THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 12, Number 3 Fall 2000

Editor: Vera Mowry Roberts Co-Editor: Jane Bowers Managing Editor: Lars Myers Editorial Assistant: Kimberly Pritchard Editorial Coordinator: Susan Tenneriello Circulation Manager: Lara Simone Shalson Circulation Assistants: Hillary Arlen Celia Braxton

Edwin Wilson, Director

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

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

The journal of American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. Our aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre, and to encourage a more enlightened understanding of our literary and theatrical heritage. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes (rather than endnotes). Hard copies should be submitted in duplicate. We request that articles be submitted on disk as well (3.5" floppy), using WordPerfect for Windows or Microsoft Word format. Submissions wil l not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Please allow three to four months for a decision. Our distinguished Editorial Board will constitute the jury of selection. Address editorial inquiries and manuscript submissions to the Editors, }ADT/Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309. Our e-mai l address is: mestc@gc.cuny.edu

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Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

Copyright 2000

The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1044-937X) is a member of CELJ and is published three times a year, in the Winter, Spring, and Fall. Subscriptions are $12.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an additional $6.00 for postage. Inquire of Circulation Manager/Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309.

THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 12, Number 3

Fall 2000

Contents

YVONNE SHAFER,

The Successful Career of Mae West on the American Stage

MIKE RIGGS,

14

Parab les Against Religion: The Modern Miracle of Humanity in O'Neill's Dynamo Cycle

BROOK BAETEN,

27

Masculine Mythology in Feminist Femininity: Molly Newman's and Barbara Damashek's Quitters

MARK EVANS BRYAN,

41

The Rhetoric of Race and Slavery in an American Patriot Drama: John Leackock's The Fall of British Tyranny

SETH BAUMRIN,

55

Jig Cook: Stage Manager for an American Renaissance

CONTRIBUTORS

75

journal of American Drama and Theatre 12 (Fall 2000)

THE SUCCESSFUL CAREER OF MAE WEST ON THE AMERICAN STAGE

YVONNE SHAFER

Mae West's first play was performed in 1926 under the simple title of Sex. Critical response included the following comments: " It is crudely vulgar and utterly without merit in text or performance. " 1 "Never in a long experience in the theatre have we met a set of characters so depraved-and so dull."2 " . .. a play cheap in conception, gaudy in interpretation and occasionally explicit to the point of mild nausea." 3 " . . . a crude, inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted." 4 These reviews gave little promise that the play Sex would be a hit at triple normal ticket prices or that its author and star would become a very successful playwright, stage actress, and movie star. Nor did they suggest that the seventy-four years after the play and twenty years after her death, Mae West would be the subject of a play, Dirty Blonde, which has attracted positive response from audiences and critics. Within a few years of Sex she was the highest paid woman in the country, her income of $480,833 a year second only to William

' "'Sex' Very Poor Stuff," N ew York Evening Post, 27 April 1926. Unless otherwise noted, newspaper reviews and journal articles are from the Mae West Cl ippings file in The Billy Rose Theatre Coll ection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. All available information is included in all citations. ' C.B.D., '"Sex' Wins High Mark for Depravity, Dullness, " Herald Tribune, 27 April192 6.
3

W.R., " More Spring Drama," World, 27 April1926 . '"Sex' a Crude Play," New York Times, 27 April 1926.

SHAFER

Randolph Hearst. When Sex opened nobody would have predicted that in two years critic Percy Hammond would write that she was more popular with her fans than Lynn Fontanne or Eva le Gallienne. 5 This paper will focus on the stage career of Mae West and analyze the qualities which led to her almost incredible popularity. The first consideration is the plays themselves. Were they so bad? Although the structure of the plays was never praised, some critics saw beyond the immediate element of shock (which put off most critics) and commented positively on characteristics which contributed to their popularity. The chief characteristic was that they were very funny. An anonymous critic wrote of Sex, after noting it might be closed by the censor: "But vulgarity and all, there are times when the thing is downright amusing. The cabaret scene in Trinidad has color and movement- perhaps too much." 6 (His last comment refers to Mae West's dancing.) Most of the critics commented on the comedy in Diamond Lit in 1928. Richard lockbridge wrote that the play was far from shocking-in fact, it seemed old-fashioned, especially in the supposedly shocking scene of undress: "She appeared in an amply protective and very funny corset." 7 j.H. wrote that the play as a whole was improbable and melodramatic, but "done with such complete gusto that it lived and breathed with al l the garishness of a lurid lithograph seen under a flaring gas jet, and that is probab ly the reason it was such good fun." 8 Percy Hammond was very satirical about newly " respectable Mae West" who had recently been sentenced to ten days in jail in connection with an allegedly obscene dance she did in Sex. He noted that the audience at Diamond Lit was very amused and that it was "one of the hits of the season."9 Writing in 1931 about The Constant Sinner, an anonymous critic for the Herald Tribune wrote, "The piece strikes me as crisp, exceedingly well cast, exciting, and above all things, exceedingly amusing netherworld melodrama ... which amounts to a sort of dramatic kidding very like that in which nowadays we indulge toward old-fashioned melodrama. The Constant Sinner should not be missed by those who love the tricks of the theatre and its occasional truth s." 10 A play which was perceived by many
5

Percy Hammond, "The Rewards of Virtue," New York Tribune, 29 April

1928.
6

"Sex," Sun, 10 April 1926. Richard Lockbridge, "Mae West," Sun, 27 April1928. j.H., "Di amond Lil," 10 April 1928.

Hammond, " The Rewards of Virtue."

"West's New Play," Herald Tribune, 18 October 1931 .

Mae West

cntiCs as Mae West's most unpleasant, Pleasure Man, produced in 1928, was nevertheless considered funny. An anonymous reviewer for America wrote, "Those on the inside chuckled at it. . . . It is an amusing piece, interesting because it is a little different. ... [the lines] were for the most part laugh-getters." 11 Writing in 1997, Mary Beth Hamilton suggested that part of the reason for the laughs was, in fact, that West was laughing at sex. West was "vaguely tongue-in-cheek, as if she were mocking the very notion of sexiness itself." 12 Of course a major element in the fun and comedy of th e plays was the persona West created for herself and the dialogue she wrote. Many of her lines have become a part of popular culture, frequently quoted by critics of the plays and later writers. When she observes a man staring at her figure, instead of being insulted she remarks, " It's better to be looked over, than to be overlooked." The line from Diamond Li1 which is probably her most famous is usually incompletely quoted: "Come up and see me sometime, when you've got nothin' to do and lots of time to do it." This was frank sexuality, yet so casually tossed off as to be funny-certainly not serious. A perspicacious review by Brooks Atkin son of the 1949 revival of Diamond Lil examines this aspect of the comedy of her persona: Even in the clinches she is monumentally disinterested, and she concludes her love scenes with a devastating wi se-crack before they are started. Although Miss West is the goddess of sex, it might reasonably be argued that she scrupulously keeps sex out of her acting by invariably withdrawing from anything but the briefest encounters. "Diamond Lil" is about the world of sex, but there is very little sex in it. 13 Writing about th e same production, Howard Barnes called it a "comic melodrama . . . [with the] preposterous Mae W est, who discovered that sex can be both vulgar and funny. . . . She can be outrageous without ever actually relying on the more sordid aspects of physical love. . . . Whenever she is on stage, the show is amusing, bawdy and nostalgic." 14 The nostalgia was an important element in the comedy, of course. The old-fashioned corset, the swan bed, the velvet curtains all called up an era which delighted both West and her
" America, 1928.
11 Mary Beth Hamilton, When I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West and American Entertainment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 128.

Brooks Atkinson, " Mae West Back in Town as 'Diamond Lil'," (New York Times, 7 February 1949) in New York Times Theatre Critics Reviews 1949, 370.
14

13

Howard Barnes, "Review of Diamond Li/," in NYTTCR 1949, 370.

SHAFER

audience. As Pamela Robertson observed, "West's complicated star image, her ability to both parody sex and be sexy, depended not only on her transgressive identifications with marginalized figures but also on her anachronistic use of 1890s settings." 15 Another element of comedy in the Mae West persona was her attitude toward men. Louise Beaver, who performed with her many times, observed, "She treated gentlemen like gentlemen used to treat ladies." 16 That is, West, in an appropriation of the male gaze, viewed men as potential sex objects. Thus, when a man informs her in a marked way that he lives in the house into which she is moving, rather than taking offense, she takes the lead and says, "A man in the house is worth two in the street." This attitude involves an admission of a lack of innocence which she also treated frankly. When a character tells her, "You're a mighty fine lady," she snaps back with pleasure, "One of the finest ladies that ever walked the streets." West's frank attitude toward sex and her attitude toward men must have been appealing, if only on a subconscious level, to many of the women in the audience. In an interview long after her stage career had ended, she said, "I helped start women's liberation; see, I chose my own men, my own friends, and I always worked and supported myself, even if I did accept diamonds from my men friends." 17 The fun of her character also included the fact that it was a thoroughly outrageous persona which she maintained after the curtain fell. Audiences looked forward with delight to her curtain speeches which most of the critics quoted. Following Catherine Was Great she told the audience, "Catherine the Great had three hundred lovers. I did the best I could in two hours." Having played her usual role of wise-cracking seductress in The Constant Sinner she said in her curtain speech, "I'm not at all like Babe-l'm more of the home girl type." Her sense of fun led critics to fun, so that critic j.B. commented, "She did not confirm, however, that she would act next year for the Children's Theatre in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." 18 Critics who thought that West's approach to sex was funny often pointed out, however, that the sexual element was still undeniably present. As an element, it can certainly be said to have contributed to the popularity of the plays, but not, as with many other plays, simply
15 Pamela Robertson, Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 37.

Louise Beaver quoted in George Haddad-Garcia, "Mae West Everybody's Friend," Black Stars (April 1981 ): 63. "West quoted in Haddad-Garcia.
18

16

j.B., "Mae West in New Scarlet Role," New York Times , 15 September

1931 .

Mae West

because of its presence, but because of West's adroit use of it. She achieved a balance in the use of it which drew in audiences, but did not go so far as to keep decent people out of the theatre. West often said she didn't see what people could object to since she never used nudity and never used obscene language. The latter is particularly notable when it is remembered that she w rote after the linguistically shocking, but highly successful What Price Glory? and tough-talking Chicago, which begins with the heroine pointing a gun at a man and shouting, "You damned tightwad! Like hell you're through! You Goddamned louse-!" 19 West, several critics observed, never even used " household oaths." 20 In 1949, John Chapman wrote of her alleged shocker, Diamond Lit, "Its extravagant sexiness and its background of Bowery dives, swan beds, white slavery and hoodlumism were spoofs even in 1928, but the cynicism of the play and its star made Diamond Lil rath er pleasantly naughty." 21 Mae West provided a good summation of her approach to sex in the plays in a line in which she is describing some photos taken of herself, "Sorta spicy, but not too raw-Ya know what I mean?" The material which initially drew in mobs of sailors to the premiere of Sex ultimately drew in a wide audience of devoted fans who enjoyed the spice without being offended or truly shocked. Writing in 1949 about the audience reaction to the revival of Diamond Lil, Robert Coleman wrote, "She makes what in other hands might seem offensive, amusing. It is remarkable to watch sedate dowagers applaud and roar at material that in less gifted hands would make them turn up their aristocratic noses." 22 Writing in 1975, Michael Bavar noted that time did not seem to diminish the image West created and the sexual quality inherent in it. He concluded, unknowingly predicting West's status as a sexual icon in Dirty Blonde and elsewhere, "Knowing Mae, she will probably be reincarnated as the sex symbol of the twenty-first century ." 23 In addition to the comedy and the titillating sexual elements, there were a number of unconventional elements in the plays that set them apart from others being produced and created interest for the
19 Quoted in Yvonne Shafer, American Women Playwrights 1900-1950 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 435.
20

R. Peter Bowling, " Mae West on Broadway," 10.

" John Chapman, "Same Old Mae in Same Old Play, but 'Diamond Lil' Role is Funnier Now," Daily News, 7.
22 Robert Coleman, "Mae West Still Sparkles in 'Diamond Lil' Role," Daily Mirror 7 February 1949.

23

Michael Bavar, Mae West (New York: Pyramid, 1975), 150.

SHAFER

audience. These included th e settings, the inclusion of unfamiliar characters, and the subject matter. Following th e production of The Constant Sinner, a number of critics wrote conventional responses. Stephen Rathbun called it a " dull and vulgar play." 24 An anonymous criti c wrote that th e play pandered to those w ith strong stomachs and weak minds: "The plot progresses in its nauseous theme of miscegenation, with prostitution, dope-peddling, and similar obscenity as atmosphere-the final word in vicio us vulgarity." 25 But others objected to these critics' complaints of immorality. The critic for the Herald Tribune referred to "a certain amount of moral high-hatting" and said that the supposed " horrific nature of its contents ... they are, I should say, in contrast with many politer Broadway plays as guileless as the old Jesse James thrillers." 26 Critics who were not blinded by " moral high-hatting" often noted unconventiona l, successful innovations which were intriguing to audiences of this time. As noted above, the scenes set in Trinidad provided interest for Sex. In The Constant Sinner th ere were characters and settings in Harlem, black actors, and a white woman married to a black boxer. This character, played by Mae West, consorts with gangsters and hoodlums, commenting that every time she opens the door a bunch of them are waiting for her. " When I opened the door thi s morning, five of them fell in . I wouldn't have minded, but two of them was dead. " Arthur Pollock wrote, "other playwrights w rite of these characters with more polish, but not such effect of reality." 27 That reality developed because of her close friendships w ith actors and musicians in Harl em and her inclusion of them, first in plays and later in movies. After she died there were many tributes to her from black performers, including Louis Armstrong, Louise Beaver, and Hattie McDaniel, whose careers she furthered against opposition from w hite producers. In " M ae West, Everybody's Friend," West was quoted as saying, " I was always ahead of my time. I knew people were prejudiced, but I never paid any attention to it. . .. I always thought women were equal, and I managed to get my own way and enjoy all the privi leges of bein' a woman . I also thought blacks were equal to whites, and from my teen years on, in Brooklyn, I had good friends who happened to be black." 28 Rea lizing that these friends also
14 Stephen Rathbun, " Mae West Returns," New York Evening Post, 15 September 1931.

25

" Play 'Constant Sinner' Opens," New York American, 15 September 1931.
Herald Tribune, 62 .

26

27

Arthur Po llock, " The Constant Sinner." West quoted in Haddad-Garcia, 63.

28

Mae West

happened to have talent which was sti ll unknown to most white audiences, she utilized daring and innovative casting. Approving of this, Wilella Waldorf wrote a positive review and noted the interest of scenes set in Harlem and "introduction of Negroes. The idea is generally considered a shocking one, not generally bandied about on the stage." 29 Another critic noted "a score of negro performers who create a tough aura for the piece." 30 Remembering the difficulties the Provincetown Players had producing All Cod's Chillun Cot Wings (death threats to O'Neill and others and a planned march by the Ku Klux Klan were only a part) and the fact that not until Finian's Rainbow in 1947 was a chorus for a Broadway musical integrated makes it clear how unusual West's writing and casting was. Another unusual element of writing and casting was the presence of homosexual characters in her plays. In the period in which West was writing plays there was a terrific scandal in connection with lesbian characters in the shocking play The Captive in 1928 and it was generally believed that Lillian Hellman was denied the Pulitzer Prize for The Children's Hour in 1931 because of the homosexual element in the story. West's plays included homosexual characters in a much more open and flamboyant manner than either of these two plays. In The Drag (1927) the story was about gay men and culminated in a grand scene of a ball with forty men, dressed as women, dancing and singing. She had the play performed out of town and was advised that she should not bring it into New York. According to a recent article by Claudia Roth Pierpont, the play was presented as an unadvertised preview in New York and was one of the causes of West's arrest31 (although the jail sentence related to her dance in Sex which she claimed was just an exercise her boxer father taught her). Following The Drag, West continued playing with fire in Pleasure Man in 1928. Written in part while she was in jail, the play was interesting because of its backstage setting and vaudeville turns, not because of its slight plot. Robert Littell noted how the audience enjoyed it, and while he thought it mildly amusing and enhanced by local color, he objected to the dialogue: "full of the revolting innuendo of perversion." 32 An anonymous reviewer for the Brooklyn Eagle voiced similar objections,
29 Wi lella Waldorf, "Mae West Returns," New York Evening Post, 15 September 1931 .

30

Howard Barnes, "Mae West's Play Opens at the Royale Theatre," Herald

Tribune, 15 September 1931.

Claudia Roth Pierpont, "The Strong Woman," New Yorker 72 (11 November 1996): 107.
31

31

Robert Littell, "They Don't Come Any Dirtier," Evening Post, 2 October

1928.

SHAFER

noting that the play was set in a small vaudeville house and was " just a collection of vaudeville turns. One or two of the female impersonators were not bad. But if they must be on the stage, one is enough in any bill. At the Biltmore there were entirely too many for comfort."33 The critic for America took a lighter view of it, writing, "Perversion never before was used to give diversion like it was last night. Pleasure Man may drag along, if permitted, for many months."34 His revi ew made reference to the fact that the show was raided, the fifty-five cast members arrested, and West served with an injunction. This time, however, she was not arrested. As she later reported, she went to court with Nathan Burkan "one of the ablest lawyers in New York, defending me and my show. This time I won the case on the grounds the show was not 'basically an immoral performance.' I was vind icated." Once the cast was released, the play continued and, no doubt helped by the publicity, required police again-this time to keep the crowds in order. The play continued to draw crowds, in part because of the good acting and the interest of the characters in the backstage scenes, according to some critics. When asked about her attitude toward homosexuals, West answered, "I look upon them as amusing and having a great sense of humor. They were all crazy about me and my costumes. They were the first ones to imitate me in my presence." Asked if she was a crusader in her determination to include characterization of homosexuals in her plays she answered with her usual frankness: "At the time I would have denied it. And perhaps I have never fully understood my own motives in writing plays that brought down the howl of the too pious. I saw no indecency or perversion in the normal private habits of men and women." 35 To conclude this point, West ventured where other playwrights feared to tread and added interest and humor to her plays in so doing. In 1977 she received additional reward : After Dark magazine gave Mae West its Ruby Award, indicating that she was a woman "Whose bold comic brilliance has taught us to laugh at our conventional puritanical heritage. " 36 A final element in the popularity of Mae West's stage plays was simply the high quality of the performers and the productions. Although her first production, Sex, was properly criticized as cheap and tawdry, it was the best she could do. When the play was rejected,
""Mae West Again," Brooklyn Eagle, 2 October 1928.
34

America, 1928.

35

West quoted in Bowling, 13.

36 Daniel Raymond Nadon, "Come Up and See Me Sometime! The Sexual Outsider in the Plays of Mae West," (Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Ch icago, August 1990).

Mae West

not surprisingly, by the Shuberts and other producers, she and her mother and her mother's lawyer produced it with the little money they could raise. When it proved a success in New London, a New York producer brought it into the city, but w ithout improving the production. But when West began to make money, she put it into her plays and they were high class productions with good casts. As Mary Beth Hamilton observes, "With a premiere of her fourth full-length Broadway play, Diamond Lil, M ae West became a full-fledged Broadway star, appealing to a broad range of theatre patrons and drawing raves even from many of the 'art theatre' advocates." 37 For The Constant Sinner she hired the very successful designer Rollo Wayne, who created exciting settings using a revolving stage, which was an innovation in 1931. Percy Hammond, who looked down his nose at the whole business, had to admit "she was smart enough to get a good cast" and noted that George Givot, acting the black boxer, was good enough to be in productions by the Theatre Guild.38 Catherine Was Great was produced in 1944 by Michael Todd who spared no expense. A cast of nearly a hundred was carefully selected and rehearsed and although the critics did not find the play as funny as they hoped, they generally praised the production and the tal ent of the performers. Burton Rascoe wrote, Shades of Max Reinhardt and Morris Gest! The Michael Todd historical extravagance "Catherine Was Great," by Mae West and starring Mae West, which opened at the Shubert last night before an aud ience which had bo ught $4,000,000 worth of War Bonds in order to purchase tickets, makes Chu Chin Chow and The Miracle, in retrospect, seem like productions of the late lamented Federal Theatre Project of the WPA. It is a spectacle of almost unbelievable magnificence in the way of sets and costumes. 39 Others concurred with high praise for the splendor of the settings by Howard Bay. Robert Garland wrote, Mike Todd, the producer of the piece, has given Mae West and Mae West's show the best that can be gotten. He has
37

Hamilton, 1OS.

Percy Hammond, " Is There No Flit?," Herald Tribune, 4 October 193 1. It is often stated that Givot was a black actor when, in fact, he was a white man in black make-up-something he wou ld reveal during the curtain call. Burton Rascoe, '"Catherine Was Great' Is Spectacular but Uneven," (New York World Telegram, 3 August 1944) in New York Theatre Critics Reviews 1944, 154.
39

38

10

SHAFER

given it the direction of Roy Hargrave, not to mention some finishing touches of his own. He has given it the resplendent, if somewhat cluttery, backgrounds of Howard Bay. He has given it the ballet-like costumes of Mary Percy Schenck and Ernest Schrapps. He has given it authentic Eighteenth Century furniture from the Newel Galleries. He has given it a gliding curtain, a revolving stage, a-Well, he has given it everything you can think of, including a huge and handsome cast of nigh onto a hundred persons.40 john Chapman spoke of the "slavic splendors as only Howard Bay could bring into being." (Like most critics, he felt it wasn't funny enough, but did quote one line which brought a big laugh: Mae West, dressed as the empress, told a servant, "Get me a traveling case and my peasant disguise." 41 ) Of course the center of the productions was always Mae West, even though, unlike many stars, she took care to surround herself with talented actors, singers, and dancers. She was praised for her talent as a singer, dancer, and comedienne from her first performances in vaudeville. In fact, she had a long apprenticeship on the stage, beginning in her childhood, when she played in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Lord Fauntleroy. When she toured in vaudeville, she made a close study of the audiences, noting what appealed to them and why. She said, "I used to have to work on the audience, appeal to them with little private gestures, twists of my head, the way I spoke a word, or winked over a song line. Inside I worried about the audience-in the end I would get them." 42 Analyzing her appeal, the writer R. Peter Bowling accurately points out, "Mae West's act always had a flair, a freshness, and intimacy with every audience, a closeness she tried to develop out of fear of disappointing."43 Even those critics who did not find her personally attractive in the 1930s had to admit she was a talented performer, and by the 1940s she was described as a first class performer who "never misses a trick." When she performed in the revival of Diamond Lit she was fifty-seven years old. Thanks to her lifetime habits of careful, healthful diet, no smoking or drinking (in contrast to the persona she created), and the exercises her father taught her, she was able to perform convincingly in the leading role. Many of
40

Robert Garland, "'Catherine Was Great' Has Mae West As Star," (New

York journal American, 3 August 1944) in NYTCR 7944, 155.

john Chapman, "Mae West Gives History the 0-0 in Lavish 'Catherine Was Great'," (New York Daily News, 3 August 1944) in NYTCR 7944, 155.
42

41

West quoted in Bowling, 10. Ibid.

43

Mae West

11

the cntrcs noted little change in her appearance and certainly no decline in abilities. William Hawkins wrote, Mae is no girl to be fazed by the passage of a couple of decades. If anything, she is sleeker if just as curvaceous as she was when "Diamond Lil" first became her trademark. . . . Miss West is a true phenomenon, and certainly for her day, which looks hardly past noon yet, is one of the wonders of the world ... There is never a moment when you do not wish she would talk and walk or sing more. And the payoff, of course, is that you leave the theater planning to come right back for more. Miss West is reported to have made several millions out of variations on the role of Lil. I hope she has, because she deserves every one of them .44 Howard Barnes said her performance was in a class by itself. " After twenty years, her current appearance at the Coronet is a very personal triumph, although she has surrounded herself with a large and willing company." 45 Richard Watts said, "Mae West is one of the famous comic legends of our time, and, in ' Diamond Lil/ you can see why." He noted the presence of many devotees who had seen the play in 1928, but noted that "most of the audience seemed to belong to a new generation that was encountering Miss West for the first time. It is obvious that these newcomers were suitably impressed." 46 Under the heading "Mae West Sti ll Sparkles in 'Diamond Lil' Role/' Robert Coleman noted that she had set a house record in Montclair, New Jersey when the revival opened there and it then "piled up huge grosses on a brief tour of the East." Observing that she sti ll sang the songs with wh ich she used to stop shows on the Keith-Aibee Circuit, he wrote an appreciation which fairly represents the attitude of the critics in general: Mae West is in a class by herself. There is no one in the theatre today comparable to her. She has authority, vitality and a method of theatrical projection that is unique. She can take hokum and make it glitter like gold . . . . No player in recent seasons has received an ovation such as was given Miss West on her entrance Saturday night. The audience went wild
44

William Hawkins, " Diamond Lil ' Brings West for the Wicked," (New York

World-Telegram , 7 February 1949) in NYTCR 7949, 370.

Howard Barnes, "Personal Triumph," (New York Herald Tribune) in

NYTCR 1949, 371.

Richard Watts, " A Famous Institution Returns for a Visit," (New York Post, 7 February 1949) in NYTCR 1949, 371.

46

12

SHAFER

and cheered for several minutes. . . . After witnessing Miss West's magic touch at the Montclair and Coronet, this reporter is still fascinated by the West techn ique. She gives a truly brilliant performance. 47 Mae West enjoyed a theatrical career almost without parallel. She moved from an audience of eighty-five sailors in a dilapidated theatre in New london-so small an audience she asked them to move down so she could see them-and subsequent scandal and a jail sentence to almost incredible popularity and critical praise. John Chapman (who said he and the rest of the audience laughed fit to bust at the revival of Diamond Li/) detailed the difficulties she had faced. "On the evening of April 9, 1928 'Diamond lil ' didn't even get the second-string reviewers, or the third-stringers; it got theatre-lov ing reporters off the city desks including me, who were eager to see anything on a pair of passes." Listing the theatrical block-busters which opened that night, he said that West had to "claw her way up" in the face of intense competition and that she had succeeded. 48 Her continuing popularity was the result of her talent in general, but in particular, her comic ability to " make sin seem very funny and sex somewhat hilarious,"49 her study of audiences, and the high quality of the productions. Additionally, she introduced material and characters in the plays in a way which was distinctly ahead of her time and created interest and publicity. She stated in later life, I always fought for the underdog. I thought wh ite men had had it their way too long, and shou ld stop exp loitin' women and blacks and gays. . . . I knew black people from the beginning, so I rea lized they weren't stereotypes; they were people, like me, but darker. So what was so strange about bein' friend ly to 'em and treatin ' em right? I knew someday the world would come 'round to my way of thinkin '. 50 Contributing to her popularity at all stages of her career were both the negative and positive reviews. Those with titles such as " Is There No Flit?," "Sex Wins High Mark for Depravity, Dullness," and "They Don't Come Any Dirtier" drew in an audience looking for thrill s and something daring. However, a surprising number of critics identified enterta ining, innovative qualities which drew in a broader audience.
47

Robert Coleman, "Mae West Still Sparkles in ' Diamond Lil ' Role. " Chapman, "Same Old M ae." "Sin, Sex and Mae West," (Sun, 7 February 1949) in NYTCR 1949, 372. West quoted in Haddad-Garcia, 64.

46

49

50

Mae West

13

While none of them suggested the plays should be included in the ten best plays of the year, they praised them for their comedy and other characteristics indicated above. One critic who perceived West's abilities and the fact that her plays had qualities to make them entertaining was, surprisingly, the erudite Joseph Wood Krutch, that great supporter of Eugene O'Neill. He wrote that he had felt lucky in avoiding her plays in six years of professional play-going, but was pleasantly surprised by The Constant Sinner. Heading his review in The Nation "In Defense of Mae West," he said the important thing was that Mae West had "personality" and a "sound if not very subtle idea of stage technique" using devices to get laughs he had seen employed by Ethel Barrymore and other reputable actresses. While he called the play "simple-minded, lurid, and crude" he felt it was better than many other plays "because it is at least not dull with that discouraging, anemic dullness characteristic of half the respectable plays produced on Broadway. . . . It is dramatically as sound and intellectually as respectable as a play like Belasco's "Lulu Belle" which ran for a year in one of our temples of art." He concluded "if someone will arise to proclaim in appropriate style that ' they ain't done right by our Mae,' I, for one, will whistle and stamp my feet." 51

5 ' Joseph Wood Krutch, "In Defense of Mae West," The Nation, 30 September 1931, 344.

Journal of American Drama and Theatre 12 (Fall 2000)

PARABLES AGAINST RELIGION: THE MODERN MIRACLE OF HUMANITY IN O'NEILL'S DYNAMO CYCLE

MIKE RIGGS

The two plays of what was to be Eugene O'Neill's spiritual trilogy,

Dynamo and Days Without End, illustrate the playwright's belief that
the complications of the twentieth century force us to turn away from religious beliefs and toward human trust. Dynamo is an exploration of a boy's failed relationship with his mother, and of his passion for a dynamo that embodies lust and maternal care to form the object of a greater love. Though his father is a minister, Reuben Light finds his spirituality in his mother, mostly because of the contrast between her nurturing love and his father's harsh discipline. After his temptation by lust, embodied in the atheist girl next door, he is estranged from his mother and seeks a replacement for religion in electricity. Similarly, in Days Without End, religion is a vehicle for a man to explore his psychological past, ultimately allowing him to reconcile with his dying wife. Both of these plays are autobiographical. O'Neill's tense relationship with his morphine-ravaged mother is reflected in Dynamo, and the difficulties between the playwright and Carlotta Monterey O'Neill are the motivation for Days Without End. Ultimately the religious metaphor of the plays was of only minimal importance to O'Neill, but the press responded to this aspect of the works at the expense of all others, and the plays have been evaluated as religious dramas ever since. Their lukewarm reception in production and their low rank in the canon are the result of this unfortunate miscategorization, which has obscured their value as indicators of O'Neill's personal spiritual (and non-religious) quest: the search for an ideal form of love. O'Neill was mired in personal turmoil when he wrote Dynamo. His previous work, the nine-act opus Strange Interlude, was still a sensation when he began to work on Dynamo in earnest. Though he was delighted by the positive reception of Strange Interlude, O'Neill was very suspicious of critics throughout his career and his letters indicate that he expected his next play, whether good or not, to be panned in retribution for his success . More importantly, O'Neill's

O'Neill's Dynamo Cycle

15

second marriage was beginning to crumble. His wife, Agnes Boulton O'Neill, was in Bermuda during the early conceptual stages of Dynamo, and Eugene's relationship with Carlotta Monterey, who would become his third wife, was developing into an affair. O'Neill mentions his friendship with Carlotta in his letters to Agnes, even going so far as to suggest that he "shall have to advertise for a temporary wife" for a research trip to a Niagara Falls hydroelectric power plant. 1 The playwright joined his wife on a worldwide vacation shortly thereafter, and he remained abroad after she had returned to the United States to begin divorce proceedings. The divorce was very public and highly scandalous; indeed, most of O'Neill's correspondence from these months begins with a demand that the recipient keep his current address secret, lest the American press discover his whereabouts. The divorce and subsequent alimony payments drained O'Neill financially and emotionally; in several letters he laments the negative effects of his "domestic brawling" on his work (325). Probably this failed marriage is responsible for the tensions and catastrophe within the Light family. Despite his Christian upbringing, Reuben Light cannot find spirituality in the teachings of his puritanical father, and he has transferred his faith from the church to his mother. This is apparent early in the play, in Reuben's appeal for absolution from his mother after she observes him flirting with Ada in the yard. He begs his mother to conceal her knowledge from the Reverend Hutchins Light, whose apoplexy over the atheist Fife family is already at a boiling point. Even as Reuben pleads for her complicity, however, Mrs. Light is aware that Reverend Light is hiding in the closet and listening to every word. His mother's treachery drives Reuben to abandon his family, and thereby his religion. In this betrayal Reuben is both reminiscent of and opposite to Christ, whose betrayal introduces the climax of the New Testament narrative, but whose mother is anything but disloyal. This hints at the possibility that Reuben's soon-to-be-found obsession with electricity is indeed the foundation of a new church for contemporary humanity. But it sets up a strong distinction from Christianity by suggesting that such a new religion is grounded in mistrust and cynicism-indeed, that it is a human church rather than a divine one. Reuben's new religion of electricity is an outgrowth of O'Neill's constant search for a higher love, an idea which the playwright often explores but never quite defines in his eighteen years of dramatic writing (or, for that matter, in his three marriages). Clearly lust is only a small part of this ideal love, if it has any relevance at all; in Dynamo,
'Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 259. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

16

RIGGS

the object of lust is sacrificed to the dynamo in order to bring Reuben peace. In this search for pure love, the maternal aspect-tenderness and tranquility-is clearly of primary importance to O'Neill. This is most literally expressed in Desire Under the Elms, in which Eben Cabot falls in love with his father's young wife, Abbie. In the climactic scene of Desire Under the Elms, Abbie appeals to Eben not as a lover, but as a mother: " ... She is tender.) Don't be afeered! I'll kiss ye pure, Eben-same's if I was a Maw t' ye-an' ye kin ki ss me back 's if yew was my son-my boy-sayin' good-night t' me!" Unlike his son, Ephraim Cabot does not find solace in Abbie. On the night of Abbie and Eben's encounter, Ephraim has gone out to the barn to sleep with the cows, extolling their maternal characteristics of warmth, calmness and understanding: "Down whar it's restful-whar it's warm-down t' the barn. I kin talk t' the cows. They know. They know the farm an' me. They'll give me peace." 2 In the midst of his son's and his wife's lust, Ephraim's attraction to the cows is purer and less complicated, based only upon the goal of personal peace. Likewise, in The Great Cod Brown, both principal male characters find whole love in Cybel, who is described as an " idol" and an "earth mother." Cybel is the only character in the play who sees beyond the artifice of the characters' outward (masked) personae. However, Cybel is motherly in a less ethereal sense as well; just before Dian's death, she reminds him that "i t's all a game, and after you're asleep I'll tuck you in." Dian, who has used the last of his energy to remove his mask, responds, "Mother!" In Cybel we see a recurrence of the cow imagery that first appeared in Desire Under the Elms. Several stage directions depict Cybel as serene and bovine, and Dian refers to her as "old Sacred Cow." 3 Again, O'Neill makes these references to diminish the importance of the erotic and emphasize the appeal of serenity. The most unadorned representation of O'Neill's quintessential loving female can be found in his last play, A Moon for the Misbegotten. Josie, a larger-than-life farm girl, is exhorted by her father to take jim Tyrone to bed. However, Josie's love for jim exists on a different level, and her ultimate expression of that love is to cradle the man's head on her breast for a full night. This strikingly maternal gesture is the moment of supreme peace in Tyrone's adult life. O'Neill uses a simi lar image at the moment of Brown's death in The Great Cod Brown: the fallen man, sh rouded in a loincloth, expires in Cybel's arms to the sound of her soothing voice. Less ambiguously than in The Great Cod Brown, O'Neill specifically calls for bovine
2 Eugene O'Neill, Desire Under The Elms, in Complete Plays v. II, Travis Bogard, ed. (New York: Library of America, 1988), 354, 350.
3

Eugene O'Neill, The Creat Cod Brown, in Complete Plays v. II, 500, 498.

O'Neill's Dynamo Cycle

17

qualities in Josie. She is warm and calm, and her sheer size is clearly analogous to that of a cow. While Josie cradles Tyrone, her father spends the night sleeping in the barn, just as Ephraim Cabot does in Desire Under the Elms . In abstract but effective ways, O'Neill imparts the qualities of this ideal, serene woman upon the dynamo, which is personified in the feminine during the last act. Reuben describes the sound of the dynamo as "[l]ike someone singing me to sleep-my mother-when I was a kid-calling me back to somewhere far off where I'd been once long ago and known peace," and he refers to the dynamo itself as "the Great Mother- big and warm." 4 The image of the dynamo as mother allows the playwright to establish it as a life force, forming the basis of Reuben's attachment to it as a religious icon. O'Neill wants us to see the dynamo onstage as though it is enshrined, surrounded by the switches, cables and busses that create its environment. It is safe to assume that this idea was inspired by Henry Adams, who in The Education of Henry Adams describes his own reaction to dynamos as religiously profound: [T]o Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. . . . Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive. 5 Apparently one of O'Neill's correspondents recognized the influence of Adams when she read Dynamo, for in O'Neill's response to one of her letters, he writes that he has read The Education and remembers it well (323). Though it is secondary to the maternal image, the dynamo is a powerful symbol of the industrial world in O'Neill's commentary on the state of the contemporary soul. Dynamo is a psychological drama in which Reuben returns to his mother after finding that all of his religious and quasi-religious experiences lead to her. The machinery of an industrial world, for all of its power and appeal, leads the protagonist back to his own dependence on humanity. O'Neill describes Dynamo as a play about

Eugene O'Neill, Dynamo, in Complete Plays v. II, 873, 874.

5 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, in Novels: Mont-SaintMichel, The Education, Ernest Samuels and jayne N. Samuels, eds. (New York: Library of America, 1983), 1067.

18

RIGGS

the root of sickness today as I feel it- the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new One, for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find any meaning for life in, and to comfort its fears of death with. (3 11) Of all the virtues that religions have always extolled-faith, charity, humility, love, et cetera-love between people is the only one which the industrial, commercial and scientific forces of the modern world have not undermined. Symbolism is thick in Dynamo, all pointing toward a powerful but hollow deity of science and industry. This entity, first depicted as a thunderstorm which is simultaneously perceived as an act of both the old and new gods, embodies O'Neill 's long-held fascination w ith the dichotomy between the Dionysian pursuit of earthly passions and the Appolonian adherence to pious but intangible ideals. The characters' names plainly emphasize each family's orientation- Light symbolizing the Biblical metaphor of God's light of truth, and Fife suggesting the pedestrian music accompanying the pleasures of the flesh. (Additionally, Ramsay Fife's first name may be a subtle reference to Genesis 22, in which an angel sends a ram to Abraham to sacrifice in place of his son Isaac-likewise, Reuben views Fife and electricity as an alternative to God's instructions as explained by his father.) As the thunderstorm approaches the Light and Fife houses in Act I, Ada and Ram say Fife prey upon the Lights' fear of lightning. Likewise, Reuben mockingly admonishes his father to be careful of the lightning when the Reverend sets out to report the newly revealed story of Fife's unseemly past. Lee Simonson's set design for the original production of Dynamo included poles and power lines which stood over the Fife house in much the same way as the two large elm trees stand over the Cabot farmhouse in Desire Under the Elms-with a "sinister maternity in their aspect." 6 Though they turned out as two predominantly psychological dramas, Dynamo and Days Without End are the result of O 'Neill's attempt to write a trilogy about the results of the conflict between religion and science. After conceiving of the trilogy early in the writing of Dynamo, he planned to write two more plays called Without Endings of Days and The Life of Bessie Bowen. His longestlived idea of a title for the trilogy was Cod Is Dead! Long LiveWhat?, the first three words of which are borrowed from one of O ' Neill 's greatest philosophical influences, Nietszche. O 'Neill summarized the theme of the trilogy in July of 1928: "It hits at what is
6 Ronald H. Wainscott, Staging O'Neill: The Experimental Years 1920-1934 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 250. Stage direction taken from Complete Plays v. II, 318.

O'Neill's Dynamo Cycle

19

the matter with us religiously speaking, with our old Gods and our new sciences, from a psychological and symbolical angle that hasn't been touched before (306)." He later regretted having tipped his hand, for the critics speculated wildly about the progress of the remaining plays of the trilogy. O'Neill wrote in a letter that he had blundered horribly in shooting off my mouth about a trilogy and the mea ning of it. I didn't mean what is usually meant by trilogy, of course, and I didn't mean ' message,' 'solution' or anything definite. But it gave them all a clue as to how they should misinterpret- and, as they were gunning for my next play, they seized on it eagerly. My own fault, though!" 7 As the religion of Dynamo developed into a church of psychology, O ' Neill retained many references to more traditional religion. For example, he relied heavily upon sound to convey the omnipresence of the electrical God. Indeed, it was during Dynamo that O'Neill began to understand the possibilities of aptly-designed sound, which he felt could be "one of the most original and significant dramatic values modernity has to contribute to the theatre (300) ." In the first act of Dynamo, the thunder sounds specified by O'Neil l invoke the image of an angry God throwi ng thunderbolts at the people below. 8 Likewise, during the last act of the play (and possibly even before the last act) O'Neill wanted the pervasive hum of a dynamo to underscore the characters' word s, just as it underscores Reuben's thoughts throughout the play. O' Neill's experiments with sound in Dynamo are a continuation of an old fa scination. In The Emperor }ones the playwright called for a tom-tom to punctuate the action, and in The Hairy Ape the sounds of the coa l stokers' labor are heard throughout the stokehouse scenes. Later, O'Nei ll wou ld experiment w ith implied sounds; for example, in Mourning Becomes Electra, he would structure the dialogue of the play to mirror the beating of a tomtom, driving the characters to their inevitable end. 9 O'Neill was dissatisfied with the original production of Dynamo, directed by Phillip Moeller, but he blamed himself for remaining in Europe throughout th e process. He was particularly frustrated by Simonson's set, which "was neither a real dynamo, nor an idol impression of a dynamo, but simply a dead show-soppy imitation ... . Lee's dynamo was just scenery-and who but a scenic designer could
7

Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (New York: Harper, 1962), 689. Wainscott, 246.

Evert Sprinchorn, lecture on Dynamo, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, 15 October 1997.

20

RIGGS

ever adore scenery (343)?" O'Neill also disagreed with the Guild's decision to abandon his idea of removable panels on the Light and Fife houses. In O'Neill 's stage directions, the individual rooms of the houses are revealed by flying out the wall from in front of that room; in the production, there were no removable panels at all, and rooms of the houses were individually lit whenever they were occupied. 10 After his successful experiment with asides in Strange Interlude, O ' Neill tried to apply the same idea to Dynamo. The asides in Dynamo, though, do not contradict the action of the play as they do in Strange Interlude, and cri tics found this considerably less interesting. 11 He decided early in the writing process that "as for the dialogue, it is lnterludism. Thought will be as prominent as actual speech, probably, but th ere will be much less of the cutting in of the brief asides. Dynamo, for one thing, deals with more direct, less cerebral people (301 )." Moeller was satisfied with the asides because of the contrapuntal melody that they provided, but O'Neill ultimately concluded that they were uninteresting compared to those in Strange Interlude because they did not run counter to the dialogue. 12 Critical response to Dynamo was tepid at best. George Jean Nathan published in a review a li sting of all the brief stage directions in the first act of the play to demonstrate the playwright's heavyhanded manipulation of th e actors. 13 In a rath er infamous response to Robert Benchley's New Yorker review, Arthur Guiterman published his poetic reaction to the production: Eeny-meeny mynamo I have been to Dynamo All except that girl in red It was worse' n what you said. 14 O'Neill's first reaction to the negative criticism was one of dismissive cynicism. He felt that Dynamo would have "scored a failure ... if the play had been Hamlet! They were out to take it out of my hide for the success of lnterlude." 15 He was also indignant that, in responding to
10

Wainscott, 248.

"Gelb, 687.
' 2

Sprinchorn, Lecture. Louis Shaeffer, O 'Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Littl e, Brown, 1973), 323-4.

'

Gelb, 688. The girl in red w as Claudette Colbert, whose tight dress and long legs made Ada the highlight of the production for some viewers.
' 5

Shaeffer, 32 5.

O'Neill's Dynamo Cycle

21

the rei igious aspect of the play, the critics did not connect it to the more important psychological drama beneath the surface. On this point O'Neill was perhaps unfair, considering his own pride in the religious aspect of the play. He had written in 1928: It seems to me that anyone trying to do big work nowadays must have this big subject behind all the little subjects of his plays or novels, or he is simply scribbling around on the surface of things and has no more real status than a parlor entertainer. (311) Though he intended the religious subject-"this big subject"-merely to counterpoint the psychological aspect of the play, O'Neill seems to have been unable to articulate the more important theme until a few years later, when he remarked that no criticism, favorable or not, got what I thought my play was about.... the psychological mess a boy got into because he suddenly felt that the whole world had turned against him and betrayed him into cowardice. Most of all his mother, whose betrayal really smashes him .... How anybody could think, in light of previous work, that I would waste time writing a play on the piffling struggle between pseudo-religion and pseudoscience is more than I can make out. (325) Eventually, after widespread negative criticism of Dynamo, O'Neill conceded that it was not one of his greatest works. "When I read it over," he wrote a confidant, "I was appalled by its raggedness and, in the third part, vagueness and complicatedness. It was in no shape for production." 16 Perhaps because of the sting of negative reception, O'Neill abandoned the Cod Is Dead trilogy to begin his greatest trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra. He would not return to the psychology of spirituality for five years. Days Without End, the second play in the never-completed Cod Is Dead trilogy, is shaped largely by O' Neill's personal life. Though he had considerable difficulty writing the play, the concept came to him quite easily: he dreamed the entire action of the play in September of 1932. 17 Apparently the dream did not translate well into written English; O'Neill wrote to Eugene O'Neill Jr. just four months later that the inspiration was lost, and Without Endings of Days (which was the working title at the time, based on O'Neill's mistaken belief that it was

16

Gelb, 690. Ibid., 761.

17

22

RIGGS

a Biblical quote 18) was "a case in point where infinite pains and concentration availed nothing (408)!" O'Neill's muse had returned by May, though; he wrote to Eugene describing the concept of the play in effusive excitement: . . . a sort of Faust-Mephistopheles in one person idea, modern psychologically conceived, the damned self being masked, the two selves speaking as from one individual, the unmasked self being the only one the other people in the play see-or hear, even when it is that masked self who speaks.
(411)

The ease with which O'Nei ll conceived Days Without End is partially due to the parallels between the play and his own life. There is resemblance between O'Neill and john Loving, the protagonist, in their similar searches for spiritual significance in the world's religions. Father Baird, the priest, has the hard discipline and formal affection of james O ' Neill, the playwright's father. The Lovings live in a New York duplex apartment, as did O'Neill and Carlotta, and Elsa Loving has previously been married to an unfaithful husband, as had Carlotta Monterey. The story of Days Without End can be found in O'Neill's life also. Carlotta had long encouraged O 'Neill to return to the Catholic church, although she never tried to force him. 19 And, of course, john Loving explores his life in his largely autobiographical novel, just as O'Neill does in his plays. As O'Neill's last mask play, Days Without End marks the end of the playwright's experimental period. The structure of the play grows out of the double-character idea that was at the core of O'Neill's concept. The character of john Loving is played by two actors, denoted in the script as " John" and " Loving. " John is the character's outward persona, like the masked selves of the characters in The Great Cod Brown; he is the side of the character that other characters see. Loving, played by a physically similar actor wearing a mask to liken him to the actor playing john, is invisible to the other characters in the play. All interaction between the characters goes through john, and when Loving speaks, the other characters hear the words from John. This innovative (if heavy-handed) device allows O'Neill to experiment This further with the Jungian concepts of persona and anima. distinction between the outward personality and the soul is apparent in O'Neill 's previous experimental plays; the masks in The Great Cod Brown are used to differentiate between the persona (masked) and the
16 Evert Sprinchorn, "O'Neill's Myth Plays for the God Forsaken," Theater Three 5 (1988), 60.

19

Gelb, 764-5, 779.

O'Neill's Dynamo Cycle

23

anima (unmasked), and the asides in Strange Interlude are brief glimpses into the anima of the characters. The technical difficulties of physically donning a mask and the structural challenge of interrupting the action for an aside are circumvented here with the establishment of an individual character for the anima. As in Dynamo, religion is used as a vehicle and not as a subject; it is a worthy topic for conflict between the two sides of John Loving. The ubiquity of religious and spiritual doubt in twentieth-century America was important to O'Neill; he wrote to the producer that he wanted Days Without End to open as soon after Christmas as possible so that audiences would have their own religion at the front of their minds (423). O'Neill intended the religious subtext of the play to function in the same way as the sets, which he felt should be "merely background for the psychological-religious drama in John Loving's soul ... should never attract notice as being something in themselves (424)." The playwright was adamantly opposed to anything that might give the appearance of didacticism; when Bennett Cerf suggested showing the manuscript to Catholic clergy for an endorsement, O'Neill venomously replied: No, I certainly cannot consent to you r trying to get any advance endorsements of Days Without End from the high dignitaries of the Church! In fact, I feel so strongly on this point that if you do, I shall have to oil up the family automatic and surge forth and eliminate you from our midst! (425, O'Neill's emphasis) O'Neill evidently realized that he was powerless to influence the reception of the play, and his letters indicate that he was resigned to being eva luated on th e religious aspect of his work. He wrote in August 1933:

Days Without End is nothing if not controversial, especially in its Catholic aspect. It is sure, fail or succeed, to arouse much bitter argument. It w ill be well hated by the prejudiced who won't see the psychological study end of it, but only the general aspect. (419)
He was especially disgusted with the idea th at his play endorsed the Catholic Church, which he described as "a politically-meddling, social-reactionary force [that] repels me (433)." While Days Without End carefully avoids any mention of the Church's structu re, its audiences did not succeed in separating the spiritual aspect of the play from its religious counterpart in the real world. O'Neill lamented that

24

RIGGS

to judge from the chatter that reached me in New York, you'd think I was on the verge of joining the Trappist monks! Which leads me to fear that any day now I may be arrested for attempted rape on my sister, confession of which is so obvious as Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra. That I never had a sister shou ldn't matter to the folks who think I'm al l of John Loving in Days [Without End] and who so easily ignore that for one item of simi larity of experience there are ten dissimilar items which have a great part in the psychological working out of the play to its inevitable end. (429) Religion for john Loving (and, we may infer, for O'Neill) occupies a place within the psychological being that defies logical explanation. The function of john Loving's religion in the plot of Days Without End is to allow personal and interpersonal peace. Like the religious aspect of the dy namo, O'Neill may be borrowing this idea from Henry Adams, who writes of the profound effect of religion upon men in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Observing the architectural and social triumph of Mont-Saint-Michel, Ad ams writes: The whole mount . . . expressed. the unity of Church and State, God and Man, Peace and War, Life and Death, Good and Bad; it solved the whole problem of the universe. The priest and the soldier were both at home here . . . the politicia n was not outside of it; the si nner was welcome; the poet was made happy in his own spirit, with a sympathy, almost an affection, that suggests a habit of verse in the Abbot as well as the architect. God reconciles all. ... 20 The peace brought about by John Lov ing's return to the church is largely accidental. O ' Neill originally planned for John to shoot himself at the altar in the fina l scene, torn between his cynical nihilism and his desperate need for Elsa. Two Jesuit priests, with whom O'Neill had struck up an intellectual friendship, persuaded him to change the ending to its existing state. According to Mrs. O'Neill, the playwright "felt he had ruined the play and that he was a traitor to himself as a writer" by accommodating the Jesuits' request. 21 The new ending resulted in Catholic acceptance of the play and enthusiasm for O'Neill in general, as expressed in a Commonweal review:

20

Henry Adam s, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, in Samuels and Samuels,

382-3.
2 '

O'Neill's Dynamo Cycle

25

To many, the towering paradox of victory in surrender will be lost. But to those who understand the universal soul of the mystic, in all times and all ages, the meaning will be plain enough. They will see the courage of humility, where others may see only softness or what they may defensively call sentimentality. 22 In reality, though, it seems that O'Neill had little interest in this "courage of humility," and that he came to regard the ending as soft and sentimental himself. Ultimately, O'Neill discounted the critics' negative response to the play because he came to the conclusion that the people who would most appreciate it were those with a spiritual (though not necessarily religious) consciousness who would be difficult to lure into the modern theater. The greatest endorsement of Days Without End came when William Butler Yeats requested permission to produce the play at his Abbey Theatre. "If a poet like Yeats sees what is in it," O'Neill remarked, "all. my hard work on it is more than justified (430)." Ironically, one week later the same Commonweal reviewer published a similar dismissal of the New York critics: " I cannot say that the New York critical reaction is entirely unexpected. The trouble, as I see it, is this-that the reality of the struggle toward faith is exceedingly remote from the Broadway consciousness.'' 23 O'Neill gave the scripts of Days Without End and Ah, Wilderness! (the only comedy of his career) to the Theatre Guild at the same time. He and the Guild agonized over which play to present first, but ultimately decided on Ah, Wilderness! O'Neill's rationale for this decision was that controversy, sure to erupt over Days Without End, would be fatal for Ah, Wilderness! if Days Without End were presented first. 24 This was probably a wise decision, because O'Neill had become rather fiercely negative toward theater critics. Just as he suspected them of retribution when Dynamo failed after the success of Strange Interlude, he probably would not have been open to negative criticism of Ah, Wilderness! once Days Without End had erupted onto the New York stage. As it was, he passively dismissed critics' reviews of Days Without End. He cabled to the company after the New York opening:

Richard Dana Skinner, "The Play: 'Days Without End,"' Commonweal, 19 january 1934, p. 328.
23

22

Richard Dana Skinner, "The Play: The Critics and 'Days Without End,"'

Commonweal, 26 January 1934, p. 357.

Gelb, 769.

26

RIGGS

Don 't let the bad newspaper reviews bother you .... I know you will find ... a steadily growing audience of the intelligent and unprejudiced who will know what the play is about. .. . This is a play we can carry over the critics heads. So carry on with confidence in the final result and make them like it. (371)

Dynamo and Days Without End each present novel and challenging ideas about religion and spirituality. Often the plays are evaluated strictly on this basis, and some critics have found merit on this level. However, O'Neill has a loftier purpose than evangelism. Religion acts as a strict guide to existence only for Hutchins Light and Father Baird, both of whom are supporting characters whose one-sided faith is presented only to emphasize the difference between themselves and the protagonists. Reuben Light and John Loving are both psychologically complex characters who struggle to reconcile the cynicism of a material age with personal relationships that are still guided by an otherwise battered spirituality. The plays are functional dramas about religion, for viewers who wish to stop there. For those who see beyond the religious supertext, however, the Dynamo cycle is a profound exploration of the conflicts within the contemporary mind.

journal of American Drama and Theatre 12 (Fall 2000)

MASCU LINE MYTHOLOGY IN FEMINIST FEMININITY: MOLLY NEWMAN 'S AND BARBARA DAMASHEK'S QUILTERS

BROOKE BAETEN

The American West is a myth. It exists somewhere in the distance and over the next mountain range, where the air is filled with dust and tumbleweeds and the people are as rugged as the frontier itself. These heroic people, rough and hardened, independent and free, are al ive and wel l in the American psyche, and inhabit an uncivilized territory just over the horizon from the civilized settlements of modern 1 America. We are neighbors, we modern Americans, to these legends. And as friendly neighbors do, we occasionally take a ride over to the wild side next door, where there may not be much green grass but there sure is a spectacular sunset. And when the sun goes down and we ride home again, we mourn the loss of the Great American Frontier and we regret that in our settlem ent it's so much harder to be a hero. In our territory, a man's got to talk his way out of conflict, and a woman is considered oppressed if she spends her days sewing and raising her fifteen ch ildren. And in our territory, the laundry lists of qualities that make a man a man and a woman a woman are simply
' As Max Westbrook defines it, myth in this context exists as a "consistent prefabrication, the creation of make-believe stories or revisionist history to entertain, to inspire, or to control. By [this] definition, myths are organizing stories that explain a human enterprise, stories that shape the history and values of a given people. The function of such stories is both psychological and practical, for they express a sense of unity, purpose. More than a superior propaganda, myth in this sense is alive, on-going, changing; and it may include religions, cultu re, morality, history, literature, and even practical matters such as agriculture, medicine, hunting, clothing, housing, and politics. " (Max Westbrook, " Myth, Reality, and the American Frontier" in Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature, Barbara Howard Meldrum, ed. (Troy, NY: The Whitson Publishing Company, 1985), 14.) I use this definition of myth to emphasize both the omnipresent quality of the frontier myth in the modern American psyche and the influence the frontier myth exercises on modern constructions of identity during the most everyday, practical occupations-especially as that myth manifests itself in Quitters.

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not so clear. It follows, then, that in our modern imaginings of our frontier neighbors we should blur the lines a bit between our perceptions of them and our definitions of ourselves. In Molly Newman's and Barbara Damashek's Quilters, in fact, it seems that the modern desire to identify with the pioneer ideal produces characterizations that are not merely muddled on the timeline, but muddled on the gender line as well. In questioning the interplay between modern and pioneer ideals, I mean to suggest that Quilters presents a specifically gendered construction of identity that is problematized by the pervasive myth of the Western pioneer; that the characters in this play acquire masculine characteristics even as the play attempts to portray unadulterated femininity; that the women of Quilters are ultimately more fully realized as pieces of a composite and complicated gender identity than as individuals; and that the gender-bending in this play produces a muddled and unsatisfying construction of modern gender identity. Written and performed in the eighties, Quilters self-consciously concerns itself with constructions of femininity and the legacy of the pioneer woman. Though hardly "feminist" in comparison with more radical works of the eighties, Quilters comes as part of th e renewed interest in quilts begun by Jonathan Holstein in the early seventies and embraced by the women's movement. 2 Overwhelmingly womancentered (the few male characters are played by women), Quilters recalls women's personal histories of the civilization of the frontier West, thereby participating in the "consciousness raising" tradition of 3 the feminist movement.

Kathleen Sterritt, "Rediscovering Quilts, Irreplaceable Treasures from America's Past," The Washington Post, 6 September 1984, "Washington Home, Decorating," p. 16. From a nineties perspective, thi s "consciousness raising," this active recognition that the American woman's perspective has been repressed and devalued, this celebration of women's experien ce and validation of the importance of that experience to American culture, seems fairly obvious. Apparently, that agenda was not as obvious when Quilters was first performed. John Simon wrote, "Quilters is the sort of show that gives regional theater a bad name. It is cute, senti mental, sophomoric, pseudo-significant, and really not theater at all .... If the subject is one of major historical interest, oral history can, with extreme sensitivity and skill, be fashioned into a documentary drama. But quilting and the comments on it by legions of nameless needleworkers? ... I understand also that quilting was the chief-perhaps only-mode of self-expression for generations of pioneer women, that it took the place of recreation, art appreciation, family history, autobiography, psychotherapy, and chicken soup. But never, under any circumstances, can I see its taking the place of drama" Oohn Simon, "Rev. of Quilters, by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek," New York 17 (October 1984): 77). Legitimizing those "legions of nameless needleworkers" as important
3

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Along with the tradition of consciousness ra1smg comes the development of a strong community of women, unfettered by the interference or domination of men; thus, as Joanne Karpinski notes, "In the dramatic structure of Quilters men's presence interferes with the 4 emergence of female autonomy." Male characters are only minor figures within the action, and even when an entire scene (or block, as Newman and Damashek call them in keeping with the quilting theme) focuses on the relationships a male character, James Earl Prentiss, has with the women making his quilt, Prentiss himself never appears on stage. Throughout this block, each woman expresses her love for Jamie, and despite the fact that three of these women harbor romantic desires for him, never is there any antagonism within the quilting circle itself; when Elly pronounces, "If I get near that simp I hear you're fiddlin' with, I'm gonna tear her hair out," she simply turns back to the task of group quilting, unconcerned with the fact that two of the other 5 young women in the circle have recently "fiddled" with Jamie. Karpinski explains, "This bonding is central to the quilting culture.... The women working on James' Freedom Quilt may be jealous of each others' relationships with him, but this doesn't threaten the working harmony of the group. Crisis assaults this community from without ... 6 rather than eroding it from within." For the women of Quilters, enjoying a strong female community is one of the two motivations for quilting that are not strictly utilitarian; the other motivation, it seems, is the opportunity for artistic creation. Sarah reminisces: In the summers, we'd put up the frame on the screened porch and when the work was done for the day, Mama would say, "OK girls, let's go to it." That was the signal for good times and laughin'. We'd pull up our chairs around the frame and anyone that dropped in would do the same, even if they couldn't stitch straight. Course we'd take out their stitches later if they was really bad. But it was for talking and visiting that we put up quilts in the

Americans and artists, it seems, was precisely the point; as a participatory art form, then, drama seems quite an appropriate vehicle.
4 joanne Karpinski, "The Shadow Block: Female Bonding in Quitters," Women and Performance 4:1 (1988-1989): 9.

5 Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek, "Act I, Four Doves in a Window," in Quitters (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1986), 49. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text and will indicate act, scene name, and character(s) speaking (when not otherwise indicated).
6

Karpinski 14, 16.

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summer. People would get out after the chores in the summertime and oh how the word would fly that we had the frame up. Had to have a screened porch 'cause sometimes you'd quilt and visit 'til midnight by lamplight with the bugs battin ' aga inst the screen. (Act I, Four Doves in a Window, 43-44) Though the reason for quilting is community-oriented in this charming vignette, the attention to detai I and the desire to c reate a perfect product underlies the event-the "really bad" stitches are later removed to improve the quality of the quilt. Highlighted here is the creative process, indicating that quilting is not merely domestic necessity or quaint craft, but art. Sarah emphasizes this point while remembering her mother, who "would pin a cloth over the top of a quilt [she liked a lot herself] so nobody could look at it till she was done," and th en again when instructing her daughters, saying " And by the way, when you bury me, don't bury me in my best quilt." (Act I, Baby's Blocks, 17; Act II, Tree of Life, 77) Determined to be remembered by their best work, these women cherish their quilting because it is th e one activity that allows for artistic creation, that " let[s] th e light shine," that emphasizes female intellect and accomplishment beyond the duties of "women's work. " Not all of the women of Quilters crave the community or artistry of quilting, however, and implicit in the femini st construction of the play is the ideal that a woman can be anything and everything without being less of a woman. Most obvious as a challenge to the social norm is Annie, whose goals are less concerned with "women's work" than with following in her father's footsteps. She narrates: My ambition is to become a doctor like my father. I'm my father's girl. ... My mother tries to make me do quilts all the time, but I don't want nothing to do with it. . . . My sister Florry is a real good quilter, I guess. Mother says so all the time. Florry's favorite pattern is the Sunbonnet Sue. Mother taught her how to do applique blocks and since then she's made prob' ly a dozen "Sunbonnet Sue" quilts. You've seen 'em, they're like little dolls turned sidew ays with big sunbonnets on. Florry makes each one a little different. ... People think they' re sooo c ute.... Let me tell you, she's driving me crazy with her "Sunbonnet Sues." So I decided to make one quilt and give it to Florry.... I call it the Demise of Sunbonnet Sue. Each little block is different, just like Florry does it. I've got a block of her hanging, another one with a knife in her chest, eaten by a snake, eaten by a frog, struck by lightning, and burned up. I'm sorta proud of it. . . . It turned out real good! (Act I, The Rebel Patch, 25) Less rebellious but as independent as Annie is Katherine, whose

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inability to have children precludes her from marrying. She narrates her story: No. I never married. Once, I almost did, but it didn't work out. I was twenty-seven years old. I was quite a go-getter in those days. Very headstrong. I'd been away to teachers college and was very definite about my career. . . . I cou ldn't have children. It didn't bother me though ... So, anyway thi s doctor came to town. He was from California. My, he was so handsome.... Well, we just fell in love, you know. . . . We had a few months of happiness after that. ... Then one day he told me he'd made a mistake.... Shortly after that, a woman he knew from California moved to town and they got married. I taught both their children in school before I retired. Like I said, I never married. Living alone always suited me just fine. (Act II, Country Crossroads, 67) Content in her profession and her identity, Katherine relates thi s story matter-of-factly, without bitterness or even much emotion. Both Annie and Katherine represent a feminist construction of femininity that encourages women to challenge the social norm with strength and independence. Through these characters and the emphasis on community and artistry, a feminist construction of female identity emerges: the ideal of modern femininity, in which women support each other in their endeavors, accomplishments, and goals, regardless of jealousy or challenges to the social norm. This femini st ideal, however, imports modern constructions of femininity into its historical recovery, and is therefore complicated by the reality of the pioneer experience. As oral history, Quilters also presents the difficulty of frontier life and women's inability to cope w ith death and desertion . Trapped in an inhospitable environment and dependent upon the family for survival, the women of Quilters are as vulnerable to bouts of madness as they are to the elements. The most obviously " mad" frontier woman is Lizz ie's natural mother, found wandering in the road with two infants in her arms, one dead. Unable to speak from trauma, this woman tears apart everything from her garments to the bedclothes, sewing them together with her hair: " Patient discovered this morning with hair cut off to the sca lp. Skirt, petticoats, bedsheets ripped up. Search for the instrument proved inconclusive. . . . The patient is sewing the scraps of her garments together. A close watch is kept until we relieve her of the tools. She works feverishly . . . . " (Act I, The Butterfly, 35-38). Desperate to preserve a sense of family, this woman quilts in order to leave something for her daughter; yet, the product is literally stamped with madness, read ing CHIPPEWA STATE ASYLUM, and the woman commits suicide. Though not driven completely mad, other women in Q uilters

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suffer bouts of dementia in the face of death and devastation. When her husband is killed on the railroad, Cassie is unable to even respond to the news; she narrates, "They tell me I didn't cry or say a word. I just sat down on the porch kinda in a little ball and started rockin' back and forth-rockin' and starin', rockin' and starin'" (Act II, Country Crossroads, 68-69). Cassie remains in this semi-comatose state for four months, so traumatized by this experience that she can only return to consciousness through quilting and childbirth. Katie, on the other hand, responds to the deaths of her sister and father with hysterical babbling: The cows froze Polly. All the cows are dead. Papa's skinnin ' 'em now. Don't worry, I' ll keep the fire gain' good. . . . Papa's throwin' the cowhides over the roof to keep out the cold. That should help some. . . . I wish I could sleep through all this like you do. Are you thirsty? Want some water? I'll get you some fresh snow to drink.... Here, Poll. It's prob'ly cold already. Take it, Polly. Please take it. I know you want it. You haven't had nothin' to eat for two days. Take it. I'm afraid to open your mouth. I don't want to catch it. . . . Here, I'll just set it on your chest. . . . Mama! I don 't know what to do. Why did you go and leave us, Polly? Why does everyone have to go away all the time? . . . Papa! . . . Polly ... Polly .. . Get up! . . . Wake up! . . . Get up! ... Wake up! . . . Papa promised just as soon as the storm lets up, we're gonna bury you proper. (Act I, Dugout, 13-14) Calling to her dead mother in her despair, Katie continues to speak to her dead sister as though she might recover, even commending her ability to sleep through the blizzard. Though only seven when this occurs, Katie is the female head of the household and as responsible for her family as any woman, and her hysteria represents a probable response for any woman on the frontier. Through such dramatizations of madness, Quitters acknowledges the weakness of frontier women as it is usually represented in stories of the West; Jane Tompkin s comments, "The message . . . in the case of women in Westerns generally, is that there's nothing to them. Th ey may seem strong and resilient, fiery and resourceful at first, but when push comes to shove, 7 as it always does, they crumble." Thi s message, however, is incompatible with a modern feminist desire to celebrate the strength and resilience of the pioneer woman. The purpose of th ese " madwomen" may be to di sturb Quitters'
' Jane Tompkins, "Women and the Language of Men," in Old West - New West: Centennial Essays, Barbara Howard Meldrum, ed. (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1993 ), 54.

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readers/audience, thereby forcing them to recognize the horrors of the frontier experience, but ultimately the play focuses on women's ability to survive such horrors with integrity. On the whole, the women of Quilters manage to bear up under the worst of trials; Brendan Gill comments, "Widowed, they are valiant in their loneliness and infirmity, and they go on incessantly stitching quilts out of scraps, as they have done from childhood." 8 In fact, through quilting and the community of women that quilting has built, these women conquer fear, pain, and suffering. These victories are recorded in what Newman and Damashek call the "shadow blocks," dark and somewhat mysterious scenes in which desolation in response to childbirth, abortion or natural disaster threatens the composure of frontier women. In their stage directions Newman and Damashek explain, "The 'Shadow Blocks' are essentially nonverbal representations of the darker side of the women's rites of passage. The events depicted are not always tragic, but we should get a sense of the unspoken fears involved and the presence of Mystery and Death." 9 As these directions suggest, the shadow blocks depict events common to the feminine experience, traumatic and sometimes tragic events that strengthen a woman and her values. Concentrating on women's ability to endure and carry on, the shadow blocks comment not only on the invincibility of the pioneer woman, but also on her relationship to modern feminism. Karpinski argues, "Quitters is effective in using the shadow block motif to illustrate a linkage between sexuality, death, and madness that could not be adequately expressed and would not be adequately perceived in terms of the culturally dominant language of frontier America." 10 That is, by emphasizing psychological connections popularized by Freudian theorists in the twentieth century, the shadow blocks employ a distinctly modern sensibility in depicting the trials of women on the frontier as they confront death. The fear and pain associated with childbearing figure prominently in the first two shadow blocks. Threatened by complications, the birth in the first shadow block (Act I, Childbirth Shadowblock, 20-21) is underscored by the competence of the three assisting women, who support and comfort the mother, keep the environment warm and sterile, and act as midwives, triumphantly raising the healthy child in the air before laying it in its mother's arms. The women in this

Brendan Gill, "Rev. of Quilters, by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek," The New Yorker (October 1984): 116.
9

Newman and Damashek, " Notes on the Shadow Blocks," in Quilters, 19.

Karpinski 10, 12.

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birthing scene are exultant, but in the second shadow block (Act II, Secret Drawer, 57-61), birth is not merely frightening, but lifethreatening, for both mother and family. Dismayed at her twelfth pregnancy and concerned for the survival of her family should she die in childbirth, Mabel Louise obtains an abortion recipe from her sister, who regrets her absence, writing, "I hate to think of you carrying this burden alone." Hardly alone, Mabel Louise is supported by a group of women who shield and protect her, chanting their children's names in a litany of sympathy and understanding. Robert Koehler writes, "Quilters dramatizes perhaps the most persuasive argument for a woman's right to choose an abortion that the stage has ever managed. This is not the Nostalgia of the Pioneers; the pain and suffering and loneliness are palpable,'' 11 and it is the stunning power of the shadow blocks that delivers the feminist ideal: these women can survive even the worst of horrors. This endurance is epitomized in the final shadow block, "Crosses and Losses." The occurrence of a prairie fire provides the plot of this block, but it is the courage with which the women fight the fire and tend to the dispossessed that conveys the feminist message. Plowing fireguards, handing out quilts or tearing them up to make bandages, even beating the fire into submission with dampened quilts (and catching fire as they do so), these pioneer women struggle with despair and loss but refuse to be defeated . Quoting biblical passages as the fire decimates the stage, the women are "baptized by fire," emerging from their deliverance almost as saints, lusti ly singing and waltzing into the transcendent "Tree of Life" block. Building and clearing and, of course, quilting, the company rebuild their lives, and it is many presumably equally triumphant years later that the block (and the play) ends with the superlative Sarah passing on her Legacy Quilt to her daughters. Karpinski summarizes, "Quitters ... demonstrates through its metaphor of the shadow block that the supposedly marginalized culture can become a network through which women articulate for and with each other values which have been denied full expression 12 within the cultural dominant," and clearly it is women exclusively who are the self-made and community-conscious heroes of Quilters, competent, creative, and distinctive. It is significant, however, that the shadow blocks, while strengthening the identity of the otherwise somewhat weak pioneer woman, simultaneously deprive the women of Quilters of individuality. Emphasized again and again in the play is the bonding

" Robert Koehler, "Stage Beat: Qui/ters Pattern Not Seamless Production,"
Los Angeles Times, 10 October 1986, "Calendar," part 6, p. 8.
12

Karpinski, 18.

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involved in the activity of quilting, the building of a support system, a community of women. Rather than acting as individuals, the women in the play function in relation to and support of each other, so that individual stories accumulate to create a general impression of the various aspects of women's experience on the frontier. Thus one "character" can just as easily be exchanged for another (with the possible exception of Sarah); indeed, in many of the blocks, characters are not even named, and in the Authors' Notes, Newman and Damashek state that when their characters are named it is merely "for the benefit of the actresses and director during the rehearsal process." 13 This lack of individuality among the characters serves to conflate all the women of Quilters. As Lianne Stevens comments, "By the time it ends . . . only one "character" remains in mind: the hammered-in image of a strong woman who averaged 15 children, suffered hard work and fearful concepts of life and death, and found relief from every tribulation by making neat, invisible stitches on 14 hundreds of lovingly created quilts." This image is not quite as simple as Stevens suggests. The superhuman quality of the Quilters woman is not the result of a heavyhanded idealization of forgotten foremothers (as Stevens implies by her reductive dismissal); rather, the invincibility of this composite female is created by the infusion of both pioneer and modern ideals of femininity into her character. Enacting an abortion, discussing menstruation, challenging the social norm, and confronting death without succumbing to madness, she is an embodiment of modern feminist notions of feminine strength; in this sense, she is a modern Western woman-like those interviewed by Linda Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier, and Nancy Curtis in their collection of modern Western women's narratives-a woman who lives by "the Western code": "Swallow complaints. Don't talk about trouble. Stress? Headaches? Never heard of them. We expected to, and did, find women as tough as we are.... We also met women more patient and angrier than we are, women who have endured pain that struck us dumb and yet kept their hope and faith. And we knew they weren 't dusty bones clothed in someone's imagination; these women are 15 alive." Enduring sadness, despair, and destruction, courting men and quilting for her family and those less fortunate, she represents the reality of pioneer womanhood; as Chalon Smith notes:
13

Newman and Damashek, "Author's Notes," in Quitters, 6.

Lianne Stevens, "Theater Review: Quitters Falls Apart at the Seams," Los Angeles Times, 3 june 1986, "Calendar," part 6," p. 1. Linda Hasse lstrom, Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), xviii.
15

14

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The musical centers on a time when living by Emerson's code of self-reliance wasn't a choice but a necessity-survival depended on spiritual strength and making do. The challenge was particularly demanding for women, the linchpin of family life. Their men held their own against the harsh environment through work and the satisfaction it brought. But what of the women ? They found grace through handling daily troubles and ... by making quilts, an expression of continuity and 16 creativity in a harsh world. Dramatized on the modern stage, she is idealized into a mythic construction of ali-good-things-pioneer, masculine and feminine. In fact, by creating this mythic Western woman and focusing on her victories over the desolation of the frontier, Q uilters implies that the Western woman has all the makings of the mythic Western man. In their discussions of Western dramas, James D. Riemer, Jane Tompkins, and Megan Williams describe this ideal pioneer man. Riemer writes, "[He] is the rugged individualist living on the outskirts of society, close to nature, in the desert where it is 'cl~an.' His response to life is a primitive, natural one which rejects intellectualism in favor of physical and instinctual action based on emotion and physical desires;" 17 Tompkins argues that th e Western man expresses himself through physical actions rather than cultivated language; 18 and Megan Wi lliams suggests that the Western hero "possesses an almost mythical sense of 19 freedom" in the "vague and endless territory of 'wherever. "' Like this Western hero, the woman of Quilters conquers the wilderness in which she lives through physical endurance (bearing numerous children, suffering the physical trauma of abortion and miscarriage, digging and building homes, surviving storms and natural disasters) and dexterity (piecing and quilting, of course, but even learning to ride a windmi ll without being slung to the ground). Like the Western hero, this woman expresses herself through colloquial dialect and visual

Chalon Smith, "Quilters Has Tinge of a Grandma Moses Work," Los Angeles Times, 10 October 1986, "Calendar," part 6, p. 26. James D. Riemer, "Integrating the Psyche of the American Male: Conflicting Ideals of Manhood in Sam Shepard's True West," University of Dayton Review 18, 2 (1986-1987 Winter-Spring): 41-2.
18 17

16

Tompkins, 50.

19 Megan Williams, "Nowhere Man and the Twentieth-Century Cowboy: Images of Identity and American History in Sam Shepard's True West," Modern Drama 40, 1 (1997 Spring): 64.

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representation rather than cultivated intellectual discourse. And like the Western hero, she is capable of surviving in an inhospitable environment and occupying the nebulous space of the "frontier"- for where is this woman really located, if not somewhere on the boundary between the tangible rugged wilderness and the mythic landscape that recedes off into the sunset? Like any Western hero, then, thi s mythic Western woman progressively conquers the West, and even assumes the role of the traditional romance hero, whose quest has been reinvented in stories of the Western hero. Madelon Heatherington examines this reinvention in some detail: Deliverance, the romance/Western hero's principal duty, can be subdivided into two related and sequential tasks. First, the hero must confront evil, usually by undertaking an arduous journey during which he encounters several preliminary sources of con fli ct before he meets and slays the symbolic dragon which has been ravaging the Princesses, ruining the crops, and generally rendering the landscape sterile. So the romance-hero's social obligation is to eliminate the savagery that has disrupted the community. 20 Clearly the mythic woman of Quitters undertakes such an "arduous journey" as she crosses America in a Conestoga wagon, passing grave after grave and suffering the snow, the dust, the Indians, the coyotes, "anything you were afraid of." Surviving these trials, she arrives at her destination, only to find desolation: "Looked like there was nothin' at all up ahead clear to the edge of the earth ... Nothin' but gray and brown, nothin' but dust and tumbleweeds blowin' .... As far as the eye could see there was nothing, emptiness, it was so lonely" (Woman One, Woman Two, and Christy in Act I, Rocky Road to Kansas, 11 -12). Like the mal e hero, this woman eliminates savagery by civilizing the wilderness, but she does it by creating domesticity and fertility within the inhospitable environment, by gradually building community and culture through quilting. The frontier is eventually conquered; the dragon is slain. Continuing the quest of the romance/Western hero, the mythic woman of Quitters takes on an almost spiritual significance as she

Madelon Heatherington, " Romance Without Women: The Sterile Ficti on of the American West," in Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature, 81. Heatherington's interest lies mainly in the treatment of women characters in Western fiction; her argument is that the lack of fully developed and non-formulaic female characters aborts the romance and ultimately limits the potential of Western fiction as a genre.

20

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tran scends her suffering. Once the community has recovered from the "savagery" it has experienced and been cleansed of its "evil/' the hero must transport that community into an at least momentary bliss by his example. Heatherington continues: His second task is to return the community-however illusorily, however momentarily-to the purified, prelapsarian, neoplatonic paradise from which sou ls are expel led when they are born into this ordinary world of bills, beans, and boredom. The hero's anagogic function, then, is to give us a glimpse of what we could be if we were better than we are. The point here is that in order to carry out this two-stage process of deliverance, any hero of romance, and therefore of a Western, must accept and conquer various initiating challenges which prepare him for the task ahead. It is because of the initiatory tests that he progresses first to mastery of himself and his world and thence to the salvation of lesser 21 mortals from sterility and despair. With her Biblical quoting, her singing, her waltzing, and her ability to survive just about anything, the woman of Quilters certainly transcends the everyday world of "bi lls, beans, and boredom" by the final block. Able to endure trauma and devastation with unfailing strength, faith, and integrity, this mythic woman, we are certain, is better than we are. Through great trial and tribulation, she learns to control her own destiny: "And then you're just given so much to work with in a life, and you have to do the best you can with what you got. The materials is passed on to you or is all you can afford to buy ... that's just what's given to you. Your fate. But the way you put them together is your business" (Act II, Crosses and Losses, 74). And through this "mastery," the woman of Quilters brings us (the " lesser mortals") to our salvation. Or does she? If the mythic Western woman of Quilters has to appropriate a masculine construct of heroism in order to conquer the West, if she has to complete a quest like a knight of the Round Table, if she has to, in short, be as good as a man for us to celebrate her accomplishments, who is saved? If the point of historical recovery in the tradition of consciousness raising is to actively express and celebrate women's experience and signify the importance of that experience in American culture, then infusing that experience with the mythology of masculine heroism (as Newman and Damashek do, however unknowingly) only serves to sustain the notion that femininity is inferior to masculinity, that a woman is nothing w ithout a man to
2 '

Ibid.

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define and validate her identity and experience. From this perspective, even the strength and courage with which this mythic pioneer woman endures disaster falls under what Ann Rosalind jones calls "the suspect ideal of 'taking it like a man."' Hardly a traditionally "feminine" ideal, this notion is not even a feminist ideal-seeking to va lidate female experience by appropriating a masculine construct is not exactly liberating. 22 It is possible to argue that the mythic Western woman depicted in Quitters successfully occupies a traditionally male role through a cultivation of human qualities inaccurately or unjustly associated with men. From this perspective, Quilters functions primarily as a feminist statement, employing the historical recovery merely as a vehicle to further that goal. The problem, however, is that as a feminist statement, Quitters is both too mild and too unfocused to be satisfying. Or, as Frank Rich comments, "The theme-the indominatability of American women- is so superficially explored that it never amounts to more than a tired slogan." 23 In any case, Quitters fails to present a satisfying Western woman; in the context of the play, femininity is sad ly inadequate unless it combines both modern and pioneer ideals, but when those ideals are combined, gender identity becomes both muddled and insufferable. It seems, then, that the pioneer ideal merely complicates our modern constructions of gender; perhaps it even jeopardizes the sufficiency of our modern notions of identity. Nevertheless, our desire to ride over to the wild side problematizes the relationship between masculinity and femininity, between myth and reality, between past and present. As Megan Williams argues, "the present may search in the past for definition, yet all it wi ll find is an empty image that rehearses the death of another moment in the American past; the only past the present will ever know is one where the cowboy and the mythical figure of America's past loses his freedom and ceases to exist." 24 Unable to accept the loss of the frontier and its mythical
jones illustrates this point with less delicacy: "A counselor at a [self-help) clinic, showing a friend of mine her cervix for the first time in a mirror, made a remark (unintentionally, that's the point) that struck us both as far less liberating than it was intended to be: 'Big, isn't it? Doesn't it look powerful? As good as a penis any day"' (Ann Rosalind jones, " Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L' ecriture Feminine," Feminist Studies 7, 2 (Summer 1981): 254). Jones' " point" (and mine) is that male-centered ideologies make their way into even the best-intentioned feminist efforts, robbing them of much of their power and liberatory effect. Frank Rich, "Quilters, A Musical, Opens a New Season," The New York Times, 26 September 1984, sec. C, p. 17.
2

22

23

Williams, 63.

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inhabitants, we keep them alive in ourselves; unable to live out their ideals in the modern world, we curse the constraints of our settlement and look longingly, everlastingly, into the sunset.

Journal of American Drama and Theatre 12 (fall 2000)

THE RHETORIC OF RACE AND SLAVERY IN AN AMERICAN PATRIOT DRAMA: jOHN LEACOCK'S THE FALL OF BRITISH TYRANNY

MARK EVANS BRYAN

"Enter Negroes" (The Fall of British Tyranny, Act IV, Scene 3.) The Tryals of Last April/ may shew that we are not to Depend on Either [slaves'] Stupidity, or that Babel of Languages among 'em; freedom Wears a Cap which Can Without a Tongue, Call Togather all Those who Long to Shake off the fetters of Slavery. -Alexander Spotswood, Colonial Governor of Virginia, 17101

By the decade of the American Revolution, freedom did indeed have a "Tongue." Americans agitated for rebellion in public speeches, widely-distributed political tracts, and a fledgling American drama of revolutionary ideas which reached its audience largely through the printed word of pamphlets, but also through performance. And while such colonial thought focused on enacting revolution against the English colonial power, it was always mindful of the threat of revolution from within. Indeed, the period of the Revolutionary War instilled in colonial Americans not only distinctive strains of political egalitarianism, but also the first significant fears of internal revolution from the population of oppressed and enslaved peoples within the nascent republic. The fourth act of john Leacock's 1776 chronicle play of the first campaign of the American Revolution, The Fall of British Tyranny; or, American Liberty Triumphant, depicts such fears as a British regional

' Spotswood refers to a slave rebellion earlier in the year. As colonial governor of Virginia, he held the same post as Lord Dunmore, the inspiration for Leacock's Lord Kidnapper, would hold during the Revolution. Quoted in Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 62-63.

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governor incites liberated slaves to rebel against their former masters. The impulse to insurrection was a potentially disastrous Pandora's Box for all (male land-owning Anglo-) Americans. As Winthrop Jordan has suggested, insurrection had equal potential for building community and anti-community in eighteenth-century America: "The spectre of Negro rebellion presented an appalling world turned upside down, a crazy nonsense world of black over white, an anti-community which was the 3 direct negation of the community as white men knew it." Calls for the construction of an American state or a distinctly American identity through revolution-the armed conflict between those in metaphoric bondage and those in metaphoric mastery-became thusly complicated by the simultaneity of building one's community and the fear of its "direct negation." "Prior to the Revolution," writes David Brion Davis, "few colonists were capable of th e imaginative leap of placing themselves in their slaves' position." Freedom had a Tongue, enacting or describing the performance of revolution in early America, but its danger to the economic and political hegemony of the new nation lay in its (li)ability to bring together and incite "a// Those who Long to Shake off the fetters of Slavery." (emphasis mine) Davis does note that despite the ideological inconsistency of American revolutionary thought, "of the vast number of speeches, sermons, and resolutions warning of a British plot to enslave America, only a handful made the unsettling leap to the 4 Americans' enslavement of Negroes." The Fall of British Tyranny is among the "handful" of American writings that make just such an "unsettling leap." Leacock's play is not simply an uncritical tract which agitates for war and portrays African Americans in rebellion in a secondary and peripheral episode, as has been argued in the past; it agitates for revolution while portraying
' The Fall of British Tyranny; or, American Liberty Triumphant, Th e First Campaign: "A Tragi-Comedy of Five Acts as Lately Planned at the Royal Theatrum Pandemonium at St. james's" was first published in Philadelphia in 1776 by Styner and Cist. For this essay, I have rel ied on the text from Montrose j. Moses, Representative Plays by American Dramatists (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1918), 283350; and Norman Philbrick, Trumpets Sounding: Propaganda Plays of the American Revolution (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972), 57-132, which was culled from the Philadelphia first edition and subsequent editions printed in Boston and Providence later in 1776. I shall refer to the page numbers of the 1972 Philbrick edition in the text of this essay. Moses Coit Tyler, in Literary History of the American Revolution, v. 2 (New York: Putnam, 1897) placed the play's writing in the period between the january 1776 publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the March 1776 evacuation of Boston (198).
3

Jordan, 63.

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 17701823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 279, 286.

The Fall of British Tyranny

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rebellion and thereby reflects the double consciousness of the American Revolution. As has been noted most recently by S. E. Wi lmer, " leading theatre scholars" have underestimated the political complexity of much early American drama, describing many eighteenth-century Ameri can plays as si mply " nationalistic," overlooking their " political subtleties."5 In this essay, I am interested in uncovering the ideological "subtleties" of an early American play too often remembered as si mply patriotic and propagandistic. I will examine The Fall of British Tyranny as it is complicated by its embodiment of the double consciousness of American racial ideology of its . age, the play's exploration of the oppositional tension of the American Revolutionary activist program which fomented rebel lion while fearing it from within. Despite claims to the contrary in the small body of critical writings on The Fall of British Tyranny, its pattern of metaphoric invocation of slavery culminating in a performed slave rebellion is fundamental to understanding the complicated rhetoric of thi s drama and of its time.

* * * *
William Dunlap began his History of the American Theatre by "endeavour[ing] to rescue from oblivion" the history of the small amount of theatre practice of which thi s country cou ld boast before 1800.6 Characterized by very limited offerings, largely in the middle Atlantic colonies by English theatrical companies, most notably the Hallams, theatrical activity, to say nothing of native drama, had been nearly invisible in America before the Revolutionary period. The theatrical movements associated with the Revolutionary War, however, both pro-American and Loyalist, re-invigorated dramatic writing in the American colonies. Though theatre was proscribed by law by the Continental Congress, British military forces required such entertainments in the less civi lized, colonial world. A formal English theatre, brought with the occupying military forces, would become most prominent during the Revolution in New York City, a city with a history 7 of both Loyalist and pro-theatre sentiments.
S. E. Wilmer, "Partisan Theatre in the Early Years of the United States," Theatre Survey 40, 2 (November 1999), 1 and 23 (note 1). William Dunlap, History of the American Theatre (New York: Franklin,
5

1963), 3.
See jared Brown, The Theatre in America During the Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1-44. Dunlap notes that the British military theatre in New York of the Revolution had been an "imperfect and rusty link" "in the chain of the theatrical history of this country" (87).
7

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In pro-American Whig circles, the "Tongue" of "all Those who Long[ed] to Shake off the fetters of Slavery" gave rise to both literary and performed spectacles of American sentiment: political and religious oratory, the publication of dialogic pamphlets, and even a small demand for a distinctly American theatre, answered at this particular time by the writers of the pro-American propaganda dramas. Often represented by the plays of Mercy Otis Warren and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the propaganda dramas of the Revolutionary period glorify American valor, lampoon British manners, and agitate in support of the Revolution. john Leacock's The Fall of British Tyranny is often singled out from its contemporaries as particularly "audacious" and the "most ambitious" 8 play of the period. Structurally a variant on English chronicle histories and eighteenth-century political drama, The Fall of British Tyranny is episodic, expansive in its chronology, and focused on dozens of characters and scenes. The arc of dramatic action just in Act Ill takes the audience from a Boston street corner where working citizens discuss the economic effects of civil war with Britain, to a partisan debate between a Whig and a Tory on another Boston street, to the encampment of a British military commander, to the dialogue of two shepherds near Lexington, and, finally, to a bed chamber in Boston weeks later in which a middle class woman receives the news that her family has been killed. The play's narrative follows disparate personal encounters with "revolution" and "nation," its characters serving largely as a succession of unrelated participants in or limited narrators of the conflicts between America and England, between the mercantile class and the working class in revolution, and between the versions of freedom and bondage which would characterize the poles of participation in the American Revolution. 9 Leacock locates his first two acts in an England at the center of a
Walter j. Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 1828 (B loomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 78; and Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976), 310. See also Brown, 74- 79; Gary A. Richardson, American Drama from the Colonial Period through World War I (New York: Twayne, 1993), 37-41; Philbrick, 11 -12 and 41-56; and Moses, 49-55. Brown notes that it is " unlikely that The Fall of British Tyranny was performed at the time of its composition," though, without documentary evidence, earlier scholars persisted in the belief that the play was produced in Ph iladelphia and perhaps elsewhere before its highly successful publication in pamphlet form. It is known that the play was performed by Harvard College students prior to the 1781 writings of French Army chaplain, Claude C. Robin, who recalls its performance along with such plays as Brackenridge's The Death of General Montgomery (79). Ginger Strand's article, "The Many Deaths of Montgomery: Audiences and Pamphlet Plays of the Revolution," American Literary History 9, 1 (Spring 1997): 1-20, highlights the play's life as a pamphlet drama.
9

The Fall of British Tyranny

45

trans-Atlantic world of privileged individuals, manipulating the machines of state for economic or political motives, among political leaders who alternately favor and oppose the subjugation of "Americans" by force. Acts I and II are the most virulently anti-British in The Fall of British Tyranny-Leacock's play suggests that the American Revolution is the product of scheming and power-mongering in England which would culminate in a Scots-led military coup. At the other end of the spectrum, Leacock locates his final act with the military leaders of the Continental Army; George Washington and Ethan Allen are, among others, portrayed gallantly defending Americans from foreign oppressors. In the middle of this political and structural divide, the third and fourth acts, as well as the speeches which precede the first act of The Fall of British Tyranny, introduce the audience to the voices of working class and artisan urban colonial citizens, American shepherds in the pastoral Yankee tradition, and British soldiers and sailors. And, in the Act IV interaction between the English Lord Kidnapper and Cudjo's men, Leacock brings to the stage freed African-American slaves acting in rebellion. In exchange for the military aid of Cudjo and his comrades, the Lord Kidnapper barters what history tells us were empty promises of freedom. 10 The conversation between the Lord Kidnapper and Cudjo is, according to Norman Philbrick's notes accompanying the play, "probably the second time that the Negro appeared in native American drama." Philbrick cites Ralpho, the servant in Robert Munford's unproduced 1770 play The Candidates, 11 as the first. The introduction of Cudjo, however, is no mere appearance of an African-American character in the early American drama. Gary A. Richardson's reading of The Fall of British Tyranny in American Drama from the Colonial Period through World War I posits that in Act IV, Leacock carefully distinguishes the British-inspired slave uprising from the Patriot revolution, both as to impetus and effect. The slaves are depicted as a subhuman species whose
10

Davis notes that in 1775 Dunmore, on whom the Lord Kidnapper is based, "promise[d] freedom to any slaves who desert[ed] rebellious masters and who serve[d] in the king's forces, an offer taken up by some 800 blacks" (24). Philbrick's introduction to The Fall of British Tyranny cites a 1776 letter from Thomas Jefferson to john Page which stated that, having failed in his counter-revolutionary campaign in Virginia, Dunmore transferred his healthy forces to Staten Island "and the blacks he shipped off to the West Indies" to be sold (51). In Act IV, the Boatswain confides to the Lord Kidnapper that he understands his game: "When you have done with 'em here, and they get they're brains knock'd out, d'ye see, your honour can sell them in the West Indies ... " (108). " Philbrick, 110 (note j).

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native savagery is no match for the duplicitous English who intend to sell them back into slavery the moment the Patriots are crushed. Though Leacock is ideologically sympathetic to the human desire for freedom, the slaves' longing for an anarchic, Hobbesean state of nature obviously distinguishes them from the colonists whose new society w ill be mediated by civilization's civilizing influence. 12 Indeed, this is the fine (and disgraceful) line of distinction that American revolutionary ideology embraced, but it is not the line of distinction which Leacock makes in The Fall of British Tyranny. A man of his age and region (Pennsylvan ia would not even begin its incremental emancipation of its own slaves until 1780) Leacock seems aware of the opportunity for building a revolutionary community while cognizant of the threat of its "direct negation." The play repeatedly invokes the image of chattel slavery in portraying the necessity of revolution, each time raising the stakes in its involvement with the complicated ideas of revolution in a society with a massive forced labor economy. Act IV is rarely more than mentioned in a perfunctory manner in most scholarship on the play but is pivotal to an understanding of the play's rhetoric and intellectual heritage. Leacock goes so far as to physically represent on stage the nagging fears of the revolutionary populace. "Would you shoot your old master . . . if you could see him?" says the Lord Kidnapper in Act IV. " Eas, massa," Cudjo replies, " me shoot him down dead." "That's a brave fellow," says the Lord Kidnapper, " damn 'emdown with them all-shoot all the damn'd rebels (112)." Cudjo is not an animal seeking a return to a "Hobbesean state of nature"; he is a thinking, vengeful man who must be convinced and bartered with in order to join w ith the Lord Kidnapper in counter-revolution, the "direct negation" of the ideals of the Anglo-American revolutionary comm unity. The Lord Kidnapper offers Cudjo freedom and the " money" and "good clothes" of free Anglo-American men in exchange for his service, not merely the chance to "shoot all the damn'd rebels (111-12)." "Who can blame a galley slave for making his escape?" asks the pro-Ameri can Lord Wisdom, in Act II (80); and who can blame the escaped slave for making revolution his asks Leacock's play. Winthrop jordan posits the American Revolution as the primary turning point from more benign, European thought on issues of race and slavery in the North American colonies to the virulent and, later, particularly American race hatred which fueled the Market Revolution in the following half-century. " Indeed the Revolution," Jordan writes, "[was] a revolution in American consciousness." He continues,

'

Richardson, 39.

The Fall of British Tyranny

47

Americans came to realize that they were no longer Englishmen; at the same time they grew conscious of their own "prejudices" concerning Negroes. . . . During the Revolution ... equality 13 was naturalized, legalized, politicized, and nationalized. Environmentalist philosophy, deeply influential on republican thought, held that all men were afforded "natural rights." "This widely shared presumption," writes Jordan, "led inescapably to realization that 14 In 1768, a Americans were indulging in a monstrous inconsistency." Philadelphia journalist asked "How suits it with the glorious cause of Liberty to keep your fellow men in bondage, men equally the work of 15 your great Creator, men formed for freedom as yourselves?" At the same time future President John Adams would rhetorically employ the American system of racialized slavery to agitate for revolution: We won't be [Britain's] negroes. Providence never designed us for negroes. I know, for if it had it would have given us black hides and thick lips ... which it hadn't done, and therefore 16 never intended us for slaves. Indeed, American society can be said to be predicated on this very 17 "inconsistency" from which Adams, perhaps sensing the awkwardness

13

Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,

7550-7872 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 270.

Ibid., 289. (emphasis mine) jordan, The White Man's Burden, 119.

15

David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: The Making of the American Working Class, Rev. Ed. (london: Verso, 1999), 28. " Here, I refer specifically to the concept of the herrenvolk democracy-first defined by Pierre L. van den Berghe in his 1967 study, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective- as understood and recapitulated by George M. Fredrickson in The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817- 1914 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1971 ) and, more recently, by Roediger. Fredrickson quotes van den Berghe to describe the term herrenvolk democracy: "regimes like those of the United States and South Africa that are democratic for the master race but tyrannical for the subordinate groups" (61). Roediger then alters the term to herrenvolk republicanism, since van den Berghe's theory does not "describe the coupling of gains by poorer whites in political rights and the loss of rights by free Blacks (59)." Republicanism, writes Roediger, "read AfricanAmericans out of the ranks of the producers and then proved more able to concentrate fire downward on to the dependent and Black than upward against the rich and powerful (60)."

16

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BRYAN

of subdividing the domain of natural freedom, omits the agency of the God who would figure so prominently in the Declaration of Independence, giving the statement over to the "it" of "Providence." The embodiment in The Fall of British Tyranny of this "inconsistency," both the embrace of racialized invocations of chattel slavery in the rhetoric of the (Anglo-American) revolutionary voices in the play and the performance of racialized revolutionary (African-American) actionfomenting without, fearing within- make it truly representative of its age. The revolutionary rhetoric of The Fall of British Tyranny follows the pattern of the early Anglo-American usage of slavery to describe the abuses of the English political system against free persons in the American colonies. Moreover, it invokes a specifically racialized model of this rhetoric before, finally, presenting a dialectical pageant of racial unrest in the dialogue between Cudjo and the Lord Kidnapper in Act IV. Davis writes that the rhetorical usage of slavery as analogous to English oppression in the American colonies "appeared with metaphorical regularity." 18 David Roediger has noted that its use was so extravagant when constraints on white American liberties are compared with constraints on Black slaves that one is tempted to conclude that the revolutionary critique of political "slavery" merely echoed old Anglo-American rhetoric and had little to do 19 with actual chattel slavery. This would be a mistake. In The Fall of British Tyranny too, this is a mistake. Though Davis notes that "for eighteenth-century thinkers who contemplated the subject, slavery stood as the central metaphor for all the forces that debased the human spirit," the intensity of that metaphor in a slave-holding culture 20 and in the context of performance cannot be stressed enough. "Although the metaphoric use of slavery for any threat to liberty," Roediger writes, "had deep roots in virtually slaveless England, Scotland, Venice and Florence, its special force in the American colonies derived 21 in large part from proximity to chattel slavery." Roediger notes the
Moreover, I refer to the contrast between this formulation of the dynamic between white and black in early America and the formulation of the paternalistic, "civilizing" dynamic between Anglo-Americans and the American Indian. See Bernard M. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carol ina Press, 1973).
18

Davi s, 283. Roediger, 28. Davis, 263. Roediger, 28.

19

20

21

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American uniqueness of the cultural usage of the slavery metaphor in geographic and social proximity to the American forced labor economy. In much the same fashion, the metaphoric use of slavery and the racialized extension of this metaphor in The Fall of British Tyranny, in such close dramaturgical proximity to the Act IV Cudjo episode, cannot fail to derive its own "special force." The rhetoric of slavery appears in The Fall of British Tyranny from its very beginning. "Fight and be free!" begins the fourth and final prefatory speech of the Prologue-"Or be ye slaves-and give up liberty! I Blest Continent, while groaning nations round I Bend to the servile yoke, ignobly bound . . . (63)." "We will be free," concludes the Prologue's speaker, "or bravely we will die (63)," a sentiment abounding with nationalistic fervor and, at the very same time, with the dread of America's "monstrous inconsistency." The Preface makes an explicit association between American colonists and the Egyptian captivity, the racialized slavery of the Old Testament: "Would [King Solomon] not have said, [the "unrelenting tyr[rany]" of English rule] was oppression and ingratitude in the highest degree, exceeding the oppression of the children of Israel (61 )?" Would King Solomon not "deliver" the American people the Preface asks (61 ). The first Act's plotting chief conspirator, Lord Paramount, continues in this vein: . . . I'll enforce ["our authority"] with the pointed bayonet; the Americans from one end to the other shall submit . . . my inflexibility shall stand firm, and convince them the second Pharoah is at least equal to the first. I am unalterably determined at every hazard and at the risk of every consequence to compel the colonies to absolute submission ... (70-71) Paramount calls himself the "second Pharoah," again evoking slavery's racialized past (and, thereby, its present) as he outlines a program for "absolute submission" which suggests John Locke's "perfect condition of slavery," "the state of war continued between a lawful conqueror and a captive," such that the captive has forfeited his "freedom from 22 absolute, arbitrary power." It is this "absolute submission" that Revolutionary Americans found indistinguishable from chattel slavery.23 Paramount's co-conspirator, Lord Catspaw, lobbies for American submission, using language perhaps all too familiar to an America economically dependent on racialized chattel slavery:

John Locke, "Second Treatise on Civil Government," Locke on Politics, Religion, and Education (New York: Collier, 1965), 27-28. See Davis, 255-84; and Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 55-143.
23

22

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These sour Americans, ignorant brutes, unbroke and wild, must be tamed; they'll soon be humble if punish'd; but if disregarded, grow fierce. -Barbarous nations must be held by fear, rein'd and spurr'd hard, chain'd to the oar, and bow'd to due controul, 'till they look grim with blood (76). The British pro-American powers represented in Act II use metaphoric slavery and metaphoric mastery to articulate the transAtlantic situation at the close of the American Revolution's first campaign. Legal manipulations by Paramount and his confederates that have resulted in the cession of lands and wealth-and the ire of Americans inclined to rebellion-are compared with "the bloody knife to be held to the throats of the Americans" forcing "them to submit to slav'ry" (79). Lord Wisdom articulates a vision of the future in which successful revolution in America might lead to class war throughout the British empire (79-80) and in which America "will shake off the galling yoke before it is riveted on them" (80). It is perhaps not until the introduction of American working- and middle-class perspectives in Act Ill, however, that the "special force" of the rhetoric of slavery in The Fall of British Tyranny comes fully to bear. Roediger writes that "for working people of the revolutionary generation metaphors regarding enslavement, and the consciousness of the difference between mastery and servitude, must have been particularly vivid." 24 In scene one, between the Citizen and the Selectman, " stopping our ports and depriving us of all trade" is equated with a compulsion to forced labor: "The ministry and parliament ... [will] compel us to be slaves (84)." The Citizen continues, . . . each citizen and each individual inhabitant of America are bound by the ties of nature; the laws of God and man justi fy [revolution]; passive obedience for passive slaves, and nonresistance for servile wretches who know not, neither deserve, the sweets of liberty. (85) Later, in scene 3, a Whig offers thi s rejoinder to a Tory's defense of British economic and political control: Great-Britain's power, Sir, is too much magnified, 'twill soon grow weak, by endeavouring to make slaves of American freemen; we are not Africans yet ... (88) Act Ill's common men on the streets in the close proximity to chattel
24

Roediger, 28.

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51

slavery which the American colonies provided, invoke racialized servitude in order to describe the American situation. The slave is an African, and passivity in servitude indicates a people violating the " laws of God" and undeserving of "the sweets of liberty." Leacock complicates this racialized conception of slavery in the Minister's warning, suggesting the "direct negation" of the community which lies perhaps just beyond revolution and hearkening to the African slave's 25 experience of Middle Passage : ... your estates are to be confiscated; your patrimony to be given those who ever labor'd for it ... you will perish with want and famine, or suffer ignominious death; your w ives, children, dearest relatives and friends, forever separated from you in this world, without the prospect of receiving any comfort or consolation from them, or the least hope of affording any to them. (86) The rhetoric of slaveholding American revolutionary leader, Arthur Lee, who, writes Roediger, "almost incoherently registered fears that must have seemed exceptionally vivid to those who knew and ran a slave system," is eerily similar: I see already men torn from their weeping and distressed families, without hope, without redress, never to return, by an unrelenting, lawless crew, unbridled by our own civil and legislative authority, and wantonly cruel in the exercise of despotic power. I see every endearing tie of father, husband, son and brother, torn asunder, unrespited, unpitied, 26 unreprieved. The hasty retreat of British forces from the Battle of Lexington, which is the focus of much of the rest of Act Ill, is justified because the Americans were "as numerous as the locusts of Egypt," as one British officer says, again evoking the racialized slavery of the Old Testament (93). A different and curious double standard of American racialist republican thought comes to bear near the close of Act Ill in which Dick and Roger, the shepherds who have stood watch over the retreat the British have just described, sing the praise of "St. Tammany," the

25 The Minister's warning could have been inspired by the racial and political climate of America's neighbors to the south. In 1791, unrest in St. Domingue (Haiti) would erupt in a civil war sparked by a large-scale slave revolt. Largely a product of the ensuing conflicts, Haiti became the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere in 1804.
26

Roediger, 28.

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American Indian leader Sachem. The song they sing, in which "Pharaoh" is cited again (99), compares the American Indian hero, with " His jetty black hair," to England's patron saint ("St. George sure had never such grace") (99-1 00). The preceding succession of images and citations of race, submission, slavery, and revolution might just as easily be dismissed as "merely" the reverberation of "old Anglo-American rhetoric" with " little 27 to do with actual chattel slavery" except for the performance of rebellion which dominates Act IV of The Fall of British Tyranny, in which the action moves to the deck, holds, and staterooms of a British man-of-war anchored off Norfolk as the Lord Kidnapper conscripts a group of former slaves to strike back at their former masters. The question which Leacock rai ses in Act IV is not only of America's rebellion against colonial powers, but one of revolution itself, for the repercussions of the glorious revolutionary ideology to which Brackenridge so passionately subscribes in a play like The Death of General Montgomery (1777) are indeed more complicated than his heroic romantic dramas portray. " They' re as black as so many devils," says the Sailor to the Boatswain as Cudjo and his men come aboard the Lord Kidnapper's man-of-war. "No matter," replies the Boatswain, " they' re recruits for the Kidnapper. " " We shall be all of a colour by and by-damn me," the Sailor growls (106). So begins the meeting of the metaphoric masters of Americans who have been made " slaves" but "are not Africans yet" (88) and Africans who have, in fact, been made slaves of these very Americans. The Lord Kidnapper's Boatswain concludes, .. . any port in a storm-if a man is to be hand'd, or have his throat cut, d'ye see- who are so fit to do it as his own slaves especially as they're to have their freedoms for it; nobody can blame 'em . .. (107-8) The Boatswain articulates not only the revolutionary American community's "direct negation," but al so th e direct negation of American revolution, the turning of ideological and metaphoric tables on American rebels. Because "nobody can blame 'em." The Lord Kidnapper's persuasion of Cudjo is culled from the deepest fears and mixed feelings of late eighteenth-century Americans regarding the enslaved African population in the colonies. The Americans "have no right to make you slaves," the Lord Kidnapper tells Cudjo, " I wi sh all Negroes wou'd do the same ["run away" ) (11 0)." Lord Kidnapper makes thi s offer to Cudjo and his fellow recruits:

27

Ibid.

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... if you behave well, -I'll soon make you a greater man than your master, and if I find the rest of you behave well, I'll make you all officers, and after you have serv'd Lord Paramount a while, you shall have money in your pockets, good clothes on your backs, and be as free as them white men there (111) ... Tomorrow you shall have guns like them white men-Can you shoot some of them rebels ashore, Major Cudjo? (112) It is here that the Lord Kidnapper asks Cudjo, "Would you shoot your old master ... if you could see him?" "Eas, massa," Cudjo replies, "me shoot him down dead." "Damn 'em-down with them all -shoot all the damn'd rebels (112)." Cudjo and his men having been recruited and left to be fed by a Cook who all but refuses to serve them, the Lord Kidnapper retires to his cabin with the ship's Chaplain. "Thoughts of emancipation will make [the new African recruits] brave," he says to the Chaplain. "I look upon this to be a grand manoeuvre in politics; this making dog eat dog-thief catch thief-the servant against the master-rebel against rebel," he concludes (113). Leacock's villain articulates the American fear not only of the forces of Britain, the metaphoric masters of rebellious American "slaves," but the "slaves'" slaves as well. In the final scene of The Fall of British Tyranny (Act V, scene v), George Washington proclaims, "I have drawn my sword, and never more will I sheathe it, 'till America is free, or I'm no more (130)." But even at the close of the American revolution, who was free? Chattel slavery existed in the northern states until well into the nineteenth century; slavery would not be abolished in total until the great conflict of the American Civil War. The tension implicit in Washington's penultimate statement of the play is made explicit in The Fall of British Tyranny.

* * * *
In Brecht and Method, Fredric Jameson wonders about the dialectic at the heart of the epic theatre of the twentieth century: To ask us 'merely' to register the structural or the historical situation itself, and to articulate the feelings and acts of the play in the light of its more 'objective' tensions-is this . . . the dialectic itself ... an inseparability of progress and violence all at once, as the impossibility of separating a positive from a 28 negative.. : ?
'" Fredric jameson, Brecht and Method (London and New York: Verso, 1998),

107.

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The interplay of oppositional forces in the play, between Tory and Patriot, America and Britain, is perhaps not so much in question as is " the impossibility of separating a positive from a[n Anglo-American] negative." The idea of revolution in eighteenth-century America was at once overwhelmingly constructive and overwhelmingly dangerous to the social and economic concerns of an Anglo-American society dependent on a massive, racist forced labor economy. Davis w rites that " the fear of a British conspiracy to 'enslave' America had an obvious but complex bearing" on the situation of African chattel slavery in North America and that the recognition of Jordan's " monstrous inconsistency" during the Revolutionary period led to the propagation of "antislavery sentiment" in th e American colonies.29 To its lasting credit, Leacock's play recognizes the " inseparability" of the two sides of American revolutionary rhetori c and, perhaps, is not only a play which agitated Ameri cans toward war with Britain but also a play which agitated Americans toward the dissolution of the forced labor economy and the abolition of slavery.

29

Davis, 274.

journal of American Drama and Theatre 12 (Fall 2000)

jiG COOK: STAGE MANAGER FOR AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

SETH BAUMRIN

George Cram Cook, affectionately known as Jig, founder of the Provincetown Players and their president/director from 1915 to 1922, played a pivotal role in the development of theatre in twentiethcentury United States. He harnessed the energy of a formidable group of rebels and intellectuals who innocently believed they could change American culture. In seven years they produced ninety-two plays by forty-seven playwrights. Today Cook is usually considered only in connection with the beginnings of Eugene O'Neill's career. For that reason Cook's place in theatre history is obscured. Historical record rarely makes mention of him. When it does, his role as founder of the Provincetown Players and as the mentor of many playwrights is usually glossed over, and he is described as "disorganized," "impractical," or "muddled."' The two most useful resources for information on Cook are Susan Glaspell's The Road to the Temple and Robert Karoly Sarlos's jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment. 2 Each book is entirely devoted to Cook. Glaspell's biography however tends towards hagiography, and Sarlos's thoroughgoing historical study, initially his dissertation, occasionally runs into trouble because of the author's enthusiasm. In his third chapter, "Jig Cook: Dionysos in 1915," for example, Sarlos proposes that Cook ought to be considered the progenitor of the off-Broadway movement and American group
' Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 288; Mary C. Henderson, Theater in America: 200 Years of Plays, Players and Productions (New York: Harry N. Adams, 1986), 297-299; Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the America Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day, vol. ii (New York: Crofts and Co., 1943), 209; Helen Deutsch and Stel la Hannau, The Provincetown, A Story of the Theatre (New York: Farrar and Reinhart), 1931.
2 Susan Glaspell, The Road to the Temple (New York: Frank A. Stokes, 1927); Robert Karoly Sarlos, jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982). All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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theatres of the remainder of the century, paying particular attention to the experimental movement of the sixties and seventies. This claim is in part based on Sarlos's misunderstanding of Nietzsche's notion of Dionysian intoxication, confusing it with mere drunkenness. Cook's role is better understood when he is examined in the context of the intellectual and cultural history of his most active years. The purpose of this study is to reconsider Cook's apparent failure as a writer to demonstrate that his contribution to American theatre was a managerial success consonant with his dreams of an American cultural renaissance. Although Cook believed he was a failure and history accords him no better judgment, his failure became the renaissance for which he hoped-perhaps not cultural renaissance per se, but the ascendance of the American drama nonetheless. But why did Cook see it as failure? Did this literary renaissance pale in comparison to Cook's hopes? Or was it simply that Cook's plays were never as appealing to audiences as those of his colleagues? According to Susan Glaspell, "The life of George Cram Cook is a life of achievement which is most distinguished in defeats (Giaspell, ix)." From 1892, when Cook entered Harvard, to 1915, when the Provincetown Players first gathered, young people in America were exposed to a series of intoxicating ideas and then were sobered by the outbreak of WWI. Intellectuals in this generation were caught in a cultural conflict between American puritanism and Victorian morality. This conflict resulted in a vacuum into which a great many, often contradictory, ideas were drawn. American culture was vibrating with a new kind of liberty, no longer grounded in Yankee ingenuity, the Protestant work ethic, or the pioneer spirit of exploration. The mood of the nation's artists and intellectuals during these years showed a broadening acceptance of contemporary European thought and a shift away from traditional American anti-intellectualism. These rumblings and clashes were epitomized by the discourse at Cook's alma mater, Harvard, at the turn of the century. They were especially pronounced in the pedagogy of cousin scholars Charles Eliot Norton and William Charles Eliot. Norton attempted to separate himself from "the hearty callous America of the late nineteenth century." Through his promotion of the Italian Renaissance (Dante at the expense of Tennyson), he made an overt scholarly gesture. Eliot, on the other hand, retained his Victorian, positivist faith in "moralized science and benevolent, expanding history."3 Eliot was Harvard's president when Cook was a student and remained an elder statesman when John Reed, future founding member of the Provincetown Players, graduated in 1910. Eliot's view of the Anglo-Saxon's mission of leadership and philanthropy was as deeply imprinted on Cook and Reed as Norton's opposition to the insensitivity of nineteenth-century
3

May, 36.

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America. " In 1904 . . . Eliot told Harvard students that a gentleman, a natural leader, is by definition both a democrat and a 'vigorous doer."' 4 This was what Cook and Reed became-vigorous doers. Yet they were not predisposed to Eliot's moral faith in progress; they proposed a different kind of progress-one more aligned with Norton's view of a compassionate America. The two different and seemingly opposed views of the role of the intellectual and the leader combined to suggest a new kind of gentleman scholar, embodied by the rebellious Cook and Reed. For Cook and Reed, as well as Robert Edmond Jones and Eugene O' Neill, who both attended in the early teens, Harvard was a place where contemporary ideas of Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx could be considered along with older ideas of Plato, Euripedes, Dante, and Shakespeare. Harvard has always been a cultural citadel where Americans can engage in thought th at is not necessarily American. William James wrote that the true Harvard graduate was " truth seeking, and independent and often very solitary." 5 Cook's correspondence and Harvard diaries attest to his own isolation and independent thinking. They also foreshadowed his love for ancient Greece, a thread running through all his work. As a freshman in 1892, he wrote his mother in Iowa, " I think America is a good place to metamorphose the Greeks." In his diaries he wrote, "Talked wildly in Charles Eliot's Fine Arts 3 . . . Power is coming in the place for the old desire for power. I will make life glorious for myself (or) others (Giaspell, 45)." It was in the intellectual context of fin de siec/e Harvard that Cook's idea for an American renaissance germinated. After graduation in 1896, he taught at Stanford and the University of Iowa, only to retreat from academia to become a Davenport farmer in 1902. Hi s intellectual isolation led to stasis until the beginning of his friendship with fellow Davenporters, radical farmhand Floyd Dell and newspaper reporter Susan Glaspell. But his contact with the Harvard milieu was hardly finished. After Cook's marriage to Glaspell in 1913, their honeymoon in Provincetown exposed them to the town's artist colony within which a new generation of Harvard men were associating, including John Reed, Robert Edmond Jones, and, in 1915, Eugene O'Neill. Bridging the intellectual generation gap between Cook and his colleagues from Harvard's next generation was the work of John Ruskin whose interrogation of industrial and democratic culture in America helped foster a national aestheticism by attracting people to poets like Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandberg, and Edgar Lee Masters.
4

Ibid.

5 Steven Biel, Independent Intellectuals in the United States: 1910-1945 (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 23.

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Historian Henry F. May calls Ruskin's disciples the "rebels of 1912." Because Ruskin opposed industrial capitalism and the inscription of British culture on American, his disciples apparently believed that they could "get along without a past." 6 This is especially significant since one of the goals of Cook and his literary milieu was to establish, through their activities, what another Harvard graduate, contemporary cultural critic, Van Wyck Brooks, called a " usable past." 7 If American dramatists recognized the uselessness of their nation's past, as it was constituted within literature, they were obliged to create a tradition of their own. Ruskin's influence radiated beyond the academies, into less protected environments, like Elbert Hubbard's anarchist communities in Arden, Delaware, and more significantly, Davenport, Iowa during the years of Cook's retreat from academia. In Davenport, Ruskin's ideas were avidly absorbed by the local literary triad, Jig Cook, Susan Glaspell , and Floyd Dell. May divides the epoch's discourse into two helpful categories when describing the movements of 1912. The first is represented mutually by Eliot and Norton, whom he calls "custodians of culture." The second is Ruskin's rebels of 1912. Cook can be more accurately described as a custodian because of his generation and his avowed love of Plato and ancient Greece, but his interest in the transformation of American culture made him eager to be among the rebels. Their idealism attracted him because, in spirit, it matched his own. Meanwhile, the little theatre movement in America emerged at the turn of the century partly in emulation of the recent European independent theatres of the eighties and nineties (such as Theatre Libre, the Independent Theatre Society, or Theatre I'Oeuvre), and embraced the work of the European naturalists and symbolists. A handful of little theatres were established, such as the Washington Square Players and the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, the Chicago Little Theatre, the Toy Theatre in Boston, and the Wi sconsin Drama Society in Madison and Milwaukee. The most durable among them, the Washington Square Players and Chicago Little Theatre, did not offer sufficient opportunities to American playwrights, primarily because of a predilection towards European authors such as Ibsen, Maeterlink, and Shaw. But in Cook's case the little theatre movement became a vehicle to promote American drama and, in turn, a cultural renaissance. In spite of the continuous rejection of Cook's short stories by publishers, in 1913 Cook hoped to cultivate a new audience-one which he believed already existed and was consonant with the spirit of the times. He sincerely believed that a "nascence" was close at hand.
6

May, 256.
Biel, 164.

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He wrote, "Suppose the stage of econom ic, political and social evolution is such that a great creative movement can either appear or not appear in the second decade of twentieth-century America (G iaspell, 244)." Even before he thought of directing hi s energy towards th eatre, the idea of setting the stage for an American renaissance was fermenting. In the teens frustration with American culture turned some people into cultural actors. Two who had especial significance for Cook were Mary Heaton Vorse and john Reed. Both were writers and labor activi sts. Mary Heaton Vorse provided two spaces: The Liberal Club in Greenwich Village and, in 1915, her wharf in Provincetown . The latter became the Wharf Theatre, site of the Provincetown Pl ayers' first public performances. Both were real estate for cultural upheaval. In 191 3, john Reed turned Madison Square Garden into real estate for cultural upheaval with his and Robert Edmond Jones's Patterson Silk Strike, a theatrical pageant, in which over a thousand garment workers portrayed the working and living conditions of the American laborer. Interestingly it was contemporaneous with the advent of Bolshevik spectacle in the emerging Soviet Union-indeed it predates their most important spectacles. The Patterson Silk Strike began as a procession before the actua l performance. Twelve hundred workers/actors paraded down Fifth Avenue into Madison Square Garden-a virtual invasion of the space. Reed and jones extended that procession onto a roadway running through the Garden onto the stage. Once there, the workers depicted their own lives to approximately 15,000 spectators. According to Martin Green The Patterson Silk Strike was conceived in the tradition of th e David Pageants of the French Revolution , the same way that Evreinov staged The Taking of the Winter Palace. 8 The Patterson Silk Strike demonstrated that theatre and politics were in discourse prior to WWI, that Americans enthusiastically embraced the interdisciplinary work of cultural production, that art could function as a form of intervention. It also showed the potential power of a creative collective. The Patterson Silk Strike was unique among labor related theatre. It was a large pageant comprised of many smaller dramas; it was more mediaeval pageant than play. It was a far cry from the literary theatre that would soon emanate from the Provincetown Players. By vi rtue of Silk Strike's liminality, American theatre was positioned to move in almost any direction. Some of those directions were taken immediately, especially that of labor theatre. But some directions were not pursued until decades later such as theatri calized political demonstrations, happenings, and nonmimetic performance. Cook and Glaspell were in the Madison Square Garden audience. Glaspell later called the pageant the first labor

Martin Green, New York: 1913 (New York: Collier, 1988), 205.

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play. 9 In 1915, Reed became a strong voice in the founding of the Provincetown Players. Though their first seasons exhibited signs of the upcoming genre of labor-related theatre, it is more accurate to say that they unveiled an emerging consciousness of social malaise-malaise obscured behind romanticism and melodrama in fin de siecle American plays like Nigger by Edward Sheldon, or Langdon Mitchell's The New York Idea, but overt in the twenties and thirties in plays like Machinal by Sophie Treadwell or Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets. The Patterson Silk Strike was so overtly radical that it cleared the air for the outspoken and self-reflexive cultural critique of the Provincetown plays. Although the Provincetown Players did not consciously aspire to dramatize politics, their politics were reflected in their work conditions and creative process. The milieu within which these intellectual and theatrical crosscurrents occurred-the site where anarchy met philanthropywas conducive to the prolific growth of the American culture of the "new" such as new art, new dance, the new Negro, new poetry, new politics, new psychology, and the New Woman. Social evenings at the homes of New York salonierre, Mabel Dodge, where the people she attracted were affectionately nicknamed "movers and shakers," included the writers, artists, and activists whose influence radiated into the eccentric circles of culture and politics. Among them were writer, Floyd Dell; dancer, Isadora Duncan; journalist, Max Eastman; critic, Hutchins Hapgood; Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) organizer, William Haywood; designer, Robert Edmond Jones; actor and activist, Ida Rauh; writer and activist, John Reed; activist, Margaret Sanger; and painter, William Zorach. Meanwhile in Chicago, Margaret Anderson was equally active, doing in a tent on the shore of Lake Michigan what Dodge did in her Fifth Avenue apartment and in her Cape Cod home. Margaret Anderson and Maurice Brown, organizers of the Chicago Little Theatre, played a seminal role in the Little Theatre movement and strongly influenced Cook at the time when he and Dell were editors on the Chicago Evening Post. Cook reviewed Anderson and Brown's work, which consisted primarily of productions of modern European playwrights and Greek tragedies. If not for the Chicago exodus which swept Dell and Cook and a number of Chicago's other writers and artists to New York, Anderson and Brown were positioned to be the pioneers of the new American Drama, but this was not to be their lot. Other significant loci for this discourse of rebellion were the various magazines, literary reviews, and journals such as Max Eastman's New York publication, The Masses, "an irreverent magazine of socia l protest (Sarlos, 3)." Floyd Dell joined the editorial staff of
9 Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, 79 75: The Cultural Moment (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991 ), 224-26.

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The Masses at about the same time that Cook and Glaspell became interested in the little theatres of Greenwich Village. Eastman and many contributors to the journal were in the Provincetown Players's earliest audiences, indeed helping to found the theatre. The crossfertilization of theatre and journalism ran in many directions, not only in terms of content but also in terms of group dynamics. The challenge for groups who espoused radical ideas was just how to manage themselves. Although Eastman was an anarchist, he was also editor-in-chief of a magazine. This created a socio/cultural paradox: how does a person whose goal is to create a product lead an anarchist collective without becoming the kind of tyrant the group itself by definition opposes? This was the kind of problem which would soon confront Cook. The problem was an ideological one, more deeply inscribed perhaps than Cook and his colleagues realized. It was carried within the connotations of the word "production" as it applies to performance. As Bruce McConachie indicates in "Historicizing the Relations of Theatrical Production," the word production as a name for theatre performances has a very short history, emerging in reference to theatre in 1894 in the same sense that Adam Smith uses it in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations to describe the manufacture of goods. 10 The word appeared in almost all of the Provincetown Players's circulars as well as in its by-laws. The word's internal code is in stark contrast to the avowed anarchic collectivism that Cook espoused. Cook's involvement in the little theatre movement began in 1911 in Chicago. His original attraction to the missionary zeal of Anderson and Brown at the Chicago Little Theatre was later tempered by his impatience at the lack of seriousness at the Bandbox, home of the Washington Square Players in 1914 (Giaspell, 248). Meanwhile at Mary Heaton Vorse's Liberal Club and the Washington Square Bookshop, Dell staged his first play, in collaboration with Robert Edmond Jones and Ida Rauh. The Liberal Club was also the site of John Reed's experimental labor plays. This original collection of rebels from within the intellectual elite provided Cook with the raw materials for a theatre that accepted as symbiotic art both social criticism and political activity. Their names would eventually turn up on the rosters of later theatres like the Federal Project, the Theatre Guild, and the New Playwrights Theatre. Some would turn up on Broadway; some in the American universities. But in the summers of 1914 and 1915 these people gathered in Provincetown at Mary Heaton Vorse and Mabel Dodge's homes or the rented cottagesof their friends.
10 Bruce McConachie, "Historicizing the Relations of Theatrical Production" in Critical Theory and Performance, Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph P. Roach, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 168.

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If not for the appearance of Jig Cook, the Provincetown convergence would have been no more than a gathering of Vorse and Dodge's New York and Boston Ivy League elite and its hangers-on. That the energy of the intellectual tidepool could be harnessed and turned into some thing like a theatre is testimony to Cook's dynamic The Provincetown gathering personality and leadership skills. provided a pre-existing group that Cook could shape into a creative collective. Mary Heaton Vorse called the formation of the Provincetown Players, "an organic thing like a plant growing (Sarlos, 9)." Vorse's statement has become a standard trope attached to the Players, but one that obscures some of the vibrant cultural issues surrounding Cook's directorship of this purportedly autochthonous group. Vorse's comment suggests spartoi sprung from the cliffs of Provincetown fated to die at the hand s of their brothers. As Nicole Loraux points out in her fascinating essay on Euripedes' ton, "Kerousa the Autochthon," the myth of autochthony "provides citizenship with its imaginary roots." 11 But by invoking the myth of organic roots for the Provincetown Players, its actual beginnings become obscure. Glaspell saw some of the roots of Vorse's "organi c thing" emanating from her and Cook's 191 3 honeymoon in Provincetown. In 1 914, they returned to buy a house, which they restored with the help of friends Max Eastman, John Reed, Neith Boyce, and Hutchins Hapgood. She wrote of the people who helped unpack the couple's books: " Friends come to help.... Jig dusts off Chaucer, reads a bit to us .. . [Dhey feel the deep life in him, with it the sweetness, the play (Giaspell, 235)." For Glaspell, this poetic and theatrical moment marked the group's beginning. But th e Provincetown Players' chronology proper began in the summer of 1915 at the home of writers Boyce and Hapgood with a presentation of Cook and Glaspell's collaboration, Suppressed Desires, a self-deprecatory comedy about a Greenwich Village couple dabbling in Freudian psychoanalysis. This play, which even the unconventional Washington Square Players would not produce, was given its first performance in Provincetown along with Boyce's Constancy. Robert Edmond Jones transformed the Boyce/Hapgood home into a theatre for the occasion. Cook and Glaspell were surprised that people enjoyed Suppressed Desires. Their neighbors were offended at not being invited. Driven by popular demand, Cook, Glaspell, and Boyce performed the bill a second time at Vorse's wharf, which was volunteered to accommodate the anticipated larger audience. Cook became so enthralled with thi s intimate, grassroots approach to theatre production that, later that
11 Nicole Loraux, " Kreusa the Autochthon: A Study of Euripedes' /on" in Nothing to Do with Dionysos, Froma I. Zeitlin and john J. Winkler, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 179.

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summer, he presented a second bill consisting of his own Change Your Style, a parody of the Provincetown art schools and Wilbur Daniel Steele's passionate labor play, Contemporaries, an allegorical drama about Frank Tannebaum's work with the unemployed and homeless of New York in 1913, but set in the Jerusalem of Jesus Christ. Thus began the Provincetown Players's first season before they were conscious of their cohesion as a theatre collective. The growth of the Provincetown Players was so rapid as to seem inevitable. Although it was a by-product of personal circumstances, demonstrated by Cook's diaries in the 1890s, on a larger scale, it marked the end of a period of over two hundred years without a national drama by destabilizing the climate of anti-intellectualism, anti-European sentiment, puritan work ethics, and imported Victorian tastes, all inscribed in the earlier American drama. This emergence also occurred during a time of great beginnings for the United Statesa time of both colonial expansion and radical conscience. The rebels of 1912 beheld a much older member of their generation in Jig Cook. The younger members of the Provincetown milieu gravitated towards Cook at the same time that he gravitated towards theatre. All of this compressed to burst forth in 1915. In the Autumn of 1915, Cook and Glaspell returned to New York and presented Suppressed Desires at Vorse's Liberal Club at 137 Macdougal Street and at Ira Remsen's studio at 131 Macdougal. In the summer of 1916, Cook wanted to repeat the experiment on the whar( now referred to as the Wharf Theatre. Someone suggested that Cook and Glaspell read the plays of newcomer, Eugene O'Neill. The moment of O'Neill's emergence now seems lost in a cacophony of apocrypha as it is retold by early Provincetown Players in numerous different versions. It is not clear who introduced O'Neill to CookGiaspell, Hapgood, th e painter Bror Nordfelt, or Reed - but it is clear that O'Neill was not a member in 1915 but joined in 1916. 12 O'Neill's attraction to the group demonstrates its mission, which can be described in two ways-outwardly to promote the development of American drama, and inwardly, to found a creative collective devoted to cultural renaissance. For O'Neill, the group's attraction lay in its devotion to American drama, as it must have for Glaspell. Given the rich poetic and philosophic complexity of her plays, the question arises, what might American drama have become had she not devoted her energies to promoting O'Neil l's career? Cook also had aspirations as a playwright but the establishment of the creative collective was foremost among his goals. After the summer of 1916, Cook decided to continue the group's activities in New York. He went with all the theatre's assets, $320, to Greenwich Village, bought and renovated a building on MacDougal
' 2

May, 288; Deutsch and Hannau, 11; Sarlos, 22.

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Street, and turned it into a little theatre. In The Road to the Temple, Glaspell's description of Cook standing amid sawdust and surrounded by policemen, to whom he explained the purpose of the renovation, gives the impression that he founded and built this theatre singlehandedly (Giaspell, 220). Meanwhile, in Provincetown, john Reed drafted the group's These two documents stressed the constitution and by-laws. playwright's prominence in the collective. The by-laws stated: [l]t is the primary purpose of the Provincetown Players to encourage the writing of American plays of real, artistic, literary and dramatic-as opposed to Broadway merit ... the theatre is not to be run for pecuniary profit ... No play shall be considered unless the author will personally superintend the production at the theatre in New York. The by-laws further stated that production of any play will be supervised by its playwright with the cooperation of the president (Cook) and " [t]hat the resources of the theatre ... [wi II] be placed at the disposal of the author." 13 When in production, the group was to be guided by the wills of both the playwright and Cook. The question as to whether this was truly a collective or a group dominated by one man is already inscribed in the ambiguities of its by-laws. From 1916 to 1919, the theatre at 139 MacDougal Street, known as the Playwright's Theatre, devoted itself to continuous productions of members' plays under the inspired leadership of Cook. His devotion was manifest in his service to the authors in virtually every imaginable theatrical function from actor to carpenter, business manager to dramaturg. In 1918, the theatre at 139 MacDougal was deemed too small so they moved to 133 Macdougal Street. The Provincetown Players' Playwright's Theatre, along with Vorse's Liberal Club and Ira Remsen's studio occupied one whole block in Greenwich Villageanarchists colonize bohemia. There the Provincetown Players attracted, encouraged, and produced new American playwrights. Their notion of a season did not parallel Broadway's. They did not sell tickets. Instead the Playwright's Theatre sold subscriptions for one or all shows in advance, thereby making their audience into associate members. That money, in turn, provided Cook with the capital to produce the shows. By virtue of their club status they could circumvent New York's blue laws prohibiting Sunday performances, keep critics out, raise money without resorting to patronage, and give members a sense of personal involvement.

" The Provincetown Players. "Minutes, " [n.p.], Hardbound notebook, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, Lincoln Center.

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During the 1916-17 season they cultivated their new American playwrights, Neith Boyce, Saxe Commins, Floyd Dell, Susan Glaspell, Alfred Kreymbourg, John Mosher, Bror Nordfelt, and Eugene O'Neill in a vigorous, vibrant, and naYvely enthusiastic Greenwich Village. It was also the moment of the nation's entrance into the WWI. Cook established an anti-war policy whereby the group considered their service to the American drama consonant with their duties to the nation and proclaimed themselves immune from the draft; not all members agreed with this policy which was articulated in the group's circulars. This, along with the Group's initial refusal to pay federal taxes, drew the attention of the federal government (Giaspell, 298). In 1917, dissent among group members erupted over a variety of issues. Among them was the imbalance between the group's pronounced amateur status and its reliance on professional directors (Sarlos, 236). An example of this is the disagreement between Cook and Dell as to who would direct the latter's An Angel Intrudes. Dell was determined to maintain control over his play at the same time that Cook decided that the productions needed professional directors. Young professionals Jasper Deeter and Nina Moise were recruited strictly to direct plays, wresting the control, originally guaranteed to playwrights in the by-laws, away from them. This strengthened the performances, and perhaps even to greater degree, Cook. Implicit in this and other conflicts is the quality of Cook's style of leadership that rested on an unresolved paradox inherent in combining creative collectivity and theatrical authority. What exactly was Cook's roledirector? president? How is the leader defined in anarchist communities and how does that differ from the concept of a theatrical director or an artistic director? The paradox is expansive. The Provincetown Players's bank records show erasures after Cook's name where his title should follow; the term "president" was struck over and replaced with the word "director." 14 Another source of dissent was whether their goals were essentially political or artistic (Sarlos, 105). Since active membership was broadly defined as contingent on having something to offer, such as a play or skill in acting, scene painting or carpentry, and willingness to volunteer time to current productions, many new members joined who were not among the founders. Their professional needs were neither consonant with Cook's spontaneous theatre collective nor with Reed's and Dell's political views. Nonetheless, Cook encouraged those younger members who opposed his enlightened amateurism, like actor Jasper Deeter, director Jimmy Light, and playwright Alfred Kreymbourg. From within the midst of the Players they founded the Other Players. Cook gave the Other Players four days of the 19171918 season to present their own work. This attests to Cook's roles as
14

Ibid.

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innovator, mentor, and cu ltivator, and to his spirit of collaboration. But, because they lacked the disinterested vigor that characterized the founders, these new members created tension. Their hopes for professional success were antithetical to Cook's original goals, but ultimately consonant with O'Neill's (Sarlos, 1 04). By 1921 it became clear that the public was more interested in O'Neill than in the other playwrights such as Dell, Glaspell, Michael Gold, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Single show subscriptions at the Playwright's Theatre were on a par with season subscription and were sold primarily to people interested in O'Neill. Cook and O'Neill's divergence deepened in 1921 when The Emperor Jones, a product of their 1919 sabbatical to Provincetown, moved uptown to the Selwyn Theatre on Forty-Second Street. It is important to consider the extent of Cook's influence on O ' Neill. The reco rd indicates Cook's role as both collaborator and catalyst for Glaspell and Gold. To what extent did he nurture and/or collaborate with O'Neill? Cook's influence on and collaboration with O'Neill is most apparent in the latter's Lazarus Laughed, but the record shows that he had a collaborative hand in the writing of The Emperor jones (Sarlos, 52). The success of The Emperor jones led to rapid acceptance of th e Provincetown Players within the New York theatre community and ultimately positioned them for the kind of commercial notoriety Cook shunned. This move aroused something in Cook that can only be described as jealousy. With money inherited from his mother, he took his own work, Spring, to the Princess Theatre on Thirty-Ninth Street later that year. Spring, a play that proposed that a higher order of knowledge is possible through extrasensory communication, was neither a commercial nor a critical success (Sarlos, 56). Whereas The Emperor jones played to full houses, Spring was forced to close prematurely for lack of attendance (Sarlos, 137). Cook was bitter and turned his attention downtown to the preservation of the faltering Provincetown Players. Tensions between Cook and O'Neill split the group in two. One part consisted of those who, like the Other Players, wanted to grow beyond their avowed amateur status and compete in the uptown commercial venues, and the other consisted mostly of founding members who wanted to continue the pursuit of more group-oriented work downtown (Sarlos, 137). The first group lost faith in Cook who was unwilling to pursue commercial theatre wholeheartedly. The Players's great opportunity, confirmation as legitimate theatre and potential absorption into the mainstream hovered briefly and then drifted away; an exhausted and bitter Jig Cook abdicated. His internal sense of the failure of his long-hoped-for renaissance led him to grow more acrimonious, and the group lost faith in him. In spite of the group's eventual collapse, the Provincetown Players became a point of departure. This literary upnsmg in a noncommercial little theatre milieu continued in mainstream theatres

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without its originators. Surely Glaspell's, Gold's, Millay' s, and O ' Neill's subsequent popularity and influence is evidence of the triumph of the Provincetown Players. Their success however helps illuminate Cook' s failure. After the debacle of the uptown moves, Cook wrote: I am now forced to confess that our attempt to build up, by our own life and death, in this alien sea, a coral island of our own, has failed . . . . Our individual gifts and talents have sought their private perfection. We have not, as we hoped, created the beloved community of life-givers. Our richest, like our poorest, have desired most not to give life, but to have it given to them. We have valued creative energy less than its rewards-our sin against our Holy Ghost. (Sarlos, 309) The problem stemmed from Cook's leadership style-a style that inhabited the paradox of authority over an egalitarian collective (the colonization of creativity), antithetical to Cook' s professed ideology but not disharmonious with his actions, which were patriarchal and authoritarian, regardless of his charisma. However, the paradox fit the epoch. The period from 1892, when Cook entered Harvard, to 1915, when he formed the Provincetown Players, marked the establishment of American colonial power at home and abroad and, simultaneously, the raised consciousness of African Americans, women, workers, and other marginalized Americans. This was a time of beginnings for the labor movement, the women's movement, and the NAACP. The Spanish-American War was fought in 1898. The Panama Canal was dug in 1904. Two other contrasting events, spectacles separated by twenty years, enveloped the spirit of the times. The period began with the Columbia Exhibition, Chicago 1893, and closed with the Patterson Silk Strike Pageant, New York 1913. Both were unique forms of cu ltural production-simulations of American culture which reached backward to recuperate events, but al so projected forward toward the dominance of capital and the growth of the labor movement. These hybrids represented American power structures and the challenges faced by those who tried to undo them. Power structures in a collective differ from those of a commercial production company. One of Cook's essential tenets was that the separation of duties in the theatre works against collective creativity (Sarlos, 41 ). This desire to avoid division of labor was reflected in the Players' by-laws where it was stated that each member was to assume production duties in the current production without regard to his/her actual role in the theatre. After his first productions O'Neill was exempt from this stipulation. Cook believed the division of labor in a producing company to be the most self-alienating aspect of any theatre. But the reality is that undivided labor often remains undone

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and the respo nsibility for the ensuing consequences fall on the leader- in thi s case Cook. When Cook turned his theories into management, their impracticality became a source of chaos from which Cook usually emerged as th e unchallenged leader of th e group primarily because he did almost all the manual labor himself. The New York space was annexed on thi s kind puritanical stoicism. An example of the enormous outlays of energy that Cook gave was the installation of a sky dome in the theatre. In 1920 a sky dome (or kuppelhorizont, a recent German innovation in theatre technology) was installed over the stage of the tiny theatre on MacDougal Street for the purposes of enhancing acoustics and adding an innovative visual element for the upcoming premiere of O'Neill's The Emperor j ones. The installation was poorly timed, fal ling in the middle of a season, yet Cook's hope was that the project would pull the group together at a time when dissent was making the future seem bleak. In this cri sis Cook's authoritarian nature destroyed his hard-earned cred ibility. Playreader and foundin g member, Edna Kenton, one of Cook's most loyal supporters, called him "dictator (Sarlos, 128)." The building of th e sky dome was one misadventure from which Cook could not recover. The Emperor jones was in rehearsal at the same time Cook was building the dome. It was a superhuman effort to get th e dome installed before the show opened, but perhaps there were other things Cook should have been doing such as protecting both his investment in The Emperor jones and also th e group's investment in O'Neill. At thi s time, O'Neill was struggling not only for recognition, but to survive-Cook's younger colleagues were outgrowing amateurism, while he and th e o lder members became more entrenched in it. This disjuncture was irrecoverable. The Emperor jones was such a hit on Macdougal Street that producer, Alfred Klauber, offered to move it up to Broadway. The group put the move to a vote and was al l but unanimously in favor. The one dissenting vote was Edna Kenton's. She knew that, fo r th e group, letting The Emperor jones move uptown was a mi stake. After the artistic and financial success of The Emperor Jones, and while Spring faltered and ultimately flopped, Cook escaped to Cape Cod. By 1922, he and Glaspell had left for Greece. Edna Kenton urged Cook to return to New York and assert his authority, but Cook was not responsive (Sarlos, 135). Though many original members were loyal to Cook, for others, potential criti cal acclaim proved too great a seduction. This was the case with Floyd Dell whose ambitions took him far afield. Dell's loss of faith in Cook points to the nature of Cook's relations with other members who gradually outgrew the co llective. 15 Thi s was especially true of O'Neill, but also Robert
5 ' See Floyd Dell, Homecoming: An Autobiography (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1969).

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Edmond Jones and Kenneth MacGowan who, with O'Neill, formed a triumvirate, whose function was to continue the work of the Provincetown Players without Cook. Their goal was to protect their anticipated hard-earned success in th e mainstream by starting their own group under the aegis of the Prov incetown Playhouse. Glaspell would have none of this. In a letter to the triumvirate, she wrote: It savors a bit of wanting to profit by a thing and at the same time saying 'We don't owe nothing to nobody.' Since you are not Provincetown Players I do not think you should call yourself Provincetown something else and let people go on calling you Provincetown Players. (Sarlos, 150) With the triumvirate installed, it was as if Cook's colleagues and disciples were expressing their final loss of faith. The ultimate turning point was the divestiture of Cook's power of signature on the Thi s ostracism of Cook was Provincetown Players's checks. 16 contradicted by th e group's desire, expressed in their circulars, to resuscitate itself after a brief interim. The New York theatre community eagerly antici pated its return. In 1923, critic Oliver Sayler wrote: During this interim what has happened to the minds, the imaginations of Cook, Glaspell, O'Neill, Uimmy] Light? Will others enter the situation to stimulate interest, rouse further questions? On the answer-unpredictable because it is not the individual answers or their sum but the group answer whi ch is important-depends a larger share of the future of our awakening theatre than can be readily foreseen. 17 Sayler's statement indicates that publicly it was believed Cook would return and continue to lead the Provincetown Players, but the triumvirate's treachery in late 1922 and early 1923 led to other results. Sayler's remarks also indicate recognition of Cook's significant contribution to contemporary American theatre. Ultimately it w as to Plato's Republic (and not to Marx), to Nietzsche (and not to Freud), to Ancient Greece (and not to modern Europe) that Cook turned for a model of cultural renaissance. In the summer of 191 5, it was as if Cook's earlier dreams had converged in an American playwrights' theatre; but it was more than a theatre.
16

Minutes. Oliver Sayler, Our American Theatre (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1923),

17

101.

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Throughout his writing Cook constantly reiterated his "dream city" where theatre endows people with "[t]he will to form the Beloved Community of Lifegivers (Giaspell, 252)." He saw his beloved community as those who gathered at Neith Boyce's house and Mary Heaton Verse's wharf. They were Eliot's "vigorous doers" and Dodge's " movers and shakers." This was the Platonic community from which he would mold his "New Athens (G iaspel l, 252)." The overarching value of Cook's renaissance was that of building a healthy creative society as a response to the nation's inward sickness. This inward sickness consisted of a kind of self-loathing that Hutchins Hapgood claimed was characteristic of the Provincetown milieu before Cook and Glaspell arrived in the summer of 1913. Hapgood called pre-Cook Provincetown gatherings "poison distributing centers;" he described people's " instinct to destroy each other's personalities. "' 8 This sickness was to be cured through social catharsis. According to Sarlos, Cook was influenced by Austrian psychologist-turned-theatre-artist, Jacob L. Moreno, the pioneer of psychodrama (Sarlos, 40). Combining the ideas of such prominent Europeans as Buber, Freud, Marx, Moreno, and Nietzsche, the creative collective gestated first in Cook's imagination and then was born in the sand dunes of Provincetown. This collective, already structured as an imaginary Platonic republic, fused many contradictory ideas, while glossing over certain obstacles which would create tension later, especially issues of authority, authorship, and the division of labor. These became issues that haunted Cook near the end of his and the group's life, but their fusion and the energy emanating from that fusion created conditions cond ucive to both creative work and the emergence of powerful personalities who could withstand the process of anarchic creative collectivity. Perhaps it seems ironic that so many European ideas were at play during what was ostensibly an American renaissance not so neatly fitted to the paradigm of Yankee ingenuity, the puritan work ethic, or the stoical Iowan. But there was no pronounced dichotomy for Cook. European ideas passed through the prism of American social malaise; in fact they were often retailored to suit the intellectual and economic needs of the people who espoused them at any given time. The newer European artists and thinkers created breathing room for these rebellious and independent people. Marx was as attractive to the sons and daughters of the old patrician families like Dodge, Reed, and Vorse in search of new and manageable dogmas as he was to the rural and working poor and to middle income Americans like Floyd Dell and Bill Haywood. Cook fell into neither category, but as an

18 Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939), 392; Hapgood quoted in Sarlos, 45-47.

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intellectual he attracted both. The desire for a healthy society caused Cook to look beyond American thought. Cook saw his small society as one with commonly held values such as artistic and cultural creativity, game and role-p laying, group encounter, and, of especial importance, group existence. Cook's theatre was a laboratory for these values (Sarlos, 40-43). The goal of this collective cultural laboratory was to communicate its own values beyond its boundaries into society at large. Ironically, group existence generally tends to be in conflict with the self-discovery inherent in Moreno's psychodrama and role-playing. The bipolarity of individual liberty and group existence was something Cook sincerely believed he could and should overcome; indeed they were appropriate bedfellows in the marriage he proposed between the cultural actor and the political activist. Sarlos's essay, "Dionysos in 1915," provides an in-depth study of this creative collective's intellectual and cultural strata. Sarlos indicates that of all the intellectual pathways leading to Provincetown 1915, Cook chose Nietzsche as the most direct route to renaissance. Nietzsche's influence in the United States broadened beyond the university in 1896 with the appearance of the English translations. By 1912, Nietzsche's writing had influenced intellectuals in the United States to strenuously reject conventional morality. 19 In the academies and the press Nietzsche was adapted to th e point of distortion. It is not of great importance whether he was understood correctly. He became what people needed him to become. Idealists like Cook were attracted to Nietzsche's critique of "dollar chasing democracy." 20 Part of what appealed to the founders of the Provincetown Players and Their their milieu was Nietzsche's rejection of the systematic. activities fit into Nietzsche's broader rejection of "systems of rejection (Sarlos, 36)." Nietzsche's view was that systems such as progress or reason, the bases of modern positivist society, were symptoms of an " inward sickness." 21 Thi s sickness was deeply inscribed in the social infrastructure of the United States. Cook wanted to lead his group on a Nietzschian quest for the rediscovery of tragedy, whereby, through cultural catharsis, people would dispel their inner sickness. As one among many disaffected intellectuals and artists, his power to attract so many like-minded talented and influential people can be understood through his conflation of Nietzsche and Plato. Of especial interest is Nietzsche's view of Dionysian intoxication, from which Cook believed tragedy flows. Thereby, through tragedy, Dionysian
19

May, 206, 196. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 207.

20

21

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ecstasy will redeem society and bring about Apollonian order (Sarlos, 36). Cook believed ecstasy to be the theatre's healing power. Cook combined his Nietzsche with his lifestyle. He envisioned what Sarlos calls a "Dionysian triple kingdom" involving intoxication, sexual rites, and theatre (Sarlos, 36). The Provincetown milieu was ripe for Cook's approach. Prior to 1915, the group can best be described as artistic couples-painters, activists, poets and performers-focused on socializing and drinking. But, given the Nietzschian diagnosis of the inward sickness of society, these were optimum conditions for the birth of a truly modern American drama. Unfortunately the level of literal intoxication now receives an inordinate amount of attention in most accounts of the players, both scholarly and first-hand. Among the standard tropes attached to Cook is his punchbowl incantation from the group's get-togethers at their club, Christine's: "When the wine [begins] to show at the bottom of the bowl, 'Give it all to me,' Cook would propose, 'and I guarantee to intoxicate all the rest of you (Giaspell, 266)."' Sarlos's accounts of Cook tend to cast a nostalgic eye at the group's activities at Christine's and their parties in Provincetown. Thi s, however, seriously distracts from more pertinent theoretical and practical issues. Perhaps when Sarlos calls Cook Dionysos, he leaves unexplored another side of Nietzschian thought, dominant in Cook's philosophy, namely the superman. It is interesting to note that in comparing the two most comprehensive works devoted to Cook, Sarlos's jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment and Glaspell's The Road to the Temple, Sarlos is the one who consistently imposes the Dionysian grid on Cook, whereas Glaspell, whose work consists of contextualizing Cook's diaries and farm journals, does not mention the Dionysian at all. Cook's style can be described as si mple, almost rural. But his motives are complex. He approached theatre production as a Mennonite might a labor union. He sincerely believed in both the collaborative potential of theatre and the American/puritan work ethic. Although he espoused collaboration, his rugged individualism was manifest in his will, and it dominated all he undertook. This may not have been his intent, but it was his nature. Compare the following diary entries: To write alone will not content me. The blood of a backwoods statesman is in my veins. I must act, organize, accomplish, embody my ideal in stubborn material things which must be shaped with energy, toil. ... One man cannot produce a drama. The true drama is born only of one feeling . . . animating all the members of a clan-a spirit shared by all expressed by the few for the all. ... If there is nothing to take the place of the common religious purpose and passion of the

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primitive group, out of which the Dionysian dance was born, no new vital drama can arise in any people. (Giaspell, 252) Here is the essential Cook who fused the popular Nietzschian view of the Dionysian root of drama with the Platonic ideal of an elite community of philosophers, "the few" within the larger community of "the all," providing spiritual and intellectual sustenance. What stands out is the backwoods statesman. The energy and ideals of the backwoods statesman drove him to go beyond the boundaries of collective creativity. According to sociologist Charles Lindholm, in his study of personality cults, Charisma, the Nietzschian construct of the superman thrives on genius-slave relationships, which are among the basic building blocks of personality cults. Nietzsche's superman is a charismatic genius destined to lead because he or she embraces and accepts predispositions and pleasures, whereas the slave tries to justify moral weakness, taking revenge on the strong through the invention of morality. 22 This distinction between genius and slave helps to describe Cook's approach to collective theatre and its divergence from conventional practice. Lindholm's comparison of John Stuart Mill's genius to Nietzsche's superman may help determine why Cook was so appealing to Ruskin's "rebels of 1912." Whereas Mill's genius is a poet and connoisseur leading other lesser mortals to higher pleasures by showing them the usefulness of enjoyment, Nietzsche has neither such altruistic nor utilitarian concerns. Nietzsche's superman is an explosive individual in whom a great deal of energy has accumulated. This explosiveness is then transformed into power over others.B While still at Harvard, Cook wrote in his diary that he could feel his very desire for power transform into a power unto itself. Cook had some qualities of Mill's genius, but his techniques were those of the Nietzsche's superman. He led by making it seem to others that his idea was theirs. Glaspell observed this quality in Cook: "It was an amateur group ... with no money, the only hold he had on them was through making them want to do it. It was his intensity held the thing together (Giaspell, 255-56)." Cook harnessed other people's desire to his desire, creating an oscillation between firmly held beliefs. He did not impose strict codes of order such as rules. Rather it was John Reed who drafted the by-laws and the constitution of the Provincetown Players. Cook preferred to lead by example and inspiration. Cook's farm journal entry from Memorial Day, 1912 shows his mission and his charisma as Nietzschian reciprocals.

22

Charles Lindholm, Charisma (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 38. Ibid., 18.

23

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I see the glamour of intoxicating emotion around antidemocracy. . . . I call upon the vital writers of America to attain a finer culture . . . to make themselves strong as caryatids, prepared to bear together each the hundredth part of our Renaissance .. . . Is it megalomania to aspire to be the voices of a spirit so great? (Giaspell, 255-56) Glaspell bears out Cook's inspirational leadership: " [He] works as if it were death which waits if the thing is not done (Giaspell, 262)." Throughout Sarlos, the primordial role Dionysos is supposed to have played in the formation of theatre in ancient Greece is likened to Cook's dramaturgy and persona. Although it is true that Cook's dreams were full of ancient Greece, it seems too convenient a metaphor, and one that overlooks the intricate working of Cook's mind. Though Sarlos's deepest analysis of Cook passes through the lens of Glaspell's biography, he draws a conclusion which ultimately returns Cook to the very obscurity from which Glaspell hoped to rescue him. In reality Cook's dream was not so Dionysian. The popularity and possibly mistaken notion of the role of the Cult of Dionysos as a progenitor of tragedy, pronounced by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, has somehow become an accepted metanarrative in the study of drama and theatre. Yet, long ago, Sir A rthur PicardCambridge, and, more recently, Froma Zeitlin, cast considerable doubt on this purported origin. H. D. F. Kitto openly calls it wrong. 24 Kitto sees tragedy as an innovation originated by Thespis and not a genre evolved from ritual. Even when Cook invoked Dionysos it was not a sound metaphor. Inspirational leaders like Cook are more readily explained by the attractiveness of the cult of their own personality than that of Dionysos or any other God or political dogma. It is more probable that he emerged as the catalyst of this renaissance by virtue of the intense energy he devoted to mentorship and not because of any inherent relationship between Dionysian intoxication and the telos of a healthy society as Sarlos proposes. Perhaps because the Davenport/Provincetown/Greenwich Village milieu needed a mentor, they attracted Cook who needed a group and who also provided the intellectual raw material at a time when a cultural power vacuum would be filled regardless of who fills it. A jig Cook would have been invented if one did not emerge. Cook was more a manager than a playwright or a director. To call a manager Dionysos seems out of touch with what the man really did. Cook can be seen as a manager for cultural change, or, if affection is warranted, stage manager for an American Renaissance.

24

H. D. F. Kitto, "Greek Tragedy and Dionysus" in Theatre Survey 1 (1960) 3-

17.

CONTRIBUTORS

BROOKE BAETEN is a graduate student and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her current work considers issues of gender and narrative in contemporary fiction. SETH BAUMRIN recently received his Ph .D. in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate School and University Center. Formerly the Artistic Director of Five Moon Theatre, he started working professionally in 1978 for Martha's Vineyard's Island Theatre Workshop. He is currently a member of the founders' steering committee for the Hansberry Project and works as an instructor in theatre and humanities at Rutgers University and Lehman College. MARK EVANS BRYAN is a doctoral student in the History, Literature, and Criticism of the Theatre program at the Ohio State University. MIKE RIGGS is a lighting designer for theater, opera and dance. He is the author of "Paradox Now" UADT 10,3), a study of the Living Theater's Paradise Now. He is a graduate of Vassar College and currently resides in New York City. YVONNE SHAFER is Assistant Professor of theatre at St. John's University. She has written articles and books on American theatre including American Women Playwrights, 7900-1950 (Peter Lang, 1995) and August Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Greenwood Press, 1998). Her latest book Performing O'Neill: Interviews with Actors and Directors (St. Martin's Press) will be published in November of 2000.

ERRATUM

An error was made in the Contents page of our last issue (12, 2). The correct title for John Houchin's article is "Hair: The Legal Legacy." The following page is a corrected print of the Contents, which can be torn out and inserted in your copy of volume 12, 2.

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JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE Vera Mowry Roberts and Jane Bowers, editors. The widely acclaimed journal devoted solely to drama and theatre in the USA-past and present. Provocative, thoughtful articles by the leading scholars of our time provide invaluable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Published three times per year. $/2 per annum domestid$18 U.S. foreign JADT@gc.cuny.edu

SLAVIC AND EAST EUROPEAN PERFORMANCE Daniel Gerould, editor. This journal brings readers lively, authoritative accounts of drama, theatre and film throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, and articles on important new plays, innovative productions, significant revivals, emerging artists, and the latest in film. Outstanding interviews and overviews. Published three times per year. $/0 per annum domesric/$1 5 U.S. foreign SEEP @gc.cuny.edu

--~-.,.--

WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES Marvin Carlson, editor. An indispensable resource in keeping abreast of the latest theatre developments in Western Europe. Each issue contains a wealth of information about recent European
festival s and productions. including reviews, interviews,

and reports. Winter issues focus on the theatre in individual countries or on special themes. News of forthcoming events: the latest changes in artistic directorships, new plays and playwrights, outstanding performances, and directorial interpretations. Published three times per year. $/5 per annum/$20 U.S. foreign WES@gc.cuny.edu To order any of these publications, please send your request to our Circulation Manager at: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016-4309 MESTC@gc.cuny.edu Please make checks payable to the journal title.

THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 12, Number 2

Spring 2000

Contents

SARAH BAY-CHENG,

Atom and Eve: A Consideration of Gertrude Stein's

Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights

jOHN H. HOUCHIN ,

25

Hair: The Legal Legacy

jENNI FER STILES,

38

Import or Immigrant? The Representation of Blacks and Irish on the American Stage from 1767 - 1856
LAWRENCE

G.

AVERY,

56

Stereotypes and the Development of African American Drama

ROBERT BAKER-WHITE,

71

Questioning the Ground of American Identity: George Pierce Baker's The Pilgrim Spirit and Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play

CONTRIBUTORS

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