nature would reach
some minds which could not be otherwise stirred.
17
An audience of 4,000 enjoyed the sunset pr<;>cessional of "a long,
bri IIi ant, motley crowd of historical and fantastical figures, dancing girls,
forty-two nations with their flags, and cunning I ittle citizens of peace
carrying the national banners." A group of boys and girls dressed in
white planted a young evergreen tree, atop a box of thousands of peace
pledges signed by the children of the city. The pageant itself consists
of three episodes. The first is an idyllic pastoral of primitive times that
15
Beulah Marie Dix, A Pageant of Peace (Boston: American School Peace
League, 191 5) .
16
MacKaye's pageant is described in Tacke!, 294-8 . .
17
Mrs. Milton Perry Smith, "A Peace Pageant," The American City 123 (October
1915): 334. The following description of the pageant is taken from this article. For
a similar play written in 1915 that has most of the elements of a pageant see
Marguerite Wilkinson, The Passing of Mars: A Modern Morality Play (Coronado, CA:
published by the author, 1915).
Women, Pageantry, and WWI 97
is disrupted by the presence of Fear. As distrust arises among the
people, War enters and is triumphant over Mother Earth. The second
episode introduces the Spirit of Prophetic Peace, who calls forth the
Builders of Peace-actual historical figures, including Frances Willard,
jane Addams and Baroness Von Suttner, the winner of the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1905. When Fear sees these women, he asks "Shall women
drive war from the earth?" Faith answers, "They conquer through their
very womanhood." The third episode shows Peace triumphant, as
Columbia advances carrying the peace flag and the band plays
"America the Beautiful." The New Mother, "representing the women
pacifists of America, " brings forth the New Chi ld, and the nine leading
nations remove thei r swords and hand them to the child. This pageant
was the first ever given in the city and it was very successful. Many
doubters left the park wearing a peace pin, which sold for two cents.
"The visual ization of the central idea of peace, presented in such a
dramatic form, did more for the cause than a whole series of sermons
and lectures on the subject."
The pageants presented in America at this stage of the European
War were del iberately neutral toward the hostile nations. just as
America itself tried to remain unentangled, the writers of these pageants
were usually careful to portray the bell igerents in very abstract ways,
rather than as representatives of particular countries. However, one of
the many pageants written by women between 1915 and 1917 does
refer specifically to Germany. May F. james's Weighed in the Balance
reveals the feeling in the peace movement at that time that America
should serve as an example and as . an arbitrator, rather than as a
participant in the war. Written early in 1915 and dedicated to "H.R.M.
Albert, King of the Belgians and his heroic people," it portrays the
United States as the figure of Justicia who finds Germany at fault and
restores Peace by replacing him with a New Germany, now a female
figure who is willing to join the other peaceful nations. This change of
gender is one of the best examples of what later came to be the almost
universally accepted belief by women that the war-like Germany
exhibited the worst of mascul i ne traits and that, in order to be accepted
by peaceful nations, it would have to cast off those traits and assume
ones associated with feminine nature-peacefulness and coopera-
. tion.
18
These pageants also reflect the kind of peace-oriented pageant
written by women before events in Europe forced the United States to
take a more militaristic attitude. However, even in 1915-1916,
18
May F. James, Weighed in the Balance (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1916).
98 BZOWSKI
pageants were more likely to be patriotic than pacifist. Although they
often did not refer specifically to the European War, they portrayed
historical American and local victories in a way that showed war as
glorious, not horrible, and as part of a community's proud heritage.
The emphasis was on the sacrifice of past generations as an inspiration
to the present one. One example of this kind of pageant was written
by Constance D' Arcy Mackay. Her Memorial Day Pageant (for some
reason performed on 4 July 1915, in North Chillicothe, Illinois) showed
the importance of wars for freedom-the Revolutionary War, the Civi l
War, and the Spanish-American War. At the end of the pageant
America appears with two female attendants-one in white carrying a
Dove (Peace) and the other in white with a purple mantle (Peace With
Honor). By this time, after the sinking of the Lusitania, unconditional
peace was no longer acceptable. The final scene, which seems to be
almost obligatory by now, shows children of foreign lands, this time
thanking America for giving them freedom and opportunity.
19
Such pageants reflected the growing preparedness movement in the
country in 1915-1917 and the part that pageantry could serve in that
movement. In 1916 Albert Gilmer, a professor at Tufts University and
president of the APA, spoke at its fourth annual convention on the topic
of "The Place of Pageantry and Drama in the Program of National
Preparedness":
Drama and pageantry can nerve the nation's heart, quicken
national consciousness, inflame heroism, and arouse to action.
What instruments, not even except schools and churches, are
more powerful in their influence than drama and pageantry, if
fully and rightfully employed.
20
Once the United States entered the war in 1917, community
dramatic presentations took on even more importance. Pageants had
already been used for fund-raising for European relief and for the Red
19
Constance D'Arcy Mackay, Memorial Day Pageant (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1916).
20
Aibert Gilmer, " The Place of Pageantry," APA Bulletin 37 (15 July 1916),
quoted in Tackel, 299. For more about the preparedness movement in general see
John Patrick Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon: the Campaign for American
Military Preparedness, 1914-191 7 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1974).
Women, Pageantry, and WWI 99
Cross,
21
but now pageants and masques also served as promoters of
the war, solidifiers of gender and national images, and forces to
nationalize the diverse regions and ethnic groups of the country. The
APA issued a publication called "Pageants for War Service" in 1918
and suggested a national contest for "the creation of a pageant best
calculated to express the average community's emotional reaction to
the present day war situation."
22
The war provided an instant, almost unquenchable, demand for
dramatic forms of propaganda. The U.S. government showed a
remarkable understanding of the power of drama, art and film both to
inspire men to enlist and fight and to promote stability and "normalcy"
for young men away from their homes. Almost as soon as the United
States entered the war, the War Department established a Committee
on Public Information to provide films, pamphlets, posters, and other
media to communities throughout the nation. It also organized a
Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) to coordinate
recreational activities, including drama, for the enlisted men. The
Playground and Recreation Association of America (PRAA) offered its
services to the army and founded the War Camp Community Service
(WCCS) to provide community recreational activities for soldiers in
order to make them feel at home in the towns near the army camps.
The WCCS also created a Division of Community Drama, headed by
Constance D' Arcy Mackay, to provide texts of pageants and dramas that
could be easily produced in American towns. Mackay published her
suggestions in her book Patriotic Drama in Your Town. Also, the APA
published and distributed short allegorical masques that could be
21
Although pageants had been used as fund raisers for the Red Cross since 1914,
one of the most elaborate was done after the United States entered the war. Written
by Thomas Wood Stevens it was performed on 5 October 1 91 7, at the Rosemary
Open Air Theatre, Huntington, Long Island, on the estate of Roland B. Conklin.
Almost every star on the New York stage volunteered for a part in this pageant. It
was later performed indoors at Carnegie Hall and at the Metropolitan Opera House
and was even filmed to be used for the benefit of the Red Cross. Stevens claimed
that, "Never in the history of pageantry in Ameri ca have so great a company and
so thrilling a story joined hands in a symbolic spectacle as in the Rosemary Red
Cross Pageant." " America' s First Great War Pageant," Theatre Magazine 26
(October 191 7): 199.
22
"Pageantry in War Service, " APA Bulletin, No. 58, September 15, 1918. The
quote is from Glassberg, 214.
100 BZOWSKI
produced simply by any community that wanted to use them to aid the
war effort.
23
Perhaps as one more proof of the masculine nature of all things
concerned with war, the War Department and the military-related
agencies formed during the war years did not include women, except
for Mackay, in roles of leadership. However, women did not give up
the niche that they had carved for themselves in community pageantry.
While some men of drama and the theatre found administrative
positions within the official network of the military's theatrical efforts,
many women provided the pageants for the WCCS and also continued
to write and perform their pageants for the benefit of their own home
communities throughout the United States.
Pageantry was perhaps the ideal theatrical form to vindicate to the
average citizen the country's entrance into the war. It lent itself quite
naturally to an uncompromising representation of good and evil, and
its rei iance on symbolic gender figures was used to great advantage to
illustrate victimization and salvation, democracy and tyranny, peace
and war.
24
Men and women of pageantry were quick to see the
advantage of putting their art at the service of their country. In fact,
some, like William Chauncy Langdon and Constance D'Arcy Mackay,
felt that war would be the crucial test of the usefulness of pageantry
and drama. Langdon wrote that:
23
Constance D'Arcy Mackay, Patriotic Drama in Your Town (New York: Henry
Holt, 1918). Much has been written about the use of propaganda techniques by the
War Department in World War I. See George Creel, How We Advertised America
(New York: Harper & Bros., 1920); Harold l. Lasswell, Propaganda Techniques in
the Great War (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1927); James R. Mock and Cedric Larson,
Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917-
1919 (Princeton: University Press, 1939); Alfred E. Cornebise, War As Advertised:
the Four Minute Men and America's Crusade, 191 7-1918 (Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society, 1984); Larry Wayne Ward, The Motion Picture Goes to War:
The U.S. Government Film Effort During World War I (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1985); Craig W. Campbell, Reel America and World War I Uefferson, N.C.:
Mcfarland, 1985); Walton Rawls, Wake Up America! World War I and the
American Poster (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988); and Michele J. Shover, "Roles
and Images of Women in World War I Propaganda," Politics and Society 5 (1975):
469-86. See also Richard F. Knapp, "The Playground and Recreation Association
of America in World War 1," Parks and Recreation 7 Uanuary 1972): 27-31f.
24
Giassberg aptly notes the similarity between the World War I pageant and the
poster in presenting an issue in two-dimensional form: "To elicit the desired
emotional response, pageant writers created the melodramatic equivalent of World
War I recruiting posters depicting in symbolic form the events that led Woodrow
Wilson to send American troops overseas." Glassberg, 216.
Women, Pageantry, and WWI 101
[Pageantry] must keep pace with the progress of events that are
happening within the purview of its institution and measure up to
the greater meaning that the days which try men's souls are
instilling into its episodes. Such also is the vitalizing, searching fire
of judgment through which the whole art of pageantry is passing.
Will it survive? As sure as pageantry truly reflects the spirit of
America, it must and it will.
25
Unless a pageant could prove its usefulness in these critical years
it would not be accepted by a community. The pageants written from
1917 and afterward were designed for one of three purposes:
1. To unite the divergent ethnic groups in the country into all-
American supporters of the war and to supply a national identity rather
than a regional or ethnic one.
In her Memorial Day Pageant of 1915 Mackay had included a
figure representing the State, to be clothed in the colors of whatever
state was performing the pageant. At this early time in the European
War, state identity could still remain autonomous, although even then
the states showed some national loyalty. However, in Maud May
Parker's A Pageant of Yesterday and Today performed in 1917, the
state of Louisiana must now contribute her gifts of sugar cane, rice,
fruit, and salt to America, and the state's mothers, dressed in white,
offer their sons for the nation's battle. Such pageants emphasized the
transcendence of the nation in a time. of crisis.
26
Pageantry was also used to create a national outlook through its
ability to mold immigrant groups into American citizens. Now more
than ever there was a need to Americanize immigrants and to eliminate
the cultural pluralism that could be destructive in wartime. In Patriotic
Drama in Your Town Mackay particularly emphasized this purpose of
pageantry:
And as Americanization is to be our watchword now and in
the days that are coming, what can make for more solidarity
more swiftly and effectively than the art of drama? What can
more quickly and vividly make our history real to the foreign-
25
Wi II iam Chauncy Langdon," American Pageantry and the War/' Brown Alumni
Monthly 18 Uune 1917): 8.
26
See Glassberg, 216.
102 BZOWSKI
born within our midst? How shall they learn patriotism save
through participation? How should they assimilate our
language save through the spoken word?
27
Mackay suggested, however, that writers now stress what America has
done to benefit the immigrant rather than the contributions that the
immigrants have brought to the United States. Such pageants idealized
the acceptance of immigrants by an open-minded and welcoming
America, even at a time when the country was actually becoming more
distrustful of what the press called "hyphenated Americans." The
WCCS did its part toward Americanization by designating 4 july 1918,
as Loyalty Day. Cities throughout the nation sponsored parades that
included immigrants pledging their allegiance to the United States.
Women made their own contribution to these "Americanization"
pageants. josephine Thorp wrote The Answer: A Patriotic Festival in
1918. In it Progress calls forth America, who depicts the settling of the
country by the original settlers from France, Holland and England.
Later immigrants come from other countries as the nation grows to its
48 states. America welcomes all who come in peace and who seek
freedom. When the oppressed countries of Belgium, Servia [sic],
Armenia, Poland, and others cry out to America, the Spirit of Democra-
cy defeats War, aided by the Sword of justice and the Shield of
Truth.
28
Although Nina Lamkin's America, Yesterday and Today, a pageant,
which was produced 350 times during 1917 by schools and communi-
ties, did not deal specifically with immigrants, it did emphasize the
common culture in America. Lamkin was the Director of Normal
Course in Physical Education at Northwestern University School of
Oratory and Physical Education, and a well-known pageant director and
Chatauqua lecturer. After two historical scenes of "Indian Days" and
"The Spirit of the Wilderness," the Spirit of Patriotism enters with some
of the values and institutions that made America great-Christianity,
Education, Community Spirit, Art, Drama, Welfare, Play, Music, Forest
27
Mackay, Patriotic Drama in Your Town, vi.
28
Josephine Thorp, "The Answer: A Patriotic Exercise," in Josephine Thorp and
Rosamond Kimball, Patriotic Pageants of Today (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
1918).
Women, Pageantry, and WWI 103
Preservation, in addition to the Red Cross, Suffrage, YMCA and YWCA.
The pageant ends with the singing of "America."
29
2. To encourage service both at home and abroad.
Women were particularly adept at writing pageants of service,
especially those aimed at other women and at children. In Rosamond
Kimball's A Call to the Youth of America: A Patriotic Exercise, America
calls upon boys and girls to work for the good of the country. The Boy
Scouts, Girls' Patriotic League, Farmerettes, Girls' Canning Club, and
young Thrift Stamp Buyers respond with their pledges. When the
European nations, including a blindfolded Germany, call for help,
America passes her torch of Freedom and Love to the children of
America. This pageant ends with the singing of "America the Beauti-
fu 1."3o
Uncle Sam's S.O.S.-A Patriotic Pageant published by Estelle Miller
and Edith Bristol in 1918 is set at a moment
11
HERE and NOW."
Touched by the cries of France and Belgium, Uncle Sam calls on
Americans to aid in "this righteous war." And of course they do-the
parents who send their sons to war; the Boy Scouts; the Farmer who is
encouraged by Uncle Sam as "the man behind the man behind the
gun"; the Stoker; the Red Cross; the YMCA and YWCA; the WCTU; the
Knights of Columbus; the Baker; the Liberty Loan; the Shipbuilder; the
Bride; Young America; and, of course, the U.S. Soldier. Not even the
housewife is forgotten in this national rally. Madame Conservation's
plea to her is:
You'd better save your food and send it over there
'Way Over There.
You'd better send the soldiers more than you can spare,
Than you can spare;
Take the sugar from the table; give up bacon when you're
able; Make every cake and bun mean a bullet for the Hun; It
isn't very hard to substitute for lard, And if you think it's pretty
hard to cut out wheat, Just remember that the soldiers have to
29
Nina Lamkin, America, Yesterday and Today, a pageant (Chicago: T.S.
Denison, 1917).
30
Rosamond Kimball, "A Call to the Youth of America: a Patriotic Exercise," in
Thorp and Kimball, Patriotic Pageants of Today. See also "A Peace Pageant,"
Industrial Arts Magazine '6 Uune 1917): 231-2.
104 BZOWSKI
eat, they do. Conservation is the only way! It's a mighty fine
maneuver,
Cooperate with Hoover!
Conservate, clean your plate, 'cause you're serving the
U.S.A.
31
A pageant that was a direct chastisement of slackers on the home
front was Kathrine F. Carlyon's The Crowning of Columbia. In this
little performance Columbia is approached by various groups that wish
her to be their queen. First the Children of America come and beg her
to accept their crown of flowers, but she says the flowers are fading
and she must have a more eternal symbol; then the Farmers urge her
to be their queen, but she tells them they have produced for profit and
must learn to sacrifice; next the Miners and Ammunition Makers plead,
but she says they are not working hard enough for the country. The
Red Cross Workers are refused, although they offer their knitting,
because Columbia says they must be willing to give up their loved ones
and even themselves in the spirit of self-sacrifice. Columbia reserves
her harshest criticism for the Pleasure Seekers, whom she denounces
for their bright clothes and selfishness. Finally the Soldiers offer them-
selves to her unconditionally and give her, not a crown, but the flag,
which she accepts.
32

Some pageants were written specifically to praise and to encourage
women/s participation in war service. One that was written under the
auspices of the U.S. War Service Commission was performed at
Petersborough, N.H. in August 1917 and as a U.S. camp pageant at
Camp Logan, Houston, Texas, in December 1917. Mrs. March
Culmore was both the writer and director of the pageant titled The
Torch Bearers. She admitted that,
Its obvious purpose is to convey a clear impression of the high
ideals which inspired this country to enter the present war, and
to create a finer spirit of co-operation in the training camp
communities.
31
Estelle Miller and Edith Bristol , Uncle Sam's S.O.S.-A Patriotic Pageant (n.p.,
1918).
32
Kathrine F. Carlyon, The Crowning of Columbia, a Patriotic Fantasy in One
Act (Boston: Walter H. Baker and Co., 1918).
Women, Pageantry, and WWI
Woman's part in the development of civilization has been
emphasized, not only because work of presenting the pageant
would largely devolve on women, but because they are taking
a singularly prominent place in the world of today.
33
105
After early episodes showing the Earth Mother reviewing the history of
civilization, such as Greeks, Egyptians, Joan of Arc, Pocahontas, and
(presumably as a concession to the Texans) the Battle of San Jacinto,
the next episode shows the "Woman in the War Today-The Sister."
Women of all types, classes and occupations form a circle. Liberty
brings forth Clara Barton who urges them to work together and suffer
with the troops. The women form a cross and are enclosed in red
cloth. As they sing patriotic songs they perform rei ief work-knitting,
rolling bandages, writing letters and preparing comfort bags, all of
which is taken by a Red Cross truck to the men at the camps. A song
called "I Am the Woman," with words by M.E. Tracy and music by
Mrs. M.E. Tracy completes this episode:
I am the woman who must foreswear
All thought of self and own;
The one who cannot hope to share
The pomp and praise, but who must bear
Her sacrifice alone;
Must force a smile for the glazing eye
That men may dare to suffer and die
For sake of faith in God on high .
That makes the world atone.
Refrain:
Waiting, working,
Lonely, but uncomplaining-
My part is remaining
Back of the battle I i ne
Waiting, yearning,
Keeping the home fires burning-
Mine to encourage, assist and sustain,
Back of the battle I i ne.
I am the mother with love sublime,
The wife with anguished soul,
33
Mrs. March Cui more, "The Torch Bearers," in the William Chauncy Langdon
Papers, john Hay Library, Brown University, Ms. 82.1, Box 122, Folder 12. The
following description of the pageant is from this source.
106
The white-lipped girl who turned away
To hide the tears she could not stay
When drums began to roll;
But sent a prayer to her God on high
For strength to smile when she said good-bye,
That men might dare to do or die,
As traced upon the soul.
BZOWSKI
The final episode shows the Earth Mother transformed into Liberty,
which defeats Tyranny with the aid of U.S. soldiers and sailors. At the
end, children of all nations join in singing "America."
Another pageant designed specifically for women, oddly enough
with the same title, written by Lotta Clark, was given by the Minneapo-
lis Civic Players and directed by Mary Cutler. The pageant text clearly
states that its focus is Woman, who "by her love and understanding
and sacrifice has led the standard bearers of mankind's spiritual
progress." Six episodes glorify such historically strong women as
Miriam, Joan of Arc, Isabella and Pocahontas, as defenders of freedom.
And now, when men go forth to fight:
. . . they leave behind
Not helpless women,
Distracted and distrait [sic]-
But women who remain behind to save
All the things that men hold dear;
In this dark hour women will again
Be the torch bearers of the earth.
34
3. To justify the United States' entry by tracing events up to that time
and showing America as the victorious savior of the besieged countries.
This theme is often intertwined with the others, for in effect, all the
pageants written after 1917 are vindications of America's involvement.
These pageants are the most blatant defenders of democracy as a force
of justice and strength destined to defeat the nations of tyranny and
autocracy. The inherent purpose of these wartime pageants was to
provide the idealistic rationale for Americans to go to war. Clara Fitch,
the chairwoman of the Drama League's Festivals Committee, explained
this purpose of pageantry as:
34
See Tackel , 303-4 for a description of this pageant.
Women, Pageantry, and WWI
establishing the spiritual aims of the nation and of spreading
knowledge that spiritual ideals alone can inspire men to the
deeds of sacrifice and patriotism that are required to win liberty
for the world.
35
107
The Spirit of Democracy written in 1917 by Miss Merab Eberle is
a good example. In this pageant Autocracy threatens Democracy.
England, Italy, and a near-blind Russia answer the call to aid Belgium,
France and Poland, but they are not strong enough to do the j ob.
Finally, Democracy calls upon America, who promises her aid in
payment for the many gifts that she has been given by Democracy:
Yea, would I fight for her, though all my men
Laid dead in stenchful trenches thickly strewn.
Yea, would I fight if all my wealth had fled
Through roar of musketry and cannon's crash.
Onward I'll go forever in her name!
36
At the Gate of Stars by Adelaide Nichol s is similar to The Spirit of
Democracy. The setting is at the Gates of Brotherhood where America
sits enthroned in a golden robe. England and France come to the aid
of Belgium, but Russia is unable to help until she casts off her crown
and rids herself of the god of war hidden beneath her robe, probably
a reference to the 1917 revolution. America at first refuses to help,
saying she must keep the Gates of Brotherhood open for all. After
Serbia, Alsace-lorraine, Poland, and Armenia beg for help, America
opens a curtain and Red Cross nurses come forward, but still the nation
refuses to join the war. Only w ~ n the nations of England, France,
Russia, Japan and Italy are no longer able to fight does America call on
her people to participate:
Yes, I wi II call them, and God grant they come.
I have not often bidden them to war.
They trusted in my golden shining robe
And in my wreaths of peace. If I should break
The garlands and destroy my glittering cloak,
Wi II they stay with me? So I hardly dare
35
Festival Committee Plans and Suggestions for 1918," Drama League Monthly
2 (191 7): 491 , quoted in Glassberg, 215.
36
Miss Merab Eberl e, The Spirit of Democracy (Frankl i n, Ohi o: Eldridge
Entertainment House, 1917).
108 BZOWSKI
To call upon their service, but I call,
And draw my sword. Follow me all who will.
37
And of course they do come, from New England, the South and the
West, following America's call to arms. The Angel of the Gates takes
America's place at the Gates of Brotherhood, promising to protect it
unti I America can return. America casts off her golden robe and wears
a "great service flag." Holding aloft her crusader's sword she leads the
countries on to victory.
Although pacifist pageants were not very likely to be performed
during the war years, a few pageants and masques showed a continuing
faith in internationalism to bring about a new world order after the war
was over. At the Gate of Stars suggests this with its promise that the
Gates of Brotherhood wi II reopen at the end of the war, but Democracy
Triumphant, written by four women in 1918, goes even further to show
that postwar peace and forgiveness are possible. This pageant includes
some typical propaganda for service, castigating Extravagance and
Selfishness and praising the Red Cross and YMCA as children of
Courage and Great Heart. But the ending of this pageant is unlike any
other pub! ished during the war years. A soldier describes quite
graphically the horrors of war-women and children skewered on
bayonets, their husbands crucified, and all manner of atrocities
committed by Autocracy/Germany. His speech is so touching that even
. the villain is moved to repentance. Germany Reborn ends the pageant
with a conversion, "I am awakening from thralldom, thanks be unto
Democracy who has struck off my shackles." Soldier, Sailor, and
Home object to receiving Germany in their circle, but Great Heart,
Democracy, Red Cross and YMCA urge forgiveness.
38
37
Adelaide Nichols, At the Gate of Stars: A Patriotic Masque (published by the
author, 1918), 18.
38
Wilhemina Higgins, et al., Democracy Triumphant, a Patriotic Pageant in One
Scene (New York: Samuel French, 1918). Women were the first to insist on
i ncl ud i ng Germany in any postwar i nternationalleague. The Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) objected to the peace treaty because of its
punitive attitude toward Germany and to the League of Nations because of its
exclusion of Germany and its lack of provisions for arbitration and di sarmament. The
WILPF, which before the war had resolved to meet at the same time and in the
same place as the peace conference, chose to hold its conference in Zurich rather
than Versailles because it specifically wanted to include women from the defeated
nations. For more on the WILPF see Catherine Foster, Women For All Seasons: The
Story of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1989).
Women, Pageantry, and WWI 109
The New Day, a masque written by Margaret Plank Ganssle for a
patriotic ritual for Pembina County, Saint Thomas, North Dakota, 14
july 1918, also suggested that world peace was inevitable. In her
foreword Ganssle wrote:
Bel ieving that the production of a masque of this nature might
be a tiny factor in the building of that greater league of
cooperation and brotherhood, which one day will redeem the
world, these men and women [the 500 participants in St.
Thomas] labored ardently for its success.
39
The proceeds from the masque were donated to the Red Cross, " that
sole redeeming agency in the turmoil that now distorts the world."
40
The first part is an allegory in which the Wielder of Years announces
that a new day is possible on earth. An immortal youth and maiden
are given the gifts of race and nationality, worldly possessions, and
individual talents by the Three Sisters of Destiny. But on earth they are
soon greeted by Envy, Greed and Might, who urge them to take
everything they want. The youth is wounded but rescued by Red Cross
and sent on a mission of love and peace. The second part shows
Moloch, god of war, ruling supreme, surrounded by Pride, Greed,
Envy, Self-Aggrandizement, Might, Hate, Suspicion and Discontent.
Warriors throughout history offer him blood:
Aye, blood have we, the reddest,-rich, ruddy gore from
throats of thousands! Ears and tongues of newborn
babes- eyes and breasts of maidens-noses and hands of
children, teeth and gnarled joints of men, beards and toes of
the aged!
41
The Spirits of Religion, Philosophy and Arts try to argue with
Moloch but they are killed by the war god's slaves. Finally a Red Cross
appears in the sky, as Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton and the
Herald of a New Day enter. Part three consists of three scenes:
Florence Nightingale ministering to the wounded i n the Crimea; Clara
Barton being honored at a banquet in Washington and in turn honoring
39
Margaret Plank Ganssl e, The New Day, A Masque of the Future (St. Thomas,
North Dakota, 14July 1918).
40
/bid.
4 1
/bid.
110 BZOWSKI
the Civil War nurses who cared for men at the battlefields; and the
fields of France where the wounded men are brave and the medical
staff is courageous and hard-working. The last part of the masque
shows an international court ruled by Love with her aides, justice,
Liberty, Peace, Faith, and Truth. They have gathered together to ratify
a treaty of enduring peace. All countries are free; all arms and
warships are destroyed; all lands have equal rights so the strong do not
rule the weak; all are now ruled by love.
When armistice was declared on 11 November 1918, women in
pageantry could look with pride at their participation as writers and
directors of community pageants, which not only reflected the war
situation but also helped to influence people and events. The women
who wrote these stirring pageants and saw them performed in
campgrounds or city parks were New Women, indeed, achieving
recognition for their public performances and their writing and
directorial skill, but they were still a product of past assumptions that
women possessed unique characteristics that made them a compelling
force for peace through their very gender. Actually, the fact that women
were granted the vote when the war ended in recognition of their loyal
war service probably reinforced both their belief that they were new
actors on the national stage and their conviction that their most
powerful weapon was their womanliness.
As the war progressed and as new demands were made on all
Americans, women in pageantry changed their focus to fit the temper
of the times. From 1914 to 1915 they followed their "natural"
inclinations and promoted peace, believing in these early days of the
war in Europe that, even without the vote, women could use their
moral credibility to influence the nation's leaders to offer the United
States as a neutral arbitrator. Most pageants written by women at this
time were anti-war and expressed confidence that reasonable people
could effect a world peace. After the sinking of the Lusitania, although
many Americans still hoped for world peace and non-intervention of
the United States, others began to doubt that neutrality was an
honorable choice. Women, along with most of the country, clamored
for preparedness to show the rest of the world a strong and ready
America.
42
The pageants written by women at this time no longer
42
0ne very public indication of the change in women's attitude toward the war
even before the United States was involved is the parades in which they participat-
ed. On 29 August 1914, the 1,500 women dressed in black mourning who
marched silently down Fifth Avenue were praised for showing women's inherent
abhorrence to the war that had broken out in Europe (New York Times, 30 August
1914, sec. 2, p. 11). By 1916 an Anti-Preparedness parade organized by the New
Women, Pageantry, and WWI 111
demanded peace at any price; now peace must be attained with honor.
These pageants emphasized the country's pride in its military past and
its willingness to fight for justice. Finally, after the United States joined
the war, women in pageantry, like women in all walks of life, did their
part by creating pageants that inspired U.S. citizens to serve their
country. Many of these pageants were aimed particularly at women
and children and encouraged them to send their men to war with a
smile, to bake their cakes without wheat, and to save their pennies for
Liberty bonds. Yet even in the heat of the war fervor, some women
kept their early hopes alive and wrote pageants that looked to a future
of world peace through international cooperation, a league of all
nations and a world tribunal. In these pageants, written near the end
of the war, women renewed their faith that they could direct misguided
men toward higher goals. By keeping the flame of internationalism and
world unity burning throughout a devastating war, such women were
truly the "torchbearers of the earth."
York City branch of WPP represented a distinct minority of American women. Far
more representative were the4,000-5,000 women who marched in the Preparedness
parade held in May of that year in New York City (New York Times, 14 May 1916,
sec. 1, p. 1 and 5 July 1916 p. 11 and " A Huge Parade for Preparedness," Literary
Digest 52 [27 May 1916]: 1518-9).
CONTRIBUTORS
JEANE LUERE is Professor Emeritus in the English and Drama
Department at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.
KAMAL BHASIN is a Reader in the Department of English in the
A.R.S.D. College at the University of Delhi, New Delhi, India.
He was studying on a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of
Maryland in College Park when he interviewed Edward Albee.
MELANIE N. BLOOD is Assistant Professor of Drama in the
Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of
Georgia in Athens.
LARRY FINK is a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre at The
Ohio State University in Columbus.
TINA REDD is a second-year doctoral student in the School of
Drama at the University of Washington in Seattle .
. FRANCES DIODATO BZOWSKI contributed several entries on
American women playwrights to both the Cambridge Guide to
World Theatre and the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre.
She is also the compiler of American Women Playwrights, 1900-
1930, published by Greenwood Press in 1992.
112
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journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Spring 1995)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Mid-American Theatre Conference
Theatre History Symposium
Chicago, 14-17 March 1996
The Unreal Verisimilitude:
Cinema and Theatre's First Century of Co-Existence
Proposals are invited on al l aspects of theatre/cinema interrelations over
the past century. Proposals should be no longer than two pages. Oral
presentations will be limited to twenty minutes. Send two copies of
proposals to either of the co-chairs:
Tracy C. Davis
Dept. of Theatre
1979 Sheridan Road
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208-2430
FAX: (708) 467-2019
Laurence Sene I ick
Dept. of Drama
Leir Hall
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155
FAX: (617) 627-3803
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS:
1 NOVEMBER 1995