THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 25, Number 1 Winter2013
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve
Co-Editors: David Savran and James F. Wilson
Guest Co-Editor: Naomi ]. Stubbs
Managing Editor: James Armstrong
Editorial Assistant: Kyungjin Jo
Circulation Manager: Shiraz Biggie
Circulation Assistant: Seth Powers
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director & Director of Programs
Professor Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YoRK
THE JouRNAL oF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 25, Number 1 Winter 2013
CoNTENTs
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON 5
Fireboys and Burning Theatres: Performing the Astor Place Riot
CFRANCIS BLACKCHILD 27
Signifying in the Wilderness: Alice Childress and the Black Arts
Movement
RAYMOND A. SARACENI
"Romantic Grandeur and Extravagant Folly": Performing John
Andre's Demise and his Philadelphia Meschianza
SEOKHUN (HOI
"The Play's the Thing": Scripted Performance and Theatre of the
Oppressed in Sleep Deprivation Chamber and Motherhood 2000
CONTRIBUTORS
55
83
101
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 25, NO. 1 (WINTER 2013)
FIREBOYS AND BURNING THEATRES:
PERFORMING THE ASTOR PLACE RioT
Elizabeth Williamson
I cannot say how many; the crowd appeared to be increas-
ing and more dense; the mob appeared to be determined
to accomplish some particular act; there seemed to be a
strong determination, although they only threw stones.
-Sidney H. Stewart
Clerk of the Police, City of New York
1
According to Alan Bloom, Abraham Lincoln viewed Shakespeare's Macbeth
as "the perfect illustration of the problems of tyranny and murder."
2
Lawrence Levine reproduces this assertion as evidence for his claim that
Shakespeare was an integral part of nineteenth-century American culture,
and the play was indeed regularly performed by American entertainers in
the 1800s.
3
But what did audiences derive from its depiction of political
tumult and violent revenge? This essay re-examines the production of
Macbeth that sparked the 1849 Astor Place riot, focusing on the variety of
performers who contributed to the action, both on stage and off. It relies
on, but also departs from, the work of scholars such as Levine, who have
described the riot as a turning point in American theatre culture, signaling
the increasing consolidation of both cultural capital and actual capital in
1
H. M. Ranney, Account qf the Terrific and Fatal Riot at the New-York Place Opera
House, on the Night qf Mqy 1(Jh, 1849, with the Quamfs qf Forrest and Macreatjy, Including all
the Causes Which fed to that Awful Tragedy/: Wherein an Infuriated Mob 1vas Quelled by the Public
Authorities and Military, with its Mournful Termination in the Sudden Death or Mutilation qf More
than Fifty Citizens, with Full and Authentic Particulars (New York: H. M. Ranney, 1849), 21-
2. I wish to express my gratitude to the members of the 2012 Shakespeare Association
of America seminar on "Shakespearean Theatre as Mass Entertainment" for providing
feedback on an earlier version of this essay. I am particularly indebted to Eric Mallin for
offering such generous written comments. I am also grateful to JADT's anonymous reader,
whose suggestions helped me significantly clarify my argument.
2
Alan Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 5.
3
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence qf Cultural Hierarcf(y in
Amenca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 39. According to David
Grimsted, Macbeth was among the most frequently performed of Shakespeare's works in
antebellum America. Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800-1850 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1968; 1987 reprint), 252.
fiREBOYS AND B URNING THEATRES 7
chaos (the causal ambiguity of escalating violence). In particular, there is an
apparent bifurcation between Macready's carefully rehearsed performance
of Macbeth and the rioters' unpredictable responses to it, as depicted in
first-hand accounts, journalistic reporting, and the actor's own diaries.
When read more carefully, however, these sources reveal that Macready's
responses were more improvisational than his enemies had expected, and
that the b'hoys went off-script in a variety of ways. In other words, I argue
that both the advertised performances and the counter-performances that
took place at Astor Place were a mixture of provocation and improvisation.
By emphasizing the performative aspect of these events, I seek to shift the
critical focus away from the gradual disempowerment of the American
working class and thereby recover some of the agency of the individual
actors, both famous and anonymous, who participated in the re-framing
of Shakespeare's playtext. Though this essay is indebted to scholars who
astutely link the riot and its suppression to increasing class stratification,
I want to resist the temptation to see these events as the inevitable result
of social change and political machination. It is my hope that attending to
the formal qualities of both Macready's and the b'hoys' performances will
allow us to linger, however briefly, over a moment in which things could
have been different, in which many forms of play were possible.
***
Before launching into my analysis of these performances I offer a brief
summary of the theatrical and social conditions that contributed to
the Astor Place riot and call attention to some of the most compelling
scholarly accounts of those conditions. For my purposes, one of the most
important characteristics of mid-nineteenth-century American theatre
was that all American playgoers, not just the elite ones, felt a sense of
ownership of Shakespeare's plays, which were widely quoted, spoofed, set
to music, and generally adapted to suit the desires of a popular audience.
Most American playgoers had been taught Shakespeare's plays as examples
of successful rhetoric and were accustomed to judging and critiquing the
performances of professional actors. Audiences refashioned the texts to
suit their own cultural values, often acting as participants in the action
rather than bystanders. Their role as "the final arbiters of cultural meaning"
was typically expressed through applauding, hissing, or direct participation
in the stage action.
7
On Christmas 1832, for instance, at a performance
7
Bruce A. McConachie, "Metamora's Revenge," in S. E. Wilmer, ed., Native
American Perjom1ance and Representation (fuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 195.
For more on the "local color" dramas in which audiences regularly took an active role, see
FrREBOYS AND Bu RNING THEATRES 9
Shakespeare, they were also accustomed to rioting as a form of political
expression. Bruce McConachie writes that riots in preindustrial America
were an acceptable form of collective action in which "the elite granted the
mob a 'kind of temporary license' ... to protest a wrong that most citizens
of the town agreed was unjust, but which remained, for whatever reason,
beyond the reach of the law."
12
Theatre riots, in particular, had been a
robust part of both English and American culture since the eighteenth
century. Audiences rioted for a host of reasons, protesting everything from
rising ticket prices to nationalist fervor, and they "notoriously resented"
any suggestion that they might be in violation of the riot acts.
13
In 1849,
however, the tide was beginning to change. Audiences were being offered
increasingly specialized forms of theatrical entertainment that helped
segregate them from each other, and riotous behavior was becoming less
acceptable in the new era of the Shakespearean text as "legitimate" cultural
capital.
14
Around 1850, producers of theatrical entertainment began
deleting the farces that usually filled out the second half of an evening
of Shakespeare and eliminating from the printed program the standard
warnings about the enforcement of decorum. Such admonishments
were no longer necessary, since potential troublemakers had been driven
elsewhere, leading to a decline in the overall number of Shakespearean
performances offered to the public.
15
At the same time, producers of live
entertainment in New York and elsewhere were beginning to consolidate
their business practices, making them more streamlined and effi.cient.
16
It was in this atmosphere of increasing discomfort around the idea of
"Shakespeare for the masses" that the Astor Place riot took place; what
made this event different from theatre riots that had preceded it was the
response from city officials and the elites who supported them.
17
H. M.
12
Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society,
1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 151-3. Prior co Astor Place, some
riots were explicitly directed toward "the class distinctions of the rich as a legacy of English
oppression." McConachie, "Metamora's Revenge," 198. See also David Grimsted, "Rioting
in its Jacksonian Setting," The American Historical Review 77, no. 2 (April 1972): 361-97.
13
Alan L. Ackerman, The Portable Theater: Amen'can Literature & the Nineteenth-
Century Stage (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1999), 108. See also Grimsted,
Mewdrama Unveiled, 65-8.
14
The term "legitimate drama" was already in use in 1849; Ranney references
it as one of the main forms of entertainment offered, in addition to I talian Opera, at the
new Astor Place venue. Account, 5.
15
Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrmv, 28, 33-4.
16
Ibid., 77-8.
17
Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to
1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 762.
FIREBOYS AND BURNING THEATRES 11
of the b'hoys out of the theatre. Ejected onto the streets, the b'hoys began
throwing paving stones through the windows and soon a crowd estimated
at ten to fifteen thousand had gathered, some of them daring the soldiers
to fire. Eventually, the soldiers did shoot, leaving at least 22 dead, most of
them bystanders.
Local reporters were divided in assigning guilt for the violence, but
there was a certain conservative streak in several of the accounts, as well as
in the judicial verdict that justified the state's use of force.
21
One reporter
described the riot as the product of "an element of the community, that,
ungovernable in itself, knowing no law and having nothing at stake, is
always ready to lend itself to mischief, for the mere sake of seeing how
easily it can work mischief."
22
But in fact working-class New Yorkers
had much at stake and many concrete grievances underlying their anger.
McConachie argues that traditional craftsmen, who were being quickly
squeezed out of the labor force through decreasing wages and increasing
specialization, found in the theatre "not only a justification but also a ritual
form through which they might legitimately act out their frustrations." He
connects the workers' desire for an "end to frustration and exploitation"
with the apocalyptic revenge elements of popular melodramas, and sees
in that desire a dialectic relationship between socioeconomic forces and
cultu.ral productionP
Articulating an even more direct link between theatrical and social
action, Heather Nathans argues that "Forrest's Macbeth embodied the
brutal violence that Rynders and his followers understood as the new
reality of antebellum American politics," and that the riot demonstrates
"the most visible incident of the play being used as a testing ground for
real-life political activism."
24
I am convinced by Nathans's description
21
Macready himself reports the decision of the coroner's inquest: "That the
deceased persons came to their deaths by gun-shot wounds, the guns being fired by the
military, by order of the civil authorities of New York, and that the authorities were
justified, under the existing circumstances, in ordering the military to fire upon the mob;
and we fur ther believe that if a larger number of policemen had been ordered out, the
necessity of a resort to the use of the military might have been avoided." J. C. Trewin,
ed., The Journal of William Charles Macreat!J, 1832-1851 (London: Longmans, 1967), 428-9.
22
Anonymous reporter cited in Moody, The Astor Place Riot, 154.
23
McCooachie, "'The Theatre of the Mob': Apocalyptic Melodrama and
Preindustri.al Riots in Antebellum New York," in Bruce A. McConachie and Daniel
Friedman, eds., Theatre for Working-Class Auditnces in the United States, 1830-1980 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 19. This analysis has been particularly crucial to my own
thinking, because it suggests that the b'hoys' actions were influenced by a wide variety of
modes of theatrical expression.
" Heather S. Nathans, "'Blood Will Have Blood': Violence, Slavery, and Macbeth
in the Antebellum American Imagination," in Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson,
fiREBOYS AND B URNING THEATRES
13
ability to succeed despite the adverse conditions under which he was forced
to perform.
27
Nevertheless, his own account of the 1849 Macbeth betrays
this history of stoic bravado, indicating that he lost control of what was
happening on stage the moment the b'hoys entered the theatre. In arguing
that Macready's Macbeth was uncharacteristically improvisational, I am
attempting to resist the idea that the outcome of his theatrical rivalry with
Forrest was pre-ordained, but I am also working to put the b'hoys on
equal footing with the famous actor as co-creators of the performances
that took place inside the theatre.
Macready left England because he found it difficult to fund serious
Shakespearean theatre there, but by 1849 he was beginning to despise
American playgoers even more than the apathetic British customers he
had left behind. '"Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary," he wrote,
in typically melodramatic fashion, "'to sweeten my imagination' poisoned
with the foetor of this disgusting country."
28
Macready might not have
complained so bitterly about his audiences if he did not have such a
profound understanding of his own reliance on them. Having grown up
the child of a failed theatre manager, he knew the effect of economic
hardship on a family. Some of the most impassioned entries in his journal
in the final years of his career express his gratitude for the relative security
he was able to provide for his wife and children.
29
Forrest, on the other
hand, was not afraid to take public risks with his reputation if he thought it
might boost ticket sales. Forrest also understood the importance of giving
as many people as possible access to his shows: tickets for Macready's
Macbeth were $1 in the parquet, 50 cents in the amphitheatre; Forrest's
performance was 25 cents cheaper for both kinds of seats.
30
As it is a study of violence and murder, Macbeth seems an odd
27
Macready, Journal, 419. Fellow actor Joseph Jefferson reports that "as soon
as Macready entered the theatre he began to assume the character he was going to enact.
He would remain in his dressing-room absorbed with the play; no one was permitted to
enter; his dresser was not allowed to speak to him, but stood outside ready to open the
door just before it was time for the actor to go upon the stage. If the mechanism of the
play remained intact, he became lost in his character and produced grand effects, but if
by some carelessness he was recalled to himself, the chain was broken and he could not
reunite it. He now realized that his acting would be tame, and then his rage knew no
bounds; he would seize the unlucky actor who had 'ruined him,' shake him, throw him
aside, and rushing to his dressing-room fall exhausted upon the sofa." Alan S. Downer, ed.,
The Autobiograpfty of Joseph Jefferson (Cambridge, MA: Har vard University Press, 1964), 35-6.
28
Cited in Moody, Astor Place Riot, 79.
29
" Now if I die, I leave my family 20,000 [pounds], besides my furniture, plate,
prints, etc. Thank God! thank God! thank God!" Macready, Journal, 419.
30
Moody, A stor Place Riot, 93.
fiREBOYS AND B URNING THEATRES
Acted Macbeth in very good style-acted for myself,
not to please these barbarians, several of whom were
laughing at certain passages of the dagger and murder
scenes, but at last became "hushed in grim repose." The
canaille-the brutes! Was called and very fervently but
would not go on. I really despise my audience, and dislike
them too.
34
15
Macready was so distracted by the question of whether his audience
approved of him that he mistook the b'hoys' opening gesture on the night
of 7 May. When the crowd enthusiastically applauded the American actor
playing Macduff (who, in the nineteenth-century acting version of the
text, is given some of Ross's lines), Macready was sure that the clamor
was meant for him.
35
He also misread, at least initially, the audience's
sustained applause upon his entrance, which was not acclamation but an
attempt to shout him down. According to other observers, the b'hoys
literally summoned Macready to the stage through their "tramp" warning,
which was described as "a cacophony of clapping and banging which
signaled their desire to start the show."
36
W K. Northall seeks to capture
the sounds of the "diabolical uproar," recording the escalation of bodies
in motion from "Tramp! Tramp! Rap, rap. Tramp!/ Tramp! Tramp! Rap, rap.
Tramp!" to ''THUMP! THUMP! tramp! tramp! THUMP!" as the energy in
the hall increased.
37
At last, recognizing the "howlings" coming from the
right hand corner of the theatre, Macready "walked forward to address
them," as actors often did in the period, either to thank the audience or
to barter with them. Before he could speak, however, one of the b'hoys
had taken charge of the conversation, hurling a rotten egg at his feet.
Macready responded by pointing it back at the audience and "smil[ing]
with contempt, persisting in [his] endeavor to be heard." Though he
professed a calm state of mind, confronting his adversaries "with perfect
sang-froid and good-humour, reposing in the consciousness of [his] own
truth," he eventually gave up the effort to communicate and went on with
the play-as-dumb-show.
38
This is one of the most aesthetically interesting
34
Macready, journal, 420.
35
Ibid., 108. Macready had hired an American Macduff in an attempt to placate
his rabidly anti-British critics; thus he was willing, at least on some level, to concede to his
audience's desire to see an Englishman murdered by an American.
36
McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 148.
37
W. K. Northall, Bifore and Behind the Curtain: or Fifteen Years' Observations Among
the Theatres of New York (New York: W. F Burgess, 1851), 147, 136.
38
Macready, journal, 423.
FtREBOYS AND BURNING THEATRES 17
just how much Macready was, ironically, enjoying being himself in this
moment, sensing that perhaps he was finally winning. The banquet scene
was almost audible, and by the fifth act he was once again playing before
an audience who could hear him delivering all his lines. "In the very spirit
of resistance," he writes, "I flung my whole soul into every word I uttered,
acting my very best and exciting the audience to a sympathy even with
the glowing words of fiction, whilst these dreadful deeds of real crime
and outrage were roaring at intervals in our ears and rising to madness
all round us."
44
In this recollection of the events, as on the night of the
7'\ Macready's efforts were focused on distinguishing his presentation of
Macbeth from the b'hoys' travesty of decorum. He stood his ground-as
he once did when fellow actor Joseph Jefferson nearly set his wig on fire
due to a slight confusion in the blocking- because that was how he had
rehearsed his part.
45
But the role he was eventually compelled to enact
was a far cry from his carefully studied Macbeth and demonstrates the
influence of the b'hoys on the overall shape of the evening's performance.
By the end of the play, the remaining audience members were
cheering, and when they demanded a curtain call Macready was officially
back in his element: "I went on, and with action earnesdy and most
emphatically expressive of my sympathy with them and my feelings of
gratefulness to them, I quitted the New York stage."
46
For a moment,
his performance was the right one in front of the right audience, and his
communication with them, at least in his own mind, was successful. He
retired to his dressing room with "no feeling of fear or apprehension."
Once there, however, his peace of mind was interrupted (according to his
journal entry) by a number of nameless speakers anxiously asking about
the state of the performance outside the theatre: "Why were not the
military sent for?' 'They were here.' Where? Why did they not act?' 'They
were not here; they were drawn up in the Bowery.' 'Of what use were they
a storm of cheers, groans, hisses, and yells. The whole audience rose, and the greatest
part, who were friendly to Macready, cheered and waved their hats and handkerchiefs; but
when these cheers were spent, the noise had not subsided. A large body in the parguette,
and another in the amphitheatre hissed and groaned, and the contest was kept up until
a placard was displayed on the stage, on which was written-'The friends of order will
remain guiet.' The friends of disorder, however, kept up their noise through the first act."
Ranney, Account, 20.
44
Macready, Journal, 426.
45
"This could have been avoided if he had but moved six inches further up the
stage when he saw me coming; but no, he had never shifted from that spot before, why
should he do so now? I believe if I had singed his very eyebrows he would have stood his
ground." Jefferson, Autobiograp!(y, 37.
46
Macready,Journal, 426.
fiREBOYS AND BURNING THEATRES 19
like aristocrats, roving gang members who were featured prominently
on the popular stage, high-spirited tricksters and low-class thugs. And
despite all of Buntline and Rynder's efforts, the evidence we have of their
participation in the performance of Macready's Macbeth betrays as much
playfulness as it does a desire for a conflagration, perhaps in part because
their identification with the titular character-whom Macready portrayed
as torn by a profound sense of remorse-was necessarily so complicated.
52
One reporter picked up on this idea of the b'hoys as satirists, describing
the riot as "their travesty of Macbeth," just as, in their daily adventures, they
presented a "travesty of 'Uppertendom."'
53
Most of what we know about the b'hoys is shaped by their
reputations as pawns in a broader political battle. We do not have a
record of Buntline and Rynder's intentions for the riot: we know only
that they purchased the tickets for the crowd of b'hoys, and that they
attempted to provoke their righteous anger by linking Macready with an
assault on American freedoms.
54
But there are important precedents for
the riot, including a transcontinental tradition of theatre riots as a form of
audience expression.
55
The provocateurs may also have been attempting
to recreate a series of performances at Tammany Hall, where the b'hoys
were regularly conscripted to "pack" or "paper" the house in support of
a particular political candidate. Peter Buckley makes an extended case for
this connection, arguing that "the popular theatre of the Bowery was an
adjunct to the political stage, not just in the content of the plays themselves,
but in the very act of performance."
56
Likewise, Michael Kaplan suggests
that many of the b'hoys' exploits, both in political venues and outside of
them, can be viewed as "street theatre" in that they often drew curious
spectators.
57
And from a contemporary perspective, Northall remarks
although the b'hoys were a varied lot, "when these discordant materials
are brought to harmonize and act upon any occasion, in a mass, they form
a most effective force, whose power in a riot nothing short of military
discipline can withstand." Northall's prose plays into a kind of logic of
inevitability that portrays the "masses" as an irresistible and inhuman
52
See Brown, Focus on Macbeth, 83.
53
Buckley, "To the Opera House," 296.
54
Historians cite Isaiah Rynders' antagonism toward the new Whig administration
in New York City, and his assistant Ned Buntline's penchant for jingoistic attacks, as
primary motivations for their instigation of the riot. McConachie argues, convincingly, that
they didn't anticipate the militia any more than anyone else did. "Theatre of the Mob," 39.
55
As discussed above.
56
Buckley, "To the Opera House," 44, 68.
57
Kaplan, "World of the B'hoys," 95.
FIREBOYS AND BURNING 'THEATRES 21
less hazardous venues, and there was less mixing of the classes in the
playhouses themselves, but there was still a profound sense of anxiety,
especially given the swelling of urban populations, about the crowds who
might be lurking outside the theatres and concert halls. Accordingly, it was
common for commentators to use imagery that painted the gathering of a
large number of people, especially lower-class people, as a kind of natural
disaster. An editorial in the New York Evening Post in 1834 reads:
In a city like this swarming with countless multitudes
of people easily excited, and difficult to be restrained,
dissension runs like wildfire and impulses leap from
man to man like flashes of lighting. Once set infuriated
multitudes by the ears, and nothing but blood will cool
them.
62
This language was picked up by several commentators on the Astor Place
riot, one of whom described the crowd outside the theatre on 10 May as
"heaving to and fro like the tumultuous waves on the ocean."
63
More than
ten years later, former Mayor Caleb S. Woodhull would justify his use of
force against the rioters using the same tropes. As with "mighty floods and
conflagrations," he writes, "repairing the first break or extinguishing the
first spark is the surest way of avoiding the irremediable evils that must
inevitably otherwise follow."
64
Woodhull's rhetoric demonstrates the beauty
of the natural disaster analogy from the point of view of the defenders
of law and order- it insists on the need for early, forceful intervention
(intervention which might seem excessive in proportion to the threat),
while hinting that even if such precautions are taken, the mob might still
be irrepressible. Thus Woodhull re-enshrines the absolute nature of the
threat even as he outlines the necessary mechanisms for controlling it.
65
If the b'hoys were being demonized as a kind of pernicious force
62
Evening Post, 13 April1834.
63
Scrapbook Volume G, Charles Patrick Daly Papers, New York Publi.c Library,
cited in Shelley Streeby, Ameni:an Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture
(Berkeley: University of Cali.fornia Press, 2002), 150.
64
Caleb S. Woodhull to Peter Erben Jr., 22 March 1861. Miscellaneous
Manuscripts, Astor Place Riot, New York Historical Society. Cited in Kaplan, "World of
the B'hoys," 190.
65
This imagery of conflagration was contrasted to a nationalistic notion of
republi.can law and order, as expressed by Patrick Daly, the judge who convicted the rioters:
"It is only by maintaining the laws, that the li.berty of the individual can be protected. It is
the only safeguard to secure it from popular violence or aristocratic encroachment." Cited
in Moody, Astor Place Riot, 231.
FIREBOYS AND B URNING THEATRES 23
uses to describe the witches in Northall's 1843 Macbeth the
best term for the particular kind of abjection being expressed in these
accounts. And indeed, it is possible that the man with the glass was taking
a cue from the description of one of the spirits raised by the rag-picker
ghouls in that same text: ''Another, too, who bears a glass! I'm thinking I
He's quite a jolly ghost, and has been drinking."
70
This line of speculation
re-figures the b'hoys as tricksters rather than thugs, making them the
descendants of the devil-hermit in the lower-left hand tondo of Bosch's
"Seven Deadly Sins" (c. 1480), who holds up a circular looking-glass to a
naked couple under the heading "superbia" (pride).
The witches, long dismissed as only marginally Shakespearean by
critics from Coleridge onward, were in many ways the ideal characters
for the b'hoys to appropriate for their own performances.
71
The witches'
prophecies dominate the action of the play and their liminal status,
hovering between human and spirit, man and woman, complicates the
other characters' performance of their political ambitions. The fantastical
vocabulary of the Second Witch's first speech-"When the hurly-burly's
done I When the batde's lost and won" (1.1.3-4)-might also have been
appealing. The O:>iford English Dictionary entry on "hurly burly" references
several examples in which the word is conflated with political insurrection,
but always with the sense of a chaotic rather than a carefully planned
military action.
72
By linking the b'hoys to the play's own macabre aesthetic, I am
working to extricate them from the narrative of absolute causality in
which they function mainly as signifiers of their own impending cultural
demise. Yes, they were economically disempowered by the elites whom
they leered at through their oversized glasses. But the riot was not just
an assault on the property owned and managed by those upper class
spectators. It was an assertion of the b'hoys' right to create "hurly burly"
in order to "scour" the stage of its pretensions, if only temporarily. The
performances accomplished by the b'hoys may not have been precisely
what Bundine and Rynders anticipated when they imagined that the mere
massing of bodies-a tactic they learned from various Tammany Hall
meetings- would drive Macready from the stage. Those performances
70
Northall, Macbeth Travestie, 28.
71
Kenneth Muir, ed., Macbeth (London: Routledge, 1994), 3.
72
Definition A.a. reads: "Commotion, tumult, strife, uproar, turmoil, confusion.
(Formerly a more dignified word than now)." Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. " hurly-
burly," accessed 15 January 2012, www.oed.com. In his edition of the play, Nicholas
Brooke summarizes the connotation as "commotion, confusion-originally used of noble
fighting, but in the sixteenth century commonly confined to the confusion of civil war."
The Tragedy of Macbeth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 95.
fJREBOYS AND BURNING THEATRES 25
The narrative was no longer in his control-if it ever had been.
The natural impulse of commentators from the nineteenth
century onward has been to try to discover the organizing logic that
eluded the self-absorbed Macready. As the competition between the two
actors was heating up in November of 1848, the Public Ledger proclaimed
that "somebody should dramatize this great feud immediately."
75
And
indeed subsequent accounts of the riot reinscribe this kind of slippage,
self-consciously highlighting the connections between theatre and politics.
A Home Journal article from 12 May, for instance, compares the rivalry
between '"the B'hoys' of New York' and the 'Upper Ten"' to that of "the
'White and Red Roses of York and Lancaster,"' referring to the clashing
nobles made famous by Shakespeare's history plays.
76
Other reporters
used the opportunity to deplore the patterns of class difference that were
becoming more visible in the United States. The Public Ledger wrote that
the riot introduced "a feeling to which this community has hitherto been
a stranger-an opposition of classes-the rich and the poor, white kids
and no kids at all."
77
But the very fact that journalists were already using
stock phrases like "Upper Ten" to refer to Macready's backers belies the
claim that class difference was somehow a new phenomenon. Just five
months after the riot, an anonymous "Working Man" writing in the Clarion
presented an already well-formed analysis of conditions in the city as a
kind of warfare "for the purpose of showing to the world that where the
interests of the working classes of republican America clashed with those
of Monopolists and Capitalists, the former must give way." "The massacre
of the people," Working Man continues, "is but one step, and a long one,
too, toward the social and political supremacy of the rich and aristocratic
over the working and poorer classes."
78
Despite their differing ideological positions, the flurry of
commentaries that emerged immediately after the riot are intriguing
precisely because they are so consistent about the basic causes of both
the riots and their suppression. This consistency, in turn, cements the
narrative of the increasing disempowerment of the populace, giving the
riot "the status of teleological inevitability."
79
Similarly, the accounts of
scholars such as Levine and Reed-which make otherwise compelling
arguments for the rationale behind the city government's unusually
75
"Acror's Quarrels," Public Ledger, 23 November 1848.
76
Home journal, 12 May 1849.
77
Public Ledger, 16 May 1849.
78
Clarion, 6 October 1849.
79
Ackerman, Portable Theater, 101-3.
jOURNAL Of A MERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 25, NO. 1 (WINTER 2013)
SIGNIFYING IN THE WILDERNESS: ALICE CHILDRESS AND THE
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT
cfrancis blackchild
"Finally, I would like to say, today we hear so
much about the new Negro. As though we
never breathed a protest until a few years ago."
- Alice Childress
1
Introduction
African-American playwright and activist Alice Childress's commitment
to social justice found expression in her plays that challenged racism,
sexism, and classism in innovative ways. Her plays Florence
2
and Trouble In
Mind
3
exposed the self-delusion and underlying racist beliefs that belied
the actions of would-be liberals. Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black
and White
4
challenged stereotypes about love across racial lines, while
Wine in the Wilderness
5
critiqued the contentious, contemporary intra-racial
dynamics across class and gender lines.
Wine in the Wilderness served as the inaugural production of "On
Being Black," a Ford Foundation-sponsored series on Public Broadcasting
Service (PBS) television stations. Its broadcast in 1969 came in the midst
of a Black social revolution when Black artists, intellectuals, and activists
were forging a "new" Black cultural and political identity. Yet during this
period of increased Black activism, Wine's setting during the 1964 Harlem
1
Alice Childress, "The Negro Woman in American Literature," Freedomwtgs 6,
no. 1 (1966): 19.
2
Florence, directed by Childress, was produced at the American Negro Theatre
(ANT) in 1949.
3
Trouble In Mind was produced off-Broadway at the Greenwich Mews in 1956.
4
Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White was first presented at the
University of Michigan in 1966 and opened at the Public Theatre in New York City in
1971.
5
Wine in the Wilderness was broadcast nationally by WGBH in Boston 4 March,
1969. Several television stations in the South opted out of the broadcast.
S!GN!FYlNG lN THE WILDERNESS
29
this study, I limit my research to biographical information and primary
documents copyrighted before the time of Wine's 1969 broadcast when
discussing the content of the play. This restriction ensures that I use
sources that Childress would reasonably have had access to during the
creation of Wine. Secondary documents used to support my analysis are
not restricted to that copyright date.
Response to Childress's work
A brief overview of Childress's life and career increases our understanding
of the socio-political nature of her work. Alice Childress was born on 12
October 1920, in Charleston, South Carolina, and died of cancer in New
York City, 14 August 1994.
9
At nine years of age, she moved from South
Carolina to Harlem, New York, to live with her grandmother. The deaths
of her working-class mother and grandmother left her without financial
resources, forcing her to find a job-thereby ending her secondary
education before she earned a high school diploma.
10
During her lifetime
she worked as a photo-retoucher, insurance agent, assistant machinist, and
salesperson.
11
These experiences solidified her already strong bond with the
working-class and were reflected in her work throughout her lifetime. In
Black Women Writers (19 54-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Childress explained
her commitment to documenting the lives of working-class people:
My writing attempts to interpret the "ordinary'' because
they are not ordinary. Each human is uniquely different
.... I concentrate on portraying have-nots in a have society,
those seldom singled out by mass media, except as source
material for derogatory humor and/ or condescending
clinical, social analysis.
12
True to her stated commitment, Childress's protagonists were often
"ordinary'' working-class women fighting a valiant batde to live with
9
Chilruess's birth year is disputed. It is listed as 1916 and 1920.
10
Olga Dugan, "Telling the Truth: Alice Chilruess as Theorist and Playwright,"
Journal of Negro History 81 (Winter 1996): 124.
11
Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, "Alice Chilruess," in Wines in the Wilderness: Plays
f?y Afncan American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Eli zabeth Brown-
Guillory (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 98.
12
Mari Evans, Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Cn"tical Evaluation (Garden
City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 111.
SIGNIIYlNG IN THE WILDERNESS 31
e.g. rituals
16
or the avant-garde structures favored by BAM, rendered
invisible political content that did not adhere to BAM's precepts.
Genevieve Fabre's 1983 study, Drumbeats Masks and Metaphor:
Contemporary Afro-American Theatre, examines the works of African-
American theatre practitioners during the sixties and seventies, the period
when Childress was most prolific as a playwright. In Drumbeats Fabre
divided the work of these practitioners into two categories, "militant
theatre" and "theatre of experience." Below she explicates a distinction
between the two categories:
At first a shout of anger and challenge, the militant
theatre then became an inspired, almost visionary work.
It prophesies the advent of a Black nation, the coming
of an era when Blacks will be creative and free.
In contrast to the didactic speech of the militant
theatre which demonstrates and prescribes action, a
"theatre of experience" develops out of a dialogue in
the language of blacks about their own experiences.
17
Unsurprisingly, Fabre places the work of Amiri Baraka, arguably the artist-
activist most readily identified with BAM, within the scope of militant
theatre. Childress's works are categorized as belonging under the umbrella
of theatre of experience. By categorizing Childress's plays as theatre of
experience, however, Fabre does not mean to exclude Childress's works
from political consideration. She explains:
Militant theatre and theatre of experience should not
be seen as successive stages in the development of
black drama- . . . . However, even if one form did
dominate a period, both types of theatre coexisted
throughout. . . . They are not mutually exclusive, but
complementary .... The two developments nevertheless
reveal two very distinct perspectives when one
considers the place each gives to the theatrical act. One
16
"The Revolutionary Theatre," Baraka's 1964 essay commissioned by The
New York Times but refused for publication by its editors, identifies the use of ritual as
one aspect of the revolutionary theatre, "It must isolate the ritual and historical cycles of
reality." Ritual was integral to many of Baraka's plays, particularly Slave Ship, which Larry
Neal characterized as "ritualized history," in his essay "The Black Arts Movement."
17
Genevieve Fabre, Drumbeats Masks and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American
Theatre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 3.
SIGNIFYING IN THE WILDERNESS 33
Childress's artistic integrity precluded creating works that would
bring her fame by tailoring them to suit the taste of the time. I n her
essay ''A Candle in a Gale Wind," she expresses her process of working
outside of imposed limitations to express the truth: "I try to bend my
writing form to most truthfully express content, to move beyond the
either/ or of 'artistic' and politically imposed limitations."
21
Her refusal to
compromise her sense of truth in pursuit of success stymied production
opportunities for Trouble in Mind and Wedding Band.
22
Because she has not
been categorized within a particular school or movement of theatre, her
work is often overlooked. Despite having worked as a playwright, novelist,
actor, director, activist, and cultural critic, as well as earning an Obie
award, a Tony nomination, an American Library Association Best Young
Adult Book of 1975, a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and a Jane Addams
Award for young adult novels, Childress once described herself as "one
of the best known unknown persons."
23
It can be argued that Childress's
long and diverse career makes it difficult to pigeonhole her works. Soyica
Diggs Colbert, in ''A Pedagogical Approach to Understanding Rioting as
Revolutionary Action in Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness," suggests
historians' inability to position Childress's work has resulted in her being
left out of the BAM canon.
24
The consequence of being outside of an
obvious category is that, when courses in dramatic literature are taught,
Childress's work is often not considered for inclusion.
Thankfully, with the rise of postmodero feminist criticism in the
1980s, feminist scholars began explicating the political nature of Childress's
21
Alice Childress, "A Candle in a Gale Wind," in Black Women Writers (1950-1980)
A Cn.tical Evalualzon, ed. Mari Evans (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press Doubleday, 1984),
114.
22
Childress changed the ending of Trouble in Mind for its off-Broadway
production at the Greenwich Mews. She was unhappy with the result and refused to
change her plays to satisfy commercial interests again. In her 1999 interview with Don
Evans, "Alice: Conversations with Alice Childress," published in the premier issue of
Obsidian III, she explained that although Trouble was optioned for Broadway several times,
each optioning required a rewrite to include a sympathetic white character, and she would
not do that just to mount a Broadway production.
23
Trudier Harris, ''ll..l.ice Childress," in Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists
and Prose Wnlers, ed. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris (Detroit, MI: Gale Research
Company, 1985), 68.
24
Soyica Diggs Colbert, "A Pedagogical Approach to Understanding Rioting as
Revolutionary Action in Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness," Theatre Topics 19, no. 1
(2009): 77.
SIGNIFYING lN THE WtLOERNfSS 35
to the spiritual and cultural needs of Black people.
28
Addison Gayle's introduction to The Black Aesthetic identifies the
criteria by which Black artists' work must be judged. He explains that what
is important in works of art is not the beauty "of a melody, a play, a
poem, or a novel, but how much more beautiful has the poem, melody,
play or novel made the life of a single black man?"
29
In his October 1967
talk to the Organization of Black American Culture, Ron Karenga laid
out more succinctly his principle of art's necessary functionality: "Black
Art must be for the people, by the people and from the people. That
is to say, it must be functional, collective and committing .... Black art
initiates, supports and promotes change."
30
In his essay "Black Cultural
Nationalism," Karenga insists on the importance politics must play in art,
arguing that although artistic consideration is important in judging art,
in the Black Aesthetic Movement, social criteria, the usefulness of art, is
more important.
31
Karenga's call for art "for the people, by the people and
from the people" echoed the manifestoes of the Crisis Guild of Writers
and Artists (KRIGWA) . While previous champions of Black cultural
expressions, including WE.B. Du Bois,
32
advocated for political content
in art, Karenga's call diverged from previous manifestoes issued by Black
theatre groups, such as KRIGWA and the American Negro Theatre, with
his insistence that politics should take precedence over art.
BAM's Silence on Gender Issues
BAM, despite its concern with improving the lives of Black people,
was mostly silent on gender issues.
33
Barbara Christian's evaluation of
BAM in her essay, "The Race for Theory," posits that, when speaking
28
Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," 272.
29
Addison Gayle Jr., "Introduction," in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr.
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1971), xxiii.
30
James Cunningham, "Critique: Ron Karenga and Black Cultural Nationalism,"
Black World/Negro Digest4 Qanuary 1968): 76.
31
Ron Karenga, "Black Cultural Nationalism," in The Black A esthetic, ed. Addison
Gayle Jr. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1971), 33.
32
Although Du Bois, in his essay "Criteria for Negro Art," stated "I do not
care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda," he did not advocate that the
propagandistic elements take precedence over artistic value.
33
Olga Barrios, "From Seeking One's Voice to Uttering the Scream: The
Pioneering Journey of African American Women's Playwrights Through the 1960s and
1970s," African American Review 37 (Winter 2003): 612.
SIGNIFYING IN THE WTLDERN.ESS 37
Report, was released in March 1965. The report concluded that problems
rooted in slavery and practices that forced the Negro community into
a matriarchal structure had destabilized the Negro family and were
contributing to the deterioration of the community. The section ''A Tangle
of Pathology'' explicates the situation.
There is, presumably, no special reason why a society
in which males are dominant in family relationships is
to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However,
it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be
operating on one principle, while the great majority of
the population, and the one with the most advantages
to begin with, is operating on another. This is the
present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which
presumes male leadership in private and public affairs.
The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership
and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro
American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a
distinct disadvantage.
38
Moynihan's report did not hold African-American women responsible
for the misalignment of power dynamics between the African-American
community and the dominant culture. However, by attributing the
community's social and economic disadvantage to a misaligned matriarchal
power structure, he opened the gates for attacks on Black women for
their perceived betrayal. The Moynihan Report reverberated through the
African-American community, and some Black Arts theorists felt a need
to realign the power dynamics in the Black community or, at least, how
these dynamics were presented in the arts. In his essay "The Black Arts
Movement," Neal opined on the destructive behavior of Black women
towards Black men:
In Afro-American literature of prev10us decades the
strong Black mother was the object of awe and respect.
But in the new literature her status is ambivalent and
laced with tension. Historically, Afro-American women
have had to be the economic mainstays of the family.
38
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Fami(y: The Case for National Action.
http:/ / www.dol.gov / oasam/ programs/history /webid-meynihan.htrn#. UPDMN_L4aC8
(accessed 11 Jan. 2013).
SIGNIFYING IN THE WILDERNESS 39
was elaborating on how African-American women used their imagined
matriarchal power.
Like many Black artists, Childress was aware of the negative
perception of matriarchy in the Black community following the Moynihan
Report. Her 1966 Freedomwqys essay, "The Negro Woman in American
Literature," addresses the circumstances of Black women's lives and their
struggle to maintain the family:
Facing the world alone makes a woman strong. The
emancipated Negro woman of America did the only
thing she could do. She earned a pittance by washing,
ironing, cooking, cleaning, and picking cotton. She
helped her man, and if she often stood in the front line,
it was to shield him from a mob of men organized and
dedicated to bring about his total destruction.
4
I
Childress believed blaming Black women for Black men's societal
problems was a convenient and misleading conclusion.
42
Her essay details
legislation that was put in place to the detriment of Black women and
families. The essay concludes that faulting "Black matriarchy" was blaming
Black women for responding to circumstances beyond their control and
punishing them for things that were outside of their power. Wine in the
Wilderness can be read as the creative expression of Childress's defense
of Black women against societal accusations of causing socioeconomic
deterioration through Black matriarchy.
Wine in the Wilderness
Set on a summer night during the 1964 Harlem riots, Wine in the Wilderness
opens on the Harlem tenement apartment of Bill Jameson, the male
protagonist, as the riot draws to a close outside. I t is clear that Bill is
not a typical tenement dweller. His education and middle-class taste are
apparent in his collection of African-American history books and various
ethnic inspired furnishings: Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, West Indian, and
most importantly, African. Bill is interrupted by his "friend" Oldtimer, a
down-and-out neighborhood regular, who is looking for a place to stash
gleanings he has gathered in the wake of the riot. After some resistance,
Bill agrees to hold Old timer's loot. Bill, an artist, explains his latest series of
41
Alice Childress, "The Negro Woman in American Literature," Freedomwqys 6
(Winter 1966): 19.
42
Ibid.
SIGNIFYING IN THE WILDERNESS 41
An examination of Bill through the lens of the Black Arts/
Black Aesthetic Movement forwards the theory of Childress signifying
on the movement's history and conventions. Bill is a member of the Black
intellectual/ artistic class who, following the edict of BAM, is using art
"to transform the American Negro into the African American."
44
Bill's
biography parallels the background of Baraka, the activist-artist most
closely identified with the Black Arts Movement. These parallels can be
seen as the first step in signifying-repetition. Both men are in their early
thirties. Bill is 34, and Baraka was 30 in 1964, when the play is set, and
35 at the time of Wine's initial broadcast. Both men come from middle-
class backgrounds that enabled them to attend college. Baraka's father,
Colt LeRoy Jones, was a postal supervisor, and his mother was a social
worker.
45
Bill explains that "everybody in my family worked at the Post
Office."
46
Despite having other options, both Baraka and Bill moved to
Harlem- before gentrification was in vogue-to live and create art in a
Black environment. Like Baraka, Bill is divorced; and, although the play
is silent on the identity of Bill's ex-wife, the audience discovers that he
was previously romantically and creatively involved with a white woman
who served as his model. This information also parallels Baraka's life.
Baraka's first wife, Hettie Jones nee Cohen, was a white Jewish poet with
whom he co-edited Yugen, an avant-garde literary magazine. Baraka was
the recipient of the 1965 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Fellowship as well as a grant in 1965 with which he funded the Black
Arts Repertory Theatre. Although the audience is not privy to the specific
funding sources that Bill has access to, the play suggests that they might be
similar to Baraka's. Old timer mentions that "My day we didn't have all this
grants and scholarship like now,"
47
leaving the impression that Bill has had
the benefits that Oldtimer missed. Also, Bill expects to win a monetary
prize for his art.
48
This suggests that, like Baraka, he is an artist of enough
renown to make a living on grants, fellowships, and prizes. As Black male
artists of the period, the biographical parallels between Bill and Baraka
are not unique to them. Nonetheless, it is interesting that almost all the
biographical information the audience learns about Bill is mirrored in
"" Gayle, "Introduction," xxiii.
45
This information has been documented in several sources, including Poet.
org, The Academy of American Poet website which can be accessed from a link on Amiri
Baraka's website.
46
Childress, "Wine in the Wilderness," 358.
47
Ibid., 347.
48
Ibid., 348.
SIGNIFYING IN THE WILDERNESS 43
manner that is more easily relatable to an audience than words on the page
and allows her to subvert his choices within the audience's subconscious.
Bill's use of a female triptych as his means of teaching "messed-up
chicks" how to be better Black women resonates outside of the character's
awareness. Bill's triptych signifies on the classic trinity of goddesses
representing stages of womanhood: maiden- mother or nymph--crone,
and corresponds to the Greek goddesses, Core or Persephone, Demeter,
and Hecate. These goddesses are manifestations of stages in a woman's life
cycle: pre-sexual, sexual, and post-menopausal. As the play begins, Bill has
already painted the innocent "pre-sexual" black girl. His image of "Mother
Africa" represents womanhood brimming with sexual possibilities. The
painting that is meant to complete the triptych, which Bill identifies as a
"messed-up chick," holds the place in the trinity traditionally associated
with the crone/wise-woman. Like the crone, the "messed-up chick" is
seen as beneath interest, sexual or otherwise, and therefore of little value.
In Wine, Tommy, the woman considered for the position of "messed-up
chick," shares the crone's duality, and on reconsideration, will prove more
valuable than first impressions may indicate.
The audience is then introduced to "Tommy," Tomorrow Marie,
Wine's female protagonist. Tommy has been brought as an "offering" to
Bill as the perfect model for the "Lost Woman" panel of his triptych by
his friends Cynthia, a social worker-a profession she shares with Baraka's
mother- and Sonny-Man, a writer. Sonny-Man, like Bill, believes in the
revolution and the artist's place in it:
BILL: The revolution is here. Whatta you do with her?
You paint her?
SONNY-MAN: You write her ... you write the revolution
into a novel nine hundred pages long.
53
Tommy is different from this trio of formally educated Black folks. She is
poor, relatively unschooled, unsophisticated in her language, and direct in
expressing her desires. Moreover, Tommy is at a disadvantage: everyone
else knows she is there to be the model of Black womanhood, which is
"as close to the bottom as you can get without cracking up."
54
Tommy,
however, thinks that she is being introduced as a possible romantic partner
for Bill, and she responds as such. Therein lies the conflict of the play.
Wine in the Wilderness can be satisfactorily read as a romance
53
Childress, "Wine in the Wilderness," 354.
54
Ibid., 348.
SIGNIFYING IN THE WILDERNESS
subservient role:
Once, a long time ago, a poet named Omar told us what
a paradise life would be if a man had a loaf of bread,
a jug of wine and . . . a woman singing to him in the
wilderness. She is the woman, she is the bread, she is
the wine, she is the singing. This Abyssinian maiden is
paradise, ... perfect Black womanhood.
58
45
Bill's ideal of Black female perfection lacks agency and autonomy. She
is as much a possession of the poet as his bread and wine. She does not
eat or drink or in any way satisfy her own needs. Instead, her role is to
serve the poet by singing, a function that mirrors Bill's expectation that
Tommy will serve him by posing. In Bill's worldview, women exist for
men's use and comfort; beyond that, they have little value. When Oldtimer
suggests he and Bill stomp the "Lost Woman" to death when she arrives,
Bill rejects the idea: "Not till after I paint her. Gonna put her right here
on this canvas."
59
Bill's reason for rejecting Oldtimer's idea is not linked
to Tommy's humanity, but to his own needs. For the artist-liberator, the
"messed-up chick" has no value beyond the use he can make of her.
It is not always easy to know in Wine exactly which form of
devaluing bias, sexism, or classism is at work. Nevertheless, it is clear that
Bill and Sonny-Man, two artists in the BAM mode, give little consideration
to the needs of women. Sonny-Man presents Tommy to Bill like a pet
cat presenting a dead bird to its owner, showing little consideration
or interest in her feelings. Instead, Sonny-Man is focused on receiving
acknowledgment from Bill. On arrival, Sonny-Man can hardly wait to give
Bill his prize. He bangs on Bill's door, demanding that Bill "Open up!
Open up! Sonny-Man and company."
60
Sonny-Man neglects to identify
the women who are with him; instead, he lumps his wife, Cynthia, and
Tommy both in the category of "company." He then pushes the door
open, barely giving Bill time to undo the lock.
61
Once in the apartment,
he does not introduce Tommy to Bill, but leaves the social niceties to
Cynthia. Sonny-Man stands behind Tommy, where she cannot see him,
and points down at her to draw Bill's attention before exclaiming ''Yes,
53
Childress, "Wine in the Wilderness," 347.
59
Ibid., 348.
60
Ibid., 349.
6
' Ibid.
SIGNIFYING IN THE WILDERNESS
CYNTHIA: You have to let the Black man have his
manhood again. You have to give it back Tommy.
TOMMY: I didn't take it from him, how I'm gonna give
it back?
66
47
Bill's critique of the African-American woman and matriarchy is less
generous. After he gives an impromptu lecture on African-American
history, Tommy asks Bill to teach her more. Bill's response is surprising,
considering his role as artist-liberator. ''Aw, baby, why torment yourself?
Trouble with our women, . . . they all want to be great brains. Leave
something for a man to do."
67
Bill's critique of Black women in general,
and Tommy in particular, continues throughout the scene:
The Matriarchy gotta go. Yall throw them suppers
together, keep your husband happy, raise kids. . . .
Another thing ... our women don't know a damn thing
bout bein' feminine. Give in sometime. It won't kill you
.... You too damn opinionated.
68
Like Sonny-Man's behavior, Bill's response to Tommy, coupled with his
description of how his triptych is meant to function, suggests that, for
him, the revolution is not meant to liberate women, or teach them to think
critically. Instead its function is to inculcate them in ways of behaving
appropriately, that is in a supporting role for Black men, starting with
him: "Forget yourself sometime, sugar. On that canvas you'll be givin' and
givin' and givin' .... That's where you can do your thing best."
69
Cynthia's critique of Tommy's strength, along with Bill's
condemnation of matriarchy and his practice of relegating women to
serving roles, correlates with Larry Neal's views of matriarchy expressed
in his essay, "The Black Arts Movement." Childress's essay in Freedomwa.ys
addressed the charges brought against Black women, and Cynthia's lines
read like a paraphrase of Childress's essay:
Today, the negro woman's faults are sometimes pointed
out, that she is too militant, so domineering, so aggressive,
with son, husband and brother, that it is one of the chief
66
Childress, "Wine in the Wilderness," 353.
67
Ibid., 355.
68
Ibid., 355-6.
69
Ibid., 355.
S IGNIFYING IN THE W ILDERNESS
49
Tommy's outward transformation allows Bill to hear her and see her as
she is. Despite his best efforts, the "Lost Woman" myth dissolves before
his eyes, and he is faced with the reality, Tommy, a real woman with a life
history and desires, and he finds himself attracted to her. Bill's speech to
Tommy shows that his appreciation of Black women has moved away
from the abstraction of "thighs of mahogany" and "speech that pour
forth sparkling clear as the waters of Victoria Falls,"
74
to a concrete and
attainable reality. Without her worn, riot-ravaged garments, Bill is able to
appreciate Tommy for who she is: "I'm glad you're here. Black is beautiful,
you're beautiful, A.M.E, Elks, pink roses, bush flowers, ... blooming out
of the slavery of Sweetwater Springs, Virginia."
75
However, his impulse
to embrace this new reality is disrupted when his original intentions are
revealed to Tommy by Oldtimer.
It is at this point the play directly addresses the disconnect on the
part of both artists, Bill and Sonny-Man, from the people they wish to
liberate with their art.
Wine in the Wilderness on Class
Despite leaving his parents' house in Jamaica, Long Island, to live with
Black folks up in Harlem, Bill has made little effort to get to know his
neighbors as individuals. Of the neighborhood people, he seems to have
the most evolved relationship with Oldtimer, yet he knows very little about
the man as an individual, not even his name. He only learns Oldtimer's
name after Tommy takes the time to individualize Oldtimer by asking
Oldtimer what it is. The only time both men bond and approach a sense
of being equals is over their mutual delight in explicating the nature of
the "Lost Woman's" downtrodden reality. Even in the middle of the civil
disturbance, Bill, the artist-liberator, makes no attempt to connect with his
Harlem neighbors; instead he remains isolated throughout until Oldtimer
visits. Despite hearing his neighbor's distress over the chaos of the riot,
Bill makes no attempt to get involved: rather he dismisses her as "another
messed-up chick," as if her concerns are irrational.
76
The only people he
connects with are Sonny-Man and Cynthia, people with economic and
educational backgrounds similar to his own.
Even with their Harlem addresses, it is evident that the members
of this trio are not neighborhood people. After discovering the true reason
74
Childress, "Wine in the Wilderness," 348.
75
Ibid., 358.
76
Ibid., 348.
SIGNIFYING IN THE WILDERNESS
TOJ\1MY: No need to cry, it's sad enough. They hollerin'
whitey, whitey ... but who they burn out? Me.
BILL: The brothers and sisters are tired, weary of the
endless get-no-where struggle.
TOJ\1MY: I'm standin' there in the bar ... tellin' it like it
is ... next thing I know they talkin' bout bringin' me to
meet you.
81
51
Here is a stark example of clashing worldviews regarding events on the
street. For Tommy, who was caught in a conflagration that "burnt her
out," there is chaos and destruction. While Bill, who suffers no damage
from the events and remains dispassionately disengaged, sees brothers and
sisters engaged in political action. A more disturbing disconnect is how
Sonny-Man experienced Tommy when they first met. Tommy's telling the
story of her troubles was a jokefest for Sonny-Man. Throughout the play
the men have difficulty seeing Tommy beyond their conception of her
class. Every interaction is viewed through a lens focused on her status as a
broken-down nothing. Bill's interpretation of her response to his offer of
drinks is another example of seeing her through a warped lens. Bill offers
liquor, wine, or beer. Tommy bypasses both the liquor and beer and settles
on wme:
TOJ\1MY: I'll take the wine.
BILL: Yeah, I knew it.
TOJ\1MY: Don't wanta start nothin' I can't keep up.
(OLDTIMER slaps his thigh with pleasure)
BILL: That's all right, baby, you just a wine-o.
TOJ\1MY: You the one that's got the wine, not me.
BILL: I use it for cookin'.
TOJ\1MY: You like to get loaded while you cook?
BILL: Oh, baby, you too much.
82
This scene offers two class markers: The audience learns that Tommy's
life is not one that exposes her to cooking wine as Bill's does; second the
audience sees Bill work to confirm his image of Tommy as a "messed-up
chick." He offers only alcoholic beverages, and Bill takes Tommy's choice
of wine as a confirmation of his mental picture of her as, "a wine-o." Yet
there is a sense that any choice Tommy makes at this point, will be seen as
proof of her "messed-up chick" status.
81
Childress, "Wine in the Wilderness," 350.
82
Ibid., 349.
SIGNifYING IN THE WILDERNESS 53
the works of more overtly political playwrights experimenting with form
and structure, Childress did not allow this lack of attention to distract
her from her mission of rendering working-class African Americans
truthfully on stage. As reported in Plqywrights of Color, Childress "remained
clear about her personal objectives. Radical experiments with form and
content did not interest her nearly so much as telling stories and crafting
characters."
84
Alice Childress is a complex playwright whose works function on
many levels. She is a well-trained craftsman; and, as a result, her work is
satisfying as entertaining theatre. Yet her essays and other writings indicate
that she is deeply committed to social justice, and the subject matter of
her essays frequently echoes the content of her plays. Therefore, it is
reasonable to interpret her works as being in dialogue with the politics
and culture of their time. However, her plays are rarely fully explicated
in regard to their political content or cultural dialogue. Examining
Childress's plays through the lenses of artistic excellence, political content,
and sociocultural context offers an interpretation that allows for a richer
reading than that which her plays have previously received. As Childress
herself wrote, "Finally, I would like to say, today we hear so much about
the new Negro, as though we never breathed a protest until a few years
ago."
85
Childress's first play, Florence, was a protest against the "arrogance
of good intentions" by liberals who presumed to know the conditions of
African-American lives better than the people who live those conditions.
Indeed, Childress had been breathing protesting breaths long before the
birth of the Black Arts Movement, and never let up throughout her career.
84
Swanson and Murray, Playwrights of Color, 167.
85
Childress, "The Negro Woman in American Literature," 19.
JOURNAL OF AMERJ CAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 25, NO. 1 (WINTER 2013)
"RoMANTic GRANDEUR AND ExTRAVAGANT FoLLY": PERFORMING
JoHN ANDRE'S DEMISE AND HIS PHILADELPHIA MESCHIANZA
Raymond A. Saraceni
Prelude: Theatre and Occupation
Two weeks after Washington's defeat at the Batde of Brandywine, some
2,500 British troops, led by the 16th Queen's Light Dragoons, marched into
Philadelphia, parading in resplendent display down Second Street toward
Chestnut; here the army turned sharply to the right and halted five blocks
westward, before the very statehouse where American independence had
been proclaimed just fourteen months earlier. "Well, here are the English
in earnest," wrote the young Elizabeth Drinker in her diary.
1
British
forces under the command of General Howe were to hold the city for
some nine months-from September of 1777 until June of 1778-while
Washington's poorly-supplied Continental troops limped through the
winter and early spring at Valley Forge.
What is often forgotten, however, is that the British forces came
not only "in earnest" but also to "play" upon the Philadelphia stage. One
of the first actions undertaken by the occupiers was to spruce up the
Southwark Theatre on South Street as well as to appoint a treasurer for the
theatre, so that the presentation of plays might begin as soon as possible.
During the period of the occupation, over sixteen different plays were
staged at the Southwark; these were amateur entertainments starring the
British officers themselves, along with a few local young ladies whose
families found it politically undesirable or practically difficult to abandon
Philadelphia upon the arrival of Howe's army. The ostensible reason for
such apparent frivolity was to raise funds for the relief of the widows and
orphans of the British army; no doubt there were other motives as well.
Indeed, we might reasonably interpret those plays produced
by Howe and his officers as a form of political theatre. In 1774, just
a few months prior to the events at Lexington and Concord, the
Continental Congress had met in Philadelphia and had urged the state
governments to explicidy proscribe "every species of extravagance and
dissipation, [including the] exhibition of shews, plays and other expensive
1
The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, ed. Elaine F. Crane (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1991), 1:235.
"ROMANTIC GRANDEUR AND ExTRAVAGANT fOLLY" 57
city itself as a backdrop and its own citizens as prominent actors. Known
as the Meschianza (from an Italian word for "mixing" or "mingling"), this
elaborate spectacle was part fanciful evocation of a chivalric British past,
and part military triumph intended tore-inscribe republican Philadelphia
as a city that belonged to the Crown in perpetuity, regardless of the
shifting fortunes of war. At the same time, on the tactical level, the
Meschianza served also as an attempt to burnish the military reputation and
credibility of General Sir William Howe himself. Just as at the Southwark
Theatre, Howe's officers chose performance as the medium best suited to
accomplish their ends, organizing a "theatre of war" as an alternative to
the ugly, material realities of an ultimately futile campaign. As a conclusive
battlefield victory began to seem more elusive than ever, these men sought
to realize in performance the apotheosis of British military and cultural
primacy. In his stage-management of the Meschian'{fl, Major John Andre
(amateur poet, painter, and performer), would demonstrate his subtle,
intuitive mastery of the theatrical, a mastery which he also displayed in the
"enactment" of his own, subsequent demise.
When news reached Philadelphia in the spring of 1778 that Howe's
offer to resign his post had been accepted, that he was to be replaced
as Commander-in-Chief of British forces in North America, and that
the army itself was soon to be withdrawn from the city, Andre began to
organize a grand celebration in the general's honor. Despite his victory at
New York and his accomplished campaign in southeastern Pennsylvania,
Howe remained suspect amongst conservatives in Parliament for what
appeared to be an unwillingness to prosecute the war with all necessary
vigor, a suspicion compounded by the impression that the general's
military service had been undertaken without any real enthusiasm, merely
out of a sense of duty and obligation. Certainly it did not help the
commander's cause in the eyes of the Government that he belonged to a
Whig party which became increasingly hostile toward the war itself. The
celebration organized by Andre thus worked tO construct an alternative
image of the cashiered general, situating him within a celebration of
British military achievement and nationalist nostalgia more emphatically
wrought than anything his conservative political enemies could have
imagined, substituting for the figure of the vacillating and ambivalent
persona crafted by his foes, a protagonist whose martial exploits placed
him firmly within a venerable, triumphal British military tradition.
While scholars such as Benjamin Irvin have acknowledged the
"chivalric English romance" as the source of the Meschianza's particular
shape and tone, and while Andre's association with the theatre has also
been noted elsewhere, little attention has been paid to the specifics of the
"ROMANTIC GRANDEUR ru'lD EXTRJ\VAGANT FOLLY" 59
was also a gifted amateur artist; after the British occupied Philadelphia,
he enthusiastically set himself to the task of refurbishing the Southwark
Theatre and of organizing the entertainments offered there; he seems to
have appeared onstage himself and to have designed a number of the
costumes and settings. Indeed, Andre's presence cast a long shadow at the
theatre. In his 1855 memoirs, Philadelphia actor and theatre impresario
William Wood records that:
A scenic curiosity ~ o n g remained from the private
theatricals of the English officers who had occupied
[the Southwark] during the war. It was a drop curtain,
painted by Major Andre and carefully preserved until the
conflagration of the theatre [in May of 1821]. The scene
was probably considered a creditable amateur effort, as it
bore the name of the artist
6
The Quaker City would not soon forget John Andre, and the memory of
his stagecraft would continue to inspire a complex and contradictory set
of responses in Philadelphia well into the nineteenth century.
It was his career after the British withdrawal from Philadelphia,
however, that served (peculiarly enough) to make the young officer
something of an early American folk hero as well as to further trouble any
absolute distinction between the military officer and the showman. Andre
was to serve as Benedict Arnold's British liaison in the latter's ill-fated
attempt to hand over the American fort at West Point to the forces of the
Crown. Returning to New York City after a secret night-time parlay with
Arnold, Andre was captured near Tarrytown on 23 September 1780. On
the advice of Arnold, Andre had been traveling in disguise at the time of
his apprehension; the fact that he had set aside his officer's uniform and was
moving secretly about the country virtually guaranteed that Andre would
be charged as a spy. A military court was quickly convened at Tappan, and
the young officer was sentenced to death. The execution of a captured
British officer would normally have represented a savage departure from
the rules of eighteenth-century warfare, but the court had determined
that Andre had renounced the privileges to which officers were usually
entitled when he had donned his disguise-a farmer's overcoat belonging
to one Joshua Smith. While awaiting execution, however, Andre appears
to have played the part of both officer and gentleman so movingly and
effectively that he turned the circumstances of his execution into heroic,
6
William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Henry Carey
Baird, 1855), 78.
"ROMANTIC GRANDEUR AND EXTRAVJ\G,\NT FOLLY" 61
this masterful piece of self-dramatization that also contained within its
careful semiotics a silent testament to the injustice of these proceedings.
An actual, verbal indictment would probably have compromised the
grandeur and pathos of the performance. Shortly before his execution,
Andre had sent his officer's uniform to New York City to be cleaned and
prepared, for the Major had requested that he be hanged in full officer's
dress. An unnamed American soldier who was present describes Andre's
appearance on the morning of his execution.
He was dressed in what I should call a complete British
uniform; coat of the brightest scarlet, faced or trimmed
with the most beautiful green. His vest and breeches
were bright buff [and he had] a long and beautiful head
of hair, which, agreeably to the fashion, was wound with
a black ribbon and hung down his back. All eyes were
upon him; and it is not believed that any (other) officer
of the British army, placed in his situation, would have
appeared better than this unfortunate man.
10
In this context, even the Major's last words (''You will all bear witness
that I met my fate like a brave man")
11
seem a calculated evocation of an
ideal, chivalric past. As Hamilton himself pointed out, Andre's appearance
encouraged observers to "suppose more than appeared" (one might
reasonably argue that this is precisely the work of any actor and any
performance).
Andre would hardly have been the first individual who sought
to turn the inherent (if morbid) theatricality of execution to his own
advantage, nor is this sort of semiotic sleight-of-hand unfamiliar to more
traditional dramatists: Antony famously reverses the significance of
Caesar's murder, even as Aeschylus's Prometheus turns Zeus's arguably
just punishments into a vivid manifestation of tyranny. I simply wish
to argue that Andre accomplished this sort of work more successfully
than most, whether victim or playwright, and that his success was due
in part to a personality that was fluent in the subjunctive language of
the theatre-of understanding what a particular phenomenon could be
made to signify if only one might trouble or re-inscribe its fundamental
semiotic suppositions. Insisting that he be hanged in his officer's uniform,
10
C. DeWitt Wilcox, ed., Mqjor n d r e ~ Journal (New York: New York Times &
Arno Press, 1968), 110.
11
Cited in Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 159.
"ROMANTIC GRANDEUR AND EXTRAVAGANT fou:.y"
Roach tells us that:
The man of feeling is helplessly [moved] .... If he
merely hears a touching word or sees a touching
spectacle, his self-possession dissolves into shudders,
tears, and choking sighs. His judgment vanishes along
with his resourcefulness. The truly great [actor] will have
mastered this disposition ... he will have taken control
of his own movements and hence of his own destiny.
14
63
Given his care in presenting himself to his American captors in the
dress of a British officer, as well as his careful situation of the members
of the military court as his audience (they are made and called upon to
"bear witness''), Andre's "self-possession" could hardly be said to have
dissolved, any more than his "judgment" may be said to have vanished.
Instead, he turns his audience into ineffectual and helpless men of feeling
by means of a carefully arranged performance-moving them to tears
even as he implicitly condemns their perfidy and indifference to the rules
of war. In his control of his own movements, Andre thus exercises the
only sort of command left to him: a semiotic management of his own
destiny. Andre is not the man of sensibility; he is an actor plqying the man
of sensibility for an audience that remains deeply appreciative despite
its better judgment. The notion that Andre is simply feeling the affective
truth of a highly fraught moment for himself- rather than working to
shape his audience's response to that moment through a carefully crafted
enactment of the man of sensibility-makes it difficult to understand why
(and even how) the Major might have taken the time to dress himself in
the appropriate costume, to present himself to the gaze of his audience
without "dissolving into tears," as the "authentic" person of sentiment
(but not Diderot's ideal actor) might have been expected to do. What
Knott refers to as Andre's inherent "disruptiveness" is thus no epochal
accident; it is the consequence of a masterful performance of self, one
wholly consistent with emergent notions of what the actor does.
Andre's "performance" was a success on both sides of the
Atlantic. George III ordered that a marble monument to his memory be
placed in Westminster Abbey, while in 1821 the British consul in New
York had the Major's remains sent to London for burial in front of the
memorial. Situated amongst the tombs of the great, Andre's monument is
surmounted by a weeping Britannia and a mournful lion atop an imitation
14
Joseph Roach, The Player} Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1985), 132.
"RO!'>IANTIC GRA. "' DEUR AND ExTRAVAGANT FoLLY" 65
his flair for the sort of self-dramatization that necessarily confuses the
fragile stability of identity had itself been brilliantly displayed in occupied
Philadelphia three years earlier, in 1778, particularly in the extraordinary
spectacle of the Meschianza. While it is true, as Irvin claims, that this
entertainment took as its motif the "chivalric English romance," we must
pay careful attention to the dramaturgical shape of this entertainment,
to its set-pieces, costuming, and choreography-each element pregnant
with semiotic possibilities fully exploited by Andre himself. Likewise, the
Meschianifl's particular association with earlier performance traditions must
also be explored more carefully if we are to grasp the ways in which Andre
worked to organize and exploit the theatricality of the event in a manner
that is wholly congruent with and further illuminated by contemporary
performance theory.
The extravaganza began early on the morning of 18 May with
a large and colorful regatta along the Delaware River. Leading this
procession were three flat boats "with a band of music in each of them,"
while behind them sailed a number of smaller vessels carrying the starring
players of this pageant: the British officers and their ladies. According to
John Fanning Watson, a number of skiffs were also required to keep boats
filled with enthusiastic spectators at a distance, while "the houses, balconies
and wharves were filled with spectators all along the riverside."
17
Arriving
at the wharf near Old Swede's Church, the officers paraded through an
avenue of grenadiers to the Wharton estate where t he full spectacle was to
be enacted. Many of the most prominent Philadelphia families were on the
guest list, including the Bonds, Shipp ens, Chews, Redmans, and others who
had socialized and collaborated with the British during the occupation of
the city. Andre had determined that the officers would appear in the garb
of medieval knights, while the Philadelphia ladies were to be costumed as
"Turkish Maidens," their apparel designed by the Major himself. In her
elegantly sentimental evocation of a bygone Philadelphia, published over a
century after the Meschianza, Anne Hollingsworth Wharton (a descendent
of Thomas) offered her readers a rich description of a pageant that was
equal parts wartime propaganda and exotic, medieval fantasia.
Passing up [an] avenue the company [of officers and
their ladies] entered a lawn where all was prepared for
the exhibition of a tournament according to the laws of
ancient chivalry. Here were two pavilions, with rows of
benches rising one above the other; on the front row of
17
John F. Watson, A nnals of Philadelphia and Pennrylvania in the Olden Time
(Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1870), 2:290.
"RoMANTIC GRANDEUR AND EXTRAVAGANT fOLLY" 67
Andre had created at the Southwark Theatre.
21
The guests repaired to the
ballroom, which was decorated in a "light, elegant style of painting and
showing many festoons of flowers" with which the Major had adorned
the chamber's eighty-five mirrors. The ball was opened by the ladies and
their knights, concluding shortly before midnight when the windows of
the ballroom were thrown open, and the guests witnessed a "magnificent
bouquet of rockets" consisting of "twenty different displays in great variety
and beauty ... changing General Howe's arch into a variety of shapes
and devices."
22
These pyrotechnics were organized by John Montresor,
Andre's fellow-officer and the army's chief engineer. Immediately after
the fireworks, dinner was announced and the guests entered a large
hall, its walls painted with vine leaves and fitted-out with "fifty-six large
pier-glasses, ornamented with green silk artificial flowers and ribands."
Apparently, all of these mirrors had been "borrowed" from the citizens of
Philadelphia, and each was later returned to its owner (all with ornaments
attached as a compliment for their use). We are also told that there were
eighteen lustres of twenty-four lights hung from the
ceiling [and] ... three hundred wax tapers on the supper
tables, four hundred and thirty covers, and twelve
hundred dishes. There were twenty-four black slaves in
oriental dresses, with silver collars and bracelets. Towards
the close of the banquet, the herald with his trumpeters
entered and announced the king and the royal family's
health ... after the supper, the company returned to the
ball-room [sic], and continued to dance until four o'clock
in the morning.
23
Major Andre was later to describe the Meschianza as "the most splendid
entertainment ever given by an army to its general."
24
Indeed, it would
seem difficult to deny this claim, just as it would seem difficult to deny
the decidedly theatrical nature of the entire cavalcade. However, we must
work to understand the pageant within its own very particular political
and semiotic environment if we are to grasp the deeper work that Andre
imagined his elaborate fete might accomplish: the enactment of British
military glory at the conclusion of an ultimately humiliating campaign, the
21
Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 2:292.
22
Ibid., 2:291.
23
Ibid., 2:292.
24
Cited in ibid.
"ROMANTIC GRANDEUR AND EXTRAVAGANT fOLLY" 69
bridge, castle, or tower, especially constructed for the event-from an
equal number of challengers. The actual combats would be sandwiched
between long ceremonial processions,
and participants might assume allegorical identities
reinforced by their dress and behavior, playing quasi-
dramatic roles which they might maintain into evening
festivities ... although chivalric conflict could become
a deadly earnest affair, the lists became a natural setting
for symbolic games of elaborate make believe, to which
allegorical scenic devices, inscriptions, costumes, action,
impersonation, and even dialogue contributed.
26
Such entertainments became directly associated with Arthurian romance
from a comparatively early date: Round Table societies had been established
in Europe by the end of the thirteenth century, and tournaments of
knights were held at Kenilworth in 1279, as well as at Nefyn, in North
Wales, in 1284. Thus, from the very beginning, the pas d'armes and its
cognates (like the tournament) were situated somewhere between actuality
and theatricality, between volatile, material earnestness and the fictive
performance of such earnestness. Likewise, these sorts of entertainments
appear to have sought the evocation of a romantic, fantastical, and
chivalric past long before the staging of Andre's particular iteration.
While we might thus imagine the tournament and the pas d'armes
as a peculiar combination of twenty-first century sporting event and
historical reenactment, something of particular interest begins to unfold
when Andre places the pas d'armes into such a radically different context
as that offered by occupied Philadelphia in the spring of 1778. For Andre
did not offer his audience a performance of the pas d'armes, but rather
a performance of a performance: a nostalgic reenactment of a form of
medieval nostalgic enactment. This sort of reframing lies at the heart of
what theorist Richard Schechner sees as the essence of all theatre and
theatrical endeavor: the notion of performance as "restored" or "twice-
behaved behavior." According to Schechner, behaviors are "restored"
precisely because they exist independently "of the causal systems (social,
psychological, technological) that brought them into existence. They
have a life of their own. The original 'truth' or 'source' of the behavior
may be lost, ignored, or contradicted- even while this truth or source
1s apparently being honored or observed ... restored behavior is the
26
William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), 87.
"ROMANTIC GRANDEUR AND EXTRAVAGANT fOLLY" 71
reality of an increasingly unsuccessful campaign. The very evanescence
of the pageant may thus be seen as its great value, indeed, as its raison
d'etre, for its nonchalant and offhand extravagance implied an aristocratic
indifference toward the petty inconveniences wrought by a handful of
disloyal subjects of the Crown who refused to pay their taxes and who
fielded an army of mere brigands.
David Cannadine has argued that the British Empire was always
"an imaginatively constructed artifact," a relentless performance of
"regular ritual and occasional spectacle" by means of which "the British
exported vernacular sociological visions from the metropolis to the
periphery ... thereby constructing comforting and familiar resemblances
and equivalencies and affinities."
30
If Britain's North American Empire
was in part a performance, the Meschianza was one of its more spectacular
and successful scenes, exporting an exotic image of ancient British martial
glory and chivalric deportment, while at the same time re-inscribing
colonial Philadelphia, its Quaker and republican values, as negligible
and decidedly "unspectacular" when situated within the penumbra of
such accomplished political theatre. Andre's pageant would thus seem
to reflect an awareness of and a calculated response to what Peter Shaw
has called "festival deprivation." According to Shaw, few of the holiday
rituals that had been popular for centuries in Britain had been successfully
transplanted to North American soil, thus contributing to a political culture
that had no traditional methodology in place for the performance of its
own values, history, and vitality.
31
Rousseau himself had considered the
problem of inventing a living tradition of republican self-performance,
thus advocating a series of outdoor public festivals to replace the small,
"aristocratic" realm of the theatre.
Andre cunningly responds to such "festival deprivation" by
deploying Rousseau's methodology against itself, transforming an
outdoor "public" performance into the very antithesis of republican self-
enactment: constructing an image of the King's North American subjects
as players within an enduring performance of imperial pageantry that
persists in constructing "comfortable ... equivalencies and affinities."
32
Unlike Rousseau's performance of difference, his advocacy of a form of
political spectacle that might suggest the realization of a radically new
cultural semiotics, Andre's is a festival of resemblances. The spectacle
30
David Cannadine, Ornamenlalism: How the British Saw their Empire (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 122.
>J Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals if Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1981), 199.
n Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 122.
"ROMANTIC GRANOUR ANO ExTILWAGANT Fou.y" 73
of her fellow religionists), the Meschianza signified callous wastefulness as
well as the sinful celebration of yesterday's imagined military glories at
the expense of deep material suffering in the very real present. Indeed,
Drinker suspects a hidden agenda; she notes that Andre's entertainment
had been organized "under the pretence of shewing respect to Gen.
Howe."
34
If paying tribute to General Howe was little more than mere
pretence, what, we might ask, was the true motivation for the Meschianza?
Drinker's diary seems to suggest an answer: the humiliation of the Quaker
City and the semiotic repudiation of its religious and republican values.
In the performance of such work, Philadelphia's women were
perhaps the most decisive of semiotic tools, and Andre's subtle iteration of
the ways in which colonial-era women were made to signify accomplished
even more fully the troubling of American (and Philadelphian) identity.
Rosemarie Zagarri has demonstrated that the American Revolution marked
"a watershed in the popular perceptions of women's relationship to the
state," largely because of women's determination to play a central role in
the political, industrial (and military) life of the fledgling nation. As early
as the 1760s, women often led calls for the boycott of imported luxury
goods, even as they worked to produce the homemade textiles and clothing
that might serve as alternatives. Printed calls to action often explicitly
appealed to women, thereby "acknowledging women's importance to the
cause" of liberty and affirming their "capacity to act as political agents,"
thus "politicizing them in ways and to an extent that had never before
occurred."
35
Andre seems also to have quite consciously "politicized" the
women of Philadelphia, turning their presence at the Wharton estate to
very different ends. The Meschianza placed the daughters of Philadelphia's
first families on extravagant display, thus implicating these women as
signifiers of the city's abiding loyalty to General Howe and the Crown.
Turning once more to Schechner, we find that his notion of
restored behavior accounts for and helps to clarify the semiotic slipperiness
that Andre so craftily exploited. In describing those performers engaged
in the work of historical or cultural reenactment, he writes that it
is "not accurate to call them actors, and it is not accurate to call them
not actors. They are between ' not actors' and 'not not actors,' a liminal
realm of double negativity that precisely locates the process of theatrical
characterization."
36
As Turkish Maidens, the women of Philadelphia
constituted both audience and performers, playing a decisive role in the
3
' Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 306 (my italics).
35
Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American
Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 26.
36
Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology, 97.
"ROMANTIC G RANDEUR AND EXTRAVAGANT foux" 75
that signified an enduring affinity for, and loyalty to, the aristocratic realm
of British pageantry, monarchy, and prestige. While the Meschianza ladies
were Turkish Maidens rather than Mother Eves, Andre seems to have
been playing with further iterations of the same sort of signifiers afforded
by entertainments like Ia sauvaige dame.
Benjamin Irvin has pointed out that the women's "Turkish
costumes hinted toward their sexual allure and colonial exoticism," thus
positioning them once more as "other," as beautiful savages outside the
space of civilization-their lives and reputations again to be secured
by valorous and gallant knights-errant in what Irvin goes on to call "a
noble defense of female virtue."
40
My point here is that it is the nature of
restored behavior within this particular context to perform iterations of
the sorts of signification that the pas d'armes had always circulated, although
here it is their representation within what David Cannadine might call
a "performance of empire" that saves the sacred honor of these ladies,
rescued for all time from the ungracious fate of signifying mere homespun
republican simplicity. Hair, of course, remained a critical signifier, whether
in Ia sauvaige dame or the Meschianza. In the case of the latter, the women's
hair was worn in high turbans, within which they might conceal small
gifts for their respective knights; as Susan E. l<lepp has pointed out, such
high, elaborately decorated and expensive hairstyles were frequently worn
by American women in imitation of European aristocrats, and just as
frequently condemned by Whigs and radicals.
41
Andre was clearly gilding
the tonsorial lily-these ladies' headdresses signified for the Crown.
Despite its reputation as the birthplace of American liberty,
Philadelphia was a city deeply divided by the war for independence, with
many of her wealthiest families- like the Chews and the Shippens-
declaring their loyalty to the Crown. Families like these maintained their
place in what passed for the social life of the forlorn and occupied city;
the Meschianza thus also functioned as a valedictory assertion of the power
of semiotic display in the enactment of social hierarchy and difference,
accomplishing precisely the opposite kind of work as that described by
Waldstreicher as characteristic of the spectacles and celebrations organized
in support of the republican cause. "Early Fourth of July celebrations,"
he argues, "were attempts to establish (or reestablish) an organic link
between elite and populace .. . ratifying both popular sovereignty and
the most tasteful displays of patriotic affiliation."
42
In its utterly fantastic
40
Irvin, Clothed in Robes of S overeignry, 156.
41
Susan E. K!epp, "Rough Music on Independence Day: Philadelphia, 1778," in
Riot and &ve/ry in Ear!J America, 164.
42
Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, 38.
"ROMANTIC GRANDEUR AND EXTRAV.\GANT F OLLY" 77
dancing had begun, the evening became a pleasant one, "as if nothing of
jealousy had ever existed, and all umbrage was forgotten."
45
Anxious to
create a fond picture of amity and accord that is consistent with the Annals'
general tone of antiquarian romance, Watson avoids calling anything more
than superficial attention to the very real anxieties that the Meschianza
apparently still inspired. The "high headdresses" he describes seem to
have been quite consciously worn in sympathetic evocation of Andre's
own designs. Likewise, it seems improbable that the women would have
been unaware of the ways in which this manner of self-decoration might
signify to the American and French officers by whom they were being
entertained. Rather than conceal their participation in the Meschianza, these
women seem to have been determined to assert their roles as Andre's
Turkish Maidens, thus compelling their own countrymen and allied
officers to acknowledge the enduring exceptionality of Philadelphia and
her leading ladies. Now become Americans by ideology and force of arms,
these women seem to have asserted that they would nevertheless remain
Britons in their aristocratic demeanor, their nostalgia, and in their lingering
enthusiasm for a culture of extravagant display. Indeed, we may see both
in the Meschianza itself and in such responses to the event, the beginnings
of what Nathaniel Burt has identified as "a feeling of nostalgia, of loss,
regret for the old days," which he sees as a central aspect of Philadelphia
culture, and which Watson himself certainly reinforces by means of his
own work's delighted, antiquarian enthusiasm for the romance of Andre's
pageant.
46
Working to understand Andre as a kind of performer/producer
allows us to look afresh both at his Philadelphia pageant and at the
"enactment" of his own demise a little more than two years later. His
familiarity with and efficacious deployment of the theatre's semiotic,
subjunctive language are on display in both instances, encouraging us to
be attentive to the ways in which Andre's treatment of these two events
establishes something of a formal correspondence between them-
particularly in terms of their performative and political work. Just as the
"showman" deploys the pas d'armes within a context radically different
from its original situation, carefully organizing a "twice-behaved" iteration
of the medieval tournament designed to disrupt and disable the signifiers
of American identity and patriotic unanimity, so Andre accomplishes
something similar upon the scaffold at Tappan. In seeking to understand
his careful attention to the semiotics of his execution as an aspect of
45
Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 2:293.
46
Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians, the Anatortry of an A merican Class
(Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), xxiv.
"ROMANTIC GRANDEUR AND EXTRAVAGANT FOLLY" 79
ghost of Mary Balantyne, a young woman whom he had earlier seduced
and apparently driven to suicide. The "specter'' asks Andre's musicians
to play "Lough Errock's Side" (her father's favorite song) and requests
a dance with the horrified Captain Harris. General Howe consents and
Harris takes the floor, although Mary's ghost insists that the two may not
touch each other during the dance. While on the dance floor with the very
athletic "spirit," Harris swoons and quickly escapes the Wharton estate
after he regains consciousness. Apprehended almost immediately by two
patriots, Harris is brought to a small church in nearby Chester County,
where he finds Mary (very much alive) and her father waiting for him.
Insane from grief, Mary compels her father, a Presbyterian minister, to
marry the terrified Harris to his daughter, after which she murders her
seducer and then kills herself.
In this novel, McHenry combines the nostalgic patriotism of the
moment with an increasing enthusiasm for the macabre and grotesque.
Particularly in Philadelphia, where grisly, frightening novels like Brown's
Arthur Merryn and Wieland had already laid the ground for later works
by Poe and George Lippard, the eerie conclusion of McHenry's Meredith
was certain to satisfy readers who sought an alternative in fiction to the
staid probity and respectability of the Quaker City. What interests us here
is McHenry's choice to bring his novel to its climax during the evening
of the Meschianza, his decision to employ this event, "the last exhibition
of romantic grandeur and extravagant folly which the fair City of
Independence was ever to witness under foreign rule," into a site for the
reconfiguration of Philadelphia's (and the nation's) cultural ethos.
47
Just as
Andre sought to situate Philadelphia's first ladies as signifiers of British
prestige and fantastic cultural primacy-thereby re-inscribing republican
personifications of liberty as metonyms for monarchy and traditional class
privilege-so McHenry "dresses-up" his female protagonist as something
she is not in an attempt to assign a very different sort of cultural work to
the Meschianza itself. The novel re-imagines the event not as a lingering
and divisive embarrassment, but as a site of antiquarian and Romantic
wonder, a pageant where performance and disguise work not so much
to destabilize identity as to create something of the aura of historical
melodrama: Scott's romances come to mind as one considers McHenry's
novel. While Mary's "ghost" is actually not a spirit at all, McHenry seems
to understand that the Meschianza itself remains a kind of revenant haunting
Philadelphia's cultural memory, a haunting which might now serve to
remind the citizens of the Quaker City of a past that may function as a
47
James McHenry, Meredith; Or, The Mystery of the Meschianza (Philadelphia, 1831 ),
240.
"ROMANTIC G RANDEUR AND EXTRAVAGANT F OllY" 81
in a satisfyingly nostalgic fashion as a tribute to the city's own aristocratic
class and its privileged place in the history of the Republic.
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 25, NO. 1 (WINTER 2013)
"THE PLAY'S THE THING":
ScRIPTED PERFORMANCE AND THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED IN
SLEEP DEPRIVATION CHAMBER AND MOTHERHOOD 2000
Seokhun Choi
While visiting his father in Arlington, Virginia, in January 1991, Adrienne
Kennedy's son Adam P. Kennedy, who was then a college student, had
an unfortunate experience that subsequendy involved exhaustive and
frustrating legal batdes. One night, he was ordered by a police officer to
stop his car for a faulty taillight near his father's house. He drove several
blocks until he reached the driveway of the house and parked the car.
When he got out of the car, the cop tried to subdue him, and Adam was
beaten and accused of resisting arrest and assaulting the police officer.
Adam and the officer presented two contradictory testimonies during
the trial, the former claiming innocence while the latter insisting that
Adam had reacted aggressively and struck him first. Although Adam was
eventually acquitted by the trial judge, the event remained traumatic for
him and his family.
Adrienne Kennedy deals with this case of racial profiling in
three different works: her essay, "Letter to My Students on My Sixty-first
Birthday by Suzanne Alexander" (1992), a short play called Motherhood
2000 (1994), and the Obie-Award-winning play she co-authored with
her son Sleep Deprivation Chamber (1996). In this article, I examine the role
of script and performance applying Michel de Certeau's spatial practice
and Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. Although both plays are
autobiographical and based on the same case of racist brutality inflicted on
young Kennedy, they display different dramaturgical styles and approaches.
Sleep Deprivation Chamber, set in Ohio, Washington D.C. and Virginia, is
a full-length and rather conventional realist drama documenting the
actual legal batdes fought surrounding the case. Lines and imagery from
Shakespeare's Hamlet overlap with the plight of Teddy, Adam P. Kennedy's
alter ego, including the police violence, interrogations, and trial. Just as the
lives of the characters in Hamlet are controlled by fate, Teddy's incident
and the ensuing legal proceedings become a scripted performance,
following the pattern laid down by the corrupt (racist) discourse of the
time. Motherhood 2000 is a short piece set in imaginary future New York
where municipal and legal institutions have crumbled at the mercy of the
violent mobs who overtook the city. Here, a passion play, in which the
policeman who beat young Kennedy plays Christ, serves as the symbol
"THE PLAY'S THE THING"
lives it on stage. She puts him into the Hamlet of her
mind. Like Hamlet, Teddy is plunged into a nightmare of
political corruption, revenge, and madness. Teddy, like
Shakespeare's tragic hero, is watched, questioned, slated
for extinction in a police state where something is rotten.
In such a world, Teddy's plight is indeed Hamlet-like for
his mother. In her transformative dream sequences of
Hamlet, Suzanne becomes a redeemed Gertrude, Teddy
a threatened Hamlet, Hamlet's father's murder the basis
for Teddy's search for justice, Claudius's crime is Holzer's
brutality, and Arlington turns into Denmark.
2
85
As the play moves to Scene II, the playwrights juxtapose Teddy's case with
another tragedy. Suzanne is now in Ohio Theatre in Cleveland where the
rehearsal of Kennedy's Ohio State Murders, a play based on the murders
of her twin babies by their own white biological father, is in progress.
The parallels drawn between Teddy and the tragic figures reinforce the
notion of scripted performance that leaves the characters little choice but
to follow the path laid down by the greater force outside themselves only
to repeat the cycle of oppression, violence, and the sense of bereavement.
In relation to the concept of scripted performance, another
prominent theme of the play is writing. Although Sleep Deprivation Chamber
displays characteristics of non-realist theatre with its violent imagery and
dream sequences, it mainly takes the form of a courtroom drama that
faithfully reconstructs the past events surrounding Adam P. Kennedy's
case by means of letters and the reenactments of interrogations and the
trial. Desperate to seek help that would rectify the injustice perpetrated
to her son, Suzanne sends letters to numerous authorities including the
senator, governor, county manager, police chief, president of NAACP
and so on. In her first letter to Governor Wilder, she describes the racial
brutality that happened to Teddy as follows:
On Friday night, January 11, my son, a fine citizen who
has never been in any trouble whatsoever, was knocked
to the ground and beaten in the face, kicked repeatedly
in the chest and the stomach and dragged in the mud by
an Arlington Virginia policeman whose name is Holzer.
This occurred in his father's front yard on Riverdale
Street in Arlington. My son was stopped because he had a
2
Philip C. Kolin, Understanding Adn'enne Kennet!J (Columbia: Univ. of South
Carolina Press, 2005), 165.
"THE PLAY's THE THING"
87
playwrights to bring the truth to light on a material stage for the audience
to witness. However, simply reproducing the past by writing alone could be
constraining rather than liberating, especially when the writing echoes the
status quo. For instance, repetitious representation can get audiences used
to what is being represented and circumscribe their ways of thinking and
acting, rather than lead them to contrive alternate ways outside the system.
The idea that writing can limit one's way of seeing and acting can also be
found in the police manual read by the Student Cast. They are divided into
two different groups of Blacks and Whites, and they take turns reading
contradictory passages from the fragment. For instance, Blacks read the
fragment that says, ''Asking 'personal questions' of someone one has met
for the first time is seen as improper and intrusive," which is followed by
Whites reading, "Inquiring about jobs, family, etc., of someone one has
met for the first time is seen as friendly."
8
The fragment of the police
manual reveals the arbitrariness of writing and how writing fails to contain
the different dynamic of different contexts, restraining action and limiting
one's choice in performance.
Towards the end, the play completes its cycle to return to the
violence inflicted on Teddy, who is standing beside Yorick's grave as his
trial before a judge begins. The court revisits the crime scene in question
through the statements of the attorneys and the interrogation of Officer
Holzer who is now a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service. The two
sides come up with two different versions of the same incident, Officer
Holzer insisting that Teddy attacked him while the defendant pleads not
guilty. As Teddy's lawyer Edelstein questions Holzer, the whole sequence
of the violence is reenacted on stage. Then the trial resumes, and the
judge finally rules to dismiss the charges saying: "The court hesitates to
comment on any of the rationale for its decision, but would say I'm going
to grant the motion to strike only because I hold police officers to a higher
standard and expect an assault to constitute more than what I have heard.
Case dismissed."
9
The play ends showing the video of Teddy's beating
which is "very dark and filled with the sounds of his screams."
10
As Kolin
noted on the play's ending in comparison to that of Hamlet, "the rest is
not silence."
11
The false charges on Teddy are dropped, but the conclusion
leaves full justice yet to be achieved and brings the audience back to the
scene of the beating only to hear Teddy's screams.
8
Jones, "Beyond the Funnyhouse," 24.
9
Ibid., 72.
10
Ibid.
11
Kolin, Understanding Adrienne Kennec!J, 167.
"THE PLAY's THE THING" 89
as in the apartments with the legal tenants."
13
Even the city parks are taken
over by the homeless for dwelling, and these transgressive occupations
of the public and private space can be seen as "tactical" practices against
modernist urban landscape as well as the failure of modern institution and
capitalism. In addition, a white troupe called the Oliviers performs "an
ancient miracle play" on the steps of the Soldiers and Sailors monument.
14
The monument, which was built to celebrate the liberating spirit of the
Civil War, is now turned into a theatre run by an exclusively white troupe
nighdy performing a passion play while Mrs. Alexander is watching. Her
neighbor Judy thinks that they are one of the troupes traveling "from
national monument to monument trying to find asylum,"
15
which suggests
that they too have been participating in other-ing social spaces; they have
turned every monument where they performed the passion play into a
theatre. Here, the passion play, like Hamlet in Sleep Deprivation Chamber,
stands for the theatrical metanarrative of the western civilization and
American society, the canonical narrative through which other narratives
are deciphered and legitimized.
The volatile character of space in 2000 New York, which once
was the representative city of modern architecture, implies that the city
itself has become a "smooth" space. As nomad space, the smooth is
defined by Deleuze and Guattari as "the continuous variation," which
the System constandy seeks to translate into "the striated," the space of
"horizontal melodic lines and vertical harmonic planes."
16
In other words,
the striated is a space of order, unity, and fixity whereas the smooth is one
of disorder, heterogeneity, and variability. Indeed, New York has been the
striated space par excellence with neady outlined streets, carefully defined
and separated commercial and financial districts and public and private
space, all planned and organized by the city government. And now the
people in New York undo the striation with their spatial tactics to turn the
city into the "smooth" space of unlimited freedom, chaos, and constant
becomings. In this respect, the New Yorkers are aesthetic human symbols
for "the nomad, constandy translating striated space into smooth spaces
of play."
17
In her essay "Aesthetic Spaces/Imaginative Geographies," Shari
13
Adrienne Kennedy, Motherhood 2000 in The Adrienne Kennetfy Reader (Minneapolis:
Univ. of .Minnesota Press, 2001), 228.
Ibid., 228.
IS Ibid., 231.
16
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 478.
17
Shari Popen, "Aesthetic spaces/imaginative geographies," A Boa/ Companion:
Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics, ed. Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman (New
"THE P LAY'S THE THING" 91
of the people in the play. Just as the Soldiers and Sailors monument has
been transformed into Golgotha evoking death - which alludes to the
fate of Richard Fox, the police officer who beat Mrs. Alexander's son -
by the troupe, the Statue of Liberty has now become the site of execution
where city officials are "constantly drowned."
24
Owing to these practices,
the city became a world in which symbols are allegories of "ruins" and the
link between the signifier and the signified is severed.
What makes the space of New York more disorienting is the
civil unrest that thwarts some of the everyday practices of the residents;
men fight on the sidewalks, street shootings occur daily, and unexpected
bombings keep people fearful. The urban chaos prevents Mrs. Alexander
from going to "the market on Broadway and 91st" for food, her neighbor
Judy sometimes has to stay downtown for the night, refuges from New
Jersey are driven to the city every morning, and people have to choose
to live at the 79th street Boat Basin and the Path Station while gangs
inhabiting Riverside Park almost block access to the area. By turning the
city into a battlefield, the violent mobs seem to have abused their rights
to carry out their own spatial practices, since their strife - although they
are not interested in regulating or dominating the everyday life of the
others as a government would- violates the spatial practice of the others.
According to Certeau, however, everyday practice is inevitably "poaching in
countless ways on the property of others."
25
Innumerable ways of playing and foiling the other's game
(jouer/ dgouer lejeu de /'autre), that is, the space instituted by
others, characterize the subtle, stubborn, resistant activity
of groups which, since they lack their own space, have
to get along in a network of already established forces
and representations. People have to make do with what
they have ... . Like the skill of a driver in the streets of
Rome or Naples, there is a skill that has its connoisseurs
and its esthetics exercised in any labyrinth of powers, a
skill ceaselessly recreating opacities and ambiguities -
spaces of darkness and trickery - in the universe of
technocratic transparency, a skill that disappears into
them and reappears again, taking no responsibility for the
administration of a totality. Even the field of misfortune
is refashioned by this combination and enjoyment.
26
24
Kennedy, Motherhood 2000, 231.
25
Certeau, The Practice of Everydc:J Uft, xii.
26
Ibid., 18.
"THE PLAY'S THE THING" 93
who need a venue to practice their "tactics," and Mrs. Alexander's New
York seems to be a perfect stage to carry them out.
The paradigm of performance as a resistance to Script appears
more concretely in the play-within-the-play. The Oliviers, the white
troupe performing a passion play, represents the American metanarrative
legitimized by power and tradition: i.e., the dominant white culture. It is
a script that has its own plot and characters, and its distinctive nature
is twofold: it is traditional and institutional - note that the actors were
"former district attorney, the county manager, the police chief, and two
policemen who had been involved in [Mrs. Alexander's] son's case."
30
According to this script, an African-American cannot be a savior figure,
only playing minor roles in the narrative, which Kennedy dramatizes in
Fumryhottse of a Negro, where the black father/Father/God homology is
made impossible by white culture. Also, it feeds, and is fed by in return, the
legal institution to which Mrs. Alexander keeps sending letters to no avail;
rather, it seems to condone the racist brutality. And the white troupe's
performance itself contributes to the perpetuation of the socio-political
narrative - according to which Jesus and legal authorities are supposed to
be white while black people like the Writer's son are charged with crimes
that they did not commit.
However, Mrs. Alexander's granted membership in the Oliviers
changes the Script established by the racist white culture and sustained
by the actors. Although her stepping into the passion play in itself does
not directly challenge or delegitimize the Script, it creates a crack that
allows her tactic to destabilize the other's space due to her foreign nature.
Not only her different skin color and gender but also the heterogeneous
demography of the brownstone apartment where she comes from
contrasts the gender and racial homogeneity of the Oliviers: "In the
brownstone I lived in it was impossible to tell friends from enemies: the
five floors were occupied by Bosnians, Californians, Haitians, Neo-Nazis:
all were split into subgroups and each group had their own agenda, wars,
and language."
31
Disrupted by the disconnection among the tenants and
its ethnic diversity, the brownstone is another example of the "smooth"
space that frustrates the will to impose unity or to create meaning by
giving priority to one sign over the other.
Having been admitted into the play, she affects more than the
racial and sexual topography of the troupe, for when she becomes "their
only Black member," a very unusual thing happens; when she says she
once was a playwright and taught at Harvard, the white troupe not only
30
Kennedy, Motherhood 2000, 229.
31
Ibid., 231.
"THE PLAY's TI-lE THING"
WRITER. I spoke my lines coughing, wheezing ... then
found my place directly before Fox and struck him in the
head with a hammer.
(SHE does.)
(HE falls.)
36
95
The moment she strikes him in the head with a hammer, he is relegated
from the status of the Lord/Savior to that of a mortal victim, permanently
losing his chance to rise again. Ironically, the conclusion conjures the very
image of death dictated by the line spoken by one of the soldiers at the
beginning: "The foulest death of all shall he die for his deeds."
37
Elinor Fuchs sees the Writer's action as "the central gesture of
revenge tragedy" creating "the extreme discordance of the two genres,
mystery play and revenge tragedy," which becomes a dramaturgical
reflection of the city's moral chaos.
38
With regard to the ending, Fuchs
writes: "Now morality is suspended. There is an end, but no resolution."
39
In "Remembering and Revenging the Death of Christ: Adrienne
Kennedy's Motherhood 2000 and the York Crucifixion," Leanne Groeneveld
follows and complicates Fuch's brief analysis of the play, discussing how
the protagonist's revenge in the former repeats the pattern of the latter
revolving around the martyr and the "other" thereby failing to resolve
her trauma. While Fuch's and Groeneveld's analyses of the play offers
some interesting observations on the similarities between the medieval
miracle play and Motherhood 2000, both overlook the pivotal departures
from the traditional passion play that Kennedy makes in her play. For
instance, Groeneveld describes the orderless blueprint of New York in
the play simply as "a state of apocalyptic turmoil" paying little attention
to its thematic significance to the play as whole.
40
As for Mrs. Alexander's
improvisation, Groeneveld concurs with Fuchs in seeing the Writer's
action merely as "static repetition," "a return to and a reenactment of"
both her traumatic past and the York play, failing to notice the crucial
differences between the ancient miracle play and the Writer's rewrite of
36
Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 233.
37
Ibid., 229.
38
Elinor Fuchs, "Apolycaptic Century," Theater 29, no.3 (1999): 35.
39
Ibid.
40
Leanne Groeneveld, "Remembering and Revenging the Death of Christ:
Adrienne Kennedy's Motherhood 2000 and the York Crucifixion," The journal of American
Drama and Theatre 21, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 67.
"THE PLAY'S THE THING" 97
the ephemeral."
44
And there, Mrs. Alexander changes both reality and the
image of the reality. In Aesthetics of the Oppressed (2005), Boal delineates
how the fictitious action of the "spect-actor" on stage can make such a
difference in the real world.
To h'berate onese!f is to transgress. To transgress is to be. To
liberate onese!f is to be. By invading the stage, the spectator
consciously practices a responsible act: the stage is a
representation of the real, a fiction; she, however, the
spectator, is not fictitious; she exists on stage and beyond
the stage- metaxis- the spectator is a dual reality. Invading
the stage, in the fiction of the theatre, she practices and
acts; not only in the fiction, but also in the social reality
she belongs, simultaneously, to the two worlds, that of
reality and that of the representation of this reality which
is hers. Transforming the fiction, she transforms herself
into hersel.
45
The stage of the passion play itself is a fiction. However, Mrs. Alexander,
who is the spect-actor in the Forum, is not merely fictitious since
she exists both as one of the Roman soldiers on stage and as a social
individual whose body carries social meanings (e.g. familial, sexual, racial
etc.) in reality - thus, she represents a dual reality. And by transgressing
the script of the passion play with her "tactics," she rewrites not only the
metanarrative of the performance but also that of American reality rooted
in the belief in the superiority of whites to blacks so as to challenge and
discontinue it. As a result, both the passion play and the American society
which embosoms the former become "smooth" spaces where reality is
replaced with "imaginative possibilities" that liberate the oppressed. In this
respect, the passion play, with its message of love and salvation corrupted
by racism, is a microcosm of the American society that nourishes false
beliefs in its metanarrative, and the Writer's action leaves a crack in the
two worlds just as the New Yorkers razed the System with their tactics
- therefore, the stage of the play, both fictional and real, is a space in
between, metaxis, opened only to the spect-actor in the Forum who can
change both stage action and reality with their tactics. Since those tactical
44
Warren Iinds, "Metaxis: Dancing (in) the in-between." A Boa/ Companion:
Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics, ed. Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman (New
York: Routledge, 2006), 114.
45
Augusto Boa!, The Aesthetics of the Oppressed, trans. Adrian Jackson (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 74.
"THE PLAY'S THE THING" 99
fit in American society only to be terrorized by the "other." So this time,
with her Aristotelian recognition of "the play's the thing" turned Boalian,
she chose to take advantage of the script of the "other." In contrast to the
white actors who were privileged by and content to follow the given script,
she alone had the perspicacity and audacity to go beyond the script and
improvise. Consequently, a Theatre of the Oppressor, the white troupe's
passion play, became a Theatre of the Oppressed.
Boal stressed that, while the Theatre of the Oppressed is a
rehearsal for revolution, that is not an end in itself; it is the real life that
it aspires to change through the rehearsal. In this respect, Mrs. Alexander
might have taken Boal too literally: she used theatre itself as her weapon
without rehearsal or reflection, directly leaping on to praxis. In his most
recently published work, Boal divides human perception into three levels:
"Information - the receptive level," "Knowledge and Tactical Decision-Making- the
more active level," and "Ethical Consciousness- the human level." The first level
has to do with receiving information with senses, and the second level
is about using the information and making decisions. On the third level,
one gives "meaning and value to the decisions."
47
And among these three
levels, Boal said that the third, "the human level," should be the foundation
of a Forum Theatre since it is most important to thirJk about our choices
and decisions. Then, reflecting on the Writer's choice, one might say
her solution did not change anythirJg at all and that it was too violent.
However, before we judge her, we should ask ourselves this question first:
"do we have a better solution?" Even if we do, our task it not to say it
sitting in the dark corner while watching others' choices, but to show it on
the stage of our lives as "spect-actors."
As mentioned earlier, this Boalian understanding of the play not
only liberates the play from the limitations of conventional criticisms
such as Groeneveld's, according to which Mrs. Alexander's performance
is nothing but a repetition of the past and a morally wrong choice, but
allows a more aesthetic and performacive understanding of the piece.
Except for the staged reading at the McCarter Theatre in 1994, Motherhood
2000 has not had a fully realized professional production yet, probably
due to its brevity and narrative-like structure. Yet, focusing on the
spacial tactics of the New Yorkers and the protagonist transforming the
"striated" space into their own can help one visualize the play and make
it more "doable." Also, putting the play in the Forum Theatre format
followed by a discussion can be another way to produce it. Victor Turner,
in his From Ritual to Theatre: The HumanS eriousness of Plcry (1982), notes that
the word "performance" derives from Old French parfournir meaning "to
47
Boal, Aesthetics of the Oppressed, 35-36.
101
CONTRIBUTORS
cfrancis blackchild is the Heanon Wilkins Fellow in theatre at Miami
University and a theatre doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri.
She is currently working on her dissertation, "Preparing Birds to Fly:
Lloyd Richards and the Actor."
Seokhun Choi has recently received his Ph.D. in theatre from the University
of Kansas. His major research interests are religious performance,
dramatic criticism, and interactive theatre. He holds a BA from Myongji
University (Seoul, South Korea) and an MA in English Literature from
Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea).
Raymond A. Saraceni is a professor in the Center for Liberal Education
at Villanova University, as well as an actor and dramatist. His 2011 play,
Maroons, was nominated for a Barrymore Award for best new play by the
Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia. He holds a Ph.D. in Drama
from Tufts University.
Elizabeth Williamson is the author of The Materiality of Religion in Earjy
Modern English Drama (Ashgate 2009) and co-editor, with Jane Hwang
Degenhardt, of Religion and Drama in Earjy Modern England (Ashgate
2011). Her work has appeared in Studies in English Literature, Shakespeare
International Yearbook, English Literary Renaissance, and Borrower.r and Lenders,
and is forthcoming in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. She is a
member of the faculty at The Evergreen State College.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Playwrights Before the Fall:
Eastern European Drama in Times of Revolution
Edited by Daniel Gerould.
Playwrights Before the Fall: Eastern European Drama
in Times of Revolution contains translations of Portrait
by Stawomir Mroiek (PL); Military Secret by Dusan
Jovanovic (SI); Chicken Head by Gyorgy Spiro (HU);
Sorrow, Sorrow, Fear, the Pit and the Rope by Karel
Steigerwald (CZ); and Horses at the Window by Matei
i ~ n i e c (RO).
Price US $2o.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Claudio Tolcachir's Timbre 4
Translated and with an introduction by jean Graham-Jones
Claudio Tolcachir's Timbre 4 is one of the most ex-
citing companies to emerge from Buenos Aires's
vibrant contemporary theatre scene. The Coleman
Family's Omission and Third Wing, the two plays that
put Timbre 4 on the international map, are translated
by Jean Graham-Jones and Elisa Legon.
Price US $15.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: The Graduate Center Foundation, Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY1o0164309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: [email protected] or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Czech Ploys: Seven New Works
Edited by Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, and Dani el Gerould
Czech Plays: Seven New Works is the first English-
language anthology of Czech plays written after
the 1989 "Velvet Revolution." These seven works
explore sex and gender identity, ethnicity and
violence, political corruption, 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.
Price US $2o.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
}on Fabre: Servant of Beauty
and I AM A MISTAKE - 7 Works for the Theatre
jan Fabre Books:
I AM A MISTAKE - 7 Works for the Theatre
THE SERVANT OF BEAUTY- 7 Monologues
Edited and foreword by Frank Hentschker.
Flemish-Dutch theatre arti st Jan Fabre has pro-
duced works as a performance artist, theatre
maker, choreographer, opera maker, playwright,
and visual artist. Our two Fabre books include:
I am a Mistake (2007), Etant Donnes (2ooo),
Little Body on the Wall (1996), }e suis sang (2001),
Angel of Death (2003) and others.
Price US $15.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: The Graduate Center Foundation, Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New Yor k, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: www.segal center.org Contact: mestc@gc. cuny.edu or 212-8171868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould
This volume contains seven of Witkiewicz's most
SEVEN PLAYS
important 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 Antonin
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, novels, 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: The Graduate Center Foundation, Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Ci rculation Manager, Marti n E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10o16-4309
Vi sit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: [email protected] or 2128171868
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
Galla ire's House of Wives, both Algerian, ]a lila Baccar's
Araberlin from Tunisia, and Tayeb Saddiki's The Folies
Berbers 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-represented in existing anthologies and
scholarship. That is the drama from the Northwest of
Africa, the region known in Arabic as the Maghreb.
This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus
legend by four leading dramatists of the Arab world.
Tawfiq Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali 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
theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the
Western theatre community, and we hope that this
collection will contribute to that growing awareness.
The Arab Oedipus
Edited by Marvin Carlson
Price US $2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: The Graduate Center Foundation, Inc.
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
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: [email protected] or 212-8171868