THE journal of American Drama and Theatre is published three times a year. The aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style.
THE journal of American Drama and Theatre is published three times a year. The aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style.
THE journal of American Drama and Theatre is published three times a year. The aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style.
Volume 7, Number 3 Editor: Vera Mowry Roberts Co-Editor: Jane Bowers Managing Editor: Vanessa Grimm Fall 1995 Editorial Assistants: Laura Drake and James Masters Editorial Coordinator: Jay Plum Circulation Manager: Beth Ouradnik Assistant Circulation Manager: Julie Jordan Edwin Wilson, Director CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDY IN THEATRE ARTS THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Editorial Board Stephen Archer Ruby Cohn Bruce A. McConachie Margaret Wilkerson Don B. Wilmeth Brenda Murphy 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 enli ghtened understanding of our literary and theatrical heritage. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, 13th ed., and should be submitted in duplicate. Submissions will 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 manu- script submissions to the Editors, }ADT, Ph.D. Program in Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center, 33 West 42 Street, New York, New York 10036-8099. CASTA Publications are supported by generous grants from the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York. CAST A Copyright 1995 The journal of American Drama and Theatre (I SSN 1 044-937X} 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 CASTA, CUNY Graduate School, 33 West 42 Street, New York, New York 10036-8099. THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE Volume 7, Number 3 Fall 1995 Contents FREDA SCOTT GILES, Glitter, Glitz, and Race: The Production of Harlem 1 CHARLES A. CARPENTER, American Dramatic Reactions To the Birth of the Atomic Age 13 CRISTINA C. CARUSO, "One Finds What One Seeks": Arthur Miller's The Crucible as a Regeneration Of the American Myth of Violence 30 BARBARA F. ACKER, "I Charge Thee Speak": john Barrymore and His Voice Coach, Margaret Carrington 43 FRANCES DIODATO BZOWSKI, "Torchbearers of the Earth": Women and Pageantry Between the World Wars 58 GERALD WEALES, Alan Schneider on Broadway 79 CONTRIBUTORS 88 journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Fall 1995) Glitter, Glitz, and Race: The Production of Harlem FREDA SCOTT GILES In his first autobiography, The Big Sea, poet Langston Hughes provided a definitive portrait of Wallace Thurman: He was a strange kind of fellow, who liked to drink gin, but didn't like to drink gin; who liked being a Negro, but felt it a great handicap; who adored bohemianism, but thought it wrong to be a bohemian. He liked to waste time, but he felt guilty wasting time. He loathed crowds, yet hated to be alone. He almost always felt bad, yet he didn't write poetry. 1 Thurman did write two of the most highly regarded novels of the Hadem Renaissance period, a seminal era for African-American arts and letters marked at its inception by the end of World War I and at its decline by the Great Depression: The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring. He also wrote, in collaboration with William Jourdan Rapp, a playwright of Irish-German extraction, a financially successful Broadway play, Harlem, which gained him both positive and negative notoriety, raised and dashed his hope for financial stability, and strained his chronically fragile health to the breaking point. Born 16 August 1902 in Salt Lake City, t a h ~ Thurman suffered through a childhood marked by the disintegration of his parents' marriage, frequent moves from city to city throughout the Midwest and West, and debilitating illnesses, including being caught in the great flu epidemic in 1918. He managed to finish high school, then matriculated at the University of Utah in Salt Lake, where the pressures of the hostile racial environment combined with those of his pre-medical studies precipitated a nervous breakdown. Thurman eventually completed his undergraduate studies in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California. He supported himself as a student by working as a postal 1 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963; rpt. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1986), 238. 2 GILES clerk, and remained at the post office for the year following his gradua- tion. Thurman called his decision to become a writer a "sudden inspiration." 2 Stimulated by what he had learned of the New Negro movement centered in New York, he tried starting a magazine, The Outlet, to encourage this movement on the West Coast. His effort was unsuccessful, but his friendship with a struggling young poet who worked beside him in the post office, Arna Bontemps, helped him remain enthusiastic. Bontemps, as soon as he gained publication, moved to New York, and Thurman migrated soon after, in 1925. 3 Among Thurman's first friends in New York was Theophilus Lewis, theatre critic for The-Messenger, the journal published by the Brother- hood of Sleeping Car Porters. With Lewis's help, Thurman gained editorial positions with The Messenger, as well as two white liberal publications, The Looking Glass and The World Tomorrow. By 1926, Thurman was familiar with most of the writers of his generation, and his Harlem apartment, popularly known by the appellation he had given it, "Niggeratti manor," 4 became the scene of frequent raucous gatherings of uptown black and downtown white bohemians. Thurman invited some of the most gifted of the younger generation of black writers to contribute essays, short stories, and poetry to his next effort at magazine publishing, Fire, which debuted in November 1926. Though Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen were among the contributors, this beautifully produced magazine illustrated with the artwork of Aaron Douglas, priced at a dollar per copy, proved an impossibly hard sell. Fire also ignited the wrath of powerful critics, such as W.E.B. DuBois, the editor of the NAACP's journal, The Crisis; critical denunciations, particularly from the more conservative among the black literary establ ishment, flew hot and heavy. Fire's first issue was its last, and Thurman, severely wounded emotionally and financially, was forced to spend the next several years paying off printing and start-up costs. Thurman's contribution to Fire had been a short story, "Cordelia the Crude." Written in the first person from the perspective of a struggling writer, it chronicles a brief encounter with a young woman transformed 2 Wallace Thurman papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Yale University. 3 A rna Bontemps, " The Awakening, A Memoir," in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, ed. Arna Bontemps (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972), 15. 4 Theophi lus Lewi s, " Harl em Sketchbook," Amsterdam News, 5 January 1935, Thurman papers, Johnson Collection. Glitter, Glitz, and Race 3 by life in Harlem from a naive southern migrant to a sexually precocious "chippie." In order to ease the sting of his rejection of her sexual advance, the writer presses two dollar bills into her palm; ironically, this gesture inspires Cordelia to enter a life of prostitution. Sketching out a three-act melodrama, Thurman turned the short story into a play scenario, also titled "Cordelia the Crude." He created a family for her, the Masons, recent emigres from North Carolina, and surrounded them with a variety of characters from the working class and Harlem underworld, including a bisexual male hustler and his sidekick, a gigolo known as a "sweetback." 5 In order to shape these ideas into dramatic action and dialogue, Thurman turned to William Jourdan Rapp, a friendly acquaintance since 1925, when Thurman, new to the New York scene; had sought out Rapp for advice on how to gain employment as a writer. 6 Rapp had been a feature writer for the New York Times, an editor at True Story Magazine, and a collaborator on several produced plays such as Whirlpool, Substitute for Murder and The Holmses of Baker Street. A play under his sole authorship, Osman Pasha, a drama of the Turkish Revolution, was produced in 1925. 7 Thurman and Rapp spent a year rewriting Cordelia the Crude, with a new title for each draft: City of Refuge (from a short story about Harlem by Rudolph Fisher), Black Mecca, and finally, Black Belt, which began to make the rounds of agents and producers in 1927. 8 Cordelia's family name is now Williams; she is crowded i"nto a railroad flat with her two younger sisters, younger brother, unemployed father, and overworked mother. Unlike her. older brother, who has his own family and has brought his parents and siblings to Harlem, Cordelia, seventeen, is described as "selfish, lazy, sullen." 9 Among the four boarders who also share the flat is Basil Venable, an honest, hard-working Barbadian student, who is in love with Cordelia. The Harlem underworld is represented by Roy Crowe and his cohort Kid Vamp. Crowe is a 5 Wallace Thurman, "Cordelia the Crude," typed scenario, Johnson Collection. 6 William Jourdan Rapp, autobiographical statement, Thurman Collection. 7 0bituaries of William Jourdan Rapp, Thurman papers, Johnson Collection. 8 William Jourdan Rapp, notes, Thurman papers, Johnson Collection. ~ l l c e Thurman and William Jourdan Rapp, Black Belt, typescript, Thurman papers, Johnson Coll ection. 4 GILES gambler, a numbers runner and a "sheik" (a ladies' man, no longer a bisexual as in the original story) . The action revolves around Cordelia's efforts to avoid entrapment in a life like her mother's: ... I got alii needs but freedom. Jes' cause I don' wanna tend to babies, slave, cook an' wash for pa or some white women don' mean I don't know what's best for me. I ain't cut out for dat. I'm cut out for something big, something more exciting and beautiful. . .. All black women don' have to be sudsbusters and kitchen mechanics. And don't tell me to be no schoolteacher! I've had enough of kids right here! . .. I'm going on de stage. 10 She sees Roy Crowe as her ticket out, and dances wildly with him at the rent party 11 in the Williamses' apartment, which serves as the climactic scene of Act 1; the action culminates in a fight between Basil and Roy. Cordelia leaves the party with Roy; Act 2 is set in his apart- ment. Cordelia is unaware of Roy's hidden agenda to seduce her and become her pimp. Kid Vamp murders Roy and attempts to frame Basil. The truth is revealed in Act 3, when the action returns to the Williamses' flat, where the rent party is just breaking up. Kid Vamp is killed by the police. Cordelia storms out of the apartment vowing to make her own way in the world. A number of producers expressed intere-st in Black Belt, including one who wanted to rescript the play into a vehicle for entertainer George Jessel, 12 but the play was finally optioned by Crosby Gaige, under the title, Black Mecca, in January, 1928. A cast was assembled but dismissed when the producer's partner, AI Lewis, decided that there was no "wow" in the third act; the playwrights produced several rewrites but could not satisfy Lewis. 13 The option was allowed to expire, and the script went back into circulation until it caught the attention of a neophyte producer, Edward A. Blatt, who bought the option and hired Chester Erskin to 10 /bid. 11 A house party at which admission was charged and food and drink, which during Prohibition included bootleg liquor, was sold. 12 William Jourdan Rapp, notes, Thurman papers, Johnson Collection. 13 Wallace Thurman and William Jourdan Rapp, "Detouring Harlem to Times Square," New York Times, 7 Apri I 1929, sec.1 0, p. 4. Glitter, Glitz, and Race 5 direct. Harlem, as the play would soon be known, was the first Broadway credit for both. 14 Blatt searched for investors while Erskin, Thurman, and Rapp set out in search of a cast. Believing that Porgy, which had opened in 1927 and was still running successfully on Broadway, had tied up the most viable acting talent, the trio scoured Harlem cabarets, shows, and any place where they thought talent might be found. 15 Erskin found Cordelia in the chorus at the Alhambra Theatre in Harlem. She was Isabell Washington, who had followed in the footsteps of her sister Fredi, who later would become best known for her searing performance in the 1934 film, Imitation of Life. Isabell would go on to develop a stage career and to become the first wife of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., noted Harlem minister and politician. Richard Landers, hired to play Basil, was the Trinidadian son of a politician. Veteran actors Inez Clough and Lew Payton were selected to play Ma and Pa Williams. After the show opened, a story was circulated that Erskin discovered the other Williams children in an uptown Chinese restaurant. The cast was filled out with community theatre actors, school teachers, a dentist, and two lady boxers among the company of sixty, two-thirds of whom were employed solely for the rent party sequences. 16 After a successful tryout at the Boulevard Theatre in Jackson Heights (Queens), New York for the week commencing l'1 February 1929, Harlem, now subtitled An Episode of Life in New York's Black Belt, opened at the Apollo Theatre on Forty-second Street on 20 February. The initial response of the downtown critical establishment was favorable. Brooks Atkinson, in his New York Times review, called Harlem "perhaps the most informalist melodrama in months with its high jinks, sizzling dancing, kicks on the shins and family jars .. . . It is rag-bag drama and high-pressure blow-out all in one .... "Atkinson also noted that police department censors were on hand to scrutinize the dancing in the rent party scenes and that despite the threat of censorship, the company, particularly Isabell Washington, "performed with an abandon 14 Harlem marked the beginning of successful careers for both Erskin and Blatt. Erskin directed the stage version of The Last Mile, which brought him, along with Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable, to Hollywood, where he became a producer, writer, and di rector. Erskin also claimed to have rewritten and redirected Langston Hughes's fi rst Broadway play, Mulatto; Hughes detested the changes. Blatt became an independent producer after working with producer/managers Herman Shumlin, Jed Harris, and Martin Beck. 15 Wallace Thurman, notes, Thurman papers, Johnson Collection. 16 /bid. 6 GILES seldom seen before." 17 Reviews in most of the daily papers were similar; some critics were so taken with the glossary of Harlem slang included in the program that they reprinted it. Variety and Billboard augured box office success. A cautionary note was sounded by Burns Mantle in the Daily News. While he admired the vitality of the play and the quality of much of the acting, he expressed concern for the reaction of the police commissioner to the dancing and the protests from Harlem against the transplanting of this sector of cheaper Harlem in the Time sq. [sic.] district. ... So much of a message as they had to deliver, which appears to be a plea that the southern black should be urged .to stay where his soul is comparatively safe rather than brought north .. . is so completely buried under the surface showiness of the play that it emerges as a mere whisper. 18 Harlem's producers may have anticipated a negative response from the African-American community; in any event, they made a concerted effort to discourage the potential black audience, as reported by the New York Age, a leading African-American weekly newspaper: "Harlem," the new play, . . . is not for Negro theatre-goers, said the press representative, C.A. Leonard, to a representa- tive of The Age. No advance publicity was sent to any of the Negro papers, nor were any sent tickets for the opening . . . . When inquiry over the telephone ... was made, Mr. Leonard replied that the show was primarily for "white consumption." ... The attitude is one of marked contrast to that adopted by Lew Leslie, producer of "Blackbirds," and David Belasco, when he produced "Lulu Belle" .. . in which a large number of colored people appeared .... 19 Members of the black press who did attend the opening were confined to the balcony. Thurman himself was denied access to center 17 Brooks Atkinson, "The Play," New York Times, 21 February 1929, 30. 18 Burns Mantle, " 'Harlem' Reveals Harlem in Grip of a Turbulent and Ginny Jamboree", New York Daily News, 21 February 1929,21. 19 " Negroes Not wanted as Spectators of Play, 'Harlem,' Says Producer," New York Age, 2 March 1929,1 . Glitter, Glitz, and Race APOLLO 1"'HEATRE Forty-Second Street West of Broadway GEORGE WHITE, .c-- FIRE NOTICE: Look around now and choose the nearest exit to your seat. In case of nrc, walk (noc run) co that exit. Do not tty to beat your neighbor to the srrcct. JOHN J. DORMAN, Fire Commissioner. WEEK BEGINNING MONDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 25, 192'.1 MATII'IE5 WEDNESDAY AI'ID SATUftD.<Y EDWAf<D A. DLAIT PIIESI:!ITS HARLEM '' Ad.Epitode of Life in New Yorlt'a Black Belt JY YlLUAII IOUIIDAN IIAPP AND WAI.LAC THURMAN STACED JY CUESTEII ERSKIN THE CAST (AS TilEY APPEARI ARABELLA WII.LIAMS .. .................. .. ...... mNA WISE BARK GEORGE WU.UAMS .. .. . CLARENCE TAYLOR HAZlE WILliAMS .................................... EUSE THOMAS IIA WILUA'MS, ....... ................... ........ ....... INEZ CLOUGH PA WILLIAMS ......... . .... ......... .... . .............. LEW PAYTON CORDELIA WILLIAMS ..................... ISABELL WASHINGTON BASIL _VENERABLE . ............... ..... .... ... RICHARD LANDERS PIIOCIIAJI CUNTIICU0 OH FOUIIT8 f'OLLOWJI'IC: After a tryout in Queens, New York, Harlem _opened at the Apollo Theatre on 20 February 1929. From the collection of the author. 7 8 GILES orchestra seats. 20 Shortly after the Age's report appeared, its dramatic editor, William E. Clark, was invited to review Harlem; he was conservatively favorable, calling the play an "entertaining melodrama of one phase of Negro life in New York City." 21 Other African- American papers, such as the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier expressed reservations concerning the images projected by Harlem, but recognized that some exaggeration was needed to make the play commercial. Theophilus Lewis staunchly defended the play, citing the forcefulness of the character of Cordelia as a welcome contrast to the passivity or indolence with which the usual stage Negro was portrayed. Lewis saw the success of Harlem as opening up commercial possibilities for other African-American playwrights. 22 There were those, however, who viewed the play as detrimental and dangerous, as expressed in this letter to the editor of the New York Age: I consider it is the most degrading show ever produced by colored artists. Instead of it being something to help raise the race's name in the theatrical world, it is putting the black man down where the white man wants him. 23 This view might serve as a telling contrast to an opinion on Harlem printed in the New York Times: 20 1n a letter to Rapp, Thurman stated, "Five times I have bought seats for myself to see Harlem-including opening night-and tho [sic] I asked for center aisle seats (as much as a week in advance) not yet have I succeeded in not being put on the side in a little section where any other Negro who happened to buy an orchestra seat was also placed." C.A. Leonard, the show's publicist, composed a fabrication for the June 1929 edition of Theatre Magazine: "Whenever Wallace Thurman, the young Negro co-author of Harlem, goes to the Apollo Theatre to look his show over, he voluntarily buys a seat in the balcony . . .. His chief concern when going to the theatre is that some white spectator might object to his sitting in the orchestra. He wants to spare such a spectator the possible embarrassment of discovering that he i s the co-author, and for that reason, if not another, has a perfect right to sit wherever he darn well pleases." Thurman was treated as a second-class citizen as a playwright, as well; Rapp was given primary credit in all publicity releases. 21 William E. Clark, '"Harlem', " New York Age, 23 March 1929, 6. 22 Theophilus Lewis, " If This Be Puritanism, " Opportunity, April 1929, 132. 23 Paul Bebee Grymes, " Says ' Harlem' Degrades," New York Age, 27 April 1929, 4. G I itter, G I itz, and Race The novels and plays about Harlem ... reveal and revel in a primitive folk. It is a civilization still happy in the joyous rhythms .. . that have been vanishing, alas, out of our less primitive white civilization . . . . Suppose 135th Street, as currently portrayed, does look like a very short step away from the Congo? Think of the kick our own rarer, truly civilized spirits get therefrom! Esthetically envisaged, Harlem is being glorified, not libeled. 24 Thurman and Rapp felt compelled to respond to the criticisms leveled at t h ~ r play; both individually and as a team, they produced articles and essays in support of the veracity of Harlem's situations and characters. Meanwhile, the play had garnered audience support to the extent that a second company was formed and a tour was launched. Harlem traveled to Detroit and Chicago, and there were indications that a West Coast and European tour were in the offing. The controversy over the depictions of Harlem's nightlife and underworld seemed only to fuel interest in the play. Then things began to fall apart. During the year leading to the production of Harlem, Thurman had had his first novel, The Blacker the Berry, published, had started another unsuccessful I iterary journal, had married Louise Thompson, an educator and a political activist, and six tempestuous months after the marriage, had become embroiled in a lengthy and acrimonious divorce proceeding. Further exhausted and depressed by the controversy over Harlem, Thurman traveled west, hoping to get some rest, distance himself from his problems, and break into screen writing by selling Harlem in Hollywood. According to Edward Blatt, screen rights to the play were eventually sold to Universal Studios; no film was made. 25 In letters to Rapp, Thurman expressed distrust for Harlem' s producers, which, in Detroit and Chicago, included the Shuberts. Thurman feared that he was being underpaid his royalties but was hesitant to express his doubts openly. The show's cast became increasingly less hesitant in expressing its dissatisfaction, and dissension led to rebellion in New York after the show moved to the Times Square Theatre, managed by Jed Harris, two doors away from the Apollo. According to an account given by Harlem' s stage manager, Hemsley Winfield, to the Amsterdam News, another major African- American paper, the cast had agreed to open in Queens at a much 9 24 " A White Man' s Hol iday," New York Times, 5 March 1929, Harlem clipping fil e, Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library. 25 Edward A. Blatt cl ipping file, Bi lly Rose Theatre Collect ion, New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. 10 GILES lower than average salary with raises promised if the show succeeded on Broadway. Two months after the Broadway opening, no raises were forthcoming. Verbal and written inquiries gained no response. Finally, in desperation, the ensemble in the rent party scene refused to perform at the end of the first act. An agreement was hastily reached that the cast would join Actors Equity and receive a raise. It was soon discov- ered that the pay cut forced upon the principal players compensated fully for the raises given the rent party ensemble. Prior to the strike, Isabell Washington earned seventy-five dollars per week; after the strike each principal player lost ten to fifteen dollars per week. A lead performer in Porgy could earn up to two hundred dollars per week. 26 Tensions remained high. Resentment over the preferential treatment of the sole white cast member, who, though he played a secondary role as a police detective was assigned the star dressing room and featured in the show's publicity, added to the smoldering hostilityY On 6 May 1929, director Erskin called the company together and, . following "a tirade of profane abuse," notified them that Harlem would close on 11 May. Calling them a "bunch of crafty niggers," Erskin bid the cast "go back to Harlem ... and starve." 28 The original Broadway production of Harlem closed after ninety-three performances, just short of the benchmark of one hundred that was the measure of a hit show at that time. The tour ended in Chicago on 22 june 1929. Though Blatt and Erskin publicly insisted that faltering box office receipts closed Harlem, Irving Salkow, Blatt's business manager, told the Daily News: They thought they had a whip hand and could make all kinds of demands because the show was a sell-out. But when they thought they were indispensable, and dared us to close the show, Mr. Blatt obliged .... Now they can all go back to Harlem and stage their own rent parties and see how much they make. They couldn't appreciate what we were doing for them. 29 26 "Thurman Pl ay Finds Trouble Casting," Pittsburgh Courier, 10 March 1928, sec. 2, p. 2. 27 " Director of ' Harl em' Calls Members of Cast' Artful Niggers,' "New York Age, 11 May 1929, 1. 28 /bid. 29 "Piay ' Harl em' Shut in Race-Cash Fight," Billboard, 11 May 1929, n.p. Glitter, Glitz, and Race 11 Paradoxically, Thurman sided with the producers, firing off angry telegrams to newspapers and threatening legal action for libel. Blatt and Erskin retained five members from the original cast, added a few actors from the touring company, filled out the ensemble with new performers, and revived Harlem at the Eltinge Theatre, a Shubert house on Forty- second Street, on 21 October 1929. 30 The show closed after two weeks, then played one week at the Windsor Theatre on East Fordham Road in the Bronx, followed by another one-week booking at Werber's Flatbush Theatre in Brooklyn. Harlem never played its namesake community. Robert Levy, the original producer of the Lafayette Players, the African-American stock company housed in Harlem's Lafayette Theatre, opened a production of Harlem at the Music Box Theatre in Los Angeles on 7 October 1932. Reviews were lukewarm, and the show limped through a two-week engagement. That same year, Thurman' s second novel, Infants of the Spring, had been published. Thurman, the first African-American editor at McCauley's, a major publishing concern, rose to editor-in-chief. His friendship and collabo- ration with Rapp continued; in 1930 they had completed a second play, jeremiah the Magnificent, a drama based on the rise and fall of Marcus Garvey. This play was never produced. Thurman also worked (with Rapp's wife, Virginia) on a novelization of Harlem that was never completed. In the fall of 1932, Thurman and Rapp set to work on a dramatization of Thurman's third novel, The Interne [sic], a story of corruption in a large urban hospital; there is no evidence of an extant script. In 1934 Thurman returned to California under contract with Foy Productions Ltd. to write screenplays for two fi lms, High School Girl (1935), and Tomorrow's Children, which was censored in New York due to its topic, steril ization. Life in Hollywood proved detrimental to Thurman's health, which was further endangered by his increased consumption of alcohol. He eventually returned to New York gravely ill and deeply depressed. He collapsed and was taken to City Hospital on Welfare Island, which was, ironically, his model for The Interne. Louise Thompson, despite their divorce, returned to nurse him. Thurman succumbed to tuberculosis on 22 December 1934, and was buried on Christmas EveY Much has been written about the literary gifts of Wallace Thurman and the personal demons that beset him. He struggled with his desi re 3 <>rhe Stock Market coll apsed on Friday, 28 October 1929. 31 Lewis, " Harlem Sketchbook. " 12 GILES to break new literary ground, his thirst for fame and its rewards, and his ambivalent feelings concerning his view of himself and his race, as well as his race's view of him. Harlem had made him both famous and infamous. Those who defended the play praised his vivid characters and his exposure of real problems in the African-American community, such as limited employment opportunities, strife between African- Americans and West Indians, overcrowded living conditions, crime, and the impact of life in Harlem on a family fresh from the South. Those who condemned Harlem excoriated it for fostering stereotypical images of near savages dancing to jungle music and for perpetuating the myth of Harlem as an exotic wonderland of unrepressed sensuality, a myth that had already made Harlem the playground of white cafe society after dark. Thurman was the fourth African-American playwright to have a non- musical play produced on Broadway and the first to have his play approach hit status. For this he paid a price, commercializing the play for a predominantly white audience to the extent that he risked confirming their prejudices and potentially alienating the black audience, which was deeply concerned with countering exaggerated and denigrating depictions of African-American life. But his goal was not simply to sell a play; he was attempting to strike a blow for his creative freedom. He felt that despite the risk there should be no I im its, spoken or unspoken, on what he could write, and no taboos. His rationale for creating the troubled families, alienated, confused youth, slick, dangerous underworld characters, and desperate dreamers that populated Harlem was the same as that for his creation of Fire: It was not interested in sociological problems or propaganda. It was purely artistic in intent and conception. Its contributors went to the proletariat rather than to the bourgeoisie for material. They were interested in people who still retained some individual race qualities and who were not totally white American in every aspecc save color of skin. 32
~ V V a l l a c e Thurman, "Negro Artists and the Negro,'' New Republic 52 (31
August 1 927). 37. journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Fall 1995) American Dramatic Reactions To the Birth of the Atomic Age CHARLES A. CARPENTER The atom bomb that decimated Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, was not only for its effects on the war or even on the people it vaporized, scarred, traumatized, or poisoned. It was remarkable also for its impact on the human imagination. The bomb singlehandedly created a vision of atomic apocalypse, starkly etched with images of a flash "brighter than a thousand suns," a burgeoning mushroom cloud, an eerie "black rain." One could say with Spencer Weart, in his seminal book Nuclear Fear: A History of Images, that "something unimaginable had come into the everyday world to stay." 1 But just as strategists now had to "think the unthinkable," writers were now compelled to imagine the unimaginable, to come to terms with it somehow. Fortunately, the apocalyptic vision inflicted upon them engendered its OWl) counteracting agents. Phoenix-like, dreams emerged of a world in which peace was now mandatory because war was out of the question, one in which (to apply a choice pun of the era) the atom would become a great boon for mankind rather than just a great boom. The ultimate view of atomic age existence found it inspiring as well as expiring. In whatever ways the new reality impinged on fantasy, the potentialities of atomic power remained a central preoccupation of imaginative life in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima. The early reactions of American writers to the bomb have been studied sporadically and in little depth. The richest overview of this unique segment of cultural history is Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Boyer notes that "the bomb had transformed not only military strategy and international relations, but the fundamental ground of culture and 1 Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1 06. - 14 CARPENTER consciousness." 2 He ranges far beyond imaginative literature in his attempt to describe and assess this phenomenon in the American context from late 1945 through 1950. His section on literary responses, " Words Fail : The Bomb and the Literary Imagination" (243-56), limits itself to the difficulties writers found in treating the new conditions artistically, and as a result he touches upon only a few poems, short stories, and statements by well-known authors. Other scholars have studied the relevant fiction in some detail; no one has explored the relevant drama. 3 The ensuing discussion of American dramatic reactions is a first attempt, and I hope it will also suffice to be the last. None of these plays is a neglected masterpiece. Looked at individu- ally, they would no doubt chiefly appeal as curiosities. Taken together, however, all reflect the prevailing climate of thoughtful response to the birth of the atomic age, with its new threat of nuclear destruction. Moreover, each play exemplifies the groping for artistic means to represent and comment upon a world newly dominated by the reality of atomic power. The means, in this case, are dramatic and theatrical-not simply to be experienced privately, as with poetry and fiction, but also publicly, as only in the performance arts. Though few of these plays were performed enough times to have much impact in the theatre, all were written with the contingencies of performance in mind. The focus of their content and the nature of their form are interesting and revealing enough to warrant resurrecting them from the almost total neglect they have received so far. The first is perhaps the most overtly symptomatic: a brief skit written by a nuclear physicist, Louis N. Ridenour, and published (in Fortune!) within six months of the Hiroshima blast. A grim warning in non-serious terms, "Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse" depicts a partly farcical scenario for all-out atomic war evolving from American overconfidence in its nuclear technology. The second play, better termed a stage spectacle, is well characterized by its full title: f=mc 2 : A Living Newspaper About the Atomic Age. Hallie Flanagan (Davis) concocted the script, with research help, in late 1947 to convey the Jekyll-Hyde nature of the newly 2 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), xix. 3 The only full-length study of the drama in America is Robert David Hostetter, "The American Nuclear Theatre, 1946-1984," Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1985, whi ch stresses theatrical strategies of 1980-84. The more encompassing fact is that no study of the world's drama of the nuclear age exists that is anywhere near comprehensive- not even a check I ist of relevant plays (perhaps 100 have been published). The titl e of John Elsom's Cold War Theatre (1992) describes its period, not its subject. Atomic Age 15 harnessed atom in an appealing theatrical context. The first full-fledged American drama of the atomic age is Upton Sinclair's A Giant's Strength (1948). This naturalistic play portrays reactions on the domestic plane to both Hiroshima and an imaginary nuclear war, but skews its dramaturgy to support the controversial thesis that atomic power must be controlled by a _world government if civilization is to endure. Finally, Cornel Lengyel used an atomic weapons plant as the setting in his one-act allegorical fantasy The Atom Clock (1950). A young employee becomes a kind of Everyman figure as he hears the pros and cons of the plant's ultimate mission: winning the arms race. At least three other American plays of the late 1940s touch on nuclear themes, but do not represent highly significant dramatic reactions to the new era. 4 Louis N. Ridenour's imaginative and witty playlet, "Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse, " must have been conceived in the immediate aftermath of the atomic assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 5 Yet it projects a world situation roughly equivalent to our own in the early eighties, when the superpowers seemed to be considering "limited" nuclear war a viable option and several countries with lesser arsenals were poised for defense or attack. Ridenour pushes his hypothetical scenario to the limits of absurdity: All the industrialized nations "have mastered the production and use of atomic power"; the United States is "ahead in the armaments race," but its 2,000 radio-controlled bombs in outer space are over- matched by 3,400 belonging to other nations, and no one knows how many atomic mines have been planted in the world's major cities, or by whom. The only deterrent to war is America's superior ability to retaliate. Moreover, the technology of detection lags far behind that of waging nuclear war: Meteorites have been mistaken for missiles, and the aggressor in a presumed attack must be determined by political scientists on the basis of " the highest negative rating" at the moment. The skit is set in a Defense Command center in the San Francisco area. After a pep-talk visit by the President (during which he gloats, "Who'd dare attack us when we're set up like this?"), the "pilot light" for San Francisco goes red. What is later revealed to be an earthquake is 4 Donald Ogden Stewart's How I Wonder (unpublished; performed 1947) features an astronomy professor who ruminates on a range of current issues, among them atomic power. Herman Wouk' s The Traitor (performed and published in 1949) evokes cold war anxieties in depicting a high-minded atomic physicist who intends to pass nuclear secrets to Russia, but the play is primarily a spy melodrama. Fred Eastman's The Great Choice (published 1949; never performed?) Is a revision of a 1932 one-act anti-war play that simply inserts the new argument that " war is obsolete" now that atomic weapons have been developed. 5 Published in Fortune 33 :1 Uanuary 1946), 116-17,219. 16 CARPENTER mistaken for a nuclear attack, and the search for an "enemy" comes up w ith an unlikely leading candidate: Denmark (statues presented to its king by the United States have met "widespread disapproval," and the sculptor lives in San Francisco). Cautious mi litary officials want Security Council approval before retaliating, but an apoplectic Colonel-shouting " What have we got this for if we don't use it?" - rushes to the control board and pushes a key that will bring a bomb down on Copenhagen. A logically chaotic chain reaction ensues: Stockholm goes red after Copenhagen (Colonel Peabody explains, " Sure. The Danes thought it was the Swedes. That export-duties row . .. . " ), then four British ci ties (the Swedes were also arguing with England), then Russian cities, then our own. " Dark Ages, here I come, " Peabody utters. Ridenour's playlet is a farce with an implicit moral. According to an editor's headnote no doubt approved by the scientist, the moral is that "we should do all that decently can be done to avoid an atomic- armaments race." 6 In the play, American overconfidence in its atomic superiority, falsely insured by its apparent monopoly on the latest technology, leads to the destructive attitude expressed comically by the person who later starts the bombardment, Colonel Sparks: "I'm gl ad I was born an American. We've got the know-how. I'm glad I' m on the side that's ahead in the race." The latest technology is also shown to be woefully inadequate not only to detect a genuine attack and identify its source, but also to stop a war started inadvertently. The play concludes with the Brigadier sending a futil e message: " THERE IS NO REPEAT NO WAR,'' to whi ch Colonel Peabody can only respond, "The hell there isn't. New York's gone red, and Chicago, and . . .. " The room rocks and crumbles, and the apocalyptic pilot lights go out. One reason why Ridenour's tiny futuristi c parabl e is effective is that its moral remains implicit; it emerges only from the dynami c interaction of dialogue and events. 7 Dangerous premises are exposed by being stated in a manner that casts ridi cule upon them; their logical consequences are dramatized at extremes that evoke both absurdity and horror. This is the mode of many successful fi ctional treatments of nuclear disaster, perhaps most notably the film Dr. Strange/ave. 6 Th is is one of Ridenour's main poi nts in "Military Security and the Atomic Bomb," an earli er Fortune pi ece (32:5 [May 1945] 170-71, 216-23). 7 The ski t was adapted by two musical comedy and filmscript writers, George Bellak and Robert Adl er (ostensibly with Ridenour's help) and produced as Open Secret at the Cherry Lane Theatre, New York, in December, 1946. Thi s much more gri m and di dacti c version was publ ished in The Best One-Act Plays 1946- 1947, ed. Margaret Mayorga (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947), 181-202. Atomic Age 17 A slightly altered version of "Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse" con- cludes f=mc 2 The skit is one of a variety of sources tapped in this theatrical montage, or "Living Newspaper," which was first performed in December 1947. 8 Its guiding spirit, if not only begetter, was the originator of the Living Newspaper in America, Hallie Flanagan. As director of the Federal Theatre Project in 1935-39, she developed stage productions whose aim was to treat "the most poignant problems of individual and collective judgment ever faced by mankind" 9 and to show "their historic development and their effect on people." 10 Though designed to dispense vital information in a digestible and entertaining format, these scripts were worked up in collaboration with researchers and newspapermen as well as theatre practitioners. They were supposed to be "carefully documented" and their facts "handled with judicious restraint." 11 Accordingly, in f=mc sources include the authoritative (and best-selling) 1946 volume One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb, with contributions by Einstein and Ridenour, among others; government reports on the effects of atomic explosions; articles from such journals as the Review of Modern Physics and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; hearings, interviews, news reports, and similar materials. The prominent critic George Freedley surely gratified the play's creators when he called it "a highly effective lecture in dramatic form." 12 The overall composition of f=mc 2 accomplishes its didactic purpose quite satisfactorily. Act I (of two) first dramatically recreates the impact 8 A bibliographical note: Although the chief author of this play and of the well- known memoir Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre (1940; rpr. New York: Blom, 1965) is generally referred to as Hallie Flanagan, the Samuel French edition of the play (New York, 1947) lists the authorship as Hallie Flanagan Davis, assisted by Sylvia Cassel and Day Tuttle. Subsequent references to the play will be cited in the text. Two recent studies of Living Newspapers are C.W.E. Bigsby's "The Federal Theatre and the Living Newspaper" in his A Critical Introduction to Twentieth- Century American Drama, 1: 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 211-36, and Stuart Cosgrove's introduction to "Liberty Deferred" and Other Living Newspapers of the 1930s Federal Theatre Project, ed. Lorraine Brown (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1989), ix-xxv. See also Joanne Bentley' s Hallie Flanagan: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), 386-89, and Flanagan's Arena. 9 8 igsby, 232. 1 Fianagan, Arena, 71 . 11 /bid., 72. 12 Hostetter, 96. 18 CARPENTER of the birth of the atomic age at Hiroshima, then presents the essential scientific and historic background, culminating in the decision to use the bomb. Act II focuses on questions for the present and future: Who shall control atomic power and how shall it be used? The act begins by showing its "great boon" potentialities and ends with the "great boom" in Ridenour's skit; in between, the conflict over administering this enormous source of power is dramatized in staged hearings with living advocates of mi litary/government control opposing spokesmen for civilian/international control. Invented characters ranging from ordinary citizens to Clio, muse of history, alternate with "real" people played by actors, viewed in films, or quoted by the emcee of this episodic pageant, the Stage Manager. Early in the play the Stage Manager says pointedly, "there's more than one way of releasing atomic energy-and this is the theatre way" (26). Robert L. Hostetter has treated the script at length from the theatrical point of view in his dissertation 13 ; I will examine some of the dramaturgic problems that arise in its attempt to release information and ideas about the nuclear crisis in "the theatre way." As Hallie Flanagan recognized, this mode requires not only arousing theatrical excitement but also synchronizing widely disparate elements of content and form. Like most plays that tackle the nuclear crisis, E = mc 2 intermixes extremes of fact and fiction, stark realities and engrossing fantasies. When the impact sought is that of "a highly effective lecture," the imaginative elements must not call too much attention to their fantastic and improbable qualities; they must adhere to their primary function of making facts and ideas intelligi- ble and interesting, and above all not jar incongruously with these realities. The most problematic element in f=mc 2 , from this standpoint, is one of its most prominent fictions, the Atom. Conceived as "the clothes line on which the Living Newspaper would be fashioned" 14 , the character of Atom conceptually embodies limitless potentialities for improving or blighting the lot of mankind, depending on how it is used by those who control it. The concept itself is made explicit at various times in the play-for instance by a professor who states: "atomic energy can cure disease-or cause it-create food-or poison it-provide heat for the whole world-or blow it sky- high-you see, it's going to be up to you and me" (50). Atom contributes by expressing in personal, emotional terms the main point of the play: 13 /bid., 91-106. 14 Sylvia Gassel , quoted in Hostetter, 91. Atomic Age ATOM: You people have got to get together with people all over the world and take control! (Starts to grow wild) Because I can't wait forever, see?-1 have my hypomanic moments and when I'm in that state I may go into fission any minute, see? . . . I'm getting so wrought up I'm gain' to have a nuclear breakdown, see? But you won't believe it till you're in it. ... You won't believe a thing till you see it for yourself! (74-75) 19 The problem of characterization arises from the very nature of real atoms. As Atom herself notes, her real-life counterparts are not only invisible but static if not set in motion: sheer potential. Yet she is given a "hypomanic" character to demonstrate her latent energy. The first time she appears on stage, " She springs to her feet, vital and dynamic," and "turns several cartwheels" (26). At one point she proclaims: "there's so many things in me I want to express"; then, after "insane gyrations, beating [her] breast violently," she continues: "I've got so much-in here!-that I want to get out- . .. I've got so much-energy!" (31-32). Within this established norm of explosive (though ostensibly unreleased) energy, moreover, Atom must somehow reflect the "dual personality" that the two-sided potential of atomic power implies. Her manner is supposed to be "docile and meek" at times, "hard and manic" at others, as if the nature of atomic energy differed when used benevolently or destructively. Quite apart from the general lack of appeal of this frenetic, comic-book figure, its striking lack of congruity with the concept it represents would disturb discriminating spectators and hamper the teaching function of the play. Other fantastic elements that have mixed success in this respect are those in the category of prophetic or futuristic. The play begins with a striking theatrical rendering of a precise historical event: a man's grotesque shadow being etched on a wall in Hiroshima when the bomb exploded. The ensuing sequence depicts a fictional but convincingly realistic cross-section of reactions to the news of Hiroshima. Then the Stage Manager introduces the valid but hardly necessary reminder that certain people had foreseen the approach of the atomic age. This serves as a pretext to stage a brief scene from the only (published) play that prefigured atomic power, Robert Nichols's and Maurice Browne's Wings Over Europe (1928). 15 The trouble is that the excerpt is introduced as if it contains highly serious prophecy, whereas it must appear to post-A- 15 See Charles A. Carpenter, " A ' Dramatic Extravaganza' of the Projected Atomic Age: Wings Over Europe (1928)," Modern Drama 35 (1992), 552-61. 20 CARPENTER bomb spectators as wildly extravagant and far removed from sci entifi c projections. A young scientific genius announces to Parliament that he has learned to control the energy in the atom. What this means, he proclaims abruptly, is that civi lization as it exists " is relegated at last to its proper place as the confused remembrance of an evil dream. Yesterday, man was a slave; today, he's free!" (21) . Following the excerpt, the sober predictions of living scientists (mostly culled from One World or None) only accentuate the i ncongruity. In the same general vein, when Ridenour's " Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse" is staged as the play's finale, Atom introduces it as if it were a grim enough bombshell to stir people to action: ATOM: "All right, all right!- You won't control me?-Then here goes-here goes!-lf you don't control me, this is the way it's going to be!" (75). After the half-farcical skit, the Stage Manager comments that it was not written by a dramatist or a dreamer but by a physicist. " He is allowing us to use it because he wants as many people as possible to know-that it could happen that way" (82). It is difficult to imagine sensing " a terrifying prophetic reality" in the playlet, although I am quoting a reviewer who said he did. 16 As an experiment in treating the nuclear situation through theatrical means, then, E = mc 2 is surely unique and fascinating, and in its time it would have been reasonably successful in promoting an awareness of one of the " most poignant problems of mankind." Apart from its unavoidable dated quality, however, it is not deeply coherent or integrated enough to impress-or endure-as a work of art. The extremely prolific socialist writer Upton Sinclair had already had a long career of treating vital issues in essays and novels when he chose drama to address the atomic threat in 1948. He interrupted the writing of his popular Lanny Budd series of novels, he said, " to do a play about the atomic bomb, which everybody was speculating about at the end of the 1940's." 17 The bulk of his plays remained unproduced, but the topical interest of A Giant's Strength: A Three-Act Drama of the Atomic 16 Ri chard Watt s, quoted in Hostetter, 96. 17 The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, 1962), 297. Atomic Age 21 Bomb gave it a fleeting theatrical life. 18 After its amateur premiere in 1948, it was performed briefly in both London and New York. 19 The play is an interesting but clumsy attempt at naturalistic thesis drama. Sinclair aims to suspend disbelief and arouse empathy in spectators and to lure them into experiencing vicariously how disastrous a nuc)ear war would be-a vital preliminary to the play's pitch for world- government control of atomic power. He brings the dramatized situation home to the audience by showing its long-term effects on two thirtyish married couples, a 1 0-year-old son (who grows to late adolescence by Act Ill), and his grandfather. This family group relives spectators' recent experiences of hearing the first press release about the Hiroshima bombing, General MacArthur's address when Japan surrendered, and (fictionalized) testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. These events provide a basis of verisimilitude for an invented but acceptably "historic" international crisis that unfolds and finally results in widespread nuclear war. Attacks on cities are carried out by the "most deadly method of all" deduced from the second B.iki,ni. tes-t in 1946: the setting off of bombs. in the harbors, thus creati1ng i:mmense.ti:d:a+ waves and widespread '"rachoactive mrsC' ('24]. The family group, staying i:n at the time, is spared the immediate dangers, and their ensuing frantic preparations for flight and survival foreground the grimly realistic panorama of horror that emerges from radio reports and their own informed speculations. We hear, for example, that a bomb detonated in the harbor of New York City, "close below the Battery," has produced a huge tidal wave that has "overwhelmed the downtown district of Manhattan Island" (26-27). The attempts of survivors to flee, pursued by a spreading "atomic cloud," are concretely visualized: Hundreds of thousands of people will be massed at the entrances to the few bridges in lower Manhattan, "crushing each other to death and climbing over the bodies of the dead and dying"; other thousands will be to crowd into the subways, "but the trains block the tubes, and when the crowd comes to a train, thousands will be crushed and suffocated, until the tubes are packed solid with bodies" (32). To Sinclair's credit, he does not overdo exposing the audience to such grisly images of the probable consequences of nuclear war. 16 Upton Sinclair, A Giant's Strength (Girard, KA: Haldeman-Julius, 1948). Subsequent references to the play will be cited in the text. 1 '1"he Valley Community Theatre of Claremont, California, performed it in June 1948, London' s tiny Torch Theatre in December, and Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research in january 1949. 22 CARPENTER Unfortunately, key ingredients in the play's naturalistic mix strain our sense of credulity and render empathy difficult. The household is far from a representative one. It includes an atomic scientist, Barry Harding, who has contributed to the bomb's development and who can describe its appalling effects in detail. He also serves as a partial spokesman for Sinclair, expressing his fears that the bomb will become "another toy" in "the game of power politics" and tendentiously calling for "democratic world government and control of atomic power at every stage of its production" (17). "We physicists know best," he once says, "and it's our duty to inform the public" (18). Another character, "Cramp" Ferguson, is a retired history professor who, not coincidentally, is writing an account of the rise and fall of civilizations. A cynical doomsayer throughout, his only desire after the war begins is to record the final fall . But the biggest sacrifice in the interests of ideological fullness lies in the character of "Bub" Chester, a "kids are like that" character before the family's prolonged stay in a cave-home in the Black Hills of South Dakota. That experience turns him into an activist pacifist determined to leave his isolated existence, "go back where there are people," learn what they are thinking, and "find a way to bring this war to an end" (51). The finale of the play belongs to him; "facing the audience, with fists upraised/' he shouts: All you troglodytes, you cave dwellers! Stop kill ing one another! . . . Get the nations together! . . . Tell all the people: There shall be . no more killing! There shall be love, and kindness, and understanding! There shall be a world government, with the power to keep order! Let the government have the weapons, and let no other government have them! . . . There shall be peace and disarmament, so that men can work at constructive things. Down with war, and the war makers! Down with them for all time! (52) The abrupt violation of the naturalistic fourth-wall convention here, so much more off-kilter than that in, say, Odets's Waitin8 for Lefty, wrenches the play's dramaturgy out of its previously consistent mode. The fatuousness of the high-minded but totally unrealistic sentiments expressed (Shaw would have called Bub an lmpossibilist) lifts the play from its previously down-to-earth conceptual mqorings. The effect of this disruption in both form and content is disconcerting, to say the least. Two other dimensions of the play that undercut its realism are veins of overdone soap opera and incongruous satire. Barry Harding's wife, Elaine, is a hedonistic, self-centered woman who considers it "dull" to li ve with a nuclear physicist but stil"l resents his prolonged absences Atomic Age 23 bitterly. Before he returns from "secret war work," she spends much time with a divorced man. After he returns and the war starts, Barry assumes he cannot leave with the family because the Army wi II summon him, and Elaine threatens, "If you don't come with your wife, you won't have any wife" (29). He does flee with them (for other reasons), but after several years in the cave the Army summons him and he prepares to go. Elaine dismisses him forever in a hail of invective (40-41). After flirting with the other husband, she finally works out her destiny by offering herself to an "underworld romantic," the gangster Bugs Gigotti, within ten minutes of his arrival (45). A radio serial about Lucy Dare's "sexual entanglements" is heard from time to time in the play, pointing up the comparison (42). This soap opera, along with obnoxious commercials and patriotic appeals, is part of the play's satirical attack on the commer- cial ism and manipulativeness of radio. Sinclair's earnest motive is to show how "the minds of the masses become as clay" in the hands of the businessmen and politicians who control radio (Preface). Bub, originally a radio "fiend," is capable by Act Ill of denouncing the "herd of slaves" whose minds are manipulated by commercials, "imbecile" serials, and the slogans of "political stuffed shirts" (51). A jingoistic radio announcer periodically comments that this is a war for democracy-and free enterprise-and that God is on our side (37, 51). The problem that all the references to radio creates is obvious: How has commercial radio, not to speak of big business, survived a virtual holocaust? The play itself informs us that "the financial system is kaput" and American industry will have to "start from scratch" (33). We are perhaps willing to accept the convention that news flashes will fortuitously issue forth whenever someone turns on the radio, but not the idea that "free enterprise" is still actively manipulating the few people who own working radios to purchase products that are not available. Sinclarr's anti-capitalist satire, like his alluring soap-opera plot, is misplaced and inappropriate. It is understandable that Eric Bentley called A Giant's Strength one of the London season's worst. 20 Still, the play remains the pioneering attempt to deal with all-too-conceivable nuclear disaster in the familiar medium of naturalistic drama. The last American play that can definitely be termed a dramatic reaction to the birth of the atomic age is, appropriately, an abstract dramatization of attitudes toward developing atomic power. The Atom Clock was written in 1950 by Cornel Lengyel, a jack-of-all-genres creative 20 Eric Bentley, In Search of Theatre (New York: Athaneum, 1975) 40. 24 CARPENTER writer in his mid thirties. 21 Lengyel's half-poetic allegory focuses on emotional rather than scientific or political issues involved in the intensifying cold war arms race. By 1950, the news that Russia had exploded an atom bomb had dissolved whatever complacency Americans may have derived from their nuclear monopoly, and the United States had made public its determination to create intercontinental ballistic missiles and a "so-called hydrogen or super-bomb." 22 Paul Boyer succinctly outlines the change in attitude since 1945: For a fleeting moment after Hiroshima, American culture had been profoundly affected by atomic fear, by a dizzying plethora of atomic panaceas and proposals, and by endless speculation on the social and ethical implications of the new reality. By the end of the 1940s, the cultural discourse had largely stopped. Ameri- cans now seemed not only ready to accept the bomb, but to support any measures necessary to maintain atomic supremacy. 23 In Lengyel's play, the operation of a stylized atomic weapons plant, with its establishment slogans and military control, represents the prevailing attitude of the time toward the arms race. The plant becomes a catalyst for the expression of attitudes that differ sharply from the norm or that I ie concealed beneath it. The central character is an employee, the Young Miner (delver?), who is spurred to grope for "an answer" and is bounced from one extreme point of view, and one extreme emotion, to another. 24 His progress is that of an Everyman figure confronting abstract alternatives that can be discerned as Despair and Hope, Evasion and Rebellion, with Compliance always beckoning. The play largely abandons surface reality in its search for a deeper human truth: an 21 The play was not published until 1951 (Los Angeles: Fantasy), but an acti ng edition dated 1950 is recorded in the National Union Catalogue and a publisher's blurb says that the play won Stanford University's Maxwell Anderson Award for poetic drama. I have found no record of a performance. My study is based on the much-revised edition that appeared in 1969 (Poet Lore 64, 435-57); it is superior in dramatic coherence and poetic quality, yet does not differ significantly in substance as an early dramatic reaction to the atomic age. 22 Boyer, 337. 23 /bid., 334. 24 ln the early edi tion the characters are named and described. The Young Miner, Martin Craie, is said to be "confused by the world and his part in it-groping for answers-not quite sure there are any answers" (9). Atomic Age 25 attitude toward the present nuclear situation that is both valid and viable. Realistically, no easy or gratifying answer emerges. The closest The Atom Clock comes to depicting the actual state of the atomic age is in its first few moments of exposition, when the dramaturgy is flagrantly non-naturalistic. Choral voices from offstage poetically capsuJize the essence of the era: Pursuing destruction he found the great treasure, Double-edged weapon for good or damnation, Key to an Eden no prophet foretold, Door to infernos none dare to describe. How shall he master it? (436) The voices also lay the basis for the play's allegorical device of a questing Everyman. The "he" who must p ~ n d e r how to "master" atomic power, clearly mankind, is referred to as a "lad" who is "not yet ripe for it." Abruptly a loudspeaker over the gate of the weapons plant announces the latest news: "the enemy" (never specified) has developed "a new simplified weapon to supersede our latest rocket missile," and as a result the Atomic Weapons Department, which "already controls more than half the national budget," will receive further appropriations to "regain our margin of safety." This exemplum of the arms race in action draws two sharply contrasting reactions. The newscaster himself (as in Sinclair's play) speaks for the hawkish establishment, inadvertently reducing its position to absurdity by carrying it to logical extremes: If bigger and better weapons alone will preserve our freedom, let's get behind the program. . . . Whatever the risk, we'll retaliate. If the cost is mutual annihilation, we're ready for mutual annihilation. Let's build the best and biggest hell-bomb of them all! (436-37) 25 This expressionistic trumpeting is countered by the humane admonitions of a "scholarly old gentleman" who rises from the audience and climbs on stage. He turns out to be a physics professor who regrets having helped to develop nuclear weapons. Addressing the spectators directly as an abstract voice of reason (in the first and last "theatricalist" episode of the play), he points up their complicity: "All of you are part of the show, more important than any on the stage .... We each play a part in 25 The early edition lacks the "mutual annihilation" passage, which echoes a term that emerged later, "mutual assured destruction." 26 CARPENTER building the infernal machine that's bound to blow up in our faces" (437). But the establishment intrudes; he is not permitted to read a petition he has prepared and is dragged off by guards. Finally hearing the professor's petition will mark the end of the quest for the play's Everyman, the Young Miner. Being thwarted from hearing it now prompts his quest. When he shows his determination to a man who checks employees into the plant but is also a secret plotter, the Timekeeper, that figurative pointer to "the atom clock" 26 hints at one clear alternative, Rebellion. Insisting that he knows what goes on "inside" and what should be done, the Timekeeper tells the youth: When we take over, we'll run the works for all of us. It's man who'll ride the atom and rise to the stars, not bankrupt himself on a doomsday binge riding his fellow men to hell! (440) The Young Miner derides his words as party-line "slogans for suckers" (which the context strongly implies), but he absorbs the repeated message that "the time is ripening." Another alternative emerges at once in the figure of his mother, who is also a nurse. Unexpectedly, she turns out to be the voice of Despair. In somnolent blank verse cadences, she mourns that since our weapons and defense systems are in effect obsolete, There's no more need for heroes, No more need for mothers. We're obsolete, too, now. Lengyel seems to be using the Mother to expose and discredit an increasingly prevalent tendency of the time, escaping nuclear fear by abandoning hope and receding into an attitude that I. I. Rabi called "the complacency of despair." 27 The Mother's tone of bitter depression as she says such things as "The carrion smell from the fields of tomorrow/ Already pollutes the air we breathe" (441) seems calculated to undercut Despair as an alternative for spectators with any degree of resiliency. Its immediate effect on her son is to spur him to resist further complicity. He decides to take no further part in the plant's business and 26 1 see no evidence that Lengyel is alluding to the " doomsday clock" that began appearing on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947, with its hands set at seven minutes to midnight {i.e. the end of time for humanity). The first edition of the play equates the atom clock with the "infernal machine that's bound to blow up in our faces" {7). 27 Boyer, 351. Atomic Age 27 to seek out the professor's more positive alternative. What he encounters instead is a figure willingly involved in the production of more and more destructive weapons, but paradoxically an embodiment of Hope. An attractive woman clad in white, she appears carrying a Geiger counter and shepherding an atomic warhead to its stockpile. The warhead is a highly. styiized super-bomb: two portable hemispheres that need only to be joined to attain "the critical mass" and "kill a million" (445). The Mother likens the "Young Technician" to a priestess in a satanic ritual, but this analogy does not apply well to her attitude. In line with popular opinion about the arms race at the time, she believes that the more dreadful the weapons, the less likely they are to be used: "That's why we must build the weapons/Match terror for terror, in hope of peace" (448). But the "lovely and wise" young woman has a vision that extends far beyond an image of stalemate. She envisions the arms race as "trans- muting the heart of man," hastening the day when "reason shall prevail." Her voice is that of sheer, abstract Hope as she addresses the skeptical Everyman: Believe me, it's coming, the day, the hour, The long-awaited unpostponable minute When all the forbidden gates will spring open, When men will join hands, Step forward a thousand years And convert the secret stockpiles of death Into storehouses of rich new life for all! (448) The allure of the young womans wishful thinking-and attractive- ness-sways the Young Miner for a moment, and he decides to stay on the job. But, in an ironic peripeteia, he does so just as word arrives that he has been fired for suspected disloyalty. This provokes him (with the Timekeeper's nudge) to recall the blighting features of the "infernal machine" that he had almost rejoined, chief among them the demand for unthinking Compliance. Thoroughly frustrated, he tries the alternative of Evasion, asking the Young Technician to leave with him and share a road to freedom." Her response is convincingly sound: "There is no private' path.. N!one may escape the shadow [of 'looming mushroom clouds'], not in our tfme. But each must do what he can do to remove the cloud from those who are yet to comen G451). turching rreactiun (again spurred by the Timekeeper), he tries Rebellion:, serzrng the atomic warhead and threatening to create "A 'No' to be heard around the globe!" (453). As he holds the two sections of the bomb aloft, his mother exults in this gesture of utter Despair: "Clap your cymbals, my son. It's time to celebrate." The Young Technician has little trouble showing him 28 CARPENTER that such a gesture would be useless in practical terms ("Who' II know what really happened here, if none survive?" ), and he realizes there are no simple or sure-fire alternatives. He laments: Then what's to be done? Whatever I do is wrong. Chance has given me choice, yet choice itself is loaded, loaded with death (454). The final crescendo of The Atom Clock, punctuated in fact by the clock's distant resounding, suggests that a viable attitude does exist after all; the professor's petition still hovers in our minds, waiting to be heard. The Young Miner recalls it and, still brandishing his " sheaf of thunder- bolts" (453), forces the authorities to rel i nquish it. While it is read, however, he becomes engrossed and gradually allows the two halves of the bomb to move apart. Having emblematically eschewed violence, he is shot. This second ironic peripeteia is a counterpart of the first, when the woman's wishful thinking turned him toward loyalty just as he was fired for disloyalty. This time, or so the dramaturgy implies, his search is terminated just as he has found his answer. The attitude reflected in the petition written by a man he-and the audience-must respect and sympathize with, a developer of the bomb who deplores his involvement and who was forcibly prevented from del ivering his full message, is surely the attitude that the play recommends to Everyman. The reading of the petition brings out the best in the Young Miner and the worst in the establishment. Moreover, the attractive young woman reads it, while the assembled plant employees inject the refrain, "Do not deny our petition!" Even though the young man is killed, the woman is seized as a rebellious accomplice, and the play ends by echoing the begi n- ning-" Our lad's not yet ripe for it"-the impression of the professor's words remains imprinted on the audience's consci ousness. The play would be almost fully satisfactory if this impression were strong and positive. The "message" embodied is sound enough: Halt the arms race and turn nuclear efforts toward benefitting rather than destroying mankind. Lengyel expresses this wit_h some of his best poetry: Make chain-reactions not of bright destruction To blind the last small witness-eye of heaven. Make chain-reactions of new Enlightenment to spread from man to man. Help integrate our alphabets of hope, Unite our atomized vision In one great universal stream of l ight- Atomic Age Let all who would live become As one man with two billion hearts in his breast. In union, not in fission, our faith. Do not betray the future and beggar the unborn, Designing the end-world weapon, The bomb with two billion deaths in its belly. Transmute the old terrors and let Our green planet become an island of hope In the interstellar seas of the night (456). 29 These lines would be an unequivocally stirring peroration if a flaw in dramaturgy did not blur and confuse it to a significant degree. The speech is, structurally, a counterpart of the Young Technician's plea for the arms race to continue: "Match terror for terror, in hope for peace." Yet the woman must read the professor's words as if they were her own-that is, as if she had been converted to his view before reading it. Furthermore, in effect both speeches are "alphabets of hope." That is, the general tone of wishful thinking pervades this speech as it pervaded hers, so that it may be "undercut by association," as it were, in specta- tors' minds. These factors are at least mildly disconcerting. Nevertheless, Lengyel's experiment in treating the nuclear situation through non- realistic, poetic allegory contains more depth and richness than the other varied experiments we have examined. The Atom Clock perhaps deserves to be recognized as a kind of capstone to early American dramatic reactions to the atomic age. As far as I have been able to determine, a six-year gap exists between The Atom Clock and the next American play that reflects the atomic age directly. 28 The cluster of plays we have examined thus constitutes a unique cultural phenomenon as a discrete group of literary works that are highly symptomatic of the various ways the dominant preoccupation of the time imposed itself upon creative artists and caused difficulties for them. Another cluster of plays emerged in the saber-rattling years of the early Reagan administration, a much larger group capped by Arthur Kopit's End of the World (1984). With the ensuing end of the cold war instead of the world, it will be easy to abide the lack of further Hiroshimas and their dramatic fallout. 28 The play is Arch Oboler' s Night of the Auk (1956), another poetic parable. journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Fall 1995) "One Finds What One Seeks": Arthur Miller's The Crucible as a Regeneration of the American Myth of Violence CRISTINA C. CARUSO Aboard the Arbella en route to the New World in 1630 John Winthrop delivered his sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity." This sermon was written to inspire the Puritans, to engender a sense of stunning prophecy, as they sailed toward their new home. Not only would the Puritans, if they adhered to the tenets of this sermon "walk humbly with God," but they would also become such exemplars that future colonists would exclaim in regard to their new "plantations," "Lord make it like that of New England!" 1 In the very title of this sermon, Winthrop demands that the Puritans inaugurate a "model" or "shape" for the nature of their mission, and the shape he persuasively argues for is a circle. Implicitly, this shape is evoked in the tone of the text, which suggests that the mission as a whole will be circumscribed by an orblike eye of prophecy. But Winthrop's sermon is also circular in that it asks each settler to act not as an individual, but as a round link in a chain of community who "abridge[s]" his personal "superfluities for the supply of other's necessities." 2 Winthrop asks each individual "I" to behave as a communal member of the prophetic "eye." "Abridgement" as a term that suggests the presence of absence is a particularly apt one in this case, as Winthrop's substitution or "abridgement" of the i n d i v i d u ~ for the communal is accomplished through homonyms. A communal "eye" suggests always, through sound, the individual "I" it has banished. 'John Winthrop, " A Model of Christian Charity," in Perry Miller and Thomas H. johnson, The Puritans (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), vol. 1. The text has been modernized for this article by the author. 2 /bid. Miller's The Crucible 31 This spirit of "abridgement" would prove a very useful tool for the Puritans once they arrived in the New World, for it lent itself to the nature of predestination. With this tool in hand, the Puritans could read the lack of physical promise in a frigid wilderness populated by hostile Indians not as a sign that they were "undestined" to reassert a "city upon a hill/' but as a challenge to prove their fitness, worthiness, and status as predestined. Just as Winthrop had armed the settlers with a communal tool of "abridgement" as they crossed the literal frontier between England and America, the neat legerdemain of both thought and rhetoric that the Puritans employed to keep predestination credible constituted a magical transformation or "abridgement" that was accomplished at a site of psychic frontier in each of their heads. It was at this frontier that physical and literal realities were "abridged" into metaphoric proofs of a promised land. This phenomenon is best illustrated in a phrase that Sacvan Bercovitch employs in The Puritan Origins of the American Self to explain the strange nature of predestination: " Things are not really what they are in fact." 3 Implicit in Bercovitch's statement is an invisible dash at the locus of contradiction: "Things are not really-what they are in fact." This dash or frontier line indicates both symmetry and opposition, balance and tension, the same opposing forces that govern the Puritans' reading of the American terrain, a reading borne of dashes, or more specifically of lines, lines drawn, crossed, and erased. In inaugurating a language of lines one must consider the very literal overview of the Puritan migration to America. The Puritans crossed the frontier of ocean, bridged the gap between England and America, but in so doing they created a tension between the old biblical text that had inspired them and the new physical reality of America that did not, in appearance, substantiate that text's promise. In crude constructive terms, when a bridge is built with too much tension girding it at both sides, a crack ensues, a fault line. This line, like Bercovitch's statement, is one based on the oxymoronic premise of symmetry or "sameness" versus imbalance or "otherness." This Puritanical blueprint of frontier, once established, set the stage for the American experience as a whole, an experience in which "settlers" make " things" look the way we want them to, regardless of the fact that that very appearance may be contribut- ing to the downfall or "cracking" of the mission as a whole. The first New England settlers were up against an interesting theoretical challenge: To adhere to Winthrop's prophetic and circular 3 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), 105. 32 CARUSO text demanded that they continue to transpose the reality of increasingly violent, fatal, and very individualized experiences in America into communal Puritanical dogma by siphoning it first through Bercovitch's dash, frontier, or fault line. In a sense, the Puritans were not dissimilar to their European contemporary Don Quixote who, thoroughly inculcated with a text of chivalric romance, rode through the Spanish countryside of the seventeenth century attempting to read his individual experience in terms of this text. Michel Foucault describes Quixote in The Order of Things as "a long thin graph ism, language itself," a literary but also alphabetic "character" who was the progeny of a text that represented his law and that compelled him to read the "real" world as a substantiation of this law, or as the very "letter of this law." 4 The Puritans, likewise, in their "quixotic" frame of mind, began journeying through their "countryside," and in their efforts to see every experience as a justification of the Winthropian "romance," they began to draw steadily executed uniform circles atop a world that was anything but steady or uniform. The visual model that is perhaps most helpful in understanding the Puritans' reading of experience once in America is one of concentric circles, curved "fault" lines or "cracks" closed in upon themselves, each enclosed circle a bit smaller than the one that preceded it, unti I the innermost circle is minuscule in comparison with the outermost. The Puritans, in drawing these circles on the topography of America, are heeding the Winthropian command, but what is problem- atic is that as they descend within the concentric ring, each smaller circle represents an increasingly more individualized experience that is likewise increasingly more difficult to reconcile with a notion of communality. For instance, while the outermost circle might represent the theoretical Winthropian dogma of the prophetic eye inscribed upon the geography, a smaller circle might represent King Philip's War in which settlers were engaged in hand to hand combat against Indians. One would imagine that while fighting for his life against an Indian it was difficult for a man to value a myth of communality over his individual survival. On each tier of the circle, then, the prophetic "eye" comes further into opposition with the Puritan as individual or "1." Homonyms are beginning to fight each other and this can be attributed to the fact that Puritans are not just listening to Winthrop's speech, but now they are living it and, more important, reading it in terms of actual experience. A progression is made, then, from largest circle to smallest, and yet does the progression end? Is there, in fact, a smallest circle? In 1692, this question was answered when the cracked American myth violently 4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random, 1970), 47. Miller's The Crucible 33 reiterated and re-echoed its most American spirit in Salem, Massachu- setts, with the hysterical cry of "Witch." By the time of the Salem Witch Trials, the crack in the myth, the fault line where prior text did not adhere to reality, had made a long journey. No longer was this line merely a representation of frontier and difference on a_ geographical or linguistic plane, now it was a line that had penetrated and run down the psyche of human beings, a line that divided one's conscious and subliminal selves, one's visual perceptions from one's beliefs and vocal assertions, what one saw from what one got. In essence, the colonists had enacted and re-enacted their violent myth that both affirmed their righteousness and edited out factors that might challenge that righteousness, so many times, in so many descend- ing and microcosmic echoes of their original colonial experience, that they had finally come to the most microcosmic frontier or line: them- selves. On this tier of the circle, in other words, the prophetic "eye" has come face to face with the subjective "I" and is ready to "abridge" it. The Puritan man of 1692, heeding Winthrop's admonition to "abridge the superfluities" decided to "abridge" those women who seemed to take the shape of "superfluities" in that they were too powerful or vocal. Read in Foucaultian terms, the women or "witches" of the Salem trials become the "long thin graphism[s] ... language itself.'' Tennessee Will iams, in his short story, "The Yellow Bird," refers to these women as "circle girls" 5 because those about whom they talk in their circular clique, those around whom their discourse "revolves," are accused of witchcraft. These "circle girls," assuming the circular shape of the Eye/1 do, in fact, represent the language of the Winthropian myth in that they will act as the frontier or word through which Puritan men will speak the myth. But what Puritan men seemed not to take into account was that this particular re-enactment of "abridgement" or the prophetic "eye" was about to exterminate their race as a conglomeration of "I' s," for they were about to ki II off their sources of procreation. The Puritans realize this at the penultimate moment. They stop "naming" witches, and if we return once more to Foucault, we might read this recanting in terms of frontier. Foucault posits that to name is to ki II discourse, so that most discourse stops short of the boundary or frontier of "naming" and pushes up this boundary. In this way discourse may continue chasing this boundary, rather than being swallowed up in it. In more layman terms, Salem's high officials began to realize that if they continued "naming" or killing witches there would eventually be no 5 Tennessee Williams, " The Yellow Bird," in One Arm (New York: New Directions, 1967), 199. 34 CARUSO one else to "name" but themselves, that to allow their own names to have been spoken would have meant to be "swallowed by the boundary" of a rhetoric that they themselves had initiated. And so they pushed Foucault's boundary line of naming further away and with it their own mythic crack, leaving it for some future pilgrim to grapple with as the myth grew up once again around it. The future "pilgrim" who eventually did take up the crack and grapple with it was Arthur Miller in The Crucible, another incarnation of the Salem crisis and the American myth. Published and produced in 1953, The Crucible, like the crisis at Salem, was a re-enactment, a literal"dramatization" or representation of contemporary discontent. Like the Salemites, Miller began writing his play spurred on by a sense of personal violation engendered by his involvement in the McCarthy hearings. Just as colonists feeling dis- empowered in a new land sought to reaffirm that power by silencing women, so too Miller sought a similar catharsis in writing The Crucible. Miller affirmed that his play was only loosely based on the McCarthy hearings, and rather than creating a one-to-one dynamic between real circumstances and dramatic ones, he sought to capture a spirit that he saw resonating between the witch hunts of 1692 and those of the early 1950s: It was not only the rise of McCarythism that moved me, but something which seemed more weird and mysterious. It was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new subjective reality. . . . It was as though the whole country had been born anew, without a memory of even certain elemental decencies which a year or two e r l i e ~ no one would have imagined could be altered, let alone forgotten. 6 What Miller seems to be suggesting at the end of this passage is that a cultural myth that edits and regenerates must not only stop just short of the brink of editing or destroying its creators in each re-enactment, but also it must edit their memory of the experience, so that they are "doomed to repeat it." This certainly seems to be the case with Miller whose regeneration of the American myth and whose "re-enactment" of the Salem trials is plagued with forgetfulness and revision, with a Bercovitchian spirit of things being what they are not and being what 6 Gerald Weales, ed., The Crucible: Text and Criticism (New York: Viking, 1971 ), 39-40. Miller's The Crucible 35 they are. Like the Puritans who sought to impose the text and promise of their theology on the reality of a terrain that could not accommodate it, Miller seeks to superimpose the text and themes of the Salem Witch Trials onto a "terrain" or genre that requires their factual revision, that of dramaturgy. II One finds I suppose what one seeks. I doubt I should have ever tempted agony by actually writing a play on the subject had I not come upon a single fact. It was that Abigail Williams, the prime mover of the Salem hysteria . .. had a short time earlier been the house servant of the Proctors and now was crying out Elizabeth Proctor as a witch; but more-it was clear from the record that with entirely uncharacteristic fastidiousness she was refusing to include john Proctor, Elizabeth's husband, in her accusa- tion. . . . Why? I searched the records of the trials in the courthouse at Salem but in no other instance could I find such a careful avoidance of the implicating stutter. 7 "One finds I suppose what one seeks." Miller's "supposition" is correct. His "findings" are precisely what he sought as a playwright "seeking" to "fill in the gaps" of motive and momentum necessary for a drama but absent from the court records. He molds Abigail Williams, who was eleven years old at the time of the trials, into an eighteen-year- old adulteress. In Miller's version, Williams seduces John Proctor (a man estimated by the Peabody Essex Museum to have been in his mid-sixties by the time of the crisis, but who is described in The Crucible as a "farmer in his middle thirties") while in his employ. Then, spurned by the guilty Proctor, who is portrayed as a mere victim at the hands of the comely and malicious girl, Abigail uses her status as one of the "circle girls" to cry out on Elizabeth Proctor in an effort to supersede her as Proctor's wife. Proctor and Abigail become both the literal and metaphoric "characters" in this re-enactment of the American myth; they are the locus or frontier on which interpretation will occur. They represent the signifiers that are violently changed for the sake of adhering a prior text onto a new terrain. This new terrain is that of "dramaturgy," where plot and characterization are essential. Miller needed his characters to have motive, an element most decidedly absent from the Salem court 7 /bid., 41. 36 CARUSO documents, and so to adhere his prior text onto the new terrain of the dramatic world, Miller altered circumstances and demographics a bit. Like his colonial ancestors, he edits or abridges those facts that he does not need or that interfere with his ultimate goal. He finds, as he avers himself, "what [he] seeks." This is nowhere more evident than in the Salem Trial Records in which the first line of Proctor's indictment is an accusation by one Miss Abigail Williams: 1692 Apr. 4. Abig: Williams complained of Goodm proctor & cryed out w't are you come to ... you can pinch as well as your wife & more to that purpose. 8 It seems odd that one as assiduous as Miller, one who "searched the records of the trials in the courthouse at Salem," was not able, try as he would, to find Wi II iams's accusation of Proctor. But more to the point, if we believe Miller, if we believe that in the actual first-hand documents he was unable to find this information, how still do we explain his account that not only is Abigail silent, but " fastidious" in her silence. In Miller's version, the implication is that Abigail not only failed to accuse Proctor, but that she also vehemently refused to do so. Miller chose simply to erase or abridge those factual elements that did not serve his purpose. And, in so doing, like his Puritan forbearers who in using violence to mold their "city upon a hill" " edited" the whole spirit in which the venture was initially undertaken, Miller seems to have forgotten the initial tenets upon which he had inaugurated this proj ect. In an interview during the rehearsals of the original production, Miller reiterated his opinion that the central themes of The Crucible are, first, the handing over of conscience to a communal construct which frees the individual of blame, and second, the importance of preserving one's name. I wished for a way to write a play that would be sharp, that would lift out of the morass of subject ivism the squi rming, single, defined process which would show that the sin of the public terror is that it divests man of conscience, of himself. 9 8 Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds,. The Sal em Wi tchcraft Papers (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), 677. 9 Weales, 41. Miller's The Crucible 37 And though Miller upholds these tenets thematically or dramatically (Proctor, at the play's end, goes to the gallmvs rather than sign his name to a false confession), he fails to do so historically. In fact, as a writer, he commits the same atrocities that he decried in light of McCarthyism. Proctor and Williams are both robbed of their consciences and their true names. Miller controverts facts and creates a promiscuous she-devil out of an eleven-year-old girl and a lying lecher out of a sixty-year-old man. He also consolidates, in many instances, several historical figures under the rubric of one character in his play. For instance, Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem and Abigail's uncle, is meant to represent himself, but also ministers of the day in general. To this end, there are historical inaccuracies in his characterization, the most glaring being that in The Crucible Parris affirms that he has been awarded his degree from Harvard, which is erroneous historically but significant for Miller's agenda. In the 1600s Harvard was the premiere theological institution. Had Parris attended this institution, his services as a minister would have no doubt been in demand. In fact, however, Parris had not attended Harvard, and his appointment in Salem was regarded mutually by new parishioner and parish as a last resort. This particular abridgement of historical fact brings to light another curiosity in Miller's text. It seems that Miller's editing, his mutating of the truth, is in most cases designed to portray the male characters in a positive light, even at the expense of the female ones. Marcel Ayme wrote of the difficulties of thematically translating for a French audience a play that relied heavily for its impact on the sympathies of a patriarchal American one. The sympathy of the American spectator belongs to the seducer. The reasons for that preference, though inadmissible for a Frenchman, are still weighty ones. Rugged pioneer of an earlier era, one of those resolute New England plowmen who carry in their Puritan round heads the shining promises of the age of skyscrapers and the atom bomb, the farmer is an indisputable hero from the outset. He has only to step on a Broadway stage. It's .as if he were wrapped in the Star Spangled Banner, and the public, its heart swollen with tenderness and pride, eats him up. In the presence of this eminent forefather the girl who has given herself to him with so much passion is nothing more than a little slut come to sully the glorious dawn of the U .S.A. 10 10 /bid., 240-41 . 38 CARUSO In dramatic terms, Miller is as determined as his forefathers to keep the patriarchal myth breathing, to edit out the marginal female characters who might interfere with this myth. Though the character Proctor might be guilty of lechery, he redeems his good name and his place in history by the end of the play. He perjures himself to save his wife and then goes to the gallows rather than confessing falsely to witchcraft. Abigail , conversely, is still just an evil promiscuous girl by the end of the play, a girl who has been abridged, who disappears, flees town, and who appears only one last time in an epilogue to the play, "Echoes Down The Corridor": "The legend has it that Abigail turned up later as a prostitute in Boston." 11 And, if Miller himself is not equal to the task of editing his women, he has a willing compatriot in John Proctor, who seems to feel, as his author does, that one can make a woman not exist by merely editing a fact or a sentence: PROCTOR: Abby, I may think of you softly from time to time. But I will cut off my hand before I'll ever reach for you again. Wipe it out of mind. We never touched, Abby. ABIGAIL: Aye, but we did. PROCTOR: Aye, but we did not. 12 In writing The Crucible, Miller has created a document in which the names of women from the past are preserved in writing, but they are preserved only to carry on a sullied memory of those women. Like the Salem documents themselves, The Crucible suggests that the written preservation of the historical female must necessarily result in her self- immolation. And, perhaps, Miller has done these women a worse disservice still, for dramaturgy possesses a far more immediate and powerful impact upon its audience than do yellowed historical docu- ments preserved under glass in a museum. If anyone was dubious before seeing The Crucible who it was that wanted to tear. apart the American Dream, they can have no doubt by the time the curtain falls. But while Miller commits these atrocities in the name of "good drama," he is no more culpable than those " circle girls" of 1692. Like Quixote, like the colonists,- like the girls, Miller as a writer represents merely that amorphous, diaphanous, transparent frontier, language. " A long thin graph ism" himself, Miller is so inculcated with the experiences 11 /bid., 146. 12 /bid., 23. Miller's The Crucible 39 of his culture that he unconsciously enacts the sins of his fathers, doing so ironically while he is attempting to undo them. Not only does Miller find what he seeks and fail to find that which he does not seek in perpetuating the American myth of abridgement, but he also criticizes the theatre of the 1950s precisely for those "sins" that he himself is committing historically in The Crucible: All this means to me . . . is that this generation is turning Japa- nese. The Japanese are said to admire infinite repetitions of time- hallowed stories, characters, and themes. It is the triumph of the practical in art. The most practical thing to do is to repeat what has been done and thought before. But the very l iquor of our art has always been originality, uniqueness. . . . Japanism, so to speak, took over Hollywood long ago, and now the movie is ritual thinly veiled. The practical took command. The "showman" won. High finance took sterility by the hand, and together they rolled the product smooth, stripped all of its offensive edges, its individuality, and created the perfect circle-namely zero. 13 So imbued with the American experience that he is merely just another cipher of it, Miller seems unaware that his play as well is "ritual thinly veiled," that he too has just created another "perfect circle," another tier on the concentric circle of violent abridgement, and that drawing this circle finally will end in historical reification, death, or as Miller so succinctly puts it, "zero." If Foucault's statement is correct, if to name is truly to kill, then to draw this final circle signifying "zero" is also to assert a definitive, final name, to subsume the Puritans in the reified and closed circle of the prophetic Eye. Miller kills the historical "life" of the Salem Witch Trials by having the last word on them; and, like his Puritan fathers, escapes naming and thus killing his ancestors by pushing the "boundary" of naming, and thus of responsibility, " up" as they did. Though he thinks Abigail became a prostitute ("legend has it," after all) he is not quite sure, and thus he demurs responsibility or passes the buck to someone-anyone-else, who might have the courage or foolhardiness, as it were, to name her definitively as a prostitute. He is content merely to suggest in an echo down a corridor that perhaps this is her name. 13 /bid., 159. 40 CARUSO Ill This essay has raised questions about Miller as an inaccurate historiographer, a sexist, and an exploiter of the past. However, while the repercussions of his historical abridgements are undeniable, it is perhaps more fitting to characterize him,_ like the circle girls, as a victim of the American myth, another mere cipher of this myth unconsciously performing acts of cultural atrocity because his society has taught him to do so. If one needs verification that Miller was truly as blinded in his vision of The Crucible as Quixote, the epic anti-hero, one might look to "Many Writers: Few Plays," a piece written by Miller for the New York Times: Is it quixotic to say that a time comes for an artist-and for all those who want and love theatre-when the world must be left behind? When like some pilgrim, he must consult only his own heart and cleave to the truth it utters? For out of the hectoring of columnists, the compulsion of patriotic gangs, the suspicions of the honest and the corrupt alike, art never will and never has found soil. 14 . As he involuntarily reveals here, Miller is light years away from finding art that leaves the world behind. Employing the metaphor of a pilgrim to describe himself, he avers that he wishes to leave all those "Japanese repetitions" behind, those "rituals thinly veiled." He wished to stop the distant echoing drumbeat of the Winthropian call to arms, a drumbeat whose rhythmic repetitions or pulse is recorded on the concentric circle model, each circular tier representing a successive sound vibration, dissipating, growing smaller, yet echoing on and on, even as Abigail Williams's reputation as a prostitute will echo on and on from the "corridor." Even Sir Lawrence Olivier, who starred in a production of the play, spoke of this "beat." [There is] a certain marching tempo that starts to get into that play .. . a drumbeat underneath which begins somewhere- I don't know exactly where-but in a good production it starts to beat. 15 14 Arthur Miller, "Many Writers: Few Plays," New York Times, 10 August 1952, II, 1 . 15 Weales, 153-54. Miller' s The Crucible 41 Olivier refers to this "beat" specifically in regard to the optional Act II Scene ii that is sometimes inserted, sometimes deleted in productions. This scene is one in which Abigail and Proctor confront each other in the night and Abigail openly discusses her love for Proctor and her motive for accusing his wife of witchcraft. It is jolting to read not only because it eerily reveals the demonic psychic underbelly of both characters (Proctor screams exultantly that he will reveal Abigail for the "whore" she is, and Abigail accuses Proctor of "singing halleluj ahs" at the prospect of his w ife's execution), but also because, as Olivier observes, it throws the production "off beat. " Olivier is not sure why this is, and this is perhaps because he too is mesmerized by the rhythm of the American " beat" of successive and regenerative violence that he only heeds, but does not fully comprehend. The scene works in opposition to an American tradition of abridgement. It undermines the selective forgetfulness so essential to that act, for it explains too much, fills in too many gaps. Specifically, the additional scene fills in those "gaps" of "messy detail" between concentric circles in which grey space lies the terror of America: the battered bodies of murdered women and Indians, the stench of plague and pestilence that beset the first settlers. For after all, even if Winthrop has commanded us to abridge these things, the ugly remnants must go somewhere. Without realizing it then, Olivier is referring to a scene that exposes the hiding place of the dirt and carcasses, the rotting residue of American abridgement. Olivier is troubled by the adding of this scene because it fills in the spaces of si lence between "beats," undermines the carefully orchestrated rhythm of an idealized " Star Spangled Banner" as it has been so meticulously arranged by Winthrop and Miller. Is it quixotic, "pilgrim" Miller asks, to attempt to leave the world behind, to create art that is undaunted, unmarred by the very ciphers, the very language and experiences, that comprise our very beings? The response to Miller's question is a complicated one. For, on the one hand, naturally it is foolhardy and quixotic to attempt to leave our past behind, to make what Fitzgerald refers to as a "clean break" from the fundamen- tal psychic experiences that have forged our identities both personally and nationally. 16 On the other hand, to make such an attempt in America, a country founded on a Puritan ethic of escapes, of "clean breaks" in which the "dirtiness," the blood and bone fragments of the pai nful fracture are "abridged" and swept beneath the carpet, is not quixotic at all; it is savvy and right on the money. When read against 16 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1956), 81 . Fitzgerald describes his tenuous mental state as a cracked plate and his psychic healing process as the result of a clean break with the past. 42 CARUSO the history, Miller and his play assist America's Puritan fathers in making their clean break from culpability; in doing so, Miller re-enacts history, proving that in America the "beat" goes inevitably on. journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Fall 1995) "I Charge Thee Speak": john Barrymore and His Voice Coach, Margaret Carrington BARBARA F. ACKER In the early days of his career, Barrymore did not need a good voice. He did not have to meet the challenge of speaking classical verse nor did he need a particularly good quality stage voice. Even when he began to tackle serious dramatic roles, such as the desperate Cockney clerk in justice (1916), or his roles in Peter Jbbetson (1917), Redemption (1918), and The jest (1919), critical attention focused on his physical realization of the part, not on his voice. Theatre reviews suggest that Barrymore's voice was not his best feature. When he played Dr. Rank in A Doll's House (1907), his indistinct enunciation and poor projection drew criticism. 1 In the 1908 production of A Stubborn Cinderella, the audience again had difficulty hearing him. 2 Later reviewers faulted Barrymore for vocal monotony and a tendency to be "overemphatic." 3 It was only when Barrymore played Shakespearean roles, Richard Ill (1920) and Hamlet (1922/25), that the press began to pay as much attention to his voice as to his physical presence. His critics then gave a collective sigh of gratitude that his voice had changed for the better. 1 " 'A Doll's House': Ethel Barrymore Plays An Ibsen Role," (Boston) Globe 1 February 1907, 4. 2 Amy Leslie, Chicago Daily News, 2 June 1908, 14. 3 "John Barrymore in Tolstoy Tragedy, " New York Times, 4 Gctober 1918, 11; John Corbin, " From the New Plays," New York Times, 6 October 1918, sec. 4, 2; F.H. [Franci s Hackett], "After the Play, " The New Republic 19 (10 May 1919): 55; Alexander Woollcott, "Second Thoughts on First Nights," New York Times, 28 September 1919, sec. 4, 2. 44 ACKER Broadway director Arthur Hopkins put it best: "Jack had all the beauties except voice." 4 Others agreed. Barrymore's brother, Lionel, noted that although Jack's raspy voice was "good enough for comedy and an effective reed for most drama, . .. Jack did not then have a full- rounded voice and his diction was slovenly." 5 Their uncle, john Drew, a polished and accomplished actor in his own right, lamented, "Jack talks like a stable hand." 6 Constance Collier, a British actress and friend of Barrymore, witnessed how his voice d i s ~ y e d people in British theatre circles. In later years, when he negotiated with London theatre managers to remount his production of Hamlet, Barrymore adopted a tough-talking Bowery speech: [The managers] would say, 'How can you expect in England, the home of Shakespeare, a man with a voice like that, to be any good in Shakespeare's plays?' You couldn't make Jack not put that voice on. He would do it deliberately to shock them. 7 Collier herself made arrangements for the lease of the Haymarket before the manager had an opportunity to hear Barrymore's voice and to renege on the agreement. John Barrymore's. vocal problems could hardly be attributed to his upbringing: He was born into a family of actors. His sister Ethel was lauded by theatre critic Alexander Woollcott for her enchanting, lovely voice. 8 Until the age of fifteen, Barrymore spent most of his time with his grandmother, the forbiddingly correct Mrs. john Drew, who had managed the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia for over thirty years, and 4 Arthur Melancthon Hopkins, Reference Point: Reflections on Creative Ways in General with Special Reference to Creative Ways in Theatre (New York: Samuel French, 1948), 117. 5 Lionel Barrymore and Cameron Shipp, We Barrymores: As Told to Cameron Shipp (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), 202, 158. 6 Aiexander Woollcott, Interviewed by Gene Fowler, Bomoseen, Vermont, 1942. Gene Fowler Collection, Special Collections, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, Colorado. 7 Constance Collier, unpublished manuscript. Gene Fowler Collection, Special Collections, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, Colorado, 6. 8 Aiexander Woollcott, quoted in Ethel Barrymore, Memories: An Autobiography (London: Hulton Press 1956), 168; Gene Fowler, Good Night, Sweet Prince: The Life and Times of john Barrymore (New York: The Viking Press, 1943), 135. john Barrymore 45 had acted ever since she was a young child. 9 Ethel Barrymore reminisced about the speech standards laid down by their grandmother: I came from people who spoke well, from a family where purity of speech was a matter of course, where there was no such thing as a provincial accent. If I brought a provincialism home from school, eyebrows were raised so far that they disappeared into that thick Drew hair, and that particular provincialism would never be uttered again. In running her stock company at the Arch Street Theatre, Mummum had absolutely no patience, no tolerance whatever, for slipshod speech. At home she and everyone else spoke well. Nothing was ever said about rt. It was just done. 10 Barrymore had a flair for accents, which means he had a good ear for intonation, vocal placement,_ and subtle phonetic differences. He was praised for his Cockney accent in the productions of Pantaloon (1906) and justice (1916). 11 He studied with a White Russian to perfect an accent for Redemption (1918). 12 Barrymore proved he could mimic speech patterns, proved he had the requisite skills to get rid of his sloppy, nasal sound. What he needed was a compelling reasqn to change the vocal habits of a lifetime. Lionel Barrymore recalled that by the 1920s his brother had a group of self-appointed advisors, the "Barrymore Board of Strategy," composed of Edward Sheldon, Constance Collier, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Edmond Jones, and Margaret Carrington. Anxious as his friends were for Barrymore to leave the byways of comedy and establish himself as an actor in serious roles, the Board supported Hopkins's plans to launch a classical repertory with Richard Ill. The only stumbling block was Jack's 9 Lionel Barrymore, We Barrymores, 85. 10 Ethel Memories, 47. 11 New York Dramatic Mirror, 6 January 1906, 3; " Justice, " New York Times, 23 April 1916, sec. 2, 8;" 'Justice' Done Here with Superb Cast," New York Times, 4 Apri I 1916, 11 . 12 Arthur Mel ancthon Hopkins, To A Lonely Boy (New York: Book League of America, 1937), 168- 169. 46 ACKER voice. 13 Barrymore apparently agreed, for years later he told his friend Anthony Quinn that "speech was the most important thing in the world for the actor." 14 He confessed that it was the prospect of a Shakespear- ean role which finally forced him to deal with his nasal Bowery accent. The voice specialist Barrymore turned to was Margaret Carrington. As a young woman Margaret Carrington was a concert singer in Europe. When World War I began, she settled in New York and established a reputation as a vocal coach for actors. She counted among her students her younger brother Walter Huston and Lillian Gish. She was a very successful dramatic coach who could bring out the best in an actor. Huston credtted her with teaching him how to act. 15 Nephew john Huston, the film actor and director, described Carrington as a "consummate actress in a drawing room." 16 john Huston's wife r-ecalled a "riveting" performance of Carrington's when " this thing . . came out of her when she was reading Shakespeare-one could understand how she was sought after as a coach." 17 Carrington, married to a wealthy broker, took only pupils who interested her and never accepted any payment for her lessons. 18 She taught how to improve voice quality, diction and breathing, and how to make the words come alive. She was not interested in "vocal gymnas- tics," but rather in how to link the sound and sense of words to create clear and emotionally. expressive speech. 19 13 Lionel Barrymore, We Barrymores, 202; Fowler, Good Night, Sweet Prince, 190; Hopkins, To A Lonely Boy, 199. 14 Anthony Quinn, The Original Sin: A Self-Portrait (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 206. 15 john Weld, "September Song," unpublished biography of Walter Huston. National Fi lm Information Service, Academy Foundation, Center for Motion Picture Study, Beverly Hil.ls, CA, 88, 128. 16 John Huston, An Open Book (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 37. 17 Lawrence Grobe! , The Hustons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989), 189. 18 Lillian Gish and Ann Pinchot, Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hal l, 1969), 317; Lillian Gish, manuscript, Special Collections, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washi ngton, D.C., 27. 19 Margaret Carrington, "The john Barrymore I Knew." Gene Fowler Coll ection, Special Collections, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, Colorado, 3. John Barrymore 47 When Barrymore began to study with Margaret Carrington he was already rehearsing Richard Ill. In an unfinished essay, "The John Barrymore I Knew," Carrington said that he came to see her, shyly explained his fears of acting Shakespeare and with "devastating charm" asked for her help. 20 At first, Carrington hesitated to take him. The production was slated to open in s-ix weeks and that was precious little time to change the vocal habits of a lifetime. Assessing his problems, she observed that "His voice was tired, and in spite of its rare individual quality was of short range due to a complete lack of breath control." 21 Unable to resist the challenge, she took him as a pupil. Carrington did not begin lessons with breathing or vowel exercises. Instead, she asked him to take-a piece of fruit from a bowl on the table. As Anthony Quinn tells in The Original Sin, as soon as Barrymore picked up an apple, Carrington began an inquisition: "Mr. Barrymore, what do you have in your hand?" "I got a red apple." "You have what?" "I got a red apple." "I'm sorry, I don't understand." "You don't understand? I got a red apple in my hand." Then he laughed and said his speech lessons for the first two or three weeks consisted of making that apple sound like the juiciest, reddest apple in the world. She wasn't satisfied until he had created not only the imagery, but the fullness of each word. He said, "She taught me to make love to the words. Don't get carried away with the emotion, kid. Caress the word." 22 Carrington taught Barrymore to respond to the imagery and meaning of every word to make the language clear. She gave him exercises to increase his breath capacity and improve vocal quality and diction. She recalled that he practiced vowel sounds as he walked along the street until he could speak a complete Shakespearean sentence on a single breath. 23 In order to play Richard Ill, Barrymore also had to deal with the challenge of classical verse. Later, in his memoirs, he referred to his 20 /bid., 2. 21Jbid. 22 Quinn, 206. 23 Carri ngton, " The John Barrymore I Knew," S-6. 48 ACKER struggle to master intonation, which confirms that Carrington was teaching him stress and rhythm in the verse. 24 Director Arthur Hopkins heard improvement: John . . . whose voice was furry and not best suited to Shake- speare, had been studying diligently with Mrs. Margaret - Carrington, who by some magic, entirely her own, had turned his faulty instrument into a medium of ease and beauty. 25 The role of Richard Ill became a demarcation line, dividing the old Barrymore sound from the new. Critics heralded the star's new rich vocal quality, his range and control, and his clear enunciation. Francis Hackett, in the New Republic, was delighted the actor had eliminated his nasality and developed a voice that was "beautifully placed, deep and sonorous and free." 26 Alexander Woollcott remarked in the New York Times: Now he has acquired, out of space, a voice. His voice three years ago was dry and monotonous, his speech slovenly and sometimes common. All that is largely changed. He entered upon the Shakespearean task with a patiently acquired voice, one rich, full and flexible. This is really the advance of which he may be proudest. P Carrington and Hopkins treated Richard Ill as a modern play. Barrymore brought the verse alive with a contemporary vitality and passion. The New York Call observed that Barrymore did not use 24 John Barrymore, Confessions of an Actor (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926), np. Margot Peters identifies Karl Schmidt as the author of Barrymore's memoirs in Margot Peters, The House of Barrymore (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 290. 25 Hopkins, To A Lonely Boy, 199. 26 F.H. [Francis Hackett], "After the Play," The New Republic 22 (24 March 1920): 122. 27 Aiexander Woollcott, "At 'Richard Ill,' " New York Times, 21 March 1920, sec. 6, 6. John Barrymore The role of Richard Ill was the dividing line between the old John Barrymore sound and the new. From the Harvard Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library 49 50 ACKER "rhetorical sing-song .. . . [He] lives and thinks and speaks with the sharp enunciation and natural inflections of flesh and blood." 28 Heywood Broun, writing for the Tribune, added that Barrymore had "fire and life" and was no longer guilty of "false emphasis," of stressing whatever arbitrarily chosen word suited him. 29 One critic voiced his doubts that a comedian like Barrymore could do a credible job of speaking verse. 30 Nevertheless, a hallmark of Barrymore's Shakespearean work was his intelligent, clear line delivery. Reviewers made much of the fact that they could understand every word he spoke. The critic for the New York Dramatic Mirror must have delighted Carrington when he praised the actor's impeccable diction and delivery and his clear understanding of the lines. 31 Barrymore's next project with Hopkins and Carrington was the 1922 production of Hamlet. This time Hopkins asked Carrington to prepare Barrymore for the role. She agreed on condition that she would have at least a month to work with Barrymore and that the opening date would be set only when she felt he was ready. Barrymore appeared on the doorstep of her Connecticut home one summer's day with an armload of books about Hamlet. This visit turned into a stay of two and a half months. They worked tirelessly together, in the gardens and in the woods, six to eight hours a day and sometimes into the night. Just as she had done with Richard Ill, Carrington asked him to treat Hamlet as a modern play that had never been performed and to disregard all previous interpretations of the script. They studied only the Temple edition of Hamlet. She also asked him not to memorize the part until they had explored every nuance of meaning in the script. Carrington attributed the spontaneous quality of his performance to this method. 32 At the same time Barrymore was wrestling with the meaning of the lines, he continued his voice training. Carrington wanted to rebuild his voice from the ground up, and he was willing to throw himself into more 28 Louis Cardy, "The Stage: Barrymore's 'Richard Ill ,' " New York Call, 9 1920, 6. 29 HeyWood Broun, (New York) Tribune, quoted in "Barrymore's Bout witr Richard," Literary Digest, 65 (3 April 1920): 37. 30 J. Ranken Tawse (New York) Evening Post quoted in " Barrymore' s Bout 'Richard,' " Literary Digest 65 (3 April 1920): 36-37. 31 Louis R. Reid, "The New Plays on Broadway: 'Richard Ill,' " New Yorl Dramatic Mirror, 13 March 1920, 466. 32 Carrington, "The John Barrymore I Knew," 3-4. John Barrymore 51 vowel and breath exercises. The day Carrington felt Barrymore was ready, she notified Hopkins. Carrington's work did not end with the preliminary coaching; her services were called on during the run of Hamlet. Hamlet is a vocally demanding role and when performed eight times a week, as Barrymore had to do, a vocally exhausting one. Barrymore's incessant smoking added to the strain of a heavy performance schedule. A trail of half- smoked cigarettes followed him everywhere backstage. He took two or three drags on a cigarette before every entrance. Lark Taylor, who played the roles of Bernardo and the First Player in the New York production, noted that Barrymore had vocal problems that plagued him all season: Paul, his devoted yellow valet, was kept busy with ice-bags and various remedies. Sundays Margaret Carrington worked with him most of the day to get him in good shape for Monday. 33 The work paid off handsomely: [He] spoke his lines with ease and convincing naturalness, showing he had worked carefully and earnestly. Margaret Carrington had almost entirely obliterated his monotonous delivery and Bowery pronunciation, and his voice had a surpris- ing range and quality. 34 Hamlet opened in New York on 16 November 1922, and played for 101 performances that season, breaking Edwin Booth's record of 100 performances. The next season Barrymore toured the United States with Hamlet, and in 1925 he successfully remounted the production at the Haymarket Theatre in London. Barrymore's voice and speech came under critical scrutiny once more. Critics agreed his voice quality and text delivery continued to improve, giving an impression of greater emotional expressiveness and depth. Walter Prichard Eaton, who had reviewed Barrymore as far back as The Yellow Ticket in 1914, commented on the actor's progress in 33 J. Lark Taylor, "With Hey Ho!," unpublished autobiography. Special Colledions, University Archives, The Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 339. 34 /bid.' 336. 52 ACKER vocal skills and in handling the rhythm. 35 In Theatre Arts, Kenneth Macgowan wrote of the "most brilliant Prince of this generation ... lovely of voice and poignant with emotion." 36 John Corbin thought Barrymore's deeper, lower pitches now made his voice worthy of tragedy. 37 Heywood Broun praised the actor's vocal skills: Somebody ought to write a tale about Barrymore called 'The Story of a Voice.' It is one of the most amazing adventures in our theatre. Here was a peculiarly pinched utterance distinctly marred by slipshod diction. Today it is among the finest voices in the American theatre. We don't mean that it vibrates and rumbles and roars, but that isn't our notion of a fine voice. It is attuned to talking. Hamlet never deafens the members of his family, the audience, or even himself. 38 All agreed that Barrymore made the meaning of every line clear, but critics parted company on the question of how well he handled the verse. Whitford Kane, who played the Grave Digger, felt that Barrymore was too modern and naturalistic and was better in the prose scenes, especially the scenes with Polonius. 39 Maida Castellun in the New York Call found the "splendors of passions and the soaring organ tones of Elizabethan rhetoric" lacking in Barrymore's "colloquial, casual" performance. 40 A lack of rhetorical punch or emotional fire was a charge also leveled by George Bernard Shaw, J. Ranken Towse, Glenn Hughes, and Edmund 35 Walter Prichard Eaton, "Mr. Barrymore's Hamlet, " The Freeman (10 January 1923): 424. Clipping from the Theatre Arts Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 36 Kenneth Macgowan, "And Again Repertory, " Theatre Arts Magazine 7 (April 1923): 97. 37 John Corbin, "The Twentieth Century Hamlet," New York Times, 17 December 1922, sec. 7, 1. 38 Heywood Broun, "Mr. Shakespeare, Meet Mr. Tyson," February 1923, 33, unidentified clipping in the Theatre Arts Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 3 Whitford Kane, Are We All Met? (London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1931 ), 232. 40 Maida Castellun, "The Stage: John Barrymore is Intelligent and Beautiful as a Hamlet Without Fire," New York Call, 18 November 1922, 4. john Barrymore 53 Wilson. For them, his low-keyed speech and his thoughtful style of delivering soliloquies made the play too long and too tame. 41 Most reviewers, however, applauded Barrymore's delivery precisely because he eschewed "soaring organ tones" and rant. They found his colloquial style vital and persuasive. Heywood Broun and Alexander Woollcott approved of the way Barrymore seemed to think his way through the part, declaring the soliloquies did not strike the ear as familiar set pieces but rather as the artless expression of a man wrestling with a problem. 42 John Corbin of the New York Times described the "flawless" line readings as restoration of a lost art. He liked Barrymore's conversational manner that, in his opinion, served the rhythm of the verse. 43 Stark Young liked the simple honesty of Barrymore's readings, "no idle tricks of the voice." 44 Young did take the actor to task for occasionally stressing a word in a verse line not meant to take the stress. Such misplaced stress, Young argued, disrupted the rhythm of the verse and the continuity of the thought. Barrymore, in Young's opinion, had not entirely renounced his old habit of exploding on "meaningful" words. Other reviewers felt Barrymore had delivered the verse with entirely too regular a beat, too predictable a stress. 45 This is at odds with those who censured Barrymore for breaking up the rhythm of the line with an indulgence in misplaced stress. Walter Prichard Eaton said that the actor emphasized words "at the end of lines, or just before the caesura! pause." 46 By making the audience too conscious of the rhythm, Eaton charged, Barrymore did not allow the music of the words to set the mood. 41 George Bernard Shaw, quoted in John Barrymore, Confessions of an Actor, np; J. Ranken Tawse, "'Hamlet' Spectacle and Little Else," Evening Post (New York), 17 November 1922, 7; Glenn Hughes, "Repressed Acting and Shakespeare," Drama 13 (March 1923): 211; Edmund J. Wilson, "The The Dial 74 (March 1923): 320. 42 Broun, " Mr. Shakespeare, Meet Mr. Tyson," 33; Alexander Woollcott, "The Reviewing Stand," New York Herald, 17 November 1922, 8. 43 John Corbin, "A New Hamlet," New York Times, 17 November 1922, 14. 44 Stark Young, "Hamlet," The New Republic 33 (6 December 1922): 45. 45 Cuthbert Wright, "Mr. Barrymore's ' Hamlet,' 11 The Freeman (3 January 1923): 401. Clipping from the Theatre Arts Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 46 Eaton, "Mr. Barrymore's ' Ham let, ' 11 424. 54 ACKER In London, The Sphere brought up the point the British found most remarkable, that in Hamlet Barrymore did not have an accent. 4 7 Rather than sounding American or British he used " unmarked" English. Some reviewers extolled the precision of his diction and delivery and his thoughtful readings. 48 Others praised the verse speaking: " The wonderful verse of the poet could not have been delivered with finer intelligence or more charming music." 49 William Poel believed the way that Barrymore "talked his way through the part and got the other actors to do the same" made the production superior to either Irving's or Forbes-Robertson's. 5 Constance Coli ier later wrote that 1/Jack's exquisi te diction and lovely voice absolutely overwhelmed the English audience and his triumph was phenomenal." 51 The Bard's own countrymen then accorded the audacious Yankee the tribute of an extended run. Critics agreed that Barrymore's voice was up to the demands of Shakespeare. The issue of rhythm and stress in his verse was more problematic. Critics who approved of Barrymore's line delivery usually did so on the grounds that he was colloquial, not ranting, not using old- style declamation. Those who disapproved of his delivery generally charged he was too tame and lacked emotional fire. Perhaps they missed the grandeur of old-fashioned declaiming. Evidence from several quarters-fellow actors, a director, and a critic- agree that Barrymore was an erratic performer, very intense and focused one night and lackadaisical other nights. He husbanded his strength in 47 Herbert Farjeon, "The Play's the Thing," The Sphere, (7 March 1925): 272. 48 James Agate, " Hamlet," Brief Chronicles: The Contemporary Theatre, 7925 (1926; reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 12; " Barrymore's Hamlet in London," The Christian Science Monitor, 10 March 1925, 10. Clipping, Theatre Arts Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; (London) Daily News, quoted in " Barrymore Wins London as Hamlet," New York Times, 20 February 1925, 20; "Entertainments: A New American Hamlet," (London) Times, 20 February 1925, 12; Desmond McCarthy, " Drama: The New Ham let, " New Statesman, 7 March 1925, 627; The Morning Post, quoted in " John Barrymore Stirs London," The Literary Digest 84 (28 March 1925): 30. 49 The Daily Telegraph, quoted in " Barrymore Wins London as Hamlet," New York Times, 20 February 1925, 20. 50 William Poel , " letter to Reginald Pole, 1925" quoted in Robert Speaight, William Poe/ and the Elizabethan Revival, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 27-28. 51 Collier, unpublished manuscript, 7. John Barrymore 55 some scenes of Hamlet and committed himself to full energy in other scenes. During the New York run of Hamlet Barrymore began to take longer pauses until he had added thirty minutes to the playing time. 52 Low vocal energy and a slow pace could account for the fact that some critics heard a tame and lackluster vocal delivery. In other words, judgments of how well or poorly Barrymore handled verse may have been confounded by variation in his vocal energy and rate of speech. The reviews fall into one of two camps. Some critics applauded Barrymore's style of "talking" the verse; and other critics, like Castellun, missed the over-the-top rhetorical energy. The rhetoric the two camps used clearly reveals a difference in taste: One camp liked a modern style of verse delivery and the other camp liked an older style. Ultimately such an aesthetic debate cannot be resolved, either in Barrymore's day or in later times. Some liked Barrymore's verse delivery and others did not. Two great Hamlets of this century commented on Barrymore: John Gielgud, who was twenty when he saw Barrymore's production at the Haymarket, and Lawrence Olivier, who was seventeen. Gielgud said that Barrymore's grace made his "brilliantly intellectual performance classical without being unduly severe." He found it an enthralling and in some ways "ideal production. 1153 Olivier acknowledged a debt to Barrymore for his own later Hamlets. Barrymore had breathed life into the part and swept away a poetic languor that had emasculated the rol since the days of Irving: Everything about him was exciting. He was athletic, he had charisma and, to my young mind, he played the part to perfec- tion. Although American, his English was perfect. He was astonishing .... Some critics knocked him for his verse speaking, as indeed, was to happen to me in later years. They were wrong. I know they were wrong. He had a way of choosing a word and then exploding it in a moment of passion. Perhaps you did not always agree with the choice, but it was constantly riveting. He would vary the pace, but never gabble, always understandable. There would be a sudden burst and then again a lull, rather like 52 Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy, 231; Taylor, "With Hey Ho!, " 344-345; Woollcott, "At 'Richard Ill,'" New York Times, 21 March 1920, sec. 6, 6; Blanche Yurka, Bohemian Girl: Blanche Yurka 's Theatrical Life (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1970), 100. 53 John Gielgud, Notes Inscribed on Program for Hamlet at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 26 March 1925. The Raymond Mander & Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection, Beckenham, Kent, courtesy of Dr. Martin F. Norden, University of Massachusetts. 56 ACKER the wind freshening up before a squall. For my money he really seemed to understand Hamlet. 54 Lionel Barrymore acknowledged that it was Margaret Carrington who enabled Barrymore to meet the unique demands of classical acting: Jack had gone to Mrs. Carrington to get a rasp out of his throat. He went to her humbly acknowledging his fault, conquered that fault, and emerged stronger in every other department. 5 5 The success of the Barrymore and Carrington partnership was summed up by Hopkins: Mrs. Carrington had the kind of derision that Jack appreciated. He took her most merciless barbs and went back for more. To her, he was the great opportunity that she long had sought. Just to find one voice that was really worth freeing, to hear just once the grandeur of Shakespeare's lines with unobstructed accompan- iment. So, after long perseverance, two dreams were real- ized-Mrs. Carrington's and Jack's. 56 A long time friend-of Barrymore's, Gene Fowler, wrote that Margaret Carrington was Barrymore's "principal and only real advisor" when he was preparing the role of Hamlet. 57 She had worked with him roughly six hours a day for more than two months before rehearsals began, and under her tutelage he had memorized his lines and set a great deal of the interpretation. 58 Barrymore did experiment with stage business during rehearsal with Hopkins, but he had shaped the basic path he was to follow in the months of work with Carrington. Barrymore told Mary Astor that Carrington "was a truly great dramatic coach" and he credited her "for the fullness of his own 54 Lawrence Olivier, On Acting (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), 36. 55 Lionel Barrymore, We Barrymores, 203, 206. 56 Hopkins, Reference Point, 118. 57 Gene Fowler, "Letter to Dr. Harold Thomas Hyman," quoted in Will Fowler> The Young Man from Denver (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 208. 58 Taylor, "With Hey Ho!," 332, 334; Yurka, Bohemian Girl, 98. John Barrymore 57 development as an actor." 59 Shortly before his death, Barrymore told Dorothy Gish he was indebted to Margaret Carrington for hi.s growth as an actor: "Everything he had done that was worthwhile was because of Margaret Carrington ... . Without her, he claimed, he would have been a fifth-rate actor ." 60 This is the story of a collaboration that has slipped out of the pages of history, perhaps because Barrymore took pains to craft a public artistic persona in which he was the sole author of his success. In his memoirs he does not credit Carrington for his amazing new voice. However, during the run of Hamlet in New York, he confided to Lark Taylor how much Margaret Carrington had helped him. 61 Certainly those close to Barrymore acknowledged the role of this particular coach in the famous actor's career. Stark Young marked Carrington's passing in 1942 with a salute to: one among the half-dozen most distinguished and brilliant figures of the theatre of the last two decades. . . . [She was a] teacher and authority and inspiration such as few of our flat, flim-flam stage favorites either perceive or hunger after. She was indeed a gift from heaven for certain actors who had the possibility, as it were, of surpassing themselves. 62 This was a fitting tribute to the woman who charged Barrymore to speak and enabled him to surpass himself and achieve greatness in his two most important stage roles. 59 Mary Astor, My Story: An Autobiographv (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 73. 60 Gish and Pinchot, Lillian Cish, 317. 61 Taylor, 332, 339. 62 Stark Young, " Distinction and Theatre," The New Republic 107 (24 August 1942): 227. journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Fall 1995) "Torchbearers of the Earth": Women and Pageantry Between the World Wars 1 FRANCES DIODATO BZOWSKI After the armistice ending World War I was declared on 11 Novem- ber 1918, Americans sighed their relief and prepared to move on with their lives. Soldiers returned from the battlefields to glorious parades and festivities and then were promptly forgotten and joined the ranks of the unemployed. Women, who had been extolled for their service during the war years and for their willingness to take on roles to which they were unaccustomed, such as working in munitions factories, conducting streetcars, and even serving in hospitals and as ambulance drivers at the front, were now shuffled back into their more acceptable domestic roles. A nation that had been woven into unified action unraveled. Attacks on liberals and socialists and on blacks and suspect ethnic groups increased as the citizenry struggled with its postwar frustration and the growing feel ing that all was not as glorious as it had seemed in the first flush of battle. As the nation mourned the men who never returned and coped with those who did, shattered mentally and physically by their experi- ences, many people began to question the merit of war in general and of this war in particular. 2 1 For a detailed look at the pageants written by women before and during World War I see Frances Diodato Bzowski, " 'Torchbearers of the Earth' : Women, Pageantry, and World War 1,'- 1 The journal of American Drama and Theatre (Spring 1995): 88- 111 . 2 The postwar years and the decade of the 1920s in Amer ica have probably been analyzed from every possible point of view. For some general social histories of the period see Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday, an Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Harper & Bros., 1931 ); Mark Sull ivan, Our Times, 1900-1925 (New York: Charles Scribner' s Sons, 1936) vol. 6, The Twenties; Frederic L. Paxson, American Democracy and the World War (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1948), vol. 3, Postwar Years: Normalcy, 1918-1923; Joseph C. Furnas, Great Times: An Informal Social History of the U.S., 1914-1928 (New York: Putnam's, 1974); Ethan Mordden, That jazz! An Idiosyncratic Social History of the American Twenties (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978); Ellis Wayne Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 191 7-1933 Women and Pageantry 59 Such questions had not arisen while the nation was at war and its citizens were consumed by a patriotic fervor that was carefully nurtured by the government. During the war years government agencies had used all forms of media-posters, films, and a variety of dramatic presentations, including community pageants-to persuade Americans that the war was just. 3 Now that the war was over, the committees that had been formed to create the propaganda to justify American involvement and to stir the citizens to willing and loyal service attempted to reassure a disillusioned public that their sacrifices had not been in vain. Thus, the military and community agencies responsible for wartime entertainments for the soldiers and patriotic pageants and performances for the nation's cities and towns continued to provide dramatic productions, at least in the immediate postwar years. The War Camp Community Service (WCCS), which had been formed as a part of the Playground and Recreation Association of America (PRAA) to provide community recreational activities for the soldiers, dropped its reference to war in 1919 and (New York: St. Martins Press, 1979); Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties, a History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); and Page Smith, Redeeming the Time: A People's History of the 1920s and the New Deal (New Y<?rk: McGraw Hill, 1986). . For the best general histories dealing with women during the postwar years see William O'Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969); William Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic and Political Role, 1920-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); j. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); and Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 3 For the propaganda techniques used by the War Department see George Creel , How We Advertised America (New York: Harper & Bros., 1920); Harold L. Lasswell, Propaganda Techniques in the Great War (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1927); James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917-1919 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1939); Horace C. Peterson, Propaganda for War; the Campaign Against American Neutrality, 7914-1917 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939); Larry Wayne Ward, The Motion Picture Goes to War: The U. S. Government Film Effort During World War I (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985); Craig W. Campbell, Reel America and World War I Uefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1985); and Walton Rawls, Wake Up America! World War and the American Poster (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988). The best general sources on pageantry are Martin S. Tacke!, "Women and American Pageantry: 1908-1918" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1982); David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Naima Prevots, American Pageantry: A Movement for Art & Democracy (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990). I ;: 60 BZOWSKI became simply, Community Services. 4 Constance D'Arcy Mackay, the head of the Division of Community Drama for the WCCS during the war, now was in charge of the newly named Community Services. The agency continued to distribute texts and production information about pageants, as well as announcements of insti tutes taught by pageant masters. Mackay, along with other leaders of pageantry, realized not only that drama and pageantry could provide a patriotic justification for the war to a weary population, but also that, if the new interest in such dramatic forms was to continue, leaders of the movement must seize the opportunity that the war had provided. As Mackay explained: The World War has kindled a greater love for drama than we have ever had before; it has revealed its power for service as wel l as for recreation. We cannot let this power die. After the war it must go on. It must continue to be a force for patriotism and solidarity. 5 Women not only had written and directed many of the pageants used by the WCCS and other community agencies during the war, but they also had created pageants, masques, and allegories for their own neighborhoods and clubs. These pageants served a variety of purposes depending on when they were written. For instance, in the early years of the European War, before the United States became involved, women wrote many pacifist pageants. These pageants reflected the common belief of the time that women were "natural" pacifists; that is, because of their nurturing nature and their concern for children and the home, by their very gender in fact, women espoused peaceful arbitration, coopera- tion and understanding, both within their homes and throughout the world. After the sinking of the Lusitania, as the nation prepared to take an active part in the war, and during the actual war years, women wrote pageants that were used to Americanize immigrants, arouse patriotism, and encourage willing service to the country. However, even while they placed their pageants at the service of a nation at war, women never stopped envisioning, and portraying in their pageants, a postwar world peace and an international league. 4 For activities of the PRAA see Richard F. Knapp, "The Playground and Recreation Association of America in World War 1," Parks and Recreation 7 Uanuary 1972): 27- 31 ff. 5 Constance D'Arcy Mackay, Patriotic Drama in Your Town (New York: Henry Holt, 1918). Women and Pageantry 61 At the end of the war, however, many feminist/pacifist women were not as naive as this faith in the future would make them seem. For instance, in the midst of their joy at the armistice, women faced a sobering realization. The basic issue had not changed-masculine power had led to war and would most likely lead to war again. What was needed in the United States and the world at large was the moral influence and the political strength of women. Despite their past experiences with a male-dominated government and their failure to promote peace during the war years, women remained hopeful that, if they could attain real power, they would effect lasting change by instilling their womanly values into the laws of the land and by ending war forever. The New York branch of the Woman's Peace Party stated the matter clearly: War to end war has proved a failure. The war is won, yet nowhere is there peace, security or happiness. Hate, fear and greed still rule the world . . .. We failed not because we were wrong, but because we had no power. The control of the world is still in the hands of men who have no respect for human life, or for the counsel and need of women. 6 Simi larly, women who had relied on pageantry to promote their message of peace and internationalism throughout the bitter war years also felt that they were still needed and that pageants and drama should continue to be used for the nation's benefit after the war. Fanny Ursula Payne, in the introduction to her Plays and Pageants of Democracy, published in 1919, addressed her " Dear Young Friends" about how drama could keep the value of democracy uppermost in American minds: There are many ways in whi ch this may be kept before our eyes; but perhaps no agency reaches so many people as does the drama. All through the war the drama, in all its branches, played a large and very important part in keeping before the publ ic the ideal s for which we were fighting; and in the difficult period j ust ahead the drama will still have an important part to play. By drama I mean not only Broadway and the " movi es," but also 6 Quoted i n Harriet Hyman Al onso, Peace as a Women's Issue: A History of t he U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women's Rights (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 92. Of course, the WPP and other suffragi sts felt that the vote woul d enabl e women to bri ng about this change. Unfortunately, even though the nineteenth amendment granting suffrage to women was rati fied in 1920, the nation di d not become more peaceable. 62 BZOWSKI pageantry and amateur drama, which arouse so keen an interest, because the people themselves take part. 7 And so, women continued to write pageants after the war. In general the pageants written in the first year or two after the armistice were super- patriotic. They extolled the recent victory achieved through the proper use of force. But as the twenties progressed, more often pageants expressed a rekindled hope that international organization, particularly through the League of Nations and a World Court, would bring a lasting peace. Finally, some pageants written by women later in the twenties revealed a clear-eyed recognition of the forces within the country that contributed to violence and mi I itarism, but even these pageants trusted that women's influence could end all national disharmony. Right up to the renewed hostilities in Europe that led to the second world war, women wrote their pageants extolling womanly values, universal cooperation, and a worldwide organization to ensure peace. VICTORY PAGEANTS Victory pageants, tableaux, and masques appeared almost as soon as the armistice was declared in November, 1918. Constance D'Arcy Mackay, who had provided several appropriate pageants during the war, now wrote A Victory Pageant, "for Neighborhood Production." Probably because this pageant was intended for use by modest commu- nity organizations, it traces world events in a very uncomplicated way, from Episode I, "The joy of the World Before the Darkness of the World War"; through Episode II, "The Coming of Tyranny"; to Episode Ill, "Victory." The pageant ends with a grand procession of the nations and children led by their savior America, following Victory. 8 Probably the most outstanding example of the communHy victory pageant was one organized by Mrs. Moore Forrest in Washington, D.C., as part of the International Festival of Peace on 4 july 1919. The pageant was the culminating activity for the Washington School of Recreation, which had been formed by WCCS as a recreational outlet for war and government workers. Forrest was the school's director, and certainly one of her purposes in preparing this spectacular pageant was to justify the 7 Fanny Ursula Payne, Introduction, Plays and Pageants of Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1919). 8 Coristance D'Arcy Mackay, II A Victory Pageant," Delineator 94 Oune 19.19): 78- 9. Women and Pageantry 63 continuance of drama and pageantry now that the war was over. Already the newly named Community Service envisioned a postwar role as the provider of the talent and expertise needed to promote pageantry in a nation at peace: These workers will sooner or later be going back home to Idaho or Nevada or Tennessee. And each of them, by virtue of the training received will return a potential producer, director, or playwriter, with a working knowledge of the essentials of New Theatre technique. He or she will go back to show the home town its own potentialities, and hasten the day when America shall find the ultimate expression of her democracy in the drama. 9 If anything could convince the unbeliever of the glory of pageantry, this performance would be it. Mrs. Forrest threw in everything that could possibly stir the heart and arouse the soul-color, children, symbolism, music, a perfect setting, lights, doves, flags, and crowds. Beginning at 5:00 pm, eight scenes were presented simultaneously before or near famous buildings in Washington: "The Call to World Service" at the Red Cross Building; "The Call of Labor" at the White House; "The Call of Liberty" at the D.A.R. Building; "The Call of Commerce, Business, and the Professions" at the Pan-American Building; "The Call of the Children" on the White House lawn; "The Call of Art" at the State, War and Navy Building; "The Call to Labor" on the agricultural grounds; and "The Offering of Peace" at the National Museum. These scenes were followed by a massive parade called " The World at Peace," which ended at the Capitol Building. There, twenty-eight community choruses sang such songs as "America the Beautiful," "Ri ng Out Sweet Bells of Peace," and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." At 9:00, as "late twilight was thickening into dusk," 199 heralds dressed in "rose pink" and blowing trumpets cleared the way for Peace, who released a dove as young gi rls danced about her symbolizing "the joy that follows Peace on earth." As darkness fell and lights were lit, America descended the steps to lend a helping hand to small nations lost in darkness and depression and to lead them to Liberty. Later, as the lights became brighter and revealed the brilliant colors of the costumes, Capital and Labor met in the dazzling lights with Intelligence and Unselfishness. The States, each bearing its own flag, formed a circle around Columbi a, a circle that was opened to 9 This quote and all information about Forrest's pageant come from Margaret Candler, " Washington's Community Pageant, " Theatre Magazine 30 (October 1919): 247ff. 64 BZOWSKI admit the sons of America, men in uniform who knelt before Columbia. Then the Marshals of Peace placed robes representing the professions and the trades over the soldiers, symbolizing that they would continue to serve Columbia as civilians. The whole pageant concluded with a spectacle titled the "Spirit of Love." During 1919, the first full year of peace, many other victory pageants were written by women, although none equaled the magnificence of Forrest's "Washington Community Pageant." In fact, most of them were unpretentious, and there is no evidence that they were even presented as community productions. Rather, they may have been written as exercises to be used by schools, local organizations, and camps to celebrate patriotic holidays. These pageants reviewed the events of the war; praised the many contributors to victory, such as the men in the armed forces, the Red Cross, the Land Army, the Girl and Boy Scouts, even Liberty Bonds and Thrift Stamps; and glorified America and the victory that she had won. When Fannie Rebecca Buchanan wrote Daughters of Freedom: A Patriotic Ceremonial "for use in the various War Camp Community Service districts of greater New York," she purposely kept it simple, because she planned it "for presentation by business and industrial girls who have not time for the rehearsals and practice necessary in the production of dramatics requiring the spoken word." Basically a tableau, Buchanan's ceremonial presented characters illustrating the countries involved in the war. America, according to Buchanan's directions, was to be portrayed as a Red Cross nurse, from the "Albert Herter poster in the February Woman's Home Companion." 10 Similarly, Edith Burrows's Patriotic Pictures presented four uncom- plicated scenes that represented the four years of the war: 1914-1915, ''The Allies Gather'l; 1915-1916, "The Red Cross, Greatest Mother in the World"; 1916-1917, "America Awakes"; and 1917-1918, "Victory.n Victory is unquestionably the result of America's answering the call of her European allies: Yea, slow to wrath, but swift to smite, Arose our nation in her might, And 'gainst the tyrant's boastful pride, With sister countries, side by side, Fought the good fight till war was done, Till victory and peace were won. 11 1 Fannie Rebecca Buchanan, Daughters of Freedom, A Patriotic Ceremonial (New York: Samuel French, 1919). 11 Edith Burrows, Patriotic Pictures U. Fischer & Bros., 1919). Women and Pageantry 65 Two years later Burrows wrote Our Motherland, which was a bit more involved as it traced not the history of the war but the history of America, portraying in a series of eight episodes the colonization and development of the nation, the Civil War, the industrialization and growth in America during the nineteenth century, "The Time of Darkness, 1914-1919," and finally, "Victory and Peace." In the final episode Victorious Peace leads war workers, including the men of the military, the Red Cross, and the farmerettes in a pledge of loyalty to the flag. 12 These victory pageants served a need in the years right after the war ended. First, they provided some measure of appreciation to the American workers and soldiers who had brought about the victory; and second, they glorified the nation at a time when it was undergoing a great deal of disruption and disillusionment. Although Americans probably did feel pride in their victory, already some people had doubts about the reasons for the war and about its long-lasting effect. Although these doubts are not expressed overtly in the texts of these early postwar pageants, neither is there any assurance that the tremendous sacrifice of men and money would guarantee a peace that would last forever. Only one pageant written in 1919 showed a real feeling of unity and the expectation of a lasting peace. The Hope of the World by Sadie Brewster is similar to the other pageants of that year in tracing the events of the war and the response of America, but it ends with Peace and Prophecy foreseeing a better future. 13 Perhaps it was still too soon in 1919 for many pageant writers to look far beyond the immediate present, but during the next decade women did write pageants that predicted the inevitability of a peaceful world. These pageants, like the ones written by women pacifists before the war, expressed a faith that eternal peace was possible if men would just follow their conscience and the advice of women. 12 Edith Burrows, Our Motherland (Philadelphia: The Penn Publ ishing Co., 1921). 13 Sadie B. Brewster, The Hope of the World, a Pageant (Brooklyn: T.J . McEvoy, 1919). Geoffrey Perrett comments that, during the twenties, " There was a general conviction that another war, even bloodier than the last was inevitable," (America in the Twenties, 147). He refers the reader to articles in popular magazines, such as Frederick Palmer, "Where the Next European War Will Start," Harper's (November 1925). 66 BZOWSKI PAGEANTS OF INTERNATIONALISM Throughout the decade of the twenties many women realized that something must be done to ensure a permanent peace, and they truly believed that it was up to the women of the country to do it. just as in prewar years, they began by forming their own organizations: the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Women's Peace Society, the Women's Peace Union, and the National Committee on Causes and Cure of War. Although these organizations often disagreed on tactics and on whether or not to support the League of Nations, all were founded with an explicit assertion that women possessed a special understanding that was necessary to bring peace to the world and an implicit belief that men could not be trusted to keep the nation from another war. Women must unite as "the mothers of the world" to revolt against man-made wars and insist on world peace. As one impassioned woman wrote in the New York Times: If I could gather into one voice the voices of all the mothers of the world, I would cry aloud in trumpet tones to all the Govern- ments of the world. "This is the last war the women of the world will help to fight. If the man-handled Governments of the world continue to -prepare for wars in the expectation of using up the lives of our sons in their conflicts, they are hereby fore- warned that not a woman of us all will give aid and godspeed when the call to arms comes, and we will teach our daughters this revolt against war, world without end." 14 One way that women disseminated their message of peace was through their pageants. Even though their prewar peace pageants had failed to prevent the conflict, women still believed that dramatic creations could influence people to ad in a peaceful manner. Despite the government's refusal to join the League of Nations, most women who wrote pageants 14 Margarita A. Stewart, New York Times, 20 Apri l 1921, 12. For a history of the WILPF see Catherine Foster, Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); for the WPU see Harriet Alonso, The Woman's Peace Union and the Outlawry of War, 1921-1942 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); for the NCCCW see Susan Zeiger, " Finding a Cure for War: Women's Politi cs and the Peace Movement in the 1920s," journal of Social History 24 (1990): 69-86. For an article that deals with the problems faced by feminist peace groups during the 1920s see joan Jensen, "All Pink Sisters: The War Department and the Feminist Movement in the 1920s," in Decades of Discontent: The Women 's Movement, 7920-7940, ed. Lois Scharf and Joan M. jensen (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 199-222. Women and Pageantry 67 during the twenties envisioned America as the leader of some kind of international organization. These women conveyed their faith in international unity and equality of all nations as the path to peace, at the same time, however, that they portrayed America as the savior of the world, implying that it was superior to other nations. One of the earliest pageants to promote international ism after the war was written by Ethel Allen Murphy, an English teacher at the Girls' High School, Louisville, Kentucky. In 1919 she wrote The Triumph of Humanity: A Pageant of Victory, Reconstruction, and Democracy, which was issued by the Woman's Committee Council of National Defense, Kentucky Division. 15 Designed to be performed by school children from sixth grade through high school, the pageant shows "symbolically the story of Tyranny's downfall and Humanity's triumph and of America's far- reaching activities, with a vision of Reconstruction and the World League of Peace." The first two episodes are typical: Tyranny, War and Death seize control over Humanity and are then overcome by Right, Liberty and Love led by the Allied nations, especially America. They are aided by YWCA, Camp Service, Liberty Bonds, the American Library Association, and War Mother, dressed in a classical white gown with purple drapery, a gold star in her hair and carrying a service flag. The last episode shows "Humanity Triumphant," a scene in which Humanity clothed in the Mantle of Democracy, flanked by Peace and Life, is approached by the Nations of the Earth, both the old nations and the new ones. The number of new nations is deliberately left vague, since it was still not known how many there would be. The nations are joined by Childhood and Hope as children dance their ethnic folk dances and everyone lifts hands to the Eternal. This pageant was but one of many written by women from 1919 to 1929 promoting international cooperation and understanding in order to create a lasting worldwide peace. Many of these pageants were written for children. As the nurturers of the young, women were only too aware of their responsibility to promote tolerance and global unity among the next generation of citizens in order to prevent any. recurrence of war in future years. Florence Brewer Boeckel, the Education Director of the National Council for the Prevention of War (NCPW), publ ished a guide titled A Handbook for Peace Workers, which acknowledged the importance of "Fetes and pageants, performances of music; in fact, all appeals to the artistic sense that will encourage a mutual knowledge of 15 Ethel Allen Murphy, The Triumph of Humanity: A Pageant of Victory, Reconstruction, and Democracy, William Chauncy Langdon Papers, john Hay Library, Brown University. The following description and quotations are from this source. 68 BZOWSKI different civilizations and peoples." 16 She recommended using national holidays, such as Armistice Day, Columbus Day, and Goodwill Day (18 May, the anniversary of the opening of the First Hague Peace Conference in 1899), to teach children the spirit of international cooperation. She published two volumes of plays and activities for -children called Books of Goodwill for the NCPW, an organization that was instrumental in publishing pageants, programs, and songs to be used in schools and youth groups. Hazel MacKaye, a leading innovator in pageantry during the prewar years, as well as an active suffragist and pacifist, also contributed a children's pageant as a celebration for Good Will Day, Good Will, the Magician, a Peace Pageant for Children, written for the National Child Welfare Association and the NCPW. The character Good Will introduces the children of many lands to each other and sings: In hearts too young for enmity There I ies the way to make men free; When childrens friendships are world-wide New ages will be glorified. Let child love child, and strife will cease. Disarm the hearts, for that is Peace. 17 So many pageants about international peace were written during the twenties, aimed at both children and adults, that it seemed that America would never go to war again. Sometimes the pageants traced the worldwide development of civilization from prehistory to the present. At other times they commemorated some major historical moments of peace in world history, thereby giving credit for peace to humanity rather than to any particular nations. Where individual nations were represented, the emphasis was usually on the cumulative contribution of all, but even here America was singled out for special praise. For instance, Maud C. Newberrys The Gifts of Nations, a Pageant for Rural Schools, traces the development of democracy and civilization from the Greeks to modern times, with particular emphasis on the contributions of the Allied nations-Italy, England, France, and Holland. America, the culmination 16 Fiorence Brewer Boeckel, Between War and Peace: A Handbook for Peace Workers (New York: Macmillan Co., 1928), 64. 17 Hazel MacKaye, Good Will, the Magician, a Peace Pageant for Children, Harris Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University. For more on MacKaye see Tackel , "Women and American Pageantry"; Bzowski, " ' Torchbearers of the Earth' : Women, Pageantry, and World War I"; and Karen). Blair, " Pageantry for Women's Rights: The Career of Hazel MacKaye, 1913-1 923," Theatre Survey, 31 (May 1990): 23-46. Women and Pageantry 69 of all these efforts, accepts the gifts of the other nations and returns them to the world through her own inventions, her agriculture, and her participation in the war. 18 In the majority of these postwar pageants there is a rallying of the countries that were involved in the war (although Germany is not very often depicted) and a mutual resolution to put aside disagreements and follow Peace, or Christ, who is the personification of Peace. 19 Again, despite the emphasis on equality among nations, America is singled out for a special role. Many times in such pageants America is given one of the few speaking parts, and her words are the most serious and moving in the pageant. (America in the abstract is almost invariably a woman, as is Peace.) Some of these pageants were obviously written as propaganda or praise for the League of Nations. Esther Willard Bates shows the countries of the world coming together in her A Pageant of the League of Free Nations. Although many of the nations join for selfish reasons, America's reasons are purely selfless. She sees this league as a mere extension of the family: And now that we have suffered, All with each and each with all, can we not, too, Build our great hall of government and dwell, As once the Family, the Town, the State, In One Great League, which shall in God's good time, Take all the world? 20 Because the pageants promote internationalism they are usually generous in their portrayal of all the nations; some even accept a contrite 16 Maud C. Newberry, The Gifts of Nations, a Pageant of Rural Schools (Washing- ton, D.C. : Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, 1923). See also Winifred Ayres Hope, Horizons, a Pageant Play in the Interests of International Amity (Katonah, N.Y.: published by the author, 1926); Dorothy Elderdice, The Sheathing of the Sword, a Pageant of Peace (publ ished by the author, 1922); Alice CD. Riley, The Brotherhood of Man, a Pageant of International Peace (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1924); and Mabel Wain, Conquests of Peace, a Pageant (The Lyceum and Chataqua Managers Assoc., 1922). 19 1t is almost impossible to separate the peace pageants from the Christian mi ssionary movement. Most of the women who wrote these pageants saw the connection between Christianity and pacifism as vital and indisputabl e. 20 Esther Willard Bates, A Pageant of the League of Free Nations (Boston: Joi nt Committee for a League of Free Nati ons, September 1919). 70 BZOWSKI Germany in the league. However, a few do suggest that some discrimi- nation existed even in the midst of good fellowship. For instance, in Madeleine Sweeny Miller's The Fruits of Peace Japan is described as "not a 'yellow peril' but a nation of human beings in whose hearts, as in those of most of humanity there can be discovered some of the yellow gold of good will." And in Honor at the Bar by Elizabeth M. Bartlett, at a _Convention of Nations, Turkey is portrayed as a comic, clumsy character dressed in baggy pants and a turban. He announces, "Our beloved ruler bade me say to you first of all that Turkey would have gladly fought by the side of the Allies in the late war [loud whisper] had we known they would win!" Later he even pulls a knife on Uncle Sam. 21 In the first years after the war many people believed that America would join the League of Nations and provide her leadership to the world. However, with America's refusal to participate and its endorse- ment of isolationism rather than internationalism, the League was doomed almost from the start to be nothing but a symbol. Nonetheless, the peace groups worked on in their efforts to prevent any future wars, and they did not diminish their faith in the League throughout the twenties. Esse V. Hathaway celebrated the tenth anniversary of the League of Nations with a pageant titled The March of the Nations, setting forth the accomplishments of the League over the previous decade in the areas of health, human welfare, disarmament, financial reconstruction, security, and boundary disputes. In a review of the years, this pageant also shows the new hope among pacifists at the end of the 1920s that the recently signed Kellogg-Briand Pact (in which eventually sixty-two nations agreed to outlaw war) would truly bring a lasting peace. In the pageant, the pact is presented to the Spirit of the League of Nations by World Security in the year 1929. The pageant ends with the Spirit of the League saying: For what these past ten years have done our hearts are fi lied with gratitude, for on that work we have a hope for better understand- ing among the peoples of the earth. Through that understanding we have faith the world will come at last to be secure and find 21 Madeleine Sweeny Miller, The Fruits of Peace: A Pageant for Young People (New York: The Methodist Book Concern, 1925); Elizabeth M. Bartlett, Honor at the Bar, a Civic Drama (Norwood, Mass.: Ambrose Press, Inc. , 1922). Women and Pageantry a sounder peace-a-peace that never can be broken. May power be given us to bring this gift to all mankind. 22 PEACE PAGEANTS 71 Women pacifists realized that internationalism was not the only means of eliminating war. They also understood that peace begins at home. In another group of pageants women looked less at relations between nations than at some of the more hidden reasons contributing to their own nation's unrest. In these pageants women renewed their prewar pacifist awareness that many" institutions contribute to the dangers of militarism and to disturbances that may lead to violence and dissen- sion throughout the nation. Because they believed that war damages the whole body of society, women argued that it must be eliminated as decisively as any physical disease. In 1926 Constance D'Arcy Mackay wrote another pageant, America Triumphant: A Pageant of Patriotism, to be used for patriotic holidays. Although the wars of the past are presented in this pageant, by this time there is no glory in them. The horror of war was too evident by 1926. Similarly, the villains that must be vanquished are no longer as tangible as an evil nation or an inhuman Hun, but instead are incorporeal. Science admonishes America: "Yours, too, America, Greed, Ignorance, Poverty, Disease threatening the ways of your life. One half the energy and wealth you spend on war used against these would bring true Freedom." America, ashamed, cries out passionately, "Oh, War, cease from all other wars! Make war on these." The pageant ends with War, Arts and Sciences joining together to vanquish these ancient scourgesY In the same vein, but from a different perspective, Miller's The Fruits of Peace shows the benefits of a world at peace, free of all the evils that attend war. Spirit of Peace shows the youth of the world the abundance that can be theirs if war is ended-the fruits of the harvest, good health, Christian education. At the end of this pageant the audience is asked to 22 Esse V. Hathaway, The March of the Nations (New York: Committee for the Tenth Anniversary of the League of Nations, 1929). For another pageant that extols a "League of Peace" and a "Court of Law" see Clover Hartz Seelig, The Choice, a Peace Pageant (192?), Harris Collection, john Hay Library, Brown University. 23 Constance D'Arcy Mackay, America Triumphant: A Pageant of Patriotism (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1926). This pageant is unique because it portrays War as a female, described as "like a streak of flame, in scarlet, tattered, wind-blown draperi es, with wildly floating maenad-like red hair and reaching arms ... a red domino mask over her burning eyes." 72 BZOWSKI recite the "Warless World Creed of Federated Council of Churches of Christ in America" and dedicate themselves to follow God's moral law, offer unselfish service, and work for Christian internationalism and a warless world. 24 These pageants that promoted pacifism in a more abstract way than just a call for a league of nations sometimes showed a sophisticated awareness of the internal enemies of peace within America itself. All was not right in paradise, and the women who wrote these pageants, whether because of their belief in peace or their faith in Christianity, felt called upon to show the nation its flaws. It is sometimes surprising to find in the midst of these allegorical presentations outspoken references to labor disputes, discrimination toward certain nationalities, and fears of socialistic or communistic takeovers. Women pageant writers did not hesitate to show that Americans did not always practice what they preached. While many people espoused tolerance of all nations and nationalities, they sometimes showed a disturbing tendency to discriminate against particular ethnic groups. In Daughters of Liberty, Lura Warner Callin first praises the nation for its fairness in dealing with its ethnic mix and providing schools and a just legal system for all. But in the last scene she shows her concern for certain groups-such as the Negro, the Indian, the Polish and Italian who call out for the blessings of education and freedom but are ignored. In this pageant Columbia, shamed by these unanswered calls, enlists the Daughters of Liberty to light torches and spread their light to the world. 25 Even more surprising in the postwar pageants is the suggestion of labor unrest and unfair employment practices that disturb the picture of a peaceable nation. Fanny Ursula Payne included The Highway of the King, "a pageant play of the rise of the common man," in her 1919 collection of Plays and Pageants of Democracy. In this play Andrew, who represents Everyman, travels the highways of the past and the present and finally the future. There he finds working men rebelling against Capital . and demanding better pay and working conditions. Working women demand more safety and cleanliness on the job and a chance for their children to play rather than work. Andrew, the common man, becomes king and calls on Arbitration, Liberty and justice to settle 24 Miller, The Fruits of Peace. 25 Lura Warner Callin, Daughters of Liberty: a Pageant (New York: Lorenz Publishing Co., 1923). Women and Pageantry 73 the disputes between Labor and Capital. The pageant ends with the entrance of Peace, Love and Joy. 26 Adria Barkuloo deals briefly with ethnic discrimination in her pageant, My America, but she is even more explicit about other fai I ures of her country. One character explains what the nation needs: Love that makes a nation work together for the common good; love for my neighbor that means not exploitation but my recognition of his right to live in comfort, receiving a decent wage for his labor. Love for little children that makes me see that they must be freed from the curse of hazardous, harmful, unhealthful labor, which will hamper them in their endeavor to become happy, useful men and womenY Barkuloo ends her pageant by challenging Religion and Industry to work together to instill the golden rule in the work place. At the end America is confident that all these problems can be eliminated by her handmaid- ens, ''the Christian womanhood of our dear land." Another pageant that promotes tolerance of all nationalities in America also shows that such tolerance is more an ideal than a reality. In Florence M. Eldridge's The Growth of a Nation, the Spirit of a National Ideal is confronted by Japanese, Negroes, Child Laborers, Day Laborers, and Working Girls who describe their mistreatment in America. The Spirit then speaks out about the failure of the country: America, wili you, too, drive me on? Have you forgotten the ideals that quickened people's hearts When first they sought these shores? Have you forgotten the different races that fought as one And founded this republic? America, I look across your land, Ordained to brotherhood and service, And I see childhood debased. On every side, I hear intoiPrance's voice Mouthing insidious lies on creed, On thought, on race. 26 Fanny Ursula Payne, "The Highway of the King" in Plays and Pageants of Democracy. cl Adria D. Barkuloo, My America: A Pageant (Cincinnati: The Woman's Home Missionary Society, 192?J. In this pageant a Jew, a Negro, and an Indian complain of the discrimination they face. .. 74 Class division and racial pride Are building deadly walls Of hate and strife, unless I still intolerance's voice What can I do? Justice and Goodwill Are not enough! 28 BZOWSKI However, according to the ending of this pageant, Justice and Goodwill , along with Understanding and Love, will prove enough in the future. Even in Bates's A Pageant of the League of Free Nations, which ostensibly depicts a world of unity, there is a disturbing admission of conflict. The League is threatened by Autocracy and his henchman Anarchy, who maintain they are abetted by Labor. Anarchy claims credit for the labor unrest in every land: For I foment thy strikes, Shootings and riots, bombing, the Black Hand Hiding the red. Aha, you cannot kill me,- For ten lives grow from every one that's slain. To woo Labor to his side Anarchy offers him "the very world .. . the equal distribution of wealth." His methods of attaining this wealth will be: So simple! A riot here! A mill put to the torch, and then The road made easy; arm the mob; Machine guns at the corner,- And thou shalt all the earth inherit, So thou destroy it first- But Labor refuses Anarchy, saying his job is to build, not destroy. He pledges to defend the League, but he also issues his demands, which include an eight-hour work day, one day off a week, the right to organize, a living wage, an end to child labor, equal pay for men and women doing equal work, and fairness to foreign-born workers. As all the countries agree to his demands, Labor saves their lives when Anarchy tries to throw a bomb. Even Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey renounce Autocracy and join the League but only after facing Truth. 26 Fiorence M. Eldridge, The Growth of a Nation (New York: The Womans Press, 1926). Women and Pageantry 75 What is common in all these pageants of peace and internationalism is the hopefulness at the end. No matter how serious the international or national problem may be, it can be overcome with love, understanding and, particularly, womanly reason. Surely, the writers implied, a world that had undergone the butchery of the past war, would never allow itself to follow the path to military action again. Unfortunately, as we know from the perspective of the 1990s, all these pageants intended to educate and influence humanity and to glorify internationalism could not prevent history from repeating itself. The hopefulness expressed in these pageants of the twenties was short-lived. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and the world began its unbroken slide into another war. As one historian said, "In a broad sense, collective security died and World War II was born in 1931 on the wind-swept plains of Manchuria." 29 The worsening world situation was certainly evident by 1934 when another pageant, The Summoning of the Nations, a Short Pageant of the Changing World, was written by Elizabeth Woodbridge Morris under the auspices of the league of Nations. This pageant included a quote from playwright Charles Rann Kennedy on its cover, revealing all too clearly that the pleas for international understanding, a league of right-minded nations, and the outlawry of war had failed. However, even at this late date, there was still the hope that pageants could influence people toward peace. This eloquent and moving plea for a New Deal among the nations is written in a form so simple as to be well within the dramatic capacity of any amateur group. In view of the present world emergency, it should be put on AT ONCE in every church, school, club, and public playground throughout the land. 30 Perhaps then, the women who wrote peace pageants after World War I were left with what they had before the war began, nothing but a reliance on their own womanhood, motherhood and a belief in Christian pacifism. Men had failed again; even internationalism had failed. Perhaps the best women could do was to continue insisting that their unique female view be considered in world diplomacy. Two postwar 29 Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant, A History of the Republic (Boston: D.C. Heath Co., 1956), 829. 30 Eiizabeth Woodbridge Morris, The Summoning of the Nations, a Short Pageant of the Changing World, written under the auspices of the League of Nations Association, Inc. (New York: Samuel French, 1934). 76 BZOWSKI pageants seem to suggest this. The Way of Peace, a Pageant by Laura Scherer Copenhaver, Katharine Scherer Cronk, and Ruth Mougey Worrell presents mothers and children as the providers of happiness and as the voices calling for peace: Let the mothers of earth cry out for Peace, Say ye to the rulers, Wars must cease; For the sake of the hopeless mothers who mourn For the sake of the children yet unborn 31 Although the nations of the world presented in this pageant speak of peace, they do not cease their nationalistic songs and marches. The authors show that Militarism is certainly not the answer. Nor are Industrialism, Science, Education, or the Artsl an of which can be coerced to join the cause of war. Only the spirit of Christ along with the wisdom of Motherhood can change them into implements of peace. The voice of Motherhood, like the rushing of a mighty wind, spreads over the thrones and council halls of earth. Before it are swept the clamor of selfish state-craft and the hysteria of fear. The nations meet in friendly courts where justice rules and where the voice of wisdom speaks in the spirit of co-operation. The hands of men meet, not in hate, but in brotherhood, and the disputes of men and of nations are settled, not by gunpowder and steel and poison gas but by just and friendly councilsY And finally, at the time that the peace organizations must have realized that their efforts were going to fail again, Marion Holbrook wrote The Distaff-A Pageant Play of Woman 's Progress. This pageant was predominantly a history of great women, beginning with Sappho and continuing to the most recent times, showing women's professional and political gains. Although it did not really deal with the issue of war and peace, the fina:'l episode reveals the Woman of the Future who is synonymous with Peace. Her words serve as a summary of the faith shown throughout the peace pageants from 1914 to the end of the 1920s that women, not men in power, and not governments or institutions, but only women offer hope for the future: 31 Laura Scherer Copenhaver, Katharine Scherer Cronk, and Ruth Mougey Worrell, The Way of Peace, a Pageant (Philadelphia: Women' s Missionary Society, 1924). 32 /bid. Women and Pageantry 77 WOMAN OF THE FUTURE: I am that deathless hope of all the world whom men call "peace." When shall I come to walk the earth forever? Angels heralded my coming once, but men rejected me. For when Peace comes to earth, men must give up so much that they hold dear. I ask a sacrifice they wi II not make-a sacrifice of power and vainglory. My symbols are the pen, the plough, the star (with outstretched hands). Take them, and with your minds and hands and hearts make you the sacrifice. I shall be waiting for you in the future. ALL WOMEN: (with arms outstretched) We come! We come! We have been seeking you throughout the ages. 0 Peace, we seek you still! 33 In the decade after the end of World War I women continued to write pageants with renewed purpose, even though pageantry itself changed during this decade. The great community pageants of the teen years of America were over. Except for some magnificent victory celebrations, most cities in the United States did not present any more pageants that drew upon all the resources of the community. During the twenties, pageantry, like so many aspects of American life, became commercialized as large companies such as the John B. Rogers Producing Company of Fostoria, Ohio, provided ready-made pageants that could be rented out to any community that wanted them. Most communities that did continue to present dramatic shows of their own changed from the one-time form of the pageant to the yearly portrayal of some event of local interest presented in a historical festival. 34 The writing of pageants did not end, however. Women in particular kept the art alive, but the pageants that they wrote during the twenties were designed more for presentation in schools and as celebrations of national holidays than as the massive outdoor spectacles of the prewar years. Women also kept the cause of peace alive through their pageants. After the glow of victory had worn off, women wrote pageants that called for serious efforts to achieve an international league of nations. In their pageants they also recognized the need for justice toward ethnic groups and economic classes within the country. And, finally, women never lost their faith in themselves, as women, to serve as instruments of peace. Although the woman of the late twenties had traveled a long way from 33 Marion Holbrook, The Distaff-A Pageant Play of Woman's Progress (1931 ?), Harris Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University. 34 See Glassberg for the best summary of the demise of the community pageant. 78 BZOWSKI her foremothers of the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, she retained her belief in " Womanhood" to provide the torch that would light the world to peace. journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Fall 199 5) Alan Schneider on Broadway 1 GERALD WEALES Whether CHfford Odets praised the potential of film or damned the influence of movies depended usually on whether he was. heading for Hollywood or coming home to New York. Alan Schneider was more consistent in his attitude toward Broadway. The intensity of his language did change, however, according to the occasion. In Entrances, that spirited account of his career up to the mid-1960s, he called Broadway "that rather rancidj ungle" and put flesh on the metaphor with the stories. he had to tell. Falling somewhere between recolfectron in tranquility and a look back in anger, Entrances was written after more than a decade of infrequent and disastrous returns to Broadway, but even when Schneider was successfully clearing a space for himself in that "rancid jungle," he knew that Broadway was not a likely home for " the impossible possible theatre" for which he worked, of which he dreamed. When his first Broadway production, The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker, was midway in its successful run, he used an interview in the New York Times (21 March 1954) to indicate how Broadways's cash consciousness affected the mounting of a play. "You wake up every day and you think: 'My God! There's $75,000 tied up in this!'" During the run of Anastasia, his second hit, he told Emory Lewis in Cue (7 May 1955), "Broadway itself is not so much a theatre as a series of shows, with each production the same dice game routine-hit or flop gambling." In the years that followed, as escalating costs made Pennypacker's $75,000 sound like petty cash, Schneider continued in interviews, speeches, and articles to condemn "a system concerned with prices but not with values; with profit not benefit; that recognizes only success or failure not achievement; that plays a vicious game of Russian roulette with talents and I ives and work; that always ends by corrupting its own eaters and eating its own corruption." Those are Schneider' s words, his contribution to one of those symposia that the New York Times Arts and Leisure section used to dote on. It was 1969; only six new plays had 1 0 rigi nall y prepared for presentation at the Alan Schneider Conference at the University of Wisconsin, 8-11 March 1990. 80 WEALES opened by 23 November and the Times asked, "Has Broadway Had It?" Schneider answered, "Not yet," and then went on to explain why. it was "just a matter of time." His explanation-the description of the system I have just quoted-is pure Schneider, but so, too, was the " Not yet. " Back in 1963, despite the success of his " present enterprise'' (Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), he gave an acid characterization of Broadway practices in a lecture at the University of Texas in which he said that Broadway theatre "appeals to the lowest common denominator" but added " and I know I have been a part of it and am a part of it. " Schneider's relationship to Broadway, then, is more complex than his vigorous and generally accurate diagnoses of its ills suggest. He knew Broadway was a demirep, but he had a lech for the old girl. What's more, he thought that the love of a good man could reform her although whenever they got together, she turned out to be as demanding and difficult as she had always been. But he did keep coming back-28 times between 1953 (Pennypacker) and 1980 (The Lady from Dubuque). Thirty times, if you count the limited run at the ANTA Theatre of his " Salute to France" production of The Skin of Our Teeth (1955) and the Helen Hayes The Glass Menagerie at the City Center (1956), but neither of these shows was fueled by the standard Broadway desire-to run forever and to make everyone involved rich and happy. Before I consider Schneider's Broadway shows, let me enter a caveat. It may seem odd in a discussion of a celebrated director, but I cannot say much about his directorial contributions to the hits and flops that make up his Broadway career. If I had consulted his preparatory notes on these productions, which I assume rest secure in some archive or other, I might have been able to sort out the contributions of author, director, and performer. Schneider would have been the last man to trust a critic's eye or his memory. Back in 1948, after his first New York production, Schneider had a piece in the New York Times (8 August), in which, borrowing a remark from GeorgeS. Kaufman, he insisted that only the playwright and the director know who does what to a production. In preparation for this paper, I read through the dai ly reviews of all Schneider's Broadway shows-a sobering experience-and it is clear that reviewers do not have the ability or the space or the inclination to talk about direction. For the most part, Schneider was ignored or handed a meaningless compliment. Reviewers would occasionally get specifi c for a sentence or two, but as often as not even these would edge into the amorphous; see Martin Gottfried's ritual attacks on Schneider in Women's Wear Daily. Richard Watts, in the New York Post, a sometimes perceptive and usually congenial reviewer, provides a perfect example of how to kill a director with kindness. In his review of Ballad of the Sad Cafe (31 October 1963), Watts wrote, " Alan Schneider's direction and Alan Schneider 81 Ben Edwards's set are helpful." In his notices for Tiny Alice (30 December 1964), and Box-Mao-Box (1 October 1968), he used almost exactly the same words, substituting William Ritman for Ben Edwards, of course. My favorite critical nod to Schneider comes from Whitney Bolton's review of You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running (Morning Telegraph, 15 March 1967): "Alan Schneider's direction has the sure-footedness of a puma on the prowl." To be fair to the reviewers, I should mention that, although Entrances has much about the pains and the occasional pleasures of getting a play on stage, Schneider says very little about the details of production. In 1963, for Alan Levy's profile of him in the New York Times Magazine (20 October), Schneider deplored obvious inventiveness from directors and said, "I really am my most satisfied when nobody knows I was there at all." Schneider's first "sort of Broadway" production came in 1948, a staging for ANTA's Experimental Series of A Long Way Home, the Randolph Goodman-Walter Carroll transfer of The Lower Depths to a black flophouse in the South. "This was my introduction to the New York syndrome," Schneider says in Entrances, "The maneuvering that goes on along the sidelines, the double-talk, the sparring for every possible advantage, the playing of one person off another." Although the notices were not at all bad, Schneider says that ANT A. abandoned him and the play, and he returned to Catholic University, to the summer theatres where he usually worked and finally to the new Arena Stage. It was more than five years before he made his real Broadway debut-with the "wrong play," as he says in Entrances. He had optioned Robert Anderson's All Summer Long and persuaded Zelda Fichandler to let him stage it at the Arena as a prelude to Broadway production, only to watch the plans collapse when Brooks Atkinson's favorable review (New York Times, 29 January 1953) doubted that so slight a play could go on Broadway. Enter The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker. All Summer Long did make it to Broadway in 1954, presumably because Tea and Sympathy had been such a hit, but it lingered for only a couple of months. Had Schneider been the kind of theatre professional who made judicious career choices and had he known what he had in Pennypacker, Liam O'Brien's comedy would have been the proper debut for Broadway and not simply a happy accident. By the mid-1960s, after his baptism by Samuel Beckett, Schneider had become adamant about the primacy of the playwright in production. "What a director does do is try to understand what the playwright wants to say. . .the play should be the star," he told an interviewer in 1964 (Gaslight Review, January). A year earli er, Edward Albee told Alan Levy that Schneider's "main concern is with getting the playwright's work on 82 WEALES the stage the way the playwright intended it. " In the mid-1950s, however, working in the theatre in which Elia Kazan and Joshua Logan were the directorial stars, Schneider had less compunction about fixing a playwright's work. In an appearance at the Overseas Press Club in 1965, he said that he and Robert Whitehead had written the last act of Pennypacker, and he has a funny scene in Entrances in which the director and the producer, like the loony screenwriters in Boy Meets Girl, improvise the last act while the ostensible author takes down their gems on the typewriter. "Mr. O'Brien supplies the kind of solution that would melt the hardest heart, " wrote Brooks Atkinson in his review of the "uproarious show" (New York Times, 31 December 1953). In another mild mea culpa in 1971, Schneider told Emory Lewis (Piayfare, May) that Anastasia was "an inferior script, and only important for that wonderful recognition scene in the final act. [He meant in the second act.] There I did try to improve matters and to add a thing or two. But generally this is the wrong approach." Of changes in that scene, he says in Entrances only that he persuaded Guy Bolton to make a few cuts. He says, too, that he worked on rewrites with Lorenzo Semple Jr., on his adaptation of jacques Deval's Tonight in Samarkand (1955), but the magic of Pennypacker had melted away. As late as 1965, he was making suggestions to Joe Orton about "cutting or rewriting his script [Entertain- ing Mr. Sloan] for American consumption, "but presumably by then he was doing it for the sake of the play and not in quest of "the biggest hit of the season," which he said was all the producers wanted of Samarkand. "I was now a real Broadway director," he said in Entrances, at the end of the chapter on Anastasia. "And now I felt that I had 'made it' with something approaching quality material." He had made it with a period comedy (Pennypacker) and a romantic melodrama (Anastasia) , both of which he accepted reluctantly, and despite the brief run of All Summer Long, which, however diffuse and sentimental, was his own choice. I was not yet a professional playgoer in those days, but I did see all three of Schneider's frrst Broadway productions. The one that I remember best is Pennypacker-its atmosphere, not its details. A notoriously amiable play, it bathed audiences in benignity. At intermission, playgoers did not do the usual instant dissections; they stood around, smiling, as though they had been hypnotized by good feeling. I recently re-read the play and found it an efficient comedy, but an unlikely vehicle to carry the heavy load of geniality that I recall. I like to think that the prowling puma, had a lot to do with that lobby full of good humor. At this point, Schneider was primed for success as a conventional director, " the poor man's josh Logan," as he says in Entrances. Even a mistake like Tonight in Samarkand was not likely to hold him back; Alan Schneider 83 everyone is allowed his flops-or "errors of judgement," as Schneider calls them, his tongue only slightly in his cheek. In the Times Magazine profile, written when Schneider was riding high with Virginia Woolf, Alan Levy tells how the director's first Broadway success stopped cold for two reasons. Mary Martin, annoyed that Helen Hayes was getting more laughs that she was in the Paris production of The Skin of Our Teeth, hired her own director to second-guess Schneider before the play filled its American engagements. Waiting for Godot, which Schneider had so much wanted to direct, became a painful, if farcical, disaster when the producer, selling Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell as stars, tried to package Beckett for the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami. After the Codot fiasco in 1956, he had only three Broadway shows in the next six years. All of them were flops, although only two of them were what I would call errors of judgment. Hugh Mills's The Little Glass Clock (1956), a bogus French farce that Schneider did just for the money, and Howard Teichmann's Miss Lonelyhearts (1957), a wooden adaptation of Nathaniel West's novel, probably deserved their quick closings, although Teichmann's play was at least attempting to deal with serious material. The third Schneider offering was Shimon Wincelberg's Kataki (1959L a good play and a good production that, in a better world, would have lasted for more than twenty performances. Kataki is a World War II piece, a two-character work in which an American .. and a Japanese soldier find themselves isolated on an island in the Pacific and form a community of sorts-not a simple accomplishment since they do not speak each others's language. Brooks Atkinson (New York Times, 10 Apri I 1959) found the American "monumentally uninteresting," which may be one reason the show folded, and Walter Kerr's review (New York Herald Tribune, 10 April) was mainly a love letter to Sessue Hayakawa, who played the Japanese soldier. For me, the play's strength was the weakness Atkinson found in it. Essentially a long monologue, beautifully performed by Ben Piazza, the play is all Alvin-a nice guy, a slob, a bigot, a bit of an idiot. His verbal shifts, from self-pity to braggadocio, from important matters to trivialities, from accusation to buddy-buddy chat, give the play a richness that the plot and situation cannot command. I do not know what Schneider did exactly, but he kept his two characters working off each other so effectively that a gimmick play became a truthful one. Kataki , which would have been more comfortable in a small house, really belonged off-Broadway, and it was there or in regional theatres that Schneider was doing the work that helped define him as a serious director. His productions of Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days had expunged the stain of the Miami Godot, and he had begun the long partnership with Edward Albee that would bring him back to 84 WEALES Broadway. In the early 1960s, he served for a year as drama critic on the New Leader. In the last of his New Leader pieces (4 March 1963), pondering the failure of Max Frische's Andorra and Jack Richardson's Lorenzo, he wondered if such plays "could serve the needs of an ultra- sophisticated, ultra-blase mass audience. Broadway's patrons are attuned to sensation, speed and sentimentality .. . The New York theatregoer is generally disinclined to allegory (sweet or sardonic), irony (bitter or otherwise), moral fervor, or poetry (whether subtle or overblown) ." The unusual thing about the review is that it was published more than three months after the opening of Who' s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when the play, pleasing that twice-ultra-ed audience, had clearly settled in for a long run. Perhaps it had sensation enough to make up for its irony, its moral fervor, its poetry, but the success of Virgina Woolf was the exception not the rule. As usual, Schneider had correctly diagnosed Broadway tastes and, not surprisingly, he would go on to make choices to confound Broadway expectations. "Since 'Virgina Woolf' opened a year ago, I've been offered more Broadway plays to direct than in my previous 10 years in New York, " Schneider told Alan levy. These included "practically every serious play that's being put on" and "almost every unintelligible and esoteric imitation of Be-ckett, Pinter, Albee or lonesco" (New York Times Magazine, 20 October 1963). Richard P. Cooke, reviewing The Birthday Party a few years later (Wall Street journal, 5 October 1967), called Schneider "a specialist in plays of non-meaning," and he seems to have meant the phrase positively. For the most part, what Schneider chose to do on Broadway in the 1960s was Albee. He did all of Albee's plays from Virginia Woolf to Box-Mao-Box, except for Albee's adaptation of Giles Cooper's Everything in the Garden and the musical Breakfast at Tiffany's, which closed during previews. The relationship between Albee and Schneider is too complex, too extended for consideration here; it deserves a paper-or a book-of its own. For an account of Schneider on Broadway, it is enough to say that the two men had one smash hit (Virginia W o o n ~ three respectable runs (Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Tiny Alice, A Delicate Balance), and two "errors of judgement" (Malcolm, Box-Mao-Box) . If Albee's work did not conform to Broadway's tastes as Schneider defined them in the New Leader, most of the director' s other choices in the mid-1960s were even less likely to ring chimes in the box office. Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloan, which has since come into its own, was an unpleasant surprise to most of the reviewers and largely unseen by New York audiences. It was gone after thirteen performances, but even so it lasted almost twice as long as Slapstick Tragedy (1966), the first Tennessee Williams work to suggest that the playwright might be Alan Schneider 85 forsaking Delta country for more experimental territory. The Williams double-bill is one of the few Schneider productions about which I am certain of my immediate reaction to the director. My review (The Reporter, 24 March 1966), which dismissed The Mutilated and seemed to like Gnadiges Fraulein, faulted Schneider for punching too hard for laughs in the latter play: by painting clown faces on Polly and Molly, for instance, and by making the pantomime dinner at the end so busy that it obscured the Fraulein's preparations for her race to the dock. In retrospect, I can see the logic of Schneider's choices. Clown makeup is only a visual extension of the way Williams conceived of the comic pair, a conception that recurs in so many of his plays (he described Flor and Bessie in The Rose Tattoo as ''two female clowns 11 ), and his stage direction in Fraulein says that the exit whistle is "delayed a bit for interior Still, I wonder if the grotesque comedy might have worked better if it had not so strenuously declared its cartoon quality. Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (1967) might seem to be one with the Orton and Williams plays, but at the time it came to Broadway, it was already popular around the country; Pinter had acquired an ardent band of admirers; and Schneider's off-Broadway productions-The Dumb- waiter, The Collection, The Lover-identified the playwright and the director as a winning pair. The Birthday Party ran for about four months although the people who came to it may not have .. been the usual Broadway audience. They, presumably, were busy with another Schneider offering, an anomaly among his 1960s directorial choices-Robert Anderson's You Know I Can/t Hear You When the Water's Running (1967) . In Entrances, Schneider calls Water a "fairly conventional new play, or rather four one-act and says that he was "mildly amused 11 when he first read them-comments that evince more enthusiasm than I felt when I saw them. He suggests that the production was risky because evenings of short plays were not what Broadway expected, a!though a revival of Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30 at the same time was a reminder that such a program had Broadway forbears. Not that the reception of Coward's anthology-originally or in re- vival-could have prepared anyone for the extent of Anderson's commercial triumph. Water ran for almost two years-Schneider' s greatest Broadway success and a testimony to the accuracy of his New Leaderpiece. Schneider and Anderson were together again the next year (1968) with I Never Sang for My Father, which one good irascible character could not save from stereotype. The play, which did well but never ran like Water, marked Schneider's last comfortable berth on Broadway. After that, it was disaster time. In 1971, in an excellent article in Arts in Society, Schneider wrote: "In the past two years, among other happy days, I've had three produc- 86 WEALES tions, at least one of them demonstrating work as good as any I' ve ever done, close in one night." These were Lyle Kessler's The Watering Place (1969), a bizarre play about a troubled family left more troubled by the visit of a soldier who had known the dead son in a Vietnam prison camp; La Strada (1969), a musical based on the Fell ini fi lm; and Blood Red Roses (1970), " a play with songs, " an anti-war piece with the Crimea as its setting, Vietnam as its target. While he was working on Blood Red Roses, he told Variety (4 February 1970), " I don't necessarily wait around for a masterpiece." Back in 1963, commenting on the theatricality and sensuousness of the genre, Schneider told Alan Levy, "I'd love to do a musical on Broadway" (New York Times Magazine, 20 October 1963). When he finally got around to it, either he failed or the material fai led him, as it did again in 1972 with the musical version of Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. During the string of one-night stands, he directed two other plays that quickly disappeared - from Broadway, that is, not from the world at large. Lanford Wilson's later reputation has kept The Gingham Dog (1969) alive-well, sort of-and Donald Freed's Inquest (1970) has found a place in the l iterature of the Rosenberg trial, if not in the American dramatic repertory. After Sidney Brustein, Schneider appeared i nfrequently on Broadway and with material he had done elsewhere. Michael Weller's Moonchildren and Elie Wiesel's Zalmen, or the Madness of God (1976) came from earlier productions at the Arena, and Preston jones's Texas Trilogy (1976) followed on a well-received run at the Kennedy Center in Washington. In his review in Women's Wear Daily (24 September 1976), Howard Kissel described the second of the Texas plays, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, as a nothing-happens play in the modernist mode, but he never followed through on his insight-if that is what it was. Given Schneider's reputation as Beckett' s American voice, it might have been amusing to contemplate the direction of the jones play as a product of the Beckett-Schneider alliance. Unhappi ly, I am not in a position to do that, since I did not see the production, but from what I know of the play-from television, from the page-Beckett does not seem to have been a major influence on jones. Although neither the play- wright nor the director may have thought so, with Texas Trilogy Schneider was back in Pennypacker country. There was a coda. In 1980, for the first time since Box-Mao-Box, Albee and Schneider were together again on Broadway with The Lady from Dubuque. Given the record of both men since the glory days of the mid-1960s, they were probably not surprised when the play closed after twelve performances. In his preface to Entrances, Albee says that Schneider "almost never directed a play he did not respect, and on those occasions when he persuaded himself that one was worthy when it was Alan Schneider 87 not, the results were calamitous." I am not sure whether Albee is speaking of the direction or the reception, but if the latter, there were calamities enough with material one might respect. The Lady from Dubuque for one. The story of Schneider on Broadway is the tale of a man caught in a love-hate relationship, wanting Broadway but wanting it to be better than it is and constantly discovering that it has no inclina- tion for reform. It is even more difficult to get an unconventional play on Broadway today than it was during Schneider's last years. I am sure, however, that-had he lived-he would have heard the siren song again and come back to the doxy with a fistful of wild flowers. After all , as Fred says in The Lady from Dubuque, "Where else can you come in this cold world, week after week, as regular as patchwork, and be guaranteed ridicule and contempt?" CONTRIBUTORS FREDA SCOTT GILES earned her Ph.D. in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate School and is now Associate Professor in the Department of Drama and Theatre at the Univer- sity of Georgia in Athens. She has previously contributed to ]ADT (VII: 1 ). CHARLES A. CARPENTER is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is working on a book on drama of the Nuclear Age. CRISTINA C. CARUSO is a Ph.D. candidate at the State University of New York at Albany. Her dissertation explores theoretical issues of horror in the American experience through texts ranging from Puritan sermons to the novels and films of Stephen King. BARBARA F. ACKER is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at Arizona State University in Tempe, and is vocal coach for the MFA acting program. She has previously published in the journal of Voice. FRANCES DIODATO BZOWSKI contributed several entries on American women playwrights to both the Cambridge Guide to World Theatre and the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. She was also the compiler of American Women Playwrights, 1900- 1930, published by Greenwood Press in 1992. Ms. Bzowski died in October 1995. GERALD WEALES is Professor Emeritus at the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He has previously contributed to }ADT (I: 1; IV: 1; and Vl:2, 3). 88 journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (Fall 1995) The Department of Eng I ish at New York University announces competition for The 1996 Joe A. Callaway Prize of $9,000 For the best book on Drama and Theatre by an American author Publishers are invited to send their nominated submissions (3 copies of each book) no later than 31 January 1996 to: Professor Una Chaudhuri , Department of Drama Tisch School of the Arts, New York University 721 Broadway, Room 301 New York, New York 10003 The award will be made by a panel of three distinguished professors in the fields of drama and theatre. Books nominated should have been pub I ished in 1994 or 1995 and should treat subjects in drama and theatre, including biography, criti cism, hi story, and theory. The Journal of American Drama The widely acclaimed journal devoted solely to drama and theatre in the USA - past and present. 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