THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 22, Number 1 Winter 2010
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve
Editor: David Savran
Managing Editor: Naomi Stubbs
Editorial Assistant: Rayya El Zein
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Circulation Assistant: Ana Martinez
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
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Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Publications
Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
EDITORIAL BoARD
Philip Auslander
Una Chaudhuri
William Demastes
Harry Elam
Jorge Huerta
Stacy Wolf
Shannon Jackson
Jonathan Kalb
Jill Lane
Thomas Postlewait
Robert Vorlicky
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THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 22, Number 1 Winter 2010
CONTENTS
FROM THE EDITOR
j oHN H. MusE
Eons in an Instant: The Paradoxes of Suzan-Lori Parks's
365 Dqys/ 365 Plqys
ASHIS SENGUPTA
"Corning Out of the Closet": Re-reading The Bqys in the Band and
On a Muggy Night in Mumbai
DOUGLAS A. jONES, JR.
Aesthetics, Ideology, and the use of the Victim in Early
American Melodrama
KATE DossETT
Commemorating Haiti on the Harlem Stage
CONTRIBUTORS
5
7
33
51
83
121
Vera Mowry Roberts 1913-2010
A pioneer in American theatre studies and champion of women artists
and scholars, Vera Mowry Roberts died in Texas on 1 February 2010. She
was a master teacher who trained two generations of theatre scholars and
worked tirelessly to legitimate U.S. theatre as an object of academic study.
Believing in the inextricable connection between theory and practice,
Vera was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and later directed in
educational, community, and professional theatres while teaching theatre
history and dramatic literature. In 1950 she and five others co-founded
Washington's Arena Stage, one of the first and most influential regional
theatres in the United States.
Vera joined what was then called the Department of Speech and
Dramatic Arts at Hunter College of the City University of New York in
1955 where she taught for fifty years. In 1968, she was one of the facul-
ty members who established the PhD Program in Theatre at CUNY's
Graduate Center. Her publications include dozens of articles and three
books: On Stage, A History of the Theatre (1962), The Nature of Theatre
(1972), and Notable Women in American Theatre (1989), which she co-
authored with Milly S. Baranger and Alice M. Robinson.
When Vera began her career after World War II, American
drama was widely regarded as inferior to the European canon and hard-
ly worth taking seriously as a subject of scholarship. Along with many
others, she had to fight to establish its legitimacy during a period when
playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, directors like Elia
Kazan and Jose Quintero, and a new generation of actors trained by the
Actors Studio were revolutionizing American theatre practice. By later
founding and editing the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, she became
instrumental in advancing the study of the theatre to which she was so
passionately dedicated.
Many things stand out in Vera's scholarship: her rigorous atten-
tion to history, her reluctance to accept critical cliches, and her attention
to plays and players often ignored by more conventional historians. But
above all, I am struck by her passion for live theatre and her belief that it
provides the richest way of knowing the world. For Vera, theatre "takes
the student into many areas of human knowledge-literature, art, music,
politics, economics, philosophy, science, [and] invention." Among all the
arts, it is the "most rewarding field of study for those insatiable people
who desire to know 'all about everything."' Vera will be missed by her
many, many students and colleagues but her work and dedication will
continue to inspire new generations of theatre scholars.
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA Al"i D THE,\TRE 22, NO.1 (WINTER 2010)
EONS IN AN INSTANT: THE PARADOXES OF SUZAN-LORI
PARKS'S 365 DAYS/365 PLAYS
John H. Muse
We want the mega and we want the micro, the super-
size-me and the sushi- all at the same time.
Mark Ravenhillt
In contemporary physics the uncharted territories are the quantum and
cosmic. In a theatrical milieu that accepts thirty-minute one-act plays and
fifteen-hour Ring cycles as standard, artists in search of undiscovered
time signatures must explore the extremes. A global popular culture
simultaneously saturated by shorts and obsessed with record-breaking
feats of endurance has contributed to a fascinating contemporary phe-
nomenon in the theatre: the marathon of very short plays. I call these
massive compilations of diminutive drama "microthons."2 If the practice
of theatrical compilation stretches back to the beginnings of theatre his-
tory, recent microthons register a contemporary encyclopedic urge
stoked by the pace and promise of the digital, an urge simultaneously to
break the world into comprehensible bits and to make everything avail-
able at once. Contemporary theatre provides numerous examples of the
mass consumption of single-serving drama; from the drastically abridged
comprehensiveness of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, to the Nee-
Futurists' frantic attempts to present thirty plays in an hour, the digitally-
encyclopedic Wikipedia Plays,3 or Mark Ravenhill's recent "Epic Cycle of
1 Mark Ravenhill, introduction to Shoot/ Get Treasure/ Repeat (J..-ondon: Methuen,
2008), 5.
2 I intend the term to designate extreme experiments in theatrical compilation.
A two- or three-hour evening of twenty-minute one-act plays is probably not a
microthon- not least because such standardized production packages reinforce assump-
tions about length rather than challenging them-but the Nco-Futurists's hour-long race
to complete thirty original plays in sixty minutes qualifies despite its relative brevity.
3 Ars Nova's The Wikipedia Plqys (2007) comprises seventeen ten-minute plays,
each based on the title of a Wikipedia entry. To replicate something of the randomness
and linking of an online encyclopedia, Ars Nova used Wikipedia to generate their titles
by following embedded links from one topic to another. BroadwayWorld.com, ' Jarrow,
8
MUSE
Short Plays," Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. But the microthonparexcellence--
and the focus of this article-is Suzan-Lori Parks's marathon of the
miniscule: 365 Dqys/ 365 Plqys. Parks's project offers in both its literary
and theatrical manifestations a sustained and self-conscious interrogation
of the minimal and maximal limits of dramatic form. 365 warrants par-
ticular attention not only because it epitomizes many of the tendencies
found in other recent microthons, but also because its paradoxes map a
newly expansive geography for playwriting and performance.
365 Dqys/ 365 Plqys refers to two distinct microthons: a private
compositional journey exploring dramatic form, and a public experiment
testing theatrical possibility. Starting on 13 November 2002, Parks chal-
lenged herself to write a play a day for a year. She approached the proj-
ect with near religious dedication and, a year later, completed a long and
heterogeneous collection of very short plays. The cycle remained in
Parks's drawer until 2006, when she and producer Bonnie Metzgar
devised an ambitious plan to turn her private ritual outward: the 365
Festival. The festival created an international network (365 Global) and
sixteen networks within the United States. Each network organized a
complete run of the cycle by finding fifty-two theatres or other groups
willing to perform a week of plays, however they saw fit. On 13
November 2006, four years after the first play was penned, a yearlong
epic of simultaneous theatrical collaboration began. The same day, Parks
published the series as a book.
365 exemplifies the microthon impulse on every level: as a per-
formance festival that straddled the global and local, as a one-time com-
positional challenge that created a potentially endless recurring cycle, as a
very long book yoking together hundreds of tiny pieces, as a national epic
composed of lapidary parables, and as a home to plays that frustrate des-
ignations like long or short by attempting to be both at once. Superlatives
cling to the project. Some of the cycle's plays challenge the record for the
shortest play ever, but as a whole it is among the longest scripts ever pub-
lished. Most of its plays last a few short minutes in performance, yet the
365 Festival built out of them "the largest theatrical collaboration in U.S.
history," if not world history.4 365's individual plays contend that a
moment or a thought can constitute a play, while the nearly 400-page
book argues that a play cycle can retain coherence despite extraordinary
Miranda, Etc. Take Part in 'The Wikipedia Plays."' http://www.broadwayworld.com/view
column.cfm?colid=20077 (accessed 9 September 2008).
4 Mike Boehm, "Suzan-Lori Parks Offers a Play a Day," Los Angeles Times, 30
June 2006, E-2.
EONS IN AN INSTANT 9
length. Like other microthons, 365 reflects and contributes to the widen-
ing purview of performance, an idea now so capacious as to include at
its minimal bounds almost any utterance or gesture, while offering at its
outer limits to account for the preponderance of human (and some non-
human) activity. The interplay between compression and expansion has
been an animating tension of dramatic activity since its origins. While
Parks's performance marathon bears some resemblance to earlier festi-
vals-especially medieval cycle drama-and while many of its plays
reveal the influence of earlier modernist and avant-garde experimenta-
tion, 365 deserves attention for the new and culturally-relevant ways it
tests fundamental assumptions about theatrical possibility.
Recent critics like Philip Kolin, Rebecca Rugg, and Kathryn
Walat have described how Parks's democratic embrace of radical inclu-
sion, collaboration, possibility, and flexibility has expanded and leveled
the map of American theatre.s In what follows, I acknowledge these
same urges while calling attention to opposing forces that generate pro-
ductive tensions in the project: exclusion, privacy, limitation, and formal
rigor. Taking a centripetal path from the global sweep of 365's megaper-
formance to the narrow confines of its microplays, I argue that a series
of paradoxes in scale animate the project and frustrate (rather than oblit-
erate) traditional distinctions. The 365 Festival is a media-enabled mass
production comprising unique and local performance events; the project
is both closet drama and uncloseted festival; it is a democratic epic whose
embrace of radical inclusion reveals the limitations of radical inclusion;
its time signatures are both linear and cyclical, both brief and infinite; and
finally, its plays test the minimal requirements for dramatic form, but
their very minimalism often expands their reach.
"A new geography ... in the Internet age"
The 365 National Festival represents a fascinating remediation that blurs
the distinction between mass and local production. Remediation, as
defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, refers to two related ten-
dencies: the way new media present themselves as improved and more
immediate versions of old media, and the way old media attempt to
reassert their dominance and relevance by refashioning themselves in the
5 See Philip Kolin, "Redefining the Way Theatre Is Created and Performed:
The Radical Inclusion of Suzan-Lori Parks's 365 Dqys/ 365 Plqys," Journal of Dramatic
Theory and Criticism 22, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 65-83; Rebecca Rugg, "Radical Inclusion 'Til I t
Hurts: Suzan-Lori Parks's 365 Dqys/ 365 Plqys," Theater 38, no. 1 (2008): 52-75; and
Kathryn Walat, "These Are the Days: Suzan-Lori Parks's Year of Writing Dangerously
Yields 365 Plays," American Theatre 23, no. 9 (2006): 26-27, 81-83.
10
MUSE
image of the new.6 Theatrical microthons display the latter tendency: they
remain live performance-an old medium, perhaps the oldest, and one
predicated on presence and immediacy-but they reflect and respond to
the encyclopedic impulses that characterize new media. In the case of the
365 Festival, Parks and the producers remediated the festival, a tradition-
ally site-specific form, as a decentralized network. \'\fithout the internet,
Parks's coordinated but non-hierarchical collaboration among eight hun-
dred theatres would have been unfathomable.? The production team
intentionally set out "to create a new geography for artistic productions
in the Internet age,"8 and the resulting festival makes a compelling case
study of the ways live theatrical activity is refashioning itself in the image
of communications technologies that collapse distance and encourage
simultaneity.
Theorist Paul Virilio claims that the acceleration of media and
transportation technologies during the twentieth and twenty-first cen-
turies has worked to abolish time and distance, transforming events that
once would have been site-specific (wars, catastrophes, celebrations, or
performances) into global experiences beamed to a community of bil-
lions at the same time. Virilio dubs this new decentralized territory of
simultaneous mass spectacle "a city of the instant."9 Parks's festival was
not transmitted live via satellite, but its international network relies on the
internet to facilitate local, idiosyncratic performances. The project har-
nesses new technology to create a festival of the global village, a city of
many instants that exemplifies the recent convergence of top-down,
authorial models of distribution and grass-roots participatory culture.10 A
universe of theatres only became a constellation when connected by
Parks's text, but the Festival coordinators urged each troupe to make the
plays their own. Eight hundred diverse troupes each created seven live
6 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding Nei/J Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 3-15.
7
Rugg, one of the producers of the festival, admits that "[t]he experiment would
be unima6rinable without the Internet, and it has proved to be a thoroughly contemporary,
Web- and cell-phone-dependent producing experience." "Radical Inclusion," 57.
8 "365 Days/365 Plays," The Public Theater, http:/ /www.publictheater.org/365
(accessed 24 November 2006) .
9 Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, translated by Mark Polizotti
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 87.
10 See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and Nei/J Media Collide (New
York: New York University Press, 2006).
EONS IN AN I NSTANT 11
performances: site-specific, available to a local audience, and part of a
network that fostered regional community. But the festival's simultaneous
live performances depended on a hypermediated and distributed produc-
tion scheme. In an interview conducted during the build-up to the festi-
val, Parks offered a new rubric to describe the goal of her dramatic work
in general: "it's very much an Oberammergau thing."11 Referring to the
German town that has performed a passion a play every ten years since
the early seventeenth century, Parks said, "My plays are very much like
that-the community gets together and creates .. . a new kind of com-
munity pageant."
12
For Parks, a shrinking planet allows an enormously
expanded community of distinct yet interconnected localities: a decen-
tralized Oberammergau.
Using the internet to coordinate geographically-specific and idio-
syncratic performances around the world, the 365 Festival unsettles dis-
tinctions between mass-produced global media and live performance
event. For one, the festival's scope challenges Patrice Pavis's idea of the
"limited range" of live theatre. Pavis takes for granted a distinction
between broadcast media, which "easily multiply the number of their
spectators, becoming accessible to a potentially infinite audience," and
the intimate relationships fostered in the theatre, which "cannot tolerate
more than a limited number of spectators."13 In theory, the radically
inclusive 365 Festival-open to any performers and free for audiences-
had a nearly unlimited range of spectators. In this sense, the festival
offers the best realization yet of Philip Auslander's provocative idea that
"live performances can be mass-produced."1
4
To support his suggestion,
Auslander cites an earlier experiment in decentralized American theatre,
the WPA Federal Theatre's 1936 production of It Can't Happen Here,
which opened simultaneously in eighteen American cities. A play with
eighteen premieres may not qualify as mass-production, but an event with
seventeen distinct premieres of 379 plays surely does.15 A few pages ear-
11 Kevin]. Weanore, Jr., "It's an Oberammergau Thing: An Interview with
Suzan-Lori Parks," in Suzan Lori Parks: A Casebook (New York: Routledge, 2007), 140.
12
i bid., 139-40.
1
3 Patrice Pavis, "Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference," in
Theatre at the Crossroads qf Culture, translated by Loren Kruger (New York: Routledge,
1991), 101.
14
Philip Auslander, Liveness: Ptifomlance in a Mediatized Culture, second edition
(New York: Routledge, 2008), 51.
IS Despite its title, the cycle in fact contains 379 plays. Parks wrote two plays
on some days, and three "Constants" that accompany the cycle.
12 MUSE
lier in Liveness, Auslander suggests that in a "mediatized, repetitive econ-
omy, using the technology of reproduction in ways that defy that econo-
my may be a more significantly oppositional gesture" than insisting on
the primacy of live performance.
1
6 Park's oppositional, media-enabled
performance marathon suggests one can have it both ways: maintaining
the primacy of live performance with all of its aura and immediacy, while
taking advantage of a mediatized production network to expand the
scope of the performance and level the playing field of the American
theatrical establishment.
Parks's name for her capacious hyper-democratic impulse is rad-
ical inclusion.17 With regard to the festival, radical inclusion meant invit-
ing any theatre in the world to participate by producing a week of the
cycle anywhere they want, any way they want, for only a dollar a day in
licensing fees. They could be staged readings, happenings, or fully pro-
duced spectacles; one company performed i ts plays as a conference call
radio drama.
18
Theatres were forbidden from charging admission, so the
audience could include anyone, at least in principle. Radical inclusion also
meant dismantling the traditional hierarchies and divisions regulating
commercial theatrical output by giving well-heeled theatres and rogue
troupes of disorganized thespians egual access to the productions in
order, however temporarily, to redraw the map of the American theatre
to reflect an increasingly flat world. As self-declared "hosts" of the festi-
val, Parks and Metzgar were fond of saying: everyone's invited to the
table, and "there's pie for everyone."19
The internet enabled Parks's rhetoric of radical inclusion by
promising a digital table large enough in theory to accommodate anyone,
but in practice the radicalism and range of the 365 Festival remained lim-
ited. Parks and the producers clearly made good-faith efforts to cast a net
as widely as current digital and theatrical networks would allow, but just
how radically inclusive was the festival in the end? Despite the festival's
sincere rhetoric about democracy and leveling, the "grassroots" festival
would never have gotten off the ground without its central authorizing
16 Auslander, Liveness, 47, n30.
17
For more on radical inclusion in 365, see Rugg, "Radical Inclusion," espe-
cially 56-62; and Kolin, "Redefining the Way Theatre Is Created and Performed," 65-83.
1
8 Sadie Dingfelder describes the production by the American Century Theater
in "ACT does Theater Over the Phone," Washington City Paper, 15 December 2007.
19 ''About," 365 Days/365 Plays web site, http:/ /365days365plays.com/
about.php (accessed 9 September 2008).
EONS IN t\N l NSTt\NT 13
figure, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning celebrity powerhouse of the American
theatre. Anyone was invited to the table, but the menu had been set in
advance, and was steeped in Parks's personality. Parks may be right that
the 365 Festival offers pie for everyone, or at least petits fours, but the pri-
mary reason theatres were willing to commit time, energy, and attention
to these miniature recipes is that Parks has proven in the past that she can
make some excellent pie, and producers and audiences trusted that at
least some of the same ingredients would show up here. Compared to a
recent fully-digital project like The WikiPlay-an ongoing collaboration
which invites anyone, anywhere to contribute to a shared, multi-format,
multilingual online script20_Parks's collaboration seems downright tradi-
tional in its central focus on a year in the life of an individual playwright.
Audiences too were by and large more traditional than radical.
Anyone in the world was free to perform the plays, and all performanc-
es were open to the public without charge, but the vast majority of those
exposed to the project were already theatregoers or theatre students in
the United States and in a handful of other countries. True, the festival
production team hoped to build a fully and freely accessible mediated
version of the festival, and requested that each theatre record their per-
formances and upload videos to an online archive. The 365 Archive, if
completed, would bring to fruition Kolin's suggestion that a cycle so
resistant to staging "might best be realized as cyberspace, or digital the-
atre, a theatre of virtual performance(s)" allowing spectators to "see vari-
ations of the entire cycle."Zt But the small number of recordings available
in the gallery so far-a mere dozen or so of the more than 6000 per-
formances-suggests that the 365 Festival, unlike its published counter-
part, will remain more local repertoire than global archive.
Whatever the fate of the digital 365 Archive, Parks's year-long
festival of shorts was already a form of digitally-enabled theatre, a reme-
diated performance predicated on the dual contention that the live need
not be local and that the global need not be televisual. The influence of
new media, however, can only begin to account for the shape and multi-
farious time signatures of Parks's microthon.
365 as Uncloseted Drama
Although it is difficult to consider Parks's collection apart from the festi-
2
0 The WikiPlay, Unspun Theatre, http:/ /unspun.wikispaces.com (accessed 9
Septembet 2008).
21 Kolin, "Redefining the Way Theatre Is Created and Performed," 81.
14 MUSE
val it spawned, 365 started as an insular, individual writing project allow-
ing Parks to stretch her playwriting muscles while stretching the idea of a
play. Before it was given to the crowd, it was a solo test of creative stam-
ina that Parks compared to "running a marathon without the crowd
cheering you on."22 After a bout of popularity following the more or less
naturalistic Topdog/ Underdog, Parks found in the private rigor of 365 a
daily method to reclaim and re-explore modes of formal experimentation
that fueled her early plays. The commitment to start over each day was a
real-world correlative of a theatrical style that, as Marc Robinson notes,
"consciously tries for restlessness."
2
3 Like Clara in Adrienne Kennedy's A
Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, who vows to "do a page a day"
despite her exhaustion, Parks too became a "a spectator watching [her]
life," tracking her own manipulations of dramatic form.24 Even without
knowing that Parks did not originally intend to publish or stage the plays,
it would be easy to classify her collection as closet drama. The extreme
brevity of the plays, their many impossible stage directions, and the
daunting scale of the cycle as a whole all resist performance. The cycle
largely operates according to its own intimate rhythms, so when Bonnie
Metzgar convinced Parks to turn "intimacy ... outward" and uncloset the
plays,2s their idiosyncrasy and difficulty became something akin to the
productive antitheatricality that Martin Puchner identifies in modernist
closet drama.26 The cycle's radical departures from traditional theatre
were absorbed into the mainstream theatre community, and became the
basis for its temporary reorganization.
Much was gained in this uncloseting but some things were lost.
As is often the case with theatrical shorts, many of 365's plays work bet-
ter on the page than the stage. Parks's beautiful and complex stage direc-
22 \'V"etmore, "It's an Oberammergau Thing," 125.
23 Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), 195.
24 Adrienne Kennedy, A A1ovie Star Has to Star in Black and White, in Adrienne
Kennet!J in One Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 82.
25 Joseph Roach, "An Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks and Bonnie Metzgar,"
Yale University, 14 November 2006, http:/ /wpp.research.yale.edu/wpp_events.php?id=2
(accessed 9 September 2008).
26 See Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Antithealricaliry, and Drama
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). For more on the postmodern urge to
uncloset supposedly impossible drama, see Nicholas Salvato, "Uncloseting Drama:
Gertrude Stein and the Wooster Group," Modern Drama 50, no. 1 (2007 Spring): 36-59.
EONS IN AN INSTANT 15
tions-liberated from parentheses, right-justified, and infused with nar-
rative and poetic energies of their own-constitute a parallel text that
demands attention as often as it directs action. Over the years, she has
refined a battery of formal and typographical techniques that cram addi-
tional meaning and direction into textual spaces. The most distinctive
examples of Parks's penchant for condensing meaning are her signature
"spells," instants of heightened silence built into scripts using figures'
names followed by no dialogue. Insisting that charged silences are the
places "where the figures experience their pure true simple state," Parks
displays her faith, along with Maeterlinck and Beckett, that the essence of
a character or play can be distilled in an instant.27 But in even the most
faithful performances, audiences miss some of the nuance of Parks's
"architectural" spells on the page.2S A few of the plays in 365 resemble
spells liberated from their surrounding plays. At least once in the past,
Parks wrote a spell that was its own scene,29 but these new pieces argue
that a spell may constitute an entire play. Paper Tomatoes, for example,
reprinted here in its entirety, turns on a single reaction:
A Strongman strides in. Sits on a crate.
Immediate!J People come in and throw 1vads of paper at him.
Strongman
Strongman
R e s ~
This goes on for quite some time. Then thry leave.
He sits there.
He uses all his strength to hold back his tears.30
Here Parks revisits one of her cardinal themes, the cruelty of spectator-
ship, through a dramatic lens at its most microscopic. Is this a play? Many
traditional elements are here in miniature: inciting incident, rising action,
conflict, and a final reversal. But if Paper Tomatoes works at all, it arguably
27 Suzan-Lori Parks, "Elements of Style," in The America Play and Other Works
(New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999), 16.
28 Ibid.
29 For an article-length discussion of this scene, "Scene 19: A Scene of Love (?)"
in Venus, see Jennifer Johung, "Figuring the 'Spells' /Spelling the Figures: Suzan-Lori
Parks's 'Scene of Love (?)'," Theatre journal 58, no. 1 (2006): 39-52.
30 Suzan-Lori Parks, 365 Days/ 365 Plays (New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 2006), 234.
16 MUSE
works only on paper or if the narration is read aloud. W'ithout the stage
direction, "He uses all his strength to hold back his tears," we likely miss
the play's central turn, its play on "strength" that revises our understand-
ing of the label, "strongman."
Reading the plays also radically changes their temporal stakes.
Unlike a theatrical spectator, a reader can choose the size of her helping.
She can take a break, skip ahead, reread a section, or stay as long as she
likes. The flexibility of reading helps explain why long compilations of
very short pieces are commonplace in published poetry, but rare and rad-
ical on stage. Microthons, like all plays that experiment with time, are
both more compelling and more challenging in performance because
they impose unexpected rhythms on an audience. The cycle dictates
rhythms as a book as well, but less radically. The structure of 365 has led
some readers to adopt a daily reading schedule. Organized according to
the days of composition, and too long to be read in one sitting, the col-
lection invites readers to treat the book pseudo-devotionally, as a daily
prayer book in the dramatic mode. The same calendrical structure that
makes the plays stageable only in logistically daunting ways allows and
encourages the regular, private ritual of reading.
The world has largely measured the success of the unpreceden-
ted 365 Festival by the novelty of its project and the loftiness of its goals
rather than by the plays themselves. As a result, few critics and reviewers
have discussed them in detail. In the next three sections, I argue that the
plays of 365 reinscribe in miniature the paradoxes that drive the cycle as
a whole. Attempting to embrace all subjects and peoples, they demon-
strate hope in an utterly democratic dramaturgy while admitting the
impossibility of such total inclusion. Endorsing both linear and cyclical
modes of time, they simultaneously dismiss and reinforce the strictures
of theatrical temporality. Finally, they demonstrate that stripping plays to
their bare minimum can, somewhat unexpectedly, expand their signifi-
cance.
A Fragmentary Epic
Radical inclusion governed not just the festival, but also the year of writ-
ing. Park's project was not only to write a play a day for a year, but to con-
tain a year in the life of her country and her planet in all its diversity. She
makes admirable attempts to build an intentionally diverse and democrat-
ic mosaic, but these attempts coexist with her awareness of the limits of
radical inclusion as a dramaturgical ethos or as a political philosophy.
Parks's encyclopedic microthon is a strange hybrid: everyone and every-
EoNS IN AN INSTANT 17
thing is included, but none fully fleshed out; the scope is epic, but there's
no hero (other than Parks) and no quest or direction. 365 is a union of
atoms, a Whitmanesque epic composed of glimpses, a scrapbook history.
For Parks, plays are "a way of creating and rewriting history
through the medium of literature."3I Given the chance to document a
year as it accumulated, she felt an acute burden to make her history inclu-
sive. So i l g r i m ~ Progress (for Thanksgiving), shows a throng of pilgrims
slowly and deliberately crossing the stage, but the directions call for pil-
grims of every imaginable stripe-from Mayflower to Mecca, Canterbury
to Varanasi, Western Wall to Mount Kailash-and demand,
''Accommodate as many as you can. Don't intentionally exclude any-
body."32 Those lines could have been a mantra for Parks, whose cycle jux-
taposes as many kinds of history as possible: geopolitical and local,
national and African-American, mythic and quotidian, private and the-
atrical. 365 reprocesses Parks's own history as a playwright by digging up
themes from her earlier work-Abraham Lincoln and other dead presi-
dents, holes and digging, race relations, absent fathers-and refreshes
theatrical tradition by re-imagining classic works of the theatre, from The
Tempest to The Seagull, in her own idiom.
The radical hospitality of 365 strains to include even those plays
the collection could not include. In Outtakes, a writer and an editor are
surprised as the stage fills, paradoxically, w-ith a crowd of theatrical out-
takes from the cycle: "some characters, some plays that u;erent even fui!J formed
enough to get titles, like little almost-birds who fall out of the nest." The editor
takes pity on them and announces, "We'll call the play 'Outtakes.' They'll
be welcome here."
33
An even more poignant expression of the theme is
Too Close, written when Parks had only two months of plays left to write.
A Writer Woman holds a clear plastic bag, blows her nose, balls up the
tissue, and drops it in the bag. She coughs into a napkin, examines the
phlegm, balls it up, and adds it to the bag. She empties her pockets of
countless tiny folded slips of paper covered with words, reads some, and
carefully places each in the bag. Her brief monologue is a eulogy for the
author's unnumbered thoughts that will never grow into brainchildren:
You start thinking aft er awhile about the ones that got
away. Not the ones you wrote. But the ones you didnt
31 Parks, "Possession," in America Plcry, 4.
32 Parks, 365/365, 33.
33 Ibid., 93.
18
write. Like the eggs that passed out of yr body without
becoming babies. Or sperm, if yr a guy. Imagine if each
one became somebody. Time is limited, I know, even in
a work of this length. So Ive jotted down the un-includ-
ed ones and put them in this plastic bag.34
MUSE
Like the tomb of the unknown soldier, the bag of unknown characters
is, along with its play, a placeholder, an anonymous memorial. Parks tries
to preserve every scrap of mental detritus, and yet, even plays like
Outtakes and Too Close that purport to include the lost, in the end serve as
reminders of the impossibility of total inclusion and the inevitability of
loss. Even in the longest of works, time and space are limited. Like all art,
plays rely on selection, and in this sense, theatre of any length remains
impoverished.
Parks's love of encyclopedic diversity closely resembles that of
an earlier American artist who also contains multitudes, Walt Whitman,
for whom "nothing is too close, nothing is too far off" to be included.3S
Just as Whitman's ecstatic embrace in Leaves of Grass includes everyone
(the slave, the corpse, the prostitute), Parks's epic is a microcosm from
which no creed, color, or class has been excluded. For both Whitman and
Parks, however, extreme democratic leveling can lead to reductive con-
Elations of difference. The exchange that concludes Pilgrims' Progress
shrinks an impressive diversity of pilgrims to a thin idealistic capsule:
Someone: All Pilgrims
Someone Else: So different!
Someone: But all going to the same place.
Smiles all around 36
Naively or not, Parks shares Whitman's hope that a generous canvas can
model and contribute to an inclusive society. Both authors push against
the limitations of their media. Whitman yearns to collapse the distance
between art object and viewer. "This is no book," he wrote in the 1860
edition of Leaves of Grass,
34 Ibid., 309.
35 Walt Whitman, Leaves ofGmss: The First (1855) Edition (New York: Penguin,
1959), 8.
36 Parks, 365/365, 33.
EONS IN AN I NSTANT
Who touches this, touches a man
(Is it night? Are you alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms.37
19
Parks shares Whitman's love of the capacious embrace that spills off the
page and touches the world. The stage directions that comprise Parks's
Something For Mom reach beyond the bounds of the play (or any play) and
express her hope that a modest gesture, whether a play or a hug, can have
a contagious and enormous effect:
A Kid (you could even cast an actual child),
holding a bunch of flmvers, runs toward Mother.
Mother is surprised and happy. Kid presents flowers.
Mother admires the flowers. Then, lifting Kid,
Mother showers love.
This happens several times, with other Mothers and other Kids.
And "Mothers" and "Kids" are mutating and expanding to
include all of us, filling the stage, the theatre, and the world,
as the action continues and repeats forever.
Even during peacetime. 38
The simplicity of the gesture and the lack of dialogue or conflict make
this a minimal drama, but the closing stage directions ask it to expand to
impossibly large proportions. This is stage direction as wish fulfillment,
as a gesture of faith not only in a production team to execute the instruc-
tions, but in the world to enact them. It is an experiment in viral joy. In
this case, Parks bypasses the limitations of theatre by remediating it using
the split screen conventions of video. The ending of Something for Mom
asks for a f.tl.mic effect very similar to the ending of Love Actualb (2003),
the British romantic comedy released, coincidentally, six months after
Parks wrote the play (but three years before she published it). After two
of the main characters of Love Actuai!J embrace in an airport, the real
happy ending comes when the focus multiplies via split screen mitosis to
include the hugs of ordinary people of all types and nations, expanding
until the screen teems with a multicultural mosaic of miniature embraces
(Figures 1 and 2). Like the f.tl.m, S omethingjor Mom may feel saccharine and
37 Walt Whitman, The ColJected Writings of Walt Whitman, edited by Gay Wilson
Allen and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 10: 611.
38 Parks, 365/365, 163.
20 MusE
Figures 1 and 2 (opposite): Embraces multiply and divide in the final
moments of Love Actuai!J. Directed by Richard Curtis. Copyright 2003,
Universal Pictures.
naive, but the 365 Festival at least partially brought the play's impossible
instructions to fruition in late March of 2007, when at least seventeen
different sets of multiple Mothers and Kids populated far-flung stages
during the same week. A play that asks to include everyone highlights the
impossibility of total inclusion, but the simultaneity and global reach of
the 365 Festival began to unravel the paradox of a "mutating and expand-
ing" action that fills the world, continues, and repeats forever.
Plays with Time: An Eon in an Instant
Who will hold the heart of man, so that it may stand still
and see how steadfast eternity, neither future nor past,
decrees times future and those past?
St. Augustine, Confessions39
Somethingfor Mom is one of a number of plays in the collection that lasts
forever. The "forever plays" are the most extreme examples of Parks's
radically inclusive conception of time. Parks's plays have routinely dis-
rupted and subverted linear time, allowing the historical past and the
future to coexist and mingle in present moments that conflate "yesterday
today next summer tomorrow" and "just uh moment ago."40 In 365, she
39 St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, translated by John K. Ryan
(New York: Doubleday, 1960), 285.
40 Parks, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, in America
Plqy, 102.
EONS IN AN INSTANT 21
pushes the temporal flexibility of the theatrical moment to its extremes,
creating individual plays that must be cataloged simultaneously among
the shortest and the longest ever. Parks's temporal manipulations both
reinforce traditional dramaturgy by exaggerating the ways theatre has
always warped time (excerpting, eliding, dilating, or juxtaposing
moments), and highlight the limitations of theatrical time by borrowing
time signatures from other media, including film, art installations, and
visual art.
The plays of 365 provide a hyperbolic catalog of the ways the-
atre distorts time. In some cases, like The 2nd Constant, a moment extends
and becomes self-sufficient. This is the entire play: "Someone standing still.
Thry could be dressed in mourning. The sound of wind or whales jorever."41 With
The 2nd Constant, Parks finally calls Maurice Maeterlinck's bluff in "The
Tragical in Everyday Life" that tragedy can consist in nothing other than
someone waiting patiently and giving ear to the eternal. The phrase,
"Someone standing still" follows Samuel Beckett in capitalizing on the
ambiguity of the word "still," a word that, like this play, is simultaneous-
ly frozen (to stand still) and continuous (to remain standing). Other plays
drastically accelerate standard theatrical compression. The 3rd Foreign
Dignitary in Abraham Lincoln at 89 docs a "beautiful and complicated"
narrative dance relating a national epic. The stage direction that follows
describes the central paradox of Parks's cycle: "It all took eons to happen and
it all happened in an instant."42 The dignitary's dance instantiates the mythic
simultaneity Parks aspires for in her national epic: a single theatrical ges-
ture contains and distills larger narratives, histories, and times. As
Maeterlinck cryptically suggests, the infmitesimal reveals "the concave
41 Parks, 365/365, x.
42
Ibid., 38.
22
MusE
side of the illimitable."43
Most often, Parks bends linear time into cyclical patterns. The
idea that "[t]ime has a circular shape" has long been a central hypothesis
in her dramaturgical physics.44 If Parks has always seen the moment of
performance as a fusion of past, present, and future, some plays from
365 replace repetition and revision with a form of strict repetition bor-
rowed from film installations: the infinite loop. Father Comes home from the
Wars (Part 11: His Eternal Return-A Plcry for My Father) is a "never-ending
loop cif action" in which an unending series of five returning husbands twirl
their wives and greet their children.
45
A complement to Somethingfor Mom,
the play is a gift to Parks's military father who left and returned many
times in her youth, as well as a gesture of impossible faith that the world's
fathers will return home from their wars in perpetuity. The tension
between linear and cyclical time in plays like this one reflects a parallel
tension animating the project as a whole. On the one hand, Parks set a
goal and marched resolutely forward toward its finale, including every-
thing she could along the way to shore up a sense of comprehensive
finality. On the other hand, 365 remains insistently a rycle shaped by the
rhythms of diurnal and annual renewal. The project ends where it began
on 12 November, and the promise of performance means the plays will
be continually reinvented by new production teams.
From one perspective, the forever plays are provocative hyper-
bole, playful winks to readers and directors that invite creative solutions.46
As Rebecca Rugg describes, Parks's "open time signature" in 365liberates
the plays and represents a tacit admission that all stagings will be approx-
imate and provisional.
47
But from another angle, Parks may be serious
when she claims that the plays last forever. Even before they are per-
formed, Parks insists, "plays are complete-they just exist in another
realm."48 This nee-Platonic definition keeps open the possibility of an
43 Maurice Maeterlinck, The Lift of Space, translated by Bernard Miall (New
York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1928), 122.
44 Parks, "Elements of Style," 11.
45 Parks, 365 I 365, 368.
46 Gregory ]\filler, "Everybody Lean Forward: Watching and Doing Times
365," paper given at American Literature Association Panel, May 2007.
47 Rugg, "Radical I nclusion," 54.
4R \X'etmore, "It's an Oberammergau Thing," 137.
EONS IN AN INSTANT 23
ideal play that lasts forever in the mind, while inviting performers and
directors to drag the idea into being in whatever way they may. The acci-
dents of performance make do in time, but the plays themselves refuse
to be bound by any time but their own. Like Parks, they answer to a high-
er power.
Nothing is Anything: Parks's Ontological Parables
If the plays of 365 can be considered enormous on account of every-
thing they include-in form, in content, and in time-a number of them
gain magnitude on account of everything they exclude. The most fasci -
nating kind of immensity in the plays is the scope created by the minimal
gesture, the echo magnified by empty space. Like plays by Beckett and
Pinter, Parks's spare dramas apply more widely because they do less. Of
course all theatre-and all art, for that matter-relies on the accretion of
meaning that comes from restricting one's view within a particular frame.
Martin Essl.in makes this capacity a central theme of The Field of Drama:
The stage or screen as a place where significant things
are being exhibited elevates the most mundane objects
and events to exemplary status, makes them significant
beyond their mere individual being: they become signs
for multitudes of similar objects and events. Any object,
any gesture thus is potentially redolent of possible
metaphorical or symbolic meaning, far beyond its literal
or factual function in the performance.49
Esslin's remarks apply Viktor Shklovsky's concept of defamil.iarization,
or Marcel Duchamp's insistence that art consists only in the framing, to
the stage and the screen.so But the scale of the frame also makes a dif-
ference. Minimal art revises Esslin's account by teaching us that the nat-
ural tendency of artistic framing to make objects significant can increase
as the size and complexity of the field decreases.s
1
A bushel of apples in
49 Martin Esslin, The Field of Drama: Hotv the Signs in the Drama Create Meaning on
Stage and Screen (London: Methuen, 1987), 163.
SO Brecht's Veifmndungsifftkt also redeployed Shklovsky in a theatrical context,
but where Brecht advocated particular strategies to produce estrangement, Esslin con-
tends that things on a stage are always already strange.
51 Of course, some minimal artists resist the idea that their creations mean any-
thing at all. But the literalist stance, summarized most famously in Frank Stella's tautol-
24 MusE
the back of Mother Courage's wagon likely means somewhat more than
one in your house, but an apple alone on a bare stage cannot help but
stand in for the idea of an apple, and is more likely to suggest Eve's temp-
tation or Newton's discovery or New York City, or perhaps all three at
once.
Like Beckett, Parks takes advantage of spare or unmarked the-
atrical spaces to create ontological parables.sz A parable operates by com-
pressing vast moral or spiritual insights into an apparently simple story.
The lack of identifying features in Parks's minimal parables adds meta-
physical resonance to their implications. She winks at this tendency with
the meta-parable, Empty, a play devoid of context that ruminates on the
freedom afforded by an empty apartment, a blank canvas, or an empty
stage:
Its empty.
Yeah.
Its- really-very-
Empty.
Yes.
I told you it was.
I had to see for myself.53
TUJo speakers.
One speaker, familiar with the space, has brought another who is skepti-
cal at first, but soon understands that emptiness provides its own immen-
sity:
At!)thing could happen here because-
Because nothing's happening here right now?
Yr sort of getting the hang of it. How do you
feel?
Less empty. Or-empty but ok.
ogy, "What you see is what you see," rarely applies to minimalism in the theatre, about
which one could almost say "what you see is always both what you see and what you don't
see." Quoted in "Questions to Stella and Judd," an interview by Bruce Glaser, edited by
Lucy Lippard, in Minima/Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battock (New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1968), 168.
52 I borrow this term from the title of Lance St. John Butler's Samuel Beckett and
the Meaning o/ Being: A Stut!J in Ontological Parable (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984).
53 Parks, 365/365, 90.
EONS IN AN INSTANT
Y r gonna go far. I can tell.
You think?
I'm betting on it.
Gee.
Yeah.
(Rest)
Tell me something. Whered everything go, you
think?
Good question. Dunno.
Cool. 5
4
25
Parks gets a kick out of her own provocative reticence. Providing less
direction liberates directors, producers, and readers to discover their own
meanings in the spare landscapes of 365. In plays like this, Parks removes
context to make the conversation echo beyond itself, taking advantage
both of the tendency of the miniature to refer to itself, and of the human
penchant to interpret the ordinary in symbolic terms.
Parks's tendency to build plays around a single gesture or
metaphor can lead to facile reduction. In 1 and 2, a man enters stage left
walking backward two steps, forward one step, backward two steps, and
so on until he collapses from exhaustion and sobs. Similarly, in Almost
Perfect a character whose sign reads ''Almost Perfect" is profoundly disap-
pointed when he meets another whose sign reads "Perfect." Parks's habit
of announcing the tenor of her single-serving allegories, ostensibly
another gesture of hospitality, weakens this play and others in 365 by
reducing them to a single idea and leaving the spectator with little work
to do. Parks's sign-posting seems to indicate, somewhat ironically, her lack
of faith in the meaning-generating capacity of the theatre, or at least her
awareness that building an allegory quickly is difficult. Beckett's shorts, by
contrast, almost never announce the terms of their metaphors, and they
are all the more remarkable for it. In the past, Parks has resisted decod-
ing the blueprints her plays provide, and has looked down on plays based
on a single transparent idea: "I think that the playwright provides the
map. But I think a bad play only has a one-way road. Yes, I think the bad
play has one road; one idea, one message, one way of doing it."55 If some
of Parks's single-idea parables feel like one-way roads, others gain grace
and poignancy from their economy. This is the hope of Live Free or Die.
As the play begins, the Furies line either side of the stage. A mythical
5
4
Ibid.
55 Shelby Jiggets, "Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks," Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 312.
26 MusE
murderess enters, hands bloody. She picks up speed when she sees the
Furies, throws her body toward them, and comes heart-wrenchingly close
to breaking their ranks:
We see it in slow motion, like a sprinter through a tape,
every muscle strained to cross the finish line, but then the tape,
instead tif breaking, holds her qy the hands.
They remain extended like this.
She pulls away as they pull her back. Lights out. 56
This is a play reduced to a single gestus, theatre approaching the condition
of sculpture. The play's conceit-that struggling against fate is like play-
ing an impossible game of Red Rover organized by the Furies-may be
hokey, but as a piece of unadorned kinesthetic tragedy, it creates a stage
moment that personifies the unassailable web of guilt and retribution
binding those who try to kill their way out of a problem. That the play
also serves as a parable about 365 makes it all the more resonant. Again
and again in 365, Parks throws everything she has at limitations and
boundaries, but instead of breaking, the limits stretch, accommodate the
assault, and create something new held together by its tensions.
The Window o/ Opportunity, written in the first week of the cycle,
is a diminutive ontological parable that displays all of the kinds of minia-
ture magnitude I have discussed so far: it includes everything, means
everything, and contains all time. Like the Great Hole of History in The
America Play, the window in The Windou; o/ Opportunity uses the space of
the stage to resuscitate a dead metaphor and invest it with significance.
Onstage, window curtains cover an ordinary window. A uniformed fig-
ure, the Window Meister, enters to perform his official duty. He checks
his watch, checks the wind, then takes a deep breath. He draws the cur-
tains, opens the window "with a great flourish," stands at attention, and
announces, "The Window of Opportunity is now open!"S
7
At first, noth-
ing happens. Then the curtains start to flutter in the breeze, and conti-
nue as the Window Meister announces the passage of absolutely every-
thing to date in a dizzyingly abbreviated paragraph:
Window Meister: Ellipses. Ellipses. Before. The Dawn
of Time. The Creation of the Universe. Ellipses. The
fish crawls out of the sea. Ellipses. Olduvai Gorge.
56 Parks, 365/365, 304.
57 Ibid., 9.
EoNs JN AN lNST.'\NT
27
Figure 3: Rachel Holmes as The One Who Got Away and Joan Macintosh
as Window Meister in The Public Theater production of The Window of
Opportunity. Directed by Michael Greif. Photo copyright Michal Daniel, 2006.
Ellipses. Homo Erectus in God's image. Ellipses. Gods,
Gods and more Gods. The Rise. The Fall. Ellipses.
Ellipses. Ellipses. Confucius and the Buddha. Ellipses.
Jesus. Ellipses. Ellipses. United States version:
Mayflower and Indians and Slavery; Washington
Crossing the Delaware. Ellipses. Civil War. Ellipses. The
War to End All Wars. Ellipses. Ellipses. All universal
events of great significance up to and including the
Present Day.s8
The Window Meister announces that the Window is closed, and a
moment later someone enters running, but has arrived just a moment too
late. The Meister offers a word of encouragement, "Look at it this way:
Y r 'The One Who Got Away.' . .. Maybe next time.''59 These words are
small consolation to the figure, who leaves with a heavy heart, but the
play itself represents some consolation. Parks is obsessed with the
absences and holes in history- everything elided by the many ellipses in
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., 10.
28
MUSE
the Window Meister's speech-and thinks of her plays as parallel histo-
ries that make space for those who got away from traditional histories:
theatre, for me, is the perfect place to "make" history-
that is because so much of African-American histor y
has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of
my tasks as playwright is to ... locate the ancestral bur-
ial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones
sing, write it down .... I'm re-membering and staging
historical events which, through their happening on
stage, are ripe for inclusion in the canon of history.6o
In this case, Parks restages the holey whole of history in less than a
minute, and makes the tragic protagonist a representative for those his-
tory forgot. But The Windon; of Opportunity is not just a parable about
African-American or other subaltern history; it is also an expression of
the futile race against fate, as well as a parable about the theatre, and a
reflexive commentary on 365. The Window Meister pulling back the cur-
tain ("perhaps a gorgeous portion of purple velvet drapery") is also a
stage manager. As the title suggests, any play is a window of opportun-
ity, a structure that invites us to view a world through a small frame for a
limited time. That the figure's name, The One Who Got Away, is the
same name Parks uses in Too Close to describe the ideas she couldn't
record ("you start thinking about the ones that got away'') reveals a per-
sonal thrust to the metaphor.6
1
When she wrote this fourth play in the
series, Parks had just begun a race against time, a race to add something
to the history of everything by opening her own window of opportun-
ity and trying to let in all of those who tend to get away.
The title of The Window of Opportunity renders its metaphor more
or less as transparent as its window. Arguably, Parks could have had more
faith in the capacity of the stage to generate its own meaning. Open a
window on a bare stage and let the wind blow through it, and you already
have a window of opportunity, a breath of fresh air, an opening onto
possibility. For that matter, she may not have needed the window at all,
because the stage is always already a frame, and left alone will signify one.
At the end of her compositional odyssey, fifty-one weeks after writing
The Window of Opportunity, Parks found that you can tell a story with wind
and light moving through an empty stage:
60 Parks, "Possession," 4.
61 Parks, 365/365,309.
EONS IN AN INSTANT
The Blank Before the World
A very s/01v light cue, as slow as possible,
from deep black to Jvhite-hot zoom.
The light reveals the stage, which is complete!J blank.
(Is this possible?)
The light cue is accompanied f?y a sound of wind-
the wind which brought most of us here to this country
or this planet. Then, the wind reveals itse!f to be
an enormous!J elongated single breath.
When the light cue has reached its maximum
and the breath has expired-the lights bump out quick!J. 62
29
This penultimate play in the cycle restages Beckett's 30-second play,
Breath, with several key re\isions that convert a pessimistic parable into a
hopeful hymn to theatrical possibility. Like Breath, it has no characters and
no dialogue, and consists in a single light cue, up and down, coordinated
with the sound of a slow single breath. But instead of a stage full of
trash, we see a completely blank stage full of potential. Like Breath, this
script is all stage direction, but where Beckett employs mannered techni-
cal instructions, Parks's stage direction is a free verse poem with strategic
line breaks. Putting the parenthetical, "Is this possible?" on its own line
makes it not only a question about whether a stage can ever truly be
blank, but also a wink at her own audacity: Is this play possible? Similarly,
the line break that separates "the wind which brought most of us here to
this country" from the next line, "or this planet," registers hesitation
between a story about migration and American possibility, and a story
about the creation of the world. Crucially, where Beckett's light rises and
falls together with breath, Parks's version gives us one long sunrise. As
the human breath gives out, hot light illuminates a blank stage. Beckett's
play witnesses the end of the world; The Blank Before the World oversees its
birth. Like Beckett, Parks understands the way the theatre encourages our
natural tendency to organize even blank light and empty time into a story.
Both playwrights capitalize on the human instinct to mythologize, to read
the rhythms of the natural world-sunrise and sunset, inhalation and
exhalation-as signs laden with metaphysical import. Paul Ricoeur writes
that "Time becomes human to the extent that it is organized after the
manner of narrative."63 While it might seem to have no story to tell, The
62 Ibid. 376.
63 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984), 3.
30
MUSE
Blank Before the World has a clear beginning, middle, and end. It organizes
time after the manner of narrative so as to render even a very short peri-
od of time without any visible human presence, manifestly hopeful. What
may seem like a rebuke to dramatic convention is in fact a testament to
the deep and tenacious conventions that structure our always dramatiz-
ing imaginations.
At the end of The Blank Before the World, the quick blackout may
seem like a surprise apocalypse, until we realize that this play is part of a
pair. The next and final play in the cycle is among the shortest ever pub-
lished:
365 Days/365 Plays
Lights bump back up to 1vhite-hot.
Zoom.
Onstage, the manuscript of365 Days/365 Plays.6
4
This is a "ta-dah" moment, of course, that borrows an exclamation point
from cinematography to reveal the child of Parks's year-long artistic
labor, the world after the blank. But it is also an act of humility. If the
plays of 365 are daily offerings to the theatre, the final play in the series
offers the manuscript as a gift to the world. The breath of creation has
faded, but its offspring will be reanimated through performance.
In light of the many paradoxes of 365- its hypermediated
immediacy, its public intimacy, its fragmented community, its inter-
minable moments, and full voids-Parks's project emerges as a dance of
controlled surrender, a balancing act between formal rigor and expansive
freedom. As she puts it, "Discipline is a lattice on which a vine can
grow."65 Bound by a commitment to daily composition, Parks was liber-
ated to tinker with dramatic form. 365 marches in step with the calendar,
yet everywhere creates its own ways to measure time. The plays cannot
escape their dates of composition which are printed just before each title,
but they routinely evade everyday time. Honing plays to minimal gestures,
Parks frees them to work parabolically. A cognate tension made the fes-
tival possible. Parks and Metzgar built for themselves the largest
American theatre collaboration in history only by surrendering the plays
to the world. This equipoise between flexibility and tension used to be
part of Parks's rhetoric. Ten years ago, before she embraced radical inclu-
sion, she described her plays this way:
64 Parks, 365/365, 376.
65 Roach, ~ Interview With Suzan-Lori Parks and Bonnie Mezgar."
EONS IN AN INSTANT
Plays have to be soft and loose and complete!J flexible and
complete!J taut, to withstand the minds, and hearts, and
souls of thousands of hundreds of people, and actors
getting in there and saying, "What's my motivation?"
And directors going, ''What are we going to do at this
moment?" ... It's like someone who's practiced yoga for
nine million years. They're incredibly strong and incred-
ibly flexible at the same time. That's what a play has to
be.66
31
In yoga-both individual and communal, spiritual and athletic, inclusive
and rigorous-we find an image that encapsulates the paradoxical
strength and flexibility of Parks's capacious microthon.67
66 Suzan-Lori Parks, Interview b)' Han Ong, in Speak Theater and Film!: Tbe Best
of Bomb Magai'{!te's Interviews with Playwrights, A ctors, and Directors, edited by Betsy Sussler
(Australia: G + B Arts International, 1999), 176, emphasis mine.
6
7
As Kolin notes, C. Denby Swanson also describes 365 in terms of yoga:
"What's happening ... around the country is large-scale yoga drama: breaching together,
observing together, giving attention." ''Yoga drama," Austin Chronicle, 10 November 2006,
http:/ /www.austinchronicle.com/ gyrobase/J ssue/ story?oid=oid:418608 (accessed 16
February 2009).
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA i\ND THEATRE 22, NO.1 (WINTER 2010)
"COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET": RE-READING Tim BoYS IN
7HE BAND AND ON A MUGGY NIGHT IN MUMBAI
Ashis Sengupta
Mart Crowley's The Bqys in the Band (1968) and Mahesh Dattani's On a
Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998), despite all temporal distance and cultural
difference, come fairly close to each other in dealing with issues of
(homo)sexuality. Crowley's play, preceding the Stonewall riots by a year,
in fact presages them in a modest manner; Dattani's is the first Indian
play to bring out the "travails of gay men and women'' in India and inter-
rogate the normality/ normativity of heterosexuality.
1
When Bqys opened
off-Broadway in 1968, it was the first "mainstream [American] play" to
approach homosexual life on its own terms. Until then, gays on stage or
screen were "objects of pity or derision."Z With gays increasingly redefin-
ing themselves as "strong and proud" ever since 1969, the play has been
criticized for its "low [gay] self-esteem."3 But re-read in the context of its
time, it will appear fairly bold in putting on the stage a longstanding taboo
subject. Twenty-seven years after the play was first produced, Crowley
defended his work by saying that he had known "a lot of people" like his
"boys," whose self-esteem (read: self-loathing) was born out of "a sense
of what the times told you about yourself."
4
Muggy Night, on the other
hand, opened in Mumbai in 1998, when the Indian attitude (to use that
generalizing term) toward gays was not very different from that prevalent
in the United States until Stonewall. Dattani admits that he himself did
not expect the drama "to play to mainstage audiences," though it did-
thanks to the director's "perseverance and grit."S The playwright's appre-
hensions do not sound ungrounded when we recall the howls of protest
Deepa Mehta's film Fire (released roughly a week after Dattani's play was
first produced) met from the political Right, including its women's fac-
tions. If Mehta's work (which, as a fllm, enjoyed a larger audience) basi-
1
Mahesh Dattani, Preface, Collected Plays (New Delhi: Penguin Books India,
2000), xiv.
2 Edward Guthmann, "'70s Gay Film Has Low Esteem Boys attitude' seems
dated," http:/ / www.sfgate.com/chronicle (accessed 23 May 2005).
3 Ibid.
4 Mart Crowley, quoted in Guthmann, "70's Gay Film."
5 Dattani, Preface, xiv.
34 SENGUPTA
cally deals with female homoeroticism, Dattani's "metrosexual love
story"-as he calls it-unravels multiple facets of gay culture in a coun-
try where "homosexuality" is still punishable by law. Muggy Night is not
simply the first Indian play to handle such a theme, as John McRae main-
tains, but shows "how society creates patterns of behaviour" to which
individuals fall victim so easily.6 Unlike Crowley's Bqys, it has a lesbian
character in it, and some of the gay men are strongly anti-heterosexual.
If Dattani's play lends a stronger voice to all deviant sexualities, including
those elided by a gay identity, it is so because contemporary global devel-
opments in the realm of sexual identity somehow form the subtext of a
play that otherwise addresses a conservative society in this regard. This
paper seeks to show how both plays, by challenging compulsory hetero-
sexuality, rewrote gay history on the stage-American and Indian-at
different times and in different ways.
In "Teaching the 'Boys': Mart Crowley in the Millennia]
Classroom," Michael R. Schiavi seeks to find out why his class at New
York University, of which two-thirds openly identified as gay, lesbian, or
bisexual, vehemently rejected the play as a most "hateful" piece-he had
expected a more empathetic reading of the pre-Stonewall gay male char-
acters. Schiavi identifies three reasons for the "debacle": his students
"demanded from stagings of homosexuality total ravishment of mind
and/ or body, whether actors' or spectators"'; he overestimated their
knowledge of gay history and therefore did not recommend adequate
historical reading; and he "allowed insufficient time for textual discus-
sion, much less contextualization" of the work.? A little homework is
indeed necessary for appreciating the play as a period piece, and for
understanding why William Friedkin's 1970 film adaptation occasioned
the first protest by gays against a Hollywood fllm later regarded as "a
turning point in the evolution of gay theatre."s The play's "dense refer-
entiality"-as self-evident in the characters' "film-spun banter," their
"specialized language skills," and allusions to contemporary cultural
denominators of homosexuality-would also explain why Crowley had
two "training films" prepared by a friend of his for members of the Bqys'
1996 WPA Theatre revival cast.9
6 John McRae, "A Note on the Play," in Dattani, Collected Plqys, 47.
7 Michael R. Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys': Mart Crowley in the Millennia]
Classroom," Modern Language Studies 31, no. 2 (2001): 84, 87.
8 Don Shewey, quoted in Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys,"' 77.
9 Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys,"' 79.
"COIVUNG OUT OF THE CLOSET" 35
Set during a gay birthday party in Manhattan, Bqys brings togeth-
er "six tired screaming fairy queens and one anxious queer," to leave aside
the supposedly straight Alan.
1
o The opening dialogue between Michael
and Donald, replete with dishy one-liners, has frequent references to
depression, psychiatry, and the like-suggesting "psychoanalytic culture's
determination" to equate homosexuality with sickness and to treat gay
men and lesbians by making them "'talk' themselves out sexual 'immatu-
rity."'! I The effect of such social and medical policing was guilt and
depression. Larry's ''A lot of guys have to get loaded to have sex";
12
Michael's "I was still in the 'Christ-was-1-drunk-last-night syndrome"'
1
3
and ''You show me a happy homosexual, and I'll show you a gay
corpse"14-all point to the quality of gay life in a predominandy homo-
phobic and heterosexual society.
Constructionists would argue that although people might have
always engaged in same-sex erotics, "such individuals did not necessarily
assume an oppositional stance to society that resulted in a clear sense of
sexual identity."1S The transformation of the social discourse on sexuali-
ty in the nineteenth century gave birth to specific sexual identities; "the
new psycho-medical designation of 'homosexual' [as a species] allowed
for a categorization of feelings and encounters that resulted in ... a well-
defined homosexual identity."16 As Sara Ahmed argues, "Oeffrey] Week's
positing of ... the homosexual alongside the bracketed figure of the het-
erosexual is crucial."1
7
The emergence of the idea of "sexual orientation"
does not situate the two figures "in a relation of equivalence." The homo-
sexual was always presumed to have an "orientation" while the hetero-
10 Mart Crowley, The B'!)'S in the Band, in Best American Plqys, edited by Clive
Barnes (New York: Crown, 1975), 496.
11 Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys,"' 87.
12 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 502.
13 Ibid., 501.
14
Ibid., 527.
15 Donald E. Hall, "Identity," in glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gqy, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgender, and Queer Culture, http:/ /www.glbtq.com/literature/idcntity.htrnl (accessed 12
March 2006).
!6 Ibid.
17 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 69.
36 SENGUPTA
sexual was supposed to be neutral.
1
8 Once the hetero-homo binary
became pronounced, there were terrifying odds, including legal, against
gay friendship/relationship. The threats modern gays had to confront are
underscored by Emory's feigning a police raid on his arrival at Michael's.
Their lifestyle, in the absence of social acceptance and recognition, is
characterized by the "cycle" of partying and drinking in order to forget
"what did I do last night!"l 9 An analyst's counseling would bring about a
gnawing sense of guilt in them, pushing them further into a world of
"aspirin, Alka-Seltzer, Darvon, [and] Dapraisal." Thanks to such repres-
sive ideology, Michael "really thought [he] was straight" and "didn't think
[he] was lying to [him]self."
20
Donald is too self-hating to consider him-
self healthy or pursue a career, a "classic Freudian stereotype of arrested
development . . . linked to psychoanalytic interpretation."21 Many gay
men had to get married and have children. Under compulsion, they were
living a double life. Michael mocks the "quaint little idea-if a man is
married, then he is automatically heterosexual."22
Gay performance had traditionally been equated with "non-stop
camp."23 In contemporary critical parlance, "camp" is defined, as Nigel
Wheale puts it, "as the culture and taste of marginal groups who cele-
brate the fact of their marginality through parody and self-mockery."2
4
It
is, however, believed to have originated from the acceptance of gayness
as "effeminacy"-a belief that runs through Crowley's play. "Camp" also
gradually came to be extended to all things "over the top."25 Harold the
birthday boy is always afraid of losing his physical beauty and "spends
hours getting ready," as Larry says, "before he can go out." Michael
18 Ibid.
19 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 500.
20
Ibid., 500-01.
21 John M. Clum, Acting Gqy: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992), 255.
22 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 518.
23 Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys,"' 80.
24
Nigel Wheale, quoted in Jeremy Hawthorn, A Glossary of Contemporary
Literary Theory (London: Arnold, 2000), 33.
25 Martin P. Levine, Gqy Macho (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 72.
"COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET"
37
reacts: "Faggots are worse than women about their age. They think their
lives are over at thirty."26 Michael was frail and pale as a child, and had
always heard his mother complain that he "should have been a girl."27
Emory, the most effeminate of these gays who would "make somebody
a good wife,"28 describes Donald as "the most exotic woman" and calls
Bernard "the African queen."29 Dancing, an act once despised by "he-
men," is a moment of fulfillment for Michael. Significantly, all this is pit-
ted against the explicit markers of conventional male sexuality. Michael
and Emory are chided for spending "their childhood in a movie house"30
away from "the masculine pastimes of baseball and lawn-mowing."3
1
The
supposedly straight Alan finds himself at ease only in Hank's company
because he takes the married man for a confirmed hetero with whom he
can have a man-to-man talk.3
2
The female impersonation at this level
remains within the framework of gender difference and is played against
an exaggerated masculinity which also governs relationships between gay
men. The midnight cowboy, a hustler and birthday present for Harold,
exemplifies the butch-femme binary. One comes across such gender dif-
ference as early as when Michael tells Donald that the "hair spray'' in
question has the words "For Men" written about thirty times all over "the
goddamn can."33 This is how standard psychoanalytic types are sustained.
"The actions of the characters become performances," Clum writes,
"watched and judged by the 'normal' outsider who offers society's judg-
ments, which the characters ... readily accept."34
As regards the gay protest against the Hollywood adaptation of
the play, the objection was as much to the representation of gays as
26 Crowley, The Bcrys in the Band, 512.
27
Ibid., 498.
28
Ibid., 513.
29 Ibid., 500, 505
30
Ibid., 516.
31 Schiavi, "Teaching the ' Boys,"' 79.
32 Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Ccry Theatre in the Twentieth CentUI)'
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 301-302.
33 Crowley, The Bcrys in the Band, 495.
34 Clum, Acting Ccry, 255.
38 SENGUPTA
"effeminate" men as to their supposedly unrelieved self-loathing.3s If
screenwri ter Barry Sandler found in the boys an "incredible sense of
camaraderie,"36 there were many gays who felt "frightened of all that bit-
ter wit and self-flagellation"3
7
and accused Crowley of romanticizing "the
bravery and wit shown by the Boys in coping with 'the unlucky hand' fate
had dealt them."38 The "truth game," a device that Crowley borrowed
from "Get the Guests" in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woo!f?, presents the
boys' mutual laceration as the only way to come out. Each would call up
his love and tell him about it. Alan is desperate to leave and take Hank
with him. But he stays on for reasons not made clear while Hank declares
his love for Larry. Bernard confesses to his secret passion for a straight
boy (Peter) in Detroit years ago, with whom he "made it" one night after
a drunken swimming party but who pretended next morning "like noth-
ing at all had happened."39 Emory had a crush on a high school boy
(Delbert) seven years his senior, and without his knowing it; bur Delbert
was engaged to a girl whom he married later. Hank dials Larry's number
and leaves the message that he loves him and .in the process shocks Alan.
Michael's laceration reaches its height when he pressures Alan to admit
that he had slept with Justin Stuart (whom Alan considers just a very
good friend) and compels him to call him. Alan outwits Michael by call-
ing his wife. Harold calls Michael "a sad and pathetic man ... . A homo-
sexual ... [who] may very well one day be able to know a heterosexual
life if you want it desperately enough ... but (who] will always be homo-
sexual as well."40 Harold may be trying to essentialize the gay sensibility,
but he also parodies Michael's own words against Alan: "you couldn't face
the truth . .. you lied to yourself."
41
Michael eventually surrenders to
Donald, his Donnie, and realizes that they should not have hated each
other "quite so very much." Yet the price of "coming out" has been too
hard to forget. It is not certain, even as the curtain comes down, why
35 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 523.
36 Barry Sandler, quoted in Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys,"' 78.
37 Paul Monette, quoted in ibid.
38 Martin Duberman, quoted in ibid.
39 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 518.
4
0 Ibid., 526.
41
Ibid.
"COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET"
39
Alan came there or whether he is really straight or whether he wanted to
confess but ultimately preferred going back to his heterosexual life on
seeing the violence the men did to each other as well to themselves. "All
that self-hating angst, all those demoralizing confessions," Brantley
observes, are "not exactly supportive images for a minority struggling to
become visible."42
As Wheale writes, camp "can also be seen as the (semi-)tolerat-
ed public face of the unaccepted." In the past it had been the way in
which homosexuals were able to "display their sexual orientation without
admitting to it."
43
"l'f]he mode of camp which undermines the categories
which exclude it, and does so through parody and mimicry," informs the
character of Emory.44 When Larry says that he discovered him "leaning
against a lamppost," Emory fill s in: "With an orchid behind my ear and
big wet lips painted over the lipline."45 Or when Donald asks if every-
body is ready for a drink, Emory, "flipping up his sweater," wants to plqy their
"topless cocktail waitress."46 Emory not only describes himself and the
other "boys" as "women" but uses a masculine pronoun for Alan's wife.
Provoking Alan, Emory takes what Dollimore calls the "pervert's revenge
on authenticity" and in turn invites a beating from Alan. The masquerade
of camp thus becomes less self-concealment than a kind of attack.47
If the traditional gay types-such as butch, screaming queen,
and hustler-still remain in place, the familiar motifs of gay representa-
tion are reprised by Crowley to point to their constructedness and thus
open up the possibility of their reconstruction.48 Sinfield refers to Robert
Brustein's complaint about the cowboy figure in the plays of Tennessee
Williams and William Inge-"the 'male impersonator,' who wears blue
42 Ben Brandey, "As the Boys Return, The Party Isn't Over," Nm- York Times,
21 June 1996, http:/ /www.theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html (accessed 10
May 2006).
43 Nigel Wheale, quoted in Hawthorn, A Glossary, 34-5.
44
Jonathan Dollimore, "Post/modern: On the Gay Sensibility, or the Pervert's
Revenge on Authenticity," in Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide, edited by Julian Wolfreys
(New York: New York University press, 1999), 556.
45 Crowley, Tbe Bqys in the Band, 501.
46
Ibid., 503.
47 Dollimore, "Post/modern," 553.
48 Sinfield, Out on Stage, 300-01.
40 SENGUPTA
jeans, cowboy boots, and T-shirt and is credited with athletic prowess, but
'hides fundamental insecurities behind an exaggerated show of male-
ness."'49 Cowboy in Bqys, according to Michael, "looks straight out of a
William Inge play,"50 "but in this instance there is no discreet ambiva-
lence" as Cowboy is hired for the night as Harold's birthday present.5
1
Manly American manners are largely undermined by latency and repres-
sion. "This question is actualized on the stage," to quote Sinfield again,
"by Hank and Alan, both of whom appear straight, are married and have
children."52 Both of them also play tennis, a "man's game." While Hank
leaves his family for Larry, Alan ends up assaulting Emory as he realizes
he is at a gay party. Alan's fear could be either homophobia or "the hys-
teria of latency," though the play never implies that every hetero is homo-
phobic and anyone who seems gay really is so. The image of gay men as
sick creatures fighting themselves lingers untill the end. But the impact of
the play goes beyond its explicit statements and helps to "dislodge the ...
conditions that had determined those models."53 Moreover, Hank and
Larry provide, it seems today, positive role models. Their happiness,
despite their different attitudes toward fidelity, points toward "distinctive
and sensible kinds of relations among gay people."54 Whatever one
thinks of it, as playwright William M. Hoffman notes, "The Bqys in the
Band, more than any other single play, publicized homosexuals as a
minority group."S5 The performance, as well as the film, has been dis-
missed on contrasting grounds: heterosexuals found it a reassuring pic-
ture of the unhappy lives of gays and gay men saw it as a quaint period
piece. But fllm critic Vito Russo believes that the fllm "summed up a gen-
eration of gay men who were taught to blame all their troubles on their
homosexuality."S6 What the outsider and the audience now see and hear
4
9 Ibid.
50 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 508.
51 Sinfield, Out 011 Stage, 301.
5
2
Ibid.
53 Ibid., 302.
5
4
Ibid., 300.
55 William M. Hoffman, qtd. in Clum, Acting Gay, 254.
56 Vito Russo, quoted in Clum, Acting Gay, 254. Emphasis mine.
"COMI NG OUT OF THE CLOSET" 41
is purported to be a slice of the "'off-stage' activities of closeted gay
characters" when they are not playing straight. "For the first time, main-
stream audiences see gay men," Clum rightly observes, "talk openly about
their sexual predilections, dance together, kiss, and retire upstairs for
sex."
57
The ending still does not sound positive to several critics. It is
most unlikely that after all that has occurred in his apartment Michael as
a gay man would find much solace in the midnight mass he goes to. Doric
Wilson's Street Theatre parodies him and Donald as "the most eloquent
spokesmen for the men in power."58 They are the only gay characters in
Wilson, Clum continues, who "attack the participants in the Stonewall
riots from the sidelines."5
9
"The revolt dramatized in Street Theatre is not
so much against outside forces," writes Clum, "as it is against the inter-
nalization of those forces ... [which] maintains the closet and prevents
community."6o Crowley's play dramatizes "the sadder elements of gay his-
tory" rather than parodying them; yet it uses parody in its own way to cre-
ate positive images of gay men.61 "While positing unhappy isolation for
most of its characters," Clum observes, "The Bqys in the Band also defined
a subgenre of gay dramas about redefining the rules of gay men's rela-
tionships."62 In the resolution of Hank and Larry, Crowley indicates the
possibility of a stable relationship as well as the fact that the rules cannot
be the same as they are for "faithful" heterosexuals: "Respect-for each
other's freedom. With no need to lie or pretend."63 A relationship, not yet
recognized as "a civil union," let alone marriage, has been carved out, and
Larry and Hank truly succeed in leaving "the neurotic game-playing"
behind.64 This surely implies a transformation of "orientation" as "direc-
tion" into "identity."
57 Clum, Acting Gq;, 255.
58 Ibid., 253.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 233.
61 Ibid., 253-54.
62 I bid., 257.
63 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 524.
64 Clum, A cting Gqy, 258.
42 SENGUPTA
Reminiscent of Crowley's Bqys, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai is the
first Indian play to deal with the themes of love, partnership, trust, and
betrayal- all within a group of suffering gays, some of whom have left
their families while others are living a double life. The "pre-Stonewall"
attitude toward lesbians and gays still somewhat prevailed in India when
Muggy Night was first performed. Legally, homosexuality has been a taboo
in India ever since the drafting by Lord Macaulay of Section 377 of the
Indian Penal Code in 1883 that prescribes severe punishment for same-
sex "crimes." But it is more or less accepted today that same-sex sex has
always been present in "Indian culture" and was more condemned as a
sin than punished as a crime in pre-modern times. Much of ancient
Sanskrit writing bears proof. References to same-sex relationships figure
in the sixth-century Kamasutra, which projects sex as more than as a
means to procreation. The Western term "homosexual" is predated in
India by a variety of words in different languages, such as "chapti" in
medieval Urdu poetry and "swayamvara sakhi" in the eleventh-century
Kathasaritsagara for "lesbian" relationships.65 Again, male poets of the
medieval school of Bhakti literature, called Madhuri Bhakti, envisaged
themselves as women in love with a male god. Indian (Hindu) myths and
legends also celebrate love between man and man. It is believed that
Lords Vishnu and Shiva in the form of Mohini coupled after the amrit
manthan (churning of the oceans) to give birth to god-child Ayyappa. In
the temple of Thanjavur, two (male) priests still "ritually enact the copu-
lation of the male gods, one cross-dressed as female."66 The depiction of
"non-procreative and non-heterosexual" practices in ancient I-:lindu
architecture, as Bose and Bhattacharya maintain, further questions "the
assumption of the [present] 'norm' as a given."67 The disjunction in
"Indian" attitude toward sex/ sexuality may be said to have come with
colonial intervention, rather than with the advent of Islam. As Manu rec-
ommended only ritual purification for the man indulging in "unnatural"
sex and even exempted the sudras (the low-born) from any form of pun-
ishment, Zia ud-din Barni declared in his Fatawa-yiJahandari that while "all
male prostitutes ... adorning themselves like women ... should be treat-
6
5 Ruth Vanita and Saleem K.idwai, eds., Same Sex Love in India: Readings from
Literature and History (New York: Palgra\'e Macmillan, 2001), xxi.
66 Hoshang Merchant, ed., Introduction, Yaraana: Gqy Writingjrom India (New
Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1999), xvii-xvili.
6? Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharya, eds., Introduction, The Phobic and
the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007), xii.
"COMING OlJf OF THE CLOSET" 43
ed with harshness," "habitual sinners" indulging in their practices "in
secret" might be spared "severe investigations about their activities."68
The minor strain of homophobia in pre-modern India became predom-
inant under British rule-thanks to the modern nation-state's imperative
to impose uniformity in most spheres of life, including sexual matters
viewed from the Christian perspective. The nationalist/ anticolonial dis-
course interestingly became complicit with the colonial technology of
power in the othering of gendered and sexual minorities. In the negotia-
tion of power, "India" became "a site of anxiety" to the nationalists as
the dissident sexual subject threatened the "ideological apparatus" of the
"national imagination" that was constituted by the binary of woman as
mother-nation with a virile man. Homosexual males were automatically
defined as "passive, penetrated, effeminate ... men,"69 unworthy as (free-
dom) fighters. "[T]he ongoing construction of the alternatively sexual-
ized subject in contemporary India," Bose and Bhattacharya add, is
"framed within two overarching contexts": the current politics of the
Hindu Right and globalization in terms of media images of LGBTQs.7
On the one hand, the sexually deviant may have to get married (to the
opposite sex!) under societal pressure or even commit suicide due to
mental torture. On the other, they are bold enough to view themselves as
part of a global gay identity so to garner greater visibility and solidarity.
Asian/Indian arrangements of (alternative) sexuality, whether or not they
allow for richer diversity than their Western counterparts, have different
nomenclature based on socio-cultural specificities and older forms of
sexual behavior that now coexist with "imported" identities. Prevalent is
also the trend, as exemplified by the term MSM, to act out the frequent
disconnection between identity and desire, sexual orientation and behav-
ior.71 The gay demand for the right to same-sex marriage, however, in
India or elsewhere, entails defmitions of desire and conduct.
The story of Muggy Night in Mumbai unfolds in the living room
of Kamlesh, an affluent Mumbai-based fashion designer, and reaches its
climax with the shocking revelation that Prakash, Kamlesh's former love,
68 Zia ud-clin Barni, quoted in Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, the
Present: The Pretext: The Fire ControYersy," in The Phobic and the Erotic, 23-24. Emphasis
mme.
69 Bose and Bhattacharya, The Phobic and the Erotic, xvii.
70 Ibid., xviii.
71
MSM-or Men (who have) Sex (with) Men-is a resistant label coined by
gay activists in India to underscore their culturally different sexual identiry.
44 SENGUPTA
is about to marry his sister Kiran. By the end of the play, the anguished
Kamlesh exploits others, while Prakash (known as Ed to Kiran) whose
past relationship with Kamlesh now stands exposed to her, becomes a
victim of his sexual uncertainties that are ascribable to socially prescribed
forms of sexual behavior.
The play deals with both essentialist and constructionist under-
standings of homosexuality in all their complexity. Kamlesh has left his
family, seeking to realize his "authentic" gay self which is, for him, a
human essence repressed by dominant heterosexual culture. Kamlesh is
a "real" gay-a man desiring another man. This trope of gender sepa-
ratism, which figures "same-sex desire as the ultimate expression of a
person's identification with her or his own gender,"
72
challenges the very
old but still common distinction between desire and identification, but
retains the hetero/homo divide in favor of the "authenticity" or "natu-
ralness" of same-sex desire. I t operates within the relations of gender dif-
ference but is a distinct form of sexuality. Kamlesh does not accept his
psychiatrist's "aversion therapy" because he does not think that he can
sexually "reorient" himself and be happy.73 The heterosexual logic that
identification and desire be mutually exclusive, as Judith Butler observes,
is "one of the most reductive of heterosexism's psychological instru-
ments."74 In the 1960s, psychiatry was attacked for being a form of social
policing which, with the aid of pseudo-scientific categories, mystified
socially desirable behavior as natural, and undesirable behavior as abnor-
mal psychosexual development. R. D. Laing, preoccupied with the idea of
authentic self or repressed human essence, wrote in The Divided Seifthat
psychiatry is a kind of brainwashing to create in all a "normal" "adjust-
ed" state that encourages them to acquire "a false self" so as to adapt to
the "false realities."7S For homosexuals, heterosexuality is that "false real-
ity;" and homosexuality, in this view, is a different substantive/ authentic
category which is dismissed as unnatural on the grounds that it does not
conform to norms.
Deepali, on the other hand, is a woman-identified-woman who
functions as a metaphor for an identity entirely different from the male
72 Biddy Martin, "Sexual Practice and Changing Lesbian Identities," in
Dutabilizillg Theory, edited by Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1992), 101.
73 Dattani, 011 a Muggy Night i11 Mumbai, in Collected Plqys, 69.
7
4
Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," in Wolfreys, Literary Theories, 583.
75 R. D. Laing, The Divided Seif(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 12.
"COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET'' 45
economy of power. But she is not uncaring toward her family relations,
as is a common prejudice of the hereto-patriarchal Indian family about
its gay member. For instance, she has come to see her friend in trouble,
leaving her two-year-old niece "in the inexperienced hands"76 of her "sig-
nificant other,"
77
and keeps giving Tina instructions over the phone about
babysitting. For Deepali, lesbianism disrupts male power as well as gen-
uine bonding, often sexual, between women. When Sharad "complains"
that Kamlesh exploited the guard as "a sex object," Deepali "supports"
Kamlesh: "Treat him like a sex object. Men should get a dose of their
own medicine!"78 She is proud to be a woman and says sarcastically that
"men deserve only men."
79
Like lesbian feminists of the seventies, she
seems to claim that lesbianism has nothing to do with a medical or bio-
logically "essential" condition, but that it is, in fact, a choice available to
all women-a choice that any woman aware of the oppressive nature of
hetero-patriarchy should make. But her need to fix lesbian identity as a
stable and coherent category for gaining visibility eventually gives rise to
an essentialist view of lesbianism. Her aim is to forge a new culture based
on women's values, and the result in such a case is the ultimate belief in
an essential female nature and sexuality. Deepali believes that women are
better than men, thus presenting her radicalism as more universalizing
than socially grounded and maintaining the fundamental significance of
gender differentiation.
The character of Sharad, who complains that he wasted a year of
his life living with Kamlesh as his "housewife" and trying to make him
forget Prakash, ultimately provides a critique of both of the above posi-
tions on the relationship between sexuality and gender. He plays multiple
gender roles-queen, gay machismo, and straight-thus displacing bio-
logically as well as culturally "f1Xed" identity categories. More often than
not, he is camp, yet perhaps more than that. While Kamlesh and Deepali
stress their separate gay and lesbian identities, imagining for themselves a
kind of "purity" or "exclusivity," though in diametrically opposite ways,
Sharad plays, if only in stylized speech and gesture, with differences to
undermine the very notion of identity. Kamlesh and Deepali emphasize
sexual difference as it is applicable to males and females respectively:
76 Dattani, Muggy Night, 64.
77
Ibid., 58.
7
8 Ibid., 63.
79 Ibid., 60.
46 SENGUPTA
theirs is a sort of acceptance of identity, only altered by sexual difference.
But Sharad privileges sexuality over gender. His parodic roles are perfor-
mative strategies that are used to overplay the codes of gender and there-
by present identity in its most subversive and denaturalized forms. He is
a "housewife," a "drama queen," a glamour girl of the silver screen, a
"male bitch." Deepali warns him not to insult the female. But his imita-
tion (gender inversion) is more than an insult to women-because it
problematizes femininity as traditionally understood. On the other hand,
when he plays a macho, his pelvis in an obscene ... fashion," his
imitation is more than an aping of masculinity because it destabilizes our
understanding of the masculine as the other half of the spectrum of nor-
mative heterosexuality.80 Most interestingly, by simultaneously playing
both camp and machismo, "virtual alternatives in fact,"8t and parodying
both feminine and masculine gender, he exposes gender itself as a fiction.
As this contests heterosexual norms and with it the sanctity of marriage
that is the base of the traditional family (here one cannot miss Sharad's
mockery of the "wedding ceremony" on the compound of K.amlesh's
apartment), it also questions an essential/unitary gay desire. It presents
desire as something culturally relative which cuts across gender.
From this queer perspective, Deepali's investments in "the sta-
bility, internal coherence, and uniqueness of lesbian identity" may
obscure sexual differences between lesbians, as Martin would have it, and
generate a "resistance to knowing" what one fantasizes, desires, and
thinks.sz On the other hand, K.amlesh's idea of male homosexuality as a
stable category may itself be a cultural construct and appear inadequate
for leveling out differences between culturally specific or legally and reli-
giously encoded identities within the male gay culture itself. His fantasy
of marrying Deepali if she were a man or if he were a woman also fore-
grounds the instability of identity which can be further split and changed
by unpredictable fantasies, giving rise to newer (and equally temporary)
identities.
Lastly, is Prakash's change of attitude, his conviction that he has
to marry a woman, caused by the pressure of a heterosexual society or
just a matter of choice? One possible explanation, in the words of Eve
Sedgwick, again could be that sexual desire is a powerful solvent of sta-
ble identities-apparently homosexual people may be marked by hetero-
80 Ibid., 101.
81 Dollimore, "Post/ modern," 563.
82 Martin, "Sexual Practice and Changing Lesbian Identities," 97.
C o ~ U N G OUT OF THE CLOSET'' 47
sexual fantasies and practices, and vice versa for apparently heterosexual
ones.83 But the psychic and embodied consequences of such fantasies are
real. Imagining or engaging in different sexual practices takes on differ-
ent senses of the embodied self. Later Prakash wants to be known as a
straight in order to partake of the privileges of power unavailable to the
homosexual. And if he is a bisexual, his suffering at the play's end is due
to his confusion over his identity in a society where heteros elide homos,
and homos elide bis. It is also important to note that most Indian male
homosexuals (of any religio-cultural communities) get married (to
women) under "societal pressures" and try to "adjust to a double [sex]
life."B
4
Bunny is a classic example in this respect. Apparently, he finds
nothing wrong with such "camouflage": "Even animals do it. Blend with
the surroundings. They can't find you."BS Significantly, Bunny plays the
ideal husband and father in a television serial titled Yeh Hai Hamara
Parivaar (This is Our FamilY). But the tragedy is that the only people who
know him truly-that is, his friends-hate him for his duplicity. By try-
ing to exist in two worlds dishonestly, he seems to exist in neither.
Muggy Night shows how heterosexuality has always dismissed
homosexuality as "unnatural," claiming itself as the original matrix by
which to measure all sexual perversity. The early modern transvestite's
transgression was regarded as social rather than sexual- but with para-
noia, since he was regarded as "upsetting the entire social domain," even
when his "sexual 'orientation' was not the issue."86 The modern concep-
tualization/ construction of the sexual deviant as an identity, a patholog-
ical sexual subjectivity, has had its own dangers. To have sexuality as a
medical and medicalizable object, as Foucault argues in "The Repressive
Hypothesis," is also to detect in it a "lesion" or "dysfunction" "in the
depths of the organism" itself.B
7
This version of difference as dysfunc-
tion betrays the coercive effort to expel from reality the form(s) of sex-
uality "not amenable to the ... Qogic] of reproduction."BB This, in turn,
83 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkley, CA: University of
California Press, 1990), 85.
84 l'vferchant, "Introduction," xvi.
85 Dattani, Muggy Night, 70.
86 Dollimore, "Post/modern," 564.
8
7
Michel Foucault, "The Repressive Hypothesis," in The Foucault Reader, edited
by Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 323.
ss Ibid., 316.
48 SENGUPTA
reduces gender to sex to reproduction, creating homophobia which oper-
ates through the naturalization of sexual and gender norms, through the
attribution of a damaged or abject identity to the homosexual. The
resentment of the people, gathered for the wedding outside, at their acci-
dental discovery of Kamlesh's past relationship with Prakash dramatizes
it all. Sexuality in its normative forms constitutes a "truth" connecting
inextricably "with other truths and norms not explicitly sexual."B9 This is
a major reason why sexual deviance is found threatening. "[I]n deviating
from normative truth and the 'nature' which underpins it," Dollimore
continues, such deviance confuses and troubles "the norms of truth and
being throughout culture."
9
0 The fear is that running foul of the law in
sexual life may be a stimulus to rebellion in every other discursive field.
Deviants may not always be "confronted with direct, coercive efforts to
control" what they "do in bed," but they are constantly "threatened with
erasure" from social fields where the "naturalizing" process "works to
obliterate actual pluralities."91
Muggy Night also destabilizes the culturally "fixed" categories of
sexual identities and addresses the ways in which they may be performed,
transgressed and even queered. The character of Kamalesh, as noted ear-
lier, problematizes the notion of an essential/unitary gay sensibility by
suggesting that in the gay male's involvement with masculinity one is like-
ly to encounter the simultaneous "identification with, desire for, and par-
odies of masculinity."92 Sharad, on the other hand, shows that gay
machismo not only apes "the masculinity oppressive of women ... and
gays" alike, to borrow phrases from Richard Dyer, but does "much mis-
chief" to the security and power of "men" by eroticizing the traditional
signs of masculinity "in a blatantly homosexual context."93 Conversely,
the camp gay's parody of femininity is both a way of "giving vent to the
hostility toward women," to put it in Leo Bersani's words, and a way of
"helping to deconstruct that image for women themselves."94 It is neither
"degrading to women nor an uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereo-
89 Dollimore, "Post/modern," 554.
90 Ibid.
91 Martin, "Sexual Practice and Changing Lesbian Identities," 95.
92 Dollimore, "Post/modern," 565.
93 Leo Bersani, qtd. in Dollimore, "Post/ modern," 563.
94
Ibid., 565.
"COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET"
49
typing." Rather, in imitating gender it reveals "the imitative structure of
gender itself."95 Heterosexuality, like the gender divisions on which it
relies, "is constituted through repetitive signifying practices that strive,
but ... fail, to replicate fantasized ideals of masculinity, femininity, and
normal sexuality."% In the process, heterosexuality must "ward off the
excesses" (unruly sexual fantasies and desires), as Martin argues, "that
emerge in the intervals of repeated performances, excesses that it may
then hypostatize in an Other, the homosexual."97
Dattani's play is more radical in its treatment of gender and sex-
uality than Mart Crowley's. There are self-hating, morbid gay males in
Muggy Night, too. Stung by the failure of his relationship with Kamlesh as
well as with I<.iran, Ed contemplates suicide and then hits out at Kamlesh
as his suicidal attempt is foiled by his friends. Yet the play puts the sexu-
ally deviant in a new light, problematizing apparently stable same-sex
identities. Dramatizing the complex dynamics of the relationship
between sexuality and gender, desire and identification, Muggy Night in
Mumbai and The Bqys in the Band were the first Indian and American plays
respectively to insist on acceptance by a heterosexual society of the sex-
ual deviant on equal terms, with a view to minimizing the antagonism
between the still valid identity categories. Significantly, the Delhi High
Court has, in a recent ruling, decriminalized same-sex sex, much to the
applaud of the gay rights activists in India, and the Union Cabinet is now
waiting for the Supreme Court to take the final stand on the issue. With
the Democrats coming to power in the US in 2009, on the other hand,
the whole world looks to America for further developments in gay rights.
Meanwhile, proper appreciation of the two plays, with their subtexts and
contexts, should ensure their historic importance.
95 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York,
London: Routledge, 1990), 137.
96 Martin, "Sexual Practice and Changing Lesbian Identities," 103.
97 Ibid., 103-04.
jOURl"lAL OF AMERJCAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 22, NO. 1 (WINTER 2010)
AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICTIM IN
EARLY AMERICAN MELODRAMA
Douglas A. Jones, Jr.
I began th.is investigation of melodrama with the conceit that there must
be someth.ing significant about the form; not only was it the most popu-
lar theatrical form among nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic audiences,
but also the considerable, at times blithe, disregard for the form among
contemporary scholars signifies that it must be really, reai!J important.!
This relative scholarly neglect for melodrama is reflected in the negative
connotations we associate with the term and its adjectival derivative
"melodramatic." They are pejoratives, derisive descriptors that at best sig-
nify harmless theatrics and at worst grating h.istrionics. Th.is range of sig-
nification underlies the fact that that which we call "melodramatic" is
hardly ever consequential. And therein lies its irony: although we now
deem over-emotional, over-sensational frivolity "melodramatic," the aes-
thetics of nineteenth-century melodrama were hardly trivial. The form
thrived on serious business: brave heroes battling to save their civiliza-
tions from imperious villains, virtuous individuals staving off corruption
and vice, and righteous victims sacrificed for the good of mankind.
What, then, to make of melodrama's historical sh.ift from the weighty to
the weightless?2 (It is not enough to say that contemporary conceptions
1 Since the 1980s, historians of theatre and culture started to turn to melodra-
ma more readily in order to inquire into the nature of early American audiences and, more
generally, American culture in its nascence. I believe that there are two primary reasons
for this development. First, the publication of Peter Brooks' 1976 The Melodramatic
Imagination: Balzac, Hmry James, and the Mode if Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1976) seemed to legitimize melodrama as an appropriate object of inquiry for literary
scholars and theorists; Brooks argued that melodrama constituted a cultural mode of
"excess" and that that mode structured modern sensibility. Furthermore, the develop-
ment of a Nco-Marxist narrative and historiographic paradigm among theatre historians
led to the examination of these plays, their performances, and their productions as sug-
gestive of an ever-codifying class stratification in Antebellum America. Some notable
examples in this historiography are: Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American
Theatre and Socie!J, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992); Jeffrey D.
Mason, Melodrama and the Myth if America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993);
and I'vlichael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds., Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence if
Genre (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996). Notwithstanding the publication of these and
other texts, there remains an egregious lacuna in the critical and historical literature on
melodrama.
2 I do not want to give the impression that all spectators of melodrama in the
52 jONES
of melodrama and the melodramatic are simply linguistic ones. Very few
playwrights today would, without irony, classify their works as melodra-
ma. In this case, there is a relationship among the formal, the linguistic,
and history.) It seems that the aesthetic and theory of melodrama are his-
torically grounded in a conception of the socio-existential that is histori-
cally hermetic, a spatia-temporal sealing with no interest in the past- or
future-infinite. (IX!e are part of that future-infinite and thus these nine-
teenth-century plays seem to have very little to offer us.) That is, the pro-
duction of melodrama and melodramatic texts was overdetermined by
philosophical and ideological formulations that were explicitly immediate
to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and unrepentantly histo-
rio-material in their construction: melodrama of the first-half of the
nineteenth-century flaunts its connection to eighteenth-century senti-
mentalism and a mercantilist-bourgeois ethic, as it attempts to reconcile
the relative contradictions between the two in its aesthetic.3 In this way,
melodrama is akin to comedy in that both genres "function explicitly as
social documents," "insist on being understood in the concrete and par-
ticular," and "present us with a socialized ethic."
4
And yet melodramas are not comedies; they frequently do not
tend toward unity, wholeness, or reconciliation. In fact, many playwrights
of melodrama called their works tragedies, and there are ways in which
melodramatic action corresponds to that of tragedy: there is great pathos
and suffering; immolated protagonists betoken a crack in the social,
moral, and cosmological order; and the form often offers an "individual-
ized metaphysic."S The notion of an "individualized metaphysic" coun-
antebellum era espoused the form and thought it serious. The critics, for instance,
inveighed against "the childish geegaws [sic] yclep'd Melo-dramas." Robert Ewing,
Theatrical Contributions of 'Jacques" to the ''United States Gazette" (1826) quoted in David
Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: Amencan Theatre and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1968), 41. By the 1840s, though, even the critics could no longer deny
the popularity of melodrama among audiences, as they recognized their inability to
refashion public opinion and theatre practices, and thus accepted what Grimsted calls
"theatrical democracy" (44).
3 By aesthetic I refer not only to melodrama's formal structures, but also, fol-
lowing the lead of German idealists of the mid-eighteenth century, to the bocfy and its sen-
ses. See Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica (1750; reprint, Hildesheim: G. Olms,
1961 ); Immanuel Kant, Critique of judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar (1790; reprint,
Indianapolis.: Hackett Publishing, 1987); and G. W F. Hegel, The Phi/osopf?y of Fine Art,
translated by Francis P. Osmaston (1820-1829; reprint, London: G. Bell Sons, 1920).
4 Alice Rayner, Comic Persuasion: MoralS truct11re in British Comeqy from Shakespeare
to Stoppard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 7-11.
5 Ibid., 11.
AE.STJIE"fiCS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VJCfiM
53
terposed with "socialized ethic" is one of the generic formulas that Alice
Rayner suggests differentiates tragedy from comedy. Yet I am suggesting
melodrama contains both elements. There is, therefore, a fundamental ten-
sion within the structure of melodrama that creates a sort of "muddied"
form, an aesthetic "impurity" that blatantly draws from both comedy and
tragedy in order to produce its desired affect on the spectator. Yet that
saturation of form partly explains melodrama's fragility in relation to his-
tory: as drama, it attempts to do too much, to accomplish too many
things at once. (fhere is a certain metaphysical conceptualization in
Shakespeare's Hamlet, for instance, that keeps us going back to the play as
it constitutes an understanding of something of the human condition
that goes beyond the time-space of Shakespeare's England; whereas the
social critique embedded in a comedy such as Jonson's The Alchemist pres-
ents us with a particular socio-historical document in which the material-
ity of Jonson's idealism, articulated especially in the speeches of Sir
Epicure Mammon, functions as a sort of hyper-register of the dialects of
physical pleasure in early seventeenth century England. Melodrama qua
drama too often dips in both genres' cans: at once, it strives towards the
depiction of the particular and the metaphysical, the historical and the
transhistorical.) Thus, melodrama's inability to stand the test of time-
the aforementioned historical shift from the most consumed form of
Romanticism in the nineteenth-century to insult-is not only the result
of its own historicity and shifted historio-material groundings, but also of
its mutually contradictive, compressive, and tensional structural forma-
tions.6
That melodrama borrows equally from comedy and tragedy-
most specifically sentimental comedy and bourgeois tragedy (this bor-
rowing of genre is part of what I call the pragmatics o/ melodrama, a by-any-
means-necessary move of melodrama to accomplish what it wants: an
excess of emotionality)-signals one of its most profound contradic-
tions. But when we inquire further, we notice melodrama is marked by
multiple variances. The texts of early US melodrama, for instance, bla-
tantly contest the historical actualities of antebellum society. As African
Americans, Native American, and the poor were beaten to the margins of
society, they were sometimes the heroes, heroines, and exemplars of
virtue within the theatrical frame. Their efforts on the melodramatic
6
Of course, the formal structures of melodrama continue to fashion all sorts
of artistic undertakings. From bestselling novels, to soap opera, to Academy Award-win-
ning films, the melodramatic strand undergirds much of contemporary popular culture,
even if it is not called "melodrama."
54
jONES
stage were celebrated, lauded, and pitied; it seemed as if playwrights and
theatre-producers were at times in the business of constructing models
of resistance and rebellion for these oppressed subjects, giving the
impression that their melodramas were oppositional, counter-hegemonic
texts. Why, then, would abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass exhort
his socio-political allies to stay away from the theatre? I suggest
Douglass's and similar minded anti-theatricalists' denunciations of the-
atre-going might not have been limited to their moral prejudice against
the theatre and/ or the raucousness of its audiences. ("Raucousness" is
perhaps too mild a characterization of audiences given their tumultuous
and riotous behaviors, from the prurience of the gallery to the unruliness
of the pit dominated by a working-class clientele who, particularly during
the Age of Jackson and the height of the popularity of heroic melodra-
mas, was especially hostile to non-whites.) Douglass and others might
also have sensed the fact that melodrama is, as critic Jeffrey H. Richards
puts it, "conservative to the core" and thus anathema to their political
interests.? I ts reactionary center is composed of a structural dynamism
that, as this essay will attempt to show, has to choose a victim whose sac-
rifice strives to impel emotional and psychic "discharge" among specta-
tors, a discharge that is not necessarily one of amelioration, but rather, as
Freud put it, "a heightening of ... energetic [emotional] cathexis."B In
early America, the most downtrodden subjects-such as African
Americans, Native Americans, and the poor-would make the best vic-
tims for melodrama because their immolation proved to be the most
pitiable. In Aristotelian terms, although a spectator did not necessarily
have to fear enduring a plight similar to that of the victim of the action,
that spectator's pity was at least redoubled because the sacrificed suffered
greatly in life and in death.
However, the appearance remains that the producers and con-
sumers of early American melodrama were allies of the subaltern.
Therein lies the problem: one cannot read these plays-texts, or any for
that matter, as autonomous systems of signification in relation to the his-
torical. Suffice it to say here that the ostensible radicalism of melodrama
is simply an expression of textual "freedom." What melodrama says (its
text) is not necessarily what melodrama does (its ideology): it "simply
conceals its more fundamental determination by the constituents of its
7 Jeffrey H. Richards, ed., Ear!J American Drama (New York: Penguin Books,
1997), 447.
8 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), translated by Joan Riviere (New
York: W W Norton and Company, 1960), 15.
AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICTIM 55
ideological matrix."9 A text's "ideological matrix" is, as Terry Eagleton
theorizes it, composed of the General Ideology (GI)-"a relatively
coherent set of 'discourses' of values, representations, and beliefs"-and
the Aesthetic Ideology (AI)- "a signification of the function, meaning,
and value of the aesthetic itself within a particular social formation."to
There is at times, then, a fundamental contradiction between the activity
of melodrama's production (the GI/ AI matrix) and its resultant product
(the "free" text). I argue here that this contradiction forms the ideologi-
cal crux of early American melodrama and endows the form with its par-
ticularly invidious politico-ethics.
The contour of any ethical structure is the aftereffect of the
form's self-performativity, that is, how it proceeds to enact its own ideo-
logical matrix. An examination of the discursivity of that move from
GI/ AI to text, from "interiority" to "exteriority," offers the most com-
plete picture of the epistemology rf the melodrama; that is, it reveals not only
what the forms "thinks," but also how it "thinks." Such an analysis lays
bare melodrama's structures, its assumptions, and its theatrical desire, that
is, what it seeks to show and what it seeks to render invisible. Through an
analysis of melodrama's historical and philosophical fields, this essay
explores the form's epistemic, ideological, and hegemonic functions in
the new nation and specifically the use-value of African Americans,
Natives Americans, and the poor in terms of their inherent worth to the
form's production and consumption. The aesthetics of melodrama
depend upon communality, collectivity, and the presence of living bodies
to produce a sociality of shared sensibility. I follow Jeffrey D. Mason who
argues, "The ideological substructure of melodrama is the sentimental
vision of humanity, one based on a high regard for emotions, especially
sympathy with others, fraught with profound contradictions that became
increasingly debilitating as the nineteenth century unfolded."11 Early
Americans turned to melodrama in part because communal emotionality
has the potential to defer, at least temporarily, the sorts of contradictions
and bitter stratifications-class, ideological, and political-that struc-
9 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Stutfy in Marxist Criticism (1976; reprint,
London: Verso Books, 2006), 74. This formulation is not, of course, limited to melodrama.
10 Ibid., 54, 60; It is important to note here that Authorial Ideology (Aul) is also
important in the text's productive mechanisms. As I hope to show later in the essay, how-
ever, in terms of early US melodrama the insertion of the biographical is negligible
because its "variable" significance was in effect "cancelled as a specific factor" in the pro-
duction of the text by the "disjoint or conjoint effects" of the Gl/ AI (63).
11 Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of A merica, 12.
56 jONES
tured the new nation.
1
2
The conspicuous disparities of wealth and political access belied
the promise of a true democracy and Alexis de Tocqueville was perhaps
the most perspicacious of contemporaneous observers of this reality. I
turn to Tocqueville's writings on the period not only because of his sin-
gular ability to recognize these contradictions, but also because of his
directive to remark the dynamic interplay between theatre and democ-
racy, his implicit assertion that such contradictions would necessarily
manifest on the stage. That is to say that Tocqueville compels us to con-
sider the ways in which the circumscribed notion of "we" in "We, the
People" was reinforced and legitimized by the stage. This sort of theatri-
cal legitimation of a white, male order worked to provide a kind of psy-
cho-sensorial bracing for those white male subjects to prepare to weath-
er the storm of an impending and unrelenting technological and indus-
trial-capitalist modernity.
And yet, the exteriorization of the conservative melodrama-i.e.
the "free" text-was at times too tempting for some radical-leftists in the
antebellum era to ignore. Precisely because melodrama triggers emotion-
al sensibilities, it has the potential to be used for socio-political opposi-
tion and subversion. When this happens, progressive forces appropriate
the text's "freedom" for their purposes and, paradoxically, the conserva-
tive form seems to double back on itself and, temporarily, becomes
counter-hegemonic. Abolitionists, for instance, used the melodramatic
theatre and focused on the emotionality of audiences in performances of
Uncle Tom} Cabin in 1853 to prove that whites did, in fact, care for slaves.
This notion of caring expressed in the aesthetic, abolitionists thought,
might at the very least have the capacity to change those who were
ambivalent to the cause of abolitionism. Yet it was extremely rare for rad-
icals to turn to melodrama. As I hope to show, melodrama's ideological
structure is too steeped in a conservative aesthetic in which the specta-
tor's job, relying on the form's simplification and clarity of emotion, was
completed when he felt for the victim in the playhouse; he did not have
to then apply that upset in ways to re-work the general ideology on behalf
of the oppressed.
12 This is the case for melodrama both as a literary text and as a performance
event. What differentiates the theatre of melodrama from melodramatic texts is the
immediacy of the community of spectators versus a community of readers, in terms of
the propinquity of physical presence. Moreover, the texts discussed in this essay were
intended for performance; they were not studied or leisure texts.
AEsTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICTIM 57
Democracy and Theatrocratic Desire
By the time Tocqueville published the second volume of his magisterial
treatise Democrary in America in 1840, the United States of America was
fraught with contradiction. Just a few years prior, for instance,
Pennsylvania wrote and ratified (183 7 -1838) a new state Constitution that
gave all of her white male citizens the right to vote as pari passu; that right
was stripped from those few African Americans males who had hitherto
exercised it. Furthermore, black slavery was firmly entrenched in the
South; the federal government had recently instituted a policy that man-
dated either ethnic cleansing of Native Americans or their subjection to
a forced, genocidal removal to the American hinterlands; and the eco-
nomic depression that coursed through the land did not bring men and
women together to fashion mutually supportive structures, as the predi-
cates of participatory democracy and Jacksonianism might seem to sug-
gest. These only intensified class stratification, a reality that Tocqueville
deemed as "very natural" (reflective of his own aristocratic bias), and
doubly propelled "the personal pride of individuals . . . to form some-
where an inequality to their own advantage."13 All these realities formed
the tragic strains that bound US democracy and signaled the conscious
attempts of a fledgling society to define the paradigms of its democracy
and the ontology of citizenship: its tragedy, though, rests in the fact that
if all men were indeed created equal, then performances of that equality
by some men were incumbent upon the (almost ritualistic) sacrifice of
other men.
From his position as outside observer, as proto-ethnographer,
Tocqueville was sensitive to these sorts of contradictions, happenings
that shaped the United States' unprecedented and daunting project: mak-
ing democracy. Relative to the voluminous treatise, Tocqueville offers
very little in Democrar;y in America about American contradictions in terms
of the harsh realities for blacks, Native Americans, and the poor. What
he does offer at the end of volume 1, however, is a prediction regarding
the "present and probable future" of "Indian Tribes" and a bleak obser-
vation on the inability of the three races to mix harmoniously.
1
4 We might
couple these almost disembodied accounts of racialization and power
with the grief-filled confessions Tocqueville reserved for the most inti-
mate-and problematic-of confessor-analysts, the Mother. Writing to
13 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democrary in Amenca, volume 2 (1840), translated by
Henry Reeve (New York: Bantam Books, 2002), 747.
14 I bid., 385-442.
58 j ONES
his mother about the removal of Native Americans from Tennessee,
Tocqueville admits that he could not "witness [the scene] without a heavy
heart." He tells her that it was "an odd coincidence .. . to witness the
expulsion, or perhaps dissolution, of one of the last vestiges of one of ...
the most famous American nations."
1
5 Tocgueville witnessed this tragedy
first-hand and was moved to sentimentalized pity. The tragic meaning
was clear: that if America were to flourish, it would have to feed canni-
balistically upon itself with the "dissolution" of the subaltern.
I think it is important to insert Tocqueville in this discussion of
early American democracy because of his keen recognition of the pro-
ductive roles these contradictions played in the realms of the social and
the political, as formative moves of the General Ideology (GI). That very
recognition, I believe, partly shaped Tocgueville's ambivalence towards
American democracy, an ambivalence most succinctly captured in his
description of America's move to democracy: "lapsing" (tourne a).16 The
term "lapse" denotes a change in position. That change, the etymology
of "lapse" suggests, is at best a lateral one; in fact, as in the term
"relapse," that movement is often regressive, signaling a fail.t7 Thus, if
America was "lapsing into democracy," she was not necessarily, at least as
Tocqueville saw it, moving towards a more perfect union.
What is noteworthy is that Tocgueville makes this qualification
regarding lapsing in the midst of "Some Observations on the Drama
Amongst Democratic Nations":
When the revolution which subverts the social and
political state of an aristocratic people begins to pene-
trate into literature, it generally manifests itself in the
drama, and it always remains conspicuous there .... If
you would judge beforehand of the literature of a peo-
ple which is lapsing into democracy, study its dramatic
productions. IS
15 Alexis de Tocqueville, Letter to his Mother, 25 December 1831, quoted in
George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996), 593; and de Tocqueville quoted in, Andre Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biograpf?y, translated
by Lydia Davis and Robert Hemingway (New York: Macmillan Books, 1989), 169.
Emphasis mine.
16 Alexis de Tocqueville, De Ia dimocralie en Amerique, second volume (1840;
Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1868), 130.
17 I am grateful to Alice Rayner for pointing out the "double-edge" significa-
tion of "lapsing."
18 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 596.
A ESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE V!CDM 59
It is too difficult for any cultural historian or dramatic critic to ignore this
suggestive observation. First, throughout this chapter, Tocqueville-per-
haps unwittingly-conflates drama ("literature") and theatre ("dramatic
productions"). But this conflation is not as problematic as it might be had
he not stressed performance before audiences (les spectateurs). His concern with
drama is with the ways receiving publics and their mores shape its liter-
ary and theatrical production. For Tocqueville, a drama's worth can only
be evaluated in terms of its contribution to the theatrical event: "For,
after all, the principal object of a dramatic piece is to be performed, and
its chief merit is to affect the audience."19 In this way, Tocqueville is in
accordance with those contemporaneous American critics and play-
wrights such as Dion Boucicault who believed that "public opinion is the
highest and sole court of jurisdiction in literary and artistic matters ...
and the drama is, therefore, made by the collaboration of the people and
poet."
20
This "collaboration," moreover, situates the playwright between
an imagined audience and an actual one. That is, in Tocqueville's study the
playwright must anticipate what would please his audience- whether it is
an audience of one such as Richelieu in the Court of Louis XIII or audi-
ences of many hundred such as those in Antebellum America. The sub-
sequent reception of the enacted text would then provide the playwright
concerned with public consumption with a sort of register of what
"worked" and what did not. But what works is not simply indicative of
taste but also of the General Ideology (GI), and how that something
works bespeaks of the Aesthetic Ideology (AI). Thus, the "success" of
theatre in many ways depends on how well these ideologies are embed-
ded within a particular text. Therefore any reading of the texts of early
American melodrama is, perhaps paradoxically, at the same time a read-
ing of the theatres of melodrama because playwrights at the time were
particularly beholden to popular opinion and consumption.
Tocqueville implicitly recognized that ideological structures
rather than abstracted theories of art (which despite any claims of being
transhistorical, are also in determinate ways bound to their particular
times and places) dictated what was acceptable to the public: ''You may
be sure that if you succeed in bringing your audience into the presence
of something that affects them, they will not care by what road you
brought them there; and they will never reproach you for having excited
19 Ibid., 599.
zo Dion Boucicault, quoted in Richards, E ar!J Amencan Drama, 444.
60 JONES
their emotions in spite of dramatic rules."
21
What Tocqueville is talking
about is what the ancient Greeks scorned as "theatrocracy." Samuel Weber
explains theatrocracy as "the rule of the audience," in which "it appears to
respect no . .. limits."22 In the context of melodrama, this lack of limits
can be read in part as a formal concern, namely that melodrama equally
takes from tragedy and comedy. But that investment in tragedy and com-
edy is not arbitrary-it expresses theatrocratic desire. That is to say, a the-
atrocracy reflects the power an audience wields in relation to the play-
wright: in theatrocracy, pleasing the audience matters most.
The playwright's concern, or lack thereof, for the affectation and
emotions of his audience is not only a reflection of the artistic or eco-
nomic pressures he might feel in relation to his craft, but also of the
social system itself. That is to say, societies seem to "choose" between
theatre and drama. As Richard Schechner notes:
What might be said is that rigid social systems tend to
generate events that concentrate on theater and per-
formance, on spectacular confirmations of the existing
social order within which brackets of play are allowed,
while flexible social systems tend toward drama .... The
impulse toward collectivity, groupness, identification
with others leads toward theater and performance; the
impulse toward individuality, personal assertiveness, and
confrontation between individuals leads towards
drama.
2
3
In the context of early US history, this theory of the relation between
society and drama/theatre raises several important questions. If early
America tended towards theatre and performance as opposed to drama,
as the historical and textual records suggest (it was a theatrocracy), then
what can we say about its social system? That is, if Schechner is accurate
in this formulation-and I believe he is-then what are we to make of
the American articulation of democracy, with its socio-cultural uncon-
scious, as a "rigid social system"? Finally, what was it about the new,
21 Tocqueville, Democracy in Amenca, 600.
22
Samuel Weber, Theatricaliry as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press,
2004), 33.
23 Richard Schechner, Peiformance Theory (1988; reprint, London: Routledge,
2003), 102-3.
AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND TilE USE OF THE VICTIM 61
"existing social order" that necessitated confirmation within the theatri-
cal frame and in what ways was the "revolution that subvert[ed] the social
and political state of an aristocratic people" productive of and operative
in its "dramatic productions"?
24
To consider these questions is an attempt
to locate the movement of the GI within the State and its apparatuses
such as the theatre. (Even spaces of resistance "belong" to the State:
resistance is a method of participation.) To that end, I turn to the aes-
thetic of the theatre of melodrama and specifically to its philosophical
genealogy because such an analysis makes clear the function such an aes-
thetic plays in relation to the perpetuation of the State, particularly for a
new one that needed (white, male) post-revolutionary reconciliation. The
melodramatic theatre- with its participatory dimensions (the emotional-
ity, the "oohs" and "ahhs") that were "written into" the texts-was
indeed such a site (even if the reconciliation was often transient). For the
good of the State, those performative additives worked to foreclose dis-
sidence, legitimize its efforts, and foster reconciliation.
Philosophy and the Painful Politics of "Healing"
The critical literature on the formal history of early American melodra-
ma frequently centers on the authorial antecedents of the genre. Critics
turn to European playwrights such as August von Kotzebue, Guilbert de
Pixerecourt, and Thomas Holcraft because they were instrumental in the
development of melodrama in Europe and their plays, often as adapta-
tions or translations, were popular among early American audiences.2s Yet
these discussions reveal very little in terms of locating the ideological
machinery of melodrama; furthermore, they run the risk of establishing
a too direct link by suggesting a simple causality from one playwright to
the other, a critical move that occludes the ideological and hegemonic
dynamism that pervaded not only the drama (and the arts) of the period,
but also the social, the political, and the economic. In other words, to
focus for example, on the influence of Pixerecourt's fairy-tale melodra-
mas on the works of John Howard Payne without an eye to the larger
philosophic and episternic formulations of the period would be, in effect,
to grant a sort of existential autonomy to both authors that positions
24 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 596.
2
5 Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 8-16; McConachie, Melodramatic J7ormations, 30-
56; Hays and Nikolopoulou, Melodrama, viii-ix.
62 jONES
them outside history.26 As Eagleton notes, the subjectivity of the author,
or Authorial Ideology (Aul), "is never to be treated in isolation from GI,
but must be studied in its articulation with it ... [because the text] is the
product of an aesthetic working of 'general' ideology as that ideology is
itself worked and 'produced' by an overdetermination of authorial-biog-
raphical factors."
27
What is noteworthy about early American melodrama
is that the majority of playwrights were so concerned with popular suc-
cess-recall that Boucicault called public opinion "the highest and sole
court of jurisdiction in literary and artistic matters"-that any trace of
authorial idiosyncrasy within the texts is virtually negligible.zs
This over-regard for the public led to several important devel-
opments. The most ironic: an awareness that the United States lacked an
indigenous national drama. Even though American audiences got what
they wanted, their spectatorial desires continued to be fundamentally
shaped by European thought. (This is not surprising given the country's
newness.) Therefore, they could not produce a "literature of the people,"
i.e. national drama, because it was not, as the journal North American
Review put it, "peculiar."29 This lack of peculiarity is not simply attributa-
ble to America's inability to produce an artistic "genius" (a categorization
"invented" during the romantic period) but more important, we can also
account for the dearth of dramatic singularity and the negligibility of Aul
within the texts because the Aul "may be effectively homologous with
GI/ AI, or it may be 'cancelled' as a specific factor by their distinct or
conjoint effects. In either of these cases, Aul as a particular 'level' effec-
tively disappears."3D The disappearance of Aul within melodrama was not
only the result of the intensity of the GI/ AI relation, but in the context
of early US history, its lack was also the consequence of a new nation
making use of the elements of an inherited and jumbled Weltanschauung
26 Bruce McConachie's Melodramatic Formations avoids this sort of authorial cen-
tering in relation to the production of a text, as he always considers the functioning (of)
ideology; it remains the finest reading of early American melodrama.
27 Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, 58-59.
28 There are, of course, melodramas that are better written than others. Robert
Montgomery Bird, playwright of The Gladiator, was one of the most talented writers in
the period and, because of American theatrocracy, turned to the novel because he
thought he might utilize more of his authorial talents there. See Grimsted, Melodrama
Unveiled, 56-7.
29 North American Review, 19 October 1824.
30 Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, 63.
AESTHETIC$, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE V!CriM 63
as it struggled to build its own.
My analysis, then, requires a turn to the "triumphant, rationalist,
humanist 'Enlightenment' of the eighteenth century" of Western Europe
and its critiques because they were the dominant ideologies that shaped
the personal, racial, and political formations of early America- forma-
tions that would be realized in the textual and theatrical material of the
melodrama.31 (An American philosophical tradition does not really begin
until the 1840s with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman; a conse-
quential philosophic class does not form until later in the century with
William James, his students George Santayana and W E. B. Du Bois, and
John Dewey.) Post-Reformation and post-Descartes, the rationalist and
secular turn in European thought led to the "creation" of the individual,
a conceptualization of subjectivity that posited the human as a self-
reflexive, self-contained atom who inherently possessed all of the neces-
sary faculties with which to produce happiness. According to this formu-
lation, man was only a social being in so far as he entered into social
"contracts" with others, a sum that was never greater than its individual
parts. This atomization of society became the basis of what Hobsbawm
calls "classical bourgeois liberalism" and manifest in the political realm as
a schism between (belief in) the rule of the majority and that by a prop-
ertied elite.32
The beginning of American political history and philosophy tells
its own version of this tale, e.g. Jeffersonianism versus Federalism. And
while there is no need to rehearse that story here, what is important for
my purposes is that both sides ascribed to liberalism insofar as they both
promulgated the same definition of natural rights. Natural rights meant, in
part, man should be free from the tyranny and coercion of monarchies
and aristocracies. In this way, liberalism shared with (pre-Marxian) social-
ism a view of the world that would produce a social utilitarianism, that is,
the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But socialism differed
with liberalism in that socialism views society as organically social, that
"society was not a necessary but regrettable diminution of man's unlim-
ited natural right to do as he liked, but [rather] the setting of his life, hap-
piness, and individuality."33 Regardless of their respective differences,
both socialism (happiness qua irreducible molecule) and liberalism (hap-
31 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Rvoilltion, 1789-1848 (1962; reprint, New York:
Random House, 1996), 234.
32 Ibid., 234-41.
33 Ibid., 243.
64
JONES
piness qua irreducible atom) found in conservatism its greatest enemy, an
ideological formulation that argued both liberals and socialists were inter-
fering in the "natural" course of history. As the conservative and elo-
quent Edmund Burke put it in 1791, "It were better to forget, once and
for all, the encyclopedie and the whole body of economists, and to revert to
those old rules and principles which have hitherto made princes great and
nations happy."34 If the teleology of history positioned the few on top
and the great many on bottom, whose business was it to intervene in the
"natural" order of things?
Clearly, the vast majority of Americans did not subscribe to such
articulations of conservatism. Yet there was a decided split between those
who subscribed to liberalism and its economic derivative capitalism
(mostly the emerging and aspiring bourgeoisie) and those who accepted
socialism (most often the poor and those who would join phalanxes and
utopias); and while that split continues to structure political alliances and
sociality, early Americans often found themselves in situations in which
they had to interact with their ideological counterparts. Although upper-
class elites would start to build "refuges" from the masses in the late
1830s and 1840s such as the Astor Place Opera House (1843), and the
reform-minded would turn to polite museum theatres in the 1850s, the-
atre-going remained an economically-mixed affair. How, then, could this
sociality be harmonious? What might make these social "contracts" bear-
able? Where might individuals put aside their ideological differences and
stand on common ground? If anything might do it, it would be the the-
atre of melodrama-the space where the effusion of emotionality and
sentimentality ostensibly strips away all ideology because it leaves its
spectators bathed in tears, wrapped in laughs, and engulfed in wonder.JS
Why? Because, at least as sentimental philosophy would have it, melo-
drama consciously implicates the sentiments, those sensorial, experiential,
and universal markers of truth and morality that, following David Hume,
"are not only the same in all human creatures, and produce the same
approbation or censure; but they also comprehend all human crea-
tures."36
34 Edmund Burke, "Letter to Chevalier de Rivarol," 1 June 1791, quoted in
ibid., 246.
35 It is not that everything functioned according to plan within the playhouse,
that there were not contingencies that shaped the event; what I am after in this essay is
the aesthetic theory of the melodrama.
3
6
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by Tom L.
Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 148.
AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICTIM 65
For Hume and the Anglo moral sense philosophers, the body
and its senses are the final arbiters of what is moral, ethical, and true.
That is to say, morality is not a "matter of fact," but rather a "feeling."3
7
Hume was deeply skeptical of the ability of a systematic Reason severed
from the realm of the mundane to constitute moral and ethical structures
for lived experience precisely because such philosophical moves-typi-
fied in the period by Immanuel Kant and the German idealists in search
of the elusive noumena-shunned the mundane. Hume's inversion of
the Cartesian mind/body split-for him it was body/mind-set Anglo
philosophy on a course that, for some time, put its greatest stock in the
aesthetic. As Eagleton reminds us, the aesthetic concern is not merely a
concern with form, the always already permeable enclosure of represen-
tation, but also as a philosophical thematic, aesthetics was "born as a dis-
course of the body .... [I]t is as though philosophy suddenly wakes up to
the fact that there is a dense, swarming territory beyond its own enclave
which threatens to fall utterly outside its sway."38 The burgeoning of aes-
thetic philosophy and morality in the eighteenth century- prefigured in
the previous century in the writings of Baruch Spinoza-marks a critical
move in Western philosophy away from the realm of transcendence to
that of imminence.
That is not to say that philosophies of transcendence disap-
peared in the eighteenth century. In Kant, Western philosophy found its
most consequential metaphysician since Plato; in fact, part of the project
of German idealism was to find a way to subordinate the aesthetic under
the umbrella of Reason.39 But their Anglo counterparts to the west reject-
ed this hierarchization of transcendence over immanence (Hume explic-
3
7
David Hume, Treatise o/ Human Nature, 1739-1740, edited by L. A. Shelby
Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 469.
38 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology o/ the Aesthetic (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991 ), 13.
39 Alexander Baumgarten's 1750 Aesthetica initiates the project in the most sig-
nificant way. Kant would later inveigh against the subjectivity of "egoistic" taste and argue
that taste can never be subjective but is always bound by what Hannah Arendt terms the
"nonsubjective element in the nonobjective senses," that is, the social or "intersubjectivi-
ty." (Hannah Arendt, Lectures o/ Kant's Political Philosophy, edited by Ronal Beiner [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989], 67; Immanuel Kant, "Critique of Taste" in the
Critique of Judgment [1787).) Later in the nineteenth century in his Pbtlosopby of Fine Art,
Hegel would give way to the sensations of sight and hearing and suggest that they are the
only aesthetic sense worthy of philosophical concern because they elude desire and there-
fore are subject to a sort of disembodied analytic. Adam Smith, Theory o/ Moral Sentiments
(1759) quoted in British Moralists, being Selections from Writers Principai!J o/ the Eighteenth
Century, vol.l, edited by L.A. Shelby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 337.
66 jONES
itly inverted it) and were instead led by what Eagleton calls "the law of
the heart."40 This aestheticized ethical compass did not only guide the
philosophical queries of figures such as Hume and the Earl of
Shaftsbury, but it also reached to the realms of politics (in Edmund
Burke's conservatism, for instance) and economics (in Adam Smith's for-
mulation of capitalism). In fact, Smith's first major work, Theory of Moral
Sentiments, provides the most succinct formulation of the interrelations of
society, virtue/vice, and the aesthetic/body:
Human society, when we contemplate 1t m a certain
abstract and philosophical light appears like a great,
immense machine .... [S]o virtue, which is, as it were,
the fine polish to the wheels of society, necessarily
pleases; while vice, like the vile rust, which makes them
jar and grate upon one another, is necessarily offen-
si\e.41
Thus, if the early Smith were to legitimize the later Smith of The Wealth
of Nations, the "invisible hand" of the free market would produce the
greatest happiness among the greatest number of people, as the presence
of happiness would be self-evident as embodied pleasure. In other words,
capitalism would be legitimated by an aestheticized utilitarianism.
The United States embraced this portion of their Anglo heritage.
Utilitarianism was part and parcel of what they conceived of "democra-
cy," with chants democratic ringing out pro bono publico. But also the new
nation took to the Humean notion of the aestheticization of truth and
socialized ethic.
4
2 This is one of the major reasons why melodrama was
especially formative and popular in early America: it functioned as a sort
of locus of "truth," where sensibility legitimized ideology. That valoriza-
tion gave (at least temporarily) a sense of closure, of finality because the
truth-value of an ideology was felt and therefore measured as it coursed
through the body and the senses, that is, in the aesthetic.
The aesthetics of melodrama work in such a way as to create a
space where subjects with different ideologies-e.g. liberalism/socialism;
40 Eagleton, Ideology Aesthetic, 31.
41 Quoted in .ibid., 32-5.
42 Not until the late 1830s did the United States produce as1y sort of conse-
quential work on the socio-philosophic thematic of transcendence. It was Ralph Waldo
Emerson's foray into Kantian metaphysics and the publication of his essay "Nature" in
1836 that would set in motion the school of American Transcendentalism.
AEsTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICrJM 67
rule of the majority/ rule of propertied elite; paternalism/ working-class
solidarity-can exist in a sort of sentimental harmony, where they can
dwell in something like the neoplatonic One, a conception of an origi-
nary unity of man and the good. McConachie offers a compelling read-
ing of the ways in which neoplatonism figures in (the ideology of) fairy-
tale melodrama within the theatrical frame, and particularly in relation to
the tableau: "The tableau, in effect, reveals the neoplatonic moment
when materiality rejoins the One, when the multiplicity of intentions and
emotions on stage melts into a single image fusing mundane relationships
with spiritual grace. The final tableau projects a paternalistic utopia."43 I
want to extend his formulation to include the theatre of melodrama in
terms of what it seeks to do with its audiences, that is, to envelop them in
Oneness. Shared sentimentality as the means to Oneness was the mech-
anism by which hierarchies, such as those reflected in ticket prices and
seating location as well as ideological differences, would be collapsed.
The ideology of the aesthetic (AI) of melodrama, then, is the systemiza-
tion of a set of signifying structures by way of sentimental impressions
on spectators' bodies that attempts to preclude social, political, ideologi-
cal, and personal difference among subjects in order to reveal its own
socio-ideological order in markedly absolutist, determinate, and almost
mystical terms.
The socio-ideological order of melodrama, moreover, is funda-
mentally a conservative one. In one sense, melodrama's aestheticization
relies on appeals to the General Ideology (GI)-that is to say, on calls to
culture, "through a plea for the values and affectations richly implicit in
national tradition;" this appeal is perhaps more of an insertion of the
GI into melodrama because, like tragedy, it is a "conservative genre, a
ready-made vehicle for cultural values."45 The double conservatism of
melodrama-in terms of how and what it holds-occludes, ironically, its
own conservatism in the sense that its appeal to sensibility works to natu-
ralize the enacted (conservative) ideology as though the very ideology itself
resides in the aesthetic, in the body, in the One, as Truth. This ideologi-
cal hiding, its "naturalization," is its hegemonic vehicle in that it "rul[es]
and inform[sJ the senses from within while allowing them to thrive in all
of their relative autonomy."46 No wonder then that Burke, the towering
43 McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 45.
44 Eagleton, Ideology Aesthetic, 26.
45 Rayner, Comic Persuasion, 9.
46 Eagleton, Ideology Aesthetic, 1 7
68 JONES
conservative Briton in the period, would write in his An Appeal to the New
From the Old Wht;gs: "There is a boundary to men's passions when they act
from feelings, none when they are under the influence of imagination."4
7
This structuring constitutes the operational logic of melodrama
that not only works to resolve ideological, economic, and social contra-
dictions; but such a working also has the capacity to produce its own sort
of seeming internal contradiction in terms of the relationship between
AI and GI. How to produce the One (AI) when the time of melodrama
was the period of State-sanctioned slavery (GI)? What is Oneness in rela-
tion to the Trail of Tears? These questions are meant to suggest that a GI
founded on a sociality of exclusivity and erasure- the vexed contradic-
tions of early US democracy-can never produce a neoplatonic totality.
(But what can?) But melodrama anticipates this actuality; its aesthetic
compensates for the impossibility of utter totality, it improvises, and
seeks to deal with it accordingly. The anticipation of the impossibility of
Oneness is part of the pragmatics of melodrama. (Melodrama says: "If I
can't have the One-One, I will have one One.") These pragmatics mani-
fest themselves in a structural move in which melodrama, in a hermeneu-
tic way, chooses a victim as a way to deal with the problem. (What is so
effective about this pragmatic gesture is that before the victim is sacri-
ficed, [s]he always leaves something with the spectator: a model of virtue,
noble [savage] innocence, or humility. In this way, these "mechanisms
towards the Good" of the sacrificed are bestowed upon the spectator to
help him with the journey back to the white, male One. I deal with this
in more detail later in the essay.)
On one level, the destruction of the victim satiates a personal
desire, as the immolated object produces a sentimentalized, affected sub-
ject-spectator. But as Eagleton notes, this association with the object is
mosdy an attenuated one and instead produces a certain kind of spectato-
rial narcissism: "To be sentimental is to consume less the object itself than
one's own feelings for it."48 A sentimentalized attachment to the suffering
object is one sustained by an empathetic projection of the subject's self
onto the object-Other. This projection most often veils the Other's wounds
and can produce a kind of ironic solipsism, an over-investment in the self
at the expense of the Other, in which the real wounding of the Other only
exists in the imagination of the empathetic spectator. Saidiya Hartman
writes about this in her discussion of white spectators witnessing the ter-
rors of black slavery and how such a projection stymies political action on
47 Quoted in ibid., 28.
48
Ibid., 40.
AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICTIM 69
behalf of the abject Other: "'Yet empathy in important respects confounds
[the spectator's] efforts to identify with the enslaved because in making the
slave's suffering his own, [the spectator] begins to feel for himself rather
than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to
reach."49 As Bertolt Brecht profoundly understood, empathy is a conser-
vative gesture that makes men sick with self-love.
On another level, the destruction of the victim in melodrama is
to make way for a (white, male, homo) social order that the forces of the
world outside of the theatrical frame somehow refuse, somehow defer.
The destruction operates as an aestheticized ideal of what the GI could
do outside the frame of representation if it had its way and did not meet
with forms of resistance (such as abolitionism, working-class activism,
and social reform movements). The "lesson" of a melodrama such as The
Octoroon (1859) is that despite her integrity, generosity, and magnanimity,
Zoe has to be sacrificed in order to restore harmony and order. Her abil-
ity to traverse the racial divide, both in terms of the epidermis and the
cultural, suggests a permeable social order that stands in the way of the
journey to the (white, male, homo) social One. In the context of the for-
mation of a white supremacist ideology (constitutive of the GI) in early
America, Oneness relies on an intensely rigid social order in which
"white" means "this" and "black" means "that." These circles of posi-
tionality should not bisect or overlap in any way, hence the profusion of
literature against social and sexual amalgamation Qater called miscegena-
tion) in the antebellum period. The persistence of a society that is built
on the institution of black slavery requires the termination of sexual,
domestic, and cultural interracial relations. The Octoroon works to reinforce
this ideology, but it does so in such a way as to give Zoe (and those like
her) her proper due. (Britain, which had abolished slavery two decades
prior to the first performance of The Octoroon, saw a very different play:
Zoe lives and she and George go off to marry.)
The immolation of Zoe (and other characters similar to her such
as Uncle Tom and Metamora) offers the (white) spectator: 1) the time and
space to release collective emotion; and 2) what I call mechanisms towards
the Good. As for the former, right before her death and the final tableau,
Zoe says: "No; but I loved you so, I could not bear my fate .... 0! George,
you may, without a blush, confess your love for the Octoroon."SO Zoe's
appeal to George, that he let the world know of his love for her, is made
49 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19.
50 Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon (1859), in Richards, Ear!J American Drama, 494.
70
jONES
possible by her death. Yet the use-value of Zoe's death is not limited to
the action contained within the theatrical frame; her death also functions
to let loose within the audience the emotional vestiges of unfulfilled desire
for the black Other; if blackface minstrelsy was the "cultural marker" or
"visible sign" of "cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable
fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people," as
Eric Lott argues, then the melodramatic stage was a cultural space where
white spectators could collectively mourn the impossibility of the co-exis-
tence of their "love" for (the idea of) blackness, black culture, and black
bodies with the general ideology of whiteness in America.Sl This is what
troubles an oppositional text such as William Wells Brown's The Escape; or,
a Leap for Freedom (1858), the first published play by an African American.
As melodrama, its oppositional edge is fraught because the leap for free-
dom is a litera/leap out of America and into Canada. The final tableau: "Glen,
Melinda, and Cato jump into the boat, and as it leaves the shore and floats
away [to Canada,] Glen and Cato wave their hats, and shout loudly for
freedom."52 Even an antislavery play such as The Escape, participates in the
aesthetic ideology of melodrama in that it understands, pragmatically, how
Oneness in the context of early American's general ideology required the
sacrifice of black people. Although Glen, Melinda, and Cato live in The
Escape, they are sacrificed in the sense that they have to leave the United
States. The play qua melodrama is a text of mourning. But an explicit
pleasure tempers grief in this case because Glen, Melinda, and Cato live.
Thus, white spectators get to have it both ways in The Escape: black bodies
are gotten rid of, but they do not suffer and die in the end: it is sacrifice
with a certain kind of moral satisfaction.
Furthermore, the grief expressed in response to the immolation
of the victim allowed white spectators to participate in a sphere of sen-
timentality that legitimates their humanity and the ideology of white
supremacy. The project of whiteness has in large part been a project of
proving the incontrovertible humanity of white subjects in contradistinc-
tion to and at the expense of the racial Other, and nineteenth-century
melodrama was one of its most potent cultural devises because it
"proved" an important premise of that ideology: the belief that white
subjects felt deeper-and thus were more human- than others. In The
Octoroon, after the slave Pete tells his fellow slaves that their mistress has
51 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrel.[y and the American Working Class
(Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 1993), 6.
52 William Wells Brown, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), edited by John
Ernest (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2001), 47.
AESTHSnCS, lDEOWGY, AND THE USE OF THE VJCnM 71
to sell them in order to pay off debts and liens on her plantation, he
makes an implicit valorization of race, humanity, and sentiment: "Come
along; she har what we say, and she's cryin' for us. None o' ye ign'rant nig-
gers could cry for yerselves like dat."S3 In other words, blacks were infe-
rior to whites even in terms of grasping the magnitude of the trauma of
their own separation and sale because they could not produce the appro-
priately sensible reaction. Pete makes the same equivalence of thinking,
feeling, and humanity that Thomas Jefferson makes in his Notes on the
State if Virginia. In response to the question of whether or not to "retain
and incorporate blacks into the state," Jefferson cites objections such as
"deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites," but he also suggests
a relationship between the physiological, the sentiments, humanity, and
citizenship. He writes:
To these objections, which are political, may be added
others, which are physical and moral. The first difference
which strikes us is that of color. Whether the black of
the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the
skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it
proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the
bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference
is fixed in nature, and is real as if its seat and cause were
better known to us. And is this difference of no impor-
tance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share
of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of
red and white, the expressions of every passion by
greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable
to that eternal monotony which reigns in the counte-
nances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the
emotions of the other races? ... I advance it therefore as
a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a dis-
tinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances,
are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both
body and mind . . .. [fhe] unfortunate difference of
color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to
the emancipation of these people.S4
53 Boucicault, The Octoroon, 478.
54 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), in Defending Slavery:
Pros/avery Thought in the Old South, edited by Paul Finkelman (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's
Press, 2003), 49-54.
72 jONES
Implied in Jefferson's pro slavery defense is his belief in the incontrovert-
ible humanity (and therefore freedom) of whites because of the physio-
logical capacity of white skin to stage emotion (blushing). The theatre of
melodrama gave white sentimental spectators the ability to affirm their
humanity (and freedom) in heightened and concentrated form. And
because this affirmation was located in the senses, in the aesthetic, every
member of the audience was equipped to participate. The melodramatic
action of Uncle o m ~ Cabin in an 1853 production at the National Theatre
in New York City, for instance, compelled the rowdy Bowery B'hoys of
the pit to fall ".into deep silence," the johns and harlots of the gallery to
be "bathed in tears and oblivious to all baser purposes," and even the
fiercely anti-theatrical Harriet Beecher Stowe who observed from her
elite box-seat "scarcely spoke during the evening; but her expression was
eloquent-smiles and tears succeeding each other through the whole."SS
In short, melodrama allowed white spectators from all walks of life to
share .in the oneness of emotionality.
But the sacrifice of the victim-Other not only provided a space
where white spectators could aesthetically affirm their humanity. As I
suggest above, the pragmatics of melodrama also grant the immolated
victim certain traits-mechanisms towards the Good, I call them-to
pass on to spectators who then might take them on outside the play-
house. By mechanisms towards the Good, I mean the sorts of qualities
that, in discussions of melodrama or sentimental comedy, are subsumed
under the rubric of virtue-honesty, generosity, loyalty, sincerity, piety,
and, in early America, patriotism. But I also mean the types of qualities
that would, according to anti-bourgeois ideology, return man to his "nat-
ural," pre-Industrial Revolution state, namely, primitivism. Primitivism,
from Rousseau through the Romantic epoch, meant a society composed
of men of feeling, of men uncorrupted by "civilization" and technol-
ogy; it was imagined as "a sort of model for utopia" because men were
free of capitalist competition and technology, and thus were not alienat-
ed from each other and the world.
56
For these thinkers, primitivism was
55 "'Uncle Tom' Among the Bowery Boys," New York Dai!J Times, 27 July 1853;
"The Drama of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,"' The National Era, 25 August 1853, quoted in A.M.
Drummond and Richard Moody, "The Hit of the Century: Uncle Tom's Cabin: 1852-1952,"
Educational Theatre Journal 4 (December 1952): 158. I should note that some theatres, such
as A. H. Purdy's in New York City when it offered Uncle Tom's Cabin, would sometimes
allow free and slave African Americans to attend. In those cases, however, it did not
impact the aesthetic ideology of the theatre of melodrama that I am after in this essay.
56 Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 267.
AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VJC!1M 73
the ideal state of being because in it man was his most natural, most sen-
sible, and most innocent, that is, his most human. Moral sense philosophy
posits that sensibility is not secondary to Reason, but rather (at the very
least) an equal part of the same epistemological apparatus. Thus, and to
couple this formulation with Platonic terms, primitive man is closest to
the Form of the Good-the space whence enlightenment and knowl-
edge spring forth-because he is closest to his heart.
No other literary or theatrical figure of antebellum America was
more representative of the blessings of primitivism than the free, noble
savage, that is, the Native American hero. Yet this condition was wholly
figural: Native Americans were forced to undergo a systematic genocide
sponsored by the federal government. While "savage" "nobility" figured
on the melodramatic stage and in the Leatherstocking novels of James
Fenimore Cooper, state and local governments in the South found no use
for Native Americans-noble, savage, or otherwise-and successfully
lobbied for the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. In actuality,
little was known about Native American life and the "noble savage" was
largely a theoretical construct.
Theory or not, the "stage Indian" was one of the most popular
character-types throughout the antebellum period. As Americans were
overwhelmed by what some saw as the dehumanizing ideology and tech-
nology of the Industrial Revolution, they took comfort in the fact that
one could always turn to the noble savage for a model of innocence and
purity, a model (back) towards the Good. James Nelson Barker's The
Indian Princess (1808), the earliest, extant play to stage Native Americans,
tells the story of Pocahontas and celebrates the type of instinctual and
emotional knowledge that became characteristic of the noble savage,
knowledge that was at times deemed more useful to certain forms of
rationalistic and technological Reasoning. After Captain John Smith has
been captured, the Chief of the Powhatan tribe decides to execute Smith.
Nantaquas, son of Powhatan, tries to reason with his father as a means
to save Smith: ''Warriors, listen to my words; listen, my father, while your
son tells the deeds of the brave white man .... Hearken my father, to my
true words! ... His Icing is like you, my father, good and great; and he
comes from a land beyond the wide water, to make us wise and happy."S7
Yet his words are fruitless; it takes the visceral and tearful attempt of
Pocahontas to save Smith. Barker writes in a stage direction: "Music. The
third signal is struck, the hatchets are lifted up: when the Princess, shrieking, runs dis-
5
7
James Nelson Barker, The Indian Ptincess (1808), in Richards, Ear!J American
Drama, 132-3.
74 jONES
tracted!J to the block, and presses Smith's head to her bosom." She then says: "My
father, dost thou love thy daughter? Listen to her voice: look upon her
tears: they ask for mercy to the captive."
58
Here, the sentimental appeal is
the most effective because it reads as the most truthful.
But unlike Metamora, The Indian Princess does not end in the phys-
ical death of noble savages. It does, however, end for them in a sort of
cultural death. After Smith has been saved, Nantaquas remains intrigued
by European culture and says to his father: "Father, hear the design that
fills my breast. I will go among the white men; I will learn their arts; and
my people shall be made wise and happy."59 What might become of
Nantaquas' people once they are introduced to Western culture?
Furthermore, after Pocahontas falls in love with the Englishman Rolfe she
exclaims: "Long, 0! long/I was the savage child of savage Nature; ... 0!
'tis from thee that I have drawn my being:/Blood-stain'd and rude, where
rove my countrymen,/ And taught me heavenly truths, and fill'd my
heart/With sentiments sublime, and sweet, and social."60 The play teach-
es that Nantaquas, Pocahontas, and Native Americans need the "arts" and
knowledge of "the white men" in order to be "wise and happy" and
raised out of their "rude" and beastly state. And while the melodrama
extols certain passions of the noble savage, it champions whiteness as the
standard-bearer of humanity: white subjects are closest to the Good, but
need to turn to the model of noble savages to regain some of the natu-
ral-human qualities they lost on their move to modernity.
Metamora, on the other hand, is not as forthright in its champi-
oning of whiteness. The play, written by John Augustus Stone and first
performed in 1829, was a star-vehicle for the period's most celebrated
actor, Edwin Forrest. Furthermore, it was a favorite of Jacksonian audi-
ences and, like Jack Cade and The Gladiator, is a heroic melodrama par excel-
lence: a God-chosen, Arcadian hero fights an avaricious and "civilized"
enemy for his land and the freedom of his family and people; he suc-
cessfully leads his troops in battle, winning important military campaigns;
his people start enjoying the spoils of war, turn on their leader, and let
their guard down, all leading to successful retaliations from the enemy;
the hero is left alone and is executed by the enemy, thereby becoming a
martyr and symbol of the liberatory cause of his people.61 What sepa-
58 Ibid., 133.
59 Ibid., 134.
6
0 Ibid., 149.
6! McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 104.
AESTHETICS, I DEOLOGY, AND THE UsE OF THE V!CfiM 75
rates Metamora from Jack Cade and Spartacus (the hero of The Gladiator)
is that Metamora was a clearly defined Other. (One could rightly make
the case that Spartacus was, in strict ancestral terms, an Other to early
American audiences. But by this time, the best of Greek and Roman cul-
ture was assumed part of America's intellectual heritage because, as
Thomas Jefferson so bluntly put it, they "were whites."
6
2)
Perhaps more than any other character on the melodramatic
stage, Metamora is the epitome of the noble savage. Oceana, the virtu-
ous daughter of an Englishman, describes witnessing Metamora in his
natural and primitive glory:
High on a craggy rock an Indian stood, with sinewy arm
and eye that pierced the glen. His bowstring drawn to
win a second death, a robe of fur was o'er his shoulder
thrown, and o'er his long, dark hair an eagle's plume
waved in the breeze, a feathery diadem. Firmly he stood
upon the jutting height, as if a sculptor's hand had
carved him there. With awe I gazed as on the cliff he
turned-the grandest model of might man.63
Furthermore, throughout the melodrama, Metamora acts in such
a way as to legitimize his immediacy to nature: he equates bravery with
being a "red man," he tells his wife that "Metamora cannot lie," and when
offered gold to protect the life of one of his captives, he responds, "No!
Give me back the happy days, the fair hunting ground, and the dominion
my great forefathers bequeathed me."6
4
Thus, Metamora yearns for the
days of yore, for "Home, Sweet Home," where he can exist in his natu-
ral, primitive state without concern for the dehumanizing effects of the
material world: money, competition, and technology.6s
But Stone's characterization of Metamora is somewhat curious
62 Jefferson, Notes, 53.
63 John Augustus Stone, Metamora; or The Last of Wampanoags (1829); (London:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), http:// collections.chadwyck/ com (accessed 8 January
2009), 11.
64 Ibid., 11, 26, 62.
65 "Home, Sweet Home" was a popular song composed by Henry Bishop and
played throughout taverns and playhouses in antebellum America. It was interpolated in
plays and often was the high point of the theatrical event. A melodic affirmation of the
,irtues of simplicity and nature, one verse of "Home, Sweet Home" reads:
76 jONES
given the historical record of the man on whom Metamora is based:
Metacomet. Metacomet not only Anglicized his name, changing it to
"King Philip," but also had a legendary penchant for Boston fashion. His
self-nominal and sartorial choices do not indicate a noble savage, but
rather one who made calculated political decisions and was infatuated
with Western culture.
66
Granted the drama is not beholden to (the impos-
sible task of) achieving archival exactitude, but Stone's reworking of
Metacomet is conspicuous. The question becomes, then, what to make of
his Metamora vis-a-vis Metacomet. I suggest that Metamora is a con-
summate product of the play's GI/ AI relation and its conservative ideol-
ogy. On the one hand, Metamora (and Cade and Spartacus) is an essen-
tially safe model of revolutionary hero in relation to conservatism-he
and his family are slaughtered at the end of play, so who wants to follow
that model? But also the notion of primitivism itself is tied to conser-
vatism. Unlike liberalism, which looks forward to a sociality of contrac-
tual relations based in the belief of individual and natural rights, that all
men start as equals, conservatism and its derivative Primitivism (and its
derivative figure the noble savage) is an "ideal anchored firmly to the
past" and to past communality. In the context of early nineteenth-centu-
ry thought, conservative-Primitivism argued that
in important respects the old regime had been or was
better than the new. In it God made them high and lowly
and ordered their estate, which pleased conservatives,
but he also imposed duties (however light and badly car-
ried out) on the high. Men were unequai!J human, but
they were not commodities valued according to the mar-
ket. Above all they lived together, in tight networks of
social and personal relationships, guided by the clear map
of custom, social institutions, and obligations.67
Home, Sweet, home!
There's no place like home,
An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain!
Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again!
The birds singing gaily that come at my cali,-
Give me them, wit the peace of mind dearer than all!
Home, sweet home!
(Quoted in McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 53-4.)
66 The Red King's Rebellion: Racial Politics in Nezv England, 1675-1678 (London:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 1-2.
67 I-Iobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 267, 246. Emphasis mine.
AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE Of THE VICTIM 77
Although conservative-primitivism had its "advantages"-"duties" and
mutual "obligations"-it was based on an ideology of natural inequality.
The dissimulation of a figure such as the noble savage is that although he
becomes a model of virtue, he is essentially the "high," the singular, the
exception; but in such singularity, there exists a simplicity that leads to the
hero's undoing by the not-noble savages around him. Spectators can
revile the noble savage's simplistic singularity (the stuff of revolutionar-
ies) as they revel in certain features of his virtue (the stuff of a complic-
it underclass). Thus, conservatives need not fear a play such as Metamora:
its GI/ AI ideological matrix-namely, conservatism wrapped in the
robes of excessive emotionality-conceals its essential conservatism: the
play does not deal in any real conception of Native Americans or any
consideration of their plight in the new nation, but rather the play cele-
brates, through a theoretical conception of the "noble savage," the
virtues of a past built on the notion of natural inequality.
Although by the middle of the 1830s the grand exit of elite audi-
ences and paternalistic melodrama from theatres made way for the hero-
ic melodrama that ostensibly celebrated "the people" and eventually the
moral reform melodrama, the general ideology of conservatism and the
aesthetic ideology of sentimentalism was so fixed in place that they con-
tinued to mark the melodramatic form but in more concealed ways, as in
the case of Metamora. But conservatives not only had melodramas about
noble savages to extol the virtues of primitivism, they also could rely on
melodramas that dealt with the poor to fulfill the same function. In
Robert Taylor Conrad's Jack Cade (1835), for instance, after the rebel
leader Cade is told that his followers believe him to be the rightful King
(Mortimer), Cade says that after their successful campaign against their
oppressors, he will renounce the name "Mortimer," which he adopts
strategically to rally his troops, and forego the spoils of a prince:
I will be Mortimer unto the world;-but only
Until our chains are molten in the glow
Of kindled spirits; for I seek not power,
I know no glory,- save the godlike joy of making
The bondman free. When we are free, Jack Cade
Will back unto his hills, and proudly smile
Down on the spangled meanness of the court,
Claiming a title higher than their highest,-
An honest man-a freeman!68
68 Robert Taylor Conrad, jack Cade: The Captain of the Commons (1835; reprint,
78 )ONES
Although Jack Cade is a celebration of (American) freedom (from the
British), the play is steeped in conservatism in its espousal of the natu-
ralness of a society built on the few who have and the many who have
not. Not that Cade needs to be preoccupied with materialism; but the
melodrama substantiates an ideology that valorizes freedom to the detri-
ment of the working-class person's economic and social wellbeing.
In fact, Jack Cade directly argues that wealth and the material are
anathema to freedom. As Cade's men are winning battles, they begin to
loot and lose discipline. Lacy, Cade's closest advisor, reports: ''Ay! And
find them/Drunken with triumph. They think toil and care/ Are over
now, and deem that, when they're free,/Life will be but a lawless long-
drawn revel .... Already they are struggling for their rank./ All would be
great, all captains, leaders, lords."69 In this rebuke of the material, there is
a certain anti-egalitarian spirit. The passage (and the play) expresses an
anxiety about democracy in terms of the dangers of "the people" con-
trolling the means of the political and economic realms. The play sug-
gests a kind of decay of civilization when the masses rule; it implies the
necessity of benevolent paternalism or a kind of patrician conservatism
in which the few rule in order to protect the many from themselves and
the vices of material.
Jack Cade is similar to Robert Montgomery Bird's The Gladiator
(1831). But The Gladiator is even more explicit in its condemnation of
wealth. The play opens with the Thracian slave Phasarius lambasting the
hedonism of the Romans: "If there be any virtue in the love of wealth,
then is the praetor a most virtuous man; for he loves it better than the
Gods."70 But after Phasarius joins his brother Spartacus to fight the
Romans, their enslavers, he starts enjoying the wealth and fame that
comes along with military success. Spartacus tries to right his brother's
path and tells him of the real reason for their rebellion: home. "I think,
we do not fight [for ambition]. ... Ah, would to heaven, Phasarius/I were
with her now and my smiling boy,/In Thrace again, besides our moun-
tain cot,/ Or in those vales, where babbling Hebrus tumbles/ Along his
golden sands; and dreamt no more/Of sacks and battles."
7
1 Like the
London: Cambridge University Press, 2003), http:// collections.chadwyck/ com (accessed
8 January 2009), 62.
69 Ibid., 65.
7
0 Robert Montgomery Bird, The Gladiator (1831), reprinted in Richards, Ear(y
American Drama, 173.
71 Ibid., 204-205.
AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE UsE OF THE V!crJM 79
primitivism of Metamora, The Gladiator espouses a past of simplicity that
is marked by a distribution of the material that signals an inherent
inequality. As conservatism would have it, on the one hand, all men
should be free; on the other hand, all were not meant to enjoy material
success and participate in a society of equals. Both The Gladiator and Jack
Cade make the case for the importance of the perpetuation and clarity of
class distinctions. They celebrate the lack of concern for wealth and rel-
ative poverty as the key to the common man's happiness.
This point-that most men are naturai!J disposed to be happiest
without money-is best dramatized in Dion Boucicault's The Poor of New
York (1857). The melodrama tells the story of several families with dif-
ferent economic statuses during the Panic of 1837 and the Panic of 1857.
Livingstone, a one-time moneyed elite who has lost his money in the eco-
nomic downturn, tells why the formerly rich are the truly "miserable of
the poor of New York":
The poor!-whom do you call the poor? Do you know
them? Do you see them? They are more frequently
found under a black coat than under a red shirt. The
poor man is the clerk with a family, forced to maintain a
decent suit of clothes, paid for out of hunger of his
children. The poor man is the artist who is obliged to
pledge the tools of his trade to buy medicines for his
sick wife. The lawyer who, craving for employment, but-
tons up his thin paletot to hide his shirtless breast.
These needy wretches are poorer than the poor, for they
are obliged to conceal their poverty with the false mask
of content-smoking a cigar to disguise their hunger-
they drag from the pockets their last quarter, to cast it
with studied carelessness, to the beggar, whose mattress
at home is lined with gold. These are the most of the
poor of New YorkJ2
This speech cannot be classified as ironic not only because Livingstone is
one of the plays virtuous heroes, but more important because irony is not
operative in melodrama. The message of this speech is radically conser-
vative in that it suggests that it takes a special quality to deal with the sorts
72 Dion Boucicault, The Poor of New York, in A merican Melodrama, edited by
Daniel C. Gerould (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983), 47.
80 JONES
of responsibilities that come with ha\'ing money and status: they are not
meant for everyone. If those few on top perform their "duties" and
"obligations" to the many on the bottom successfully, not only does it
signal the naturalness of their high status, but also it should produce the
greatest happiness of the greatest number (perhaps the conservative for-
mulation of social utilitarianism).
My brief survey of these play texts is meant to demonstrate the
ways in which melodrama is the production of an interrelation between
a general ideology of conservatism and an aesthetic ideology of senti-
mentalism. Practitioners and white, male spectators developed in melo-
drama a theatrical form that allowed them, at least temporarily within the
playhouse, to suture some of their internecine wounds that came as a
result of the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the burgeoning
of capitalism, and an expanding geography. What is noteworthy about
some of those melodramas is that they featured African Americans,
Native Americans, and the poor as hero-victims, thus giving the impres-
sion that they are counter-hegemonic texts. (The operation of gender and
particularly the marginalization of women in conservative ideology in the
period structured the melodramatic form in ways dissimilar to those of
these groups and therefore requires its own treatment.) Yet that seeming
radicalism only veiled melodrama's conservatism.
Moreover, because the aesthetic of melodrama is one of exces-
sive emotionality and early Americans were greatly under the influence of
eighteenth-century Anglo moral sense philosophy, the qualities of con-
servatism were legitimized because they made sense on the body. It is not
that melodrama did not have the potential to be used by progressives; as I
stated above, some groups such as radical abolitionists claimed the senti-
mentality expressed on behalf of the stage slave proved white recogni-
tion of black humanity and therefore necessitated universal emancipa-
tion. (In 1853, for instance, abolitionist newspapers reported on the emo-
tion in the audiences of a production of Uncle Tom'.s Cabin at A. H.
Purdy's National Theatre in New York City. The emotion was so great
that one reviewer confessed how he "hoped to remain sufficiently com-
posed to study certain characters" but because of the effect of the play,
"[he] was altogether disappointed [because of the] harrowing agony of
soul, alternating with tearful joy and irrepressible laughter, overwhelmed
me ... rendering criticism impossible."73 But this case, too, requires its
own investigation.) That is to say, I recognize Thomas Postlewait's provi-
so that we need "to get beyond the pervasive dichotomies" such as
73 The N ational Era, 25 August 1853.
AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VIcnM
81
"melodrama is conservative, realism is radical;"74 but what I am after here
is not so much an evaluative framework by which to measure melodrama
against, say, realism. But rather, my interest is in how and why the aesthet-
ic of melodrama was so important to a specific group of spectators: its
aestheticized conservatism and its conservative treatment of the Other-
sacrifice her-generated a theatrical form that was intended to be a cul-
tural fixative for a group who, given certain historical exigencies, needed
intra-racial and intra-gender healing, as well as bracing for an oncoming
and unrelenting modernity.
74
Thomas Postlewait, "From Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of
American Drama," in Hays and Nikolopoulou, Melodrama, 56.
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 22, NO. 1 (WINTER 2010)
COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE
Kate Dossett
On 2 March 1938, a new production opened at the Lafayette Theatre in
Harlem. It dramatized the heroic resistance of former slaves to Napoleon
Bonaparte's attempts to restore slavery and French rule to the island of
Saint Domingue. This struggle would lead to the creation of Haiti, the
first independent black republic in the New World. Written by a white
newspaperman named William Dubois (not to be confused with the
black intellectual W E. B. Du Bois), Haiti was intended as a warning
against the dangers of miscegenation. However, in the hands of the
Harlem Negro Unit, an all-black troupe that operated out of the
Lafayette under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the
play became a celebration of Haiti's founding heroes. Toussaint
L'Ouverture and Henri Christophe were represented as powerful, self-
controlled, and successful black men. By contrast, General Leclerc and
his army appeared as decadent Frenchmen more interested in stroking
their whiskers, fighting over women, and drinking cognac than promul-
gating liberty, fraternity, and equality. Unlike most white-authored dramas
of black life, Haiti did not offer whites reassuring portraits of failed black
masculinity. Following the efficient dispatch of the few white men too
foolish or drunk to flee the final Haitian onslaught, the play ended with
Henri Christophe triumphant before a crowd of cheering, independent
Haitians.
These images of powerful black manhood were ones that neither
black nor white audiences were accustomed to seeing on the American
stage. White critics reviewing the opening night attempted to place Haiti
within a white dramatic tradition of black primitivism, claiming it to be
"a rousing, primitive melodrama."! Yet they also noted that black audi-
ences seemed unusually receptive to the play's ending: Time magazine
observed that "When the Haitians win their freedom from the French at
the end, the Negroes in the audience burst into frenzied, deep-throated
applause." The critic for the New York Sun noted that the opening night
"had Harlem cheering at the close last night like a college football crowd
watching a long-legged halfback go to town." These were not isolated
comments. The Boston Herald noted that "the smashing climax, with
Christopher coming down from the mountains to drive the French into
1 Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, 6 March 1938, 149.
84 DOSSETT
the sea, takes on heightened intensity before a predominantly Negro
audience," while the Brook!Jn Eagle reported that "The audience hailed the
play at the end with the enthusiasm of thrilled children." But even as
white critics mocked what they saw as the childishness of the audience,
they recognized the uniqueness of the dramatization. As Brooks
Atkinson, theatre critic for the New York Times acknowledged: "If it is a
tale that made the hair of the French army curl, it does the same for the
toupee theatergoer. Not very many historical plays turn out so well for
Harlem."2 The purpose of this article is to examine how Haiti became a
play that "turned out well" for Harlem. Specifically, I will explore how the
black theatre troupe, black critics, and the broader Harlem community
managed to transform Dubois's racist play into a celebration of black
agency, and why this white-authored Federal Theatre play became an
important black lieu de memoire or site of memory.3
Haiti had become an important symbol of black resistance for
African Americans following the successful slave revolution of 1791. In
the twentieth century, Haiti's status as the harbinger of black liberation
was compromised when it was invaded and occupied by the U.S. between
1915 and 1934. Military occupation was accompanied by a fascination
with the culture of the "Magic Island" on the part of white writers and
dramatists. White-authored plays of Haiti written in the interwar period
offer important context for understanding the 1938 production of
Dubois's Haiti. Eugene O'Neill's regularly performed Emperor Jones (1920)
and Orson Welles's so-called Voodoo Macbeth (1936) explored black
men's ill-fated aspirations for self-determination while indulging white
fantasies of savage black masculinity. Produced in a political context that
encouraged audiences to make links between the African American pres-
ent and the Haitian past, these plays helped create the environment in
which Haiti came to be staged. But whereas O'Neill's and Welles's heroes
are defeated, in Haiti, black men are triumphant. That Haiti broke the
mold established by previous white-authored dramas was due in no small
part to the black-directed memory work which directly shaped the pro-
duction, performance, and reception of Dubois's play. By memory work
I refer to the unstable, dynamic process of remembrance, a process
2 "New Plays in Manhattan," Time, Monday, 14 March 1938; Herrick Brown,
NeJV York Sun, 3 March 1938; Boston Herald, 5 March 1928; Arthur Pollack, Brook!Jn Eagle, 3
March 1938, in Vassar College Collection of Press Clippings Relating to Plays, 1937-1939,
RG69, Box 129, NA; Brooks Atkinson, "The Play," Ne/JJ York Times, 3 March 1938, 16.
3 Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,"
Representations 26 (Spring, 1989): 7-24.
COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 85
"dependent on notions of the future as much as on images of the past"
and in which identifying agency- who remembers, how, why, and
when-is central.
4
As Maria Grever reminds us, "the receivers in the
process of reception do not remain passive. Memory participants some-
times integrate and use the received meanings and values in their own cul-
ture, and might disturb the larger mnemonic community to which they
also belong. From this point of view culture consumption is also culture
production."S Black memory participants in and around the production
of Haiti were not passive receptacles of white men's visions of Haiti.
Reviving the Harlem theatre community that had developed out of the
Harlem Experimental Theatre and Little Theatres of the 1920s, black
audiences, critics, and civic and political leaders responded to the Negro
Unit's staging of the Haitian revolution in ways that reclaimed Haiti as a
memory site for black Americans. Their active engagement with the pro-
duction disrupted popular white narratives of Haiti, and enabled them to
become producers of culture.6
U.S. occupation, white dramatizations of Haiti, and the active
memory work of a black community all shaped the production of Haiti,
but they do not explain why it was this particular Haiti play and this par-
ticular production which was able to bring to life the Haitian past for a
contemporary black audience. The Haitian revolution was a popular sub-
ject for black playwrights in the interwar period; Langston Hughes's
Troubled Island and C. L. R. James's Toussaint L'Ouverture are only the most
well known of the many black-authored dramas of the revolution
authored in these years. Haiti plays, as Michelle Stephens has argued, gave
black playwrights "the chance to explore the possibilities and limits of
black statehood."7 The subsequent failure of black government in Haiti
however could serve to highlight the "limits" rather than the "possibili-
ties" as Hughes's attempts to explore the roots of this failure demon-
4 Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Betzveen Memory and History in the
Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 3-4.
5 Maria Grever, "Beyond Petrified Histories: Gender and Collective Memory,"
Museumsblatt Mitteilungen aus dem MuseumsJVesen Baden-Wiirllembergs 34, no. 5 (April 2003): 2.
6 Adrienne C. Macki, "Reconstructing Community and Identity: Harlem
Experimental Theatre and Social Protest," journal of American Drama and Theatre 20, no. 2
(Spring 2008): 107-39.
7 Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean
Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 211.
86 DOSSETI
strated.B The Harlem Negro Unit production avoided the problem of
sustainable black government by focusing instead on Haitians' successful
resistance to white rule. In doing so, it offered audiences the opportuni-
ty to cheer Haitian heroes on the American stage: night after night (well,
atleast 103 of them) Harlemites could witness black men whipping white
soldiers before large interracial audiences. By contrast, black-authored
Haiti plays were either never performed or reached only limited audiences
through very short runs at Little Theatres.9 It was not only in the per-
forming arts that black Americans investigated Haiti. To name just a few,
writers such as Arna Bontemps and Zora Neale Hurston, and the artist
Jacob Lawrence's Federal Arts Project-sponsored Toussaint L'Ouverture
series (1937-38) were also part of this effort to reclaim Haiti during the
interwar period. lO Yet it was the Federal Theatre production that publicly
mobilized discussion around the meaning and memory of Haiti. To
understand why, we need to understand the unique mission and set up of
the FTP which made its productions unusually alive to public engage-
ment. First, however, we must examine the place of Haiti in U.S. history.
Haiti and U.S. History
Beginning with the successful slave revolution in 1791 and declaration of
independence in 1804, Haiti became an important symbol of black
8 For Hughes's play as, "a study in failure," see Arthur Rampersad, The Ufi of
Langston Hughes: Vol I: 1901-1941: I Too Sing America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986), 330-33. Troubled Island was rejected by FTP playreaders. See FTP Play script and
Radio script Collection, George Mason University, Box 7.
9
E. Quita Craig discusses all three scripts in Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), especially 161-71; C. L. R. James's
Toussaint L'Ouverture played for two nights at the Westminster Theatre in 1936 with Paul
Robeson in the title role. See Paul Buhle, C L R James: The Artist as Revolutionary (New
York: Verso, 1988), 57; For a discussion of how James used the play to explore black state-
hood, see Stephens, Black Empire, especially 205-222. For a discussion of rarely performed
black-authored Haiti plays see Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans: Black Public Ufi
in Harlem (Cambridge, MA: Hanard University Press, 2009), especially 174--92.
10 Arna Bontemps, Dmms at Dusk: A Novel (New York: Macmillan, 1939; Baton
Rouge: Louisiana Srate University Press, 2009); Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo
and Ufi in Haiti and Jamaica (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938; New York: Perennial Library,
1990); Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, eds., Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and
Murals (1935-1999): A Catalogue Raisonne (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
For an overview of Haiti in African American culture see Maurice Jackson, "Friends of the
Negro! Fly with me, The Path is Open to the Sea": Remembering the Haitian Revolution
in the History, Music, and Culture of the African American People," Earb American Sllldies:
An Interdisciplinary Journal6, no. 1 (2008): 59-103.
COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 87
agency and power for African Americans. Yet both as a political entity
and as a symbol of black resistance, Haiti would need constant protec-
tion and reinforcement against the encroachments of whites. Across the
diaspora, slaves and slaveholders immediately grasped that the Haitian
revolution could serve as inspiration for black freedom struggles. Leaders
of slave rebellions in the United States, Gabriel Prosser and Denmark
Vesey called upon memories of heroic Haitian resistance, promising their
followers that the Haitian republic would help them destroy white
Americans. Black freedom fighters frequently evoked the Haitian revolu-
tion in ways that not only encouraged their followers but also terrorized
whites, drawing on violent imagery, powerful black masculinity, and the
power of voodoo. In turn, white Americans summoned the spectre of a
Haitian bloodbath to justify severe punishment of slave dissent in gener-
al and attempted slave insurrection in particular. II
The events of the Haitian revolution and the meaning African
Americans ascribed to them continued to challenge white supremacy
long after they took place. Historians have recently begun to document
how African Americans commemorated the events of the Haitian revo-
lution through the construction of lieux de memoire.12 According to the
French historian Pierre Nora, les /ieux de memoire originate, "with the sense
that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create
archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, [and] pronounce
eulogies."I3 As Elizabeth Raub Bethel has demonstrated, for African
Americans the creation of Haitian sites of memory was both a direct
result and would become an important part of their search for a better
home in the nineteenth century. B.etween the 1820s and 1850s, waves of
immigration of black Americans to Haiti and back again, as well as the
frequent Caribbean crossings by black sailors, generated a shared knowl-
edge of black America and Haiti which helped connect the American
present with the Haitian past through "a body of shared beliefs, myths,
and images."14
In the twentieth century, this body of "beliefs, myths, and
11 Jackson, "Friends of the Negro! Fly with me," 61-66.
12
Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, "Images of Hayti: The Construction of An Afro-
American Lieu De Memoire," Callaloo 15, no. 3 (Summer, 1992): 827-41. For essays on
African American lieu de mimoire, see Genevieve Fabre and Robert O'Meally eds., History
and Memory in African-American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
13 Nora, "Between Memory and History," 12.
14 Bethel, "Images of Hayti," 827-28, 840.
88
DossEn
images" came under renewed attack when the United States invaded and
occupied Haiti in July 1915 on the pretext of rescuing the republic from
anarchy and defending foreign interests, following a military coup which
ejected the incumbent president.
1
5 During the nineteen-year occupation
that ensued, Haitians lived under a puppet government held in place by
U.S. force. Facing press censorship, surveillance, and curfews, Haitian
protest movements were brutally suppressed.J6 The occupation of the
black republic by an increasingly dominant U.S. meant that African
Americans' Haitian lieu de memoire-Christophe's fort, tales of Toussaint's
heroic leadership, and the defeat of Napoleon's army-risked being sup-
planted by harrowing new sites of twentieth-century colonial encounter.
African Americans had to renew their efforts to build, defend, and recov-
er Haiti as a site of memory and a political entity. The U.S. government
had justified their occupation of a sovereign state by employing pater-
nalistic rhetoric about black men's political unfitness for autonomous
rule. In protesting U.S. occupation of an independent black state, African
Americans resisted this narrative and called for the reinvigoration of the
Haiti of collective black memory, a place where Africans had not only
successfully resisted white rule in the past, but must resist white rule in
the future. As W E. B. Du Bois explained, African Americans "must
cease to think of Liberia and Haiti as failures in government .... [T]hese
are the pictures of each other which white people have painted for us and
which with engaging naivete we accept, and then proceed to laugh at each
other and criticize each other before we make any attempt to learn the
truth."
1
7 One truth that African American critics revealed was that U.S.
occupation had left in its place no new model democracy, but rather an
authoritarian leader who presided over a state economically dependent on
and financially beneficial to the United States. When, in 1934, the second
independent New World republic emerged from occupation by the first,
Haiti as memory and Haiti's new emerging history were at war.18
1
5 Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 90-91.
16 Ibid., 102-3.
1
7 W E. B. Du Bois, "Pan-Africa and New Racial Philosophy," The Crisis 40
(November 1933): 247, 262.
18 Plummer, Haiti and the United States, 139-44. For discussion of U.S. military
occupation and subsequent withdrawal see Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation
and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2001).
COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 89
Meanwhile American military forays in the tropics had opened
up space for white cultural occupation of Haiti. White artists, authors,
and dramatists grasped the opportunity offered by the occupation to
explore those exotic ingredients-primitivism and voodoo-that appar-
ently contributed to Africans' failure to self-govern. Their endeavors
found an enthusiastic outlet: in the 1920s and 1930s American publish-
ing houses lapped up white-authored travelogues, novels, and plays set in
Haiti whose titles often included the words voodoo, fire, magic, or prim-
itive.19 Although these accounts capitalized on recent interest in Haitian
affairs they also relied on a shared cultural understanding of Haiti's sym-
bolic status as signifier of Africans' racial inferiority. For example, in his
review of Richard Loderer's 1935 travelogue, Voodoo Fire in Haiti, the New
York Times critic Edward Allen deployed the tropes of primitivism-can-
nibalism and voodoo--to connect the "savagery" of the slave uprising of
1791 with the "confusion" of the Haitian political present and the most
well-known white American race drama, Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor
Jones. Describing voodoo as "a fiendishly active cult" "a horrible old-out
religion" but one which the "best informed white men have as yet been
unable to penetrate," Allen's review suggests that voodoo signified more
than a fascination with the exotic; it was the key to a different, impene-
trable, and unknowable black masculinity.20 Blacks' susceptibility to
voodoo in white travelogues and novels often stands in for hypersexual-
ity and lack of self-control, characteristics believed to be inherent in
African Americans, and which could be drawn upon to shore up the
political, social, and economic privileges of whiteness in the United
States. Whites, by contrast, might entertain an intellectual interest in
voodoo, but they were not prepared to let superstition and black magic
get the better of them. Summarizing whites' relationship to Haiti, Allen
declared: "Loederer has gone as far as the majority of readers will care to
follow." Many white readers however were prepared to follow their inter-
est in Haiti into the theatre where they could view voodoo for them-
selves. The more risk-averse could enjoy the experience from the comfort
of their own homes, as Allen advised: ~ f t e r reading of this spectacle,
1
9 See for example John W Vandercook, Black Majesty (New York: Literary
Guild of America, 1928); William Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1929); and Richard Loderer's Voodoo Fire in Haiti (New York: Literary Guild of America,
1935). For discussion of white-authored Haiti texts, see Mary Renda, Taking Haiti, espe-
cially chapters 5 and 6.
20 Edward Frank Allen, "Haiti Interpreted by the Flaring Light of Voodooism,"
New York Times, 28 July 1935, BR 3.
90 D OSSF.Tf
one might reasonably taper off by re-reading Eugene O'Neill's 'The
Emperor Jones."'21
It is important, as Allen suggests, to remind ourselves of
O'Neill's 1920 play because it influenced white conceptions of "Negro"
drama well into the 1930s. The Emperor Jones dramatized what happens
when black men aspire to political rule. A one-act play set in Haiti, the
play unfolds across eight scenes which are structured around the mono-
logues of the central character Brutus Jones. An African American who
escapes to the island as a fugitive from American justice, Jones is
described by the playwright as "a tall, powerfui!J-built, full-blooded negro
of middle age. His features are typically negroid," and "His eyes are alive
with a keen, cunning intelligence."22 Using this combination of wile and
brute strength-he tricks the "natives" into believing his life is protected
by a charm that only a silver bullet can r upture- Jones takes control of
the island. Although Brutus Jones assumes the trappings of power
including a royal court "to turn de heads o'de low-flung bush niggers,"
underneath he is no more capable of self mastery than his black sub-
jects.23 On discovering that the islanders are tired of his high taxes and
preparing to revolt, Jones embarks on a carefully planned escape route
through the forest. His rational retreat however is short-lived; reduced to
a near naked, superstitious wreck by the beat of the voodoo drums,
Jones's past sins and African heritage haunt him in a series of hallucina-
tions, which eventually incapacitate his flight. Although he is fini shed off
in the final scene by a witch doctor who has furnished the silver bullet
believed necessary to kill the mighty Jones, it is his reversion to primi-
tivism which leads to his political and physical death. This is Jones's fail-
ure, his racial destiny. His African descent means he shares the fate of all
black men. Unable to master their primitive instincts and desires, black
men are not fit to rule.
First performed by the black actor Charles Gilpin and the
Provincetown Players in November 1920, Emperor Jones received high
acclaim from white critics and audiences alike. White critics hailed
O'Neill's expressionist experiment as " just about the most interesting
21 Ibid.
22 The prefatory note explains that the play is set "on an island in the West
Indies as yet not self-determined by White Marines," an easily understood, if caustic ref-
erence to the U.S.'s defense that its occupation of Haiti represented merely a temporary
trusteeship. Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 150.
Emphasis mine.
23 Ibid., 153.
COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 91
play which has yet come from the most prormsmg playwright in
America." White audiences agreed: Charles Gilpin would play the title
role for 204 performances at the Princess Theatre in New York before
embarking on a two-year tour. Far from making white audiences feel
complicit in the wages of whiteness or troubled by the legacy of slavery
and continued colonial oppression, Emperor Jones offered a legitimate
space for whites to consume physically powerful black male bodies in the
role of the "burly darky."24
African American critics were divided in their response. Some
welcomed what they saw as at least an attempt to examine the black man's
mind in a serious fashion, but others were troubled by the portrait of the
black primitive. The critic for the black nationalist newspaper, the Negro
World was clear in his judgment that white critics considered Emperor Jones
"great" for one reason only: "it is pronounced a great play by the critics,
but they are whites, and will pronounce anything good that has white
supremacy as its theme." Others found it ridiculous. Langston Hughes
memorably recalled black audiences' amused cries for the Emperor to
"come on out o' that jungle-back to Harlem where you belong" when
Jules Bledsoe attempted to perform the role before black audiences at the
Lincoln Theatre in Harlem. While in Washington DC, the Emperor was
similarly the source of mirth to black audiences. Indeed, O'Neill's well-
worn stereotypes were familiar enough to black audiences for his play to
become the subject of at least two parodies performed in Harlem in the
interwar period.25
24
Heywood Broun, "The 'Emperor Jones' by O'Neill Gives Chance for
Cheers," New York Tribune, 4 November 1920, 8; "burly darky" in Alexander Woollcott
"Second Thoughts on First Nights," Ne1v York Times, 7 November 1920, 88; Paul
Robeson, who had already followed Gilpin into other roles, would also make the part his
own, first in the 1924 Broadway version and again in the 1933 motion picture of Du Bose
Heyward's screenplay.
25 Negro World cited in David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African American
Theatre, Drama and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2002), 195; Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940; New York: Thunders Mouth Press,
1986), 258; Errol G. Hill and James V Hatch eds., A History of Afncan American Theatre
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 516, fn 44; "'Pudden Jones' Scores as
Delightful Little Farce," Amsterdam News, 13 May 1925, 6; Langston Hughes, "The Em-
Fuehrer Jones," in Lost Plays of the Harlem Rmaissance edited by James V Hatch and Leo
Hamalian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 358-361. For black critics who wel-
comed the play as an attempt at serious mainstream black drama see Jean Toomer "Negro
Psychology in The Emperor Jones" (1921 ), in Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Uterary CritiCism,
edited by Robert B. Jones (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 6;
Montgomery Gregory, "The Drama of Negro Life," in Alain Locke ed., The New Negro
(1925; New York: Atheneum, 1968), 157.
92 DossETI
More recent commentators have suggested that The Emperor Jones
offered black actors new opportunities to shape the representation of
black men on the American stage and at least examined the idea of black
men's guest for self-determination.26 Serious examination or not,
O'Neill's hero is undone not by whites and the injustices of the colonial
system, but rather by his incapacity for self-mastery, a failing that makes
him no better than the "bush niggers" he tricked into gaining his tempo-
rary crown. In staging the Emperor's reversion to primitivism, the play
built upon, rather than resisted, the degrading stereotypes of blacks that
white Americans were accustomed to finding on the American stage and
which were used to justify the subordination of black men at home and
in Haiti. O'Neill's play did not, as some of its apologists have suggested,
offer a universal portrait of man's retreat to barbarism under pressure,
but rather relied upon racial stereotypes so hackneyed they made black
audiences laugh.2
7
It is important to remember that Emperor Jones was
continuously performed not because it amused black theatre-goers or
because it offered a powerful critique of colonialism, but because whites
watched, read, and loved the play. Simultaneously entertained and reas-
sured, white audiences and critics would come back again and again to see
this "extraordinarily striking and dramatic study of panic fear."28 By the
time the FTP was established in 1935, the U.S. had withdrawn from a
much weakened Haiti, and O'Neill had an assured place in the American
theatre canon. His play, Emperor Jones had become the lens through which
white Americans created and received serious dramatic representations of
black manhood. This had a direct impact on the FTP because much of
the black theatre produced under its auspices was chosen, produced,
directed, and written by whites.
26 Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant, 197-203; Charles Musser, "To Redream the
Dreams of White Playwrights: Reappropriation and Resistance in Oscar 11icheaux's Body
and Soul," Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 331; Hatch and Hill eds., A History
of African American Theatre, 229; Renda, Taking Haiti, 187.
27 For two accounts which reject the tendency to see universalism in the
Emperor Jones, and place race back at the heart of the play, see John Cooley, "In Pursuit of
the Primitive: Black Portraits by Eugene O'Neill and Other Village Bohemians," in The
Harlem Renaissance Re-examined edited by Victor A. Kramer (Troy, NY: Whitsun Publishing
Co., 1997), 83-97; and Carme Manuel, ''A Ghost in the Expressionist Jungle O'Neill's The
Emperor Jones," African American Review 39, no. 1/2 (Spring 2005): 66-85.
2
8 Alexander Woollcott, "Second Thoughts on First Nights," New York Times, 7
November 1920, 88.
COMMEMORATING Hi\ITI ON THE H A R L E ~ STAGE 93
The Federal Theatre Project and Black Theatre
The FTP was part of the Works Progress Administration set up by
President Roosevelt's New Deal Administration in 1935 as a federal jobs
program designed to alleviate the high levels of unemployment during
America's worst economic depression. Led by the dynamic Hallie
Flanagan, the project's mission was twofold: to get unemployed actors,
directors, playwrights, and stage technicians off relief, and to encourage
creativity in the performing arts. Ambitious to produce new types of the-
atre that represented the diversity of the American experience, Flanagan
set up a range of production units, including seventeen so-called "Negro
Units." Across the U.S., black theatre professionals, from actors, musi-
cians, and dancers, to theatre technicians and stage hands, were employed
on federal wages and performed plays before both regular theatregoers
and thousands of ordinary black Americans many of whom experienced
a live production for the first time.
Although the Negro Unit's mission was to relieve unemployment
of black theatre professionals, nearly all directors of Negro Units, and
the majority of individual productions were directed by whites. Only the
Boston Negro Unit employed a black director for the whole four years of
the FTP. As Rena Fraden's excellent study of the Negro Units has
demonstrated, white oversight of Negro Units and in particular pro-
gramming could cause considerable intra and inter racial conflict within
local communities, as well as the wider theatre community.
29
The over-
whelming majority of plays produced by Negro Units, particularly in the
first year of the FTP, were either written by white dramatists or blacked
up versions of the classic white repertoire.30 At the regional level, plan-
ning boards were usually constituted of an entirely white membership,
which explains in part this reliance on the existing white repertoire; but it
was also a consequence of the FTP's national structures. FTP officials
often blamed the lack of trained black dramatists for the scarcity of
black-authored plays appearing on the federal stage. Yet the reports of
white play readers, who worked for the National Service Bureau (the cen-
tral body through which plays were approved for production and sent out
29 Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), especially 93-97.
30 For a list of so-called "black plays" put on by Negro Units see, "Catalog-
Calendar of Productions: African American Theatre," in "Cultural Diversiry in the
Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939," 29-57, finding aid compiled by Lorraine Brown,
Center for the Federal Theatre Project, George Mason University.
94 DOSSETI
to regional units), reveal that they read and considered many black-
authored plays. These black dramas (including those by Langston Hughes
and Theodore Ward) were often rejected, or recommended only with
strong reservations, because they failed to conform to the white stereo-
types of African Americans which white play readers believed to be
essential to "authentic" "Negro" drama.3
1
Unsurprisingly, comic tales of
simple but happy-go-lucky black types were more often found in white-
authored "black" plays than in new contemporary dramas of urban black
life. But white play readers also highly recommended "serious" dramas of
black folk life, including plays by O'Neill, Paul Green, Marc Connelly, and
Dorothy and Du Bose Heyward. As one white play reader, H. K. Fishel
explained in his gushing report on the Heywards' Porgy, it fell to white
playwrights to "tap that rich source of wholly American folk-drama,"
because "negro authors have contributed but little to the rapidly accu-
mulating store of negro folk drama."32
The FTP then clearly shared many of the limitations of the com-
mercial theatre when it came to producing black drama. At the same time,
there were aspects of the FTP that made it much more open to black
input. As a relief program, the FTP's first priority was reemployment.
Theatre units were required to spend 90 percent of all production costs
on wages, which, unlike the strictures of commercial theatre, encouraged
productions on a massive scale in terms of casts and crew. The size of
casts and multiplicity of officials responsible for productions at the the-
atre, city project, and national level of the FTP made it even more diffi-
cult for one director to control a production; indeed, the political fac-
tions, labor disputes, and walk-outs within FTP units are legendary.33 A
second priority was to produce theatre which reflected and was accessi-
ble to the whole range of Americans whose tax dollars supported it.
31 Some historical accounts have repeated white FTP officials' claims that there
were simply no black dramatists and/ or plays in existence. See for example Jo. A Tanner,
"Classical Black Theatre: The Federal Theatres' All-Black 'Voodoo Macbeth,"' Journal of
American Drama and Theatre 7, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 55.
3
2 See Playreaders Report File, 1935-1939, especially "Porgy," Box 286.
Hughes's Troubled Island was dismissed as "Just another Black Majesty Melodrama,"
"Twubled Island," Box 336, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Library of Congress
(FfP-LOq.
33 Particularly in New York City where the theatre industry had long been
unionized and also served as a hub for many black political organizations. See "New York
State Correspondence, Hallie Flanagan, Labor Relations; Project Reports, Publicity and
Promotion" in "Correspondence with Regional Offices I-V, 1935-1939," Record Group
(RG) 69, Box 57, National Archives (NA).
COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE H A R L E ~ STAGE 95
Paternalistic they may have been, but FTP bureaucrats did try to facilitate
productions they thought were relevant to the community, and they did try
to fmd out what communities wanted through audience surveys which
ran for the first two years of the project before the budget cuts in 1937.34
Public funding also meant that federal theatre seats were either free, or
priced between 10 and 55 cents, allowing Americans to experience live
theatre for the f.trst time and guaranteeing even the worst productions a
decent run and an audience beyond the dreams and capacity of both
commercial and Little Theatres. The use of audience surveys, the media
spotlight on a politically contentious state run theatre, and FTP officials'
public statements led black theatre-goers to expect plays which reflected
their own lives and interests. As Hallie Flanagan explained in 1936: "It is
of no value whatever to stimulate theatre-going unless, once inside our
doors, our audience sees something which has some vital connection
with their own lives and their own immediate problems." When they did
not, as voluminous FTP correspondence shows, audiences could be
relied upon to tell them and anyone else who would listen.35
Voodoo Macbeth "A cast full of Emperor Jones"
One of the first Negro Units to be set up, and based in the U.S.'s theatre
capital, the Harlem Negro Unit was catapulted to stardom with Orson
Welles and John Houseman's 1936 production of Macbeth. The Haitian-
inspired Macbeth may have failed to connect with the immediate problems
of black life, but it stimulated theatre-going, becoming the FTP's first
"box-office" hit in 1936.36 For most white critics attending the opening
34 Audience surveys can be found in "General Correspondence of the National
Office 1935-39," RG69, Box 2, NA. For a discussion of the surveys see Fraden, Blueprints
for a Black Federal Theatre, 144-46.
35 Flanagan cited in Jane de Hart Matthews, The Federal Theatre, 1935-39: Plays,
Relief and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 89. The Chicago Negro
Unit rivaled the New York project in terms of number of complaints about individual
productions, programing choices and FrP officials. See "Regional Office Chronological
Correspondence File 1937-38," RG69, Box 618-621, NA.
36 Although the Unit would later be directed by a black triumvirate, when it was
first set up the Hungarian-born, British-educated John Houseman was appointed as direc-
tor alongside black theatre veteran Rose McClendon, who resigned shortly after her
appointment due to terminal illness. Macbeth had been preceded by two black-authored
plays, Frank Wilson's Walk Together Chill11n and Rudolph Fisher's Conjure Man Dies, which
attracted audiences of 10,530 (5,037 free tickets) and 83,588 (75,782 free tickets) respec-
tively. Compare this with Macbeth's figures of 117,244, of which only 21,647 seats were
96
DossE1T
night on 14 April 1936, Welles's Macbeth was haunted by the still fre-
quently performed Emperor Jones. Burns Mantle drew on familiar imagery
to interpret the play for white New Yorkers: "It's a little as though
O'Neill's Emperor Jones had re-established his kingdom in the South Sea
Islands and staged a monster fete." Arthur Pollack declared "This lviacbeth
seems to have a cast full of Emperor Jones," while Brooks Atkinson saw
not Shakespeare, but rather "a voodoo show inspired by the Macbeth leg-
end." He nevertheless praised those scenes which enabled black actors to
showcase their "natural" talent: "when the play falls within their Emperor
Jones caprice, they have the artists and actors who can translate supernat-
uralism into flaring excitement."37 These and many other white critics
applauded the color and excitement of Macbeth and warmly recommend-
ed the "experience" to their readers. Macbeth offered white Americans the
opportunity to enjoy the warmth of a "simpler race," even as it con-
firmed white superiority, as the critic for Vogue explained:
the whites came in droves to spread their chilly fingers
before the reviving fires of a warmer, happier, simpler
race .... In watching them, we capture briefly what once
we were, long centuries ago before our ancestors suf-
fered the blights of thought, worry, and the printed
word.3
8
That critics connected Macbeth with Emperor Jones was hardly sur-
prising. Welles's Macbeth, like Brutus Jones, is ultimately unmanned by a
combination of voodoo and superstition; like Jones he will meet the pre-
destined fate of black men who aspire to self-determination. With the
free. Negro Productions at the Lafayette Theatte" in "Press Releases of the Department
of Information" RG69, Box 533, NA.
37 By haunting I refer to Marvin Carlson's notion that the audience's experience
of the theatte "is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations while these
ghosts are simultaneously shifted and modified by the processes of recycling and recol-
lection." Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre As Memory Machine (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2001), 2; Burns Mantle, Ne1v York Dai!J News, 15 April1936
and Arthur Pollack, Brook!Jn Dai!J Eagle, 16 April 1936, both cited in Richard France,
"Introduction" to Orson Welles On Shakespeare: The WP.A and Mercury Theatre Piayscripts,
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 15; Brooks Atkinson, "The Play," N ew York
Times, 15 April 1936, 25.
38 Robert Littell, "Macbeth in Chocolate," reprinted in Reader's Digest, January
1937, 88-89 cited in John O'Connor, "But Was It 'Shakespeare?': Welles's 'Macbeth' and
'Julius Caesar,"' Theatre Journa/32, no. 3 (1980): 338.
COMMEMORATING HAl'TI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 97
play transposed from Scotland to the sizzling forests of Henri
Christophe's Haiti, whites saw on Welles's stage not the demise of a hero-
villain whose wrong choices brought about a tragic ending, but rather a
race of primitive beings whose destinies were not their own. Welles
adapted the script so that lines uttered by mortals were put into the
mouths of supernatural figures. The roles of the witches and Hecate
(now a voodoo priest) were at the centre of the action and those lines
where mortal characters debate possible courses of action and make
choices were cut, along with the agency of Macbeth, Banquo, and
Macduff. Welles's Macbeth is directed not by his own ambition but by the
will of the witches, ruled by voodoo priest Hecate. It is they who set into
motion a series of murderous acts that will elevate Macbeth to kingship
but that ultimately also lead to his demise. Welles not only offered a stage
peopled with so many Emperors Jones but the dark jungle scenery and
constant voodoo drumming also evoked the earlier play. Indeed Welles'
script is replete with demands for a "voodoo effect," which was provid-
ed by the Sierra Leonean performer Asadata Dafora Hunton and his
dance troupe with voodoo drumming led by an "African witch doctor,
known simply as Abdul."39 As Susan McCloskey has demonstrated, in
Welles's hands, the drama of Macbeth was to be found in spectacle and
melodrama, rather than in the freedom to make the wrong choices that
accompanies tragedy.40
Although white critics focused on what they saw as obvious con-
nections between Macbeth and Emperor Jone.r, black critics were keen to put
distance between Macbeth and earlier white dramas of black life. This
might have been partly a response to the rumors during the three long
months of rehearsals that Welles and Houseman were preparing a
Shakespearian burlesque intended to mock black aspiration to serious
drama.41 Quashing such speculation, black critics welcomed the produc-
tion and urged their readers to spend an evening at the Lafayette. Unlike
39 Richard France, The Theatre of Orson Welles (London: Associated University
Presses, 1977), 65. For a discussion of scenery and costume see Bernice Kliman, Macbeth
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 115-18.
4
0 Susan McCloskey, "Shakespeare, Orson Welles, and the 'Voodoo' Macbeth,"
Shakespeare Quarterly 36, no. 4: 413-4.
4
1 "They Came to Scoff, but Left to Cheer Macbeth," Afro-American, 25 April
1936, 10; "New York Macbeth Glamourous Presentation: Masses Turn Out to Jeer, Stay
to Cheer, Applaud," Pittsburgh Courier, 25 April 1936, A 7; Houseman, &n-Tbrough, 190-1;
Orson Welles Interview by Richard Marienstras, reprinted in Mark W Estrin, Orson Welles
Interviews Qackson: University Press of Mississippi), 154.
98 DOSSE'IT
Emperor Jones, when Macbeth opened before a star-studded interracial audi-
ence, there were no reports of contemptuous black (or white) laughter.
According to the black press, audiences loved it. On the play's reception,
the New York Age reported that: "the audience, white and Negro cheered
itself hoarse." On the play's significance it declared: "this production
proved to Harlem that it could create and support a Shakespearean play
of its own." It "marked Harlem's cultural coming of age."42 Ralph
Matthews of the Afro American suggested that Macbeth had answered the
question "'Can colored actors do Shakespeare?' ... so completely that
none but fools would venture such a query again."43
As these comments on a coming of age suggest, black critics
were also eager to disassociate Macbeth from Emperor Jones because they
saw in the Negro Unit a precious opportunity to create a serious black
community theatre. So although black reviews paid attention to many
aspects of the production, they tended to emphasize the significance of
Shakespeare beingperformedby black actors and watched by black audiences
in Harlem. In his review, Adam Clayton Powell J r. showered praised on
the production as a whole, but lamented the closing of so many Harlem
theatres in recent years. Stressing Macbeth's important transitional role in
Harlem's theatre history, he welcomed a production that he believed
could lead to the rebirth of serious black theatre: "Macbeth" he pro-
claimed, "has saved the day." But the production was only a first step;
Harlemites must support and direct the theatre and its productions, "The
Negro Theatre is not sufficient, it must be the Negro's."44 Powell's
demand was made more urgent by the often patronizing reviews and mis-
interpretations of white critics who insisted on viewing through
the lens of primitive and powerless masculinity. Although he also praised
the production, black critic Roi Otley was particularly troubled by the
Emperor Jones lens through which white critics viewed Macbeth, complain-
ing of "the Broadway reviewers . .. [who] journeyed to Harlem with the
idea of seeing a mixture of Emperor Jones and Stepin Fechit [sic], with
burlesque thrown in to season a palatable opinion many of their readers
42 "Negroes Hail Real Theater as Macbeth Usurps Harlem: All-Colored Cast
Plays Shakespeare-Audience Ri\als Hollywood's," New York Age, 15 April 1936, cited in
Mona Z. Smith, Becoming Something: Tbe Story of Canada Lee (Ne>\' York: Faber and Faber,
2004), 57.
4
3 Ralph Matthews, Afro-American, 25 April 1936, 10.
44 Adam Clayton Powell Jr., "The Soapbox," Amsterdam Nezvs, 9 May 1936, 12.
45 Roi Ottley, New Tbeatre, May 1936, 24.
COMMEMORATING H AITI ON THE H ARLEM STAGE 99
have of the Negro."45
African American reviewers and cultural commentators seized
on Macbeth as proof that Harlem could sustain a black theatre. Its success
was vital because it would demonstrate the need for and viability of a
Negro Unit in Harlem. At the same time Powell, Otley, and many of
those working within the Negro Unit, were looking toward a future
where black Americans controlled black theatre. Under the direction of
Welles and Houseman, the Negro Unit had staged a spectacularly suc-
cessful production. Macbeth played at the Lafayette for ten weeks before
moving first downtown and then on to a nationwide tour of thirteen
weeks. It reached an estimated 120,000 people.46 But even if Macbeth
attracted large audiences, its theme offered little opportunity for black
community engagement: weak black man, manipulated by greedy wife
and evil voodoo priest, ends up, along with most of the cast, slain. What
was needed was a play with the excitement and drama of Voodoo
Macbeth, but one that might also offer up an empowering image of black
life that could be celebrated beyond the confines of the theatre. And
William Dubois's Haiti, staged under a triumvirate of black Negro Unit
directors, offered just this opportunity.
Haiti
Following the success of Macbeth, Houseman and Welles left to set up
their own unit, while in Harlem, the Negro Unit was reorganized. The
director Carlton Moss became Managing Project Supervisor, Harry
Edwards, the West Indian intellectual, was put in charge of administra-
tion, while Gus Smith, an actor, playwright, and director became manag-
ing producer with some authority over choice of plays.47 Although the
Negro Unit was now under black leadership, this did not mean that
African Americans had control of programming; Smith and his team
read and recommended plays, but it was the New York City Planning
Board, under Federal Director George K.ondulf, which made final deci-
sions on the repertoire. Consisting of an entirely white membership, the
46 ''A Survey of the WPA Negro Theatre in New York City," in " Press Releases
of the Department of Information," RG69, Box 533, NA.
47 Philip W Barber to All Project Supervisors and Heads of Departments, 17
August 1936. New Deal Agencies and Black America in the 1930s (NDABA) (Frederick, ~ . i l l :
University Publications of America, 1984), Reel 25. For more information on Moss,
Edward, and Smith see Bernard L. Peterson Jr., Ear!J Black Plqy11m"ghts and Dramatic Writers:
A Biographical Directory and Catalog of Plqys, Films and Broadcasting Scripts (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1990).
100 DoSSETr
Planning Board consistently assigned white producers to manage black
productions. This failure to assign black directors and produce black-
authored plays led such groups as the Negro Arts Committee to demand
black representation on the Planning Board as necessary to realizing a
truly black theatre.
4
B The response by FTP officials to these and other
complaints reveal how the FTP management's desire to create communi-
ty theatres was always tempered, and frequently contradicted, by a pater-
nalistic belief that FTP administrators were better qualified to judge what
constituted good black drama. For example, in response to criticism of
the repertoire by the editor of the black journal, Opportuni!J
1
Hallie
Flanagan insisted "We have always consulted with our Negro group as to
choice of plays." This kind of response reinforced black FTP workers'
sense that though FTP officials were willing to consult communities, they
were not prepared to relinquish the necessary responsibility into the
hands of those community theatres and black directors who could create
a truly black theatre.49
It is not entirely clear who was ultimately responsible for choos-
ing Haiti as a Harlem Negro Unit production. NSB play readers recom-
mended it as "full of color and action," ''A roaring melodrama," with
"background and material [which] will always have a strong appeal to
Negro audiences."
50
The New York City Project, which in March 1937
was taken under the direct command of Flanagan, had been on the look-
out for such a play for some time. The same month she moved her head-
quarters to New York, Flanagan met with the black directors of the
Negro Unit to agree on a strategy for choosing plays. In a memo to her
secretary she recorded the plan: "(1) of one series of revivals, such as The
48 Department of Information "WPA Negro Theatre," 21 December 1937, 4,
in "Correspondence of Hallie Flanagan," RG69, Box 41, NA; "Negro Arts Committee
Brief," 1939, General Correspondence of the National Office, RG69, NA. The NAC rep-
resented among others the NAACP, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, The
Southern Negro Youth Congress, NNC, Urban Leagues, International Workers Order
and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.
4
9 Opportrmi!J XVII Ganuary 1939): 15; Hallie Flanagan to Elmer Anderson
Carter, 27 January 1939. RG69, NA. Emphasis mine. Also see Fraden, Bluepn.nt fora Black
Federal Theatre, 198-199. For further evidence of FTP officials' desire to consult the black
community while controlling the frameworks and participants in that consultation see
National Service Bureau to its "List of Representative Negro Citizens" requesting their
views on the Negro Unit's repertoire in order to avoid future "misunderstandings" n.d.,
Administrative Records, Box 114, FTP-LOC.
50
"Haiti," National Service Bureau review, New Plays Survey, Box 26, FTP-
LOC.
COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE l-iARLEM STAGE 101
Show-Off, of sure fire entertainment previously done in the white theatre;
and (2) one series of the best negro plays which they can find from their
own dramatists; (3) an occasional big spectacle, to be directed by
Houseman, or Walker Hart, or some white director whom they
choose."St Since Macbeth, the Negro Unit had presented a black-authored
play, Turpentine, which was co-authored by Gus Smith (one of the Unit's
directors) and was a moderate success. It was followed by a series of
poorly attended white-authored plays, culminating in the spectacularly
unsuccessful production of O'Neill's S. S. Glencairn in the autumn of
1937.52 Having tried options 1 and 2, perhaps the New York Planning
Board and Negro Unit directors decided it was time for a spectacle that
might replicate the success of Macbeth, but also reengage its Harlem con-
stituency following the failure of the O'Neill sea plays. The Amsterdam
News certainly interpreted the decision to stage a play on Haiti as a posi-
tive response to the growing demand within Harlem for a drama relevant
to black life. Attracting Harlemites to the Lafayette was, the newspaper
claimed, "the sole motivation behind the ultimate selection of 'Haiti.'
Broadway was ignored. Every other demand, the predilections of every
group of theatrical force outside of Harlem was brushed aside to assure
the production of Harlem's type of play."53
It was in this context that the Negro Unit put on another white-
authored play under another white director, but on a "black" theme.
Maurice Clark, who had directed theatre in the Experimental and
Children's Units was assigned to direct William Dubois's Haiti. In an
interview many years later, Clark offered his version of how and why
William Dubois's play was chosen. Describing Dubois as "a southerner,
a real southern Cracker" who got himself excited about miscegenation,
51 Hallie Flanagan to Mrs. Woodward, 4 March 1937, "General
Correspondence of the National Office 1935-39," RG69, Box 32, NA.
52 O'Neill's sea plays attracted 7,884 audience members, of which 5,802 paid
for their tickets. This low figure was surpassed only by Horse Pft:y, which had figures of
5,355, over fewer performances. Since Macbeth, only George Kell y's The Sho1v Off was a box
office hit with attendance figures of 96,048, but 79,048 of these were free. Turpentine
managed 23,791 over 62 performances, but no other play managed to attract more than
16,000 until Haiti. See "Negro Productions at the Lafayette Theatre," New York Project
Correspondence, RG69, Box 533, NA; Gus Smith Report, 22 March 1938, and I. Vinton's
report on audience reaction, both in "Correspondence from the New York Ciry Office,"
RG69, Box 498, NA.
53 "Lafayette Incident Rebuke to Cultural Pride of Community," Amsterdam
News, 4 June 1938, Vassar College Collection of Programs and Promotion Materials,
RG69, Box 148, NA.
102
Clark made central his own role in transforming the script:
A play had been kicking around among the directors and
no one wanted it. It was called Haiti .... Well it wasn't a
good play, but the idea that such a theme was to go
untouched I just couldn't take. So I called the playwright
up to my apartment. I said, "Look, this play should be
done in Harlem, but if it is done in Harlem, I can tell
you one thing. They will come right over the footlights
and tear us to pieces. But," I said, ' 'We can make a play
out of this that they will love." And so we went to work,
and we rewrote this play from top to bottom. Each day
he thought I had finished work, but each day he came by
with a new version and I had another one for him. And
on and on from top to bottom, this was practically a
new play. It was about the victorious Haitian republic
over the greatest army that had ever been in existence. 54
DoSSF.IT
In exchange for transforming Dubois's play, Clark admits to agreeing to
Dubois's request that black and white actors would not touch each other
on the stage, although he presented a mixed curtain cau.ss Clark's recol-
lections have often been used to explain the transformation of Dubois's
play. But in relying only on Clark's testimony we ignore the appetite for
investing in t heatre as a platform for social change which Harlem activists
had developed over several decades. A study of black community engage-
ment with the production suggests that it was black-directed memory
work that reshaped a white-authored, white-directed play into a celebra-
tion of successful black resistance to white rule. 56 In tracing the evolution
of the production we need to examine the different versions of the
script, the role of black critics and community in shaping the production,
54 Maurice and Helen Fisher Clark, interviewed by John O'Connor, 7 August
1976. Los Angeles, California. Revised by interviewee January, 1979. Tape 1, Side 1-2,
Theatre of the Thirties Oral History Collection, Special Collections & Archives, George
Mason University (Hereafter OHC).
55 Additional statement by Maurice Clark, in letter dated 6 January 1979, OHC.
56 Several accounts credit Maurice Clark with the transformation of Haiti
including John O'Connor and Lorraine Brown, Free, Adult & Uncensored The Federal
Theatre Prqject (Washington: New Republic Books, 1978), 118-9, Mary Renda, Taking Haiti,
296; for the development of a community for social change around Harlem's Little
Theatres see Macki, "Reconstructing Community and Identity," especially 107-18.
COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 103
as well as the political use to which black political groups put Haiti in
order to refashion it as a lieu de memoire capable of serving the political
needs of the present.
Harlem knew that Haitian heroes were coming to visit in the
spring of 1938. In the weeks leading up to the official opening of Haiti,
black newspapers nationally paid close attention to the progress of
rehearsals, informing readers of casting decisions, the secret marriage of
its star Rex Ingram who would play the leading role, Christophe, and
explaining why black Americans should be interested in contemporary
political developments in Haiti.57 It was also reported that cast members
had been coached in the early history of Haiti by Arthur Schomburg, col-
lector, historian, and historiographer of black life, and that his lectures
had emphasized the courage and heroism of Toussaint and Christophe. sa
While some black newspapers were still confused as to whether William
Dubois was their very own W. E. B. Du Bois, the Amsterdam Ne1vs, which
had taken great interest in the Unit since its inception, cast doubt on the
capacity of a white playwright to render effectively a drama of black
resistance. On 26 February, the editor published a letter of complaint to
FTP headquarters written by one of their readers, Harold Williams.
Having attended a preview performance of Haiti, Williams felt compelled
to express his dismay at the characterization of black manhood he found
in Dubois's play. Claiming ownership of Haiti's history and culture for
himself and the black community, Williams explained: "Because of our
knowledge of the Haitian Revolution my friends and I believe the play
did not correctly represent the spirit of Haiti. We think Mr. Dubois (of
the New York Times Dramatic Department) is prejudiced in his outlook: in
that he misrepresents the Blacks."S9 Williams's criticisms were aimed
specifically at the characterization and plot offered by the script, rather
than actors' interpretations of roles. Toussaint, he complained, was
wrongly treated as a common soldier rather as the Governor-General of
Haiti: "the treatment given him in the play is a concoction typical of the
American attitude toward Negroes." Moreover, Williams and his friends
57 "Haiti Cast Completed," Pittsburgh Courier, 12 February 1938, 21; "Haiti Will
Open Late in February," Afro American, 12 February 1938, 11; "Rex Ingram Secretly
Marries Francienc Everette," Amsterdam News, 19 February 1938; 1; "Defender Sends Aid
to Haiti," Chicago Defender, 5 February 1938, 4.
58 Al Monroe, "Harlem WPA Players Hear Haiti's Early Tilt: Arthur Schomburg,
Ace Curator, Ably Discusses Islanders;' Chicago Defender, 5 February 1938, 16; 'Schomburg
Addresses WPA Players on Haiti," New Jounzal and Guide, 5 February 1938, 18.
59 "Technique of Play Flayed by Reader," Amsterdam News, 26 February 1938, 19.
104 D OSSETI
believed that Christophe was similarly represented through the sneering
eyes of whites: "Christophe" he complained, "gives more the appearance
of a well-bred house servant, than a mature, shrewd man capable of lead-
ing a people." He was also contemptuous of the errant storyline that sin-
gled out Odette, the mixed race French woman who did not reveal her
knowledge of Haitian spies, as being critical to the success of the Haitian
revolution.60
Although the Amsterdam News does not appear to follow up on
this story, the same edition included a WPA press release claiming that
the postponed opening was due to the difficulty in procuring period fur-
niture. In the weeks that followed, the Afro American printed two articles
which reported the widely held belief that the delayed operung was a
result of the less than enthusiastic previews:
Although no official statement has been given out, it is
reported that adverse criticism given the play by a group
of pre-viewers, is responsible. Critics obj ected to the
characterization given Toussaint L'Ouverture by William
Dubois, white, who authored the play .... It is being
reported that the play is being mended and smoothed
frantically during these days of waiting.61
Repeating this claim in a foll ow up article, the Afro American suggested
that Dubois's original play had not done justice to the bravery of Haitians
and changes had to be made accordingly.62
There are three extant versions of the script, with subtle differ-
ences which could support the Afro American's claims. The first, publica-
tion number 50-S, was prepared by the FTP and published for 50 cents
in April 1938. A second version appeared later that year in a Random
House publication, Federal Theatre Plqys. Finally, there is what appears to
be an unpublished and undated version which has been catalogued at the
FTP collection at George Mason as the "Revised Edition."63 Although it
60 Ibid.
61 "Opening of 'Haiti' Play Postponed," Amsterdam News, 26 February 1938, 16;
"Opening of Haiti postponed," Afro-American, 5 March 1938, 11.
62 "Rex I ngram is Applauded for his work in 'Haiti,"' Afro American, 12 March
1938, 10.
63 Federal Theatre Project, Federal Theatre Plqys (New York: Random House,
1938), hereafter RHS. Publication number 50-S (hereafter PS 50-S) and the "Revised
Edition" (hereafter RE) are both available in the Federal Theatre Playscript and
Radioscript Collection, Special Collections and Archives, George Mason Universiry, Box 2.
COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE. 105
is unclear which version was used in production, as there is no director's
report for Haiti or clearly definable working script, all three could be ren-
dered sympathetic to the Haitian revolution in production. Indeed, the
three scripts are identical for much of the play. Set in Haiti in 1802 after
the slaves have rebelled and killed their slave masters, the island is gov-
erned by Toussaint L'Ouverture. The play opens with Toussaint and
Christophe contemplating the arrival of the French army, led by
Napoleon's brother-in-law, General Leclerc, who has come to Haiti to re-
establish French control over the island and reimpose slavery. Under
Toussaint's direction and with the reluctant compliance of his second-in-
command, Henri Christophe, the Haitians retreat to the hills, but refuse
to surrender. The French capture Toussaint through trickery but are final-
ly forced to flee when Christophe, now the Haitian leader, leads a heroic
expedition down from the hills which overwhelms the invaders.
Important sub-plots include a romance, a father's search for his long-lost
daughter, and a case of mistaken racial identity on the part of an appar-
ently "white" French woman Odette, who is married to a malevolent
French Colonel, but who has instinctive sympathy for the Haitians due to
her mixed race heritage. Although neither Odette nor her French com-
patriots know it, Odette is the product of a love affair between a Haitian
slave, Jacques, and the white wife of his slave master. The complaint of
the preview attendee suggests that it was Odette's character that had orig-
inally been used by the playwright to illustrate the dangers of miscegena-
tion.M Odette's failure to tell her husband that Jacques and Christophe
have been spying on their headquarters is one (of several) factors leading
to Haitian victory. If a production presented Odette as the "tragic mulat-
ta" is it easy to see how this play could have gone down the route of
Griffith's Birth of a Nation: interracial sex leads to mixed race progeny,
mixed loyalties, and consequently is a step toward disastrous black rule.
However, the response of the black community to the play in the spring
of 1938 suggests they saw a version in which the heroism of Toussaint
and Christophe took centre stage.
Although all three scripts would allow for a heroic reading, there
are subtle variations between them which suggest that the so-called
Revised Edition may have been the script used in production, following
revisions made in response to community pressure. We can assume that
the Random House version and the FrP Publication 50-S received the
consent of the author and in fact these two versions are the most alike.
The Revised Edition however seems to contain some variations in char-
64 "Technique of Play Flayed by Reader," Amsterdnm News, 26 February 1938, 19.
106
DOSSETT
acterization which Dubois (if his character references are to be believed)
would have been unlikely to condone and a Harlem audience likely to
love. \'\!hen one examines the three versions of the play, one may find
some textual evidence to support the Afro American's claims that Haiti had
to be amended. In the Revised Edition, Toussaint appears less naive and
Christophe steelier than in the Random House and FfP publications,
suggesting that this version may have been rewritten in response to pre-
view audience criticism. In all three versions, Toussaint is cautious and
has patience enough to retreat to the hills to wait and see whether the
French come in peace, or, as his colleagues suspect, to reimpose slavery
and French control on the island. In the published scripts Toussaint asks
Christophe: "Did you think I'd give up all we won together? First I will
taste General Leclerc's 'abundance-and-peace' from a safe distance." In
the Revised Edition, although Toussaint takes the same course, an addi-
tional phrase is inserted, in which Toussaint seems to explicitly reject
charges of naivety: "Did you think I'd give up all we won together-/ike
a trusting schoolbqy? "65 In the Revised Edition, Christophe is more blood-
thirsty and without mercy for his enemy. Although there is no mention of
it in the published scripts, in the Revised Edition, Christophe noncha-
lantly recalls the massacre of white slaveholders, reflecting that Odette's
white mother left Haiti just in time, "We made a clean sweep of the
Moreaus."66 Later in act 2, Christophe's black nationalism and race pride
is made more prominent. Informing Odette that he has killed her odious
husband, Christophe declares: "There can be no truce between black
blood and white." Christophe also introduces himself in the Revised
Edition as the Governor of Northern Haiti and "the . first of the
blacks."67 These subtle changes may have been a response to Harold
Williams's charge that Christophe appeared in previews as more a "well-
bred house servant, than a mature, shrewd man capable of leading a peo-
ple."
Further evidence to support the contention that the Revised
Edition may have been the working script is suggested by the clear expla-
nations offered in place of technical terms, presumably to ensure the
script's meaning could be understood by the widest possible audience.
For example, in all three scripts, Christophe comments wryly on the
indulgent accessories-including women that the French have brought
6
5 Act 1, Scene 1, RE, 5; PS 50-S, 4; RHS, 7. Additions in italics.
66 Act 1, Scene 1, RE, 9.
67 Act 1, Scene 2, RE, 37, 43.
COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE H ARLEM STAGE 107
Figure 1: Alvin Childress as J acgues, Louis Sharpe as Toussaint L'Ouverture
and Rex Ingram as Henri Christophe in Haiti, Act 1, Scene 1. Box 1177,
Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC.
on their mission to retake Haiti. But whereas in the two published scripts
Christophe dismisses French excess, "a little Tuileries-on QQI island!" in
the Revised Edition, this likely unfamiliar reference to the royal French
pleasure garden, is made meaningful by a preceding phrase, "Lace,
Lackeys, gold chairs," adding to the characterization of the French as
arrogant, indulgent, and distracted by luxury even during war.68
Which of the three scripts was presented on 2 March and sub-
sequent nights is difficult to ascertain with any certainty. What is clear is
that while there were reservations about the previews, the show that
opened at the Lafayette on 2 March was one that many community lead-
ers and local newspapers could embrace. Harlem audiences witnessed
black male characters in positions of power, who did not feel compelled
to strip to a loin cloth in the manner of Brutus Jones, nor succumb to the
powers of voodoo, but who were instead restrained, in control, and polit-
ically successful. They also had the opportunity to watch Ingram, the star
of the movie version of Green Pastures, play Christophe, a rugged and dar-
ing character who never loses control (although he does lose his shirt in
68 Act 1, Scene 1: RE, 5; PS 50-S, 5; RHS, 8. Another example occurs in Act 2,
when Odette notices her would-be lover Duval's promotion to Colonel. In the published
versions, Odette says "l see new epaulettes" while in the Revised version she makes ref-
erence to "more braid on the sleeve." Act 2, Scene 1, RE, 17; PS 50-S, 17; RHS, 46.
108 DOSSETT
Figure 2: Rex Ingram as Henri Christophe, Box 1177, Federal Theatre Project
Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
the heat of the battle). Toussaint, played by Louis Sharpe is wise, weary
and diplomatic, while Alvin Childress, who played Jacques, was singled
out by critics for his controlled performance.69 By contrast, the French
soldiers are savage and unmanly: they send their inferiors into dangerous
battles to settle grievances over women and are constantly imbibing
cognac and rum to keep up their courage. As the director Clark later
recalled, "Haiti broke the pattern of unequal black and white parts and
even made the black parts dominate. It dared to show that blacks could
create a nation of their own with a superior culture and the courage to
defend themselves."70
Certainly black reviewers thought so. Leading the praise for
Haiti, the Amsterdam News found it "Brilliantly staged, excellently acted
and enthusiastically received." Its exuberant response to the first night
was such that it declared itself prepared to overlook Haill's historical
inaccuracies in favor of its general inspirational feel: "That the play
departs from the bounds of actual history is of little moment. The result
69 "Brilliance Reigns at Haiti Opening," Amsterdam News, 12 March 1938, 16;
"Role Lauded" Pittsburg/; Courier, 11 June 1938, 20.
70 Additional Statement by Maurice Clark, in letter dated 6 January 1979, OHC.
COMI\IEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 109
Figure 3: Rex Ingram Posing as Henri Christophe. Box 1177, Federal Theatre
Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
is as stupendous as any production ground out by Hollywood cameras
and upholds the WPA federal theatre tradition of prodigious accom-
plishment."71 The Atlanta Dai!J World agreed, calling it "The finest play
produced in New York City in recent years."72 Perhaps partly because of
Haiti's casual disregard for historical accuracy (as one newspaper pointed
out, it was Dessalines, rather than Christophe, who proclaimed Haitian
independence in 1804), once in production black commentators spent
less time commenting on details of the production itself but rather
played a proactive role in determining and interpreting the meaning of
Haiti for black Americans through the promotion of Haiti related
events.73
Black newspapers advertised and organized Haitian themed
events which drew on the interest generated by the production. For
example, to coincide with the anticipated February opening of Haiti, a
special Haitian evening was held on 23 February which included talks by
7
1
"Brilliance Reigns at Haiti Opening," Amsterdam News, 12 March 1938, 16.
72 Alvin Moses, "Footlight Flickers," Atlanta Daify World, 21 March 1938, 2.
73 ''Technique of Play Flayed by Reader," Amsterdam News, 26 February 1938, 19.
110 Doss Err
Arthur Schomburg, as well as members of the cast, Ingram and Sharpe,
and Laura Bowman and her husband Leroy Antoine performing the
Haitian music they had composed and arranged for the production.7
4
Indeed, both individually and as a group, the Haiti cast played an impor-
tant role in translating past struggles into present day concerns. The
entire Haiti cast was presented at a benefit to raise money for black art,
hosted by the Negro People's Art Committee, whose leading members
overlapped with those of the cast, including president Rex Ingram, and
vice-president Add Bates.?S The cast also frequently appeared at
Schomburg's seminars and public lectures on Haiti between February and
May 1938,76 Schomburg himself appeared at nearly every public Haitian
event during the run of the production, and also curated a special exhi-
bition of his collection at the 135th Street library which featured a num-
ber of Haitian artifacts including the signatures of Toussaint, Christophe,
and Dessalines. Proselytizing for the exhibition, the Amsterdam News pro-
claimed it even more exciting than the play.
7
7
Headlines on the Negro Unit's latest offering such as "Heroes of
Haiti Live again," and "Toussaint L'Ouverture Comes to Life," are indica-
tive of the emphasis black newspapers placed on the contemporary rele-
vance of Haiti's past to black AmericansJS Their coverage of the play
often extended to lengthy discussions on history of the Haitian revolu-
tion and the key figures that readers would encounter in the play. For
example, the Atlanta Dai!J World lamented the fact that Toussaint
L'Ouverture had for too long been "neglected by school books and
heretofore ignored as material for the drama" but celebrated that "Now
that he has been immortalized in the stirring drama by William Du Bois
[sic], intelligent members of the Negro race everywhere are clamoring for
more information about L'Ouverture."
79
This connection between the
7
4
"Haiti Opens February 23," Amsterdam News, 19 February 1938, 16.
'5 "For Art's Sake," Amsterdam NelliS, 19 March 1938, 8.
76 Schomburg particularly stressed the "courage and heroism" of Toussaint
and Christophe. See "Schomburg Addresses WPA Players on Haiti," New Journal & Guide,
5 February 1938, 18.
77 "Library Exhibition on Haiti Matchless," Amsterdam News, 7 I\ fay 1938, 13.
78 "Heroes of Haiti Live again in WPA Theatre," Afro American, 12 March
1938, 12; "Heroes of Haiti Live Again in WPA Theatre Play 'Haiti,"' New Journal & Guide,
12 February 1938, 16.
79 "WPA's Haiti Recalls Famous Speech by Wendell Phillips," Atlanta Daify
World, 6 June 1938, 3.
(OMli!EMOR.\TING HAITI ON THF. HARLEM STAGE 111
staging of Haiti at the Lafayette and the importance of Haiti's founding
heroes for black Americans was made most explicit by the FfP spon-
sored "Haiti Week in Harlem." Commencing on 31 May, the week
opened with a pageant to commemorate the coronation of "the liberator
of Haiti." According to a WPA press release:
The pageant will start as "royal procession" from the
corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, and will
march to the accompaniment of Haitian ceremonial
music to the Lafayette Theatre, with Rex Ingram and a
guard of honor leading the parade. The procession will
end on the stage of the Lafayette Theatre and, supple-
mented by a program of music and the presence of
many Haitian and Harlem notables, the actual corona-
tion scene will be enacted. Everyone is welcome to
attend. Among the speakers will be Dr. Binga Dismond
and Dr. Arthur A. Schomburg, well-known authorities
on Haiti and its dramatic history.so
During Haiti week, Haitian girls were to visit Mayor La Guardia to invite
him to the coronation, while "Sound trucks will cruise the streets of
Harlem" to announce "the coming coronation of Christophe, the man
who ran Napoleon's armies off the islands and brought about the com-
plete independence of Haiti." The week's festivities ended with a cele-
bration of the 135th anniversary of the birth of Toussaint on 5 June,
sponsored by the National Negro Congress.81 Described by the
Amsterdam News as a "tremendous success," the closing ceremony took
place on the stage of the Lafayette and included speeches from the
heroes of the current production including Rex Ingram and Louis
Sharpe. Wendell Phillips's often-quoted tribute to Toussaint was read out,
and Richard B. Moore, the influential Barbadian Communist, delivered an
address.8
2
Attendees included representatives of the Haitian consulate,
the American Friends of the Haitian People, the New York Association
for the Study of Negro Life and History, the NAACP, the Brotherhood
80 Press Release, 20 May 1938, in ''Vassar College Collection," RG69, Box
148, NA.
81 Ibid.
82 "L'Ouverture Memorial Attracts at Lafayette," Amsterdam News, 11 June
1938, 9A.
112 00SSETf
of Sleeping Car Porters, the church, and of course the National Negro
Congress.s3 On these and other similar events, black columnists insisted
that the history of Haiti needed protecting from white authored narra-
tives out to steal their black past. The commemoration of the Haitian
revolution served as bulwark in this endeavor; it reminded black
Americans and Haitians of their shared heritage and offered a correction
to the dominant narrative that justified U.S. invasion and fostered white
cultural exploitation of an independent black state.
Political leaders also found the production of Haiti a valuable
prop in connecting the Haitian past with the African American present.
Describing the production as "far superior to Macbeth," Adam Clayton
Powell Jr.-the prominent civil rights activist and pastor of Harlem's
Abyssinian Baptist Church-used his regular column in the Amsterdam
News to urge Harlemites to see Haiti immediately. Black audiences, he
said, would get "a strange thrill in that last act when the Haitian masses,
led by Christophe, sweep down from the hills through the French line
and establish their freedom."B
4
Powell made a direct link between those
black men and women who found strength and courage to resist the
Napoleons of the past and those who would struggle against fascism and
Hitler in the present: "In this hour, when the borders of liberty are
becoming increasingly narrow and the frontiers of freedom are receding,
it is inspiring to note that there were once raggedy fellow blacks as who
were able to rise up and crush Napoleon's best. As long as this spirit is
free in the world, the Napoleons and Hitlers are not to be feared." Powell
went on to lament the lack of men and women prepared to "risk their all
in the eternal fight for liberty" expressing particular criticism for Austria's
failure to stand up to Nazi Germany and the persecution of a local
Communist by the American legion and the Catholic church.
8
5 Linking
the history of Haitian resistance not only to contemporary black strug-
gles, but also to the production itself, Powell suggested that black
Americans had a duty to see the play and study the forces that led to the
self emancipation of black slaves.
Others used the production to focus special attention on Haiti's
ongoing struggle to resist subordination both at the hands of the U.S. and
also the American supported Rafael Trujillo, authoritarian leader of the
83 "Patriot to be Commemorated: Toussaint L'Ouverrure l\feering, June 5,"
Amsterdam News, 4 June 1938, 20.
84 Adam Clayton Powell Jr., "Soapbox," Amsterdam News, 19 March 1938, 13.
85Jbid.
HAITI ON THE H t\RLEM STJ\GE 113
Figure 4: "Finale of Haiti, the play by William Dubois which the Federal
Theatre will present at the Copley Theatre beginning on Oct. 24th." Box 1177,
Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC.
neighboring Dominican Republic. There was extensive coverage in the
black press of the Dominican Republican Army's massacre of Haitians
in October 1937 and the negotiations which led to the payment by the
Dominican of a $750,000 indemnity.B6 Attention was also paid to groups
beyond the U.S. and Haiti who were campaigning for black freedom on a
global scale. For example, the Chicago Defender gave prominent coverage to
the founding meeting of the International African Service Bureau in
London and its new manifesto which explained the symbolic impor-
tance of Haiti and Liberia, "the only states where to be black is not a
stigma ... an example of the capacity of Africans and peoples of
African descent to govern themselves."87
All of this activity meant that when rumors circulated that Haiti
was to be taken over by a commercial theatre company and moved to
86 "Haitians Killed by Dominicans," Pittsburgh Courier, 30 October 1937, 24;
"5000 Slaughtered in San Domingo," Amsterdam News, 13 November 1937, 1; "Haiti
Mobilizes Troops Along Frontier," Chicago Defender, 20 November 1937, 24; "Dominican
Republic Must Pay for Haitian Loss," Philadelphia Tribune, 3 February 1938, 3.
8
7
"London Blacks in Appeal for Haiti, Liberia," Chicago Defender, 21 May
1938, 24.
114 DOSSETT
Broadway, many black Americans saw it as part of the same struggle: just
as Haitians had struggled for their liberty first from the French, then the
Americans, and now from the machete-wielding Dominican army, black
Americans now had to resist white attempts to control Haiti's past. As
part of that struggle, Harlemites would fight to keep Haiti. Beginning in
June 1938, Negro Unit workers, theatre unions, black newspapers, and
political and civic organizations orchestrated an intensive campaign to
prevent Haiti from being moved downtown. They feared (not unreason-
ably, given the repeated FTP cuts and reorganizations that had begun in
1937) that any decision to leave the Lafayette dark that summer might be
a prelude to the permanent closure of the Harlem federal theatre. On 24
June, these diverse groups came together at a mass meeting at the Harlem
YMCA to build a campaign to keep the Lafayette open and fight racial
discrimination in the FTP. "Outstanding leaders" lending their support
included Langston Hughes and playwright and actor Frank Wilson, as
well as Richard Moore and Adam Clayton Powell. Leaders of the New
York Harlem YMCA, Negro Labor Committee, and National Negro
Congress committed to using their resources to ensure that the theatre
would not be closed down, even for the summer. To mobilize the com-
munity, pickets were organized outside the Lafayette, with signs calling on
Harlemites to "help us in our fight to save your community theatre," and
promising "your support will help us save" it. Others declared, "we
protest the liquidation of the Negro theatre," and "our productions not
only entertain but educate, see Haiti."88 This protest made the front page
of the Amsterdam News which had been campaigning throughout June to
keep Haiti in Harlem. The paper suggested that higher black attendance
figures (it estimated that less than 20,000 of the 74,000 who attended
Haiti were black, although there is no evidence to support these figures)
were required in order to ensure the production stayed at the Lafayette.89
The paper took a particularly strong stand, suggesting that the people of
Harlem were responsible th"rough their attendance for keeping "what is
justly Harlem's own, the culture that has its only rightful home in
Harlem," and lamenting that those "actors, directors and technical
experts, who have worked so hard to build a substantial Negro theatre in
88 "Fight Moving of Lafayette," Amsterdam News, 25 June 1938, 1.
89 "Weekly Topics," Amsterdam News, 15 June 1938; "Lafayette Incident Rebuke
to Cultural Pride of Community," Amsterdam NeJJJs, 4 June 1938, Vassar College Collection
of Programs and Promotion Materials 1935-1939. See also "Harlem Will Get Work: WPA
Theatre Promises," Afro American, 16 July 1938, which suggested that the play had been
moved to Broadway because of greater chances of white patronage.
COMMEMORATING HAJTI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 115
Figure 5: Poster advertising the Harlem Negro Unit's production of Haiti at
the Lafayette, New York City (1938). Box 1144, Federal Theatre Project
Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Harlem, must go outside Harlem for their reward."90
The Amsterdam News's view that Haiti and a permanent black the-
atre could be theirs forever, if only more black Americans attended more
performances, may have offered an empowering sense that the fate of
Haiti/ Haiti lay in black hands, thereby contributing to a growing sense of
Haiti as an important lieu de memo ire. In reality, the fate of Haiti was decid-
ed by factors beyond the community's control. The rising cost of the
Lafayette's rent, the need to renegotiate the lease, and the uncertainty
over the Negro Unit's future due to nation-wide budget cuts all shaped
Haitls fate.9J Hallie Flanagan defended the decision to move Haiti from
the Lafayette as a temporary closure, due to a desire to "draw in new
audiences" to Haiti on Broadway. Certainly there was both ambition and
precedent within the FfP for moving popular shows around the country
to enable as many Americans as possible to see a successful production.
90 "Lafayette Incident Rebuke to Cultural Pride of Community," Amsterdam
News, 4 June 1938, Vassar College Collection of Programs and Promotion Materials 1935-
1939.
91 "Haiti May Return to Lafayette," Pittsburgh Courier, 8 October 1938, 20.
116
DOSSETT
Figure 6: Poster advertising the Copley Theatre production of Haiti, Boston,
(1938). Box 1144, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library
of Congress, Washington, DC.
To put it in perspective, Macbeth had played for ten weeks at the Lafayette
before going downtown to the Adelphi and then on tour. Haiti had
already run uptown for nineteen weeks.
92
No official records were kept
of the racial make up of the audiences that saw Haiti, but whether they
were predominantly black or white, the play's long run at the Lafayette
made it the biggest hit in the Harlem Unit's history. The white critics who
attended early on in the run commented on the predominantly black
audiences and we know that throughout the run, Haiti continued to
attract group bookings from black associations and organizations includ-
ing the Harlem Cultural Club and the West Harlem Community
Council.93 Perhaps black attendance did diminish over the course of the
run, or perhaps some African Americans fighting for a black theatre
92 Hallie Flanagan, letter to Cecelia Cabaniss Saunders, Executive Secretary
137th Street YWCA, 9 August 1936, NDABA, Reel 24; Department of Jnformation
"WPA Negro Theatre," 21 December 1937,4, in "Correspondence of Hallie Flanagan,"
RG69, Box 41, NA.
9
3 "The Theatre," Wall Street Journal, 5 March 1938, 2. Also see footnote 2;
"Haiti Passes Macbeth Record," Amsterdam Ne1vs, 19 March 1938, 19; "44,000 Have Seen
Haiti: Advance Sale is 50,000," Chicago Defender, 7 May 1938.
COM..t"lEMORATING HAITI ON THE H_-\RLEM STAGE 117
would have found anything less than an entirely black audience insuffi-
cient.
Haiti ran for a record 103 performances at the Lafayette where it
was seen by an estimated 74,000 New Yorkers before moving downtown
to Daly's on 11 July. Black newspapers further removed from Harlem pol-
itics such as the Atlanta Daify World welcomed the opportunity for plays
addressing serious black issues to be performed before white as well as
black audiences, suggesting that: "Broadway get over its scare-phobia as
to how 'NEGROPHOBES' might receive this mighty spectacle of .. .
BLACK ISLAND DOMINANCE ... and give 'Milky Way' theatre-goers
an opportunity to view some grand acting." Whites, they suggested,
might even benefit from seeing "plays where blacks gain dominance over
whites ... physically or mentally as the case may be."94 In October, fol-
lowing the Broadway run, the troupe took the production to Boston for
a short tour, playing at the same time as the Hartford Negro Unit, who
were presenting their own four-night run of Dubois's drama.9S When
Haitt's run finally came to an end that autumn, black groups lamented its
loss and questioned the motives for its discontinuance. The Colored
Actors and Performers Association sent a strongly-worded telegram to
the DC headquarters:
We being necessarily interested in the advancement and
development of Negro culture, see in the success of the
Federal Theatre Productions "Haiti" the interpretative
means towards realizing our objectives. Protesting there-
fore the unfair closing of Haiti we classify such tactics
as rank discrimination and demand "Haiti" immediate
reopening to continue this successful run.96
They were informed by Flanagan's secretary that Haitt's long run in
Harlem and Broadway, followed by a two-week tour in Boston had final-
ly "exhausted" the audience for such a play as reflected in the "falling off
94 Alvin Moses, "Footlight Flickers" Philadelphia Tribune, 17 March 1938, 14;
Moses, "Footlight Flickers," Atlanta Dai!J World, 21 March 1938, 2.
95 O'Connor and Brown, Free, Adult & Uncensored, 118; "Final Performance of
Haiti Tonight at Avery Memorial," Hartford Courant, 29 October 1938, 5; "Two Plays
Ending Runs Here Tonight," New York Times, 9 July 1938, 10.
96 Colored Actors and Performers Association to Ellen Woodward, Assistant
Administrator WPA, 15 November 1938, NDABA, Reel24.
118 D OSSETf
in attendance."9
7
The FrP's decision to close the play was no doubt
encouraged by the fact that in July 1938, Haiti had been singled out by
Congressman J. Parnell Thomas as a play with "communistic leanings." A
member of the Dies Committee created by the House of Representatives
to investigate un-American and subversive activities in ali WPA projects,
Thomas's charge may have revealed more about New Deal opponents'
willingness to use charges of communism to protect racial segregation,
than how Haiti was performed and received, but it was indicative of the
threats faced by the FTP which would lead to its closure in 1939.98
By serving as a focal point for black public engagement with
Haiti's past and its relationship to the black American present, the Negro
Unit's production marked an important moment in American theatre his-
tory. It showed that a black theatre (even one with white oversight, and
too often, white playwrights and directors) could serve as a medium for
black expression and protest, that black Americans were producers as
well as consumers of art, and that through theatre they could disrupt
dominant ideas about black masculinity. The FTP offered a real oppor-
tunity to develop black theatre, because its mandate and structures did,
however imperfectly, engage with the audiences and communities whose
tax dollars supported it. Harlem's residents and civic leaders recognized
the opportunity-it was why they invested heavily in their Negro Unit
and fought so hard to keep it. The Harlem branch of the Young Women's
Christian Association lent out its auditorium and dressing rooms for the
rehearsal of new plays, while its director Cecelia Cabaniss Saunders
played a prominent role in the campaign to keep Haiti in Harlem.
Insisting that the Negro Unit was an important part of Harlem's cultur-
al and political life, Saunders explained in a letter to Hallie Flanagan that
the Negro Unit offered Harlemites an experience Broadway never could,
"not only because of the prices charged, but because so many of the peo-
ple are called upon to work very late and it would be impossible for them
to cover the long distance necessary to come home, get dressed for atten-
dance at a play, and then go back down town in time for the show."
Shows like Haiti she insisted "must be presented in our own communi-
ty." The FTP enabled African Americans who had never experienced the-
atre to attend their first productions, transform those productions, and
9
7
Ellen S. Woodward to Colored Actors and Performer Association, 17
November 1935, NDABA, Reel 24.
98 "Theatre Project Faces an Inquiry," New York Times, 27 July 1938, 19. The
FTP became an early target for the Dies Committee, not least because of the FTP's insis-
tence on integrated audiences.
TITLE
119
make them Harlem's own. "In these days when, 'government for the peo-
ple' is something more than a phrase," Haiti suggested that American the-
atre need not be an elite leisure pursuit, but a provocative public medium
for the negotiation of African Americans' political future.
99
99 Cecelia Cabaniss Saunders, Executive Secretary of the 137th Street YWCA,
to Hallie Flanagan, 2 August 1938, NDABA, Reel 24.
CONTRIBUTORS
Kate Dossett is Lecturer in American History at the University of Leeds,
UK. Her book, Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism
1
Feminism and
Integration in the United States
1
1896-1935 (University Press of Florida,
2008), won the 2009 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for best book in southern
women's history. She is currently working on a second book Stages in the
Struggle: Black Theatre and Politics in 1930s America, and has a forthcoming
article in African American Review on the staging of Garveyism in
Theodore Ward's Big White Fog (1938).
Douglas A. Jones, Jr. is a PhD candidate in Drama and Humanities at
Stanford University. His primary area of research is nineteenth-century
performance and performativity, with particular emphasis on antebellum
culture and the history of slavery. His work on the period has also
appeared in Theatre Topics.
John H. Muse is a PhD candidate at Yale, where he teaches courses on
theatre and modernism. John's dissertation, "Short Attention Span
Theaters: Modernist Theatrical Shorts Since 1880," explores the under-
studied significance of short experimental drama over the last hundred
and thirty years. His other research interests include twentieth-century
drama, performance studies from ancient to digital, genre-bending,
media studies, and early modern drama.
Ashis Sengupta is Professor of English at the University of North
Bengal (India). Recipient of the Olive I Reddick Award (1995), he has
published many articles on modern American and Indian English drama
in journals/ edited volumes of international repute. Sengupta was a fellow
at the Fulbright American Studies Institute in New York in 2002, a guest
lecturer at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in 2003, and a visiting
Fulbright professor at the Department of English, Rhode Island College,
during Fall 2006. He has presented papers at a number of seminars and
conferences in India and abroad. Sengupta recently visited Sweden as a
SASNET guest professor.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Barcelona Plays: A Collection of New Works by
Catalan Playwrights
Translated and edited by Marion Peter Holt and Sharon G. Feldman
The new plays in this collection represent outstanding
playwrights of three generations. Benet i Jornet won his
first drama award in 1963, when was only twenty-three
years old, and in recent decades he has become
Catalonia's leading exponent of thematically challeng-
ing and structurally inventive theatre. His plays have
been performed internationally and translated into four
teen languages, including Korean and Arabic. Sergi
Belbel and Llu"lsa Cunille arrived on the scene in the late
1980s and early 1990s, with distinctive and provocative
dramatic voices. The actor-director-playwright Pau Mir6
is a member of yet another generation that is now
attracting favorable critical attention.
josep M. Benet I jornet: Two Plays
Translated by Marion Peter Holt
Josep M. Benet i Jornet, born in Barcelona, is the author of
more than forty works for the stage and has been a lead-
ing contributor to the striking revitalization of Catalan the-
atre in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a compelling
"tragedy-within-a-play," and Stages, with its monological
recall of a dead and unseen protagonist, rank among his
most important plays. They provide an introduction to a
playwright whose inventive experiments in dramatic form
and treatment of provocative themes have made him a
major figure in contemporary European theatre.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Czech Plays: Seven New Works
Edited by Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, and Daniel Gerould
Czech Plays: Seven New Works is the first English-lan-
guage anthology of Czech plays written after the 1989
"Velvet Revolution." These seven works explore sex and
gender identity, ethnicity and violence, political corrup-
tion, and religious taboos. Using innovative forms and
diverse styles, they tackle the new realities of Czech
society brought on by democracy and globalization with
characteristic humor and intelligence.
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}an Fabre: I Am A Mistake. Seven Works for the Theatre
Edited and forward by Frank Hentschker
Flemish-Dutch theatre artist jan Fabre is considered one of
the most innovative and versatile artists of his day. Over
the past twenty-five years, he has produced works as a
performance artist, theatre maker, choreographer, opera
maker, playwright, and visual artist. This volume repre-
sents the first collection of plays by )an Fabre in an English
translation. Plays include: I am a Mistake (2007), History
of Tears (2005), je suis sang (conte de fees medieval)
(2001), Angel of Death (2003) and others.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
roMANIA After 2000
Edited by Saviana Stanescu and Daniel Gerould.
Translation editors: Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraff.
$''3@i I
This volume represents the first anthology of new
Romanian Drama published in the United States and
introduces American readers to compelling playwrights
and plays that address resonant issues of a post-totali-
tarian society on its way toward democracy and a new
European identity. includes the plays: Stop The Tempo
by Gianina Carbunariu, Romania. Kiss Me! by Bogdan
Georgescu, Vitamins by Vera lon, Romania 21 by ~ t e f n
Peca and Waxing West by Saviana Stanescu.
This publication produced in collaboration with the
Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Bucharest.
Buenos Aires in Trans loti on
Translated and Edited by Jean Graham-Jones
BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical collabora-
tion, bringing together four of the most important contem-
porary playwrights from Buenos Aires and pairing them
with four cutting-edge US-based directors and their
ensembles. Throughout a period of one year, playwrights,
translator, directors, and actors worked together to deliv-
er four English-language world premieres at Performance
Space 122 in the fall of 2006.
Plays include: Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel Veronese;
A Kingdom, A Country or a Wasteland, In the Snow by Lola
Arias; Ex-Antwone by Federico Leon; Panic by Rafael
Spregelburd. BAiT is a Performance Space 122 Production,
an initiative of Salon Volcan, with the support of lnstituto
Cervantes and the Consulate General of Argentina in
NewYork.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Ploys
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould
WltkiCWICZ
SEVEN PLAYS
This volume contains seven of Witkiewicz's most impor
tant plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor Brainiowicz, Gyubal
Wahazar, The Anonymous Work, The Cuttlefish, Dainty
Shapes and Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub Sonata, as
well as two of his theoretical essays, "Theoretical
Introduction" and "A Few Words About the Role of the
Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form."
Witkiewicz . .. takes up and continues the vein of dream
and grotesque fantasy exemplified by the late Strindberg
or by Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those
of the surrealists and Anton in Artaud which culminated in
the masterpieces of the dramatists of the Absurd . ... It is
high time that this major playwright should become better
known in the English-speaking world. Martin Esslin
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Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus
Translated and Edited by David Willinger
Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch
language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish by birth and
upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, nov
els, and collections of poetry. He is renowned as an enfant
terrible of the arts.throughout Europe. From the time he
was affiliated with the international art group, COBRA, to
his liaison with pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the
celebration of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has
careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden
and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his times.
Price US$15.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY1oo16-4309
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Theatre Research Resources in New York City
Sixth Edition, 2007
Editor: jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most
comprehensive catalogue of New York City research
facilities available to theatre scholars. Within the
indexed volume, each facility is briefly described includ-
ing an outline of its holdings and practical matters such
as hours of operation. Most entries include electronic
contact information and web sites. The listings are
grouped as follows: Libraries, Museums, and Historical
Societies; University and College Libraries; Ethnic and
Language Associations; Theatre Companies and Acting
Schools; and Film and Other.
Comedy: A Bi bli ogrophy
Editor: Meghan Duffy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould
This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers, stu-
dents, artists, and general readers interested in the theo-
ry and practice of comedy. The keenest minds have been
drawn to the debate about the nature of comedy and
attracted to speculation about its theory and practice. For
all lovers of comedy Comedy: A Bibliography is an essen-
tial guide and resource, providing authors, titles, and pub-
lication data for over a thousand books and articles devot-
ed to this most elusive of genres.
... --c-----
---.._..._ ___
Price US$to.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10o164309
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Four Plays From North Africa
Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four modern plays from the
Maghreb: Abdelkader Alloula's The Veil and Fatima
Gallaire's House of Wives, both Algerian, Julila Baccar's
Araberlin from Tunisia, and Tayeb Saddiki's The Folies Ber-
bers from Morocco.
As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has recently
begun to be recognized by the Western theatre community,
an important area within that tradition is still under-repre-
sented in existing anthologies and scholarship. That is the
drama from the Northwest of Africa, the region known in
Arabic as the Maghreb.
The Arab Oedipus
Edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus leg-
end by four leading dramatists of the Arab world. Tawfiq
AI-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali Ahmed Bakathir's The
Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus
and Walid lkhlasi's Oedipus as well as Al-Hakim's preface
to his Oedipus on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a preface
on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general
introduction by the editor.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic the-
atre has only recently begun to be felt by the Western the-
atre community, and we hope that this collection will con-
tribute to that growing awareness.
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Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016 4309
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
The Heirs of Moliere
Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson
aY ...........
This volume contains four representative French comedies
of the period from the death of Moliere to the French
Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover by Jean-Fran(ois
Regnard, The Conceited Count by Philippe Nericault
Destouches, The Fashionable Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de
la Chaussee, and The Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya.

......
Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit
and spirit of the originals, these four plays suggest some-
thing of the range of the Moliere inheritance, from comedy
of character through the highly popular sentimental come-
dy of the mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that employs
the Moliere tradition for more contemporary political ends.
E9 '- .. '-
,,4'>.,1, \ U t t,. l .u>lt
""""-''"
Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most important
melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or ]afar and Zaida, The
Dog ofMontargis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher Colum-
bus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or The Scot-
tish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's
"Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's
plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright,
"Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."
Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most
stunning effects, and brought the classic situations of fair
ground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of
a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th centu
ry. Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
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Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Marti n E. Segal Theatre Center.
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