THE JouRNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 23, Number 1 Winter 2011
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THE JouRNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 23, Number 1 Winter 201 1
CoNTENTs
MICHAEL WINETSKY
Historical and Performative Liberalism in Susan Glaspell's
Inheritors
LYNN M. THOMSON
Boiled in Oil: Recipes for Parody in Two Early George S.
Kaufman Plays
J EFFREY STEPHENS
Negotiations and Exchanges: Alan Schneider, Our Town, and
Theatrical Detente
BARBARA 0 ZIEBLO
"Pornography of Violence": Strategies of Representation in
Plays by Naomi Wallace, Stefanie Zadravec, and Lynn Nottage
CONTRIBUTORS
5
23
43
67
81
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 23, NO. 1 (WINTER 2011)
HisToRICAL AND PERFORMATIVE LIBERALISM IN SusAN GLASPELL's
INHERITORS
Michael Winetsky
A young woman chalks a rectangle on the stage. She stands in it. She
imagines its perimeter as walls. She imagines herself imprisoned. A
performance such as this one is described by the stage directions of Susan
Glaspell's 1921 drama Inhentors.
1
The woman is 21 -year-old Madeline
Morton. She struck a police officer with her tennis racket, interfering with
the arrest of several Hindu students on her college campus who were
staging a demonstration for Indian independence. It is 1920; Madeline
faces a sentence as long as twenty years under the Espionage Act of 1917.
One of her friends is already imprisoned for his refusal to fight in the First
World War. In fact, the dimensions of her chalk-outline cell are supplied
from his letter. This detail is significant for her performance, as she is not
only imaging her own fate, but also imagining that, as the stage directions
insist, "she is all the people who are in those ce//s."
2
In this essay, I consider the staging of these contemplations in
Inheritors as a form of "performative liberalism"-an exploration in the
medium of theatre of what it means to be a citizen in a democracy,
especially a dissenting citizen. I suggest that the staging of this
performative liberalism in Inheritors belongs within the cultural history of
the development of nonviolent methods of political protest. My argument
involves dual methods. One of these is an almost philological attention to
Glaspell's borrowing of words, images, and performative ideas from other
sources, and a crucial source for this is Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"-a
text that describes a performance of protest. Glaspell also worked into her
play details from the newspapers about contemporary performances of
political dissent by Alice Paul in the United States and by Gandhi in India.
I juxtapose this discussion of possible sources with a phenomenological
analysis that compares the performance of imagining imprisonment in
Inheritors in relation to philosophical formulations of liberal political theory,
such as John Dewey's. Viewing this performance phenomenologically
reveals something of the politics of performance and of the theatre. The
1
Inhen.lors was written by Glaspell for the Provincetown Players, and was first
performed by the collaborative at their MacDougal Street theatre in Greenwich Village,
part of their 1920/21 season.
2
Susan Glaspell, Inheritors in Plays by Susan Glaspell, edited by C. W. E. Bigsby
(Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, 1987), 144.
6
WINETSKY
juxtaposition of methods is intended to bring to light something of the
relationship of performance to history.
Perhaps Inheritors seems a strange selection for the site of an
investigation of these concerns. It is one of the lesser known plays by a
playwright whose renown may be increasing but remains limited. Scholarly
recuperation of Glaspell over the last thirty years has meant that such
plays as The Verge, Suppressed Desires, and Trifles are at last receiving some of
the attention they demand. The study of Glaspell has generally supported
the consensus that The Verge--her other major Provincetown drama of
1921-is her greatest contribution to American theatre. This consensus
follows the judgment of Christopher Bigsby who, in an introduction to
one of the better-known volumes of Glaspell's Plqys, contrasts the formal
"conventionalities of Inheritor!' with the "startlingly original" form of The
Verge. He complains of Inhen"tors that the "tension between radicalism of
subject and conservatism of form ... is never resolved."
3
I would argue
that this assessment of formal conservatism neglects the fact that many
of the political insights of Inheritors are ingeniously staged. In addition, this
devotion to formalism has preempted a more thorough comprehension
of the politics of the play.
Inheritors has more often been associated with radical anarchism or
socialism than with liberalism per se. The reasons for this association are
legitimate. Louise Bryant, John Reed, and Emma Goldman are counted
among Glaspell's close friends at this time. In these circles, "liberals"
were widely despised. Indeed, by labeling Glaspell's play and its anti-war
stance as "liberal," I may leave myself open to the charge of anachronism.
Liberalism was still mostly associated in the U.S. with free market ideology
during the World War I period (as it remains today in Europe, i.e.,
neoliberalism), and some of the prominent liberal thinkers of the time,
who were beginning to redefine the liberal tradition in the United States
away from laissez::faire, were supporters of the U.S. involvement in the First
World War; John Dewey is the most notable example. The association of
Inheritors with radical politics, on the other hand, goes back to the play's
first performance. Alexander Woollcott, who reviewed (unfavorably)
the original Provincetown Players performance for the New York Times,
noted that the play was an admirable "contribution to the literature of
radicalism."
4
If the subject of Inheritors is radicalism, then it must be some
form of radical liberalism. The theme of the play is not so much the
overthrow of the government as what it means to live in a democracy.
3
Ibid., 19.
4
Alexander Woo!lcott, "Second Thoughts on First Nights: The Village's Ups
and Downs," New York Times, 27 March 1921.
HISTORJCAL AND P ERFOR.MATIVE LIBERAJ.JSM 7
My concept of a performative liberalism bears certain similarities
to the concept of theatrical liberalism that Andrea Most has developed
in a critique of twentieth-century American drama. Both theatrical and
performative liberalisms describe techniques in the theatre of rendering
the illusion of character transparent, of literally or metaphorically breaking
the fourth wall. Theatrical liberalism is invested in identity formation and
it comes into play when the possibilities for the theatrical transformation
of personality align with the possibilities of new world opportunity-in
Most's words, "to be free ... from the bonds of family, biology, or history,
free to choose, perfect and perform a role."
5
Although performative
liberalism-especially in the case of Madeline Morton in Inheritors-also
concerns freedom of choice, and an individualism at odds with family
and biology, the more important consideration in identifying performative
liberalism is the performance of dissent. Both concepts resonate with the
act of identification that is central both to modern drama and to modern
liberal thinking.
Empathy as Democratic Ethic
My focus will be on Madeline's performance of imaginary imprisonment,
but this performance is part of the larger democratic themes of the play. I
cannot discuss here all the ways that Glaspell weaves the sprawling breadth
of liberal concerns into this play, which is, by one account, a four-and-a-
half hour epic.
6
I have to be selective.
Madeline is a character of the last three of the play's four acts.
Act 1, set in 1879, depicts the hour in which Madeline's grandfathers,
Silas Morton and Felix Fejevary I, decide to found a college. Silas Morton
conceives the idea and donates the choicest part of his land. Silas grieves
for the dispossession of the Native Americans, and he comes to believe
a college would help create understandings across cultural boundaries
and prevent violent conflicts such as the War of 1832, also known as
the Black Hawk War, in which he had participated. His own ideas about
higher education are vague and his own education rudimentary. But he
is inspired by the stories told him by his neighbor, Fejevary, who was a
5
Andrea Most, "Opening the Windshield: Death of a Salesman and Theatrical
Liberalism," Modem Drama 50, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 547.
6
This running time is probably an exaggeration, but its source is a review in
Billboard Magazine of the original Provincetown Players performance. The reviewer's com-
ment, "time means nothing ... to the Provincetown Players. The play began at 8:35 and
ended at 1 sharp" is quoted by Linda Ben-Z vi in her biography Susan Glaspell Her Ufe and
Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 233. A 2005 production at the Metro-
politan Playhouse in New York City ran about three hours and was largely unabridged.
8
W!NETSKY
student revolutionary in Hungary in 1848. Silas believes that some of the
personal qualities he admires in Fejevary were inculcated by his education.
Beginning to reveal his plan to found a college, he says to his friend:
It makes something of men-learning. A house that's
full of books makes a different kind of people. Oh, of
course if the books aren't there just to show off .. . (trying
hard to see if) It's not the learning itself-it's the life that
grows up from learning. Learning's like soil. Like-like
fertilizer. Get richer. See more. Feel more. . . . Does in
your house. You somehow know how it is for the other
fellow more'n we do.
7
Silas admires the quality of empathy in particular-that Fejevary "know[s]
how it is for the other fellow."
Although Silas Morton's remarks seem sentimental, an ethos
of democracy underlies them. We might see similarities between this
concept of knowing how it is for the other person and liberal discourses
from Adam Smith to John Rawls.
8
Yet, Silas Morton's tendency towards
democracy becomes clearest in light of John Dewey's ideas in Democrary
and Education (1915). The aim of Democrary and Education is to re-theorize
the established American educational practices (based on those codified in
the dynastic societies of the Middle Ages), and to re-orient those practices
for the needs of American democracy. Dewey argues that a democratic
government depends upon the character of its people, and that character
is formed by education. Dewey writes:
The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar
fact. The superficial explanation is that a government
resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful
unless those who elect and who obey their governors
are educated .... But there is a deeper explanation. A
democracy is more than a form of government; it
is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint
communicated experience. The extension in space of
the number of individuals who participate in an interest
[a government, a particular cause, or enterprise] so that
each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to
7
Glaspell, I nhen.tors, 111.
8
The word in liberal discourse is usually "sympathy" rather than empathy. Em-
pathic feelings involve a deeper identification and less "detachment" (see below).
HISTORICAL AND P ERFORMATIVE LIBERALISM
consider the action of others to give point and direction
to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those
barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept
men from perceiving the full import of their activity ....
[I]t is a matter of deliberate effort [through education] to
sustain and extend . .. a broader community of interest.
9
9
A democratic government empowers the people, but the people
must be educated in order to best execute their authority. Dewey regards
this fact as common knowledge, but takes a "deeper" look at democracy as
"a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience." In
his thinking, democracy scarcely means popular government. Instead, the
ethos of democracy requires individuals to regard one another as equally
involved in a social group. Dewey argues that the more we conceive of
ourselves as involved together in the same "interest," the more inclusive of
others our idea of ourselves must become. This is the ethos of democracy
that gives form to a program of education, John Dewey's actual one as
well as Silas Morton's fictional one.
Silas Morton's hope that education will help us "understand the
other fellow" is directed at a group of particular others who were excluded
from the American idea of "national territory." Although Silas realizes he
cannot undo the consequences of the Black Hawk War, he believes that
better education would lead to better cross-cultural understanding and
perhaps integration, rather than annihilation and dispossession. Explaining
more of his motivation behind the plan to found the college, he says: ''A
seeing how 'tis for the other person-a bein' that other person ... 'Twould
have done something for us to have been Indians a little more."
10
What Silas
calls "seeing how 'tis for the person," we may call empathy, or, in Dewey's
words, "conjoint communicated experience." With these sentiments,
Silas Morton envisions greater democracy. We must also note that his
description of "a bein' that other person," also, of course, describes the
art of acting. It is against this background that the meaning of Madeline's
performance of imagining imprisonment becomes meaningful.
Madeline's Performance and its Audience
For Madeline, standing in the chalk-outlined cell and unaguung
imprisonment means many things. Most immediately, it is a way of
making a decision. She has recourse to avoid imprisonment. Her uncle,
9
John Dewey, Democrary and Education (1915; New York: The Free Press, 1966), 87.
10
Glaspell, Inheritors, 111.
10 WINETSKY
Felix Fejevary II (the son of the Hungarian immigrant and, in the first act,
a young Harvard undergraduate) is the President of the Board of Trustees
of Morton College and also the president of a bank in town. He wants
Madeline to apologize to the court, and he believes he holds the influence
to keep her out of jail. But Madeline, young, idealistic, morally outraged
by the Espionage and Sedition Acts, by the whole jingoistic culture that
engendered them, is disinclined to seek her family's protection. She
contemplates imprisonment as a conscientious stand.
As the lights come up on act 4, Madeline sits in the same room
at the Morton farmhouse where the plan to found the college was
hatched forty-one years earlier. She clutches "a torn, wrinkled piece of
brown paper"-a letter written on scrap from Fred Jordan, her friend
who is imprisoned for his Conscientious Objection to the war. The letter
describes the conditions of his confinement. Madeline explains that her
friend "is in what they call 'the hold"':
It's two and a half feet long on one end, three feet at the
other, and six feet long. He'd been there ten days when
he wrote this. He gets two slices of bread a day; he gets
water; that's all he gets. This because he balled [sic.] the
deputy warden out for chaining another prisoner up by
the wrists.
11
This description alone would be compelling, but Madeline goes further.
She measures out the dimensions of the cell, chalking its perimeter on the
floor of the Morton's sitting-room. Glaspell directs Madeline's action on
the stage:
MADELINE: (Rises, goes to that corner closet, the same one
from which SILAS MORTON took the deed to the hill. She gets
a yard stick, looks in a box and finds a piece of chalk. On the floor
she marks off FRED JORDAN s cell. Slow!J, at the end left
unchalked, as for a door, she goes in. Her hands go up as against a
wall, looks at her other hand, sees it out too far, brings it in, giving
herse!f the wzdth of a cell. Walks its length, halts, looks up.) And
one window too high up to see out.
(In the moment she stands there, she is in that cell, she is all the
people who are in those cells.)
12
11
Ibid., 143.
12
Ibid., 143-4.
HlSTORlCAL AND P ERFORMATlVE LIBERALISM 11
Significantly, Glaspell never requires her character to be imprisoned on the
stage, but only to imagine being imprisoned. This is in keeping with a kind
of literary and theatrical modernism, wherein the action of act 4 consists
not in Madeline's sentencing or imprisonment, but rather in her resolution
to accept this punishment. The play ends with her resolution, and so her
imagining of herself imprisoned represents itself to the audience not as
a staged confinement but as the staging of an act of empathic imagining.
She is, in Silas's words, "bein' that other person."
Madeline's performance of confinement invites the audience to
share in its empathetic attempt. The fact is that the audience is confined,
in a manner, to its prescribed role of observer. No one gets up, shouts,
takes the stage, or tries to stop the performance. This confinement builds
the phenomenal walls out of the chalk outline. The "moment" Madeline
"stands there" draws attention to this fact of confinement, everyone in
the theatre being relatively still for its duration. That is, members of the
audience neither experience their own confinement as imprisonment, nor
do they, as do Madeline and possibly the actor performing her role, imagine
themselves as corporeally confined. The knowledge of their own real
freedom, that the play will eventually end, and that they will go about their
business, makes their temporary confinement bearable, detaching them
from Madeline's imagination of imprisonment. The actor's performance
of empathy with the imprisoned has its counterpart in the audience's
empathic reaction to witnessing her so confined.
In Bodied Spaces, a phenomenological study of twentieth-century
drama that does not include Inheritors, Stanton B. Garner writes:
3-4.
On the one hand, the field of performance is a scenic
space given as a spectacle to be processed and consumed
by the perceiving eye, objectified as a field of vision for a
spectator who aspires to the detachment inherent in the
perceptual act. On the other hand, this field is environment
space [sic.], "subjectified" (and intersubjectified) by the
physical actors who body forth the space they inhabit.
From this perspective, theatrical space is phenomenal
space, governed by the body and its spatial concerns,
a non-Cartesian field of habitation which undermines
the stance of objectivity and in which the categories of
subject and object give way to a relationship of mutual
implication.
13
13
Stanton B. Garner, Bodied Spaces (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994),
12 W!NETSKY
Garner shows the two ways an audience interacts with the performance:
either a "scenic space" with a spectator who is trying merely to "watch"
the performance, or (and I do not think these are mutually exclusive) what
he calls "environment space" in which the audience experiences a kinetic
awareness of the people in the performance and also the relative stillness
of the audience. Garner argues that it is the latter awareness that has the
potential to compromise "the categories of subject and object." Theatrical
liberalism and performative liberalism function in this "environment
space," yet the performance of liberalism is more easily accomplished
in a direct environment, so that theatricality is not at play. Madeline's
performance, as part of play, is perceived in both scenic and environment
space, and it is just that phenomenal detachment of the audience that her
performance calls into question.
The chalked outline of the cell remains onstage throughout act
4, and Madeline returns to it when she is arguing with Professor Holden.
Indeed, in this later exchange, the empathy with the imprisoned is
intensified:
HOLDEN: I'd like to see you give yourself a little more
chance for detachment. You need a better intellectual
equipment if you're going to fight the world you find
yourself in. I think you will count for more if you wait,
and when you strike, strike more marurely.
MADELINE: Detachment. (pause) This is one thing they
do at this place ... Chain them up to the bars-just like
this (. . . she raises her clasped hands as high as thry will go)
Eight hours a day--day after day. Just hold your arms up
like this one hour then sit down and think about-(as if
tortured f?y all who have been so tortured, her bocfy begins to give
with soh arms drop, the last word is a sob) detachrnent.
14
This is the first moment when the script indicates Madeline
should cry. She does not cry for her own pain-she is not enchained-
but rather, her crying is an empathic reaction for those who are so
enchained.
15
Neither does she cry over concern for herself-that this
14
Glaspell, Inheritors, 153.
15
Adam Smith writes, "Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we our-
selves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us what suffers." This is the limitation,
as Smith sees it, of sympathy. However, the empathic imagination of the actor, in method
acting in particular, is already a challenge to these limitations. Adam Smith, A Theory of
Modem Sentiments (1759; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11.
HISTORICAL AND PERFORMATI VE LIDERAUSM 13
will be her pain when she goes to prison. Rather, the knowledge that
another is so enchained at present inspires outrage and the desire to take
the burden of such pain on herself. The idea of "Detachment" effects
this outrage because of the paradoxical truth of criminalized dissent in
a democratic society: the detachment of such members of a democratic
society as Holden allows for the imprisonment of the conscientious, while
the conscientious experience that detachment from society as detachment
from themselves as they are confined. Madeline's tears break through such
walls of detachment, and, if they are met with tears in the audience, they
open a channel across the social rigidity of that detachment.
Spatialized Democracy
The spatial conception of the relationship between members of a society
that Glaspell writes into Inheritors is a long-standing tradition in American
protest literature. To cite two prominent examples of the spatializing at
work in Madeline's conversation, I turn to Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience,"
and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"- both
works are committed to democracy when it goes against the rule of law
and, as a result, are often read to advocate radicalism. It is almost certain
that Glaspell had read Thoreau, though obviously, she could have known
nothing of King. However, her work is situated between them in the
development of the performance of protest as an aspect of the culture of
liberalism in the United States.
Standing in the chalked outline of the cell of the end of the play,
Madeline is contemplating federal prison. However, before this, when we
first see her, she is a carefree undergraduate, a girl with a tennis racket, who
complains of the boring speeches about her grandfather on the college's
fortieth anniversary founder's day. The incident with the police leads to
her being put in the local jail for the first time.
Felix Fejevary, Jr., the President of the Board of Trustees, let
her stay in jail for a few hours in the hope of "chastening her." Having
bailed her out, he accuses her of having betrayed the college. Recollecting
her experience in the local jail to him, Madeline's attitude is flippant. She
mentions her time in jail in the context of a pledge of her love for the
college, which she calls by the affectionate metonym "the Hill." Madeline
says:
Why, Uncle Felix ... I love the Hill. I was thinking about
it in jail. I got all fuddled on direction in there, so I asked
the woman who hung around which way was College
Hill. "Right through there," she said. A blank wall. I sat
14
and looked through that wall-long time. (she looks front,
again looking through that blank w a ~ It was all-kind of
funny.
16
WINETSKY
Though the tone is different, Madeline's contemplation of the
wall serves a rhetorical function which is also used in Thoreau's narration
of his experience in jail. Thoreau tells the Lyceum audience:
I stood considering the walls of solid stone .... The
rooms were whitewashed once a month and this one, at
least, was the whitest.
17
Madeline's "blank wall" echoes Thoreau's "whitest" wall. The whiteness
and blankness they describe has a semiotic significance. It signals an erasure,
a purge of the perceptions, and it serves to replicate the experience of a
more sustained confinement. The sign is necessary to enact a narrative of
transformation.
In both Glaspell's play and Thoreau's essay, the narrative of
transformation is enacted in spite of the rhetorical necessity for the
prisoner to diminish the experience of imprisonment. Thoreau attacks
"the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere
flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up."
18
But when he emerges from
jail he does observe a subtle change:
a change had to my eyes come over the scene,- the
town, and State, and country .. . . I saw to what extent
the people among whom I lived could be trusted as
good neighbors and friends ... that they did not greatly
purpose to do right .... [T]hey ran no risks, not even to
their property; ... [F]or I believe that most of them are
not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in
their village.
19
Just as Thoreau finds the institution foolish as a way of proving his
imperviousness to an imprisonment that is supposed to be shameful or-
16
Glaspell, Inheritors, 138-39.
17
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, edited by Wil-
liam Rossi (New York: Norton, 1992), 238-39.
18
Ibid., 238.
19
Ibid., 240.
HISTORJCAL AND P ERFORIV!ATIVE LIBERAUSM 15
at a minimum-corrective, Madeline at first resists her uncle's suggestion
that her experience in jail should have "chastened" her. However, just as
Thoreau's perceptions of society are altered by the experience, Madeline
does admit that "chastened" might describe her reaction to how the
property owners of the town "run no risk" and seem "not aware."
Madeline says:
Chastened, was that the idea? Well, if you think keeping a
person where she doesn't want to be chastens her! I never
felt less "chastened" than when I came out of that slimy
spot and looked across the street at your nice bank.
20
The experience in jail changes the way Madeline perceives the institutions
and the people around her.
21
It is the social aspect of imprisonment that
effects this change: society isolates the prisoner not by getting the prisoner
away from itself, but by concealing the prisoner within the walls of one
of its institutions. The prisoner consequently sees society differently.
For Madeline, this an important awakening, as she readies herself to
take her place within society in anticipation of her twenty-first birthday.
Her thoughts on prison deepen over the course of the drama, tracking
Madeline's growth from a figure of comic violence to a figure of heroic
responsibility. When Madeline, to use Horace's words, "hauled off and
pasted the policeman a fierce one with her tennis racket," she is hardly
an effective agent of social change.
22
By accepting imprisonment rather
than compromising her principles, Madeline hopes to become an effective
agent of change.
What she develops is a deepened sense of a spatialized relationship
between citizens that confers the obligation to take a moral stand. Just
before she chalks the outline of a cell on the stage, Madeline receives a
visit from her friend Emil Johnson, who tries to dissuade her from going
to prison:
EMIL: Well, look-a-here. Madeline, ... you're a girl
who liked to be out. ... How'd you like to be where you
couldn't even see out.
20
Glaspell, Inheritors, 137.
21
This whitewashing of her vision may bring Madeline closer to that status of
"ideal observer" that is so important to Rawls's theory of justice. See John Rawls, A Theory
of Justzce (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 161-62.
22
Glaspell, Inheritors, 129.
16
MADELINE: ... There oughtn't to be such places.
EMIL: Oh, well-Jesus, if you going to talk about that-!
You can't change the way things are.
MADELINE: (quietlY) Why can't I?
EMIL: Well, say, who do you think you are?
MADELINE: I think I'm an American. And for that
reason I think I have something to say about America.
EMIL: Huh! America'll lock you up for your pains.
MADELINE: All right. If it's come to that, maybe I'd
rather be a locked-up American than a free American.
23
W INETSKY
Here we see the full conflation of a spatial idea of democracy with American
national identity as a quid pro quo for democratic values. This inspires her
sense of obligation to change, and resolution to face imprisonment. She
cannot participate in a society that perpetrates that injustice, and so, as
it happens in this case, society has a place for such persons. Thoreau
explored this logic as well. In "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau writes:
Under such a government which imprisons any unjustly,
the true place for a just man is also prison. The proper
place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has
provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is her
prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her
own act, as they have already been put themselves out by
their principles.
24
There is social holism to this thinking, a view of society and its injustices
as being inescapable, and it can best be understood as a spatial relationship.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail,"
will describe this as "the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,"
which King regards as being comparable to the moral responsibility to
obey just laws.
25
King expresses the holism of this thinking, when he
declares he is "cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and
states .... Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are all
caught in an escapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of
23
Ibid., 145.
24
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, edited by Wil-
liam Rossi (New York: Norton, 1992), 235.
25
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," http:/ / www.stan-
ford.edu/group/King/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf, 4 (accessed 6 January 2011).
HISTORICAL AND P ERFORMATIVE LlllERALISM 17
destiny."
26
When the state usurps the authority to confine dissenters, only
the imagination remains free for dissent. The performance of protest then
mandates imagining or seeking confinement by the state.
Of course, I do not mean to conflate real performances of protest
such as Thoreau's tax refusal and night in jail and King's decade long fight
for civil rights and peace, with the imaginary imprisonment Madeline
represents. Neither Madeline, the character, nor the performer who plays
her, feels in truth what is to be imprisoned or restrained by the state; she
merely imagines it empathically. As Wittgenstein said, "only I can know
whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it.'m The
differences are everywhere, but at the level of intentionality the similarity
is clear. Glaspell's play is a performance of protest; the nonviolent method
is a performed political activity.
Specificity and Mutability: Liberal Tendencies in Political
Movements of the Period
Of course, not all forms of political protest are nonviolent and not all
prisoners of conscience subscribe to democratic values or the principle
of nonviolence. Indeed, Glaspell knew many such prisoners. The editors
of The Masses, Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, also John Reed and Emma
Goldman, all jailed for dissent, were among Glaspell's close acquaintances.
She may have personally known Margaret Sanger who was jailed at this
time. However, I look outside of her immediate circle and see Alice Paul
as one example of an imprisoned political dissident from whose story
Glaspell may actually have borrowed.
Alice Paul's hunger strike and consequent force-feeding were
covered in the New York Times. One of these pieces the Times published
had for its source a "smuggled note," similar to the letter that Fred Jordan
sends Madeline. Paul describes how the windows in her cell were nailed
shut except for one which is "nailed shut at the bottom, so that the only
air I have now is from the top of one window."
28
Perhaps this detail may
have worked its way into Inheritors as, reading from Fred Jordan's letter,
Madeline describes "one window too high up to see out."
There was tremendous overlap between the women's suffrage
movement and the peace movement, which is also invoked in the play
26
Ibid., 1-2.
27
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Ans-
combe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 89.
28
"Miss Paul Removed to Prison Hospital," New York Times, 19 November 1917.
18
WINETSKY
by the imprisoned Conscientious Objector. Jane Addams comes to mind
as one such figure who was active for both causes who claimed at the
Organization Conference of the Woman's Peace Party in January 1915
that "the sensitiveness for human life is stronger in women than in men."
29
In Inheritors, Glaspell expresses a similarly gynocentric pacifism when she
has Grandmother Morton reflect ironically on the special bond felt by
veterans: "Seems nothing draws men together like killing other men."
30
Remarks such as these, threaded throughout Inheritors, provide a thematic
support for Fred Jordan who "couldn't believe in war."
31
Pacifism is as important as radicalism as a context for the play.
These are often seen as being in opposition but need not be. Radical
nonviolence mushroomed considerably at the time of Inheritors. It was not
only Alice Paul who brought about change through radical nonviolence,
but also Mahatma Gandhi, who was equally in the news.
It is not a coincidence that the cause of Indian independence
makes its way into Inheritors. I should say that although Hindu students in
Inheritors do not themselves resort to violence, their cause is not exclusively
associated with pacifism. There were members of radical movements
for Indian Independence in the United States that were interested in
violent means. J. Elleq Gainor points to the Ghadar movement as one
such group.
32
Gainor mentions the rising influence of Gandhi in Hindu
nationalist circle in the wake of the Amritsar massacres of April 1919, but
she does not thoroughly investigate the thematic resonance of Inheritors
with Gandhi's activities.
On 30 May 1920, as Glaspell was writing Inheritors,
33
the New York
Times printed an article summarizing a report by the special commission
appointed by the Indian National Congress to investigate the Amritsar
massacre. The Times cites "M. K. Gandhi" as one of signatories of the
29
Scott H. Bennet, Radical Paczftsm (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
2003), 8-9.
30
Glaspell, Inheritors, 106.
31
Ibid., 136.
32
Gainor observes that most of the adherents of the Ghadar movement were
not ethnic Hindus but Sikhs G Ellen Gainor, Susan Glaspell in Context [Ann Arbo.r: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 2001], 129). However, one of the leaders of the group, Har Dayal,
was Hindu. Dayal had been a student at the University of California, Berkeley in 1911, and
was a campus radical such as Inheritors depicts. Harish K. Puri The Ghadar Movement (Amrit-
sar, India: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1983), 56.
33
According to Ben-Zvi, Glaspell began writing Inheritors in early 1920. Ben-Zvi,
Susan Glaspell, 222. It remains unclear when exactly in the composition process the choice
of Hindu nationalist students was made.
HISTORICAL AND P ERFORMATl VE LIBERALISM 19
report, and refers to a passage of the report that details what the paper
can only describe as "the Civil Disobedience Movement of Mr. Gandhi."
The Times quotes the report:
[This movement, or, more properly, this technique,] if
properly practiced, would render government by force an
impossibility, and ... an effective enforcement of laws
disliked by the people would be difficult ... . Neither the
Satygraha [sic] nor the Hartal (general strike) had anything
to do with mob excesses .... We do not in any shape or
form desire to minimize or defend the murder of
Englishmen or incendiarism. We believe that they are
indefensible, but, no deeds, however dastardly, of an
enraged mob can warrant a slaughter of innocent people.
34
This passage is full of significance for an interpretation of Inhen"tors, beyond
merely the cause of Indian independence. The Indian National Congress
commission report articulates how the inherent authority of "the people"
may be exercised to oppose to the "laws" of the government. Inheritors
explores this very same ownership of the nation by the people prior to
government, first, as Grandmother Morton's feeling, and then as a way of
acting when Madeline is willing to go to jail for her beliefs. If the people
choose to disobey laws and prefer prison to obedience, "government by
force" becomes an impossibility. Prison is the paradigmatic instrument
of social control. The symbolism of Madeline's vision depicting the
destruction of Fred Jordan's prison cell by Silas Morton's voice is sustained
by Gandhi's idea "to render government by force an impossibility," all
the more so as a "voice," signifying truth, shatters the prison. Satyagraha
refuses social violence, believing in the eventual revelation of peace. As
it disclaims both the "mob excesses" and the violence perpetrated by the
British soldiers, the Satyagraha might be described in the same way as
Fred Jordan, refusing to "be a part of nations of men killing each other."
35
This technique, it should be noted, will work generally against any "laws
disliked by the people." This is the nature of what comes to be called
"nonviolence"; it is not one cause. It is the doctrine that no cause justifies
violence.
Inheritors, then, in depicting the contemplation of confinement
as the culmination of a young woman's actions on behalf of Hindu
nationalists and war resisters, represents the cultural fluency of the idea
34
"Blame for Arnritsar," New York Times, 30 May 1920.
35
Glaspell, Inhm"tors, 152.
20 WINETSKY
of nonviolence in this historical moment. The depiction of Madeline's
imaginary confinement, as rendered in the medium of theatre, accurately
captures the performative aspects of nonviolent techniques.
Historical and Performative Liberalism
I would like to conclude with a remark about the significance of looking at
this play as a performance of liberalism. Trying to sum up by justifying my
holistic approach to liberalism, I want to show the relationship between
performative and historical concepts of liberalism.
To comprehend how liberalism and nonviolence relate to history,
it helps to turn to Dewey's remarks on the historical relativity built into
the concept of liberalism. If, instead of being an immutable truth of
nature, the concept of liberty is a contingent and socially constructed
idea, then we have to re-evaluate what liberty means for each new era. To
this end, Dewey illuminates the troubled relation of the constructed idea
of "liberalism" to historically particularized liberties. He says in his Page-
Barbour Lectures on "Liberalism and Social Action":
Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact
of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from
something once taken as a normal part of human life
but now experienced as bondage ... . During the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it meant
liberation from despotic dynastic rule. A century
later it meant release of industrialists from inherited
legal customs that hampered the rise of new forces
of production. Today [in 1935], it signifies liberation
from material insecurity and from the coercions and
repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in
the vast cultural resources that are at hand [i.e., freedom
from poverty and deprivation]. The direct impact
of liberty always has to do with some class or group
that is suffering in a special way from some form of
constraint exercised by the distribution of powers that
exist in contemporary society. Should a classless society
ever come into being the formal concept of liberty would
lose its significance, because the fact for which it stands
would have become an integral part of the established
relations of human beings to one another.
36
36
John Dewey, Liberalism & Socia/ Action (1935; New York: Capricorn, 1963), 48.
HISTORiCAL AND PERFORMATIVE LIBERALISM 21
When Dewey imagines a "classless society," he is not speaking of the
proletariat and bourgeoisie. Rather, he realizes the mutability of what will
come to define "some class or group" in the future.
The framing of a subjunctive-"Should a classless society
ever come into being"- is a curious gesture, suggesting to the reader
the enormous question of "could it ever"? However, this suggestion
illustrates the beguiling nature of liberalism. Dewey draws our attention
with italics to a paradox in the situation of "formal concept' and ''fact."
Liberty takes its shape as formal concept from the absence of a fact. When
we have the facts, we do not need the concept. We need the concept only
because we do not have the facts. With this rhetoric, Dewey reframes the
long-standing conflict between liberal thought by casting it as a historical
temporality. No longer have we the conflict of individual and social
control that had defined the liberalism of John Stuart Mill. We have only
material circumstances that occasionally in history necessitate first an idea
of liberation and then an action.
When a stage image of a figure enchained is constructed,
the phenomenal presence of the liberal subject corresponds to its real
historicity. That is to say, when you see Madeline imagining herself in
chains you see the idea of liberalism. Audience and player participate in
an imagination of the dilemma of the prisoner of conscience. Outside
the theatre, there is no fact of liberalism. There are only the facts of
oppression. For liberalism to function, we must imagine the struggle
against oppressive circumstance. This was necessary in 1921, and it
remaJ.ns necessary.
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 23, NO. 1 (WINTER 2011)
BOILED IN OIL: RECIPES FOR PARODY IN Two EARLY GEORGE S.
KAUFMAN PLAYS
Lynn M. Thomson
Pray list to me a modest while;
I fain would spill an earful:
Don't worry--cultivate a smile-
Be always bright and cheerful.
When things are looking dour and black
Then you be blithe and hearty;
Just slap me gaily on the back-
the life of every party.
Let naught your cheery nature spoil;
Be always gay and chipper ...
And I'll supply the boiling oil,
If someone has a dipper.
''Advice to Worriers," GeorgeS. Kaufman'
This verse-first published for Ltje in July 1922-is typical of George
S. Kaufman's writing during his apprenticeship years as a humorist for
newspapers and magazines. The little poem also illustrates a form that
would launch Kaufman as a playwright and sustain him throughout his
career: parody. Margaret Rose in Paroc!J: Ancient, Modern, and Post Modern
identifies the essential components and basic process of the form in the
term's etymology: "nearness" [ "par-'1 and "opposition" ["-ody'l Rose
states that parody first "imitates" or "encodes" a source, an original, and
then changes it, distorts or "refunctions" it, for the purposes of humor
and criticism.
2
In ''Advice to Worriers," Kaufman perfectly copies the
homey wisdom ubiquitous in mainstream American writing; then he
1
GeorgeS. Kaufman, "Advice to Worriers," in Ufi, 27 July 1922, qtd. in By
George: A. Kaufman Collection, Donald Oliver, ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), 1.
2
Margaret Rose, Parotfy: Ancient, Modem and Post Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1 993), 40, 45, 90, 80, 86, 1 17. Satire, meaning medley, fulfills its etymol-
ogy in the diversity of contemporary definitions. Parody is as elusive and controversial;
increasing attention in the twentieth century expanded the territory of disagreement. For
the following analysis, and consistent with critical thinking during the 1920s, parody is a
technique to generate satire and is aptly defined by Rose.
24 THOMSON
suddenly springs a trap of cynicism to explode the sentiments and expose
the lies. The ellipsis is an especially nice touch, as if he had torn away the
poem's actual last lines and graffiti-style replaced them. He thereby uses
parody for a purpose wider than the fun of displacement and incongruity.
Rose asserts that often parody is a "word mask."
3
Literary norms evoke a
cultural setting, and parody then becomes a method for social criticism.
Kaufman's wisecracking constructs a seemingly flip, but actually deadly
earnest, assault on American light-mindedness and myopia.
In his use of parody, Kaufman aligns himself with a revolution in
the arts and literature in the 1920s among the young and smart-the self-
styled Moderns-who wanted to dispose of America's hypocritical culture
and construct a new society dedicated to truth-telling, as Ann Douglas
chronicles throughout Tern"ble Honesry: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s.
4
Moderns frequently enlisted satire and parody as weapons to eradicate
the past, the still-thriving legacy from the US before World War I. Yet,
despite the significance of parody in Kaufman's corning-of-age years as a
writer, his plays have not been thoroughly examined for this fundamental
component. Two early comedies, Big Casino is Little Casino and The Deep
Tangled Wildwood, unpublished and overlooked, not only announce
Kaufman's commitment to parody, but also identify sources and targets
that are roots of later work.
In addition, these two comedies, through their connections with
America's dramatic traditions, also intimate his rightful legacy as a pioneer
devoted to reforming American theatre. At the start of his career, he was
admired for contributing to a transformation of American drama through
vicious satire. John Whitaker, in his review of To the Ladies in February 1922,
observed: "The authors have rejuvenated American comedy. Resuscitating
the art of American satire, Kaufman and Connelly liven an appetite for it.
The thing they do will probably spread to the other makers of plays. But
don't forget that they are imitated, that they saw America first."
5
By 1930,
satire was ubiquitous, and Kaufman was repeatedly credited by theatre
critics as this nation's most important satirist.
6
In October 1934, Brooks
3
Ibid., 51.
4
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 19 20s (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1995).
5
Daify NeJvs, 21 February 1922, in To The Ladies (clippings file), Billy Rose The-
atre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereafter BRTD).
6
See, for example, Alfred Kazin who observed that "Satire had become the
order of the day" in On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt Brace Jonanovich, 1942), 193;
St. John Ervine, "George S. Kaufman, Genius," London Observer, 2 March 1933; Ervine
states, "Satire is the principle form of humor in the United States."
BOILED IN OIL 25
Atkinson, writing for t he New York Times about the openly despairing
Merri!J We Roll Along, looked back at Kaufman's accomplishments and
made a case for his daring and seriousness of purpose. Atkinson testified
that the play, however unusual for Kaufman it might seem, was of a piece
with all his work because he had consistently undertaken the same goals
and subjects as more transparently radical authors, but he did so "in the
vernacular."
7
The vernacular was the familiar language of popular drama,
which Kaufman used only to abuse.
Other theatre critics identify parody as Kaufman's primary satiric
method. Arthur Pollack surveys Kaufman's work when reviewing The Butter
and Egg Man-the only full-length play he wrote alone. Pollack observes
that Kaufman often followed the "ancient patterns" of such writers as
George M. Cohan, Winchell Smith, and Samuel Shipman. Pollack also
records that Kaufman, working with Connelly, had "hit ... upon a clever
trick of satirizing the tricks of less gifted playwrights at the same time
making use of those same tricks," a description that echoes Rose.
8
Kaufman trained himself in parody while writing humor columns
for the Washington Times and later, the New York Evening Mail,
9
and repeated
features in these columns were spoofs on cliches in theatre and film.
A recurring item in the Washington Times was "Plots of the Movies," in
which Kaufman exposed the uniform triumph of good in such stories as
the most ridiculous component. In February 1915, in a regular segment
for the Evening Mail titled "Our Movie Department by Kid," Kaufman
wrote: "I've just been looking over the records of the moving picture
business. I was very much surprised to find that in all the years of the
film's prosperity the manufacturers have made only 13,421 productions
entitled 'The Moonshiner's Daughter."' He continues, "In three of the
productions, the manufacturers ran wild, breaking away from the accepted
plot for that title. This does not auger well."
1
Kaufman's stress on trite
storytelling mixes with an attack on film as a business that standardizes
product. Always a commercial author, he proudly debunks consumerism
and the debased tastes of the mass-market consumer.
7
New York Times, 3 October 1934, in Dramatic Criticism 1933-34, BRTD.
8
Brook!Jn Dai!J Eagle, 27 September 1925, in Butter and Egg Man (clippings file),
BRTD.
9
"This and That with Sometimes a Little of the Other," Washington Times, 9 De-
cember 1912 to 11 December 1913; and "Be That as I t May" and "Mail Chute," New York
Evening Mail, 5 February to 16 July 1915.
10
Evening Mail, 13 February 1915, in Biographical Scrapbooks, 1912-21, George
S. Kaufman Papers, 1912-1958, BRTD.
26 THOMSON
Kaufman carried both subject and form directly from his humor
columns to playwriting. Big Casino is Little Casino, his first play, is a very brief
one-act performed in No Sirree!, subtitled "an Anonymous Entertainment
by the Vicious Circle of the Hotel Algonquin," presented for one night
on 30 April 1922. No Sirree! refers to Chauve-Souris, a Russian vaudeville,
a long-running hit that had performed at the same theatre the previous
season. No Sirree! is comprised of very brief pieces, each a self-contained
parody. Heywood Broun signaled the evening's target with an opening
monologue in which he is the "Spirit of the American Drama." One
sketch was The Greasy Hag, described in the program as "an O'Neill play in
one act." In this mockery of Anna Christie, the cast list includes "Elizabeth
Inchcape, known as Coal Barge Bessie, a retired water front prostitute,"
and "First Agitated Seaman," acted by Kaufman.
11
In an inscription on the tide page of the manuscript, Kaufman
declares his little play's large subject and vows allegiance to what would be
a lifetime mission:
This play is designed to contain a little bit of each of
the many things that have been keeping people away
from the theatre in recent years. Although its title might
indicate that it is aimed at a particular playwright addicted
to paradoxical titling, the play as a whole is intended to
cover a much wider ground. The idea has been to get
square with everybody in three two-minute acts.
12
Kaufman's irony (since the drama under attack had been attracting, not
repelling, audiences) claims that he targets not only a single writer or even
one kind of play, but also the recurring shapes, the dramaturgical cliches,
of all American popular drama. Through this process, he would also mete
out social criticism.
The path to that commentary begins with the particular
playwright Kaufman named in a subtitle added in the program for the
play: No Sirree!. Big Casino is Little Casino, a Samuel Shipman Plcg.
13
Shipman
was a moderately successful author who had relinquished writing severe
Ibsenesque dramas in exchange for success. His many paradoxical tides,
11
Program reprinted in James R. Gaines, i t ~ End: Df!Ys and Nights of the Algon-
quin &rmd Table (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 63.
12
George Kaufman, Big Casino is Little Casino, typescript in Plays, George S.
Kaufman Papers, 1912-1958, BRTD.
13
Program reprinted in Gaines, i t ~ End, 63.
BoiLED IN OIL 27
which earn Kaufman's diagnosis of addiction, include Friend!J Enemies,
East is West, and Lanful Larceny. The titling choice was actually not
peculiar to Shipman, but rather a habit in popular theatre and indicative
of thematic content. All such plays conclude with an unraveling of the
title to eradicate the appearance of paradox and so proclaim social unity
and cosmic harmony. Therefore, such titles promise the mandatory happy
ending that characterized American popular drama, what Samuel French
acting editions often advertised as "glad plays." The happy endings were
metaphors for Americans' ubiquitous faith in human potential and divine
goodness, an optimism detested by the Moderns. Big Casino is Uttle Casino
joins an army of cynics in a crusade against easy gladness. Kaufman retains
the title's nonsense to the final moment to exhibit the originals' silliness.
What the play does fulfill is the title's promise of insanity-and
inanity. The story begins in the mansion of a business tycoon. He is
hosting a party, but he deserts his guests to play cards with his broker
and a reform-minded defense attorney, who is secretly in love with his
daughter. Suddenly, to everyone's horror, the tycoon realizes his deck is
short a card. A detective is called and the crime traced to the tycoon's
long-lost liberal daughter who then appears in handcuffs on her way to
jail. She berates him with a fine speech climaxing with "Little Casino is
Big Casino at last."
14
During the fourth act, set in the stock market, the
daughter-----disguised as a little old man-reduces her father to poverty; he
then reconciles with her and, indeed, the last few moments are an orgy of
reunions: even the tycoon's butler (played by Alexander Woollcott) finds a
long-lost brother, revealed to be not a criminal, but a novelist.
This story is a dense pastiche of recent hits, including not only
Shipman's Crooked Gamblers, but also The Whee/by Winchell Smith and The
Uon and the Mouse by Charles Klein. Smith's Brewster's Millions contributes
names and descriptions for two characters; Shipman's Lawful Larceny's last
act is set in the stock market; a card game is portrayed in the opening scene
of Klein's The Gamblers; the long speech recalls The Uon and the Mouse,
though also resembles numerous passionate end-of-act 2 outbursts by
fiery heroines; and the daughter's entrance in handcuffs echoes Bayard
Vieller's famous Within the La1v, in which a shop girl is paraded before a
tycoon responsible for her incarceration.
By pastiching so many plays that blend all too readily, Kaufman
allows these texts to expose themselves as dramaturgically flimsy, and so,
an honest mirror of a vacuous society. In the play's conclusion, Kaufman
gathers a multitude of plot contrivances across the field of popular
drama to underscore their absurdity and he thereby dismantles American
14
Kaufman, Bzg Casino is Little Casino.
28 THOMSON
optimism. The author's attitude was bluntly stated when the brief play was
printed as a news item in the Herald with the headline: "Big Casino is Little
Casino, A Terrible Play by George S. Kaufman."
15
Kaufman similarly kids terrible plays with The Deep Tangled
Wildwood-which opened in November 1923- a full-length comedy
that also targets a particular writer and, even more precisely, one play.
Kaufman additionally sought, as he did in Big Casino, to write satire about
general kinds of plays, and through them, the whole span of traditional
American playwriting: a reprise of his vow "to get square with everybody."
The special target is identified in Wildwood's original title, Turn to the Left,
which points directly to a runaway hit, Turn to the Right by Winchell Smith
and John E. Hazzard.
The play, which opened on 17 August 1916, was an obvious
candidate for debunking. What would now be described as "hype," then
labeled "ballyhoo," surrounded Turn to the Right. Repeatedly advertised as,
"the comedy that will live forever," the play is congratulated in a publicity
pamphlet: "Ministers have lauded it from the pulpit, for its beautiful lesson
of Faith and Mother Love ... a million persons have laughed and cried
themselves into hysteria over it during the thirteen month's run in New
York and the nine months in Chicago."
16
Winchell Smith was also an ideal target. When Wildwood opened
in 1923, Smith epitomized the American popular author immersed in the
codes of a familiar and cheerful popular theatre. Born 5 April 1871 in
Hartford, Connecticut, Smith as a boy saw tours of signal plays in the
local opera house and participated there in a minstrel show. An actor,
who appeared with his uncle William Gillette in Secret Service, Smith once
worked his way back to New York in a medicine show. George M. Cohan
produced Smith's second hit play, The Fortune Hunter. Turn to the Right
inaugurated a business partnership with John Golden. They also produced
Iightnin', co-authored by Smith and Frank Bacon. Opening 26 August
1918, the play ran for three years, a Broadway record at the time.
At his death, 11 June 1933, obituaries claim Smith had earned
more money as a writer and producer than had anyone else in the
American theatre, ever. The New York Times applauds Smith as "our
most essentially American dramatist." He was unerringly a practitioner
of an optimistic national drama, grounded in beloved rituals of plot and
character stretching backward to the early nineteenth century. Those
credentials alone would have been sufficient to irritate Kaufman. However,
15
Herald, 9 November 1922, in Biographical Scrapbooks, 1918-32, George S.
Kaufman Papers, 1912-1958, BRTD.
16
Publicity pamphlet in Turn to the Right (clippings file), BRTD.
BoiLED IN OIL 29
he was especially familiar with Smith because as a reviewer for the Times,
Kaufman was obliged to write, week after week, a synopsis of the play for
the newspaper's theatre listings.
Kaufman was also naturally hostile to Smith because he expressed
sincere conviction in the sort of thinking Kaufman and his Modern
colleagues sought to eradicate. In "How I Write Popular Plays," Smith
wrote that a writer must shape a play around the tastes of the audiences: "I
keep my mind on a typical man in the audience and write to him. That man,
I give you my honest unsmiling word, is the man in the Worcestershire
Sauce ad."
17
He writes for American, December 1918: "The kind of laugh
which does count is that which is from the heart. A smile which has a tear
in it is worth screams of laughter sharpened with cynicism. People are
not naturally cynics. They are naturally kind and generous."
18
About Turn
to the Right, Smith avers that Mrs. Bascom is "the Christ"
19
and in another
column, he expanded: "We want to show the tremendous power of good
that lay in a perfect, clean soul, in unswerving belief. [Mrs. Basom] is the
apotheosis of old fashioned motherhood. It is inherent virtue that is
rewarded all round."
20
Smith is thereby avowing a reverence for the innate
goodness and wisdom of the common man. He is dutifully religious as he
clings to Victorian notions of women as the moral anchors of the family,
ideas scorned by Moderns.
A comparison between Turn to the Right and The Deep Tangled
Wildwood reveals the dual voice essential to parody, Kaufman's encoding
and refunctioning of the Smith play and in the process creating, in Rose's
words, a "word mask" to vent irate social/ cultural criticism. The word
"right" in the title has an unavoidable double meaning. Kaufman, in first
naming his satire Turn to the Left has upended Smith and, as in Big Casino
is Little Casino, emptied the original title of content: the hollowness is
Kaufman's critical judgment about the Smith play and its ideas.
The story of Turn to the Right follows a young man, Joe Bascom-
alias Peter Turner-recently out of prison, and his two pals: a pickpocket
(Muggs) and a safecracker (Gilly). Returning home to his mother, Mrs.
Bascom-described in the printed text as a "sweet faced, frail little
woman" who "always wears a cheery smile"; his pretty sister Betty; and
17
Winchell Smith, "How I Write Popular Plays," Theatre, December 1916,364.
18
Winchell Smith, American, December 1918, in Robinson Locke Collection of
Dramatic Scrapbooks, BRTD.
19
Smith, "How I Write Popular Plays," 364.
20
Winchell Smith, "Current Opinion," in Robinson Locke Collection of Dra-
matic Scrapbooks, BRTD.
30 THOMSON
mom's peach orchard. Joe discovers a plot by Deacon Tillinger to take over
the farmY Joe had loved the Deacon's daughter Elsie. The Deacon, with
the help of Elsie's city beau, the spoiled son of a wealthy businessman,
wants to manufacture mom's jam for a rich merchant. A local yokel, Sam
Martin, intervenes, uncovers the Deacon's scheme, sells the jam, and so
gets everyone very quickly rich. By the play's end, quickened through the
surprise entrance of a detective, the playboy is exposed as the real thief
in the crime that sent Joe to jail; Joe marries Elsie; the two crooks are
reformed and married; and mom wears a diamond brooch.
Kaufman launches his play by imitating and then subverting the
form, plot, and characters of the original. For the hero, Kaufman replaces
Smith's ex-convict with a Broadway playwright, James Parks Leland, on
the opening night of a flop. The equation of a failed playwright with a
crook is reiterated throughout the text by indictments of contemporary
Broadway writing.
Both Smith and Kaufman shape their plays according to a
structural formula of a prologue followed by three acts. The prologue
in Smith's play is set in a New Jersey pawnshop while in Kaufman's, the
scene is a Manhattan penthouse. However, the opposite environments
hold parallel scenes. In both, the central character expresses a yearning for
the old hometown. As Joe gives up booze and gambling for home virtues,
so James relinquishes an equally corrupting addiction to popular theatre
and New York City.
The first act of each play sketches country life. In Smith's, all
Joe's expectations are realized. The locale is: "The kitchen of a farmhouse,
set built as small as possible . .. the whole room has the appearance of
cheeriness, coziness, order and spotless cleanliness" (23). Mom has kept a
lamp in the window for the ten years Joe has been gone. When he returns,
as Mrs. Bascom is praying, her hand on the Bible, mother and son instantly
recognize each other. The stage directions explain, "No one speaks-A
pause-Joe stands awkwardly embarrassed, as if he had forgotten what
motherly affection is like. Mrs. Bascom takes his face in both hands, looks
into his eyes, then kisses him" (45). She kneels and prays.
In his parallel prologue, Kaufman conjures comparable scenes.
Leland remembers his dear Aunt Sarah-who made jam-and Millersville,
particularly the evenings: "you sit out on the front porch, with growing
things all around you, and somebody goes by in a Ford, maybe. And then
pretty soon the lights begin going out, one by one, and a great quiet settles
21
Winchell Smith and John E. Hazzard, Turn to the Right (New York: Samuel
French, 1916), 4, 24. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text.
BoiLED IN OIL 31
down over everything."
22
The last line evokes famous moments at the end
of Turn to the Right. That Leland blurs fact and fiction is an indictment
of contemporary writing. The prologue closes to the accompaniment of
"The Old Oaken Bucket," a sweet extension of his memory.
Act 1 then changes to the living room in Aunt Sarah's home: "a
handsome room, beautifully decorated." Details include French doors, a
cabinet with whiskey bottles, a roulette wheel, and a baby grand piano.
The music is still "The Old Oaken Bucket," now played in jazz. For Mrs.
Bascom, Kaufman substitutes Aunt Sarah Parks, who raised James. When
she enters, "an elderly, gorgeously gowned, gray haired woman," James
does not recognize her. She has sold her orchard and now is a bootlegger.
There is a party going in the living room at 1 0AM; several guests are
gambling; Francine, "a pretty but fresh flapper in a very decollete gown
is dancing." Also present is Joe Inglis: "a lanky hick is playing piano ..
. and singing the latest blues" (1.1, 1). Other changes in Smith's roster
of characters include Kaufman's good Deacon Flood for the villainous
Deacon Tillinger, and the removal of the detective-the latter being
mentioned in the text: when Leland asks his friend and lawyer Wallick for
help, the latter responds, "You want a detective, not a lawyer" (2.1, 17).
In Turn To the Right, Joe recalls his true love Elsie, who wore
a virginal blue dress that clings to his memory: when they meet again,
he says: "That's where you stood, Elsie, the last time I saw you- ... I
remember the dress you had on ... " (91). Similarly, Leland in Kaufman's
prologue recalls his first true love, Mary Ellen. Leland has cherished a
bit of blue gingham torn from her dress as they parted. He mourns how
few girls can wear blue. When he sees Mary Ellen again, she wears a very
different dress. A materialistic flapper, she announces, "I'm not a hick . ...
Give me a cigarette." Turning down Leland's Camels, she says, "Not much
kick in them," then "pours herself a stiff drink." Leland attempts to pick
up an absent cue: "And it's wonderful to come back and find you here! Still
the same little-to find you here" (1.1, 14). He almost says Joe's dialogue,
but stumbles on the truth. The character closest to Smith's Elsie is the
deacon's niece, Phyllis, a city girl and an artist. She enters wearing a blue
dress. She and Leland renew an old acquaintance; he is enamored with
her dress. In such alterations, Kaufman sneers at the Victorian portrait of
women whom he takes off the pedestal to suggest that, after such a long
time of posing, she needs whiskey and a cigarette.
Having established his relationship with the source, Kaufman
22
George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, The Deep Tangled Wildwood, rypescript
in Plays, George S. Kaufman Papers, 1912-1958, BRTD, prologue, 6-7. Subsequent cita-
tions will be given parenthetically in the text.
32
Ti-!OMSON
departs from the original by folding in twisted borrowings from other
Smith plays. He introduces the Deacon, here a good man worried about
his niece, under pressure from the town leaders to sell her land. Phyllis's
relationship with her uncle mirrors the plot of Smith's Thank You, which
presents a young woman returning home to care for her minister uncle.
The conspiracy to swindle Phyllis, which is about land the railroad wants,
is central to the story of Lightnin'. What differs is that the speculators
are her friends and neighbors rather than outsider city slickers. Kaufman
constructs a pastiche from the Smith plays with the clear point that they
are indistinguishable and undistinguished.
Then Kaufman departs largely from Smith, a walk into the tumult
of satire, in which a busy stage so often substitutes for plot.
23
Kaufman
montages events illustrating the vanity and corruptibility of small town
folk as they conspire to threaten Leland and Phyllis with bogus exposure
in the local tabloid newspaper. At the end of act 3, the residents gather
to inaugurate a new radio station, where Leland has agreed to speak but
instead is moved to a vehement condemnation of the new hometown: his
speech is inadvertendy broadcast. Embarrassment turns to shame; all the
small town characters-with the exception of Mary Ellen-repent. The
ending of the original is both imitated and discounted: when the hero/
writer gets his girl, they share green dreams of an ideal cottage, however,
the hero and girl also keep a safe distance from the small town- their
cottage is an apartment overlooking Central Park. The original is further
deprecated because Wallick is skeptical of the plotting; the unrepentant
Mary Ellen is the only character he believes.
Kaufman and Leland advocate truth-telling. Leland goes to the
country in search of what is "real." However, Phyllis berates Leland, as
he has derided the citizens of Millersville, for phoniness: "The trouble
with you is, you're absorbed in your plays -in a world that exists only in
your imagination. People aren't human beings to you. They're only stage
characters, and you think they're trying to do the things you make them do
in plays" (7). Kaufman here explicidy denounces Smith and his kindred
American authors for self-perpetuating formulas that exist only as the
fabrications of playwrights affirming cultural delusions.
Kaufman's subject is emphasized through self-consciously
referencing plays and theatre. Wallick is the satirist inside the play and
therefore the author's voice: he continuously brings the audience back to
the original source, expressing this play as itself a fiction. In the prologue,
23
Alex Kernan writes in The Cankered lvf.use, "the scene of satire is always disor-
dered, crowded, packed to the very point of busting" (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1959), 7-8.
BOILED IN OIL 33
Wallick dubs Millersville, "the home of the Hick" and then cites the source
for the play's title, a phrase from the song "The Old Oaken Bucket,"
which he mockingly quotes (4). Later, he describes Millersville: "It's a
one-horse town, completely equipped with one Winchell Smith Deacon
with a mortgage on every widow's home-a woman who makes preserves
or something-" (6) . When Leland vows to reform the natives, Wallick
argues, "No you're not the playwright they need. The guy they ought to
have here is Eugene O'Neill. He'd begin with the murder of that butler
in a waterfront saloon" (14). When Leland explains about the effort to
defraud Phyllis, Wallick protests, "The plot's no good, Jim-it's been done
a thousand times. But if you do it at all, you've got to do it right-the way
they're used to it. You've got to rewrite that Deacon" (16). About one
character's conversion Wallick says, "That's a dandy speech you wrote for
her. Sounds like Tum to the Right" (17).
Wallick anticipates Phyllis's complaint. Leland's dream of
Millersville is no more real than plays about such places, than Smith's play
about such a place, and perhaps even than this play. WzJdwood simultaneously
imitates and departs from the hokum it ridicules and attempts to be more
"real." A reviewer of the touring production in Chicago described the
authors as "humorous reformers," who, "by means of ridicule, which is
not always gentle ... succeed admirably in reflecting life as it is lived."
24
Other theatre reviewers of Wildwood similarly depicted Kaufman's
viewpoint and underscore how accessible the parody was. Heywood
Broun, writing for the World on 7 November 1923, mentions, "The story,
such as it is, endeavors to reverse the familiar formula of the typical
Winchell Smith comedy of small town life." The play, Broun says, attacks
"traditions of American sentiment and the plays of Winchell Smith . ...
The usual incidents are included with no change except complete about
face."
25
Kaufman's pastiche of Smith's plays is a bridge to the larger topic
of American popular theatre. Kaufman expands his sights to include
three strands of standard dramaturgy, all still prominent at the time: the
crook play, the business comedy, and the Yankee play. That Smith himself
offered examples of each-and that Turn To the Right was itself a weaving
of these strands--engenders in Wildwood a dense and adventurous fabric
with a constantly moving target.
The most recent of Kaufman's general sources was the crook
play, a fad that began with Paul Armstrong's Alias Jimmy Valentine.
24
In The Deep Tangled WildJIJood (clippings file), BRTD.
25
Nw York World, 7 November 1923, in The Deep Tangled WildJIJood (clippings
file), BRTD.
34
THOMSON
Kaufman had the opportunity to study such plays closely, as his very
first playwriting job was as the fourth writer hired to fix a standard crook
comedy, titled Someone in the House. He had cheerfully described the failure
of this comedy in an article by Burns Mantle titled "The Co-Co-Coauthor
Explains How the Proof of the Play is the Rewriting Thereof."
26
The
crook play features a gentleman thief in battle with corrupt police and
reformed by a perfect woman; he (or, occasionally, she) triumphs over the
real bad guys. Initially, such plays were vehicles for a militant Progressive
agenda, earned dramaturgically by the reversal of standard character types
in melodrama: marginalized bad guys are really the good guys, while the
rich and powerful-from police to wealthy businessmen-are shown to
be bad guys. Tremendously successful, the crook play had quickly been
depleted of its agenda of social change and infused with conformist
thinking.
27
Critics labeled Turn to the Right a crook play. Smith portrays
endearing crooks that indulge in crime for humanitarian motives and are
completely redeemed by the play's end. By the top of the second act,
Muggs is humming "Rock of Ages." Smith also traces a familiar pattern
from the crook play in the love story: the loss of Elsie had driven Joe to
the city and the memory of her brings him home. The play opens with
Joe determined to reform and the action tells of his journey to salvation.
As in Big Casino is L"ttle Casino, Kaufman's refuting the antique
dramaturgy-at least until the mild conclusion-attacks outmoded
thinking. Leland has self-consciously sought the salvation that plays
have taught him he can achieve with right living. Leland ignores Wallick's
pointed reminders that his belief in the possibility for a quick-fix spiritual
renewal has been perpetuated by fiction. Eventually, Leland does rescue
the girl, but he is constantly reprimanded for his idealism by both Wallick
and the girl. He experiences no material alteration of his soul, but only
manages to escape unharmed. Mary Ellen, the character normally obliged
to provide spiritual uplift and true love, proves to be herself obstinately
unregenerate.
Mingled with the patterns of the crook play in Turn To the Right
are elements of the business comedy. In this kind of play, the subject
is the leading character's material welfare, although the path is once
more through love to the regeneration of the soul and the return to an
inherent goodness. The rewards are love (usually through marriage to a
26
In Biographical Scrapbooks, 1918-32, George S. Kaufman Papers, 1912-1958,
BRTD.
27
See Lynn Marian Thomson, "The Crook Play," Journal of American Drama and
Theatre 13, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 1-35.
BOILED IN OIL 35
good woman) and money. Typical examples are It PC!Js to Advertise by R.
C. Megrue, and Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford and Broadwcg Jones by George
M. Cohan. Smith's contributions were Brewster's Millions and The Fortune
Hunter. In all these plays, as the main character reverts to his true self,
he revives every life around him through the healing power of gold (a
sign of blessedness). Shared details between these comedies demonstrate
their shared ideas: success in sometimes wild speculation not only reflects
current events, but also affirms that America has a place for individual
talent, and is true to the promise of self-determination.
In this marriage of morality and business, spirituality and
materialism, these plays preach the contemporaneous gospel of business.
Turn to the Right displays standard components: Joe is apparently a failure
but, with the help of Sam, he becomes a wealthy success by selling mom's
jam. A swindle and a deal that promise great riches drive the plot. The hero
adheres to honorable motives and is rewarded with love and money. The
play ends with everyone in tuxedos and gowns. Burns Mantle describes
Kaufman's use of the Smith model with: "It occurred to the Kaufman and
Connelly boys that it would be a great idea to start a play from the point at
which a Winchell Smith-John Golden comedy ends. They would go, they
agreed, into a hick town and follow up what happened after the carpet
tack factory made the natives rich or the jam business moved Mother to
Easy Street."
28
Kaufman conforms to the model in maintaining a business deal
at the center of the plot and in Leland's long haranguing monologue
excoriating materialism. However, Kaufman also significantly alters the
original. The town is overcome with speculation fever before Leland
enters. The hicks need no corrupting urban force, but are quite self-reliant
in their materialism. Leland's rescue of the girl is accomplished only
through the ridiculous, accidental broadcast of his tirade against the town,
that is, the town's incompetence and vanity, not the power of his words.
Kaufman exposes the real story buried in the original, which
seems to reject materialism while simultaneously promising wealth.
The locals admit that greed is not good. Idealism and materialism are
separated. While the moment of reformation is standard, here it takes
on a different meaning: Love and money, salvation and money, and truth
and money, are severed and incompatible. The idea is so commonplace
now as to have become itself something of a cliche in modern drama, but
then it was considered new and radical. The American middle class still
remained confident in success as a banner of purity, a sign of blessedness;
28
The Dai!J News, 6 November 1923, in The Deep Tangled Wildwood (clippings
file), BRTD.
36
THOMSON
a world in which business, art, and religion were all allies in a single cause
of godliness and brotherhood.
A frequent presence in the business comedy is the leading man's
best friend, an inspiration and guide, a pal. Wallick is this character, but
quite unlike his ancestors, he is a puncturing skeptic, a clear-sighted
disdainer of the sentimental. He does his best to deflate Leland rather
than support him; Wallick no more believes in the last act he helps write
than he was sympathetic with Leland's attachment to the old oaken bucket.
Wallick debunks the plays in which he was once so prominently a true
believer. This device, a character involved very little in the action but a
constant commentator, recurs throughout Kaufman's writing as a guide to
the play's point of view.
Finally, the third, most important, and oldest tradition embedded
in Turn to the Right is the Yankee play, which by the time of Kaufman was
dubbed-as John Corbin, writing for the New York Times, November 1923,
states-the "rural or b'gosh melodrama of yore."
29
The rural play is but
a new name for the Yankee comedies that began with Royall Tyler's The
Contrast and proliferated after the war of 1812. Critical features include
the contrast of city and country, an ancient idea that assumed parochial
resonance when adapted to the American experience-a country first
idealized as a new Eden. Rural and small town life emblemized the best
promise of America. In literature and popular drama during the first half
of the nineteenth century, the contrast of city and country became a way
to define and advocate what was American. A multitude of comedies
portrayed country bumpkins vanquishing city slickers, a dramatic action
that heralded democratic ideals, including the rights and glories of the
common man and guarantees of American life such as self-determination.
Generally, these plays told of a journey, either from country to city (and
back again), or city to country.
An especially important character in these pre-Civil War farces
was the Yankee. Despite many failings, which were the source of humor,
the archetypal character of the Yankee was a means for early American
authors to identify and celebrate the national character. As America was a
new Eden, so the Yankee was, in the words of W B. Lewis, "the American
Adam"; his most essential quality was innocence.
30
In 1920s literature and humor, the theme took on a renewed
vigor, though now American writers challenged homeland self-satisfaction
29
New York Times, 6 November 1923, in The Deep Tangled Wildwood (clippings
file), BRTD.
30
W B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragecjy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
BOILED IN O IL 37
by ridiculing the standard portrait of the small town and the rube. Yet,
the popular drama was still dedicated to the old-time values. Critics
recognized the vintage of these plays-which, as Channing Pollock notes,
were dubbed "hokum."
31
In 1917, Montrose Moses presented scenes from
seven old plays, including The Contrast, Fashion, Dary Crockett, and Shore
Acres. Heywood Broun, reporting in the New York Tribune, commented
that "Mrs. Mowatt may be identified as the forerunner not only of Booth
Tarkington, Harry Leon Wilson and William Hodge, but of Winchell
Smith, Owen Davis ... as well."
32
The contrast between city and country is introduced in Turn to the
Rights prologue, as Joe contemplates his home in the context of a grimy
pawnshop. In the city, he fell from grace, as he indulged in alcohol and
gambling. In the city, he lost who he was. He has no memory of the night
in which he was supposed to have committed a crime and had become
so unsure of his identity, that he accepted the jail sentence. He now
intends to turn back to the right. When home, he returns to his original
name sure about who he is. The play dwells increasingly on the healing,
teaching power in the beauties of nature, an important corollary to early
American reverence for the common man, the natural man. The second
act is set in the orchard. As Muggs and Gilly work, they gradually emerge
as bashful, barefoot boys. Smith manages persuasive touches of realism in
this advocacy of American values.
One Yankee in Smith's play is clearly Sam Martin. The stage
directions describe "a short, rather stout, red-faced country boy, keen-eyed
and shrewd" (27). He exhibits typical Yankee traits; most impressively, his
wit is classic Yankee: he loves a long, meandering story and his dialogue is
rich with typical malapropisms and misunderstandings. While Joe defends
his mother with an admirable indignation, the practical mechanics of her
rescue is the task of Muggs, Gilly (both urban variations of the Yankee
in the fashion of Mose the Fireman), and Sam. In an identical fashion,
decades of Yankees helped stage heroes to happy endings in dozens of
farces.
The play tells the typical journey from city to country, and the
rustication of Muggs and Gilly is an important echo of Joe's return to his
original innocence. Typical also is the contrast between Joe and another
suitor for Elsie's hand, Lester Morgan, the spoiled, vain city man who
combines egocentricity and materialism. When Sam exposes Morgan, the
play accomplishes the archetypal defeat of the city slicker by the country
31
Channing Pollock, Untitled, Greenbook Magazine, 20 (November 1918): 789.
32
Heywood Broun, "Old Plays Shine Like New Ones," New York Tribune, 23
January 1917, 9.
38
THOMSON
bumpkin.
Kaufman seeks to bring an end to all this tradition. In The Dai!J
News, 6 November 1923, Burns Mantle titles his column, "Tangled
Wildwood Satirizes Hick Plays.'m Alexander Woollcott wrote: ''A spoof ..
. at the tricks ... of those simpler souls among the Broadway playwrights
who write sentimentally of the old oaken bucket.'' He continues,
"Seemingly Messrs. Kaufman and Connelly had stood about all they
could of those rural comedies which solve all the woes of the world by
transplanting the characters from the big evil city to the cleaner greener
backdrop of some rural spot, where men are men."
34
The importance of the country/ city theme to Wildwood is
suggested by the various titles, the changes indicating also dramaturgical
problems. After Turn to the Left, the piece was titled The Old Home Town,
then West of Pittsburgh, Little Old Millersville. The final title is a phrase
from Samuel Woodworth's ''The Old Oaken Bucket," which originally
appeared in his The Forest Rose, an important link in the Yankee chain.
Through his mockery of details in Turn to the Right, Kaufman joins his
contemporaries in attacking small town/ rural life as a primal theme. This
urban perspective reflects the moment. The census of 1920 proved a new
urban advantage: for the first time in the nation's history more people
lived in the city than the country; increasingly, rural life was abandoned
by young people. Simultaneously, the city invaded small town and rural
America through mass culture. Kaufman steadfastly sides with the city
and against Leland's memories to discredit Smith's outdated portrayal of
the old hometown. Leland wants to live out the prodigal son story of
Turn to the Right, and believes there is no place like home, but his country
cousins have altered so much that he learns instead the modern lesson that
he can't go home again.
The play, therefore, expands to attack nostalgia itself and an
endemic American belief in the Edenic possibility of native life. When
Leland meets Phyllis, he suddenly becomes nostalgic about New York, as
he had so recently been about Millersville. Similarly, in the radio station,
the professional engineer in this very new medium bemoans the loss of
radio's good old days; in response, Wallick speaks in the author's voice
with, "You mean before it was invented," deflating both the nostalgia and
radio (21).
Kaufman dismisses the assumption that any contrast between city
and country exists by confounding character types: a city bumpkin battles
33
Dai!J News, 6 November 1923, in The Deep Tangled Wild1vood (clippings file),
BRTD.
34
Herald, 6 November 1923, in Dramatic Criticism, 1923-4, BRTD.
BOILED IN OIL 39
country slickers. Kaufman also confuses the prototypical plot, so that it is
the nice city artist who is victimized. She refuses to obey the laws of her
type: disinterested in being rescued and unwilling to enact the requisite
lonely fight against corruption. While Leland's subject is the corruption
of country life, the playwright's subject is Leland: As a writer of popular
successful plays, Leland stands in for Smith and, according to Kaufman,
has a great many sins to redress. That the hero becomes the target of the
authors' rebuke removes Leland entirely from the unqualified approbation
awarded Joe Bascom. When Leland's description of nature's beauties, in
the prologue, gradually merges with the conclusion of Turn to the Right,
Kaufman insists on the same point he makes in reference to the crook play
and the business play: Leland's memories are borrowed from dishonest
plays.
A Yankee in Kaufman is Joe Inglis; although maintaining the
archetype's business shrewdness, he no longer has an inherently good
and generous heart. Leland is another Yankee, especially in his naivete.
However, now the archetype is, for the bulk of the play, the object of
derision. Most significantly, Kaufman has removed the wit that is the
Yankee's birthright and transferred that humor almost entirely to the care
of Wallick, whose wisecracks are the modern and urban reincarnations of
Yankee pithiness.
The mockery of the Yankee play formula is a refusal of its implicit
values. Kaufman's power to mislead the expectations of the audience in
the first scene is enhanced by the mutual awareness of the tradition, and
it is the tradition- returning all the way to The Contrast through The Forest
Rose-as much as Turn to the Right that is refuted.
Kaufman's use of tradition uncovers some of the dramaturgical
problems in Wildwood that were never solved and account in part for its
failure: how to find forward moving action when every incident in the play
denies the possibility of the salvation that is the original's action. By the
last act, Wildwood starts, in desperation, to truly buy into what the plot has
so far rejected. The ambiguity degenerates into confusion when Leland,
whose muddled juvenile thinking has been derided for so much of the
play, suddenly becomes a traditional hero.
The parody, however, was uniformly the cause for what praise
the play earned. Through this tactic, Kaufman found a solution to a
dramaturgical challenge that faced writers who wanted to treat more
modern subject matter but were trapped in the inefficacy of old forms.
Kaufman, eschewing the exploration of new forms that typified an
O'Neill's approach to rebellion, chose to operate as a guerilla warrior
behind enemy lines by turning an old form inward and against itself
The method demonstrated here to analyze these early and
40 THOMSON
seminal plays in Kaufman's artistic life is easily applied to his other work
and illuminates buried meanings, although he ceased to target particular
plays or writers and instead concentrated on getting "even with everyone."
Examples of his rural plays are June Moon, The Butter and Egg Man, Once in
a Lifetime, Minick, Merton of the Movies, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and
George Washington Slept Here. All these plays depend on the parodic process
of imitating old plays and then inverting them. All of his many plays
about the arts-theatre, film, visual art-are actually about business and
invert the ritual patterns of business comedies. These plays include the
aforementioned titles as well as Merrily We full Along, Beggar on Horseback,
To the Ladies, and Dulry. Dulry is also a crook play, and although that fashion
becomes less important to Kaufman, strains are heard throughout his
work. Indeed, as in Wildwood, all three major strands are, to some extent,
to be found.
And mentions of Smith also recur, small reminders of a primary
source. For example, Strike Up the Band includes a character named George
Spelvin. Spelvin was a pseudonym Smith invented when he wanted to
mask his performance in one of his own plays. Because the show was
miraculously a hit, he superstitiously continued to insert the name
in programs for subsequent plays. Another Smith joke is a mysterious
character in June Moon: A Man Named Brainard, who enters amid the daily
chaos of a musical publishing office in search of a lost partner (who had
an appendectomy). After a few lines, he rushes out and disappears from
the play forever. Brainard was the title character in one of Smith's notable
plays, The Only Son.
This unearthing of parody as the playwright's favorite method
restores Kaufman to his rightful place as a Modern, while also explaining
why his reputation has altered so significantly from what it was in his
lifetime. Then he was a brutal pioneer, with a cutting wit; sixty years later,
Mel Gussow, in a review of June Moon, assigns all the darkness to Lardner
and heretically suspects Kaufman of being a secret sentimentalist.
35
Although sometimes still mechanically categorized as satire, Kaufman's
plays seem hardly to prick. Richard Eder judged Once In a Lifetime "ideal
summer theatre" in 1978,
36
yet the play, when first produced in 1930, was
congratulated by Gilbert Gabriel in the American for "vengeful mirth," and
observed by Richard Lockridge in the Sun to be "the cruelest ... assault
against the movies and their makers ever to emerge from an embittered
mind," while John Anderson in the Evening-Journal noted that "its savagery
35
Mel Gussow, "The Season's Hot Playwright: George S. Kaufman in Revival,"
New York Times, 19 February 1990.
36
New York Times, 18 June 1978, in Once In A Lifetime (clippings file), BRTD.
BOILED IN OIL 41
is relentless."
37
The parody explains the perception of savagery.
Parody and satire require some recognition of the target: because
the references that explain the parody have vanished from our cultural
landscape, Kaufman's true voice is now so muted that his work is heard-
by scholars, critics and audiences-quite differently than in his lifetime.
Without the company of Winchell Smith, without the plays of his sort
playing simultaneously with Kaufman's dismantling, the edge is not simply
dulled: Kaufman is now mistaken for the very kind of play he sought to
eradicate.
The true story of Kaufman's voice suggests also the importance
of re-examining both art and popular drama during this period for closer
bonds than are usually allowed. The common narrative about this period
is a melodrama depicting good guy art insurgents and bad guy popular
theatre merchants. The reality is that there is more crossover and ambiguity.
Eugene O'Neill would eventually return to the comedies familiar to his
father in Ah! Wilderness, a play that starred George M. Cohan. The plays
of Philip Barry utilize American archetypes as does the still biting satire of
George Kelly. Kaufman, indeed, set patterns of writing that endure to our
own time and explain unattended links in the modern theatre to American
dramatic history.
37
Ameni:an, Sun, and Evening-Journal, 25 September 1930 in Once In A Lifetime
(clippings file), BRTD.
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMJ\ J\ND T HEATRE 23, NO. 1 (WINTER 2011)
NEGOTIATIONS AND EXCHANGES: .A.l.A.N SCHNEIDER, OUR ToWN,
AND THEATRICAL D ETENTE
Jeffrey Stephens
Alan Schneider began his professional directing career at Arena Stage in
what was then a fledgling company in Washington, D.C.' It was with Arena,
too, that his production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town (along with Zelda
Fichandler's production of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's Inherit
the Wina) was performed in Moscow and Leningrad in October 1973 at
the height of detente between the superpowers. This was the first time
that an American theatre company was invited to be a part of the US
Department of State's Cultural Exchange Program, long dominated by
symphony orchestras, jazz musicians, and dance companies. The Arena
"tour" consisted of barely two weeks of performances, but its journey
to the land of the Soviets could not have occurred at a more convoluted
and anxious historical moment. This unique cultural exchange occurred
despite the high cost, the degree of bureaucracy, the seemingly millions
of miles of red tape, and the enormous complexity of the undertaking. I
am interested in exploring that uniqueness while positioning the tour in
its historical context.
In May 1984, Alan Schneider was struck by a motorcycle while
walking to a mailbox in London to post a letter to Samuel Beckett.
Schneider died from the head injuries he sustained.
2
Harold Pinter, upon
hearing of Schneider's death, wrote:
I am stunned by the arbitrariness of Alan Schneider's
death and find it extremely difficult to come to terms
with the loss of a friend of twenty years standing. It
is too sudden, too shocking. I cannot see any way to
encapsulate in a few words a man of such passionate
1
I would like to thank Lynda Corey Claassen, Director of the Mandeville Spe-
cial Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, as well as JADTs edi-
tors for their assistance during the revision of this essay. I would also like to thank both the
Friends of the UCSD Libraries at the University of California, San Diego, and the University
Personnel Development Committee at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, for the
monetary grants that allowed for my research travel.
2
An obituary by Mel Gussow announcing Schneider's death appeared on the
front page of the New York Times on 4 May 1984. This front-page treatment powerfully
conveys the strength of Schneider's reputation at the time of his death.
44
spirit and character, of such warmth and vitality. I was
the last author he worked with-last month in New
York. He was at his peak.
3
STEPHENS
Edward Albee wrote the preface to Entrances, Schneider's autobiography,
published posthumously in 1986. Schneider directed the world and/
or American stage premieres of this triumvirate's major plays: Beckett's
Waitingjor Godot (1956), Endgame (1958), Last Tape (1960), and
Happy Dqys (1961); Pinter's The Birthdqy Parry (1967); and Albee's
Afraid of Virginia Woo!f? (1962), Tii!J Alice (1964), and A Delicate Balance
(1966)
4
-all enormously challenging dramas that provoked effusive critical
commentary. Schneider's professional relationship with all three dramatists
has been well-documented.
5
Even with this stellar resume, throughout his
career Schneider tended to downplay his directorial abilities. He often
referred to himself as "the poor man's Tony Guthrie," but even such self-
effacement demonstrates Schneider's wily ability-linking one's name
with Guthrie's-to promote himself (as one must do to survive in the
commercial and even regional nonprofit American theatre).
6
Schneider revered dramatic writing. He reveled in explicating
the opaque drama of the great mid-century absurdists, but found equally
challenging the smallish dilemmas of the Webbs and Gibbses of Wilder's
Our Town (a play and playwright which intrigued him almost as much as
Beckett and Waitingfor Godot).
7
Schneider traveled with Wilder to meet
Beckett in Paris in 1955 before tackling Godot for its infamous American
premiere in Miami in 1956. Never wholly committed to the avant-garde,
Schneider also directed highly commercial plays on Broadway such as You
3
"Letters of Condolence, 1984," box 6, folder 3, Alan Schneider Papers, MSS
0103, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego (hereaf-
ter Alan Schneider Papers, UCSD). There exist varying remembrances of what Schneider
was doing when he was killed. Frances Sternhagen remembers: "[A] motorcycle killed
Alan before we even started rehearsal [on James Duff's The War at Home, a.k.a. Home Front,
planned for the Hampstead Theatre in London] . He was crossing Finchley Road reading
a letter from Samuel Beckett." See Edward Meisel, ''Well-Known Actress Goes Back to
Vassar," Poughkeepsie journal, 20 February 2009.
4
Dates in parentheses are dates of production.
5
See, for example, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and
Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
6
Douglas Cushman Giebel, "Alan Schneider: A Director for the Theatre of Our
Time" (master's thesis, San Francisco State College, 1965), 16.
7
Schneider also found much to admire in Wilder's rarely produced one-act,
Pullman Car Hiawatha, which he considered directing "for about the 15th time" as late as
1971. Letter to Wilder, 29 September 1971, box 5, folder 2, Alan Schneider Papers, UCSD.
NEGOTIATIONS AND EXCHANGES
45
Know I Can't Hear You When the Water:r futnning (1967) by Robert Anderson
(with whom he was professionally associated for many years), which ran
for over 750 performances. Schneider was scrupulous about conveying the
play on stage as written in the literary text, and yet his favorite director was
the iconoclastic theatricalist Yury Lyubimov of Moscow's famed Taganka
Theatre. He was also uniquely qualified to contend with government
bureaucracy. Having served as an advisor to Roger Stevens, Chairman of
the National Council of the Arts (and the first chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts created when the National Foundation of the
Arts and the Humanities Act was passed by Congress in 1965), as well as
to Assistant Secretary of State, Charles Frankel, under President Johnson
via the Office of Cultural Presentations, Schneider was well aware of the
glacial pace that characterized obtaining approval for such a historically
important event as the Arena tour.
8
Six months before, during, and six months after the Arena tour,
the Yom Kippur War erupted; Nixon was victorious over McGovern in
the US presidential election, but Watergate began to seriously damage
Nixon's presidency; Spiro Agnew resigned as Vice President; Valery and
Galina Panov (dancers with the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad) began a hunger
strike in hopes of emigrating to Israel; and Soviet causes celebres Andrei
Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn challenged the Kremlin record on
human rights facing internal exile or deportation. Solzhenitsyn's plight
became the most notable and notorious during detente. Fewer than six
months after the Arena tour, Schneider stated emphatically:
Whatever one feels [about the Soviet Union], one
simultaneously feels the opposite . . .. Now, when I sense
what it must be like for Mr. Solzhenitsyn, I feel equally
the need to maintain the searching for human exchange
that our trip represented. I shall fight for detente as
though there were no Solzhenitsyn and I shall fight for
Mr. Solzhenitsyn as though there were no detenteY
Leo Tolstoy's conceptualization of the "infectiousness" of a true
work of art (as opposed to "counterfeit" rhetoric or history) provides
theoretical support for my position that the increased number of cultural
8
A year after the tour, Arena actor Terrence Currier wrote a personal and hu-
morous account of his time with the Soviet tour entitled ''Arena Stage in Russia: An Actor's
Journal" published in The Washington Post, 3 November 1974 (see note 59) and, of course,
Schneider and Fichandler wrote of their experiences in the USSR, but none at length.
9
Quoted in Cindy Strousse, "Our Town in Russia," Spectrum, April 197 4, n.p.
46 STEPHENS
exchanges between the Soviet Union and the United States during the
late 1960s and early 1970s, was the result of the "infection" of the Soviet
people by events such as the publication in 1962 of Solzhenitsyn's Ivan
Demsovich. "Real" art, according to Tolstoy, "renders accessible to men of
the latest generations all the feelings experienced by their predecessors,
and those also which are being felt by their best and most foremost
contemporaries."
10
Denisovich altered the way in which the Party positioned
itself to the world. In this sense, cultural exchanges-scholarly, musical,
journalistic, and theatrical-once suspiciously and grudgingly accepted,
were embraced in order to counter the damage done to the nation's prestige
by the publication of Solzhenitsyn's novella.
11
As Solzhenitsyn opened
the window on Stalinist Russia, Party apparatchiks persuaded the Central
Committee via the Ministry of Culture to allow for more exchanges-as
part of the initial stirrings of detente in the 1960s.
American jazz and swing musicians were the most prominent
members of a group of patriotic and politically progressive artists who
became the face of American culture during the Cold War exchanges.
Artists such as Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and the first great
American cultural ambassador, Dizzy Gillespie, served a twofold purpose
in the eyes of the US government. Penny M. Von Eschen, in her seminal
work on jazz musicians as cultural emissaries during the Cold War,
Satchmo Blows Up the World, argues: "Government officials and supporters
of the arts hoped to offset what they perceived as European and Soviet
superiority in classical music and ballet, while at the same time shielding
America's Achilles' heel by demonstrating racial equality in action."
12
The
Achilles' heel, of course, was the dismal state of race relations in the US.
The Eisenhower Administration went further than any other in actively
promoting cultural exchanges between the US and the USSR that in many
ways may be linked with Robert Breen's and Blevins Davis's controversial
production of the Gershwin folk opera, Porgy and Bess, in 1955Y Yale
10
Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? trans. by Almyer Maude (1896; New York: Macrnil-
lan, 1989), 139,142-43.
11
The first volume of Sholzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was published abroad in
197 4, the same year as Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the USSR. It was not available to the
general Soviet reader, unlike the comparatively broad availability of Denisovich.
12
Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the
Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U niversit:y Press, 2004), 6.
13
The Breen and Davis revival of Porgy and Bess (under the aegis of the pro-
ducing organization, "Everyman Opera, Inc."), premiered in 1952. In terms of its later
proposed Soviet tour, the opera was "controversial" in the sense that, despite its brilliantly
innovative score, it had "unsavory" subject matter; it portrayed too negatively the living
NEGOTIATIONS AND EXCHANGES 47
Richmond asserts that "(p]erforming arts exchanges between the two
countries began" with this production.
14
(Even such iconic American
cultural coups d'etat as Van Cliburn's Tchaikovsky Competition win in
Moscow in 1958 and another pianist, Byron Janis, and his Russian tour in
November 1960 occurred after the Porgy and Bess tour.)
The US State Department under President Eisenhower agreed
to underwrite the majority of funding for the world tour of Porgy and
Bess, but flatly refused Breen's request to fund his proposed foray into
post-Stalin Russia. The tour of Porgy and Bess to Leningrad and Moscow
in the winter of 1955 was documented by Truman Capote in The Muses
are Heard (1956), a lively, if gossipy and not altogether accurate, account
of the company's confrontation with Russian bureaucracy and Soviet
Communism. According to Capote, "The International Exchange
Program, a branch of the American National Theatre and Academy
(ANTA) ... had registered opposition on the grounds that the State
Department should be more evenly spread to allow a larger catalogue
of events in cultural exchange."
15
The Soviet Ministry of Culture then
"offered to pick up the tab themselves."
16
The tour of Porgy and Bess was
a major cultural event in a post-Stalin Soviet Union, but its success did
not lead the State Department to fund additional theatrical tours. As had
happened with Hallie Flanagan's Federal Theatre Project (created by the
US Congress in 1935 and funded by the Works Progress Administration)
in the first and second terms of the Roosevelt Administration, government
funding of live dramatic theatre proved too potentially divisive in both the
Congress and the presidential administrations from Roosevelt to Nixon to
implement fully.
17
conditions among blacks in the US; and it did not reflect the "values" that the administra-
tion wished to convey to the USSR during the Cold War.
14
Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (Uni-
versity Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003), 123. Emphasis added. Upon Breen's
death in 1980, the New York Times credited him and the production with helping to "bring
Federal financing to the performing arts." Breen had been involved in the Federal Theatre
and American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) prior to producing. Special col-
lections libraries at both The Ohio State University and George Mason University hold
extensive materials related to Breen and the Porgy and Bess tour. Hollis Alpert's The Lift and
Times of Porgy and Bess: The Story of an American Classic (New York: Knopf, 1990) includes
probably the best account of the Breen tour.
15
Truman Capote, The Muses are Heard (New York: Random House, 1956), 21-22.
16
Ibid., 22.
17
The demise in 1939 of the Federal Theatre Project is often traced to the
inflammatory subject matter of specific productions such as the "living newspapers" One
Third of A Nation (expose of the squalor of tenement housing and poverty in the US) and
48 STEPHENS
The Lacy-Zarubin Agreement of January 1958 was a milestone
in cultural relations between the Cold War adversaries. The agreement
addressed "exchanges in science and technology, agriculture, medicine
and public health, radio and television, motion pictures, exhibitions,
publications, government, youth, athletics, scholarly research, culture,
and tourism."
18
Clearly not all of these areas were actively appropriated
by either the American or the Soviet side. Other western countries had
already established friendlier theatrical relations with the Soviet Union.
In 1954, the Comedie Fran<;aise brought productions of The Bourgeois
Gentleman, Tartuffe, and Le Cid to Moscow and Leningrad.
19
The Lacy-
Zarubin Agreement allowed, however, for the increased number of
cultural exchanges between the US and the USSR. Without it, Arena Stage
would never have been invited to perform in the USSR in 1973 at the
height of detente.
20
To discuss detente in the context of US-Soviet relations is to
delve into an almost impenetrable realm of Cold War political policies and
ideological wrangling. Detente encompassed concepts of nuclear parity,
the reduction of nuclear weapons such as intercontinental ballistic missiles
and the launch capacity of the opposing sides, as well as military theories
of deterrence and "mutual assured destruction." In the US, the ideology
of detente will always be linked with President Nixon and his Secretary
of State, Henry Kissinger, as surely as Watergate will. What was meant by
detente as it emerged in public pronouncements by the Americans and
Soviets was never clearly articulated. Its implications varied according to
historical events. In the United States, the word, derived from the French,
suggested a relaxation of tensions in order to prevent unbridled attempts
by both the US and USSR to achieve nuclear superiority. The political
Power (examination of power-holding companies and the creation of the publicly held
Tennessee Valley Authority); and children's drama, e.g., The Revolt of the Beavers (the "chief"
beaver of "Beaverland" is overthrown by the proletariat beaver class with the aid of two
American children).
18
Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War, 15. The agreement was named
after the American negotiator, William Lacy, and the Soviet ambassador to the United
States, Georgi Zarubin. Richmond notes that the final agreement was an "executive agree-
ment," not a treaty, and did nor require Senate ratification.
19
John van Eerde, "The Comedie Fran<;aise in the USSR," The French Review 29
(1955): 131.
20
A US touring company of My Fair Lacfy played Moscow for three weeks in
1960. In 1965, Hello Doi!J! featuring Mary Martin "was scheduled to visit the Soviet Union
.. . but was canceled at the last moment by the Soviet authorities because of the American
bombing of North Vietnam." See Bernard Gwertzman, "Capital's Arena Stage to Tour
Soviet," New York Times, 28 March 1973, 1, 36.
NEGOTIATIONS AND EXCHANGES 49
philosophy of detente began to bleed into the cultural realm by the
late 1960s. Raymond L. Garthoff, a member of the American side who
negotiated the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) in 1969 and
signed it in 1972, asserts that, for both countries: "Detente implie[d], and
its implementation involve[d], much wider and greater outside contact,
with consequent impact on Soviet (and other communist) societies."
21
During the late 1960s and 1970s, cultural exchanges were the collateral
benefits at the otherwise politically motivated heart of detente.
For the Soviets, Garthoff argues, the goal of detente was "to
remove intergovernmental barriers such as trade restraints, rather than
curtailing prudent governmental restraints on people."
22
The Soviets
never fully endorsed the American notion that detente essentially meant
full interaction among peoples. After Nixon first officially used the term
detente in 1970 while addressing the UN General Assembly, it seemed to
carry with it a sense of hopeful reconciliation between bitterly opposed
sides. The concept of detente to Western Europeans was different
still. Rather than a mere "normalization" of relations between the two
superpowers, the implications of the word were "to open up Soviet and
communist societies as a natural consequence of the increased contact
among peoples that would stem from greatly increased cultural, travel,
trade, and other ties." Detente ultimately became the word that substituted
for the idea of "peaceful coexistence."
23
Its impact, no matter its various
definitions, was probably felt most significantly during the Moscow
Summit in May 1972 when President Nixon and Soviet General Secretary
Brezhnev met in the USSR to discuss trade, space, strategic arms, Cuba,
Vietnam, and other divisive issues.
24
Such events as Arena Stage's 1973
tour represented the possibilities of a new world order infected by detente.
The US Department of State contacted Arena Stage about the
possibility of participating in the 1972-1973 program of cultural exchanges
with the Soviets. Schneider explained why Arena was chosen in the New
York Times:
21
Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from
Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1985), 15.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 34.
24
For a day-by-day transcription of the conversations between Nixon and Bre-
zhnev as well as Henry Kissinger and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, see Soviet-
American Relations: The Detente Years, 1969-1972 (Washington, DC: Department of State,
2007), 829-1004.
50
As I understand it, the final selection was made from
among the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the American
Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and the Arena
Stage in Washington, D.C. But the Soviet cultural scouts
didn't especially respond to the Guthrie's version of OJ
Mice and Men ... and Bill Ball's American Conservatory
Theatre didn't have anything suitably ''American" ....
As it happened, Arena Stage, right smack in the middle
of our nation's capital, was doing Thornton Wilder's
Our Town last winter and the wife of the Soviet cultural
attache saw the production and was moved to tears (and
a cable) because "it was just like our Chekhov." So that's
how this particular cultural exchange was born.
25
STEPHENS
Journalist Richard Coe closely monitored the developing
exchange. Regarding play selection for the tour, Coe informed his readers:
"Fichandler estimates that about 50 plays were discussed but ... the choice
became Inherit . ... The play has been available to Russian readers for
some years, the subject matter is of particular interest, evolution versus
an organized religion . .. and the fact that both [playwrights) Lawrence
and Lee have lectured in the Soviet Union."
26
Another significant reason
why Arena championed Our Town for inclusion in the exchange was
because Schneider's production of the play opened in December 1972
and "broke all Arena records ... as the most popular show" produced
there to date.
27
The cast featured Robert Prosky as the Stage Manager
and Dianne Wiest as Emily (both of whom, along with the members of
the original cast and designers, traveled to the USSR). Acclaimed artist
Ming Cho Lee designed the production. In a letter to Thornton Wilder in
January 1973, Schneider wrote: "The show closes this Sunday, January 21,
though there is talk of bringing it back next season, touring it somewhere
in Europe, something. We shall see."
28
That "tour" coalesced into the
25
Alan Schneider, "We Opened in Moscow, Then On To ... ," New York Times,
18 November 1973. Writing for the D. C. Star News, David Richards announced that Arena
had also "submitted" for consideration Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman; Edward Al-
bee's A Delicate Balance; and George Abbott's Three Men On A Horse for possible production
in the USSR. See David Richards, "Arena's Tour is Confirmed," D. C. Star News, 28 March
1973.
26
Richard L. Coe, ''A Day for the Arena: Prelude to A Cultural Exchange,"
Washington Post, 16 September 1973.
27
''Arena Stage," Plt!Jtime, October 1973.
28
"Correspondence," box 5, folder 2, Alan Schneider Papers, UCSD.
NEGOTIATIONS AND EXCHANGES 51
historic exchange.
29
(Although Arena's reputation as a major regional
theatre was not unfounded in 1973-the company had already made
regional theatre history with its transfer to Broadway of Howard Sadder's
The Great White Hope-its proximity to the Washington bureaucracy that
instigated such a venture certainly helped secure its place at the top of the
State Department's list of possible participants.)
After confirmation of the exchange, long-time Arena producing
director Zelda Fichandler must have been keen on the idea. She surely
envisioned the prospective tour as a public relations coup. Indeed, once
the Ministry of Culture of the USSR (the old behemoth of Soviet
bureaucracy that controlled all things cultural) had accepted the State
Department's proposal, Arena's subscription mailer to patrons trumpeted
its profoundly important historical significance:
As this brochure goes to press, the Arena Stage is
preparing for a history-making tour of the USSR. Never
before has a theatre company been invited to bring
American drama to Soviet audiences in Moscow and
Leningrad. You don't have to go to Moscow to see some
of the world's most exciting theatre-you can see it here,
this fall, at tremendous savings!
30
Both Schneider and Fichandler marketed the exchange for the obvious
financial rewards Arena might reap, but it is wrong to assert that this was
their sole reason for agreeing to undertake such a gargantuan task.
31
Arena's
work signified to the intelligentsia in Russia's two largest cities the state of
29
"Exchange" in the context of the Arena "tour" did not mean one US theatre
company in exchange for a Soviet counterpart. The New York City Ballet, Jose Limon
Dance, the 5th Dimension, and Duke Ellington were all originally part of the 1972-1973
program of American tours to the USSR. Richard L. Coe reported in the Washington Post
on Mar. 29, 1973 that three Soviet arts groups had been seen in the US during the 1972-
1973 exchange agreement: The Varsy-Ukrainian Dancers; the Beryozka Dance Ensemble;
and the Moscow Circus.
30
Arena subscription brochure, 1973-197 4, "Arena Stage, Russia, Clipping File,"
box 10, folder 28, Alan Schneider Papers, *T-Mss 1985-002, Billy Rose Theatre Division,
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereafter Alan Schneider Papers,
NYPL).
31
The words "exchange" and "tour" are generally interchangeable in the con-
text of the event, but Arena's productions were part of the officially designated cultural
exchange program between the two nations. The Embassy of the United States issued a
press release on 19 September 1973: "This will be the first time in the 15-year history of
the US-USSR cultural exchange that American dramatic plays will be performed." Press
release, box 10, folder 28, Alan Schneider Papers, NYPL.
52
STEPHENS
the non-commercial theatre in the US. The burden Arena's staff chose to
take on was heavy. Questions arose almost immediately about the choice
of plays. This was an urgent concern among theatre intellectuals in the US
as Arena's productions would signify the "legitimate" American theatre to
a Soviet audience that generally believed the link between American theatre
in general and musical theatre on Broadway was indissoluble. Writing in
Philadelphia's Evening Bulletin on 3 April 1973, Ernest Schier noted:
It's good news that an American regional theatre is going
to the Soviet Union, but could not the plays chosen by
Arena Stage have more bite than that provided by Our
Town and Inherit the Wind? There is even a question of
whether the two plays represent the United States today.
More daring would have been David Rabe's Sticks and
Bones.
32
Prior to the Arena trip, both Schneider and Fichandler served as
delegates to the Fifteenth Congress of the International Theatre Institute
(ITI) that convened in Moscow in May 1973. Margaret Croyden writing
for the New York Times attended, too, and advanced a withering account
of the conference:
NYPL.
The ITI Congress has been a biennial event since 1948,
when the organization was created under the auspices of
UNESCO, primarily as an antidote to the cultural cold
war .... Under the merciless lights, Madame Ekaterina
Furtseva, the Russian Minister of Culture, calmly talked
about humanism and the theatre, about friendship and
international cooperation. She conveniently forgot the
fact that her government had denied visas to the Israelis
and the South Koreans to attend the Congress, only
to back down at the last moment under the threat of
a Western boycott. . . . As one watched and listened,
the delegates to the Congress-average age about
55-appeared stiff and bland. Judging from their looks
(scarcely a youthful face among them), one wondered if
the scheduled topic-theatrical trends in contemporary
society-could be illuminating. . . . The American
32
"Arena Stage, Russia, Clipping File," box 10, folder 29, Alan Schneider Papers,
NEGOTIATIONS AND EXCHANGES
Figure 1. Alan Schneider directs Meg Kelly and Robert Prosky in the Arena
Stage production of Our Town, 1972. Courtesy of Arena Stage.
Figure 2. Curtain call in Moscow. Dianne Wiest center. Robert Prosky
to her right. Courtesy of Mandeville Special Collections Library,
University of California, San Diego.
53
54
delegates were scarcely younger or less tight-lipped;
and, in some cases, they were less qualified to speak
for contemporary creative theatre artists. . . . With the
possible exceptions of Ellen Stewart of LaMama and
Douglas Turner Ward of the Negro Ensemble Company,
the make-up of the American contingent gave no hint
of the ferment and experimentation among young
theatre people in the United States ... . Besides attending
the conference, Schneider and Mrs. Fichandler were
busy making arrangements to bring so-called modern
American theatre to Russia in the fall as part of the
Soviet-American cultural exchange-productions of Our
Town and Inherit the Wind-two stalwarts that made the
anthologies years ago.
33
STEPHENS
To Croyden's charge that the two plays were theatrically obsolete,
Schneider responded: "Let her investigate the copious files of Arena's
correspondence with the Soviet Ministry of Culture and our own
Department of State before she so smugly blames the choices on our
geriatric and reactionary status."
34
Schneider was easy to anger when he was
the victim of unwarranted or spurious charges about his theatrical taste.
Even when he was making history as the director of the first American
drama to have been performed by an American company in the USSR,
he was criticized by many in the anti-establishment realm of the Off-
Broadway theatre. Marshall W Mason, the most promising director in the
commercial American theatre after his astounding success with Lanford
Wilson's The Hot L Baltimore in March 1973, declared: ''After [Elia] Kazan,
we had the years of Alan Schneider .... The Emperor has no clothes."
35
In
the same interview, he noted specifically Schneider's direction of Wilson's
earlier The Gingham Dog on Broadway in 1969 as a "screaming mess." What
the critics did not realize or chose to ignore was the use of integrated or
33
Margaret Croyden, "New Trends in Russia?" New York Times, 29 July 1973,
Dl.
34
Unpublished letter, box 71, folder 6, Alan Schneider Papers, UCSD. In his
copy of George P. Parks's ''Alan Schneider: In Search of an American Tradition" (mas-
ter's thesis, University of Houston, 1978), he commented in the margins about certain of
Parks's various revelations: "NO!!''; "Huh?"; "Malarkey!," Alan Schneider Papers, UCSD.
35
Quoted in Mel Gussow, "Suddenly, Real Plays About Real People," New York
Times, 12 May 1974, D: 6. Mason's unfortunate comment intimated at Schneider's recent
commercial "flops" on Broadway. Besides The Gingham Dog (1969), there was, for example,
Michael Weller's important drama, Moonchildren (1972), which ran for only two weeks, and
others.
NEGOTIATIONS AND EXCHAJ'IGES 55
"color-blind" casting by both Schneider and Fichandler long before the
(at-the-time) rather radical concept had entered the mainstream theatre
in the US. Wendell W Wright (still acting with Arena in 2010) and stage
and film actor, John Marriott (80 at the time of the tour and "a veteran
of the renowned black theatre group, The Karamu Players [in Ohio]"
36
),
were cast in both touring productions. If nothing else, this deliberately
progressive decision on the part of Arena, particularly when reflected
on stage in the USSR in 1973, spoke volumes about the (albeit slowly)
changing face of American race relations. An integrated Our Town also
served the American government's purposes well. Journalist Fred Kaplan
argues that the main reason behind the Americans' support of cultural
exchanges prior to and during the height of detente was
to counter Soviet propaganda portraying the United
States as culturally barbaric. Powell's [Adam Clayton Jr.-
the mid-century Congressman from Harlem] insight was
that competing with the Bolshoi would be futile and in
any case unimaginative. Better to show off a homegrown
art form that the Soviets couldn't match-and that was
livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also racially mixed,
a potent symbol in the mid to late '50s, when segregation
in the South was tarnishing the American image. .
.. Even in its heyday jazz diplomacy, like any sort of
cultural diplomacy, was at best an adjunct to the more
conventional brand .... The biggest impact on hearts
and minds comes, as always, from what the American
government does.
37
After the invitation to Arena was officially issued by the Soviet
Ministry of Culture in March 1973 (and accepted by the US State
Department), Schneider went to work. He received a short-term grant
from the State Department to spend 13 May to 3 June in Moscow and
Leningrad. In a written report to Guy Coriden of the State Department,
he dutifully compiled a list of people with whom he wished to meet and
a list of theatres he wished to attend in both cities. The purpose of his
journey was threefold: 1) to assess the current state of the Soviet theatre
via the work of major theatres such as the Sovremennik, the Taganka, the
36
"Our Town, 1973. Reviews of Moscow Production and Telegrams," box 27,
folder 19, Alan Schneider Papers, UCSD.
37
Fred Kaplan, "When Ambassadors Had Rhythm," New York Times, 29 June
2008, 17.
56
STEPHENS
Moscow Art Theatre (MA 1), and the Malaya Bronnaya; 2) to scout theatre
spaces for Arena's Soviet tour; and 3) to attend the ITI Congress as an
American delegate.
38
Schneider determined that the theatre the Soviets proposed for
the Arena productions in Moscow-the Vakhtangov-was too small,
but that the "Filial" (or second) stage of the MAT was suitable. In
Leningrad, the Pushkin Theatre (a.k.a. the Alexandrinsky) was deemed
the appropriate venue in which to mount the productions. Both the MAT
and the Pushkin were large proscenium houses seating well over 1,000
which meant that Arena's signature in-the-round seating configuration
for Our Town required a massive overhaul of its original blocking. During
the search for space, Schneider documented his meetings with the most
essential directors' names in Soviet and to a certain extent, world, theatre.
39
Between investigating theatre spaces and participating as a delegate at the
ITI Congress, Schneider met with Georgy Tovstonogov of the Gorky
in Leningrad; Oleg Efremov at the MAT ("Efremov's work was a far cry
from what I had seen him do four years ago at the Sovremennik, and he
knew it. He didn't seem in very good shape."); Anatoly Efros, at the time
considered the most unconventional of the Soviet new breed of directors
although he was at least 40 years old; Oleg Tabakov and Galina Volchek
at the Sovremennik where, according to Schneider, he was asked to return
to direct Jason Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, That Championship
Season, although this proposal never moved beyond a nascent discussion;
and the great Yury Lyubimov at the Taganka.
40
He praised Lyubimov as
"the equal in originality and verve of such theatre artists as Peter Brook,
Giorgio Strehler, or Jean-Louis Barrault."
41
Schneider lauded the Taganka
as "one of the leading theatres in the world" and enthused that he was
"genuinely overwhelmed" by Lyubimov's work proclaiming: "I don't
think he has an equal in the world."
42
In his otherwise generally dry and
38
"Proposal for A Soviet Theatre Visit," May 1973, box 27, folder 18, Alan
Schneider Papers, UCSD.
39
Alan Schneider, "Report on Three Weeks in Moscow and Leningrad under
Cultural Exchange Program, Department of State, USA: 13 May to 3 June, 1 973," box 41,
folder 15, Alan Schneider Papers, UCSD.
40
See also Alan Schneider, "Theatre as A Magnifying Glass to Life," World, 28
August 1973, 52-55 for expanded discussion of his reactions to specific productions.
41
Schneider, "Report on Three Weeks in Moscow and Leningrad."
42
The repertory of the Taganka in 1973 included Stavinsky's contemporary
Soviet play, RPsh Hour, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Under the Skin of the
Statue of Liberty; A. Pushkin's Comrade, Believe!; Boris Vasilyev's The Dawns are Quiet Here; and
Gorky's The Mother.
NEGOTIATIONS AND ExCHANGES
57
Figure 3. Program for Arena's production of Our Town. Courtesy of Mandeville
Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego.
merely serviceable account of his Soviet journey to the Department
of State, Schneider effusively praises Lyubimov granting three pages
to his experiences at the Taganka. Schneider's commentary from 1973
corroborates the contemporary accounts of Lyubimov's work from this
enormously productive middle period of his career:
The key to Lyubimov's theatrical philosophy lies in his
refusal to separate the elements of the theatre, to work
with one before adding another. From the beginning
he works with scenery and lighting and actors and text
and movement and sound-music as one organic whole,
sifting and changing, building and discarding, but always
concerned with the synthesis .... He builds up a series of
stage metaphors, which make up not only the form but
the content of his productions. Out of specific images-
human fingers flickering into flames; tiny flashlights held
58
behind the liquid of champagne glasses; literally hundreds
of envelopes fluttering in a series to the floor; skulls with
various headgear moving up and down on ratchets; a
pendulum which moves in all directions; boards which
alternately become the back of a truck, a barracks,
shower curtains, logs with which to ford a stream .... He
builds not a literal but a stage reality which is unmatched
in my experience .... He has made me think and feel and
care differently about the theatre.
43
S'l'EPHENS
Even before Schneider left for the ITI conference, he and
Fichandler along with representatives from the US and Soviet governments
began preparing for the tour. One can only imagine the labyrinthine
web of bureaucratic red tape that moved 68 actors and crew (plus a live
monkey for Inhen't the Wind), along with movable scenery for two dramas,
from Washington Dulles International Airport to Moscow and beyond.
Protocol was important to Schneider. He met with the tour manager
of the Royal Shakespeare Company (who had taken part in the British
Council Tour of Europe and South America in 1964) in April during
which it was "suggested that we take along a number of gifts from the
theatre [Arena] to use as presentation items. For example they [the RSC]
took along a duplicate Lear's crown plus a presentation pillow."
44
Richard
L. Coe reported that Actors Equity sent with the troupe a portrait of Paul
Robeson that memorialized his past concerts in Moscow along with a
book detailing the history of Equity in the US.
45
As negotiations progressed, Goskontsert, one of the many Soviet
arts bureaucracies under the massive Ministry of Culture, agreed to
"provide and pay for stagehands," but that Arena "must bring [their]
own monkey."
46
Schneider and other Arena representatives dealt not
only with Soviet bureaucracy, but also with its American counterpart,
the Department of State. In a summary of a conversation with its
representatives, Schneider wrote:
Discussed Equity rider to contract. Seemed to be two
43
Schneider, "Report on Three Weeks in Moscow and Leningrad."
44
"Arena Stage, Russia, General, 1973," box 10, folder 25, Alan Schneider Pa-
pers, NYPL.
45
"Arena's Moscow Mission" in ''Arena Stage, Russia, Publicity Materials," box
10, folder 28, Alan Schneider Papers, NYPL.
46
Ibid.
NEGOTIATIONS AND EXCHANGES
parts which were most problem for State Department.
One, the need for First Class Air if not chartered plane
or separate compartment for company. This apparently
is contrary to all government travel reg[ulation]. ... Also
need to get waiver of 68 pounds per person since they
only 'pay' free allowance usually given by overseas flights.
They will allow extra weight for two or three "big folks."
47
59
To receive mail from the US while in the USSR, the State Department
required that letters be addressed to the American Embassy in Vienna.
Goskontsert required documentation that all Arena scenery was "flame
proofed."
48
(Sets had to fit into the plane's cargo hold, which meant that
"each strip of scenery you view has hinges every four f e e t .
4
~ Arena,
too, was specific in its own demands: ''We will require dressing rooms
for fifty actors. No individual 'star' dressing room will be required ....
In addition we will need three dressing rooms for the technical (staff),
one dressing room for the stage managers to use as an office, one room
for each director, and one room for the monkey."
50
In Leningrad, Consul
General Culver Gleysteen's staff arranged a guest list for the reception of
Arena actors and crew along with representatives from the city's theatres;
the Main Directorate of Culture of the Leningrad City Soviet; the First
Deputy Chairman of the Leningrad City Council; and a long list of names
from Goskontsert.
Tom Fichandler, Executive Director of Arena Stage and Zelda's
husband, and Arena Associate Producer Hugh Lester dealt with many
of the financial requirements of the trip including such sensitive issues
as compensation to the federal government for the cost of transporting
non-essential members of the US "delegation" to the USSR. In a letter to
47
I bid.
48
Ibid.
49
Richard L. Coe, "A Day for the Arena: Prelude to A Culrural Exchange,"
Uncatalogued Scrapbook, Alan Schneider Papers, UCSD.
50
Ibid. The monkey used in Fichandler's production of Inherit the Wind piqued
the interest of journalists covering the trip-sometimes at the expense of the momentous
historical significance of the undertaking. Fichandler wrote to Schneider after another ac-
count of the upcoming trip seemed to focus more attention on the idea of an American-
born monkey flying to the USSR than on Arena Stage: "I'm writing a letter to the Washing-
ton Post protesting the srupid way in which yesterday's event was covered. I think the Post
should not send apprentices to cover important events. You'd think the trip was about
a monkey!" ''Arena Stage, Russia, Correspondence," box 10, folder 26, Alan Schneider
Papers, NYPL.
60 STEPHENS
Fichandler just prior to the group's departure, Mark Lewis, Director of
the Office of Cultural Presentations at the Department of State, wrote:
Both wives [one of whom was Schneider's wife, Jean]
if they travel from Dulles Airport to Moscow on
the Department of State contracted charter, will be
responsible for their pro-rated share of the cost of their
transportation as required by Federal regulations. The
cost to each wife is $363.35, payable to the Department
of State.
51
Soon-to-be Mayor Walter E. Washington named 28 September ~ r e n a
Stage Day" in Washington, D.C., and on 29 September 1973 the company
left Dulles Airport on a chartered plane for Moscow. The US Embassy
was involved in assisting the company while abroad. Hugh Lester told
AP writer Donald Sanders that the Embassy in Moscow as well as the
consulate in Leningrad had even agreed to allow their kitchen staff to fry
"a full cut-up chicken for each performance [of Inherit the Wina]."
52
When the Arena company arrived in the USSR, parties were held.
Lectures were conducted. Excerpts from both Our Town and Inherit the
Wind were recorded for playback on Soviet television (which, in the early
1970s, would have played to a more or less captive audience of millions).
In Leningrad, Arena actors led an acting seminar at the city's major
university. US State Department telegrams announced that not only were
Soviet audiences generally enthralled by Arena's work, but also that the
Americans themselves were enthralled by the stage in Moscow on which
they played. Robert Pro sky (who toured as the Stage Manager in Our Town)
exclaimed almost in disbelief to his hosts: "To walk on that stage where
Stanislavsky played!"
53
Demand for tickets was so extreme that at least one closed dress
rehearsal was transformed into an open dress because so few Soviet theatre
practitioners and actors had been allowed to purchase seats. Another
official telegram reported that Arena's Soviet hosts at the Sovremennik
Theatre created and performed "an impromptu satire of Our Town in
reverse, with the Stage Manager reading his opening lines in English then
51
"Arena Stage, Russia, Correspondence," box 10, folder 26, Alan Schneider
Papers, NYPL.
52
"Our Town, 1973. Reviews of Moscow Production and Telegrams," box 27,
folder 19, Alan Schneider Papers, UCSD.
53
Ibid.
NEGOTIATIONS AND EXCHANGES 61
Figure 4. Official Soviet program for Arena tour. Courtesy of Mandeville Spe-
cial Collections Library, University of California, San Diego.
switching to Russian and heroine Emily dying in crush for tickets to the
play. In graveyard, her last wish is to see the play only once, but cemetery
mates insist if she goes, they're going too."
54
Other confirmations of the
tour's popularity included another State Department telegram's report
that "virtually every theatre director along with every drama teacher of
note saw the play [Our Town] at least once and more than one arranged
for students to see every performance" and that "observers in Leningrad
report that there has not been such a crush [for tickets] since the San
Francisco Symphony left town several months ago."
55
Before the Arena
company departed Moscow for Leningrad, Soviet Minister of Culture
Ekaterina Furtseva had caused a stir in Moscow when, between acts one
and two of Inherit the Wind, she "left her box under the American flag to
thank the troupe for coming to the Soviet Union and to say they should
have stayed longer: Tickets were so hard to get."
56
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid.
62 STEPHENS
No cultural exchange between the US and USSR was truly
complete without an invitation to the visiting Americans for a reception
at Spaso House, the residence of the US ambassador since diplomatic
relations were established between the two countries in 1933. American
host and charge d'affaires Adolph Dubs (who was assassinated in Kabul
in 1979 while serving as US ambassador to Afghanistan) welcomed the
Arena company along with dozens of Soviet guests "as symbolic of freer
contact between people in the future."
57
Deputy Minister of Culture K.
V Voronkov for the USSR "thanked the troupe 'for presenting [their]
artistry of reality.'"
58
Such proclamations shone with the spirit of detente
even though most in the group refused to think of it as a panacea to
superpower tensions. Long-time Arena actor Terrence Currier wrote:
[B)ut lurking menacingly behind the florid rhetoric of
"detente," behind the toasts and embraces, behind the
genuine expressions of brotherhood and humanity was
the nagging spectre of the "objective" world; the world
of power politics, economics, of nuclear menace, of class
and racial hatred, of collective psychosis and irrationality.
We did not delude ourselves that a handful of actors,
actresses, directors and technicians, without access to
the centers of power, could single-handedly stand the
world on its head ... ''All we can do," as Oleg Tabakov
realistically observed, "is, as artists, point out what has to
be done and help to set the stage for the feelings that are
needed to bring them about."
59
For many members of the Arena company, one of the chief
phantoms "lurking menacingly behind the florid rhetoric" was the plight
of Valery and Galina Panov, celebrities in the dance world, who petitioned
the Soviet government to emigrate to Israel in 1972. Denied visas and work
within their home organization, the Kirov Ballet (a.k.a. Mariinsky Ballet)
in Leningrad, the Panov problem deeply affected many of the Arena
company who knew of their dilemma. The plight of the Soviet Jew was on
the minds of many in the cast and crew. Indeed, the humanitarian aims of
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
59
Terrence Currier, ~ e n a Stage in Russia: An Actor's Journal," Washington Post,
3 November 1974. See http:/ /www.kolumbus.fi/catherine.jelley/russia.html (accessed 10
July 201 0). Oleg Tabakov was affiliated with the Sovremennik Theatre in Moscow as both
an actor and important director during the 1970s.
NEGOTIATIONS AND ExCHANGES 63
the tour, while not officially or necessarily publicly condoned, were most
fully realized when many in the Arena group including Schneider, returned
to the US. On 1 November 1973, the Panovs began a hunger strike and
generated even more press in the West. Within a month, 60 members
of the 68 Americans who took part in the historic theatre tour signed
a document entitled ''A Plea to the Soviet Government by Members of
the Arena Stage Company on Behalf of Valery and Galina Panov." On
30 November 1973, Congressman Richard H. Ichord (D-MO) read the
"plea" into the minutes of the Congressional Record.
60
Part of the brief
"plea" read: "We join our fellow actors across the world in their outrage at
the deplorable condition of these two long-suffering artists. We demand,
in the name of humanity and in the spirit of true cultural exchange, that
Valery and Galina Panov be immediately granted permission to emigrate
as they desire."
61
Ichord used the deeply sincere entreaty on behalf of their
fellow artists as fodder for his campaign against detente as a general and
humane concept of peaceful coexistence: "[I]t demonstrates once again
that American citizens born to freedom are not about to turn their backs
on their counterparts living under Communist oppression no matter how
much smiling, lip service is paid by their hosts to so-called detente with
the United States."
62
The Panovs were allowed to leave the USSR for Israel
in 1974.
A quick glance at a 2011 list of cultural events sponsored by the
US Embassy in Moscow via the State Department suggests that cultural
exchanges in a post-glasnost Russia have little interest in incorporating
theatre companies. There are none listed.
63
There are many "theatrical
60
!chord was a prominent anti-Communist who in some ways was as hysteri-
cally vigilant in seeking out Soviet "propaganda" as one of his predecessors in the Sen-
ate, Senator Joseph McCarthy, of HUAC infamy. !chord was a US Representative, not a
Senator, but chaired the congressional committee once known as the House Un-American
Activities Committee.
61
Richard H. Ichord, ''Washington Stage Company Invited to Soviet Union,"
Congressional Record (30 November 1973), E7644, in "Our Town, 1973. Reviews of Moscow
Production and Telegrams," box 27, folder 19, Alan Schneider Papers, UCSD.
62
Ibid.
63
See Embassy of the United States, Moscow, "Programs and Events," http://
moscow.usembassy.gov/programs_and_events.html for a listing of recent American cul-
tural programs offered in Russia (accessed 12 January 2011). Generally speaking, these
exchanges are still funded by the US Congress via the Bureau of Educational and Cultural
Affairs of the US State Department. Fred Kaplan writes: "And yet the [US] State Depart-
ment has a program in jazz diplomacy now. It's called Rhythm Road, it's run by Jazz at
Lincoln Center ... and it sends 10 bands (mainly jazz, some hip-hop, all of which audition
for the gig) to 56 countries in a year." See note 31.
64 STEPHENS
events" and historical commemorations, most notably the "Master and
Margarita Ball" held on 29 April 2004 to honor the connection between
Spaso House and Mikhail Bulgakov's great Soviet novel, The Master and
Marganta. (The masked ball scene in the novel was inspired by a party
given in 1935 at the newly established embassy by US Ambassador
William Bullitt.) The list of performances on the US Embassy's website in
Moscow affiliated with some semblance of a cultural exchange between
the US and Russia is a preponderant but nonetheless still vital who's who
of contemporary American jazz and a smattering of symphonic musical
groups-as it was at the height of detente. This fact is all the more reason
to remember Arena Stage's 1973 tour as nothing short of a major cross-
cultural event.
It has always been difficult to assess with statistical accuracy the
"real," not merely tangential, benefits of cultural exchanges of any sort.
Arena benefitted financially from undertaking its theatrical tour to the USSR
in at least one specific way. The Theatre Panel of the National Endowment
for the Arts met in April 197 4 to decide on which theatres would receive
grants for the upcoming fiscal year. One of its recommendations was
"that the Arena Stage of Washington, D.C., be given $50,000 more than
the ceiling grant (proposed to be $150,000) on the grounds that it was
hard to raise funds in the District of Columbia."
64
Although virulently
opposed by Endowment Chair Nancy Hanks who noted that the ''Arena
Stage was already getting 35 percent of its contributed income from the
Endowment," the supplemental grant was awarded to Arena.
65
The Arena tour did not lead to subsequent tours by American
theatre companies to the USSR-an obvious hope of many of the tour's
participants in 1973. Within six years, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan as US President in 1980 ended
detente as a politically practicable notion. During the years of Soviet
perestroika and glasnost, exchanges of both individual directors and
entire theatre companies began in earnest, although infrequently.
66
On the
American side, these exchanges were funded by nonprofit theatres' own
budgets, sometimes supplemented with token support from the National
Endowment for the Arts as well as many private foundations. In 1988, for
example, Mark Lamos, then with the Hartford Stage Company, directed
64
Michael Straight, Nancy Hanks: An Intimate Portrait (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 225.
65
Ibid.
66
Purely academic exchanges still occurred regularly between Soviet and Ameri-
can theatre people. The period after 1985 saw the gradual opening of certain theatre ar-
chives and access to once unthinkable infor mation in the USSR.
NEGOTIATIONS AND EXCHANGES 65
Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms with a Russian company in Moscow
while in 1989, the same Moscow company "exchanged" its artistic director,
Yuri Yeremin, with Hartford Stage where Yeremin directed the same play
with a cast of Americans. Josephine Abady of the Cleveland Play House
actively pursued theatrical exchanges between her company and the New
Experimental Theatre of Volgograd, Russia. She directed Tennessee
Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire with the Volgograd company in Russia
in 1991. In 1992, Abady arranged for the Russian company to present that
play and Nikolay Erdman's Soviet masterpiece, The Suicide, in Cleveland.
67
Still, though, such exchanges remained a rarity until the past decade.
Schneider never became cynical about the ideological value of
cultural exchange between the two superpowers. (He died in 1984, less
than a year before Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the
Communist Party.) But he was also no cockeyed optimist. He knew that
despite its liberating implications, detente did not and could not fully
alleviate tensions nor escape the reach of both capitalist and communist
propaganda. His words from 1973 are prescient:
While the spirit of and hopes for detente were strong
and expressed on every side, the [news]papers were full
of anti-American articles and comments. Millions of
people starving to death in the USA each year. Countless
workers unemployed and oppressed in such towns as
Portland, Ohio-wherever that is. And at the very time
that I was there on Cultural Exchange and feeling that
I was getting to know or at least meet a large number
of people, a law passed last December was reactivated
that made it a serious crime for Soviet citizens to say
anything to foreigners which might be construed as an
anti-Soviet sentiment .... From various sources I was
given the general feeling that we are now at a crucial
tide in USA-USSR relationships, that what happens this
week or this month or this year will either really pull us
together in greater trust and cooperation, or will separate
us and oppose us violently for a generation: If they ever
took the lid off that society and allowed the energies and
talents truly to function, there's no telling what could be
achieved, or what might happen.
68
67
See my review of the Cleveland Play House's production of The Suicide in
Theatre Jouma/45, no. 2 (1993): 250-51.
68
Schneider, "Report on Three Weeks in Moscow and Leningrad."
OF AMERICAN M>ID THEATRE 23, NO. 1 (WINTER 2011)
"PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE": STRATEGIES OF REPRESENTATION
IN PLAYS BY NAOMI wALLACE, STEFANIE ZADRAVEC, AND LYNN
NoTTAGE
Barbara Ozieblo
When Lynn Nottage was writing the Pulitzer prize-winning Ruined, she
was "determined to avoid the 'pornography' she thinks has pervaded
much of the Western press' reporting on Africa."
1
The dangers involved
in presenting or re-presenting violence on stage were pointed out by
Charlotte Canning: playwrights must be aware that re-enactment or even
discussion of brutality and rape can become "pornographically erotic."
2
The term "pornography of violence" was coined by American poet Gamel
Woolsey in 1936 as she listened to the rumors of horror stories that were
being bandied about by British refugees from the Spanish Civil War, and
it is a concept that is relevant in relation to the theme of how women
dramatists avoid morbid gratification when they deal with violence done
to women.
3
Nottage recognized that she would have to retell the stories of
sexually abused Congolese women in ways that could not be interpreted
as provoking lascivious pleasure: "I didn't want to be sensationalistic. The
audience had to be ready to hear the horrors, otherwise it would be too
easy to dismiss them. I knew I had to seduce them first."
4
This statement,
bearing in mind that Nottage originally planned to rewrite Bertolt Brecht's
Mother Courage, appears to go against the V-effect and epic theatre as
generally understood; however, we should not forget that Brecht's stand
on empathy matured with the years into at least a partial acceptance of
emotional involvement.
5
1
Patrick Pacheco, "Lynn Nottage's Ruined Finds Life and Horror in War-torn
Congo," Los Angeles Times, 19 April2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/19/enter-
tainment/ ca-lynn-nottage19 (accessed 20 January 2010).
2
Charlotte Canning, Feminist Theaters in the U.SA.: Staging WomenJ Experience
(London: Routledge, 1996), 170.
3
Gamel Woolsey, DeathS Other Kingdom (London: Virago Press, 1988), 126.
Woolsey, born in South Carolina in 1895, died in Spain in 1968. Her Collected Poems were
published in 1984 by Warren House Press.
4
Pacheco, "Lynn Nottage's Ruined."
5
Brecht's early rejection of empathy did not necessarily mean a total rejection
of emotions, and he made this clear in his later writings. See "Short Description of a New
Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect," in Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on
Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett (New York:
68 Ozu;:LBO
Unmitigated Brechtian distancing is not generally sought by
women dramatists, who prefer to appeal to their audience's emotions,
in the belief that empathy rather than estrangement will be more likely
to lead to action, although obvious exceptions are the in-yer-face pieces
of Sarah Kane or Kia Corthron. On the whole, women dramatists strive
to create scenarios that neither totally alienate the spectator nor present
the cruelty inflicted on women in the home and in times of war with
scopophilic intent.
6
The victim is presented as a subject in her own
right and not as the object of the perpetrator's desire-even when she
is absent. Women playwrights "seduce" audiences into watching plays in
which most of the protagonists survive the violence inflicted by the male
players in their games of rape and war. I will focus here on plays by Naomi
Wallace, Stefanie Zadravec, and Lynn Nottage in order to explore the ways
in which audiences are seduced, but not pleasured by, what they witness
on the stage.
Pleasure is, of course, one of the reasons why we go to the
theatre, but it is quite a different sensation from the erotic arousal that
pornography might produce. Perhaps, given the fact that our society
has traditionally sanctioned aggressive behavior in men, a male audience
may find reaffirmation of their manhood in witnessing violence done
to women.
7
But a female audience, inevitably made up of potential rape
victims, can surely only appreciate a play that centers on acts of aggression
if the violence is sufficiently muted to achieve a balance between reality on
and off stage. Such a balance will allow "spectators [to] test their reactions
to mortal danger without having to run the actual risks."
8
The semiotician
Anne Ubersfeld has argued that the pleasure of the theatre lies precisely
in that it is the "Other" who suffers and that on some level, we are aware
that such suffering is not real.
9
How we perceive the ontological "reality"
on the stage is, of course, problematic. Bruce McConachie, applying a
cognitive approach to the ambiguity of the theatrical moment, suggests
Hill and Wang, 1998), 145.
6
For the productiveness of Brecht's theories on alienation for feminist criticism,
see Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essqys on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge,
1997), chapter 2.
7
See Barbara Whitmer, The Violence Mythos (New York: State University of New
York Press, 1997).
8
Sissela Bok, Mqyhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (Brattleboro, VT: Basic
Books, 1999), 28.
9
Anne Ubersfeld, "The Pleasure of the Spectator," Modern Drama 25, no. 1
(March 1982): 136.
"PoRNOGRAPHIES OF VIOLENCE" 69
the formula of "conceptual blending" which recognizes the simultaneous
involvement of the audience with character and actor, the action on stage
and the circumstance of performance. He argues that "viewers come to
the theatre with two visual systems in place and switch back and forth
between them."
10
The skill of "conceptual blending"-a model that is
more complex than Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief"-is acquired
unconsciously and deployed automatically; thus theatre-going constitutes
a kind of game for the audience in which "any psychological pain they
might experience will be temporary and perhaps even purgative."
11
The three dramatists I am dealing with here consciously work to
engage their audiences, to seduce us and to enable us to enter into this
"double" game of "seeing as" and thereby comfortably experiencing
through others what we have been fortunate enough not to experience
personallyY Through this game of theatre we learn to "empathize with
victims"-a sensitivity society does not teach us.
13
The statistics on
violence suffered by women worldwide, in the home and outside, are
appalling, and rape has now been recognized as a weapon of war and, as
part of organized genocide and massacre, a crime against humanity.
14
Susan
]. Brison, a victim of sexual assault, affirms that although "all women's
lives are restricted by sexual violence," women who have not experienced
it "find it hard to identify with the victim. They cannot allow themselves
to imagine the victim's shattered life, or else their illusions about their own
safety and control over their lives might begin to crumble."
15
By witnessing
the simulacrum of violence on stage, we may learn to recognize the
unbearable, debilitating loss of sense of self that assault cause-but also,
even more importantly, that it is possible to survive. Survival is linked to
the victim's ability to re-create a valid identity for herself, which is what
Nottage's Mama Nadi and Sophie manage to do in Ruined. Selima, however,
10
Bruce McConachie, A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 56.
11
Ibid., 51.
12
Ibid., 7, 55.
13
Susan Brison, "Surviving Sexual Violence: A Philosophical Perspective," in
Violence Against Women: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Stanley G. French, Wanda Teays,
and Laura M. Purdy (Ithaca: Cornell Universiry Press, 1998), 17.
14
See Coalition Educating About Sexual Endangerment (CEASE), Rape Statis-
tics, http:// oak.cats.ohiou.edu/ - ad361896/ anne/ cease/ rapestatisticspage.html (accessed
15 February 2010). As for statistics on women and war, Wikipedia is as good a place as any
to begin, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_rape.
15
Brison, "Surviving Sexual Violence," 23, 17.
70 OzrELBO
rejected by husband and village, accepts the blame that those she loved
burden her with and, unable to reconstruct a satisfactory life, kills herself.
It is not difficult to identify with such an internalization of guilt, although
Canning writing in 1996 could already affirm that, "While there is a great
deal of work to be done in the area, women are no longer as strongly held
to be responsible for the violence directed at them. This shift is entirely
due to the labor of feminists, and theaters played a role in that change."
16
Dealing with violence done to women from a woman's point of
view, playwrights experiment with techniques that distance the spectator
sufficiently to make witnessing the action possible, even if not quite
comfortable, permitting sufficient empathy to create understanding,
while at the same time constituting a Brechtian call to arms. One of
the possibilities is to disembody the victim and so to make the violent
act invisible to the spectator, as Susan Glaspell did in Trifles (1916).
Contemporary women playwrights still have recourse to this device, thus
overturning the logocentric patriarchal order by using the male strategy of
silencing and, through a carnivalesque inversion, giving voice to the victim
through other means. The victim can be absent or present as a ghostly,
unreal figure; the act of violence, inflicted in the past, can be narrated by
the victim (frequently as a monologue) or by a chorus of witnesses.
Among other strategies commonly employed by women
playwrights are the eschewal or modification of realism, although Alex
Sierz argues that "Naturalistic representations of disturbing subjects are
usually much easier to handle than emotionally fraught situations that are
presented in a [sic] unfamiliar theatrical style."
17
But realistic scenes can be
punctuated with the use of modern technologies, comic moments, and
flights of the imagination that bring a sense of the eerie or unreal to the
action, frequently clothing it in an other-worldly gauze of activity that
lends a carnivalesque air to the proceedings, and makes the viewing more
comfortable for the spectator. Naomi Wallace, in In the Heart of Amenca
(1994), and even more so in The War Bqys (1993), deals with women
victims in an oblique way, playing the game of conceptual blending as her
characters move in unreal spaces and take on the role of the sacrificial
Other. In In the Heart of America, the women victims appear on stage,
but many of the scenes with Fairouz do not belong to the present and
there are multiple "realities" at work simultaneously, especially when Lue
Ming, a ghost, although "more solid," is on stage either as herself or as
Remzi, Fairouz's brother.
18
Stefanie Zadravec tells us that her Honry Brown
2001), 6.
16
Canning, Feminist Theaters, 175. Also see Whitmer, The Violence Mythos, 56-61.
17
Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face-Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber,
18
Naomi Wallace, In the Heart of America, in In the Heart of An1erica and Other Plays
"PORNOGRAPHIES OF VIOLENCE" 71
Eyes (2008) is peopled with a "cast of walking ghosts" and she blends the
realistic scenes of violence with moments of comedy, music, and heart-
wrenching dance.
19
Although Lynne Nottage places her women firmly on
stage, the song and dance routines of the brothel in a forest transport us
into a land of fairy-tale dreams- or nightmares. In In the Heart if America,
Honry Brown Eyes, and Ruined, the women victims, even if ghostly, are
strong presences, models of warrior women who care for others and, in
Zadravec's piece, Alma gives her life in a vain attempt to save her daughter.
In Wallace's The War Bqys, the women victims never appear in the
flesh and we are even free to doubt their existence; the violence done to
women is re-enacted by three young men, themselves victims of social
expectations, who embody different roles depending on the story being
told. They are patrolling "a place that could be the Mexico/Texas border"
for illegal immigrants but it could be any frontier, physical or metaphorical,
that is merely suggested to the audience by a bit of wire fence, while the
"illegal immigrants" become personifications of the boys' inner fears,
prejudices, and need for self-justification as they struggle to construct their
male identity in hostile surroundings.
20
The stage directions inform us that
the three indulge in the "War Bqys game," playing, however, for real.
21
We
eventually learn why Greg and David need to reassert themselves, cleanse
their consciences and reaffirm their manhood: what bugs them is their
betrayal of the women they loved, or should have loved. As in In the Heart
of America, what drives their performance is a past they could not control
together with the memories they cannot control in the present.
The acts of violence the three men indulge in are not shown as
happening to an actual victim or in the present of the play: although they
are violent, in-yer-face episodes that undoubtedly discomfort the spectator,
she/he is distanced by the role-playing, as David, George, or Greg become
the passive female victim. The same is true of their enticing and hunting
down of illegal immigrants, for the stage directions make it clear that these
latter do not appear; the boys "see"-always in inverted commas-the
women trying to sneak across the border, and Greg "pretends" to be
the Mexican woman they have caught until he suddenly throws David
off and inverts their positions, sitting on his former aggressor, striking
and interrogating him.
22
The spoken or enacted monologues serve to
(New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 77-142, 80.
19
Arlene Hutton, "Walking Ghosts: An Interview with the Playwright," Ameri-
can Theatre, February 2009, 59.
20
Wallace, The War Bqys, in In the Heart of America and Other Plqys, 145.
21
Ibid., 147.
22
Ibid., 185.
72
OzJELBO
distance the events and to draw attention away from the women while
giving them a voice and presence they are denied by society. Wallace has
said that she does not want her plays to give answers, but to disturb the
audience: "that's what I'd like my work to do, but to disturb people in a
way that they would come back for more."
23
Her strategy in The War Bqys
of not giving presence to the victims forces the spectator to concentrate
on the perpetrators of the acts of violence and on the ways in which
the expectations of their families and of society have twisted them into
seeking a sense of community in the hunting down of the Other on the
frontier of experience from which they cannot escape.
The re-enactment of events of the past in The War Bqys leaves the
spectator with the uneasy sense of a game being played, which is totally
absent from In the Heart of America, which is fully grounded in well-known
documented events of the Vietnam War. The direct references to specific
incidents make for a much more complex doubleness or blending which
the spectator has to negotiate. As Wallace told Claire MacDonald: "My
approach is to step back far enough so that I can see more clearly. Similar
perhaps to what Brecht calls 'making strange."'
24
Wallace uses other
Brechtian techniques to reach her audience: the fast pace of both these
plays, the short scenes, the movement between them, and the "Minimal
and not 'realistic"' scenery she requires. The historical and socio-political
reality and the mixture of past and present can be disconcerting, but they
do conspire to subdue the effect of violence, establishing a strangeness
that provokes thought.
25
Following Brecht's repudiation of realism,
Wallace admits:
I have an animosity towards "realism" on stage. It
recreates the lie that a particular space is only now, that
things are this way, always have been, always were. I don't
trust that. For me, pretty much a bare stage and bodies
and the language is all you need in theatre, because it
allows enough ventilation for ghosts to walk freely. And
with the ghosts come the clumps of buried histories, still
sinking and vital and wild.
26
23
Sierz, In-Yer-Face-Theatre, 157.
24
Claire MacDonald, "Intimate Histories: Naomi Wallace in Conversation with
Claire MacDonald," PAJ 84 (2006): 97.
25
Wallace, In the Heart o/ America, 80.
26
Claire MacDonald, "Intimate Histories," 100.
"PORNOGRAPHIES OF VIOLENCE" 73
Another "clump" of recent though "buried" history informs
Stefanie Zadravec's Honry Brown Eyes (2008), where, rather than reject
realism, she chooses to lace it with surreal comedy. The action takes place in
June 1992 in Bosnia, when the Serbian paramilitary group of White Eagles
was intent on wiping out the Muslim population.
27
Zadravec, like Wallace
and Nottage, is careful to present her story in such a way as to not alienate
the spectator by affording pleasure through the morbid gaze directed at
a victim. We do not see rape, nor are we told of it, except as something
not to be talked about. Honry Brown Eyes, according to its author, uses the
concept of ghostly-and so at least, in some sense, absent-protagonists,
although her characters, female and male, have total bodily presence on
the stage. As she explains, "It's a cast of walking ghosts, people beyond
hysteria."
28
Her women accept the seemingly inevitable violence of their
situation in a state that borders on the unconscious and continue with their
routine tasks: Serbian Jovanka insists on sharing her soup with Muslim
Denis who seeks refuge in her kitchen from his Serbian pursuers; Muslim
Alma automatically offers Dragan, her Serbian intruder, freshly-made hot
coffee- which scalds his tongue and, in at least one performance, raised
laughs in the audience.
29
Such acts of everyday life, which a reviewer found
"strangely comforting and yet oddly disturbing," and the "purposefully
spare" dialogue mute the tone of Honry Brown Eyes and make the reality of
war ghostly or remote, while paradoxically bringing it home, right into the
kitchen, the realm of the everyday that we all share.
30
As audience, we witness the terrifying invasion of Alma's kitchen
by Dragan and their confrontation during which Alma is too concerned
with the fate of her husband and children to register the danger she is
in. On the other hand, Dragan's surreal slippage between invader and
television show host throughout the first scene signifies to the audience
his lack of conviction and aplomb in the role of aggressor. When he beats
Alma up at the end of the first scene, the spectators' sensibilities are spared
by the blackout; the applause and music of the TV show that punctuate
act 1 resonate in our ears. The sound-track of the show-the TV set will
27
Honry Brown Eyes won the Charles MacArthur Award for Best New Play at the
twenty-fifth Annual Helen Hayes Awards in 2009. For more information see Stephanie
Zadravec's website http:/ /www.szadravec.com/ (accessed 28 January 2011).
28
Hutton, ''Walking Ghosts," 59.
29
Trey Graham, "Honry Brown Eyes and As American A s: Two Plays that Explore
Homeland Insecurity," Washington City Paper, 31 October 2008, http://www.washington-
citypaper.com/ display.php?id=36418 (accessed 22 February 2011 ).
30
Anon., "Honry Br01vn Eyes, Theater J's engrossing Premier," http:// dcist.com/
2008/1 0/31 / honey _brown_eyes_theater_js_engross.php (accessed 15 January 201 0).
74
0 ZIELBO
become one of the spoils of war-complicates the levels of reality for the
audience in which, as Zadravec points out, "TV both connects us to the
play and disconnects us as a people."
31
When at the end of the second scene of act 1 Dragan shoots
Alma, we hear the shot, but the blackout does not allow us actually to
see what has happened. Denied the dubious theatrical pleasure of seeing
death, we, as audience, recognize that Dragan has killed her, and that he
has done so to keep her from the horrors of the rape camp. As he then
haltingly explains in act 2 to Zlata, Alma's daughter, who had been hiding
in the kitchen throughout, "It's not what you think. ... They were going
to take her and do terrible things .... I thought she was better off."
32
Catharine A. MacKinnon, describing the rape camps in the Sethian-
Bosnian conflict, wrote:
It is rape to be seen and heard and watched and told
to others: rape as spectacle. . . . Although the orders
provide motivation enough, the rapes are made sexually
enjoyable, irresistible even, by the fact that the women
are about to be sacrificed, by the powerlessness of
the women and children in the face of their imminent
murder at the hands of their rapists. This is murder as
the ultimate sexual act.
33
Although, on some level, Honry Brown Eyes is about the consequences of
armed conflict for women, Zadravec avoids making a spectacle of the
victims. She leaves the end of the play open but we can assume that Dragan
will prefer to shoot the girl rather than be obliged to prove his manhood
with her in Branko's presence. When Dragan promises he will not shoot
her, his words are punctuated by laughter on the TV sound track.
In act 2, the realism of the encounter between Jovanka, in her
60s, and the much younger Denis is studded with flashes of surreal
farce; they are on opposite sides of the conflict but they recognize their
loneliness and their humanity. Jovanka sees in Denis a substitute for the
grandson who has fled the city with his mother while for Denis, Jovanka
is not only a mother figure but also a mother confessor before whom he
can unburden himself of what he has lived through; he eats and drinks
31
Hutton, "Walking Ghosts," 59.
32
Stefanie Zadravec, Honry Brown Eyes, in American Theatre, February 2009, 71.
33
MacKinnon, "Rape, Genocide and Women's Human Rights," in Violence
Against Women, 50.
"PORi\IOGRAPHIES OF VIOLENCE" 75
with her and then they dance a "slow, soothing dance."
34
The terror both
characters are living through is neutralized by this naturalistic yet farcical
tone which parallels the use of the TV sitcom in act 1. Although Zadravec
deliberately uses the devices of comedy and realism to seduce and soothe
her audience, so allaying the fear that the situation calls for, most reviewers
have remarked on the high "threat and tension levels," or the script's
"full throttle intensity."
35
The comedy, music, and dance scenes between
Jovanka and Denis lend the realistic setting and acting a surreal edge that
contrasts with the brute reality of the scenes between Dragan and Zlata
interlaced throughout act 2. The Muslim and Serbian kitchens become
almost interchangeable and the pace of the play is heightened as the action
shifts between them, achieving a distancing belied by the known world of
the kitchen.
Lynne Nottage's Ruined does not deal with ghostly presences, and
yet the element of unreality that pervades this play lends it an almost
fairy-tale air that seduces, distracting from the blunt edge of the horror we
witness, and the play ends with a glimmer of hope. Nottage distances the
reality of violence by presenting a surreal and terrifyingly tense display of
song and dance routines that puts us in mind of the upside down world
of carnival, except that here we know that the women, victims of abuse
and rape, are in fact working hard to keep putative attackers amused in
order to prevent further violence. Nottage deliberately uses African music
composed by Dominic Kanza to seduce her audience or, as she put it, "to
ease the audience into the story and to give them a brief break from the
reality of the world": the music is "very upbeat, inviting and enticing" and
provides a counterpoint to the lyrics that are "quite serious and dark."
36
Mama's song at the beginning of act 2, for example, juxtaposes the merry
drinking in the brothel with the destruction going on outside:
Hey, monsieur, come play, monsieur,
Hey, monsieur, come play, monsieur,
The Congo sky rages electric
34
Zadravec, Honi[J Brown Eyes, 73.
35
Barbara Mackay, '"Honey Brown Eyes' propelled by tension," The Examiner,
29 October 2008, http:/ /washingtonexaminer.com/entertainment/33469839.html (ac-
cessed 15 January 2010); Debbie Mintner Jackson, "DC Theatre Scene," http:/ /dcthe-
atrescene.com/2008/10/28/honey-brown-eyes/ (accessed 15 January 2010).
36
Deji Olukorun, "Interview with Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize winning Play-
wright of 'Ruined',"FictionThatMatters.org, 21 January 2010, http:/ /dejiridoo.com/blog1/
reviews/full-reviews/interviews/interview-lynn-nottage-ruined-2010-human-rights/ (ac-
cessed 25 February 2010).
76
As bullets fly like hell's rain,
Wild flowers wilt and forest decays.
But here we're pouring ChampagneY
Oz!ELBO
Nottage explained she felt the lyrics were "the one place where I, as the
author, could interject a sense of irony and I could say more explicitly
what I wanted to say than I did in the play. But people don't know this
because it is camouflaged by music."
38
The music and song, and the short scenes that move the story
quickly forward are Brechtian devices that should serve to jolt the audience
from passive empathy with the characters into a more active reaction
against what they are seeing. But after listening to countless stories of the
experiences of Congolese women, Nottage, who had initially planned to
re-write Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, decided to make the play
tell their story. In all her writing, she portrays the stories of strong women
who work out ways of survival, and Ruined is no exception; it is not a play
dedicated to the women victims of war, but a play that gives them "an
opportunity to share their stories with the world."
39
As Kate Whoriskey,
who directed the premiere of Ruined at Chicago's Goodman Theatre,
clarifies, Nottage found that Mother Courage offered a "false frame" for
accurately portraying the lives of the women she had talked to.
40
And
she also came to see that Brechtian distancing or alienation was not the
way to tell this story: to seduce her audience, she had to create empathy
and understanding.
41
Nottage is proud to be able to state: "People after
seeing Ruined would say, 'I've read these articles before and I know what's
happening, but now I feel moved to act.' They feel as though they've spent
two hours with a living, breathing human being with a story that can no
longer be ignored.''
42
Nottage skillfully evades the need to re-enact moments of
violence; on the whole, her characters use language or gesture to tell
what happened and the only moment of chaos and terror ensues as
37
Lynn Nottage, Ruined (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009), 63.
38
Olukotun, "Interview wirh Lynn Nottage."
39
Ibid.
40
Nottage, Ruined, xi.
41
For a comparative discussion of the need to create empathy see Vladimir J.
Konecni, "Psychological Aspects of the Expression of Anger and Violence on rhe Stage,"
Comparative Drama 25, no. 3 (Fall1991): 234.
42
Olukotun, "Interview wirh Lynn Nottage."
"PORNOGRAPHIES OF VIOLENCE" 77
Osembenga's soldiers loot the brothel and prepare to rape the women. We
don't know why Mama Nadi is running a brothel in the middle of a jungle
in the middle of a war, but we suspect all along that this is part of her
survival tactics, a Mother Courage act in spite of herself. Our suppositions
are given a hint of evidence when, towards the end of the play, furiously
angry, she discloses something of her past: "I didn't come here as Mama
N adi, I found her the same way miners find their wealth in the muck. I
stumbled off that road without two twigs to start a fire. I turned a basket
of sweets and soggy biscuits into a business."
43
Out of sheer necessity, she
had invented herself anew. The symbolically-named Christian also evades
violence when he brings Mama Nadi the two women he wants her to
shelter. She does not want to know the details; a few words are enough:
"from what I understand, her village won't have her back. Because ... "
is all we initially learn of Salima's past.
44
Sophie's past is encapsulated in
Mama's gesture "toward her own genitals" and the halting words "ruined
... ungodly things ... bayonet ... damaged" and Mama's refusal to hear
more.
45
Gradually, the women themselves disclose what happened and
Salima's "agonizing monologue" in which she tells her story was singled
out by New York Times critic Charles Isherwood as "among a handful of
indelible scenes from the current New York theater season."
46
The audience is seduced into the story Nottage tells not only by
the music and dance with which the women entertain their clients, but also
by the women themselves, the little cares and jealousies of their everyday
lives, their hopes for the future, and their relationships. Mama Nadi, initially
annoyed that she has been talked into accepting two women who are not
fit to work in a brothel, one plain and the other ruined, gradually comes to
love them, while Josephine, who initially treats them with disdain, eventually
shares their happy moments when Sophie, the better educated of the
three, entertains them by reading romance novels out loud. Their refuge
in romance is disturbed by Mama Nadi's threats to confiscate the book,
and her rejection of such stories because "the problem is I already know
how it's going to end ... and the woman will foolishly surrender her heart
to an undeserving man."
47
This is of course tantamount to a confession
43
Nottage, Ruined, 86.
44
Ibid., 12.
45
Ibid., 13.
46
Charles Isherwood, "Bearing Witness to the Chaos of War," New York Times,
22 March 2009, http:/ /www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/theater/ 22ishe.htrnl (accessed 25
February 2010).
47
Nottage, Ruined, 51.
78 OZIELBO
and only brings the women closer in a recognition of shared experiences
and fragile plans, making them into a little family that one can only hope
will stick together. Mama Nadi fights against surrendering her heart to
Christian, a character who also has a past of which we know nothing, and
whose courting of Mama runs as a background thread throughout the
play, a counterpoint to the palpable violence and insecurity of her brothel.
After Osembenga's attack and Salima's death, Nottage allows her audience
the pleasure of a possible happy ending, a fairy-tale romance come true
when Mama finally puts down her burden of pride as lonely survivor and
carer of others and tacitly accepts Christian's offer of familiar company,
predictable food, and "conversation that's too easy" when she agrees to
dance with him.
48
Sophie and Josephine's quiet pleasure in this moment
reinforces the sense of bonding between the women, pushing all their
negative experiences into the distant background, at least for the moment.
Of the plays I have looked at in this essay, Ruined is probably
the least experimental or innovative in structure or form. The realism of
Mama's bar, the chronological action and the songs make the audience feel
at ease; there is no need to decipher complex twists of plot and character
behavior as in The War Bqys. Ben Brantley of the New York Times praised
the "artistic caution" exercised by Nottage, saying that she "hooks her
audience with promises of a conventionally structured, purposefully
plotted play, stocked with sympathetic characters and informative topical
detail. She delivers on those promises."
49
It is precisely this well-kept
promise that, according to Brantley, allows audiences to accept the horrors
of her story, to empathize with her characters, and to take an interest in
their experiences. As we have seen, Zadravec also uses a realistic setting,
which although offset by the ghostly characters and the noise of war, gives
the audience a sense of the known, while Wallace's minimalist sets and
more innovative approach tend to disconcert the more cautious spectator,
thus supporting Alex Sierz's assertion that violence is "usually much easier
to handle" when presented in an easily recognizable form.
50
Although the plays dealt with here employ varied theatrical devices
to seduce the audience into accepting the representation of distasteful
events that take place elsewhere and are suffered by Others, they all aim
to awake the spectator to a reality that we hope she has not experienced,
48
Ibid., 100.
49
Ben Brantley, "War's Terrors, Through a Brothel Window," New York Times,
11 January 2009, http:/ /theater.nytimes.com/2009 /02/11/theater/ reviews/11 bran.html
(accessed 25 February 2009).
50
Sierz, In-Yer-Face-Theatre, 6.
"PORNOGRAPHIES OF V IOLENCE" 79
without falling into the trap of a facile "pornography of violence." On
the whole, this is achieved by excising the violence or the victim, a strategy
that can be contrasted with that of Shakespearean theatre, in which blood-
shedding duels are enacted in front of the audience, but also with the plays
of Sam Shepard or David Mamet, where physical or verbal violence takes
place on stage and, of course, with film, television, and reportage which
have gone far toward building indifference to the spectacle of violence.
These women playwrights prefer to play with the possibilities of absences,
ghosdy presences or surreal juxtapositions in order to evoke unpalatable
realities and so to achieve a Brechtian distancing that, while shielding the
spectator from the immediate horror of the action, makes an empathetic
connection possible. It is this connection that enables us to contemplate
what is happening, by forcing us to think, and perhaps even act, for
ourselves-as Nottage claims her audiences do.
CoNTRIBUTORS
Barbara Ozieblo is Professor of American Literature at the University
of Malaga, Spain. She is the co-founder and was the first President of
the Susan Glaspell Society. Author of Susan Glaspell A Critical Biograpi?J
published in 2000, she is at present working on contemporary women
dramatists and the representation of violence.
Jeffrey Stephens is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Dra-
matic Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. He has
published performance reviews and essays in Slavic and East European Per-
formance, Theatre Topics, and Theatre Journal.
Lynn M. Thomson is Founding Artistic Director of America-in-Play,
a theatre company devoted to immersing playwrights in the legacy of
American drama in order to foster culturally rich new plays. She is also
Full Professor at Brooklyn College.
Michael Winetsky is a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York and an adjunct lecturer in
American Studies at the College of Staten Island. He recently defended his
dissertation on Susan Glaspell entitled "Inheritors of Progress: Glaspell,
the University, and Liberal Culture in the United States."
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Barcelona Plays: A Collection of New Works by
Catalan Playwrights
Translated and edited by Marion Peter Holt and Sharon G. Feldman
The new plays in this collection represent outstanding
playwrights of three generations. Benet i Jornet won
his first drama award in 1963, when was only twenty-
three years old, and in recent decades he has become
Catalonia's leading exponent of thematically chal-
lenging and structurally inventive theatre. His plays
have been performed internationally and translated
into fourteen languages, including Korean and Arabic.
Sergi Belbel and LluYsa Cunille arrived on the scene
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with distinctive and
provocative dramatic voices. The actor-director-play-
wright Pau Mir6 is a member of yet another generation
that is now attracting favorable critical attention.
}osep M. Benet i }ornet: Two Plays
Translated by Marion Peter Holt
Josep M. Benet i Jornet, born in Barcelona, is the
author of more than forty works for the stage and has
been a leading contributor to the striking revitalization
of Catalan theatre in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a
compelling "tragedy-within-a-play," and Stages,
with its monological recall of a dead and unseen
protagonist, rank among his most important plays.
They provide an introduction to a playwright whose
inventive experiments in dramatic form and treatment
of provocative themes have made him a major figure in
contemporary European theatre.
Price US $2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NYtoo16-4309
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Czech Plays: Seven New Works
Edited by Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, and Daniel Gerould
Czech Plays: Seven New Works is the first English
language anthology of Czech plays written after
the 1989 "Velvet Revolution." These seven works
explore sex and gender identity, ethnicity and
violence, political corruption, and religious taboos.
Using innovative forms and diverse styles, they
tackle the new realities of Czech society brought on
by democracy and globalization with characteristic
humor and intelligence.
Price US $2o.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake. Seven Works for the Theatre
Edited and foreword by Frank Hentschker
Flemish-Dutch theatre artist )an Fabre is considered
one of the most innovative and versatile artists of his
day. Over the past twenty-five years, he has produced
works as a performance artist, theatre maker,
choreographer, opera maker, playwright, and visual
artist. This volume represents the first collection of
plays by )an Fabre in an English translation. Plays
include: I am a Mistake (2007), History of Tears (2005),
je suis sang (conte de fees medievaO (2001), Angel of
Death (2003) and others.
Price US Sts.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10o16-4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-8171868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
roMANIA After 2000
Edited by Saviana Stanescu and Daniel Gerould
Translation editors: Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraff
This volume represents the first anthology of new
Romanian Drama published in the United States
and introduces American readers to compelling
rmrwm playwrights and plays that address resonant issues
of a post-totalitarian society on its way toward
democracy and a new European identity. includes
the plays: Stop The Tempo by Gianina Carbunariu,
Romania. Kiss Me! by Bogdan Georgescu, Vitamins by
Vera ion, Romania 21 by t e f n Peca, and Waxing West
by Saviana Stanescu.
This publication produced in collaboration with the
Romanian Cultural institute in New York and Bucharest.
Buenos Aires in Translation
Translated and Edited by Jean Graham-Jones
BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical
collaboration, bringing together four of the most
important contemporary playwrights from Buenos
Aires and pairing them with four cutting-edge US-
based directors and their ensembles. Throughout a
period of one year, playwrights, translator, directors,
and actors worked together to deliver four English-
language world premieres at Performance Space 122
in the fall of 2006.
Plays include: Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel
Veronese; A Kingdom, A Country or a Wasteland, In
the Snow by Lola Arias; Ex-Antwone by Federico Leon;
Panic by Rafael Spregelburd. BAiT is a Performance
Space 122 Production, an initiative of Salon Volcan,
with the support of lnstituto Cervantes and the
Consulate General of Argentina in New York.
Price US $2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E_ Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NYtoo16-4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould
SEVEN PLAYS
This volume contains seven of Witkiewicz's most
important plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor Brainiowicz,
Gyubal Wahazar, The Anonymous Work, The Cuttlefish,
Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub
Sonata, as well as two of his theoretical essays,
"Theoretical Introduction" and "A Few Words About
the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form."
Witkiewicz ... takes up and continues the vein of dream
and grotesque fantasy exemplified by the late
Strindberg or by Wedekind; his ideas are closely
paralleled by those of the surrealists and Antonin
Artaud which culminated in the masterpieces of the
dramatists of the Absurd . ... It is high time that this
major playwright should become better known in the
English-speaking world. Martin Esslin
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Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus
Translated and Edited by David Willinger
Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of
Dutch language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish
by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some
ninety plays, novels, and collections of poetry. He is
renowned as an enfant terrible of the arts throughout
Europe. From the time he was affiliated with the
international art group, COBRA, to his liaison with
pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the celebration
of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has
careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden
and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his
times.
Price US Sts.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY1oo16-4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Theatre Research Resources in New York City
Sixth Edition, 2007
Editor: Jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson
l r.a .u ac ct: .. n
' ..
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the
most comprehensive catalogue of New York City
research facilities available to theatre scholars. Within
the indexed volume, each facility is briefly described
including an outline of its holdings and practical
matters such as hours of operation. Most entries
include electronic contact information and web
sites. The listings are grouped as follows: libraries,
Museums, and Historical Societies; University and
College libraries; Ethnic and language Associations;
Theatre Companies and Acting Schools; and Film and
Other.
Comedy: A Bibliography
Editor: Meghan Duffy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould
This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers,
students, artists, and general readers interested in
the theory and practice of comedy. The keenest minds
have been drawn to the debate about the nature of
comedy and attracted to speculation about its theory
and practice. For all lovers of comedy Comedy: A
Bibliography is an essential guide and resource,
providing authors, titles, and publication data for over
a thousand books and articles devoted to this most
elusive of genres.
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Price US $1o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Four Plays From North Africa
Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four modern plays from the
Maghreb: Abdelkader Alloula's The Veil and Fatima
Galla ire's House ofWives, both Algerian, ]a lila Baccar's
Araberlin from Tunisia, and Tayeb Saddiki's The Folies
Berbers from Morocco.
As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has
recently begun to be recognized by the Western theatre
community, an important area within that tradition is
still under-represented in existing anthologies and
scholarship. That is the drama from the Northwest of
Africa, the region known in Arabic as the Maghreb.
This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus
legend by four leading dramatists of the Arab world.
Tawfiq Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali Ahmed Bakathir's
The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salim's The Comedy
of Oedipus, and Walid lkhlasi's Oedipus as well as
AI-Hakim's preface to his Oedipus on the subject of
Arabic tragedy, a preface on translating Bakathir by
Dalia Basiouny, and a general introduction by the
editor.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic
theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the
Western theatre community, and we hope that this
collection will contribute to that growing awareness.
The Arab Oedipus
Edited by Marvin Carlson
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Please make payments in US dollars payabl e to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circul ation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
The Heirs of Moliere
Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson
POUI fi!:MCtt CONtDIU Or Utt
17 AtfO 16 C'f:NTUIIlS
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This volume contains four representative French
comedies of the period from the death of Moliere to
the French Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover
by Regnard, The Conceited Count by
Philippe Nericault Destouches, The Fashionable
Prejudice by Pierre Nivelte de la Chaussee, and The
Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya. Translated in
a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and spirit
of the originals, these four plays suggest something
of the range of the Moliere inheritance, from comedy
of character through the highly popular sentimental
comedy of the mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that
employs the Moliere tradition for more contemporary
political ends.
Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most
important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or }afar
and Zaida, The Dog of Montargis or The Forest of
Bondy, Christopher Columbus or The Discovery of the
New World, and Alice or The Scottish Gravediggers,
as welt as Charles Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843
Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's plays and the two
theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama,"
and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."
Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with
its most stunning effects, and brought the classic
situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He
determined the structure of a popular theatre which
was to last through the 19th century.
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
Price US $2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016 4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868