THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 13, Number 1 Winter 2001

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

Edwin Wilson, Director

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY C ENTER OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

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

The journal of American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. Our aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre, and to encourage a more enlightened understanding of our literary and theatrical heritage. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes (rather than endnotes). Hard copies should be submitted in duplicate. We request that articles be submitted on disk as well (3.5" floppy), using WordPerfect for Windows or Microsoft Word format. Submissions 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 manuscript submissions to the Editors, jADT/Martin E . Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309. Our e-mail address is: mestc@gc.cuny.edu

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Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Copyright 2001

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

THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 13, Number 1

Winter 2001

Contents

LYNN MARIAN THOMSON,

The Crook Play

BYUNGHO HAN,

36

Korean Productions of A Streetcar Named Desire

GLENDA

E.

GiLL,

52

The Triumphs and Struggles of Earle Hyman in Traditional and Non-Traditional Roles
ROBERT COMBS, 73

Slaughtering Lambs: The Moral Universe of David Mamet and Wallace Shawn

JAMES

Pons,

82

Dubose Heyward and the Politics of Representation: A Mote in the Critical Eye

CONTRIBUTORS

99

journal of American Drama and Theatre 13 (Winter 2001)

THE CROOK PLAY

lYNN MARIAN THOMSON

Prologue
What appears to be new may simply be something that has been forgotten. --Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (1986)

At the end of November 1921 , the experienced producer George C. Tyler closed Eugene O'Neill's The Straw, a box office disaster, following mixed reviews. Tyler hurried the young leading actors, Margalo Gilmore and Otto Kruger, into rehearsal for a revival of Paul Armstrong's popular hit Alias jimmy Valentine, which premiered on Broadway on 21 January 1910 and now started a new run on 8 December 1921 . 1 Alias jimmy Valentine was one of the many revivals of the 1921 season, occasioned by notable failures of assorted new plays. Despite the growing dominance of the cynical, self-styled "moderns," Alias jimmy Valentine was unexpectedly and strongly praised, admired even by Alexander Woollcott and grudgingly respected for its craft by Kenneth MacGowen. Universally, newspapers credited Alias jimmy Valentine as the originator of a familiar genre: the crook play. Alan Dale, writing for the New York American, feared he would be embarrassed by his "gush" review of the original production, but was relieved to find he had been right and titled his 9 December 1921 column, "Crook Play Grips in Same O ld Way." 2 The critic for The New York Post described the revival as occurring "after a lapse of 13 years during w hich crook plays without number have done their time. " Arthur Pollock, in the Brooklyn
1

All opening dates reflect their New York City opening.

2 Alan Dale, "Crook Play Grips in the Same O ld Way," New York American (9 December 1921) in Dramatic Criticism 1921 -22, Billy Rose Theater Collection (BRTC), New York Public Library. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

THOMSON

Daily Eagle, writes: "many crook plays have been written since this play
led dramatists into the green pastures of crime." Critics uniformly deemed the play to be entertainment, i.e. contentless. MacGowen modified his admiration for Alias jimmy Valentine with statements such as, "It is hokum"; meaning intellectually soft, formulaic, and decidedly participating in American delusions/illusions-those "pipe dreams" O'Neill would investigate in Iceman Cometh. 3 Reviews generated by the original production tell a somewhat different story. An astounding success, Alias jimmy Valentine, as reported in the New York Herald, eventually performed in "every town and hamlet in the country." 4 According to newspaper accounts between 1909-1913, the play was itself contributing to a changing drama. "New and fresh" and "more than melodrama" says Frederic Hatton in the Chicago Post (27 December 1909). A review in the Boston Transcript (9 April 1912) asserts that the play is "good old newfashioned melodrama" and credits Armstrong's achievement: "he revived a dying art." Among the qualities admired are a grittier detail and characters nearer the actualities of human nature, a departure from the idealism of standard melodrama. Another review in the Boston Transcript (16 April 1912) describes the title character as "the realist hero we never saw in melodrama." 5 Alan Dale admired in 1921 what he saw in 1910: a "hero . .. who seemed human, whose access of virtue was not due to a convulsion of gaudy stage heroics (Dale)." Although detective fiction has, throughout the twentieth century, received increasing attention from literary critics, the detective play has rarely been investigated, as Marvin Carlson notes in his study of postmodern thrillers, Deathtraps. 6 Often undifferentiated from the

All reviews cited for the 1921 production of Alias jimmy Valentine are in the George C. Tyler Collection, BRTC, unless otherwise designated. All available information is cited in the text.
4

john Cunningham Flinn, "On the Trials of Being the Hero in 'Crook' Plays,"

New York Herald, 23 March 1913, [n.p.], Robinson Locke Collection of Dramatic

Scrapbooks, vol. 479, BRTC. Flinn describes H.B. Warner (the actor who first played jimmy Valentine) as the "hero in the original 'crook' drama." All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
5 All reviews and articles for productions of Alias jimmy Valentine, in New York and on tour, 1909-191 3, are in the Robinson Locke Collection of Dramatic Scrapbooks, vol. 479, BRTC, unless otherwise designated. All available information is cited in the text.

6 Marvin Carlson, Deathtraps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Carlson states: " The murder drama [of recent times! has attracted very little attention from either historians or theorists, even though almost every season

The Crook Play

detective play, or subsumed under shadowy terminology such as mystery or crime drama, the crook play is especially obscure because it has yet to be rendered as a discrete genre. Anticipated in numerous strands of nineteenth-century popular theatre, Alias jimmy Valentine was followed by a spree of crook comedies and dramas, routinely labeled as such in the contemporaneous press. The crook play flourished until the end of World War I and then gradually diminished in popularity during the 1920s. Simultaneously classified by theatre critics as familiar andat a time when reviewers had experienced Ibsen and Shaw- unusual, the crook play borrows from, fuses with, and departs from other traditions in popular theatre. The genre is organized around a character perceived in its time as challenging to both social and dramatic conventions, and a serious, sometimes militant effort to expose destructive social conditions. The story of this little genre is also the tale of one link from old times to new times, a link that displays continuities between American popular theatre and the new art emerging from writers such as Eugene O' Neill around the time of World War I. The Beginnings
It is a propagandist play.. .. It is saturated
wit~

the vulgarity of the life it represents.

--Shaw, "Preface" to Widowers' Houses (1895)

Essential to crook plays is their participation in the world of American popular theatre, especially farce, melodrama, and detective plays. Generally, the popular play cannot be separated entirely from progenitors or unerringly demonstrate all the traits of one single genre. The assertion might be true of all plays: Aristotle is hard put to get far beyond O edipus. Popular theatre, however, is especially unconcerned with the niceties of a crystalline distinction between genres. The potpourri characteristic can be itself a signal of the popular, and often such plays carry ambiguous subtitles indicating conglomerate genres such as comedy-drama or comedy-melodrama. Augustin MacHugh's Officer 666 is both an example and sendup of a crook play; its subtitle is "a melodramatic farce." 7 A certain invisibility about crook plays then is understandable as they generally sit inside the larger categories of melodrama and farce.

throughout this [20'"1 century has produced examples of the murder drama on the stages of London and New York. The complicated development of the modern thriller has yet to be traced (3)."
7

Augustin MacH ugh, Officer 666 (N ew York: Samuel French, 1911 ).

THOMSON

Crook plays emerged from-and never completely leftmelodrama, itself a slippery, evasive term. Michael Kirby argues persuasively that the genre continues to pervade all sorts of theater, including the avant-garde.8 Frank Rahill comments that the origins of melodrama are a "hodgepodge." Rahill provides a definition which states, in part: "Primarily concerned with the situation and plot, it calls upon mimed action extensively and employs a more or less fixed complement of stock characters, the most important of which are a suffering heroine or hero, a persecuting villain, and a benevolent comic. It is conventionally moral and humanitarian in point of view and sentimental and optimistic in temper, concluding its fable happily with virtue rewarded after many trials and vice punished. " 9 Melodrama, so defined, is an essential context for a delineation of the crook play. Alias jimmy Valentine was designated by Dale as "the original of a series (Dale)." Actually, the crook play emerged gradually, not suddenly, gathering shape from many antecedents, among them nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century American plays of social awareness. As both Walter Meserve and John W. Frick point out, there were during this period many popular dramas on topics of social concern by playwrights with reformist motives. 10 Such plays prepared the ground for socially critical crook dramas. Detective plays and business plays were also precursors of the crook play. Detective plays emerged at the start of the nineteenth century, burgeoned at the end of the century, and continued steadi ly even as crook plays developed. In their plots about falsely accused innocents, detective plays featured many a crook. From the end of the nineteenth century, farces about business and businessmen continued ancient comic traditions of mistaken identity, duplicity, and sham among the social elite. Serious business plays, in which ruthless businessmen find a conscience, were very much part of pre-World War I American drama. The businessman character has much in common with the crook. The crucial and particular beginning of the crook play was Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, an adaptation by American playwright Eugene Presbrey of a character and the stories by English w riter E.W. Hornung.
B Michael Kirby, "Melodrama Manifesto of Structuralism," in Melodrama, Daniel Gerould, ed. (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980), xiv.

9 Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967), xiv.

Walter Meserve, When Conscience Trod the Stage (New York: Feedback Theatrebooks & Prospera Press, 1998), vii-xii; john W. Frick, '"Nine-tenths of All Kindness': The Nineteenth-Century American Theatre and the Spirit of Reform," New England Theater ]ournal1 0 (1999): 4 7-62.
'

The Crook Play

Though clearly modeled on Sherlock Holmes, Raffles practices his mental agi lity on the other side of the law. He lacks the usual symptoms of the master crimi nal, such as malice, selfishness, and greed. Raffles, an English aristocrat, raises cracks-manship (safecracking) to art. Still, despite his Robin Hood-like compulsion to take only from the wealthy, he bemoans his genetically determined obsession with theft. Raffles is the first example of the character without which a crook play is not a crook play: the gentleman-thief. 11 The success of Raffles led to many im itations. C. M. S. Mclellan's Leah Kleschma (opened on 12 February 1904) is a raw portrait of an impoverished, abused young woman, forced to steal by her father. The drama is a harbinger of the naturalism and advocacy in later crook drama. 12 In stark contrast is melodrama entrepreneur Charles Blaney's The Girl Raffles (opened 5 October 1906). Blaney's lead character does not live up to her name: this daughter of a crook is unaware that her father's antique store is a front, but when she learns the truth, she also discovers she is actually the daughter of a nobleman and stops the crime. 13 Detective Sparks and Seven Days anticipate the crook play in farce and comedy. The first, by Michael Morton, is a nearly Shavian comedy. Although an English import, with reputation not crime at the plot's center, the play is noteworthy because of the independent wi llful American girl who disguises herself as a detective to salvage the good name of her friend and invents a robbery to faci litate the scheme. Bits of social criticism appear as the theft of property and the theft of social place are compared and Victorian sensibilities ridiculed. 14 Seven Days, by Mary Roberts Rhinehart and Avery Hopwood (opened 10 November 1909) less than two months before Alias jimmy Valentine. It is a mixture of high comedy and farce. A thief is quarantined with a household of his so-called betters, the people he has come to rob. While much of the play dwells on the lives of a ridiculous high society, the story is presented from the crook's point of view. He identifies with his unknowing hosts: even late in the play, a stage direction indicates, "burglar appears to pantomime he has the same feelings." 15 Still, he is
11

Eugene Presbrey, Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, Typed Script, [n.d.], BRTC. C.M.S. Mclellan, Leah Kleschma (New York: Samuel French, 1920).

12

[n.a.], "Cecil Spooner in a New Play," (4 September 1906) in New York Times Theater Reviews 1904-1911 (New York: New York Times & Arno Press, 1975). "Michael Morton, Detective Sparks, Typed Script (1909), BRTC.
15 Mary Roberts Rhinehart and Avery Hopwood, Seven Days, Typed Script [n.d.], BRTC, act Ill, 4-5 .

13

THOMSON

finally driven mad by their hypocrisy and lying. As the drama's moral center, the burglar tells the "glitterati" off at the play's conclusion in quite certain terms. After its Broadway opening and a lengthy tour, Paul Armstrong's Alias jimmy Valentine became, as Gerald Boardman comments, "one of the decades most memorable successes." 16 The play was adapted from an 0. Henry short story, "The Retrieved Reformation." The adaptation follows some of the plot, but not the tone of the more delicately cynical original, which is but a few pages in length .17 Alias jimmy Valentine begins in prison, where the title character-an inmate-is brought to the Warden's office. There, by chance, he encounters Rose Lane (Laurette Taylor in the 1910 production), a girl he had bravely, and anonymously, rescued years earlier from assault; fortuitously, she is the niece of the lieutenant governor. A pardon is followed quickly by a job in a bank with her father. Jimmy returns to his original name, a signal of his determination to go straight, steadied and fed by his love of this good woman. However, for much of the play, he is trying to evade the pursuit of a detective named Doyle, a stern devotee of justice, who is trying to force a confession of Jimmy's true identity and his guilt for another crime. When, rather than escape, Jimmy rescues two children trapped in a safe, Doyle finds mercy in his heart and gruffly leaves, asserting self-consciously he was the one mistaken in Jimmy's identity. Among Armstrong's interpolations into the 0. Henry story, the most important is that Jimmy's reformation is not in doubt. In "The Retrieved Reformation," the conclusion is ambiguous and incomplete, as the safecracker has become addicted yet again to the drug of theft. Alan Dale states, "Since the time when I first saw Alias jimmy Valentine, there have been stage crooks enough to fill any prison. We have had 'em in all shapes and sizes, in sets and double sets, in rags and in fine linens, in comedies and in melodramas. We have had 'em in movies until the very idea of a crook play grew repellent and antagonistic (Dale)." Similarly, John Cunningham Flinn teases H.B. Warner-after the actor had stopped playing the role of Valentineabout his responsibility for starting the craze. Warner remarks, " We have had so many ' crook' dramas since Alias jimmy Valentine ... that I fear the public will rise in its wrath soon and say:-Who in Broadway started this thing?" Later he notes, "More than ninety percent of the
16 Gerald Boardman, American Theater: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 666.

17 0. Henry, The Complete Works of 0. Henry (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1936): 342-346.

The Crook Play

plays I have read this season have been crook plays. That goes to prove what I said about making restitution some day is true (Flinn)." Indeed, reviews from the 1911-1914 seasons chart the outbreak of crook plays while complaining about them. The plays include several by Armstrong, now considered a specialist: The Deep Purple (written with Wilson Mizner, opening 9 January 1911 ), The Escape (opening 20 September 1913), and The Heart of a Thief (opening 5 October 1914). The label of "crook play" quickly emerges, as does the retrospective understanding thatA/ias jimmy Valentine had set a pattern. An article in Munsey for March 1913 comments, "Crooks and children: such has been the trend of things theatrical on Broadway this winter. Already, however, the critics have cried, 'Hold, enough' with respect to crime plays.... With four stages already occupied by pieces dealing with the underworld, a fifth arrived in the shape of 'Biackbirds."' 18 However, the crook play proved itself again in a tremendous hit opening less than two years after Alias jimmy Valentine: Bayard Veiller's Within the Law (opened 11 September 1912). A souvenir program celebrating the play's first year anniversary on Broadway, describes Within the Law as "the famous crook play." The program depicts international success: "Playing as it is, in the principalities of the world, it has been viewed by over 3,000,000 people. It can be seen in New York, Chicago, London, Sydney, Australia and other large cities." It also includes a list of testimonials from figures in American theatre and life: from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, Burns Mantle to David Belasco, Franklin Pierce Adams, Charles Klein, Irvin S. Cobb-all among "The Roll of Honor" on a page titled, "What Some Americans Think of Within the Law." 19 Reviewers of Within the Law and Alias jimmy Valentine stress thei r tough landscape. The critic for The Dramatic Mirror (9 September 1912) applauds that Within the Law has made Veiller's career: " They say Mr. Veiller gathered his inspiration while a police reporter ... At any rate he knows his book, and there is no exaggeration in his story, which has a true ring from start to finish." 20 Similarly, Charles W. Collins declares that Armstrong's work has " the true tang of the underworld because he knows at first hand the safe-blowers and gun-

18

Robinson Locke Collection of Dramatic Scrapbooks, vol. 479. Souvenir Program for first anniversary run of Within the Law, 1913, Within

19

the Law Clippings, BRTC.

111 All reviews and articles about Within the Law are in the Robinson locke Collection of Dramatic Scrapbooks, vol. 131 , BRTC, unless otherwise designated. All available information is cited in the text.

THOMSON

men and gamblers and pickpockets he has depicted. He knows their haunts and their habits; he speaks their vernacular like a native; and he meets them as a 'pal."' 21 James Stone's article, "A Real 'Gun' Sees a Stage Crook," in the Boston Saturday Evening Traveler (20 April 1912) testifies to Alias jimmy Valentine's authenticity. The journalist is an exconvict, commissioned to appraise the play (under an alias, of course). Both Alias jimmy Valentine and Within the Law are honored as giving a new life to melodrama. Writing for the New York American (1 0 November 1913), Percy Shaw states, "Cheap melodrama has been forced out of existence by a form of amusement even cheaper," and continues, "It died an undramatic death. But that the lamp of real melodrama was only waiting for a genuine spark to touch it into quickness again was conclusively attested by the instantaneous success of 'Within the Law."' The reviewer for The Boston Transcript (12 September 1912) praises Veiller for "going Paul Armstrong one better." While Armstrong is valued for how authentic and "human" his characters are and for telling "the truth about low life, " Veiller "adds more accuracy" by introducing "an element of serious drama" the reviewer contends popular plays always lacked, namely "social criticism ." While the reviewer's perception of dramatic history has been proven inaccurate, the statement does reveal that social criticism was a crucial element of the crook play, anticipated in the politics of Raffles and Jimmy Valentine. Indeed, the growth in the number of these plays coincides with the Progressive era, often dated 1900-1915. Gradually, the crook play evaporated in the cynicism of 1920s and the politics of the New Deal, which demanded very different kinds of reform-minded social plays. Despite his joy in Alias jimmy Valentine in 1921, Alexander Woollcott addresses a changing sensibility in a New York Times review about The Lawbreaker by Jules Eckert Goodman. Woollcott describes the play as "fustian crook melodrama." 22 Silk Crooks
Ah, a lot of them silk crooks fall for this woman uplift stuff. --Wil lard Mack, Kick In (1914)

Charles W. Collins, "Paul Armstrong: The Apostle of 'Punch," ' Creenbook, 1914, [n.p.l, Paul Armstrong Clippings, BRTC.
22

21

Alexander Woollcott, "The Lady and the Thief," (7 February 1922) in New

York Times Th eater Reviews 1920- 1926 (New York: Arno Press, 1971).

The Crook Play

Together, the long-running hits Within the Law and Alias jimmy Valentine outline the borders of the crook play, and so are the necessary models and guides. While Alias jimmy Valentine sketched the initial pattern, Within the Law is a fully detailed articulation. The story of Within the Law begins in the office of a self-righteous hard-hearted millionaire and department store owner, aptly named Gi lder. He brags that his influence with a judge resulted in the harshest sentencing for a salesgirl convicted of stealing-as the Warden in Alias jimmy Valentine insists on harsh treatment of prisoners. Mary Turner enters handcuffed-as did Jimmy-into this room that is another world. She had convinced Gilder to see her because she has a scheme for stopping theft. In a passionate harangue, she declaims against the corruption of greed, explains that fair wages would end crime, and defines the struggles of her class; she also declares her innocence. He sneers. 23 In the next act, years later, an embittered and vengeful Mary lives in a posh apartment with some crook pals. Now, imitating Gilder, she earns money "within the law." For example, she threatens exposure of high society men her colleague has compromised. This is not blackmail since Mary will not accept cash, but only a contract, which makes the transaction a settlement. She is troubled, however, for she still possesses the soul and conscience that also leads Jimmy Valentine to twice risk his life for others. In an encounter that parallels the scene with Gilder, Mary is visited by the woman actually guilty of the original theft; she confesses and begs for help. Mary overcomes her rage with mercy. The moment reveals her true heart and anticipates the play's movement and conclusion. Almost seduced by her crook pals into crossing an already vague legal line, she is stopped by the young Gilder, whom she had married secretly in spite. His love engenders her redemption; she is renewed in his loyalty and affection, just as she had rescued her guilty double. Since crook plays uniformly invert qualities of detective drama, an instructive framework for both plays is Veiller's own detective play, The Thirteenth Chair, another great hit. The drama is set in the parlor of the wealthy Edward Wales who wants to solve the murder of a close friend. During a seance conducted by the motherly Rosalie LaGrange, Wales is murdered in the identical way, a knife in the back; a detective enters to carry on the mission of uncovering "whodunnit. " A bit bumbling, he follows standard procedure. Reason leads Rosalie to discover and engineer the exposure of the perpetrator, whose motive of revenge- in

n Bayard Veiller, "Within the Law," in Famous American Plays of Crime and Detection, Van H. Caratmell and Bennett Cerf, comp. (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1946). All subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text.

10

THOMSON

the name of a lost love-is quickly unveiled. Throughout the play, the murderer is only a generic society man lost among the guests, while a rich young man's fiance, not quite of the social set, is the primary and usual suspect. This bit of social criticism is absorbed within the larger need of diverting attention. The guilty one exits in chains; everything becomes as it was before. The medium is the innocent girl's long lost mother, and her identity is publicly revealed in a harmonious ending. 24 What ties these plays together is crime, and here also the paths diverge-and will continue to do so. In The Thirteenth Chair, the wrongdoing is murder; in both Alias jimmy Valentine and Within the Law, the offense is theft-of all kinds. Whether in farce or melodrama, crooks in crook plays are thieves, often safecrackers, and in the safe is often a valuable necklace, often a pearl necklace. The Noose by Willard Mack employs murder as a mainspring for the plot. In Willard Mack's Kick In , the theft of a pearl necklace, now lost, initiates the story; in Cheating Cheaters, two pearl necklaces are at stake-and neither actually exist; in The Lawbreaker, the daughter of a business man believes a thief will return a $75,000 pearl necklace. The title character in Leah Kleschma is a thief, from a family of thieves; Annie and Kansas City Kit are-among other specialties-pickpockets in Paul Armstrong's The Heart of a Thief. In Waffles, a teasing parody by Edgar Smith, the plot circles around the Smelrose diamonds. All the crooks are "con" artists--disguising themselves as someone else; the use of an " alias" in titles and characters is commonplace.25 Art is another favorite target for robbery. In Officer 666, an invaluable art collection is the object of desire. Such theft needs a rarefied sensibility. Indeed, the criminal in Officer 666 is a daunting connoisseu r, who can readily distinguish a superior copy from the real thing-he steals only the right things. Mary Turner's victims are of the best kind, and she contemplates stealing museum quality medieval tapestries. These crimes emerge from the nature of the central character throughout crook plays; the gentleman-thief, a "silk crook." 26 Raffles is Jimmy Valentine's immediate ancestor, but among the most important differences, Jimmy is a professional, not an amateur,
24

Bayard Veiller, The Thirteenth Chair (New York: Samuel French, 1922)

Willard Mack, The Noose, Typed Script, 1926, BRTC; Willard Mack, Kick In, Typed Script, 1914, BRTC; Max Marcin, Cheating Cheaters (New York: Samuel French, 1916); Paul Armstrong, The Heart of a Thief, Typed Script, 1914, BRTC; Edgar Smith, Waffles, [n.d.l, BRTC. All subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text.
26 Mack, Kick In, l, 4. Villains in melodramas often wore silk hats. gentleman-thief is also usually well-dressed.

25

The

The Crook Play

11

and not an aristocrat. And not English. He is, however, elegant; his language and manner refined, despite the very different language and behavior of his crook pals. A reviewer for The New York Telegraph (22 january 191 0) comments about Jimmy Valentine, "He is an artist in his line, and that line is safe robbery." jimmy Valentine typifies his kind. The gentleman-thief possesses a superior sensibility and a mind more conscious of the social and moral implications of his behavior than the representatives of the ruling classes-robber barons, police chiefs, judges, lawyers, etc. Moreover, he is often interchangeable with the good guy. In Officer 666, not only is the difference between the original and a copy of a Rubens elusive, so too the distinction between the rich man and his crook double is thin-the latter is only slightly more debonair, wise, self-sacrificing and first won the heart of the lovely lady both aspire to marry. Mary Turner is also quite refined, eloquent in her poverty, sophisticated in fraud . The character of the crook is routinely paradoxical, ambiguous, contradictory. These aspects determine the organization of the plays in which he or she is featured. Both stage directions and dialogue identify the type. The title character in Alias the Deacon is described as "a dignified in appearance 'Knight of the Road' ... his personality reflects poise, charm, and at the same time a quiet cunning and power. " The Deacon draws a great distinction between himself and a " thug" or "murderer." 27 In Kick In, the ex-convict Chick Hewes is described by an enemy: "He's a man of some education and refinement born with an appetite for the good things of life and without any responsibility to keep him straight (1, 4)." A wealthy woman's daughter frets in Armstrong's The Deep Purple, "Some of the crooks, mother-the confidence men-you could meet and know them for months and never suspect them being other than gentlemen." 28 In Someone in the House, which flirts with parody and so fully exposes the genre's characteristics, the alias of a notorious safecracker is "N ick Dancer," a " nick" name earned " because of his mastery of social graces." 29 Jimmy Burke (alias Nick Dancer) admires crooks because "they have more imagination than detectives (II, 27)." About his subterfuge, to play a society man who is playing a crook in a play-within-the-play (for access to a priceless necklace), Dancer asserts,
John B. Hymer and LeRoy Clemens, Alias the Deacon (New York: Samuel French, 1928), 6, 80. All subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text. Paul Armstrong and Wilson Mizner, The Deep Purple, Typed Script, 1910, BRTC, Ill, 4. All subseq uent references cited parenthetically in the text.
20 Walter Percival and George S. Kaufman, Someone in the House, Typed Script, Jn.d.]. Photocopy of original in Princeton University Library, II, 26. On Broadway, Larry Evans, one of the original authors, received credit.
26
27

12

THOMSON

"My part is perfectly fitted to me. It appeals not only to my commercial instincts but calls as well to the artist within me (1, 15)." He describes his role as a "gentleman adventurer (1, 15)" and the play within is titled, "Gentleman, First and Last (II, 22)." The composite figure of the gentleman-thief was repeatedly a source of bewilderment and surprise for many critics, a sign of a modulating tradition. The reviewer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (14 January 1913) admonishes Within the Law for "glorifying dishonesty." The reviewer for The New York Times puzzles ov~r the 1910 production of Alias jimmy Valentine: "It used to be villain who was 'still pursuing,' but here it is the plainclothes man, who, in effect, at least, is the villain of the piece, as the sympathy is all against him." 30 The reviewer for Greenbook (December 1912) comments vividly about the inversions of melodrama contained in Within the Law: All the world loves a loafer, if one may judge by the continued vogue of the crime play. Our most respectable dramatists have become literary Fagins, and are teaching the young "how to shoot"-and also how to steal and collect blackmail. In the days of my youth the man who did these things was the villain of the melodrama; now he's the hero and we applaud rapturously when he scores off law-abiding society. It's very confusing! (emphasis mine) About The Only Law by Wilson Mizner and George Bronson Howard, the New York Times reviewer fusses, "The only apparent moral appears to be that if a woman will only lie hard enough and long enough she will get what she wants." 31 Similarly, The Washington Post (29 November 191 0) reviewer despairs over Armstrong's deviation in Alias jimmy Valentine from the rules of melodrama-and moral conduct-by presenting "distorted ideas .. . that one-time convicts ... are good honest fellows," and notices that the "audience is made to sympathize with thieves and burglars and that strong antipathy is aroused for the detective who is attempting to bring to justice a man who has broken the law." However, a greater naturalism is also noted. The critic for Theater Magazine (February 191 0) examines the plot of Alias jimmy Valentine: "Unlike the average detective story, it does not tend to idealize or
30

[n.a.], "Big Thrill in New Play by Armstrong," New York Times Theater

Reviews 1904- 1911 .

31

[n.a.], "The Only Law' at the Hackett," (3 August 1909) New York Times

Theatre Reviews 1904- 1911.

The Crook Play

13

romanticize the hopelessly vicious and depraved characters." The reviewer for the Boston Transcript (9 April 1912), discussing a later tour of Alias jimmy Valentine, ponders: "It may be a sad commentary on our present notions of right and wrong that a criminal with a slight streak of the square deal and of human kindliness is so much more comfortable and sympathetic a person to associate with than the righteous. " Still, the reviewer acknowledges the portraiture accurate to the contradictions in human nature and so honors a bit of modernity: "Mr. Armstrong recognized the now fashionable discovery of Ibsen, that black and white are really pepper-and-salt in human character." Indeed, reviewers often perceive the gentleman-thief as fresh and true, and different from the si ngle-tone villains of melodrama. Occasionally, some mourn the stable clarity of distinct heroes and villains. However, reviewer for The Boston Transcript (17 February 1914), responding to a Brooklyn tour at the Majestic, is impressed that the play, " replaces [melodrama's) types with human beings." About Alias jimmy Valentine, the Chicago Post (12 December 1909) reviewer writes : "The piece is more than melodrama. It cuts ... close to life as the police reporter knows it." Rahill comments that melodrama reached its peak when all of the characteristics true throughout the nineteenth century disappeared in greater realism; but essentials were retained: 1) a heroine of astonishing and complete purity; and 2) the theme that the wages of sin are death. 32 Crook plays purposefully muddy, invert, and subvert these requisites. Crooks are, after all, crooks-and they get away with murder-quite literally so in The Noose. The murderer at the play's end is not only paroled rather than executed, but also told by Stella, the governor's wife, "And what you have been doesn't cou nt ... it wasn't you r fault (Ill, 29)." In a discussion of the Volsted Act, the Governor's complaint that the state is "almost crook controlled" is countered with Stella's insistence that individuals are "criminal because we made the law (1, 10)." The most legally innocent are not pure; and the wages of sin are not death. M ary is a very successful crook and she concludes the play happy. As cited above, the moral world of crook plays troubled many critics who reported the shifting ground. No small component of both the critics' bewilderment and their perception that crook plays were innovative was that frequently the gentleman-thief was a woman, as in Within the Law. In a review for The New York Evening World (12 September 1912) Charles Darnton questions, "When a lovely woman stoops to blackmail, what are we going to do about it?" and dismisses the play's "specious" argument.
32

Rahill, 268-69, 277.

14

THOMSON

The reviewer pursues, " In all seriousness, however, Mr. Veiller gains respect for his play in the beginning by making a strong plea for the overworked and underfed shop girl. l(n) her remarks on thi s subject Mary talks straight from the shoulder. But when she turns blackmailer and revenges herself upon her former employer by marrying his son, Mary is altogether contrary to accepted laws that we hardly know what to make of her." The reviewer for the New York Morning Telegraph (12 September 1912) describes her as " not a bit the conventional injured lady of melodrama. She is a female Sherlock Holmes on the other side of the game." Darnton adds, with irony and discomfort, "The greatest surprise of all is the change that a life of crime works in Mary. She becomes such a lady that we marvel at her." Mary's character is not fixed. She becomes the crook she is accused of being, while simultaneously rising in social class. These female crooks range from the elegant Mary Turner to a seedy flapper in Gentle Grafters by Owen Davis, from the wizened Kansas City Kit in The Heart of a Thief and Lady Jane Grey (Kate) in The Deep Purple to their very refined and na"ive comrades, Annie and Dora; from tenement dwellers May (The Escape), Leah Kleschma, and Mary O'Hara aka Houston Street Moll in The Straight Path by Clyde Fitch-to high society May (The Escape, again) and Ethyl Cartwright in Under Cover. The idealization of women in melodrama is replaced in crook plays by a murkier depiction. Jane Cowl's performance in Within the Law is richly evoked in the Boston Transcript (12 September 1912) review: " it is a short and nervous speech that she has made, full of natural breaks and hesitancy, but full of passion too. . . . The face, the figure breaks before the prison ahead, but she still has this agonized appeal to make. And she makes it, not like some young goddess hurling thunders, but as the working girl w ho tastes the bitterness of her fellows." While men in melodrama could routinely fall, suffer, then repent, the women were required to remain pure and ideal. Not so in the crook play which openly, self-consciously unlaces melodrama's portraits of women . In The Heart of a Thief, Kit, a career criminal altruistically rescues the naive Annie: both proceed to com mit fraud and theft. The women are not pure and are not punished, since as Kit declares, "Now and then even a thief has a heart" (1, 16). Leah Kleschma has a quick and vulnerable spi rit Once exposed to goodness, she recognizes it in herself; yet she continues to rob and even when she forswears, the rupture from her brutal father is neither immediate nor easy. Kate in The Deep Purple was-before the play's start-a specialist in the badger game; she attempts but fails to rescue an innocent girl, Dora, who unknowingly participates in the same crime. Her crime is then buried and forgotten . In The Noose, Stella, the Governor's wife, is the actual and unknowi ng mother of the condemned you ng man. She has lived,

The Crook Play

15

and will continue to live, free of her sins, which include an affair with a gangster and an illegitimate child . The presence of women underscores the startling duality in the gentleman-thief as well as the fact that the "gentlemanliness" of these characters was most importantly about inner graces, a sensibility. Despite a changing position in American society after the turn of the century, women were still worshipped as beacons of truth and purity: hence the ideal portrait in melodrama. Therefore, by portraying a woman-gentleman-thief, popular writers of crook plays challenged social values and expectations and reinforced the reformist mood that always concludes these plays by showing how social pressures could pervert the purest of natural instincts. Melodrama of Discussion
Formerly you had in what we called a well-made play an exposition in the first act, a situation in the second, and unraveling in the third. Now you have exposition, situation, and discussion; and the discussion is the test of the playwright. --Shaw, "The Technical Novelty in Ibsen's Plays" (1913) Love just raises hell with a bank robber. --Jim Bailey, a bank robber, Owen Davis, Easy Come, Easy Co (1925)

Responding to Within the Law, an article in the Woman's Home Companion by Anna Steele Richardson clarifies what matters in crook plays. Richardson ascribes her admiration of the play to its depiction of the new American woman. Mary Turner's reformation is less important than her social/political advocacy: "The rest of the play tells of the redemption of Mary Turner through love and her social rehabilitation, but the great appeal of this timely drama lies in the fight of the woman for her kind, her fellow workers." Consistent with this view is a narrative in the one-year anniversary souvenir program expostulating not the artistry but the social impact of the play, compared to Uncle Tom's Cabin "which incited people to fight to abolish slavery." Similarly, the program continues: "The famous crook play by Bayard Veiller has been the cause of a social, civil war exactly half a century after the bloody conflict between North and South ... . Shortly after the first appearance of Within the Law, these cities, indignant citizens backed by the district attorneys and grand juries, began investigations of the department store conditions with the results the wages of the poor, underpaid, half-starved girl employees has been raised in the four cities mentioned and their business and social conditions bettered." The hyperbole reveals the play's center.

16

THOMSON

The Boston Transcript titles a review (16 September 1912) "Melodrama of Discussion," and continues to describe the traits that "remain to stamp it melodrama, but it interests and stirs us far more than the run of these pieces because it touches the fundamentals that breed the crime, upon which these pieces thrive. It is a surprise and a pleasure to get melodrama of discussion." A later review (17 February 1914) in the Boston Transcript about a post-Broadway tour, explains that the play is "melodrama in the newer fashion" and then states, "Mr. Veiller makes melodrama actual and living and not a conventional and formal thing. He replaces its types and puppets with human beings, with beliefs, natures, and a consequent conduct of their own. He even puts ideas and the temper of the times." Unmistakable among those ideas is Progressive thought. In the " Introduction" to The Progressive Movement 1900-1915, Richard Hofstadter writes that the movement was so large and pervasive that disparity in opinion was inevitable and any two Progressives might universally disagree. Both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, political opponents, were declared Progressives. Both congratulated Veiller on the content of his play. Hofstadter does find fundamental beliefs that illuminate crook plays. He remarks, "The Progressive movement, then, may be looked upon as an attempt to develop the normal will, the intellectual insight, and the political and administrative agencies to remedy the accumulated evils and negligences of a period of industrial growth. Since the Progressives were not revolutionists, it was also an attempt to work out a strategy for orderly social change." 33 The Progressive Movement was similar to the social gospel movement, which preached the transformative power of love, mercy and brotherhood for both movements, activism replaced forbearance. Traditional American faiths drove aggressive social action and championed social change. In his inaugural address (4 March 1913) Wilson stated, "The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration." 34 The drama was an obvious venue to incite change, and crook plays illustrate the " heedlessness" that Wilson noted, as well as the process of " restoration" that he called for.35 As the function of women in these
33 Richard Hofstadter, Progressive Movement 1900-1915 (New jersey: PrenticeHall, Inc., 1963), 2-3. 34

Ibid., 1.

35 For a discussion of the imprint of progressive thinking on American drama in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see Andrew W. Apter, " Popular

The Crook Play

17

plays suggests, the dual nature of the gentleman-thief sets a dramatic course in which social commentary is a natural result. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (14 January 1913) reviewer may have worried that Within the Law championed " dishonesty/' but also underlined that the play legal simultaneously satirized "courts, judges, lawyers and proceedings." Indeed, throughout crook plays, materialism is the real crime. The New York Morning Telegraph review by Rennold Wolf mentions that "cropping out from the main story is a preachment against a capital that underpays its hirelings and forces them into dishonesty/' even though he also complains about being called upon to sympathize with a crook: "It may be ethically wrong to sympathize with Mary Turner who is thriving upon the most outrageous forms of blackmail. . .. But we do." Throughout crook plays, materialism is explored with theft as a diagnostic tool. Mary's passionate speech to Gilder in Within the Law announces the drama's primary subject. As he rejects her, she says: " Well, when you sit in a cell three months, waiting trial, like I did ... you think a lot. And so I got the idea if I cou ld talk with you, I might be able to make you understand what's really wrong; and if I could do that and so help out the other girls, what happened to me wouldn't be so awful. Mr. Gilder, do you really want to stop the girls from stealing? ... Then give them a fair chance. . . . Give them a living chance to be honest. . . . A living chance to get enough food to eat and a decent room to sleep in, and shoes that will keep their feet off the sidewalks winter mornings. Do you think any girl wants to steal." Years later, after she has secretly married Gilder's son for spite, and Gi lder calls her a crook, she declares: "And if I am, who made me one. You can't expect to send a girl to prison and her come out anything else. I served every minute of my time- three years of it, three whole years. Do you wonder that I want to get even; that some one has got to pay? Four years ago, you took away my name and gave me a number. Now I have given up the number and I've got your name. (94)" Crook plays, dwelling on theft, explicitly insist on the social and political meaning of the crime and investigate American materialism from a Progressive viewpoint. Edgar Selwyn's Rolling Stones frankly dismantles assumptions of melodrama with the Shavian sentiment of a young woman who readily embraces an arranged marriage: " It's so much easier to be in love when one is comfortable." 36 Similarly, the
American Drama as an Expression of American Society 1900-191 0," (Ph.D. Diss., Indiana University, 1976). See also M ese rve and Frick.
Jr. Edgar Selwyn, Rolling Stones, Typed Script, 191 5, BRTC, 21. All subseq uent references cited parenthetically in the text.

18

THOMSON

redemption of Jimmy Valentine is not the entirety of the play for that is accomplished quite early, within the first scene, although he struggles to maintain his choice. However, that struggle is due to the pursuit of a detective with a rigid code of justice that values the loss of property over the individual life and the altered spirit. The reforming of the detective is the play's goal and resolution. Throughout these plays, materialism divides a society and perpetuates injustice, creates-through hypocritical, class-based lawthe crime and the criminals. The criminals become themselves victims of deprivation and class bigotry, upper-class mercenaries. The label "robber baron" is explored in juxtaposition with an outcast criminal class. Gilder's wealth and class permit him undue authority in the courtroom, an authority he uses for personal gain (to make of Mary an example to other employees). In contrast, Mary, who attempts a righteous life after prison, is hounded by police, thereby loses jobs and ultimately attempts suicide. The only living available to her is the one she now has; her saviors are the crook family she now leads. The murderer in The Noose is a young man who, brought up in a depleted moral and physical environment, shoots the vile man who had raised him; his adoptive (actually real) father specializes in graft. Rolling Stones involves two honest men forced into fraud and theft because of unemployment. In The Heart of a Thief, both women were constrained into fraud in order to avoid prostitution, their narrow choice the result of false accusations by predatory society men. Reviews of crook plays emphasize the importance of victimless crimes-against things, not people-especially palatable because the theft is always from the rich, who somehow deserve it. That favored targets of theft include priceless art and almost priceless necklaces not only elevates the crook, but indicts the rich. The criminals become agents of guerrilla action, equalizing the unfair distribution of wealth and exposing the hypocrisy of a society that condemns the poor for lawbreaking, condoned when accomplished by the wealthy and influential: then it is called kleptomania-or business. Leah Kleschma, hounded by a brutal aristocratic lover and her mercenary father is both crook and victim. Speaking of Within the Law, the lengthy Boston Transcript review (12 September 1912), discusses how the crook play differs from the crime melodrama : The revenge is only the mechanics of the play. The hurt that the man did her makes the theme. It is not the questionable methods of the police; we have had them described before and we have them so forcibly presented in the Rosenthal case that an audience shivers a little at the sight of a police inspector on the stage. It isn't the criticism of the law, 'the wonderful

The Crook Play

19

twisted law, made for the rich.' We have heard before that "anybody can get rich if he has a good lawyer." Within the Law goes deeper than that. For years our melodramatists have made as it were a living off crime. Now one of them talks about the thing behind it, the despicable conditions that society offers to a half of itself. A criminal hero leads to an investigation into crime's origins, which turns to social institutions and environment. In the first act of Within the Law, Veiller lingers over Gilder's hypocrisies as he pardons his recklessly spendthrift son, contributes to inconsequential charities, and commiserates with a well-connected shoplifter, forgiven as a kleptomaniac, while ruthlessly punishing Mary. The plot demonstrates the class preferences in the legal system itself. Materialism, however, does not discriminate between classes. Anyone can be guilty. In Samuel Shipman and Alfred C. Kennedy's The Crooked Square, the den of thieves is a very respected, powerful family whose pernicious influence a young girl at first gives in to, because of her inability to find work. In Roi Cooper Megrue's Under Cover, a greedy, self-interested federal agent is all too willing to trade the reputation of a woman for recovery of smuggled jewels. The repercussions of materialism are repeated, in sometimes very similar stories, but always made topical. "Timely" is a frequently used adjective in reviews, and the plays are often praised for a documentary reflection of current headlines. In a letter to Veiller, dated 18 February 1913, Theodore Roosevelt begins, "When I was Police Commissioner you were a police reporter, and there are not a few of the incidents in your play which suggest to me the original happenings that both you and I knew. As a good citizen I wish to thank you for your play." 37 About Alias jimmy Valentine, Harley Davis in Everybody's (April 1909) writes, "The slum invades the theater and commends the play for writing about real people." About The Deep Purple, the New York Herald (1 0 January 1911) reviewer writes that the play "is almost a stage version of a celebrated case." 38 In The Heart of a Thief, a journalist-raking scandal-is one of the characters. Detective plays

"What an Ex-President of the United States Thinks of "WTL:' printed in Souvenir Program for Within the Law, Within the Law Clippings, BRTC.
;~a Robinson Locke Collection of Dramatic Scrapbooks, vol. 56, BRTC. The collusion between Gilder and the police in Within the Law reminded many reviewers of the Rosenthal case, a murder of a petty criminal about to testify to police corruption.

37

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THOMSON

consider universal subjects, but crook plays are about the day: Within the Law was subtitled "a play for today. " 39 The journalistic element in both Alias jimmy Valentine and Within the Law is played up in the press's treatment of the playwrights. Paul Armstrong is displayed in newspapers as a rugged Teddy Roosevelt sort, extremely individualistic, more Jack London than a Broadway dandy. 40 A lengthy interview in the Sunday New York Times (23 April 1911 ) is tiled "Why Paul Armstrong Adopted a Convicted Burglar" and subtitled, " How the Playwright Borrowed Him [the Crook] from Judge Rolaskyit's Not the First Time He Saved a Crook-His Experiences with Them and His Radical Theories about Crime and Criminals." 41 The discussion closes in on Armstrong's act of transforming, through opportunity and forgiveness, a repeat offender. In an odd similarity to the plot of Within the Law, Armstrong regularly sat w ith a judge who asked the playwright' s opinions. Unlike Gilder, Armstrong asked the j udge to release an aging felon. The story was incorporated by the playwright into an elaborate vaudeville play, Romance of the Underworld. Bennett states that Armstrong "had very fi rm beliefs about reforming criminals" and "radical theories about crime and criminals in his plays" that he practiced in life. Conversely, in The Escape, Armstrong appears as the uncompromising voice of reform in the character of Dr. Von Riden, who is so determined to rescue May, he hides a murder by her brother (who remarks, "Gee, you' d make a great crook." 42 ) Armstrong talks of The Escape, a blunt expose of the corruption of slum living: "I have written a play for which, when it is produced next year, I suppose the critics will tear me into shreds. It is called, 'The Escape.' The escape is from the tenements. The girl escapes from them and goes uptown. . . . Yes, they'll tear me to sh reds for it, but it's what the girl does in real life. . . . It's better for her to go up there than to stay in the tenements, marry a crook, and give birth to six girls who will go uptown ... we have turned our tenements into breeding places for the state's prison, the penitentiary, and the brothel (Bennett)."
39

Program for Within the Law, 22 November 1912, BRTC, title page.

Billy Rose, Press Release for Alias jimmy Valentine, [n.d.], Paul Armstrong Clippings, BRTC. "He had peculiar ideas about the drama, many of which figured in his failures," (Obituary, Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, 5 September 1915, [n.p.], Armstrong Clippings. Ella Costillo Bennett, "Why Paul Armstrong Adopted a Convicted Burglar," Sunday New York Times, 23 Apri l1911, [n.p.], Armstrong Clippings, BRTC.
l Paul Armstrong, The Escape, Typed Script, 1913, BRTC, IV, 4. All subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text.
41

40

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Alias jimmy Valentine was itself summoned to be an instrument for

reformation in a performance at San Quentin sponsored by a Progressive warden named Hoyle. Journalists wept over the weeping convicts, so moved-the reports insist-to see themselves justly represented and with sympathy. In Theatre Magazine Oanuary 1912) an article titled "Convicts See a Play of Convict Life" cites the warden: "The performance today is a great thing for it marks a new era in the public attitude toward convicts. It says to the prisoners, as nothing else could do, that the community has sympathy and encouragement for them .... So it will make society realize that it owes a duty of humanity to those who are confined within prison walls." The play's box office success generated a bandwagon of publicity that insisted on the progressive ideology, about which some reporters were wary. Armstrong himself was presented as staying outside the Broadway system, refusing to capitulate to managers even if that meant producing his own plays and experiencing failure. Bayard Veiller had been a police reporter, as had Armstrong. Newspapers appreciated his documentary instinct, as well as his compassion. He announced himself to be a reformer. jane Cowl-the actress who played Mary Turner-joined the reforming (and publicity) campaign by speaking out against working conditions and writing about the character she played. On 15 March 1913, Cowl wrote an article for the New York Globe titled, "Actress who Studied Shop Girl's Life." Cowl begins: "While vice committees all over the country are investigating the relationship between low wages and the fact that so many working girls stray from the paths of right living into the byways of immorality, it may be interesting to state my own. study of the problem." Suitable to the interplay between social gospel and Progressive ideology, Roosevelt asserts in his letter to Veiller, printed in the souvenir program, that the play demands that "each must be in a very real sense his brother's keeper and his sister's keeper." The advocacy of Progressive ideas limits the assault on materialism to the topical and specific. While not all crook plays are equal in being outspoken and militant, still the undercurrent is always there, inevitable baggage traveling with the gentleman-thief. Thus, another symptom of the crook play is exemplified by Dr. Von Riden in The Escape: the presence of a mouthpiece for Progressive doctrine and change. He asks, "What are we to do with criminals?" and answers his own question with, "What are we to do with our tenement children? (1, 15)." Certainly, the central character is often that mouthpiece, e.g. Mary Turner. Other spokespersons emerge, the facilitators of change, such as the younger Gilder. In Leah Kleschma, the rescuer Paul Sylvaine has written an article that condemns prisons and asserts that criminality can only be eradicated when prisons are abolished. (II, I, 35) In Kick-In,

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the gentleman-thief's wife echoes his statements in ever more passionate pleading. Never a criminal, she explodes to Police Commissioner Garvey: "You and your kind have made my life one long hell." She continues, "We want to be honest. We want to be right. But everything in this town is against us, we can't tell you anything about this necklace, except that we didn't steal it. . . . Don't you see it's that awful fear you've got planted in us that keeps us from telling you the truth." Chick adds, "Give us a square deal (IV, 12)." The roster of Progressive activists within the plays is long; they are essential to the movement from protest to actual change. The extended scene of discussion in Kick fn between an agent of the existing social order and its opponents is typical. At the start of a play, the social elite, the rich and powerful, refuse any connection with the less fortunate. The play ends with imagery of a Utopian society. The process of transformation to the new world begins with empathy, the recognition of brotherhood, the common ground of being human. The process demands also explicit conversation about the social issues raised by the story. The first scenes of The Noose are given over to debate about capital punishment and the origins of crime. Even Easy Come, Easy Go, a farce, stops often to engage the jaded businessman and an idealistic robber in discussions about social responsibility and human nature. Sidestepping from plot to conversation is the repeated strategy in the plays, bringing the implicit meanings of the story and characters directly to the surface. The discussions are, in turn, supported by the structuring of the events. A true change in the social order distinguishes the crook play from the usual action of melodrama or farce. The social protests in melodrama could be potent, but also are generally undermined by the insistence on social and/or metaphysical stability through the structure. Such plays have other faiths to affirm. Under the Gasfight by Augustin Daly complains about current urban problems and centers on a heroine who, in some ways, is an American Nora. However, the leading lady is proved to be of high birth while a superficial, society brat-whose ongoing selfishness and crudeness are magnets for suspicion-is proved to be the real daughter of a vicious criminal. With a baby switch, the action contradicts the criticism. Good guys are good guys; bad guys are bad guys and the inborn pluck of the highborn lady gets her through. The classes do not intermarry. While she has been ostracized, rejected at first by her not so true love, she endures, rather than falls, finds independence-and returns home. The social criticism is heartfelt but necessarily contained, as her lover discovers his prejudices and she rejoins an unchanged elite. The crook play crosses over such lines and indicates a social order that must alter. Significantly, cross-class marriage is prevalent. The crook play disavows the comfort of a stable and permanent society. While Progressive

The Crook Play

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ideology could become optimistic to the point of complacency, the other end of this political adventure was a fierce consciousness of the damages from the rapid growth and great fortunes of the Golden Age and a determination in the crook play meant intertwined social and dramatic alterations.

Crook Stories
One of you two is a liar and I'll be damned if I know which one. --Tom Nash, a detective, Owen Davis,

Easy Come, Easy Go (1925)

In Deathtraps, Marvin Carlson writes, "Many theorists have seen the traditional detective story as a kind of moral fable in which a happy and orderly world is temporarily disrupted by the act of murder and restored to equilibrium by the detective's discovery and hence purging of the destabilizing murderer." 43 W.H. Auden, in " The Guilty Vicarage, " which Carlson explores deeply, speaks of the "fantasy" for the reader of "being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence." 44 Carlson later remarks, " In traditional detective fiction, the detective is of course the central figure and although theorists of the genre have differed somewhat in assessing his fun ction, there is general agreement that his fun ction is the re-establishment of order in a world put into disorder by the act of murder."45 The social order therefore is purged, returned to an original state of grace, healed but unchanged. The Thirteenth Chair fu nctions exactly according to this map, with all that is unknown made known, all injustice put to right, the good rewarded and the evil punished; mystery is explai ned, and the social system, once purged of corruption, is reasserted . Good and evil are separate; the perpetrator exits in chains. In Within the Law, the society is not stable but amiss, out of balance as Mary-in chains-so eloquently deli neates at the play's beginning. The displacement is not in the crime itself. Rather, the crime is the result of an imbalance in the

43

Carlson, 49.

W.H. Auden, " The Guilty Vicarage," in Detective Ficlion: A Col/eclion of Critical Essays, Robin W . Winks, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980), 24.
45

44

Carlson, 24.

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social structu re. The action is toward integration and establishing a better order; social criticism leads to social change. The action of The Thirteenth Chair outs the bad apples. Within the Law rejects easy distinctions between good and evil. The outing is of the mistaken society, and so the action of the crook play is the process of movement-a guidebook, a recipe- to a new social order. In The Noose, the governor's wife excuses the murder, "It's the whole miserable system that's responsible ... don't you see how little the law meant to him (1, 21 )." In Alias jimmy Valentine, the detective, more than the crook, needs reforming. In Within the Law, M ary is lost and then redeemed, as is Gilder whose behavior she has duplicated. The plot can not untie until he, rather than she, changes to embrace her. Auden, in "The Guilty Vicarage" comments about detective plays that: "The interest in the thriller is the ethical and eristic conflict between good and evil, between Us and them. The interest in the story of a murderer is the observation by the innocent many of the sufferings of the guilty one. The interest in the detective story is the dialectic of innocence and guilt."46 In the crook play, the many are more guilty than the one. In Seven Days, the story is told from the thief's perspective, and it is the thief who admonishes his social betters. Within the Law exemplifies the primal action in crook plays, often with individuals-such as Jimmy Valentine-far outside the law. While the crook may, or may not change, may or may not already be redeemed, the emphasis is on the society. The individual advocates another direction for society. In The Noose, the action centers on the reformation, not of the criminal-who, in fact, is already saved-but the Governor, whose rigid moral code (which conjured Valentine's nemesis Doyle) lacks compassion. When he is softened, when he recognizes a common brotherhood, then he is rescued from unknowingly executing the young boy w ho is the illegitimate son of his wife. He represents not just the individual, but also the social order, and th e play outlines how that can be reformed. Moreover, social/political activism is evoked through a Utopia that resembles the fringe society of crook pals more than the dangerous and corrupt high society. The duality of the gentleman-thief is echoed in two parallel societies. In contrast to the ruling class is the recurring subsociety of "crook pals." Indeed, a number of these plays contain a dual protagonist, a microcosm in two, or more, of a more perfect world. Pals First, Easy Come Easy Go, Alias the Deacon, The Heart of a Thief (gal pals), Stop Thief are but a few examples. In Pals First, a wealthy man disguises himself as the returned prodigal son; actually, he is the
46

Auden, 16.

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returned prodigal son but will not forsake the crook "pal" who-as in

Within the Law, as in Easy Come, Easy Co-was a rescuer.

The hermetic, marginal subculture is parody and alternative. During a debate with Police Commissioner Garvey, Chick Hewes, in Kick In, remarks that he has not had it easy because, "from the time a man gets sent to prison ... the rats are the only ones he can call friends ... out of prison, no money or help, except for rats. " The code in The Only Law is printed in the center of the program title page, "Being square with a pal is the only law we know, Jane."47 As Armstrong avows in the New York Sunday Times, "When a yegg [slang for criminal] is caught and sent up, another yegg takes care of his wife (Bennett)." In Rolling Stones, one starving man saves another; falling, through hunger, into fraud and robbery, they eventually recover themselves, each helping the other. The generosity of Buck to Dave is strongly contrasted with the harshness of the wealthy, and greedy, landlady. In Easy Come, Easy Co, the altruistic pair of Jim and Dick, bank robbers and each a brother's keeper, is blatantly juxtaposed with the mutually self-serving relationship of a businessman and the pale, useless Horace Winfield, a "Young aristocrat of fine birth but nothing else." 48 Unemployed, out of luck Dick, a lawyer, had nursed Jim; Jim sincerely repays the caretaking by involving Dick in a bank robbery to nurse a pal back to financial health. Mary Turner, persecuted by the police, was rescued by the crooks she now protects in a constructed family. Similarly, in Kick In, while the police lie and even steal, the ex-con Chick Hewes's trouble is the result of unquestioning loyalty to his dying friend who had just committed a crime. The title of the play, which means hand over, becomes a metaphor indicating both theft and altruism; the nearly unrelenting self-serving of the police is opposed to the community of thieves, the world as it should be. We all need to " kick-in. " Chick pleads brotherhood to the harsh judgment of Garvey who claims, "once a thief, always a thief." Chick says to the Police Commissioner, " Mr. Garvey, you ought to be a kind of father to people like us (IV, 12)." The prophet of the new society is the gentleman-crook who exemplifies both the failings and future of the dying society. Through establishing and then muddying the line between criminals and representatives of the status quo, between outcasts and revered social aristocrats, the authors build a structure to support their primary idea, the urge to expunge the terrible effects of materialism: crooks-on the
47

Program for The Only Law, 2 August 1909, BRTC, title page.

Owen Davis, Easy Come, Easy Co (New York: Samuel French, 1925), 65. All subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text.

48

26

THOMSON

one side-and businessman, police, lawyers-on another-are only different in that the former have an excuse. They all break laws; all steal. Crook plays parody the mainstream, expose the false identity, and then outline a better society. Veiller spoke openly about his consciou s decision to emend tradition and his reasons. In an interview after the great success of Within the Law, he describes his early work, its failure, and a comment from his wife-director Margaret Wycherly- that he needs to know the ways of popular theatre. Samuel Shipman, who became a target of some ridicule among the Algonquin wits during the 1920s, in fact began his career by emulating Ibsen; then he was told to release such darkness and adjust to popular traditions if he wanted to be produced. And so he did quite mechanically (though in his work, which includes many crook plays, some of his native impulses emerge). On a different road, and in a deeper exploration of the past and future, Veiller states for an article in Current Literature (December 1912) that a writer " must first know the rules of the game, even if after having gained such knowledge he determines to break them. Having accomplished this, he must learn to 'pound the pulpit,' to pound it hard and at the right time." The unidentified interviewer continues, "The question of woman's industrial compensation which forms the starting point of Mr. V's play, has engaged his mind for a long time. 'Girls,' he claims, 'can't live decently on the wages they earn in department stores." Later, Veiller is cited: " There was a man named Tolstoi who once said that we clothe the poor and feed the poor, but we never get off their backs. " The new game of the crook play, the introduction of a few new rules, was noticed often in the press. In a review of Stop Thief, the critic recognizes the compromising of strict dramatic justice. In "Kleptomania in Farce," the writer laments, "As the play nears its close, one hopes that the author will break with tradition and have them lugged off to jail, for their knavery demands poetic justice. . . . But that would not be according to the rules of the 'crook' drama ... and so the burglar and his girl make a clean getaway, helped by a gun, doubling on the trail to re-enter the house, while the constabulary are trotting down Blank street . . . in pursuit." 49 The reviewer for the Dramatic Mirror (18 December 1912) ironically examining a crook play's (Blackbirds) twisted ending, comments: "They agree to escape and turn over a new life by running a gambling house in Nome together. Which seems to me quite the most subtle means of achieving grace ever put forward-even in the theater."

'" ln.a.l, "Kleptomania in Farce," Inter-Ocean, 27 August 1913, n.p., Stop Thief Clippings, BRTC.

The Crook Play

27

The double nature of the gentleman-thief is the inspiration for the construction of other characters. Substituting for the unequivocal types of melodrama and detective plays is the mystery of human nature expressed in cast lists serving ancient devices of disguise and mistaken identity. The alias is an accessible metaphor for the uncertain identities of the characters. As the plays progress, reason does not-as in detective plays- lead to a soothing containment and revelation of identity, but an escalating ambiguity. At the core of such an approach to character building is a dramatic urge to obfuscate differences between good and evil, innocence and guilt, right and wrong. The resulting shape is a mirror palace in which who is the crook and who is the righteous become significant dramatic questions, both delightful and unsettling. For example, in Owen Davis's Easy Come, Easy Co, two crooks meet two businessman during a dizzying action and then there is mix and match. Quale, the businessman, is a phony gentleman himself as he is selling his daughter to a useless aristocrat in exchange for upward mobility. The self-centered Quale, now mentoring one of the crooks, outlines his business practice as fraud, "I sold what I didn't have to people who didn't want it; that's business and I lived on what people thought I had. That's credit and credit rules the world; if people think you have plenty of money, my boy, you can live without a cent (65)." While Quale preaches that the whole world is crooked, the runaway bank robber and lawyer, Dick, becomes increasingly honest, "I'm beginning to think I am the only one around here that's on the level." Quale proves more parasitic and cynical. "Break life down and what do you get. Three things. Greed- selfishness- Bluff (65)." Dick bemoans, "I'm even a failure as a crook (45)." The health spa they are in is not only a microcosm of high society but a metaphor for the cleansing that the group needs. At the play's conclusion, Jim denies he has stolen from the guests, and they believe him, even as he removes pocket watch after pocket watch from his coat. (88-89) At the curtain, when supposedly all is set aright, the hand of the nurse is visible removing the returned bank loot. In Stop Thief, tbe robbers-a housemaid and her fiance-become indistinguishable from the wealthy family they work for: including the kleptomaniac father of the house and his son-in-law-to-be who fears he has the same disease. The standard two pairs of lovers, high and low, serious and comic, are here the social elite and their live-in robbers. However, in the first pair, she has an undue passion for her wedding gifts and he fears he is a thief. When he calls the police for help, to keep him from crime, the robber shows up disguised as the detective. The romantic thief, who is determined to go straight after this one last crime, takes on a roster of identities. In one short scene, the crook is

28

THOMSON

identified as the maid's brother, then revealed to be her fiance and that both are thieves, and then he is disguised as a detective, whereby he is readily accepted by the family. An unidentified reviewer, deftly following the intricate plot, admires the slippery identity of the title character: He proceeds to outdo Raffles. . . . He passes himself on the bridegroom as the detective; he persuades the detective-'the best in the state of Rhode lsland'-that he is a member of the family; and his fingers are eternally busy ... the first 'crook' in stage history to wear a green hat with a bow at the stern. He is Herman the Magic Man ... this resourceful gentleman ... At almost any moment one expects him to produce a rabbit from his hat. . . . He is persuasive enough to compel the family to accept him as guide, philosopher, and friend. . . . In the guise of their guardian and watchdog, he gets everyone to tell him where they keep their valuables. 5 When a real detective enters, he changes again. As the identity of the crook shifts, evolves, is elusive, crime itself becomes relative, not absolute. At the conclusion of Easy Come, Easy Co, Tom Nash, the detective, admits defeat at the most important job he has, telling the good guys from the bad guys. He says, "One of you is a liar and I'll be damned if I know which one (97)." In The Heart of a Thief, Annie multiplies selves from innocent to pickpocket to untouched school girl-imitating what she really is inside-to gentlewoman. "Whodunnit" takes on very different connotations, as roles are reversed and blended, as perpetrators and victims, crooks and righteous, become increasingly indistinguishable. In Someone in the House, a local cop, Malone, finds Nick Dancer rehearsing the safecracking from the play within the play and arrests him; Dancer (who does intend a real theft) persuades Malone to pretend the scene is real but not to interfere in order to obtain publicity (Ill, 17); Dancer also convinces this country cop that the city police are crooks. This kind of inversion and blending is essential to the technique of the crook play. In Seven Days, the exwife of the lead-rather against the leading man type in that he loves food and is quite overweight-agrees to hide their divorce from a wealthy aunt who subsidizes his art career. This looks rather like fraud. The thief's intentions, in robbing the house, are no different. Nearly every play studied for this investigation makes use of doubling characters and plots in suspenseful stories of mistaken identity
50

[n.a.], [n.t.], (n.p.), Stop Thief Clippings, BRTC.

The Crook Play

29

used to persuade. A very common plot device is an eleventh hour switch of roles: crooks are disguised as detectives; detectives are disguised as crooks. The overuse of this device is teased in Someone in the House. The amateur society playwright, Percy, declares he has cleverly revised the ending of his crook play: "I am going to have the burglar turn out at the end to be a detective . . . (the silence is oppressive) . . . the gentleman-thief will turn out to have been the detective! (II, 19)." In Megrue's Under Cover, the leading lady, trying to rescue her fallen sister, is blackmailed by a ruthless and greedy federal agent to go under cover and search out an international smuggler, who is actually a policeman hunting corrupt federal agents. Both spies reveal their disguises as they fall in love. The plot is metaphor and social criticism. Who is the crook? Who is the cop? Who can tell? Which side is she really on since she agrees to offend her conscience to save her sister, lie for loyalty? In Romance of the Underworld, two women testify on their own behalf: one is a lying, professional witness and she tells a story from melodrama (about her theft to clothe her freezing child); the other tells the truth. A judge empathizes with and releases the first and condemns the second. In The Deep Purple, three closely named men are three faces of humanity: Leland, Laycock, Lake. Leland smoothly resembles a melodramatic hero and is a ruthless con artist. Laycock, rough and violent, was falsely imprisoned; though he commits murder, he is a feeling, righteous person and escapes with the reformed crook leading lady. Lake is a socialite initially identified as "the pigeon from the West (1, 25)." Types are denied and appearances are deceptive. As the gentleman-thief determines action and characters, so his duality is refracted through the settings and arrangement of plot incidents. The plot of The Thirteenth Chair is singular, occurs in a single setting and during a single night. The plot of Within the Law is accompanied by numerous subplots, more characters, many settings, and events occurring over many years. The shape however is a tight, not loose, association between the diversity of characters, events, locations, language. The reason is the single purpose, a cause, a crusade. This structure moves, again, to the edge of parody, a natural result of the critical intention. Crook plays universally employ numerous settings, not simply for purposes of spectacle, but primarily because the environments alone offer social commentary. In Within the Law, the back to back setting of Gilder's plush office and Mary Turner' s just as plush apartment asks: which one houses a den of thieves? A brief scene in a bleak police station is the real slum in this play, and the law enforcers the most openly criminal people. In Kick In, the first and last scenes in police headquarters are contrasted with the scenes in the crook' s apartment: viciousness,

30

THOMSON

revenge, lying, stealing emerge from the first place; in the second is love, loyalty, an extended "family" support. At the same time, the good crook is able in his home to expose the truth about events, including the complicity of his good wife's drug addicted brother. Chick is double-crossed by a vicious detective. The ambiguities mount. In The Noose, the contrasting environments-accomplished by flashbackof the governor's mansion and the speakeasy, serve as parameters to a story that speaks to many reform topics including a fierce refuting of capital punishment and an exploration of the environmental factors in delinquency. The settings self-consciously echo, contrast, comment on each other. In Alias the Deacon, the first scene is played in a boxcar filled with a den of thieves. The action thereafter is in the comfortable boarding house in Kansas, which proves also to hold no small gang of thieves-and hypocrites, and murderers. . . . Indeed, the opening in a pawn shop or other underworld locale as prelude to the luxurious library or parlor became formulaic. The first act of The Deep Purple is in the basement parlor of a hotel, in the not-so-reputable mid-forties in New York City, a hotel trying to be respectable; the second act is in a high class hotel, the stage for playing out any number of illegal schemes. Where are the righteous? These environments are framed by two absolute contrasts: the apartment of Pop, who sounds like an aristocrat and is a fraud; and the hotel rooms of Lake, identified first as a rube, but actually a wealthy--tough hard-working-socialite. This kind of juxtaposition is commonplace and persuades by questioning the usual virtues assigned particular places and/or arguing the weight of environment in determining behavior. In Max Marcin's Cheating Cheaters, two identical lavish country estates each prove to be the home of crooks. The first two acts mirror each other: in Act I, a lovely family is gradually revealed to be a gang out to defraud a respectable household, visitors to the estate. In Act II, that same respectable household, now at home, is gradually revealed to also be a gang out to defraud the other supposedly upstanding household. In The Escape, a debilitating slum is contrasted with an expensive apartment: the virtuous heroine living in the violent tenement can only escape through becoming a kept woman; uptown, she discovers her moral sensibility through rejecting this environment. The horrifying din of a woman's prison (the Tombs) in The Heart of a Thief is contrasted with the comfortable refuge of a crook's apartment, and that place is quite different from a seedy dance school, the natural habitat of a society man with a taste for young girls. Expectations are overturned and jumbled . The moral squalor behind high class fronts muddies the usual clean dialectic of good and evil underscored in melodrama, so vivid in detective plays. W. H. Auden, in "The Guilty Vicarage," affirms that in

The Crook Play

31

detective plays, the archetypal parlors and libraries are Edens infected by and then purged of corruption. 51 Crook plays look at the same places and find no paradise there. The multiple environments are matched by expanding plots. In Waffles, two crooks exist and two plots: Croshay, a "hard working thief (character list, [n.p.])," as well as Lord Prowley, a bumbling Raffles-type. This sort of doubling is not confined to such open travesty but subtly informs many crook plays. In Within the Law, Mary is loved by both Gilder and Garson; the latter initiates the robbery that leads to his death. Simultaneously she is fighting police efforts, instigated by her enemy, to get these three stories-Mary and Garson, Mary and young Gilder, Mary and elder Gilder/the police-evidences the parallels between the outcast society of crooks and the rich and powerful. In Alias the Deacon, Phyllis loves Jack and is protected by the Deacon, who is loved by Mrs. Clark; she bluntly asks, "Why can't you settle down here and reform? (108). " The play starts in a box car with crooks playing poker. In the respectable boarding house, the activity is reiterated in other card games high and low, from bridge to poker. The Deacon repeatedly cheats but for increasingly admirable reasons. A local card sharp is swindling Mrs. Clark at bridge and the Deacon rescues her property, as indeed both he and john had rescued Phyllis from assault in the box car. As plots and scenes duplicate or contrast, behavior is explored from multiple viewpoints. In Owen Davis's Easy Come, Easy Co, a triangle between Horace (the society man), a nurse, and jim (a bank robber), is an echo of the relationship between Dick-the accidental thief-the aristocrat, and Barbara, the daughter of the ruthless businessman. One group is unrepentant; the other transformed. As Dick had rescued Jim, and jim had tried to save Dick, so Dick now rescues the heroine from herself as she is willing-though not a vessel of ethical certainty-to sacrifice herself to her father's greed. Dick's effort results in his own awakening to moral ambiguity. He melodramatically starts, then stumbles: "You can't take a man's name unless you pay for it with love. If a girl does that she's a thief, just a thief-and the thief is the meanest-er-er (He stops, confused as he remembers) (II, 68)." Therefore, multiple scenes, enlarged plots are not divergences, sideshow entertainments easily dispensed with, but difficult to sever because the texture of multiplicity defines the action and the theme; each scene is closely tied to the one before by a dialectic of debate about accepted social/political/legal assumptions. Reversal and surprise are the constants.

51

Auden, 19.

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THOMSON

The resulting satire is signaled by a bountiful, ironic humor, that also intimates wisecracks to come in post-war American drama. In The Heart of a Thief, Kit complains to her lawyer how expensive a bribery was and he responds, "Yes, but he's a reform detective (1, 5)." Ironic too is that the crook play inverts emphasis to pull the marginal into the center, and to marginalize the mainstream. When the crook play shifts conditions of melodrama while continuing to inhabit them, the genre moves to parody, which in turn expresses social criticism. In The Deep Purple, two characters suddenly break into a scene from melodrama, indicated by a significant, startling turn in the language, that has sought a simple, conversational speech mixed frequently with slang. The idealism of melodrama is dismantled as Leland is lying and Dora is selfdestructively, obstinately na"ive, a quality normally admired in American culture, but not here. The debunking of form anticipates the dominance of satire, especially parody, in the interwar period. The changing norms and dramatic viewpoint are evident in the large infusion of slang, which generates some of the humor. In assigning slang, authors continue to confuse identities in a time when such outlaw language was clearly separate from insider speech. In Within the Law, Act II begins with the silent movement of a richly dressed woman unmasked when she speaks, "What are you doin', Mary, dolling up? (II, 97)." Paul Armstrong is credited with his authentic use of slang. In the Boston Transcript (9 April 1912), an article subtitled "H.B. Warner, Naturalist in Melodrama," states: "Half the charm of Mr. Armstrong-if he will excuse that delicate and poetic noun-is his vocabulary. Slang is effective enough in comedy: it is the rejuvenation of melodrama." The language is relished for its humor and its authenticity. In the Bennett interview with Armstrong, the playwright teaches the journalist some slang: "What do you mean by 'the big house'?" asks the reporter. "State prison," answers Armstrong, and continues, "A 'rattler' is a car; a 'short' is a trolley car, and a man who steals from trolley cars is said to be 'working the shorts' (Bennett)." The reviewer for the New York Herald (1 0 january 1911) finds the language incomprehensible, but reports that the audience enjoyed it. Playwrights use slang to finger unlikely culprits; the talk of the police is often more criminal than that of the crooks. In Kick In, Chick-who is bilingual-speaks a language more graceful than the crudities typical of the police. At the same time, the more embroiled he is-however innocent-outside the law, so his language changes. More irony, and so further distance from standard melodrama, emerges from a recurring story event: rescuers are willing themselves to leave the mainstream when facing the prejudices that prevent bringing the outcast back to the fold. In Alias the Deacon, Phyllis enters the prologue disguised as boy on the train; she is escaping the sexual

The Crook Play

33

advances of her guardian and then is almost raped in this refuge. She becomes a surrogate daughter to the Deacon, who confesses: " I once knew a little girl very much like you-who ... herself trying to lead the black sheep back into the fold." The dialogue continues: Phyllis : But I know my love can save him. Deacon: Then you' re going to stick in the garden with your weed. Phyllis: Yes, I'm going to stick. I'm going to fight and hope and pray and if I can't save him, I'll be a weed too. (80) Similarly, Chick Hewes's wife was from the better side of the tracks but chose exile rather than leave him. As the infusion of slang indicates, the plays' literalism seeks naturalism. However, the stories develop also a poetic mechanism. The gentleman-thief as archetype is a metaphor; metaphor pervades the plays in stories that are not just illustrations but parables, images with complex, contradictory, fulsome meanings. The gentleman-thief is himself a parody, of both thieves and gentlemen. The spectacle usual to melodrama lingers in the expansiveness of the plays; that surface is diverted to serve an idea. Popular theatre follows audience pleasure, while pursuing unselfconscious archetypal patterns of character and story often celebrating national faiths, affirming essential mythology; the plays here combine that goal with deeply felt individual convictions expressed in quite conscious manipulations of form and style. Again, the source of all the multiplicity-in character, setting, plotis the common impulse that begins with the duality within the gentleman-thief and externally, through his ambiguous relationship to the society, duplicating and mocking it. The structure does not expose a dialectic between innocence and guilt, as Auden avers is the essential mission of the detective play and as pervades melodrama, but argues against materialism and for mercy and brotherhood from the blurring, confusion, and overlap of innocence and guilt. The happy ending, however, considered the unfailing residue of American optimism was a necessity, though the road to it was becoming increasingly ironic and doubtful. In Samuel French acting editions during the first two decades of the twentieth century are found many advertisements for "glad plays," such as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which market the healing powers of love, faith, mercy. In the crook play, love and mercy are similarly powerful instruments but the path is altered . The stress is not on individual rescue and the comforts of faith. Though sometimes both the thief and the society reform, always the

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social corruption is deeper, darker, more pervasive. The resolution is often the result of inverting social norms, casting the rich out for the reign of beggars. The path in the crook play takes many unusual byways, because of the confusion of values, the inversion of types, and debilitation of older forms. Epilogue The connection between The Straw and Alias jimmy Valentine, discussed in the prologue to this essay, is both telling and ironic: the obvious but misleading interpretation would be the defeat of high art by popular taste. The reviewer for the New York Evening World complains that The Straw was " morbid, depressin& with no hope or lessons offered." 52 The perceived failings indicate virtues the reviewer seeks. However, the juxtaposition is also a reminder of the process of change in which Armstrong had-with many other writers, to varying degrees of success-participated. These writers investigated a sensibility to meet the experiences of a new century in plays experimenting with how to manipulate and adapt traditions to advance a contemporary political/social activism. That Margalo Gilmore and Otto Kruger from The Straw could so readily be recast in Alias jimmy Valentine is a small kernel of this argument. Another is the speed with which O ' Neill himself would travel uptown. Within a relatively small number of years, his radicalism was on Broadway. The quick absorption into mainstream venues tells that some of the path was already cleared. Downtown efforts were anticipated through uptown consciences addressing an interlaced social/theatrical exploration. Moreover, the writers of crook plays were testing new uses of old forms. These plays not only expand the boundaries of their dramatic sources, but use them as vehicles, sometimes gently, almost imperceptibly, but self-consciously. In so many ways, crook plays knowingly defeat the expectations created by their melodramatic casings. It is important to consider the crook play in the context not only of popular theatre, but also the new art, for both Ibsen and Shaw were masters of such subversions of conventional forms. While Shaw praised Ibsen for interpolating "discussion," the structural revolution is equally loud, as witness, the humorless parody of the well-made play in, for example, the last scene of A Doll House: characters such as Nora do not leave. Later realism would become formulaic in such bleak endings, originally so startling. In crook plays, characters do stray outside inherited dramatic laws, while engaging in no small amount of
52

Tyler Collection, BRTC.

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35

discussion. Women are not pure. The real crooks are the individuals most powerful and respected in society. All is not right in what is not the best of all possible worlds. Right and wrong are relative. Good and evil are relative. Society must change. The guilty are the victims. The crook play stayed friendly with melodrama but was less soothing to its audiences. The crook play has lingered though often deprived of its originating impulses, through a metamorphosis and migration to what was the new mass media, as did so much of popular theatre. An unsigned review in Billboard describes a poetic scene: the movie version (actually one of several) of Alias Jimmy Valentine was playing in a theatre on a corner opposite to the stage revival. The path is unmistakable. Those early formulas traveled also to television: the gentleman-thief and all the story and action and values that he carried, are evident in Mr. Lucky and The Rogues (an anthology series with David Niven, Gig Young, and Charles Boyer). Later sightings on stage are Guys and Dolls and The Music Man; the continuing hit musical Chicago now on Broadway is from an early play written to type. Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief is an obvious selfparody as Cary Grant is heir to H.B. Warner. The recent Double jeopardy duplicates Within the Law to a startling degree. Another example is Entrapment , with Sean Connery as an aging gentleman-thiefart crook rescued from cynicism by a lovely double agent-she works for the government but is really also a crook; in the model of the 1914 Blackbirds, the pair goes off into the sunset to do more crime together. The crook play, subsumed under various labels including melodrama, farce, detective or crime drama, presents distinguishing traits and a remarkable internal coherence. To accomplish social criticism, these plays often use earlier popular forms but appropriate and invert expectations for the writers' reforming purpose. As such, the plays move toward modern drama and suggest that twentieth-century American theatre is not simply rupturing from the past but also continuing a story.

journal of American Drama and Theatre 13 (Winter 2001 )

KOREAN PRODUCTIONS OF A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

BYUNGHO HAN

Tennessee Williams has been one of the most popular American playwrights in post World War II Korea. Most of his major plays are translated into Korean, studied by scholars, and staged often by Korean actors and directors. The first Korean production of one of his plays was the Theater Shin-hyup's presentation of A Streetcar Named Desire on 26 August 1955. A leading Korean director, Chi-jin You, was in charge of the production, and ln-whan Park translated the play into Korean. The Theater Shin-hyup's performance of A Streetcar Named Desire was so successful that it was staged thirty-eight times in twenty days at three different theatres in downtown Seoul. According to Philip C. Kolin, in 1948, about a year after the Broadway premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire, the play was premiered in Brussels in October, Amsterdam in November, and Rome in December. In 1949, Streetcar was directed by lngmar Bergman in Gothenburg, Sweden in March and by Sir Laurence Olivier in London in October. It premiered in Mexico in December 1949 and in Australia in 1950, followed by Japan in 1953 and Korea in 1955.' The long interval between the 1947 world premiere and the Korean production in 1955 was mainly due to the Korean War which broke out in 1950 and devastated the already unstable foundation of Korean theatre. The war, however, enabled Korea and America to be closely associated politically, militarily, and culturally, which gave many Koreans opportunities to experience American popular culture. Another reason for the rather late Korean premiere of Streetcar was the tremendous difficulty in obtaining new plays for performance. For instance, in order to get literary texts for teaching and research, English professors in the middle of the 1950s had to search for second-hand books which came from resident Americans.

' Philip C. Kolin, "The Japanese Premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire," Mississippi Quarterly 48, 4 (1995): 713-721.

Korean Streetcar

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The modern Korean theatre began in the early 191 Os when a Japanese-style dramatic form named "Sh in-pa-kuk" was introduced to the public. Since its inception, the modern Korean theatre has been immensely indebted to foreign playwrights due to a scarcity of professional Korean playwrights. Before 1945, the foreign drama translated and introduced to the public was that of European and British playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and George Bernard Shaw as well as William Shakespeare. Irish playwrights had a great influence on Korean theatre since the early 1920s when Lady Gregory's The Rising of the Moon and J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea were first translated into Korean. The popularity of Irish drama was at its peak in the 1930s. Many notable Korean scholars and playwrights including Chi-jin You, Woo-jin Kim, Hyo-suk Lee, Jae-suh Choi, and Seduk Ham worked on introducing and analyzing Irish plays. Chi-jin You and Se-duk Ham produced several Korean adaptations of plays by Sean O'Casey and Synge. Interestingly enough, the immense popularity of Irish drama among Koreans was due to the perceived similarities between Korea and Ireland. As colonial nations, both Ireland and Korea struggled to regain independence. Despite their economic impoverishment and domination by a foreign power, both countries had brilliant cultural and artistic heritages that inspired their resistance. However, the influential Irish drama gradually gave way to American drama because of the powerful impact of American culture in Korea. During the 1930s, British and American drama became increasingly popular on the Korean stage. Jung-ok Shin, a professional translator, suggests three possible explanations: The number of English scholars increased rapidly enough to begin advanced research in British and American drama; professional theatre troupes with appropriate production styles began to appear; many British and American plays of the theatres showed a spirit of political resistance, which was desperately pursued by colonized Koreans.' In this period, the plays of John Galsworthy, Maxwell Anderson, and Clifford Odets were frequently staged in Korean theatres. With the approach of World War II, the popularity of foreign drama ended abruptly. Suk-kee Yoh explains the situation of Korean theatre in the 1940s:

' Jung-ok Shin, "The Reception of British and American Drama and Its Influence on Modern Korean Theatre," (Ph.D. Diss., Seoul: Hankuk U of Foreign Studies, 1984), 115. All translations are mine.

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Translation of foreign plays and even general theatre activity in Korea almost came to an end because of Japanese colonial policy of cultural annihilation. The Theater Arts Research Group (Kuk-ye-sul-yeon-ku-hoe), which had switched its repertory from Swedish realism to British and American modern drama, could not achieve fruitful results. Despite the relatively infrequent production of American plays before the war, when Korea regained independence in 1945, receptivity to American plays increased, backed by the powerful military and political relationship between two countries. 3 Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, tens of thousands of American soldiers as well as civilians have resided in Korea and have enormously influenced Koreans in areas as diverse as politics, economics, and popular culture. From government to everyday life, most Koreans valued "Americanization." The situation can be thought of as very similar to Japan's passionate acceptance of American taste in the fifties: "Japanese people in 1953 listened to country and Western music, went square dancing, and continued to be loyal baseball fans. They were also fascinated by American films and magazines as well as American popular heroes-cowboys and prizefighters." Although Korean theatre productions were infrequent after the war, American plays were relatively dominant in production, translation, and publication. Data show that between 1950 and 1969 the production frequency of American dramas outnumbered those of other foreign dramas. From 1950 to 1969, forty plays of twenty-eight American playwrights were performed in commercial theatres compared to thirtyfive plays of seventeen playwrights for English drama, twenty-two plays of fourteen playwrights for French drama, and seventeen plays of fifteen playwrights for German drama. Among American playwrights, Eugene O'Neill was ranked first with twenty-five openings of eleven plays. Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and William lnge were also ranked highly. 5 Another statistical survey shows that from 1966 to 1982 Tennessee Williams was second to
3

Suk-kee Yoh, "The Path and Process of American Drama in Korea: 19261970," The journal of Korea University Institute of American Culture (1972): 42. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
4

Kolin, "The Japanese Premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire," 714.

5 Byung-hee Chung, "A Survey of Performance of Foreign Plays in Korea: 19501969," Theatre Review 4 (1971): 24-35.

Korean Streetcar

39

Shakespeare in performance frequency among all foreign playwrights. Twelve of Williams's plays were staged in thirty-five openings, which was the highest rank among American playwrights, followed by Thornton Wilder in twenty-nine openings and Eugene O'Neill in thirteen. As for Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire was the most frequently performed play at ten times, The Class Menagerie at eight, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at six, and Suddenly Last Summer at two. In addition, Orpheus Descending, The Night of the Iguana, Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton, and others were staged once. (Suk-kee Yoh, 45 ) In the fifties and early sixties, Theater Shin-hyup, which was first noteworthy for producing Shakespearean drama, had an important role in introducing American drama to Korean audiences. Theater Shinhyup's fame was assured by the many Korean notables involved in it: Chi-jin You and Hae-rang Lee as directors; and Hae-rang Lee, Dongwon Kim, and Sang-ik Park as actors. After premiering Streetcar, the company staged nine more American plays by O 'Neill, Miller, Williams, and others until the company dissolved and the members were absorbed into other theatre troupes in the early sixties. As for Theater Shin-hyup's preference for American drama, Suk-kee Yoh explains that, "for those who sought social realism on the basis of psychological development, modern American drama of the Broadway style was thought of more highly than European modern drama, which was seen as experimental and more theatrical than realistic (Suk-kee Yoh, 46)." Theater Shin-hyup's Korean premiere of Streetcar was instigated by Chi-jin You and Hae-rang Lee, the company's important leaders, who had a chance to tour the New York theatre world. With the help of the State Department in 1955, they saw productions on Broadway as well as at the Actors Studio. During their th ree-month stay in the United States, they were greatly impressed by the advanced direction, skilled acting, and general theatre system of Broadway. After returning to his company, Chi-jin You reportedly encouraged the staging of Streetcar, which he had seen on Broadway. (Suk-kee Yoh, 47) According to newspaper reviews, the Korean premiere of Streetcar was tremendously successful. Arthur J. Mactaggart complimented Chijin You's unique direction: " In each country, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire has been transformed so that the audience and casts can understand the meaning of the play. . . . The Shin-hyup's performance was done with an excellent translation . Generally speaking, the play was interpreted as a story of the fall of a Yangban [aristocratic] family. " 6 The critic's review points out that Koreans, in
6

Arthur Mactaggart, " Korean Direction- Shin-hyup's A Streetcar Named

Desire," Kyung-hyang Shinmun, 2 September 1955, p. 2.

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HAN

their early reception of Streetcar, interpreted the play primarily as the tragedy of a declining aristocratic family, a common situation during the early modernization of Korea. From its Korean premiere to its most recent Korean production, Streetcar has had more than twenty major openings nationwide in five influential theatre groups. Since the first performance of Streetcar in 1969, Theater Women (yuh-in-kuk-jang) has staged it seven times under the direction of Yu-jung Kang, a Korean theatre specialist in Tennessee Williams's plays. Yu-jung Kang's skillful direction and appropriate casting of Min-jung Kim as Blanche and Hung-shik Ma as Stanley assured both the artistic and the commercial success of the production. The Korean Blanche's delicate appearance and action can be thought to be perfect for a Southern Belle, just as Hung-shik Ma's powerful body and sexuality fit the character of Stanley. Recollecting her past experiences in directing Streetcar, Yu-jung Kang says that A Streetcar Named Desire is like a favorite place, which she would like to visit again and again in order to feel fresh inspiration and new energy. 7 Yu-jung Kang's Streetcar embodies the decline of traditional society in the South, in a delicate, beautiful woman who fails to accommodate the new order of materialism and rejects bestial men like Stanley. Yujung Kang's standard interpretation, like the Korean premiere, emphasizes the destruction of the old order symbolized as an aristocratic family. By comparing Blanche's desperate attempts to avoid the new materialistic order with the situation of most Korean people who faced severe spiritual conflicts resulting from modernization in the 1970s and 1980s, Yu-jung Kang also comments on the significance of the play in modern Korean society. During the eighties, Streetcar was staged by two theatre groups. Theater People (Dae-jung-kuk-jang) performed Streetcar twice in 1983, the year Williams died, and each production had different casts and directors. The first was produced by a young director, jae-woo Kwon, with 11-young Moon's translation . In a brief article included in the program recollecting the Korean premiere of Streetcar in 1955 when he published an earlier translated Streetcar, 11-young Moon describes Blanche as a thornless white rose and Stanley as a weed. He explains that the play is about the rose, which was surrounded by the strongly
7 The 1988 performance of Streetcar was the Theater Women's 85th scheduled production. The playbill includes a brief article by Jung-ok Shin, who translated Streetcar for the performance. Under the title of "An Angel's Poem Burning Its Wings," jung-ok Shin explains that Blanche's miserable destruction is her madness, which appears stronger than death. Since she sees Blanche's madness as coming from her struggle against persecution, jung-ok Shin interprets Blanche's defeat as glorious and holy.

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41

thriving weeds and consequently withered. Director Jae-woo Kwon's point of view toward Blanche deviated from translator Moon's interpretation of her character. Jae-woo Kwon blamed Blanche for her hypocritical superiority over other people in New Orleans who choose to be lively and to celebrate their existence. He treated Blanche humorously and found her sexual obsession childlike and her fantasies immature. The second 1980s Korean production of Streetcar was mounted in August 1983 by Do-whun Kim, a veteran director of Williams's plays, with the translation of Jung-ok Shin. Do-whun Kim's production was based on a fairly standard interpretation: the destruction of the graceful past by Stanley's reality. The performance's commercial success was assured by casting So-jung Yun, a famous lV star, as Blanche. Yet another production of Streetcar was done from November to December 1983 by Theater Spring-Fall (Chun-chu), with Ko-hun Mun directing its six-day run. In the 1990s, Korean productions of Streetcar began with Theater Stellar (Kuk-dan-sung-dja). The troupe's 1993 performance of Streetcar may in many ways be considered as a turning point in the Korean reception of the play. Theater Stellar's Streetcar was performed approximately 110 times to virtually sold-out audiences at the company's own playhouse, Sung-dja Little Theater, from 23 October to 31 December 1993. The huge commercial success of the production led the theatre to extend its schedule until 28 February 1994. Theater Stellar's Streetcar was considered to set a record for both performance run and attendance; therefore, it is worthwhile to look closely at this recent, popular, and outstanding production. Much of the credit for the success of Theater Stellar's Streetcar should go to Young-Hwan Kim, a talented young director of the company. He had a college education in theatre and cinema, which had given him many chances to learn about theatre and to direct various plays. Since his college days in the early 1970s, Young-Hwan Kim had been attracted by realistic drama, which made him select Shakespeare's Othello when he finally made his 1980 debut in commercial theatre. Known as one of a few young directors of Williams's plays, he had already directed Streetcar three times at the college level before his professional career began; however, he knew that the 1993 performance should be different from his previous amateur productions. As a new approach to the play, he intended to leave much of the interpretation to the audience so that they could respond to the play individually and naturally. In many past Korean performances of Streetcar, the standard approach was to lead the audience to sympathize with poor, beautiful Blanche and hate cruel Stanley. This approach, familiar to Korean audiences, possibly has

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HAN

been an important element in accounting for the play's exceptional popularity. In view of Korean custom, in which hierarchical family order is highly respected, the interpretation emphasizing Blanche's innocence and Stanley's brutality was hotly contested. In flaunting Korean custom, this standard interpretation fostered lively debate and ensured the play's popularity. However, Young-whan Kim pointed out that Blanche and Stanley should not be seen as entirely good or evil figures. As every human being does, each has both good and bad characteristics. As a result, the tragedy of Streetcar could be seen not only as resulting from Stanley's brutality but also from other reasons such as Blanche's hypocrisy, Stella's ignorance, and Mitch's cruelty. Young-Hwan Kim was determined to provoke his audience to ask many questions after enjoying the play. Is not Blanche an alcoholic prostitute? Does Stanley do the right thing for his family? Is Stella a good sister? How shrewd is Mitch? In respecting the audience's individual creative responses, YoungHwan Kim's approach seems to be similar to the goal of Mike Alfreds who directed the Chinese premiere of Streetcar for the Tianjin People's Art Theater in 1988. According to the playbill for the Chinese production, "every night's performance should be a different journey.. . . If you go to see an Alfreds performance every night, every night's performance is different."8 However, there is a difference in their approaches, for while Alfreds focused on the actors' freedom of expression with very little interference from the director, Young-Hwan Kim worked hard to convey the conflicts between the old order and new order with a balanced perspective. Therefore, he often warned his actors about the negative results of overacting in an unconscious effort to justify their characters' behavior or to make them more appealing. According to Young-Hwan Kim, some of the past Korean Blanches had been presented as milder and more na'ive; therefore, the poor and impoverished aspect of Blanche was underscored in her helpless effort to survive in a naturalistic environment. The resulting problematic unbalance was pointed out by Harold Clurman who, in his critique of Elia Kazan's production of Streetcar, writes that "there is a lack of balance and perspective in the production of A Streetcar Named Desire due to the fact that the acting of the parts is of unequal force, quality and stress." Clurman adds that the actor becomes creative only when " he reveals the life from which the play's lines may have emerged, a

Philip C. Kolin and Sherry Shao, "The First Production of A Streetcar Named Desire in Mainland China," Tennessee Williams Literary journal (Winter 1991): 23.

Korean Streetcar

43

life richer perhaps than the lines' literal significance." 9 Being aware that good performance should create a life beyond what is there and that good actors need wide-ranging emotional expression, Young-Hwan Kim was uncomfortable with the limitations of performing foreign drama, that is, the difficulty of translation and the cultural gap. In order to overcome these obstacles, he demanded that his actors think of the same situation in Korean society. He also wished to describe the complicated emotional world beyond the superficial characteristics of the central characters' gentility and brutality. Young-Hwan Kim began with the adoption of a new translation of Streetcar by Chul-li Kim. Though the translation that had been used in past performances was still considered excellent and accurate, it was written in a somewhat old-fashioned style. Therefore, most conversations and some expressions were truly out of date for a contemporary audience. Chul-li Kim 's translation is based on modern everyday language; he translates slang and rough expressions such as "head," " hunk," and "that blonde" into Korean words with more vulgarity and intensity, which enabled contemporary Korean audiences to follow the play with greater enjoyment and understanding. In many countries as well as on Broadway, the vulgarity of the language was criticized during early productions. For instance, in Italy when the play was premiered in 1949, a critic pointed out that "the language in Streetcar" was "objectionable--coarse, vu lgar, and unnecessary. " ' 0 In early Korean translations, Williams's language had been cleaned up so that no objections were raised in newspapers concerning the early Korean productions. The 1993 edition of Streetcar was considered an accurate translation in terms of Williams's controversial language. For proper communication between Korean audiences and American drama, Korean common words were used in the translation: "Red hot" in scene one was translated into "hot dog," and "a poor boy's sandwich" into just "a sausage." Translator Kim even added a Korean word for telegram after "Western Union" in scene ten in order to clarify the meaning. He intentionally omitted some words that, in his opinion, could be difficult to understand, unless there were some explanation for them. For instance, "Xavier Cugat" in scene three was transformed to simply "music," and "Mardi Gras Outfit" was changed to just a "party dress." The nature or style of Blanche's speech must
Harold Clurman, " Review of A Streetcar Named Desire" in Two Modern American Tragedies: Reviews and Criticism of Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, john D. Hurrell, ed. (New York: Scribner's, 1961), 93. Philip C. Kolin, " From Coitus to Craziness: The Italian Premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire," journal of American Drama and Theatre 10, 2 (Spring 1998): 76.
10

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HAN

have been the most difficult to achieve in translation. Blanche's old fashioned expressions and her literary allusions could not be translated directly because word-to-word translation could not show the significance of her speech, which was so reflective of her cultural, social, and literary background. For example, Blanche's exclamation of " Oh, I spy, I spy!" was used to indicate her pretending to find liquor bottles, and was translated into Korean plainly meaning "Oh, I see, I see!" because to most Koreans the word "spy" implies a hostile relationship. " Ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir" was translated into "a dark woods in which ghosts are wandering," and "Grim Reaper" was translated into "a death god." These expressions can imply Blanche's considerable literary knowledge and social background, which could hardly be understood by Korean audiences without the translator's modifications. Because of language differences, there were several scenes in which the real meaning was not conveyed correctly. The sexually implicit humor in the beginning of the play seemed too difficult for the audience to pick up. The conversation between Eunice and the Negro woman may reflect the sexually open atmosphere of the New Orleans slum; however, the Korean audience evidently failed to recognize the meaning of the Negro woman's " Catch what?" and big laughter, just as German audiences failed to appreciate the sexual overtones of " meat." 11 Steve's joke scene did not play well because the double meaning involving the pronunciation of " Mass" cannot be understood from Kim's word -for-word translation. As much as possible, Young-Hwan Kim tried to reflect the atmosphere of the exotic, Southern city of New Orleans in his Streetcar; however, to a Korean audience, New Orleans and Mississippi are not familiar places at all. Therefore, Korean theatregoers, like most foreign audiences, have a difficult time comprehending the topical significance of some real names in the play. Jurgen C. Wolter argues that if German th eatregoers are not conversant with the topography of New Orleans or Mississippi, they will misunderstand names like "Desire," "Cemeteries," "Elysian Fields," "Garden District," and " Laurel" and not fully come to terms with thei r symbolic purposes. 12 In general, Koreans tend to think of the South, especially Mississippi, as a less developed, rural, and agricultural area with warm weather like the southern regions of the Korean peninsula. Whether Korean audiences
11 jurgen C. Wolter, "The Cultural Context of A Streetcar Named Desire in Germany," in Confronting Tennessee William s's A Streetcar Named Desire, Philip C. Kolin, ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1933), 205.

12

Ibid ., 203.

Korean Streetcar

45

understand the topical significance of names in Streetcar or not, the hot and humid weather of New Orleans may be easily recognized by many Koreans. Focusing on the climatic characteristics of New Orleans in the 1993 performance, Young-Hwan Kim tried hard to capture the raucous, sensual, and vivacious street life in the French Quarter. The performance began with the loud rattling sound of a streetcar in the still dark theatre, followed by blues music, a vendor's cry, a crowd's noise, and a sailor's and a woman's voice. The boisterous opening scene was effective and speedy enough to impress Korean audiences with the power and sensuality of the urban scene before them. Eunice and a black neighbor, who were sitting on the spiral steps of their French Quarter apartment, reveal the standards of the Quarter through their brief conversation. In the Seoul production, the actress portraying the black neighbor appeared in blackface, which would be inappropriate in an American theatre production. The Korean director was obviously unaware of the American connotation of donning blackface. Using blackface to signify African-American characters is taken for granted by Korean audiences, since there are no black actors in Korea. The Korean director retained the black woman in his production in order to convey the cosmopolitan character of the city where "there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town." Because many Koreans understand the basic prejudice against African Americans in American society, the candid sexual conversation between the black woman and her white neighbor, Eunice, would impress the Korean audience with its extreme familiarity. The Korean black woman was presented as much more chatty, curious, and noisy than her white counterpart. Young-whan Kim's directorial decision to accentuate the boisterousness of the black character and his use of blackface shows how little understood are basic issues of American race relations by Korean audiences and directors. While most Korean Streetcar productions in the past had been performed in large theatres, Theater Stellar's Streetcar was staged in their playhouse with a 200-seat capacity. Because of its small size and somewhat monotonous set design, the stage did not look impressive; the dark, dull color of the set made it appear a dingy cave. Knowing the disadvantage of the stage facility, Young-whan Kim intended to make use of the small size of the stage; he made the stage as simple as possible, avoiding the excessive use of props. He also used the floor space between the stage and the audience as often as possible when characters needed to enter and to exit from the stage. The stage was divided into two main rooms which had minimal furniture like a bed, a dresser, a telephone table, a kitchen table with chairs, a small sink, cabinet, and folding bed. This not only gave his actors ample space for

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performance but also let the audience concentrate on the characters' detailed movement. In spite of the simple stage design, Young-Hwan Kim's Streetcar introduced some unique devices. Above all, an unusual raking of the stage floor was Hak-soon Lee's idea to symbolize Blanche's psychologically unstable condition. Although the actors had some difficulty in acting on this floor, it was an interesting design, which along with Eunice's tilted apartment, represented the protagonist's situation. Hak-soon Lee added an uncommonly small window in the kitchen and the bedroom, which symbolized Blanche's predicament and desperate search for a way out. Owing to the tiny windows which could not possibly have let much fresh air inside the apartment, the stage seemed to reflect the sticky, steamy hot weather of New Orleans. While the small theatre had the disadvantage of " preventing the Korean Blanche from giving a large scale performance with plenty of voice power,' 113 the innovative set was fairly successful in portraying Blanche's inner turmoil and presenting the symbolic characteristics of the French Quarter apartment. In this sense, Young-Hwan Kim's stage may be considered as another effort to reflect Blanche's imprisonment, which is also shown in the set of Kazan's movie version of Streetcar in which "the cluttered Kowalski apartment ... has a claustrophobic air that seems to imply that the very walls are closing in on the trapped Blanche." 14 The success of this 1993 Streetcar was primarily due to the excellent performances of the cast. As Blanche has always been a popular role for actresses, such well-known Korean actresses as Sun-ja Choi, Sung-hee Paek, So-jung Yun, Min-jung Kim, and Keum-ji Kim have played her. Interestingly enough, because of the significance of the role, most Korean Blanches were older than Williams's Blanche, w ho is assumed to be slightly over thirty. Young-whan Kim wanted to cast a young Korean Blanche who might represent Williams' s Blanche " better" than the past actresses had. Keum-suk Yang was a perfect choice in the sense that, at the age of thirty-one, she was getting widely acclaimed in Korean "Broadway" theatre as a new actress who was "sincere and richly emotional in her performance." 15 In an interview,

Dae-whan Ok, " Ms. jum-suk Yang for Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire," Chosun 1/bo, 29 October 1993, p. 15. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
14 Gene D. Phillips, "A Streetcar Named Desire: Play and Film," in Confronting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, 227.

13

15 jae-wal Chung, "The Stage is Lively: A Streetcar Named Desire," Daily Sports, 24 October 1993, p. 16. All subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text.

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47

she showed her excitement at having a chance to play Blanche only thirteen years after her theatrical debut, saying that "my dream is fulfilled so suddenly." Though she confessed that "she is not familiar with the Southern culture," her interpretation of Blanche was quite insightful: "I am deeply moved by Blanche's dramatic life. I think that Blanche has a variety of elements that any woman may have ranging from a lovely refined lady to a promiscuous woman (Dae-whan Ok, 15)." In spite of Blanche's extraordinarily long speeches and the disadvantage of a small stage, Keum-suk Yang was successful in realizing the director's intention of portraying a rather strong and haughty Blanche. The review in Daily Sports stated, "Yang portrays her character not as a victim but as an offender who trespasses in her sister and brother-in-law's home and transgresses against their life order. Yang presents us with a significant motif, a human being destroyed by a brutal society Uae-wal Chung, 16)." Judging from the dominant opinion that "the success of Streetcar in Korean theatre is up to Blanche (Dae-whan Ok, 15)," it is not surprising to find relatively few remarks on the other characters of Streetcar in theatre reviews. Owing to his muscular body and wide-ranging performance ability, Chan-woo Lee can be considered one of the best of the Korean actors to have played Stanley. Being thirty-three at the time of the production, he could be matched with Stanley in both age and physical appearance. Winning the best-male-actor award at the 1993 Seoul Theater Festival, Chan-woo Lee was on his way to becoming one of the most distinguished and talented actors in Korean theatre. Chan-woo Lee's Stanley was described as "an offensive optimist," 16 whose free lifestyle was frequently interrupted by Blanche. According to the director, in order to prove that he is equal of any aristocrat, Stanley was supposed to impress the audience with the idea that he and Blanche are not different in their pursuit of basic human desires. As a result, Stanley's rape of Blanche may be interpreted not as a sudden burst of passion but as an intentional attack to reveal that she is exactly the same as he. The fact that he does not have a sense of guilt about raping her reflects his vindictive antipathy toward Blanche. The two central figures in this production were highly applauded by Seoul critics, one of whom stated, " The audience was greatly moved not only by the play itself but also by the excellent, powerful performance of the two talented actors." 17
16 Jung-Yong Nho, " Indicating Social Discrepancy by Destroying a Woman's Mendacity," Segye 1/bo, 11 November 1993, p. 13.
17

Eui-sook Kim, " A Streetcar Named Desire," Christian World (December 1993): 112-113.

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In the Korean Streetcar, the costumes of the two main figures and the other characters were influenced by Kazan's film version in which Vivien Leigh and Marlon Branda set a standard for the characters. When Blanche appeared in her sister's apartment, she was dressed in all white clothes from wh ite dress, white necklace, and white hat to white shoes. Throughout the play, Blanche's often graceful, dressy clothes which portrayed her as if she came for a summer party in the garden district, were contrasted to Stella's neat, practical clothes, often covered with an apron. While Blanche's white clothes symbolize the innocence and purity that her name "white woods" suggests, the whiteness also symbolizes death among Koreans. Therefore, many Korean audiences might have noticed Blanche's approaching catastrophe even in the first scene of the performance, and her whiteness was sharply contrasted with the black dress of the Mexican woman selling "flowers for the dead." Stanley was frequently shown in sweaty t-shirts with suspenders, which is generally thought to be a typical casual Western style. Though Chan-woo Lee's Stanley in the 1993 performance appeared a little milder than another who played the role at the Seoul Repertory Company in a torn tee-shirt, his primitive strength and sexual desire were represented well in his colorful clothes. Such other significant characters as Stella and Mitch also greatly contributed to Theater Stellar's successful production. Kyung-hee Lee and Kyung-geun Park portrayed new aspects of Stella and Mitch. According to Young-Hwan Kim, the roles of Stella and Mitch had been reduced to a good housewife and a rather idiotic bachelor in the past Korean performances of Streetcar. However, in his Streetcar, Stella was finally seen as a sexually-oriented and worldly-wise character. Previously, most Korean productions of Streetcar had focused on the positive image of Stella as a good wife. Th roughout the performance, Stella appeared to be a practical woman, sexually desirable and desiring and forgiving of her husband's domestic violence. Mitch was also portrayed somewhat differently than in past performances of Streetcar. He was no longer simply idiotic, though he often stammered and behaved shyly in front of Blanche. On the contrary, his nature was a bit closer to his boisterous poker friends, and he was hardly depicted as stupid. Showing cunning as well as brutality, Kyung-guen Park's performance was also humorous because of his comic skills in various scenes, especially in the Poker Night scene when he meets Blanche. Considering that Streetcar is a tragedy containing much comedy, comic elements play an important role in that "the drama becomes the more harrowing in the shifts of mood from the comic to the violent to

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49

the tragic."' 8 Above all, Blanche made the audiences laugh with her outrageous laughter and witty answers to Stanley's verbal attack. For instance, when Stanley wanted to bring his lawyer friend the written documents involving the loss of Belle Reve, Blanche sneered, saying, " present them to him with a box of aspirin tablets." The conversation between Blanche and Stella after the terrible poker night brawl showed with humor a different perspective on Stanley and Stella's marriage. In the 1993 performance a hen-pecked husband, the Korean Steve, got lots of laughs with his high-pitched tone and funny accent. For instance, he added a pause and a shrieking sound in his "Don't you throw that at me!" comment in scene five when Eunice threatened to throw something to him, which sou nded in Korean like " that! !! [a pause) don't throw!!!" His childish costume and playful moustache also made him look comic. In the begi nning of scene five, Steve and Eunice's disturbance presented the audience a moment of relief from the slowly rising tension of the play. In the Streetcar of 1993, Young-Hwan Kim tried to be faithful to the play as much as possible. His Streetcar underscored several scenes which had been often neglected in the past, scenes involving the appearance of a sai lor and a drunken prostitute and the sounds of a hot-dog vendor. Daily Sports reported that "by using music, set design, actors, and realistic conversation, he [Young-Hwan Kim) portrays the life of an idealist who struggles and is defeated in the harsh world Uaewal Chung, 16)." Throughout the play, jazz and blues, combined with strong black and white lighting, played an important part in delivering to the Korean audience the sultry, sticky heat of New Orleans and its exotic, decadent landscape. The thrilling tension of the play was successfully heightened with the noisy clanging of streetcars, loud yelling of street vendors, and sharp crying of cats. The sound of a Mexican woman selling flowers was a hugely effective scene in the performance, because her sad, desperate voice from below the dark stage provoked in th e audience a sense of approaching destruction and despair. Because of the director's ambition to stage the unabridged play, Theater Stellar's Streetcar lasted two hours and thirty-five minutes. Though somewhat long for Korean audiences who are not familiar with Southern American culture, most audiences responded favorably to the production. The supportive response from the audience led the theatre to extend the performance for another two months, under the direction of Kim and with new actors for Blanche and Stanley. As Christian
10

Donald La Badie, "On Track: 'Streetcar' is Clicking from the Start,"

Commercial Appeal, 10 july 1993, sec. C, p. 2.

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World points out, the social trends of the early nineties could be a part of Streetcar's popularity in that the prospering economy and growing

concern for women and foreign countries enabled many potential theatre audiences to see the masterpiece of an American Southern playwright in performance. In Korean theatre history, Williams's Streetcar has occupied a significant position for its popularity and excellence. Suk-kee Yoh points out Though Korean theatres have accepted foreign drama enthusiastically since the beginning, they were not diligent in improving production quality and overall standards of theatre people which included playwrights, directors, and actors. (Sukkee Yoh, 48) Productions of Streetcar have been an exception to this rule. Although American drama has rarely affected Korean playwrights, there is one Korean play, A Locomotive Engine Which Lives by Flower Leaves, which resembles Williams's Streetcar. The similarity between the two plays can be found in the titles as well as the structures of scenes. In Locomotive Engine, there are a landlady, her visiting sister, and a locomotive engineer who lives in the landlady's boarding house which is located near the Seoul Station. Therefore, the sound effects such as whistles, circus musicians' sentimental tunes, laughter, howling, and street noises are similar to those of Williams's Streetcar. Interestingly, the locomotive engineer's dialogue at the sisters' reunion scene in the house alludes to the similarity between the two plays: "(Smiling) It looks like a scene of A Streetcar Named Desire that we [the landlady and I) watched together at Si-Gong-Kwan [theater].... The scene where the two sisters meet! Ha! Ha! Ha! " ' 9 In spite of the similarities between the plays, the influence of Williams's Streetcar upon the Korean play are extremely superficial. As Suk-kee Yoh points out, such qualities in Williams's Streetcar as the protagonists' complexity and the powerful conflicts between wildness and delicacy are hardly found in Locomotive Engine. (Suk-kee Yoh, 49) The most recent performance of Streetcar took place in September 1995, by the same theatre troupe, Theater Stellar, under a veteran director of Tennessee Williams, O-il Kwun, with a completely new cast, with the exception of Stanley. This production, which was invited to the nineteenth annual Seoul Theater Festival, lasted about two months.
Hee-jae Yim, A Locomotive Engine Which Lives by Flower Leaves, in A Collection of Korean Drama (Seoul: Korean Drama Inc., 1978), 317.
19

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In the performance, O-il Kwun was concerned about "creating the supreme Korean Blanche in our history" 20 by casting another young TV star as Blanche. Williams's Streetcar has been one of the most successful repertory plays on Korean stages since its 1955 premiere. Young-Hwan Kim's 1993 Streetcar can be considered a significant leap forward for future performances of Williams's classic. He was not completely satisfied, however, with what he had achieved in the performance. In an interview he said that there were still some areas to be improved in his conception of Streetcar and that he hoped to direct it again in the near future with significant changes. 2' It seems certain that Streetcar will continue to be a staple of the Korean stage.

10 Program for A Streetcar Named Desire, performed by Theater Stellar at Sungdja Little Theater, Seoul, 14 September 1995-12 November 1995.

11

Young-whan Kim, personal Interview with author, 18 March 1998.

journal of American Drama and Theatre 13 (Winter 2001)

THE TRIUMPHS AND STRUGGLES OF EARLE HYMAN IN TRADITIONAL AND NON-TRADITIONAL ROLES

GLENDA E. GiLL

The American theatre has never really known what to do with its black performers. As with the society itself, the theatrical culture has responded to the situation in desultory spasms of tokenism, integration and separatism.' It used to be that casting black actors in traditionally white roles seemed daring, like marching in the street, and maybe things have gotten better and maybe they haven't. ... I'm not bitter, but I am angry. In Norway, where I have performed for three decades, I have played a Norwegian archbishop and no one has raised the question. 2

The debate on non-traditional casting has existed for more than forty years and escalated on June 26, 1996, with African American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson's speech at Princeton University, where he boldly stated, "We do not need colorblind casting." Caucasian Robert Brustein, critic for The New Republic, challenged Wilson, accusing him of wanting "subsidized separatism." African American Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates continued the fray in a public forum of The New Yorker, noting that Wilson's oeuvres are universal, not black theatre. Should African American actors play only roles designated for black actors? Earle Hyman has faced the question longer than most. The theatre has responded to him in "desultory spasms of tokenism, integration and separatism." If he is angry, he has reason to be. When a spectator sat in the sold-out house of a 21 May 1988 production of Alfred Uhry's Pulitzer Prize-winning Driving Miss Daisy at the off-Broadway John Houseman Theatre, she witnessed a consummate actor whose artistry has now spanned more than five

jack Kroll, "Black Shakespeare," Newsweek (5 February 1979): 67.

2 Earle Hyman quoted in Laurie Winer, "From Cosby's Father to Colonel Pickering, by Way of Norway," New York Times, 24 March 1991, sec. 2, p. 5.

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decades in the American and Scandinavian theatres. In the creative cauldron of the twentieth-century art world, Earle Hyman has performed in more Shakespearean plays than any other actor of color in America-nineteen different roles in twenty-six plays. He has also had roles in plays by O'Neill, Pinter, Soyinka, Albee, Fugard, Beckett, Hansberry and Chekhov. While he has been lionized by Scandinavian audiences, knighted in Norway for his work in Othello, and awarded the Cry statue (Norway's highest honor to an actor) in 1965 for his portrayal of Brutus Jones in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor }ones, on American shores he has received much of his strongest recognition, including an Emmy nomination, for playing Russell Huxtable, the white-haired television father of Bill Cosby. He has also received much of his greatest critical acclaim in America for roles native to his heritage: Rudolph, in the Broadway production of Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944 ), the title role on Broadway in Norman Rosten's Mister johnson (1950), and Hoke Coleburn, the chauffeur, in Alfred Uhry's Driving Miss Daisy (1988). In 1980, he received a Tony nomination for the role of Oscar in Edward Albee's Broadway production of The Lady from Dubuque. He has studied with such luminaries as Lee Strasberg, Eva LeGallienne and Uta Hagen. Although he is well-known in many New York circles and throughout the United States, few people know his name. Hyman has occasionally been cast as a white deliberately. Dick Campbell, a manager/director/singer of the 1930s through the 1960s, reported on 20 May 1988: Hyman was a protege of a well-known actress of the 1930s and 1940s by the name of Mercedes Gilbert. He seemed to be about eighteen or nineteen at the time. She brought him to me and asked me to put him in a spectacular. A part of the script called for white British soldiers to shoot down Crispus Attucks [the first black soldier to fall in the Revolutionary War) on the Boston Commons in 1776. The play was Don 't You Want to be Free. I cast Earle Hyman as a white. I put red hats on him and put pants on Hilda Simms. I did not have enough white people. They later played together in Anna Lucasta. 3 His versatility may have worked in his favor on occasion. Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, on 11 October 1926, to Zachariah and Marie (Plummer) Hyman, the actor migrated to New York as a teenager and began his career in 1943 as the Diaperman in
3

Dick Campbell, personal interview with author, 20 May 1988.

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the American Negro Theatre's (ANT) Three's A Family. That same year he was a churchgoer in Hall johnson's famed extravaganza, Run, Little Chillun. In 1944, also with the ANT, Hyman starred on Broadway opposite Hilda Moses Simms as Rudolph, the juvenile love interest, in Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta. The ANT was co-founded by Frederick O' Neal and Abram Hill. Hyman said to me of Abram Hill inviting him to appear with the ANT: I was a professional actor when I went to. the American Negro Theatre. Abram Hill was playing an extra on a radio show where I was playing George Washington Carver. Abe asked if I'd like to work in Anna Lucasta. I started out playing Anna Lucasta's brother. Then I played opposite Hilda Simms as the juvenile lead, Rudolph. I loved the ANT; the Negro Ensemble Company is doing similar work. 4 When Hyman joined ANT, it was a financially impoverished but richly talented group performing in the basement of the old Schomburg Library on West 135th Street. On 17 june 1944 Lewis Nichols reported, "The American Negro Theatre, which has a somewhat heated headquarters on West 135th Street, last evening turned its attention to the tryout of a new play." 5 That play was Anna Lucasta. Its story is vaguely reminiscent of O'Neill's Anna Christie-a prostitute, Anna, has been thrown out of a Pennsylvania home by her father. She goes back to the Brooklyn dives in which she had fallen and meets and marries a nice young man from the South. Her past is exposed and she returns, again, to her scarlet living, but her husband comes for her in a happy ending. Rosamond Gilder observed: "Anna Lucasta was the first play [of the 1944 season] to attract any serious consideration ... It presented an all Negro cast in a play that had nothing to do with Negro problems as such, but was concerned with the sins and wickednesses, the hopes and fears of a group of ordinary human beings." 6 The story of Anna, the fallen woman, attracted a virtual who's who of African American actors, including not only Simms and Hyman, but Frederick O'Neal, Alice
4

Earle Hyman, telephone interview with author, 19 December 1986.

5 Lewis Nichols, " Review of 'Anna Lucasta,"' (17 June 1944) New York Times Theatre Reviews (NYTTR) 1920-1970, vol. 5 (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1971 ).
6 Rosamond Gilder, "A Little Light: Broadway in Review," Theatre Arts 28, 11 (November 1944): 632-633.

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Childress, Alvin Childress and Canada Lee. The first five showings netted $9,500. The play, with the assistance of Harry Wagstaff Gribble, went on to Broadway. In 1947, Hyman made his first appearance in London at His Majesty's Theatre as Everett du Shane in A Lady Passing Fair, which also had a United States tour. April of 1948 saw him as Turner Thomas in Sister Oakes, about a woman evangelist. Critics spoke of his skillful performances. But life for the very young Hyman was, indeed, "no crystal stair." Speaking of leaving his native North Carolina right out of high school at sixteen, he said on 21 May 1988, following a matinee of
Driving Miss Daisy:

Forty-five years ago, I did without food. There used to be caramel candy the first time I came to New York. I went to the balcony of the Metropolitan and to Broadway on an empty stomach except for the caramel. I bought a $1.65 ticket at the Met. I fainted from starvation. People threw water in my face and I went back and stood. The standing area was all I could afford. When my black brothers are there and when Hoke says, " I never fool with that Geechi trash," I detect a different response than there is with an all white audience. 7 Following some lean periods, in 1950 Hyman enacted the title role in
Mister johnson; this young actor performed, to critical acclaim, the role

of a man who had not come to grips with his racial identity. Moving with the momentum of Hyman's growing stature, Owen Dodson, noted African American playwright/director, in 1951 cast the twenty-four year old Hyman in the title role of Hamlet at Howard University, a historically black college. James V. Hatch wrote: "After Hyman had studied with Sybil Thorndike and recorded scenes from Hamlet, he invited Owen [Dodson] for dinner, and afterwards he played recordings of Sir john Gielgud and Maurice Evans, and then slipped his own in." 8 The ingenuity paid off. Richard Coe of The Washington Post wrote of Dodson's Hamlet: Owen Dodson's production of " Hamlet" was presented last night by the Howard University Players in Spaulding Hall on the campus, with professional Negro artists in the leading roles. The
7

Earle Hyman, personal interview with author, 21 M ay 1988.

6 james V. Hatch, " The Black Prince of Denmark," in Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of ONen Dodson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 168.

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group toured Denmark in 1949. Representatives of the Scandinavian Embassies to Washington were in the opening night audience . .. . Earle Hyman, who played Rudolph in "Anna Lucasta" on the Broadway and West End stage, is the Hamlet. His reading shows a strong Gielgud influence and his characterization emphasizes the neurotic prince. His "nunnery" scene with Carolyn Hill Stewart, the Ophelia, matches the director's concept, admirably, a beautifully played, exceptionally moving scene. While all the voices have that variety of accent common to American classical readings, Mr. Hyman's has impressive power and command which stood him well in the long role. Considering the very few opportunities a Negro actor has at this role, he shows surprising mastery of its facets, and his ability to put his intellectual concept into action is impressive. 9 While it was highly unusual for a major critic to review a play at a historically black college, it is of note, as well, that Coe seems much more sensitive than many major critics of today, who fail to realize how very few black actors have played the title role of Hamlet. Owen Dodson cast Gordon Heath as the black prince of Denmark at Hampton Institute in 1945, and Richard Schechner cast a black actor in the role at Dartmouth the summer of 1999, but the commercial theatre has seldom, if ever, cast a black actor as Hamlet. For Hyman in 1951, Hamlet was a triumph in non-traditional casting. In 1952, Hyman was again the eternal menial, Logan, in The Climate of Eden. The legendary Rosemary Harris played Mabel. The Martin Beck Theater housed this drama of a young man in a psychotic frame of mind who visits a family of missionaries in the jungle of British Guiana. Critics began to pay serious attention to the young Hyman. Theatre Arts pictured Hyman, unfortunately, on his knees with the caption in dialect: "Yes, Mr. Gregory. De parson making de coffin now."10 It is amazing that with one percent of African-Americans in college in the 1950s, and a large black middle-class defined by money, manners, and light-skin (however unfortunate the latter criterion), so many white playwrights- O'Neill, Green, Thurber, Kaufman and Hart'' Richard Coe, " Review of Hamlet," (20 July 195 1) NYTTR, vol. 5.
10

[n.a.], "The Complete Text of The Climate of Eden by Moss Hart," Theatre

Arts 38, 5 (May 1954): 58.

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would stereotype people of color by writing so much dialogue in Negro dialect In March of 1953, Hyman played The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice at City Center in New York. Brooks Atkinson wrote: "Earle Hyman as the eloquent Prince of Morocco introduces a welcome whiff of personality into his casket scene." 11 Also in 1953, Hyman first played the title role in Othello. Errol Hill noted : " For this, his initial New York performance of the role to which all actors aspire, Hyman at twenty-seven years of age received such 'flattering reviews that his professional career seemed solidly grounded." 12 His next role was the soothsayer in julius Caesar in July 1955 at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. Christopher Plummer was Marc Antony. In October of 1955 he played a swanky officer with elegance in No Time for Sergeants, at the Alvin Theatre. His career was, still, mainly non-traditional. Hyman reprised the title role of Mister johnson in 1956. AI Hirschfeld did a caricature of the actor in the role of the wellintentioned government clerk, a sign of Hyman's growing stature. Brooks Atkinson observed of the 1956 run: Although Mr. Hyman, who plays the part [of Mister Johnson) has been restricted to minor roles on Broadway, he is an uncommonly talented actor who has distinguished himself in classical parts off Broadway and at the Antioch College and Stratford, Conn., Shakespeare Festivals.... In a flowing, easy, modest, spontaneous performance, Mr. Hyman acts the part magnificently. Particularly in the last scene, when Mister Johnson's emotional impulses are chaotic and desperate, Mr. Hyman acts with insight, awareness and versatility, preserving the essential sweetness of the character amid the tumult and agony of Mister Johnson's martyrdom.13

11 Brooks Atkinson, " Luther Adler Plays Shylock in 'Merchant of Venice' at City Center," (5 March 1953) NYrTR, vol. 6.

12 Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 136.

Brooks Atkinson, " African Negroes in the White Man's World," (8 April 1956) NYrTR, vol. 6.

13

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Earle Hyman as The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant o(Venice, 1953. Courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

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Earlier, on 30 March 1956, Atkinson wrote, "Mr. Hyman is superb." 14 Newspaper coverage was wide. A number of cartoons surfaced and Hyman had star status in this Broadway role. Classical roles for Hyman were juxtaposed with those of the stereotype. Hyman recalls: There was a painful part after Mister johnson's success. I was asked to play Othello at Stratford in Connecticut. I could not believe I was good, and was not satisfied. I mysteriously lost my voice one week before opening. I played hoarse. Doctors examined me. There was a sense of paralysis. Success is much harder to deal with than failure. I was extremely na'ive. My standards were high . I went into the theatre out of high school at the age of sixteen. During the paralysis time, I did study acting techniques from Harry Wagstaff Gribble and Betty Cashman .15 Errol Hill spoke of Hyman's classical work in the 1950s: In 1955 the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre at Stratford, Connecticut, was established, and Hyman was invited to join the company. Over a period of five summers he appeared in eleven roles at the theater, among his most important parts being Melun in King john with Morris Carnovsky and Fritz Weaver (1956), Othello with Alfred Drake as lago and Jacqueline Brookes as Desdemona (1957), Autolycus in The Winter's Tale (1958), and Caliban to the Prospera of Carnovsky in The Tempest (1960). 16 While in Connecticut, Hyman found year-round work which allowed him wide range, including on 12 September 1956 the role of Dunois in George Bernard Shaw's St. joan, with Siobhan McKenna in the title role. (In 1968, he played Captain La Hire in the version of St. joan that featured African American actor Diana Sands in the title role at Lincoln Center.) Neither of Hyman's roles in Saint joan was designated for a man of color. Continuing to expand, on 22 January 1957, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Hyman played Didi in an all-black version of Samuel Beckett's
" Brooks Atkinson, " Review of Mister johnson," (30 March 1956) NYTTR, vol.

6.
' 5

Earle Hyman, personal interview with author, 19 December 1986. Hill, 136-137.

'

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Waiting for Codot. Mantan Moreland, Geoffrey Holder, and Rex Ingram were in the cast Brooks Atkinson reviewed:

... Earle Hyman, who is tall and skinny ... plays Didi. Mr. Hyman's characterization is that of an egg-head- the intellectuat the dilettante, the man of words. In the midst of the squalor of the play, he introduces the occasional mystic ideas that give "Waiting for Godot" a suspicion of meaning. Mr. Hyman is an excellent actor who knows how to speak a sentence. 17 On 20 March 1957, Hyman played Antonio at The Phoenix Theater in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Atkinson criticized Hyman's language, a key complaint of many white critics about black actors: "Earle Hyman, who plays Antonio, does not find in Webster the resonant rhythms that he ordinarily discovers in Shakespeare." 18 By summer, Hyman was back at Stratford, Connecticut On 24 June 1957, he starred as Othello opposite Alfred Drake as lago. Brooks Atkinson wrote: "As far as it goes, the acting is intelligent and agreeable. Earle Hyman, an able actor, has in the last few years played Othello long enough to know the part thoroughly."19 John Houseman, who directed the 1957 Othello, wrote in Final Dress: In this production of Othello, I ran into one unpredictable problem. Our Moor, Earle Hyman, had played the part twice before and had been much admired, especially for his last appearance at Jan Huss House in New York. I had not seen it, but it had been described to me as a somewhat immature but violent and whirling performance. I had assumed that he would now be able to deepen and extend this youthful ardor; I was mistaken. In the three years that had passed since his last appearance as Othello he had become more sophisticated; he had traveled, met with celebrated European actors, studied with a female voice teacher who, while purifying his speech, had added a measure of affectation to it He was, in fact, in the
17 Brooks Atkinson, " Beckett Play Staged with Negro Cast," (22 january 195 7) NYITR,vol 6.

Brooks Atkinson, "'Duchess of' Malfi Staged at Phoenix," (20 March 195 7) NYITR,vol. 6. Brooks Atkinson, "Shakespeare Festival Opens With 'Othello,"' (24 june 1957) NYITR, vol. 6.
19

18

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intermediary stage between the natural actor he had once been and the accomplished, conscious performer he later became. 20 Affectation has been a rather consistent criticism of some of Hyman's work, even through the 1990s Hyman struggled with considerable criticism about many facets of his acting, especially while he was in this "intermediary stage." Hyman had sustained negative criticism from Caucasian and African American critics during the 1950s. For his review of The Merchant of Venice at Stratford, Lewis Funke wrote: "Earle Hyman as the overanxious Prince of Morocco makes his moments suitably funny." 21 Miles Jefferson, African American critic for Phylon, wrote much more scathingly of Hyman's work in his column, "The Negro on Broadway, 1956-1957." One section he sarcastically called, "The Busy Mr. Hyman." In it, he seldom found a redeeming feature: Mr. Earle Hyman, an actor of undeniable talent and resource, won first prize among members of his race for unflagging energy during the year, if not for unfailingly happy accomplishment ... The experience with roles calling for varied styles of acting was probably beneficial, but Mr. Hyman seemed strangely to be unequal to the requirements of so vast an array of assignments. As Antonio [the husband of the Duchess of Malfi of whom her brothers do not approve] in Webster's torrent of Elizabethan atrocities, he was decorative without being in any way compelling, in St. joan his Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, was no more than competent in its self-conscious behavior, and in Beckett's puzzling prank, Waiting for Codot, though he was perhaps more relaxed than in anything else he attacked, he suffered from what appeared to be insufficient rehearsal. 22 There is little wonder that Hyman stopped reading the critics. Harsh reviews notwithstanding, Hyman acknowledges that he has seldom, if ever, been out of work. In 1958, at the Union Theological Seminary at 121 stand Claremont in New York, he played the title role in a modern-day version of Everyman, the medieval drama where God
20

John Houseman, Final Dress (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 71.

21 lewis Funke, "American Theatre Production Opens," (11 july 1957) NYTTR, vol. 6. (Katharine Hepburn played Portia for whom Hyman was the suitor.)

22

Miles Jefferson, "The Negro on Broadway, 1956-1957," Phylon 18,3 (1957):

286.

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Othello, American Shakespeare Festival Theatre, 1957. Scene still of Earle Hyman
(Othello), jacqueline Brooks (Desdemona), and Alfred Drake (lago). Courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

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calls Everyman to account for his sins. Critics cited Hyman 's faulty voice projection, but observed his imposing movement, brooding sincerity and variety of attack. Everyman is also not a play written for a black man. In 1958, Hyman took several other non-traditional roles, including the Ghost of Laius in Cocteau's Infernal Machine, Horatio in Hamlet and Philostrate in A Midsummer Night's Dream. With guts and tenacity, Hyman took on the role of Walter Lee Younger in London in August of 1959, four months after Lorraine Hansberry's mega-hit, A Raisin in the Sun, starring Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee, Ruby Dee as his wife, Ruth; Claudia McNeil as Mama Younger, and Diana Sands, as Beneatha, the sister, took Broadway by storm. Designed for black men, the role of Walter Lee is clearly not a stereotype. With exemplary courage the black chauffeur grows into manhood against the formidable odds of the Clybourne Park Improvement Committee which tries, unsuccessfully, to buy the Youngers out of their new house in the all white neighborhood. The London critics were cool toward the play: "Most of the reviewers found its pace too slow, although most of them liked the theme and the acting, particularly of juanita Moore as the mother and Earle Hyman as the son."23 Working abroad appealed to Hyman. That same month, he was a boatswain in The Tempest at the American Shakespeare Festival, a minor role, indeed, but another non-traditional one. In 1960, at Stratford, he played Alexas in Antony and Cleopatra, another minor role, but still non-traditional. Hyman returned to New York to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on 12 October 1962, with a revival of Mister Roberts, a romantic comedy by joshua Logan and Thomas Heggen about the Navy and World War II. The New York Times reported: The large company of actors, headed by Earle Hyman as Lieutenant U. G.) Roberts ... give telling performances ... Mr. Hyman, lanky, relaxed and ingratiating, brings sincerity and conviction to the role of the junior officer who commands the respect of his rowdy crew on the not so good Cargo Ship AK601. He understands the men, their needs and foibles. 24
Mister Roberts told the amusing story of a man who did not wish to vegetate, but to be a man of adventure on the high seas. The role was not a black one.
23

[n.a. ], "London Critics Cool to 'Raisin in the Sun,"' (5 August 1959) NYITR,

val. 6.
14

Louis Calta, "Review of Mister Roberts," (12 October 1962) NYfTR, vol. 7.

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Finding more favorable reception, however, in Norway than he did in his native land, in 1963, Hyman traveled there again, having first crossed the Atlantic in 1957. In Bergen in 1963, he played the title role in Othello in Norwegian. In 1965, he played the title role in The Emperor jones at Det Norske Teatret, Oslo; Det Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern, Stockholm; and the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt at the International Theatre Festival. Oslo awarded him its highest artistic award, the Gry statue. He said to me of this experience: My Norwegian experience was the mystical experience of my life. I was the first black Othello to do the role in the language. The first time I felt as if I saw God. It was my first winter in Bergen; the oldest theatre in Norway was there and that's where, in 1963, I won several awards. The award that means the most to me is a statue given for the outstanding performance of the year in Oslo. Only seventeen actors have received it. I got it for The Emperor jones in 1965. It is the Gry statue. There is nothing that gives me more joy or more pain than the theatre. 25 Critics and audiences were ecstatic about Hyman's Othello and Emperor jones. A bronze bust of Hyman was erected in his honor in the theatre where he performed. After playing the title role in The Emperor jones, Hyman returned to the American Place Theater on West 46th Street, where, on 16 February 1966, he played the Angel in Paul Goodman's Jonah. The generally very objective critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote: "Earle Hyman, impressive-looking as the Angel, has always had a tendency to be a 'voice' actor, and Mr. Kornfeld [the director] has not curbed it." 26 While Hyman's voice has been the object of scrutiny with more than one critic, it is generally agreed that Hyman eventually rose to being an actor who did great work. Continuing to alternate between roles designated for black men and non-traditional roles, in November of 1970, Hyman worked opposite james Earl Jones in Lorraine Hansberry's Les 8/ancs at the Longacre Theatre. Hyman played Abioseh Matoseh. James Earl Jones got the kudos. In December of 1970, Hyman played the title role in West Indian playwright Edgar White's The Life and Times of}. Walter Smintheus at the Theatre DeLys on 121 Christopher Street in New York City. About this rare work which focuses on the pressures of the black bourgeoisie,
''Hyman, telephone interview.
26

Stan ley Kauffmann, " Review of Jonah," (16 February 1966) NmR, vol. 7.

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Clive Barnes noted: "As Smintheus, Earle Hyman has a wonderful, gentle, beleaguered role, with its nervous voice, academic stoicism, and humbly proud black soul." 27 This unusual play showed a black middleclass man in a number of situations. He is in a mental hospital in a catatonic state with Mozart running through his mind. He is an honors student at Cornell. His white friend marries his sister. He hates teaching in a historically black college. He has an affair with a whore who gives him a venereal disease. Barnes concluded: "Mr. White has written a fascinatingly bad play." 28 Robert Guillaume played Hyman's stage friend, Dr. Comma. It is highly unfortunate that this play could not have gone to the Eugene O'Neill Center where someone might have helped work on its writing which Barnes said was poor. The play is barely known. Continuing to get classical roles, on 7 December 1972, at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, Hyman played Gaev, the caramel-eating, fumbling and ineffectual brother to Madame Ranevskaya in an all-black version of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. James Earl Jones was Lopakhin, the servant who triumphantly buys the cherry orchard from the delusional and vacillating Madame Ranevskya, enacted by the extraordinarily regal Gloria Foster, an enormously neglected actor. Ellen Holly was Varya; Josephine Premice, Charlotta; Zakes Mokae, Firs, and Phylicia Ayers-Allen (now Phylicia Rashad), a servant. Conceived by James Earl Jones, who started out as director but had to take a role and relinquish directing to Michael Schultz, this classic was a major moment in the annals of theatre history. Hyman also participated in Chekhov's The Seagull at Center Stage, Baltimore, both of these non-traditional roles. When Actors' Equity celebrated its 60th anniversary in New York City, Hyman read a soliloquy from Othello. Frederick O'Neal, the only African American ever to head the union, was a strong supporter of the actor, having known him since the days of Anna Lucasta when O'Neal played Frank, the bullying brother-in-law. The 1980s changed Hyman's life. He began to get more honors and more recognition in America. Broadway called again for him in January of 1980 when he played Oscar "with dignity and detachment" in Edward Albee's The Lady From Dubuque, yet another non-traditional role. Although the play closed after twelve performances, Hyman won a Tony nomination. By June of 1980, the play moved to Hartford Stage. Hyman had a major opportunity when he took on a key nonClive Barnes, "Review of The Life and Tim es of}. Walter Smintheus," (1 0 December 1970) NYTTR, vol 7.
28

27

Ibid.

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traditional role in April 1981, playing James Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's journey Into Night. The run began at the Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art in New York City, but moved to Joseph Papp's Public Theater in New York. The cast was all-black. They played it straight, with no attempt at Irish characterization. Jack Kroll, in a review titled, "Passionate 'Journey,"' observed: "Earle Hyman captures the grandiloquent cowardice that has turned the father, James Tyrone, from a potentially great actor into a matinee idol whose miserliness has grievously injured his family. " 29 AI Freeman, Jr. was Jamie, and Peter Francis James, Edmund. Gloria Foster, in her usual regal splendor, played the mother on stage. In 1983, PBS aired the classic with Hyman, but Ruby Dee played the role of Mary Tyrone on television. Television became good to Hyman. In the mid-1980s, Bill Cosby sought him for the role of Russell Huxtable, his television father, in The Cosby Show. Clarice Taylor, long neglected, as well, played his television wife, Anna, with aplomb. The show featured an upper middle-class, loving black family, Claire and Cliff Huxtable, a lawyer and physician, respectively. Hyman and Taylor add considerable credence to the reality of strong black families who marry, stay married, attend college commencements and celebrate major wedding anniversaries. Russell Huxtable is a 1936 graduate of the mythical Hillman College and tries to persuade his grandchildren to go there as well. The filming was done at Spelman College in Atlanta, across the street from Morehouse College, alma mater of Martin Luther King, Jr. Hyman received gifts and letters from people. Some recognized his face, if not his name, according to his own admission. In his interview with me, Hyman called Cosby a "sheer genius." While in the middle of filming for The Cosby Show, Hyman had a variety of supporting roles in Emily Mann's stage production, Execution of justice, in March of 1986. John Simon, critic for New York, tried to like the play, but couldn't. The documentary at the Virginia Theater focused on the 1979 case of the People vs . Dan White in San Francisco. Mel Gussow wrote: "She[Emily Mann] has drawn excellent performances from a number of actors-Peter Friedman as the defense attorney; Isabell Monk, Earle Hyman, Donal Donnelly, and Jon DeVries in a variety of roles; and, especially from John Spencer as Dan White." Gussow also reminded his readers: In a double-barreled act of violence in November 1978, Dan White killed George Moscone, the Mayor of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk, a city Supervisor and the first avowed homosexual
2

Jack Kroll, " Passionate 'Journey,"' Newsweek (20 April1981): 104.

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to hold high public office in that city. After a trial that polarized San Francisco the following year, the accused was convicted on the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison. He was released in January 1984 after serving a little more than five years, and last fall he took his own life. 30 Mann later adapted Having Our Say to the stage; Hyman and Mann were both fortunate to work together on Execution of justice. In March of 1987, Lincoln Center beckoned, and Hyman starred in Wole Soyinka's Nobel Prize-winning play, Death and the King's Horseman. Edith Oliver wrote in The New Yorker: At the opening of "Death and the King's Horseman" by the Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka, the actors, in African costume, pour down the aisles of the Vivian Beaumont onto the stage, which becomes a lively African market. The characters display their bright wares and chatter and dance to drumming. Then a chief, the late king's horseman, in the person of Earle Hyman, makes his entrance. He must, according to an unbreakable tribal tradition, follow his master to death. The mood is cheerful, even exuberant; he has picked a young bride for himself as a farewell present ...31 But it is as the non-subservient, shrewd, but lovingly humane Hoke Coleburn, the black chauffeur in Atlanta, Georgia, that Hyman caused men and women to weep unashamedly. After a matinee performance of Driving Miss Daisy, Hyman stated: "The men cry worse than the women."32 Do they cry for guilt over the way Boolie treats his mother? Do they cry because truth about the treatment of the black servants stares them in the face with a reality they cannot deny? In 1987, with the advent of Hoke Coleburn, the black domestic assumed the role of protagonist, or if one considers Miss Daisy the protagonist, Hoke is, without question, the antagonist. Having wrecked her car beyond repair just as the curtain opens, Daisy Werthan, played by Frances Sternhagen in the 21 May 1988 production, is coerced by
Mel Gussow, " Review of Execution o( justice," New York Tim es, 14 March 1986, sec. C, p. 3.
31 Edith Oliver, "Review of Death and the King's Horseman," The New Yorker (16 March 1987): 71.
32

30

Hyman, personal interview.

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her son, Boolie, to hire a driver. Hoke Coleburn gets the job over Miss Daisy's cantankerous objections. Seldom has a playwright written about such a dignified, illiterate, loving, shrewd domestic as ably as Alfred Uhry. Earle Hyman said, "I use my father and brother who have facets that Hoke had- my grandfather- the behavior, the mannerisms, voices, outlook on life. So much of my father is Hoke . . . the work of the artist is always the private life that is used; they go together. The Hoke Coleburn I created is not so much the imagination as what I know." 33 Hyman's father, Zachariah, died at 104 in 1986. Hoke is a master at survival, and yet, tender with Miss Daisy in a relationship of twenty-five years, 1948-1973. The segregated school system that has denied Hoke an opportunity to learn does not cause him to be unreasonably bitter. Filled with pride even to the point of refusing an invitation Miss Daisy extends to a dinner honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. because it comes as Hoke is driving her to the affair, Hoke, as played by Hyman, is a convincing blend of toughness, tenacity, and affection. Although he witnesses lynchings, bombings, and death, Hoke remains spiritually whole, and Hyman gives him this nuanced rendering. One of the most painful and powerful scenes comes when Miss Daisy is fully prepared to accuse Hoke of stealing a thirty-three cent can of salmon which he has, indeed, taken. Enlisting the aid of her son, Boolie, Daisy Werthan has almost convinced him to fire Hoke when he walks in just in the nick of time with a can of salmon which he has just purchased from the Piggly Wiggly. Hoke explains that the left-over pork chops to which he was welcome w ere "a bit stiff." Hyman played this with the skill that only a person who has known black southern servants could have. It is also amazing that Hyman has such versatility with language. Negro dialect, for those who don't speak it as their native tongue, is infinitely harder to master than the language of Shakespeare or Synge. For Hoke, Negro dialect is appropriate and authentic as Uhry understood. In the famous scene where Hoke announces to Miss Daisy that he must relieve himself she, thoughtlessly reprimands him, saying that he should have thought of that back at the Standard Oil. Hoke responds: "Colored can' use the toilet at no standard oil . .. You know dat."34 Bringing the car to a complete halt, he asserts his manhood with the words: "How you think I feel havin' to ax you when I can make my water like I some damn dog? . . . I a man nearly seventy-two years old
33

Ibid.

Alfred Uhry, Driving Miss Daisy (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1987), 26.

34

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and I know when my bladder is full." 35 Hyman conveyed wrath with all the subdued and restrained dignity he could muster. Regarding this scene, he stated, That's a very sexual thing ... We've never discussed it. Frances [Sternhagen] and I had ten days to get this together. Black men do not discuss their body functions. For Hoke, this is the first time. The words do not fall easily out of his mouth. But we would not have survived as a race if we had not accepted some things as taboo. 36 Morgan Freeman, whom Hyman replaced on the stage, believes that Hoke and Daisy had a romantic relationship. The fact that Hoke cannot read provides a poignant moment when he accompanies Miss Daisy to her husband's grave. Hoke stirs her tutorial instincts when he cannot place flowers on the tombstone for a friend's husband, as Miss Daisy orders him to do: Hoke: Yassum . Where's the grave at? Miss Daisy: You' ll see the headstone. Bauer. Hoke : Yassum. Miss Daisy: What's the matter? Hoke: Nothin' the matter, Miz Daisy, I can't read. 37 Having lived in North Carolina, where over 300,000 people still could not read in 1988, Hyman brings a quiet pathos to a situation some few educators now acknowledge. Hyman's white hair, majestic height, tranquil, craggy face, and eyebrows that dominate his countenance hold his audiences spellbound. So do his silences. " Hold on, you' re speeding/' Miss Daisy shouts as he hurtles along at nineteen miles an hour in his chauffeur's cap, ultimately purchasing from the dealer Miss Daisy's Oldsmobile and Cadillac when she gets ready to trade. Hirschfeld captured this in his caricature of Hyman in the New York Times. As the
35

Ibid.
Hyman, personal interview. Uhry, 18.

36

37

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90-minute tour de force ends, Hoke comes to see Miss Daisy in a rain and ice storm, when it is his day off, with coffee which he has purchased for her from the convenience store. While Hoke appears in person to see about his employer under arduous and dangerous conditions, her son, Boolie, merely telephones her. When Miss Daisy's mind deteriorates, this son places her in a nursing home, but Hoke visits her there regularly. The play ends with his feeding her a piece of Thanksgiving pie when she is ninety. Of this ending, Hyman reflected: I did not feel the servant part when I rehearsed it. For me, the simplicity of love has to do with the human heart. Miss Daisy says, 'You're my best friend.' She means, 'I love you.' But she says, instead, 'I didn't say I love him; I say he's handy.' She's 95 and he's 85 at the end, when they touch for the first time. The ending of the play wiped me out! 38 There was not a dry eye in the John Houseman Theatre when the play ended on 21 May 1988. Part of the reason for the tears was Hyman's extraordinary portrayal . Why has Hyman been neglected by virtually every major theatre historian? Is it that he has insisted, in the main, on non-traditional roles? He has played far more of them than roles designed for black men. In spite of vast work in Shakespeare and other classics for much of his career, more people flocked to see him in Driving Miss Daisy than in any of his other performances. Robert Brustein writes: Hoke, though unfailingly courteous, is not merely a passive image of virtue. It takes him six days to persuade Daisy to let him drive her car ("the same time it took the Lord to make the world"), and when he finally gets her in the Oldsmobile, grumbling and complaining, driving becomes an occasion for a battle of wi lis. 39 It has taken Hyman, the actor, almost sixty years to persuade some critics that he can play any role. His audiences have known it for a long time. The Playbill for Driving Miss Daisy in its "Who's Who in the Cast" description of Hyman reads:

38

Hyman, personal interview.

39 Robert Brustein, " Elegy for Old Age. " The New Republic (28 September 1987): 28.

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While he has worked almost continuously since (1943] on stages here and abroad, he is seen by more people on just one episode of TV's The Cosby Show than have seen him during his entire stage career. (O]ne of the theatre's most acclaimed and respected actors, (Earle Hyman] won a Theatre World award for Mister johnson, a Tony nomination in 1980 for Lady from Dubuque and the Hearst ABC Arts ACE Award in 1983 for the best performance on Cable TV in Long Day's journey Into Night. 40 Why should "one of the theatre's most acclaimed and respected actors" still have to prove to critics that he can do non-traditional roles? In 1991 , with critics still questioning credibility, Hyman took on the part of Colonel Pickering, the military man turned scholar, in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, a highly non-traditional role. Then, in January 1994, with an all-black cast, he played the blind Adolph, a spiritually destitute black war veteran among other denizens at The Top of the Hill Cafe. The vehicle was Eugene Lee's East Texas Hot Links. The actor regularly delivers the "corn liquor" to the bar in 1955 East Texas. George C. Wolfe produced it at joseph Papp's Public Theatre. john Simon could not understand the language, he reported; a perpetual beef he seems to have with African Americans on stage. But Hyman admits that he ignores and does not read the critics. Audiences are his best teachers. In December of 1996, at the age of 70, Hyman was finally honored in America in a significant manner. He entered the Theater Hall of Fame, chosen by members of the American Theater Critics Association. In April 2000, Hyman was still workin& accepting a call from Houston's famed Alley Theatre, where he and Marian Seldes played an older couple in Albee's new play, The Play About the Baby. This role, too, was non-traditional. In 1991 on the matter of African American actors playing nontraditional and traditional roles, Hyman declared: "Theater is illusion .. . It is not reality, however much it may seem so at times. . . . Here I am 65 years old and I' m still saying that all roles should be available to all actors of talent, regardless of race. Why should I be deprived of seeing a great black actress play Hedda Gabler? That still makes me angry." 41 Gordon Heath wrote of Hyman, "His Falstaff, his Peer Gynt, his

40

Playbill for Driving Miss Daisy, (21 May 1988), SO.

Hyman quoted in Winer.

41

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Cyrano, and his appearances in Pinter plays were extraordinary theater events.'' 42 The subject of non-traditional casting still sparks a debate. Students at many colleges and universities find black actors in roles historically created for whites more than they can cope with. So do some regional and Broadway theatres. The Non-Traditional Casting Project has done a great deal to change this. Perhaps one day, we may be able to listen to all of our stories and accept "one of the theatre's most acclaimed and respected actors" for his lifetime of superior work. It is an obligation of the American theatre.

42 Gordon Heath, Deep Are The Roots : Memoirs of A Black Expatriate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 140.

journal of American Drama and Theatre 1 3 (Winter 2001 )

SLAUGHTERING LAMBS: THE MORAL UNIVERSE OF DAVID MAMET AND WALLACE SHAWN

ROBERT COMBS

This essay will discuss two Jeremiah's of the contemporary theatre and attempt to describe the moral concerns they share. David Mamet and Wallace Shawn have created characters who identify themselves with the destructive forces operating in their societies; somewhat comically, however, these characters do not quite realize what they have done. They see themselves as exemplary citizens who hold innocuously conservative values. Unfortunately, they have fallen on hard times and experience their lives within melodramatically defensive postures. The result is tragicomedy the audience must sort out, which they cannot do, however, without admitting to themselves their own moral confusion and complicity with evil. This is a theatre of Swiftian satire with an Orwellian message. I will focus on Mamet's Edmond (1983) and Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985), plays which embrace Orwell's symbolic year of apocalypse, 1984. Edmond consists of twenty-three lightening-fast scenes in which an average man falls apart. Bored with his life, Edmond leaves home to wander the city streets in search of sexual consolation. Exposed to the vicious financial hustle of life on the streets, he discovers his freedom and manhood when he beats up a pimp who tries to rob him and insanely murders a waitress who resists his head games. He ends up in prison, sex slave to an inmate with whom he talks new-age metaphysics. Mamet may be satirizing American narcissism of the 1970s, but Edmond's alienation goes back at least as far as the early plays of Eugene O ' Neill, especially The Emperor )ones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922). Structurally and thematically Edmond resembles both. In these plays, a central character attempts to flee the illusory world he has made for himself only to be destroyed by elemental forces he tragically assumes he can control. He assimilates himself to inhuman energy. In O ' Neill's earlier play, Brutus Jones thinks he can outsmart colonial brutality by becoming the most brutal colonizer of all. In this way, he

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betrays his own people and himself. In The Hairy Ape, Yank struggles to reaffirm a primitive masculinity even after he has seen that the world is run now by money not muscle. As a result, the life force turns on him. In the course of Mamet's play, Edmond too identifies with the force he should be fighting, in his case the manipulative language of hype and seduction. When he turns on the pimp, a black man trying to rob him, he displays his hubris. By frankly owning the racist hatred many white people feel but deny, Edmond fancies himself a superman who can kill with impunity; whereas, really, he has only lost his humanity. Structurally, these three plays do not move forward so much as downward into expressionistic depth . The Emperor }ones consists of brief dream-like episodes which reiterate Jones's attempt at liberation through violent self-deception . Each scene ends with a gunshot aimed at an image from Jones's past which he is trying unsuccessfully to repress. The Hairy Ape pictures a series of attempts to escape confinement which only result in greater confinement. Yank flees the stokehole to fight plutocrats on the street but winds up first in prison and finally in the gorilla cage at the zoo, where he is killed . Just as Yank wishes to prove the upper-class Mildred wrong who, going below in the ship, finds him disgusting, Edmond tries to disprove the words of the Fortuneteller in scene one: You are not where you belong [exactly the word O'Neill uses to describe Yank's dilemma) .. . . The world seems to be crumbling around us. You look and you wonder if what you perceive is accurate. And you are unsure what your place is. To what extent you are cause and to what an effect.
1

But each succeeding scene turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more Edmond imposes himself, the less he belongs. Edmond's decline begins when an expensive lamp broken by the housekeeper precipitates a violent argument with his wife. The illusion of his bourgeois happiness is shattered and he is propelled into the streets. The light by which he sees is too costly in human terms, and he fears that people below him are extinguishing it. Subsequent scenes reiterate middle-class frustrations with the high cost of living. Sexual desire, continuously renegotiated, becomes a garish display in bar, peep show, and whorehouse. Instant wealth represented by the card shark
1

David Mamet, Edmond (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1983), 2. subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

All

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never materializes. When Edmond asks the pawnshop owner why a knife he sees is so expensive, he replies, "This is a survival knife (3 7)." Even survival seems to be too high in this cutthroat world. Edmond tries to resist these disappointments in the same currency, so to speak, that they come to him-first in polite but coercive appeals to fair play; then in language of violent self-assertion (vulgar frankness, profanity, and intimidation); and finally at the end when he has given up struggling, in self-hypnotic language of passive agreement and banal platitudes about life in general: "You can't control what you make of your life (77)," and so forth. Central to Edmond's psychology all along is a passive innocence of attitude he unconsciously maintains notably with women, but actually with everyone. Surely, it is naive of him to announce to his wife that he is no longer interested in her spiritually or sexually. Of course he gets thrown out of the house. And what must a prostitute think of a man who approaches her with the words, "I want to have intercourse with you (23)"? He ingenuously approaches a woman on the New York subway with the words, "My mother had a hat like that (39)," and becomes verbally abusive when she will not talk to him. After he stabs the waitress with his survival knife, he cries, "now look what you've done (57)." His attitude never changes in the play. It seems to be almost a relief for him when he is incarcerated because all pretense of autonomy can be given up. Poignantly, Edmond admits to his wife when she visits him in jail, "I know at certain times we wished we could be ... closer to each other. I can say that now. I'm sure this is the way you feel when someone near you dies (67)." Confronted by the prison chaplain, he can only stammer, repeating the first person pronoun-the same reaction he has when enlisted by his cellmate for sexual favors. It is as if his identity, such as it is, were being extinguished. Mamet has captured in this play not only the middle-class fear of losing its perhaps illusory privileges, but also a far greater fear, that of recognizing oneself as empty, irrelevant, eager for abnegation. As an objective image, Edmond could be an anonymous person one reads about in the paper or a quiet neighbor who goes berserk. Subjectively speaking, one could say, he stands for a point of entry where base or cowardly impulses work their way into one's life, a point at which one is shocked to discover one's own indifference to evil. The kind of passivity Edmond suffers from makes it impossible for him to see the world as a place where joy and moral action might be abundantly possible. He confronts the chaplain: "If nothing's impossible with God, then let him let me walk out of here and be free. Let him cause a new day. In a perfect land full of life. And air. Where people are kind to each other, and there's work to do. Where we grow up in love, and in

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security we're wanted (73-4)." Is there really no such world or is the problem with Edmond that he cannot see it? Like Young Goodman Brown in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1830s allegory, Edmond leaves his wife to wander in the wilderness and keep an appointment with the Devil. In Hawthorne's forest, Brown loses faith in all mankind as he discovers that his neighbors and teachers are no better than himself, and he becomes frankly demonic as he rages through the darkness. Just before Edmond murders the waitress, she recognizes the evil he is possessed by: "You are the devil. I know who you are (57)," she says. Presumably, in Hawthorne's story, it is Brown's own doubts about life and people that constitute the Devil's forest. He goes into the dark forest of his own doubting mind, never fully to return. In Edmond's 1980s scenario, "doubt" has intensified to "paranoia." But the most troubling aspect of both tales is their worryingly Calvinist fatalism. Writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, O'Neill, and Mamet portray characters who slip beyond their These characters, like Young redeeming human communities. Goodman Brown, Bartleby the Scrivener, Jamie Tyrone (in A Moon for the Misbegotten), and Edmond, haunt us like painful memories or bad dreams. The challenge of representing Edmond on the stage is to make the audience care about him and feel his losses deeply even as his humanity slips away. Mamet toys with serious and comic images of Edmond's ultimate fate. When Edmond is recognized and turned over to the police by the Woman from the Subway, he is about to enter a storefront mission church whose preacher assures him that God knows "the terrible depth of [his] unbelief (58)." Yet at another point, Edmond speculates to his wife about why he killed the waitress: "I think I'd just had too much coffee (66)." Like T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, who has also "measured out [his] life in coffee spoons," 2 Edmond inhabits a dark urban environment in which people seem incapable of resisting evil simply because of their almost comic literalmindedness. In Mamet's greatest works, like Glengarry Glenn Ross, the edge between compassion and judgment is razor sharp. It touches us and we bleed . It is important to note that Edmond's dilemma is not uniquely personal. He represents the crisis of a whole culture, often expressed in the question, "What happened to the American Dream?" Edmond's words to the chaplain clearly evoke that question: "Let [God] cause a new day. In a perfect land full of life. And air (73)." Daniel Boorstin, in The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream, argues that
2 T. S. Eliot, "The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in Collected Poems 19091935 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), 13.

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the contemporary American mind is lost in a world of reified illusions. Heroes have become celebrities, people known for being well-known, travelers are now tourists, and ideals mere images capable of endless replication. Interestingly, Boorstin blames not Madison Avenue, but the modern American individual who, he says, wants more than any material thing the "Self-Deceiving Magic of Prestige," narcissistic unreality. According to Boorstin, there is no mass cure for this condition; people have to escape enchantment individually, if they can. 3 Even more pessimistically, jean Baudrillard, in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, decries the present state of affairs, "After the Orgy," as a post-modern ongoing simulation of all forms of liberation without, in fact, ever being revolutionary. In Baudrillard's view, there can be no substantial Self or Other in a post-revolutionary world because everyone claims the same abstract freedom to realize themselves as they wish. 4 But what can there be to wish for when no state of being need be contrary to fact? Edmond kills the waitress after she tells him she is an actress. "Act something for me (52),"' he commands. But she is not really a professional actress, only a waitress who takes acting classes. Edmond demands that she affirm therapeutically what she really is by saying, " I am a waitress (55)." This she cannot do; it contradicts her. Edmond cannot endure a world in which people pretend to be what they are not. But he lacks the imagination to see that this is everyone's problem, even his own. There is nothing heroic about his action. It is only a capitulation to the nothingness he sees everywhere around him. Mamet is enjoying a little joke with Edmond's name, which is Edmond Burke in the play: the eighteenth-century Irish-born British conservative Edmund Burke deplored the French Revolution and urged Parliament to reconcile with America. Burke believed in the political and moral importance of building upon historical foundations, not wiping them away to start society all over again, and he feared the rise of a revolutionary intelligentsia. Mamet's Edmond surely surpasses Burke's worst nightmare of the consequences of revolution, whether French or American, suggesting finally George Orwell's apocalyptic formulation: we live in an age when the autonomous individual seems to be disappearing. One need not see Orwell in too limited a way as only a critic of particular forms of political totalitarianism. In 1949,
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 239-261. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, James Benedict, trans. (London: Verso, 1993), 3-13.
3

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when 1984 appeared, in the 1980s, and today, his warning that imprecise and abstract language can all too easily be used for selfjustifying and inhuman purposes still applies. In this sense, Mamet is a profoundly Orwellian writer, as is the playwright to whom Edmond was dedicated, Wallace Shawn. Wallace Shawn's apocalyptic play, Aunt Dan and Lemon, consists of a series of monologues spoken directly to the audience by Lemon, an anorexic young woman who endures insomnia by reading about the Nazis, whom she has come frankly to admire. She tells us about the most fo rmative influence on her life--a friend of her parents named Danielle, who was at the time she knew her a tutor at Oxford. Aunt Dan somewhat resembles Muriel Spark's fictional teacher, Jean Brodie, a Pied Piper who advocates self-fulfillment, "an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye," who boasts that her students are "hers for life," even as she sends one girl to her death by inspiring her to fight for Franco in Spain. 5 Shawn's character is even more sinister. Aunt Dan delivers enthusiastic accounts of her adulterous erotic exploits to the elevenyear-old Lemon and describes the adventures of her equally amoral friends, including one cold-blooded murder. These scenes are enacted on stage, suggesting that they have become part of Lemon's life of memories. Lemon also recalls Aunt Dan's wisdom on such subjects as the deep moral sensitivities of Henry Kissinger as she imagines them during the Vietnam War and the importance of being respectful to waiters, who, like soldiers, perform those unpleasant but necessary tasks that make our lives comfortable or safe. Aunt Dan and Lemon is a shockingly seductive tour de force in which the audience hears its own values of freedom, prosperity, and pleasure affirmed within a culture of death. And it is a fiendishly clever indictment of wrongheaded "higher" education. The play ends with Lemon's denunciation of compassion, which she has come to see as purely imaginary. Shawn's play seems to ask whether the souls of contemporary privileged people can withstand an exposure to so much evil, especially as it is experienced within aestheticized sensibilities. The characters in Shawn's play, like those in Mamet's, live in an unfree world of rationalized powerlessness. But whereas Edmond struggles, only to enmesh himself further in horrifying complications, Shawn's solipsistic narrator is lost in pretentious chatter from the beginning. Her one contact with reality seems to have been her mother, who questioned Aunt Dan' s pronouncements about Kissinger and the threat of communism. When her mother speaks through
5

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss jean Brodie (london: Macmillan, 1961 )

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Lemon's memory in the play, she is the voice of modest individual reservation and common sense. She interrupts Aunt Dan's praise of the United States military presence in Vietnam in this way: But are you saying that governments can do anything, or Kissinger can do anything, and somehow it's never proper for us to say, Well we don't like this, we think this is wrong? Do you mean to say that we don't have the right to criticize this person' s decision? That no one has the right to criticize them?6 And Lemon's mother is clearly not ashamed to follow the guidance of feelings in place of intellectual formulae. Again, in reference to Kissinger, she says, " Well, I suppose I want him to assess the threat he is facing . .. with scrupulous honesty ... and then I want him to think about those people. Yes, I suppose I do want him to weep and sob at his desk. Yes. Then let him make his decisions (49)." Unfortunately, Lemon's mother died at age fifty and no other voice in Lemon's memory has the ring of truth . The other voices in her monologue are engaged in rationalizing their relationship to power, with which they tend to identify themselves. Aunt Dan, Lemon's mentor and parental surrogate, worships the prestige of Oxford, the energy of unbridled eroticism, the heady rhetorical persuasiveness of her own voice, and, of course, money. Other voices reenact stories told to Lemon by her " Aunt" Dan: Mindy entices jasper, a visiting American who has won a hundred thousand pounds gambling to give her sixty thousand of it to have sex with her. In another scene, Mindy drugs and murders Raimondo, a man she suspects is working for the police. For all their sophistication, these characters are ruthless, illusionless toughs who survive by frank deceit. They are not appreciably different from Mamet's characters who inhabit the dark streets of New York. But Shawn has created a mix of American and British characters particularly well suited to satirize an Anglo-American or Anglophile culture that regards itself as normative. It is as if the revolution Edmund Burke opposed had been transcended . Shawn's characters live in an atmosphere of precious selfimportance, sustaining themselves with continuous intellectualization. But Shawn shows us just enough of their futility to render their underlying pathos. Lemon remembers her father as a hard-driving American businessman who had " romantic feelings about the English countryside (17)." After marrying an English student at Oxford, he
6

W allace Shaw n, Aunt Dan and Lemon (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1985), 43. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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settled near London. But the place he chose "seemed like a bit of swamp near the Mississippi which had somehow been transported into the English landscape (1 7)." Her mother had been in love with books and study. Yet it seems sick the way she loved the early morning light shining on her books of seventeenth-century poetry- "dusty, cold, delicious (15)." She would read until she became faint. And Aunt Dan, who had such influence that she could rename Leonora "Lemon," a bitter transformation, was one of the youngest Americans ever to tutor at Oxford. No one apparently found it strange that this woman would spend night after night alone with an eleven-year-old girl recounting her own life story. Shawn's characters are not merely neurotically off center; they thrive on unreality and in this way embody a vision very much like Orwell's apocalypse. In 7984, the state's three slogans are "War Is Peace," "Freedom Is Slavery," and "Ignorance Is Strength," within a prevailing ethos of "controlled insanity." All three principles are expressed in Aunt Dan and Lemon. In reasoning through Nazi ideology, Lemon reflects, "the fact is, no society has ever considered the taking of life an unpardonable crime or even, really, a major tragedy (80)." Aunt Dan imagines her hero Kissinger talking to himself in this way: "I wish I were anything but what I am . I am a slave, but they see me as a master . . . . I have no self. I am a leader- that means I am a slave (45)." Lemon's opening monologue begins with an invitation to the audience to remain (not "become," as in the Biblical injunction) as little children for the good of all. " Hello, dear audience, dear good people who have taken yourselves out for a special treat, a night at the theater. Hello, little children. How sweet you are, how innocent. If everyone were just like you, perhaps the world would be nice again, perhaps we all would be happy again (1 )." Shawn is quite good at mimicking the rhetorical intonations and repetitions of logical argument spoken within a spirit of unquestioned good will. We find ourselves repeatedly on the point of yielding as if to a good salesman, when we suddenly realize what madness we are buying. Shawn has effectively ridiculed the way affluent citizens rationalize their noninvolvement in the world's problems, their indifference to the sufferings of others. Like Mamet's Edmond, Shawn's Lemon achieves what happiness she has within helplessness, and she does so by endlessly talking. Again the parallel with Orwell is striking. In 1984, Big Brother demands that each individualist verbally confess the crimes of his own thought processes and affirm the teachings of the state. This is not an honest confession issuing from self-examination, but a disorientation which results from affirming what one knows to be false. In such an absolute concealment of self, a freedom of sorts is experienced, not a positive freedom to create and accomplish, but a

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negative freedom from exposure, an invisibility within which the narcissistic prestige described by Boorstin and Baudrillard may be celebrated with impunity. Like Mamet's Edmond, Lemon represents a person or type of person who lacks the inner freedom to reject evil, which she experiences simply as neutrally factual. Both characters defensively infantalized themselves to the point of becoming grotesques, fulfilling completely what appears to be their destinies to remain lost children. In this way the playwrights hold up a mirror in which the audience is invited to see images of their own hunger for self-esteem and to contemplate its price. The modes of dramatic representation in the two plays are complementary. Edmond's world is one of fragmentation and chaotic distraction, while Aunt Dan and Lemon's is one of solipsistic obsession. Edmond tries to run away; Lemon stays with her memories in her dark London flat. Both playwrights are writing about hell in a way, or madness, understood as an impoverishment of spirit that coexists amicably alongside material abundance. Finally, the primary focus of each playwright is language-more than character, action, or setting. Mamet's characters are most terrifyingly human, and most comic, in their fierce and failed efforts to communicate. For them, language makes and unmakes identity. It attempts to manipulate and control. But ultimately it fails, because Mamet's characters live in an Orwellian world of euphemisms, code words, and lies, but also because the ultimate human mystery that his characters suffer is beyond words. In the last moments of his play, Edmond kisses his cellmate goodnight and lies down, a touching capitulation to silence. Shawn directs the attention of his audience toward a capacity for absolute evil in themselves by mischievously revealing its presence in harmlessly eccentric aesthetes. When gentle intellectuals argue that murder is justifiable, we perceive the dehumanizing power of language as something appalling. Both playwrights allow us to sharpen our perceptions and allow us to rediscover compassion by finding ways to make us listen.

journal of American Drama and Theatre 13 (Wi nter 2001)

DUBOSE HEYWARD AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION:

A MOTE IN THE CRITICAL

EYE

JAMES Pons

Three of Dubose Heyward's plays, Porgy, Mamba's Daughters, and Brass Ankle, focus upon rapidly changing racial attitudes in the South between the Civil War and the 1920s. Ironically, although each presents a pointed demand for racial justice, these plays have caused critics some anxiety over the way impoverished, dialect-speaking African Americans are presented. Unfortunately, Heyward's major critics, preoccupied with regionalism and "representation," have effectively pigeonholed him as a quaint, minor Southern writer, a curious w hite intrusion into the Harlem Renaissance. Heyward's major critics, Frank Durham and William Slavick, looking back at Heyward's career from a half century later, seem mystified at his apparent importance during his era; something clearly evades their grasp. Critics who damned the plays with faint praise often have judged them based upon written texts that were meant not to be read but to be given fuller life on the stage. Staged and received in the proper light, they make a statement that is still viable, as demonstrated by Mamba's Daughters in its recent run directed by David Herskovits or Brass Ankle as directed by James Hannaham. Heyward's dramas are due for reconsideration, for a rescue from the almost willful critical blindness that has diminished his reputation. Despite the anxiety of critics over Heyward 's representation of African Americans, the plays survive because skilled actors and clever staging have been able to make them affecting. At least as a musical, Porgy and Bess, based on Porgy and with lyrics by Heyward, is virtually canonical. Mamba's Daughters has been performed to positive reviews in New York, has won an Obie, and recently was the centerpiece of the Spoleto USA Festival in Heyward's hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. Another of his plays, Brass Ankle, remains nearly forgotten. Still, Director James Hannaham chose it for production within a minifestival of "Lost American Classics" in New York in 1997. What makes each of them special as plays is that they go beyond simple mimetic

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representation of African American characters to capture some complex relationship that strikes a chord with the audience, not just to convey a poignant and ineffable quality of African American communal life. Heyward not only invests the character Porgy with grandeur remarkable for a legless beggar but also suggests that the oppressed community around him has developed a complex "rhythm" of sharing suffering and catharsis that enables them all to endure their harsh lot. Perhaps the best of the New York drama critics, Stark Young, accurately explains Heyward's double success in drama. He proposes in the New Republic in 1927 that what ultimately defines Heyward's plays is their dependence on "the playing": "notable not for any single elements but for its whole sum, for the pressure, glow and rhythm of life that it contains ... you must go along with the whole of it if you are to get what it provides." He reminded readers that the scripts were written not to be judged as scripts but as plays: " It would be fairer to the dramatists to say that they were writing not in mere words but in theater elements." 1 Heyward seems to have created several plays that brilliantly bridge a gap between the printed page and the visual world of the stage. It also seems to me that Young, Hannaham and Herskovits have hit upon the secret to Heyward's plays: "It's all in the playing." Heyward's representation of rural African Americans provoked urban critics, even though the plays clearly do not intend racist implications. Despite his "ennoblement" of its poor black characters, Heyward's plays were castigated by reviewers such as Eric Bentley, who complained with some hyperbole that Heyward sees blacks as "not quite human beings- they are likeable if not quite housebroken, animals, among whom killing is not quite murder."2 To sprinkle his critiques with such observations, Bentley has to ignore the net effects of the plays. It would be fair to acknowledge that Heyward's prefatory notes and comments to the texts of his early plays do strongly suggest racism. His introduction to Porgy reveals a mixture of contempt for the "primitive Southern Negro," patronizingly referring to blacks as a "sub-stratum" of society, but it also confesses a fascination and emotional affinity with them, even claiming an envy of their richly emotional and spiritual character. He praises a "resi lience of spirits [and] sense of humor" in common among both Southern and Northern Negroes. He makes a
' Elizabeth Perroia Kessler, " A Brief Study of the Contem porary Reputation of Dubose Heyward and His W orks," M.A. Thesis, University of South Carolina, 1950, 51. William H. Slavick, Dubose Heyward (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981 ), 68. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
2

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host of such generalizations with presumptuous authority essentializing various traits as "characteristic of the Southern Negro." 3 But his attitudes appear to have changed quickly. Although that introduction theorizes that "the Negro seldom excels as a soloist," his second play, Mamba's Daughters is built around an African American woman soloist singing "Lonesome Walls" at its emotional peaks. By the time Mamba's Daughters had its stage run in 1939, Heyward had seen the outpouring of artistic brilliance that was the Harlem Renaissance and had even learned to trust his own destiny to black artists onstage. Such distress as Bentley expresses with Heyward's black characters fails to take into account Heyward's background and context. Having worked among the Sea Island Gullahs, Heyward was vastly more aware of this insular society than were his critics.4 By most working definitions, this culture would appear shockingly "primitive" to New York drama critics, and his portrait of its people in the 1920s is more accurate than critics were perhaps willing to accept. The West African traditions and language influences that subtly flavor Porgy and Mamba's Daughters still existed, with beliefs in "conjure" magic and "plat-eyes," or evil spirits. 5 Because Charleston was one of the last ports open to slaves and less open to outside influence after the Civil War, memory of African folk customs was fresher, less assimilated into American culture. When Porgy prefers jail to being led into the presence of Crown's ghost, a "Plat-eye," he simply reflects traces of these African folk beliefs in Charleston. But the damage done to Heyward's reputation by Bentley is relatively minor compared to that done by his two major critics, Frank Durham and William Slavick, authors of book-length studies that extend the same shallow reflections into what constitutes a critical canon. Along with an unfortunate tendency to pit Heyward in a theoretical competition with William Faulkner and the other great Modernists, they exhibit an eagerness to confine Heyward as a regionalist within the "representation" controversy. Slavick's book compares Heyward's plays to Faulkner' s novels fourteen times. Most writers can be beggared by comparison to Faulkner; the hypothetical contest seems pointless.
3 Dorothy Heyward and Dubose Heyward, Mamba's Daughters: A Play (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1939), xix.

4 Frank Durham, Dubose Heyward: The Man Who Wrote Porgy (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat P, 1954), 9. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

Georgia Writers' Project, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Spartanburg, SC: Reprint Company, 1974).

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Durham claims that "even in his 'sensationalism' Heyward, to the careful reader, was basically Southern"-by which Durham patently means raci st. Durham continues, "He does prophesy a great future for the Negro, especially recognition in the arts. But never once does he suggest anything approaching integration of the races or such other bugaboos" (88). Of course, in Heyward's third and most neglected play, Brass Ankle, he does exactly that, explicitly suggesting and justifying by implication the integration of schools, communities, and families. Yet Durham condescends again to describe Brass Ankle as " .. . an accurate picture of the state of mind (or lack of it) characteristic of a large segment of Southern life," adding with a mixture of pretentious graciousness and didacticism, "though ignorance and bigotry are not restricted geographically" (117). Describing the Southern setting for Brass Ankle, Slavick joins the sneeri ng, calling it "a remarkably accurate reflection of the darker side of the backwoods South at any time [during) the previous half-century: barren, ugly, and racist . . . the community is probably incapable of any meaningful progress. No thought has ever violated its cliche-ridden serenity" (119). Although each play clearly makes an emotional appeal for justice for African Americans, Durham and Slavick smear Heyward on the critical record, assuming that he sympathizes with his plays' villains. As their rhetoric reveals, Durham and Slavick seem much more eager to perform for an anticipated chorus of like-mi nded critics wanting to pillory the South than to respond to Heyward's plays. The injustice done to Heyward by these critics seems clear: in contrast, African American writers and actors saw Heyward's plays as worthwhile. Countee Cullen called Porgy " the best novel by a white about Negroes he had read" (Slavick iv). Langston Hughes praised Heyward, adding that " Negro writers could go to school to Heyward" (Slavick v). Most of Heyward's drama involves blacks from the lowest socio-economic classes; nevertheless, each of the three plays dramatizes courage in intolerable situations where the black character is heroic against white oppression. And African Americans of Heyward's time recognized, as Sterling Brown did, that Heyward's portrayals were "sensitive and sympathetic" and " rightly influential" and that he was among the first not only to use blacks as "foreground characters rather than as background 'types"' but also to see them as capable of genuine heroism.6 Heyward is frequently listed among the figures of the Harlem Renaissance, which is mistaken but still suggestive. 7 It is also

6 Sterling Brown, The Negro in American Fiction; Negro Poetry and Drama (New York: Ayers Company Publishing, Inc., 1972): 120-1.

Kessler, 50.

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unfortunate that critics sensitive to the portrayal of African Americans frequently overlook the indictment that the plays make of Heyward 's own white pseudo-aristocracy. Fortunately, something in Heyward 's plays has enabled them to survive despite critics such as Durham and Slavick; it is time to reconsider Heyward as a dramatist. When considering Heyward's representation of African Americans, it is worthwhile to examine his characterization of whites as well, to unveil the presumed hierarchy. Even before Heyward began writing drama, his poetry set out the problems he returns to repeatedly in his plays. In Carolina Chansons, the poetry collection he co-authored with Hervey Allen, he includes a poem called "Gamesters All," which describes a black man being shot while trying to escape arrest for playing craps, amidst frequent allusions to the slaying of a deer for sport. The poem juxtaposes the cold-blooded marshal and the killing against the trivial crime-which the marshal judges "fair enough."8 " Modern Philosophers" hints at the failure of w hites to acknowledge realistically the distance between the current condition of blacks and the " decorous array" of the Charleston drawing rooms. 9 Heyward' s texts imply that the end of the Civil War, of Reconstruction, and of the Jim Crow laws would hardly lead to a rapid disappearance of a racial and cultural divide. Perhaps the poem in the collection most indicative of the problem Heyward kept trying to resolve is Hervey Allen's " Upstairs Downstairs' ' : The judge who lives upstairs with dull decorum and its implication, Has all his servants in to family prayers, And edifies his soul with exhortation. Meanwhile his blacks live downstairs; Not always chaste, they manage to exist With less decorum than the judge upstai rs, And find withal a something that he has missed. 10 The poem suggests that some necessary part of the self has been lost, with the white upper class drifting into a lifeless, cloistered abstraction and blacks deprived of an education- and a chance to assimilate

Dubo se Heyward and Hervey Allen, Carolina Chansons: Legends of the Low Country (New York: MacMillan, 1922), 76.
9

Ibid., 72. Ibid ., 73 .

10

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equally- bound to downstairs and bodily servitude. Without full exposure to the new culture, Gullahs could not assimilate. Heyward repeats the scenario in his plays, but gives its consequences a much sharper edge. Notably, the liberals of the white "genteel class" are too detached from the realities of the African American condition to help. Worse, they grant to their insecure minions the power to brutalize Deeply flawed judges blacks with the sanction of misguided law. lacking any balance between code and humanity were incapable of meting out justice that comprehended the cultural difference between the Sea Island blacks and the Charleston aristocracy. Heyward's plays link their emotional appeal to a sustained assault upon the ethical vacuum of the racist social system, especially as revealed by law; to ignore this or to assume Heyward's complacency with the status quo, in service of a self-righteous critique of his racial consciousness, requires not so much a creative "misreading" as willful deception. Each of the three plays involves the suffering of blacks victimized both by the empowerment of the law in the hands of the middle and lower class and by the devastating benign neglect of the lawyers and judges. When a black is the victim of a crime, the police ignore it; when he/ she becomes a nuisance, the law crushes him/ her; but the law never bothers to protect a black victim. This pattern would be recognizable to most theatregoers from the well-known Gershwin musical, Porgy and Bess, based on Heyward's Porgy. Porgy is a legless beggar in love with Bess, the abused and drug-addicted former girlfriend of Crown, an imposing local thug. Porgy helps Bess beat her addiction and keeps her away from the weekly dice games that provide the opportunity for all vices. Around these games, Sportin' Life pimps and peddles drugs, longing for a chance to turn Bess to prostitution. Crown rapes Bess, and, shattered, she is soon an addict under Sportin' Life' s control. Porgy kills Crown. The police never exert any influence on all this crime; indeed, they show very little interest. However, they do jail Porgy for " contempt of court"-because, fearful of ghosts, he is afraid to be left alone with Crown's corpse. While Porgy is in jail, Sportin' Life ships Bess off to New York to be a streetwalker. The whites never provide any help. Instead, two characters, the Coroner and the Detective, seem to derive cruel amusement from intimidating the innocent. The Detective is a venial thug, always ready to beat a confession out of any panicked black available. Although the murder is not important enough for them to investigate, the nuisance of the corpse quickly draws the attention of the local whites. A white petty official comes by to add insult, threatening, " You've got to bury that nigger tomorrow or the Board of

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Health will take him and turn him over to the medical students." 11 The impoverished blacks have no choice but to bury their friend out of their own pockets, because if they do not, they will have to envision his corpse dissected. At the other end of the social spectrum, their best hope, a sympathetic white lawyer named Archdale, is very little help. He objects to Porgy begging near his law practice as an inconvenience. He decides to overlook the phony divorces his lackey is sellingapparently deciding that blacks are just so different from whites that the same laws should hardly apply. Archdale's wealthy patron is concerned with the conditions among "the Negroes," but only the "moral" conditions. 12 Archdale and his patron come to exemplify the uselessness of the white upper class to temper the misery of the plays' victims. The pattern of upper-class indifference and middle class cruelty toward black victims pervades all three plays. In Mamba's Daughters, the cruelty of this hierarchy is even more evident. Annoyed by a disturbance, the police charge a poor black woman, Hagar, with "drunk and disorderly"-although she has only defended herself against an aggressive laundry customer who tried to seduce and rape her. The play's white aristocrat, the judge, sentences her to five years in prison. Hagar's mother, Mamba, raises Hagar's lightskinned daughter Lissa during the enforced separation. As Lissa gains acceptance from a better social class, her mother's prison record becomes grounds for blackmail-and the play's villain, Gilly Bruton, manages to blackmail Hagar with the passive complicity of the local police. As in Porgy, the police in Mamba's Daughters then show little interest when Ned, an enraged victim of Bruton, tries to kill him. When Hagar saves Ned's life by taking him into Charleston, she violates a banishment provision in her parole-and in this case the whites exact the full penalty. At the end of the play, Bruton has not only blackmailed Hagar but also raped Lissa. Hagar kills him and then herself to protect Lissa from any further harm. Lissa recognizes the sacrifices that have been made for her by dedicating a song that she will perform in a radio broadcast to her mother. Amidst all this trouble, the only contribution of the white authorities is to sentence Hagar to prison for fighting off a rapist and for saving a man's life. In Mamba's Daughters, the most visible member of the white privileged class is a lawyer known as "Saint" Wentworth, as ambiguous a figure as Archdale. When Hagar is brought into her trial before the white judge, lawyer Wentworth jokes with him, calling him "Cousin

Dorothy Heyward and Dubose Heyward, Porgy: A Play in Four Acts (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1928), 39.
12

11

Ibid., 77.

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Ronald ." 13 The minute and a half it takes the judge to sentence Hagar to five years for fighting off a rapist is extended as a favor to Wentworth; another minute is all it takes to deliver her, on probation, to labor for Wentworth. He seems kindly, even concerned, but he is very little help; when Hagar spells out Bruton's blackmail plot, he only suggests "we'll have to think real hard" about what to do.14 He could easily have "Cousin Ronald" send Bruton to prison, but he does not. When no alternative presents itself to her, Hagar kills Bruton, then herself. In Mamba's Daughters and in Porgy, brutal lower class whites carry out the law's apparent injustice with malicious glee, and the detached aristocrats become a blackjack in a velvet glove. Although Hervey Allen once claimed that Heyward did not favor African American activism, 15 the three " race" plays seem to belie that claim . Certainly, Heyward's hometown of Charleston hardly welcomed them. Although his critics make little of it, Heyward's last novel, Peter Ashley (1932), depicts another Charleston white aristocrat- the character Heyward would most likely identify with- who promotes the interests of blacks and is seen as a traitor to his class. An aristocrat figure appears in each of the plays and becomes increasingly involved in actions on behalf of the African American victims. The plays provide evidence that Heyward saw himself as an advocate for African Americans. Recently, james M. Hutchinson has documented Heyward's " personal odyssey" towards active engagement with racial reform groups. 16 Though Heyward's critics class his plays as only minor melodramas, Porgy and Bess and Mamba's Daughters continue to be performed. Slavick and Durham may have based their impressions upon the written texts: given the performance history of Brass Ankle and Mamba's Daughters, it is unlikely that either critic saw them performed. Bentley, who did see Heyward's plays at their original run, denounced his representations as racist, even animalizing. Yet recently in the New York Times , Peter Marks complai ns that w hen Brass Ankle was performed offBroadway in 1998, the characters seemed too noble and that
Mamba's Daughters, 32.

'J

,. Performance of Mamba's Daughters, Dir. David Herskovits, Perf. Heather Gillespie, Dock House Theater, Charleston, 28 May 1998.
15 Hervey A llen, Dubose Heyward: A Critical and Biographical Sketch (New York: George H. Doran, 1970), 13.

'b James M. Hutchinson, Dubose Heyward: A Charleston Gentleman and the World of Porgy and Bess Uackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 120.

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"ennoblement is a form of stereotyping." 17 In a largely positive review, Donald Lyons, of the Wall Street journal, worries that Hagar seems at first to be "parodying what might be called the Butterfly McQueen aspect." 18 The contradictions in critical assessments of Heyward's plays suggest that discomfort with his representations of Sea Island blacks may be unavoidable. They also indicate that if audience members could reach such opposite conclusions, the plays are perhaps not quite the simple melodramas that the early critics suggest. Probably, Heyward recognized the advantages of spoken over written text, and for present over absent speakers, and the playwright relied upon the artistry of performers to imbue the plays with force. Slavick and Durham, not having seen the plays, did not experience the "theatre elements" and the "playing" that Stark Young described as crucial. When Mamba's Daughters was staged recently in Charleston, it presented a host of visual and aural effects that do not appear in the text. The players were marked across their shoulders with black, white, and yellow tape (possibly to indicate mixed-race ancestry); the stage itself was black, white, and yellow squares, like a chess board. The "commissary" shelves were stocked with products advertised with racial stereotypes: Aunt Jemima Pancakes, Uncle Ben's Rice, and Quaker Oats. Background music occasionally blared theme music from Cone With The Wind or "disco" hits to heighten the irony of a scene. Lissa was played, not like a fortunate light-skinned black teenager of the 1930s, but as a spoiled teenager of the 1990s, with a slight "Valley Girl" air. The woman-mountain Hagar, beautifully played by diminutive British actress Heather Gillespie, stalked the stage in ten-inch platform boots and shifted in and out of proper British or Gullah, as the moment demanded. The impoverished field-hands of the plantation lounged around the commissary in three-piece suits with gold watch chains hanging from their vests. "Color"-or pigmentation-looms over all issues, but the association of light color with privilege was undermined in this production. The Bailiff is African American-a surprising choice in context-and seemed to possess unusual authority. The play's villain was "yellow," but weakness and foolishness seemed spread equally among the races. Additional marks (blue, curiously) on faces and necks suggested other complications. Along with the colored tape, characters-and various spots on stage-were marked with "x," "y," "+"or"-." In this production race was omnipresent but illusory

17

Peter Marks, "A Familiar Tale of Sacrifice, Traversing Today and 1939," New

York Times 25 February 1998, E1.

18 Donald Lyons, Review of Mamba's Daughters, Wall Street }ourna/13 March 1998, A14.

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basis for judging people; shadings of character went beyond skin color. Herskovits explains that he is loathe to reduce the " multiplicity" inherent in artistic representations to one explanation. He saw the play as having attractive vitality because it does not shy away from racial issues, but it does retain ambiguities. 19 The performance did not seem to work against the written play; instead, its ironies seemed inherent and beautifully brought out. The performance of the play at Spoleto aimed at something well beyond a representational race melodrama. The staging called attention to disruptions of the conventions of realism. For instance, a few exchanges between characters were immediately re-enacted so as to give the audience and some of the characters information that others of the characters did not have. In one instance, while the other actors "froze," Bruton identified himself to Lissa's friends from Charleston as a man they already knew, and in another, he threatened Lissa directly, while the other actors, frozen in place, remained ignorant of his true intentions. Each scene thus presented two points of view to the audience, remindi ng the audience that interpretation depends utterly upon point of view. According to Herskovits, the replays broke up the rhythm of the play, heightening the audience's alertness to the play as a performance and creating an unstable distance between art and interpreter. In performance, various speeches were directed into the audience so that audience members sensed themselves sentenced by the judge, invited to sing with the Gullahs, and in Bruton 's scenes, brought uncomfortably close to the villain's actions. In Heyward's race plays, almost everyone bases sweeping categorical judgments upon fragile sensory impressions. Herskovits's production not only called attention to what the characters have inevitably missed as they reached these conclusions, but it also made the audience aware of its own susceptibility to the same errors. The rendition at Spoleto seemed to me to give Lissa's epiphany in the second scene of Act Three more force than it has in the written play, with very little more than spotlighting. Throughout the play, Grandma Mamba seems manipulative, almost as if she wants to pry granddaughter Lissa away from Hagar, to help Lissa "pass." But when Mamba and Hagar both come too late to rescue Lissa from Bruton's rape, a shifting intensity of light pursued each epiphany, blazing first on Mamba, then on her daughter Hagar, and on to Lissa. At this point in the play, it becomes clear that Mamba has done the best she could for each of her lineage with the materials at hand; Hagar understands that African American mothers pay in great suffering for the gradual betterment of their daughters-and that she will do so at any price; self19

Herskovits, telephone interview, 21 January 2000.

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centered Lissa finally recognizes the sacrifices made for her. This is the moment when they gain access to the well of womanly suffering and wisdom, when they become "Mamba's Daughters," and it was much more conspicuous in the theatre than in the script. Herskovits notes that it was an African American colleague, James Hannaham, who suggested Mamba's Daughters (and Brass Ankle) to him and that despite the frequent racial slurs, the play won six AU-Delco awards- ''the Black theater awards in New York"-which would seem to indicate the play's viability at its most vulnerable point. 20 Almost everyone but Heyward's major critics Slavick and Durham seems to recognize the plays' potential. Of the three plays Brass Ankle has been the most overlooked, probably because it makes an even more unsettling demand. Brass Ankle addresses miscegenation directly, and I would argue that it does so with unusual daring for its day. In the little-known play, Larry exposes one of his neighbors as having some "black blood" from an African American grandparent. Larry insists upon segregation, ostracizing the neighbor. As the unpleasant consequences of the neighbor's lineage loom, Larry and his wife Ruth await the birth of their second child. When the baby is born, Ruth's doctor makes a startling discovery: Ruth also has "black blood," as do her two children. The doctor tries to reason with the panicked Larry, but fails. Determined to protect her two children, Ruth plans to run away with them to a mixedrace community, called the "brass ankles." To clear Larry's conscience, she lies to him, telling him that he is not the father, claiming that she has slept with a black man, but the enraged Larry kills her and their children. As originally performed, the disturbing play had potential that was never fulfilled. Heyward's play first appeals to the predominantly white New York audience through the mixed-race beauty of Ruth, whose parentage is at first concealed. As in the other two plays, the effect relies upon nuances of performance- tone of voice, lighting, wardrobe, and body language- but its primary bit of stage trickery is an apparently white woman whom the argument of the play declares "black." Still, the play does not make Ruth the stereotypical tragic mulatta, blessed by her noble white blood but cursed by her "exotic" or sensual black bloodsad in a quaint way. She is not the "race horror," the abstract icon of miscegenation, that Sterling Brown complains was typical of the day. 21

20 jack McCray, "Mamba's Daughters Unites Generations," Charleson Post and Courier 28 May 1998, A 12.

21

Brown, 113.

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The stage directions of the play strongly suggest Ruth's finer quality. Her description emphasizes the " creamy, rather than ... transparent pallor" of her skin, " beneath her coarse black hair which is parted in the center and drawn back smoothly over the ears after the fashion of a madonna."2 2 Her husband Larry calls her "a lady," compared to the neighboring white, Agnes, "a field hand (11 )." Middle class Agnes has all her virtues catalogued quickly: " She doesn't lie. She doesn' t steal. She doesn't commit adultery (17)." Ruth is of mixed descent, but as she is described in the play, she is more elegant and of purer breeding than the whites. The character Ruth also demonstrates Heyward's changed attitude towards African Americans. His early black characters embody endurance and joi de vivre, physical strength and emotional vitality; contrasted with the heartless but more well-mannered whites, blacks are associated with the physical portion of a Manichean, mind-body split. But Ruth, unified in mind and body, appears superior in all ways to her white counterparts. She is not presented as the stereotypical mulatta of early twentieth-century literature because her "black" heritage is not a contaminating, "earthy" quality. Not only is she more gracious and elegant, she is also more intellectually acute, as she reveals when Larry and the neighbors suspect that one of their friends has the " one drop of black blood" that " makes a man a nigger (39-41 )." Although they have no cause against their neighbor jackson, they want to drive his children from their schools because Larry has found evidence that jackson's grandfather was "whipped for cursing a white man" -which implies to Larry that they knew the grandfather to be "black (25)." When the racist Burton asks the conspicuously calm Ruth, " What's the matter, ain't you for segregation?" , she separates the abstract idealism from its concrete injustice. She answers thoughtfully, "I can't see things by their big names. I can only think of the way the Jacksons are taking it. Having your children showed up as colored when they look as white as you or me- kicked out of the white school
(21)."

Her ironic description, " as white as you or me" adumbrates a crucial, if originally controversial element of the play. By describing Ruth as a dark, attractive, but ostensibly "white" woman, Heyward appeals to the natural physical attraction between her and the audience's males long before he presents them with the detail of her distant kinship. At the same time, Heyward takes no chances that Ruth will be undermined with the white women of the audience. Ruth, who
22 Dorothy Heyward and Dubose Heyward, Brass Ankle: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Farrar & Rhinehart, 1931 ), 11 . All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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begins the play pregnant and gives birth in Act Two, epitomizes gentle maternity. Ruth's precariou s state is presented metaphorically as that of a mother fox caught in a trap. Ruth's husband Larry teases her about her "pet fox"-which was caught in Larry's steel trap the previous year and gnawed her foot off "to go home and care for her young (106)." With evident irony, Ruth calls the neighbor a "sportsman " as she forgives him (106). Ruth gently mocks Larry's version of fatherhood" he takes being a father so seriously"-while noting that he was hunting when the child was born and behaved comically when told the news. Heyward's original description of Ruth as a "madonna" and her association with the mother fox suggest that she is a thoroughly sympathetic maternal archetype. Heyward's stock white aristocrat figure appears again in Brass Ankle. Unlike his predecessors, Doctor Wainwright, the only educated man to make an appearance, tries to affect the outcome. He arrives to help Ruth with the birth w hile the "one-drop" argument continues. Wainwright tries to prepare Larry for the news of the birth of his childwhose recessive genes reveal African blood- by casually telling him the story of the " Brass Ankles," a nearby mixed-race community established before the Civil War. He explains, " they won't let them go to the white schools, they are too proud to go to the negro, so they gave them a school of their ow n (SO)." He bluntly dismisses the culturally defining fiat declaring the Brass Ankles as " black," saying, "Well, one can hardly dispose of them as simply as that (48)." He recalls that, needing Confederate soldiers, the local gentlemen had conscripted Brass Ankle neighbor John under an agreement that declared him "white" thenceforth (53). Wainwright invokes th e tradition of gentlemanly honor, a forgotten part of the code that Larry and the neighborhood vigilantes revere, adding that when John came home from the war, " he was shown in at the front door for the very first time in his life" because the ancestors "call them good sportsmen or merely gentlemen-they stood to their guns (53)." But the Confederate code that made the Brass Ankles first inferior by law then white by code of honor dissolved with Reconstruction, leaving them in the hands of men of less quality than the ancestors, with an incomplete grasp of principle. These men are now guided by inanities such as the "one-d rop" test. Wainwright tilts the play's argument by adding a voice of higher reason and by offering to act in its service. The fi rst of Heyward's aristocrats to subvert the implacable law, Wainwright offers Larry several alternatives and supports anything but the renunciation of Ruth and her babies. Each of Heyward's three "race" plays involves a conflict between appearance and reality that heightens its disturbing quality. Each draws attention to the visible anomalies that accompany a blindly reductive, binary color code in a multi-colored world . Things are not what they

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seem. Porgy is crippled but strong; Mamba is conniving but loving. Ruth both is and is not what she seems to be; overcoming cultural conditioning is always more complex than it seems to a detached observer. In this sense, race is not the only issue in each play, and each play involves the universal conflict between ingrained behavior and new challenges to them. Wainwright tries to help Larry move beyond his conditioning. If we see Larry from Wainwright's perspective, the play's ending has more potential. Larry wants to be the classical country squire of antebellum southern vision, ethical and honorable, but he has the education of an ignorant, callow, rural youth-all he knows are a few reductive prejudices learned from the local rubes. Knowing Larry's inadequacies for the circumstances, Wainwright laments that Larry is " incapable of reason." He is "confronted by a situation which would baffle a philosopher, and he has no philosophy. He has instead a few exact definitions and an inherited code of honor (63)." Wainwright sighs with sympathy rather than rants with moral indignation. From this moment on, the problem of the play is Larry: if Larry appears a racist simpleton or a comic buffoon, the play fails. Larry experiences the universal human crisis of assimilating a new set of conditions and developing a new code to deal with them despite deep-seated, culturally ingrained inner resistance. Heyward's dialogue calls attention to Larry and Ruth as they struggle to reach the truth through familiar metaphors that confine the way they think. Unfortunately, their thinking has been structured into binaries of pure/impure, my people/others, and the like. When Wainwright explains about Ruth's Brass Ankle grandfather-one turned "white" by conscription-Larry's dualistic idea of " purity" emerges. He now considers her contaminated. He protests, " I'm clean-l'm white . . . . " He speculates upon the reason for the baby's features even after he has been told, guessing "he's a bastard" (81 ). Suddenly to Larry, Ruth's former ease of manner and flair for leisure are no longer the mark of a lady but the stereotypical laziness he imputes to blacks (72). Ruth's rationality is also badly shaken. She considers going "back to my own people," meaning those people she has just heard of for the first time (85). She senses that Larry now sees their first, "white-looking," child as black, too. As in the other plays, the issue is riot merely race, but the way the mind builds structures to support its delusions. Unfortunately, Brass Ankle's fate with critics, bound up as it is with Larry's, illuminates what happened to Heyward's reputation as a playwright. The play was significant in its time. Although it closed after only forty-four performances, some critics praised it highly, and as Durham documents, " it made at least one list of the season's ten best

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plays." 23 Richard Dana Skinner, in the 6 May 1931 Commonweal, theorizes that the play "as presented" [italics mine] fails to establish its emotional bond with the audience, largely because of the portrayal itself, which Skinner ultimately declares "juvenile." 24 At length, Skinner laments the lost potential of a "distinguished bit of play-writing" due to the clumsy presentation . Another reviewer found it flawed at the ending, but pronounced it very near being one of the three or four American great plays of this or the past century . . . in the O'Neill class." 25 But Durham and Slavick, caught up in denouncing Larry, muddle their criticism of this play (which they probably never saw) as they had the others, for the same reason. With revealing rhetoric, both roundly declare the play a failure. Slavick theorizes that the ending leaves Larry "a bigoted redneck," "above the law" in his "lily-white town ... able to continue the purity of the master race" (120). When Heyward gives characters speeches such as Atkinson's-"the Negro business . . . best left to God and the great-grandchildren"-Siavick insists that, because Heyward is a Southerner, he cannot intend irony (1 09). Slavick is even unwilling to consider the play a tragedy, complaining that the play is not relieved by the liveliness of song or Charlestonian curiosities, that it does not "explore the possibilities of life" (124). Most plays of the era, especially the mulatto tragedies, could be considered melodramatic. Few plays could not be wrecked by a lackluster performance. It is even more unlikely that any could survive such predispositions and confusions as Durham and Slavick brought to bear upon Heyward's. Heyward's plays need sympathetic directors who can recontextualize them for contemporary audiences and charismatic performers to bring the characters to life. With expressionistic staging and skilled acting, Mamba's Daughters, for example, becomes more than a black-andwhite, dualistic melodrama of turn-of-the-century race relations and reveals itself to be a subtly shaded questioning of cultural presumptions. The contemporary success of Mamba's Daughters not only suggests that Heyward's reputation should have outlasted Durham, Slavick, and Bentley, but also poses the intriguing possibility that Brass Ankle might be due for re-evaluation. There are two major tasks in making Brass Ankle viable that the original Broadway production did not solve. Presented as a bigoted

23

Durham, 117. Dubose Heyward Papers, Charleston Historical Society, # 21-12-07. Kessler, 50.

24

'

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simpleton, Larry is too small for tragedy. At the end, Larry shoots Ruth off-stage, and returns to weep, whimpering at the edge of the stage with his shotgun . One of the major reviews of the original production complained specifically of the visual emphasis given the shotgun. 26 This disastrous move focuses the scene upon the violence, thus reducing the play from the level of ideas that of simple action. The timing and lighting of the final scene are especially crucial. If the play becomes a story of external action rather than internal turmoil, it fails utterly. Larry's confusion must be given depth. The scene and the play probably could benefit from the type of defamiliarizing devices Herskovits used in the contemporary production of Mamba's Daughters. Perhaps if the audience were to see only Larry's shadow in a pose of indecision and perhaps the shadow of the threelegged fox where Ruth should be, the play would retain its best feature, an embedded appeal to the unconscious. Brass Ankle derives its force from the same psychological sources as Heyward's other plays: each is disturbing because culturally conditioned dialogue cannot make sense of visual reality. The available hierarchy and standard behavior are so illogical as to be unacceptable, and the viewer knows this subliminally before he knows the plot. Although it is appealing to imagine the play in the sort of production Herskovits gave Mamba's Daughters, director james Hannaham chose it for its recent run largely because it is "not fashionable," and determined to perform it "straight" because he felt that was " more risky. ' 127 He explains that he saw it initially "as a cautionary tale aimed at . .. well, rednecks ... " -but realized that he wanted it performed before a small crowd of New Yorkers who see themselves as liberal because he believed that it would provoke some level of anxiety within that audience. For Hannaham, the " panic" that ensues among the players over racial mixing still has an impact-despite a spreading consensus that racism is not a problem anymore.28 He found the audience's response satisfying. Clearly the issues raised by the play remain troubling. In short, the distance between the audience and the idea of the play, between their expectations and the presentation of the central conflict, is still sufficient to create the disturbance required of art. Originally, Herskovits says, he and Hannaham presented both Mamba's Daughters and Brass Ankle in a " mini-festival" of " Lost

26

Kessler, 50. j ames Hannaham, telephone interview, 22 January 2000.

27

20

Ibid.

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American Classics" in New York: the plays were chosen precisely because they are "aggressive about issues-because they confront issues-like 'race'-though not only race." 29 In both cases, Herskovits and Hannaham saw in the two plays an aggressive, challenging enigma, one that is open to multiple interpretations and one that demands the audience's interpretive collaboration. The consistent theme that ran through Herskovits's answers to my questions was "multiple systems of meaning"; to close an artistic enigma with a sole answer is, he argues, "to kill the art." Hannaham's reasoning is more playfully phrased, but ultimately makes the same point: the plays continue to provoke audiences, who must somehow accommodate the outrage of what they are seeing. Most importantly, although many of Heyward's critics interpreted the plays from perspectives virtually designed to close, confine and kill them, Herskovits and Hannaham were able to find in these plays the potential for that troubling enigma necessary to art that survives such critics. Fortunately, the dramas seem likely to re-emerge despite Heyward's hostile critics. A different audience and different critical approaches will respond to these plays in the twenty-first century, and these theatregoers will see the "race melodramas" in a radically different light. Maybe the time has come when racial sensitivities have changed so that audiences can tolerate the inconvenient pain of history in art, even where race is concerned. Regardless of the method used to draw attention to their complexity, Heyward's plays seem likely to survive his critics because they distill the central problem of the twentieth century so well: how could so many have looked into a human face and believed that the being was yet not human?

29

Herskovits, telephone interview.

CONTRIBUTORS

ROBERT COMBS is Associate Professor in the Department of English at George Washington University. An earlier version of his article in this issue was given at David Mamet at 50: A Conference and Celebration in Las Vegas, Nevada on 31 October 1997.

E. GILL is Professor of Drama at Michigan Technological University, and is the author of No Surrender! African American Pioneer Performances of Twentieth Century American Theatre (St. Martins Press, 2000).
GLENDA BYUNGHO HAN holds Master of Arts degrees in English from Chung Ang University in Seoul and University of Mississippi. JAMES Pons

is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of South Carolina.

LYNN M. THOMSON is Head of the M.F.A. Program in Dramaturgy and Theatre Criticism at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

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