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Volume 11, Number 1 Winter 1999
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THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 11, Number 1
LEWIS E. SHELTON,
Arthur Hopkins and
Winter 1999
Contents
The Neo-Romantic Perspective of Directing 1
ROBERT C. ROARTY,
Lunchtime Follies: Food, Fun, and Propaganda in
America's Wartjme Workplace 29
KIMBERLY D . DIXON,
An I am Sheba me am (She be do be wah waaaah
doo wah) O(au)rality, Textuality and Performativity:
African American Literature's Vernacular Theory
and the Work of Suzan-Lori Parks 49
SUSAN C. W. ABBOTSON,
Issues of Identity in Broken Glass:
A Humanist Response to a Postmodern World 67
jOHN FLEMING,
Facing the Holocaust: Romulus Linney's
Examination of Goering at Nuremberg 81
CONTRIBUTORS 93
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 11 (Winter 1999)
Arthur Hopkins and The
Perspective of Directing
LEWIS E. SHELTON
In the second decade of the twentieth century, Arthur Hopkins
formed through his productions and ideas a new theatrical synthesis
based upon a neo-romantic
1
imperative even as David Belasco was
solidifying his reputation (and meeting the demand) for naturalistic
staging techniques based upon his scientific perspective.
2
Hopkins's
work embodied the revolt which was brewing among artists (inspired by
continental stagecraft} who sought a more poetic, symbolic, imagistic,
simplified, united and overtly subjective approach to Their
prophets were the Englishman Gordon Craig and the Swiss Adolph
Appia; their chief exponent was Max Reinhardt in Germany. In America
these artists were primarily associated with the amateur little theatre
movement, but Arthur Hopkins was a commercial director who
successfully espoused the principles of the New Theatre and popularized
his neo-romantic perspective of directing. After reviewing Hopkins's
career, I will analyze his neo-romantic perspective as it is revealed in key
productions, in his aesthetic of theatre and in his theatrical practices.
Arthur M. Hopkins (1878-1950) was one of eight sons born of a
Welsh family in Cleveland, Ohio. Very little of his early years, education
or experience suggested that he would go on to a career as an
outstanding producer-director. His family were "church people, stern
people who had little regard for ways of manufactured diversion" who
"could only look upon the theatre as doubtful diversion in which
1
I am calling Hopkins's perspective, which was romantic, neo-romantic to avoid
confusion with the tenets of the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth-early
nineteenth centuries, and to indicate the ideas of the New Theatre Movement.
2
See lewis E. Shelton, "David Belasco and the Scientific Perspective," The
journal of American Drama and Theatre 10, 1 (Winter 1998): 1-27.
2
SHELTON
questionable people were involved."
3
However, this Welsh fami ly did
value music and public speaking. His mother had studied elocution and
read to him i n a soft, melodious voice. His later work in the theatre
reflected the qualities of simplicity, collaboration, and poetic beauty
learned from his mother:
She gave verse new meaning. Her readings from the Bible had
such simple and expressive beauty as to make her seem a
collaborator with those varied and unknown mediums through
whom those words of unexplainable rapture have come. She
taught us elocution, though elocution is too bombastic a word
for what she tried to convey. There was no declamation or
gesture. She sat very still and read to us. Her secret must have
been bel ief in beauty of thought and expression. She spoke
beauty, spoke it in overtones and rhythms.
4
Hopkins himself had experience with elocution lessons that were
bombastic, leaving him with a lifelong aversion to "ham acting" and
causing him to encourage simpl ified, natural acting.
After attending prep school at Western Re.serve Academy, Hopkins
worked for two years in steel mills and then switched to journalism.
5
Following sales and reporting stints in St. Paul, he became an ace reporter
for the Cleveland Press. While with the latter paper he scored a major
coup in 1903 when he identified Leon Czolgoez, the assassin of President
William McKinley, as a Cleveland resident and scooped the major news
associations on the details of Czolgoez's li fe. His reporting career
peaked, and Hopkins moved on to other interests i n the entertainment
business.
3
Arthur Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company,
1937), 97.
4
Ibid., 95.
s Sources for Hopkins's biographical details are Current Biography (New York:
H. W. Wilson Co., 1948), 33-35; Delmar J. Hansen, The Directing Theory and
Practice of Arthur Hopkins, Ph.D. dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1962, 8-26;
Samuell. leiter, The Great Stage Directors: 100 Distinguished Careers of the Theatre
(New York: Facts on File, 1994), 143-145; Arthur Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy; "Arthur
Hopkins: One of the New Sort of Managers," Boston Transcript, 12 October 1916,
Clipping files, Billy Rose Theatre Collect ion of the Performing Arts Research Center,
The New York Public library at lincoln Center; Theatrical Directors: A Biographical
Dictionary, john w .. Frick & Stephen M. Vallillo, eds. (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1994), 188-189.
Arthur Hopkins 3
Hopkins entered the theatre as a press agent in Cleveland and then
went to New York in 1903 as a booker of acts for summer amusement
parks.
6
He also maae a foray in the motion picture business-in 1905 he
opened the first nickelodeon in New York and ran it for a short time.
7
Later he became a booking agent for the Orpheum vaudeville circuit.
From this position, Hopkins gradually entered the artistic end of show
business by writing and staging sketches for legitimate stars who were
performing in vaudeville: Blanche Walsh, Berthe Kalich, WilliamS. Hart,
Arnold Daly among others.
8
These experiences gave Hopkins entree to
the professional theatre world, and in 1912 when he was thirty-five, his
own play, The Fatted Calf, was produced on Broadway. While not a
success, it gave Hopkjns his first experience in the legitimate theatre and
began an association with Broadway for the next thirty-four years.
After The Fatted Calf ran for only eight performances, Hopkins
became a producer himself in the fall season of that year. Steve (nine
performances) was followed by the very successful Poor Little Rich Girl
by Eleanor Gates in 1913. This production, directed by Richard Tully,
ran for 160 performances (one hundred performances constituted a hit).
Before his next production, a trip to Europe and Reinhardt's theatre
had a profound impact upon him, and he was inspired to utilize some of
the new methods in his next prodU<;:tion, a dramatization of the poem
Evangeline (October 1913)
9
-Hopkins produced but did not receive
directing credit. The result was what he claimed as the first attempt at
New Stagecraft on the American stage.
10
In that same season Hopkins
staged another play by Eleanor Gates, We Are Seven (which ran for only
6
Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy, 125.
7
"Arthur Hopkins," Boston Transcript, 12 October 1916. Most newspaper
articles and reviews used in this paper were located in the clipping files of the Billy
Rose Theatre Collection of the Performing Arts Research Center, The New York
Public Library at Lincoln Center. Subsequent references to this collection will be
noted as Lincoln Center.
8
Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy, 135; Brock Pemberton, " Arthur Hopkins,
Producer," Theatre Guild Magazine (April 1929): 23; and "Arthur Hopkins," Boston
Transcript, 12 October 1916.
9
Arthur Hopkins, "The Theatre's Contact with Life," The Drama (April 1922):
237-38.
10
(n.a.], New York Times, 8 October 1913, p. 17. See also Arthur Hopkins,
Boston Transcript, 12 October 1916. I could find no evidence of the nature of these
new methods. Hopkins wrote a letter to the New York Times, 8 October 1913,
complaining that revi ewers di d not recognize his innovations.
4 SHELTON
twenty-one performan<;es), the first of eighty-one productions in his career
as a distinguished and outstanding director.
Hopkins entered the directorial ranks at a older age than most of the
major American directors, and unlike touchstone directors Ben Teal,
David Belasco, and Elia Kazan his life and career were without
controversy. A pleasant, unassuming man who guided his productions
quietly, Hopkins was "short, compact, dark, vivid," with "a vibrant
voice, eyes that could pierce you with their sharpness or melt in mystic
reverie-altogether a compelling and magnetic personality." He was also
a shy, modest and sensitive man with a strong spiritual/mystical
streak-who appeared to have almost no friends. As a producer he
worked alone with no staff from a small, rented office in the Shubert-
owned Plymouth Theatre (where he presented most of the plays he
produced a.nd directed.)
11
His productions of unusual interest and high
quality were eagerly awaited-in 1927 critic Alexander Woollcott wrote
that the season did not begin untii"Arthur Hopkins Presents" appeared
in the theatre listings.
12
As Belasco did, Hopkins produced the plays he
directed.
A review of Hopkins's directing career indicates that his most
productive and successful years were the early ones. From 1913-14
when he directed his first production, We Are Seven, to 1918-19 he was
extremely busy producing and directing. He staged one play in 1914-
15; none the following year (he did produce the important On Trial);
13
directed two plays in 1915-16, three in 1916-17 of which two were hits,
Good Gracious, Annabelle (111 performances) and A Successful Calamity
11
Pemberton, "Arthur Hopkins, Producer," 23-24; "Arthur Hopkins Directed His
Plays 'On Honor System' in Bow to the Actor," Variety, 29 March 1950, p. 68.
12
Alexander Woollcott, "Arthur Hopkins Presents," New York World, 3
September 1927, [n.p.]
13
In his subsequent career he produced all of the plays he directed and staged
all but three of the remaining plays that he produced-On Trial (1914), The Beggar's
Opera (1920), and The Hairy Ape (1922). Although Hopkins is given credit in
reference books for having directing Poor Little Rich Girl, Evangeline, On Trial and
The Hairy Ape, the record indicates that Richard Tully, Gustav von Seyfferlitz, Sam
Forrest and James Light staged them respectively (Hopkins may have collaborated with
light). See for example, Current Biography (June 1947), 34; Fricke and Vallillo,
Theatrical Directors, 188-89; leiter, The Great Stage Directors, 145. For correction
see, Rich Girl, Best Plays 1909-1919; Evangeline program, lincoln Center; for On
Trial, see Burns Mantle, "'On Trial' Scores an Unmistakable Success," New York
Evening Mail, 22 August 1914, which lists Sam Forrest as director. I could not find
an opening night program for the production but a Playbill for 1 March 1915 lists
Forrest as director, Lincoln Center.
Arthur Hopkins 5
(144), both by Clare Kummer; . and in 1917-18 he directed eight
productions but only one, The Gypsy Trail with 111 perfqrmances, was
a hit. That season included the limited-run productions of three Ibsen
plays: The Wild Duck (the first production of the play in the United
States), Hedda Gabler, and A Doll's House. The next season, 1918-19,
Hopkins was almost as busy, staging six plays with two of them being
hits, Redemption (204), starring John Barrymore in one of his few serious
roles up to this time, and The jest (256) with both john and Lionel
Barrymore.
During the 1919-20 season Hopkins staged two plays with neither
running more than one hundred performances, and the following year he
directed three more with Samson and Delilah (143) being a hit. In 1921-
22 he had one of his most successful seasons, having directed six plays,
three of which were hits: Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (129), The Claw
(115), O'Neill's Anna Christie (177). In addition he produced, in
conjunction with the Provincetown Players, Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy
Ape.
14
The next season, 1922-23, Hopkins had five productions, of
which The Old Soak (42,3 performances) and Hamlet (101 performances)
with john Barrymore were hits. In the first ten years of his directing
career, Hopkins staged thirty-seven plays of which eleven were hits. He
staged twenty-nine productions between 1923-1933, but only five were
hits: What Price Glory (299), Burlesque (372), Paris Bound (234), Holiday
(229), Rebound (114). Between 1933 and 1943 he directed eleven plays
but only one, The Petrified Forest (197), was a hit and in his final four
seasons he staged four plays with two of them being hits-The
Magnificent Yankee (160) and a new production of Burlesque (439)-his
last production and his biggest hit. He died in 1950.
Hopkins's record of success belies the importance of his career, for
he directed a total of eighty-one productions excluding revivals but only
nineteen ran for more than one hundred performances, a success ratio of
23%. Eight other productions ran for seventy to ninety performances.
14
Hopkins may have collaborated on Hairy Ape, but I could not find a program
which listed a director. In his review of the production, Alexander Woollcott noted
that: "There is a rumor abroad that Arthur Hopkins, with a proprietary interest in the
play, has been lurking around its rehearsals." (New York Times, 10 March 1922, p.
18); Louis Shaffer maintains that O'Neill was in charge with Light assisting and
Hopkins standing by to make suggestions in O'Neill: Son and Artist, (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1973), 81. After reviewing the e v i d e n e ~ Ronald Wainscott
. concludes that "under the watchful eye of Hopkins, Light actually staged The Hairy
Ape." in Staging O'Neill: The Experimental Years, 1920-1931 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988), 107-109.
6
SHELTON
Hopkins's reputation resides in the choice of plays and the quality of
some of his productions, not in his commercial success.
15
Arthur Hopkins entered the theatre world at a propitious time giv.en
his spiritual, mystical, and poetic nature. By the early 1910s the director
was established in New York as an important figure of the theatre world.
In fact, the already dominant naturalistic mode of staging (culminating in
David Belasco's scientific perspective) and the authoritarian manner of
directing were being challenged by some directors. Max Reinhardt in
Germany was demonstrating what a regisseur could accomplish-his
pantodrama Sumurun was performed in New York in 1912. Gordon
Craig's The Art of the Theatre, calling for a more unified, visually
oriented theatre, was pub I ished in 1911. The Little Theatre movement
was burgeoning in Chicago, Detroit, Provincetown, and Greenwich
Village. Discussion and theorizing about a "New Theatre" was
rampant.
16
In this atmosphere, Hopkins became the first American
director in New York to direct from a neo-romantic perspective.
The basic premise of the neo-romantic ideal for the reformers of the
stage at the turn of the century is stated in Richard Wagner's "The
Purpose of Opera."
17
Wagner analyzes the need for a composite art
work consisting of all elements of theatre. He n.otes that the very essence
of dramatic art is that it is irrational: "it is only to be grasped by a
complete change in the nature of the observer."
18
Wagner suggests the
subjective nature of drama in his discussion of Shakespeare. According
to Wagner, Shakespeare developed a perfect form to contain his
genius-he was a presence in all his dramas. But his theatre was
imperfect because Shakespeare could not act all the roles in his plays. In
contrast the composer's genius can suffuse opera because it comes
through the music which controls the entire performance. Music has
direct force and power over the emotions, and the audience apprehends
the form and purpose of the drama through the emotions. This idea of
15
According to an untitled clipping in the files at Lincoln Center, Hopkins's
estate.totaled only $10,000 at his death.
16
See Shelden Cheney, The New Movement in the Theatre (New York: Mitchell
Kinnerley, 1914).
17
Extract from Edward L. Burlingame, Art, Life and Theories of Richard Wagner
(New York, 1875) printed in Barrett Clark, European Theories of the Drama, Henry
Popkin, rev. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1965), 289-296.
18
Ibid., 289.
Arthur Hopkins
7
knowing through the emotions was central to nee-romanticism and to the
New Theatre revolt of the early twentieth century.
The New Theatre attempted to realize this Wagnerian idea of
appealing directly to the emotions or the unconscious through the visual
elements of theatre. just as Wagner sought to use mood, atmosphere,
and suggestion as an emotional statement, so did the New Theatre seek
to use those elements to create a symbolic representation of an uncon-
scious reality. In scenic investiture, line, color, light, mass, and spat ial
arrangements became more important than a literal transcription of
reality. In contrast to realism-and venturing into different realms of
knowing-the stagings of the New Theatre followed the artists' imagina-
tions (both playwright and designer) and created a dream world through
the use of architectonic forms, drapes, and steps.
Beginning his work at this time and reflecting ideas of Wagner and
the psychological terminology of Sigmund Freud and Karl jung, Arthur
Hopkins termed his directorial approach "Unconscious Projection." He
discussed this theory, which might more properly be called "an intuition
amounting to a conviction,"
19
in How's Your Second Act?/
0
a mystical
little book. The basis for this theory was that "complete illusion has to
do entirely with the unconscious mind. Except in the case of certain
intellectual plays the theatre is whol_ly concerned with the unconscious
mind of the audience. The conscious mind should play no part." The
theatre seeks a unanimous reaction from the audience, and the only way
to achieve this reaction is through the emotions: "In the theatre I do not
want the emotion that rises out of thought, but thought that rises of
emotion. The emotional reaction must be secured first."
21
The conscious
mind has to be stilled by giving the audience no reason to think about the
subject, "by presenting every phase so unobtrusively, so free from
19
Hiram Motherwell, "How Many Theatre-goers Know Him?" The Stage,
(November 1932): 28, in Robert Hazzard, The Development of Selected American
Stage Directors From 1926 to 1960, (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota,
1962), 102.
20
Arthur Hopkins, How's Your Second Act? Notes on the Art of Production
(New York: Samuel French, 1918), 8-16. Hopkins discusses hi s approach in several
sources: How's Your Second Act? contains the basic discussion of unconscious
projection and the director' s place within it; Reference Point (New York: Samuel
French, 1948); "Our Unreasonable Theatre, " Theatre Arts Magazine 2 (February
1918): 79-84; Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy. See also Helen Krich Chinoy, The Impact
of the Stage Director on American Plays, Playwrights, and Theatres (Ph.D.
dissertation, Columbia University, 1963), 22.1-226.
21
Hopkins, How's Your Second Act?, 8.
8
SHELTON
confusing gesture, movement and emphasis, that all passing action seems
inevitable, so that we are never challenged or consciously asked why. "
Anything that creates conscious irritation must be discarded, and
everyone involved with the production must be completely the servant
of the play. His idea demands that all aspects "be inevitable, impersonal
and untrammeled. It requires complete surrender of selfishness ... . It
commands honesty and unselfishness."
22
In directing, the basic key to
achieving this unconscious projection is to strip away anything which
leads to conscious awareness. Movement, gesture, language-all must
be simple and direct. Realistic scenery is taboo because it is an
affectation that calls attention to itself. Further, Hopkins wanted the
unconscious of the actors communicating with the unconscious of the
audience-which called for a restrained, simple and direct acting
approach-for in the unconsciousness lies the reality which is common
to all. Besides suggesting Freudian levels of consciousness
23
and jungian
collective unconscious, Hopkins's theory is a statement of a central neo-
romantic, Wagnerian tenet-that knowledge comes through emotion, the
emotionalization of the intellect. Finally, again reflecting Wagner,
Hopkins wrote that the importance of art is not what we think about it,
but rather what it does to us-the changes that occur in the observer.
Hopkins applied these elements of unconscious projection to plays
that appealed to him regardless of commercial prospects. Hopkins
resorted to his approach because in practical terms he found much to
dislike in the theatre when he began his career:
As I observed the legitimate theatre it seemed to me that there
was much that was archaic. It did not carry the conviction of the
best vaudeville acting. Scenes, treated seriously, frequently
verged on the ridiculous. Many phrasings were so stilted that
they defeated any sense of authenticity. They were words to
which the author had fallen easy victim, not helped in the least
by the actors' solemn emphasis. The stage seemed over
cluttered with detail, and the movement of actors so incessant
and mechanical as to make them seem like checker men being
frantically manipulated. WhHe the text was supposed in most
22
Ibid., 10.
23
In To a Lonely Boy Hopkins tells of learning of Freud and his interpretations
of emotions and reading everything he could find on the subject. He bel ieved that
playwrights and directors needed to know Freud (7-8).
Arthur Hopkins
cases to be realistic, its treatment had little semblance of
actuality.
24
9
A review of important productions and artistic associations in Hopkins's
career will clarify his directing approach based on his disapproval of
legitimate theatre of his time and on his neo-romantic perspective.
After the innovations of Evangeline and On Trial, in 1915 Hopkins
began a collaboration with designer Robert Edmond Jones, who was just
beginning his career. Their first production, The Devi/'s Carden, had a
short but important run. Jones's designs were impressive examples of the
new work in pictorial art of the theatre/
5
yet neither director nor designer
sought to stand out; rather they worked to reflect the mood and
emotional values of the play in an orchestration of design, acting, and
text. They used simplified, abstract, unified designs as an outward
manifestation of a profound renovation of theatre. At a later date, critic
Walter Eaton assessed the importance and value of The Devil' s Carden:
"How different an effect was here achieved from anything known to our
stage of the previous decades can hardly be understood by the new
generation." Hopkins swept away useless props and used color to
heighten mood. Eaton continued:
It was that the stage models first, and then the actual
compositions formed by the living actors playing out their scenes
in the completed sets, were works of art, were calculated
pictures, with beauty and significance of design, but design
significant as drama quite as much as composition.
26
The use of significant form identified by Eaton was to be a vital element
of Hopkins's directing perspective.
Hopkins's first successful commercial ventures were with the light
farces of Clare Kum.mer of which he staged four: Good Gracious,
Annabelle (111 performances) 1916, A Successful Calamity (144) 1917,
The Rescuing Angel (32) 1917, and Be Calm, Camilla (84) 1918.
Hopkins found a niche with these comedies and staged them with an
ebullient charm that was unusual for farce at the time, but which
matched the light-spirited mood of Kummer's plays. For example, Good
24
Ibid., 146-147.
25
[n.a.], [n.t .], New York Times, 29 December 1915, [n.p.]
26
Walter Prichard Eaton, " American Producers II. Arthur Hopkins," Theatre Arts
Magazine 5 Ouly 1921): 231-232.
10
SHELTON
Gracious, Annabelle brought out the best of both Hopkins and Jones.
Despite the whimsical nature of the play, Hopkins sought to portray real
people in talk and movement: "This has meant rehearsals for continuity
of action, instead of the conventional building up of forced laughs at
intervals."
27
One reviewer stated that "there is no doubt that he
[Hopkins] has a vision. You go to his productions with a feeling that you
are going to see something fresh, done with style and originality."
28
The
same reviewer's response to jones's sets for Annabelle suggests the
importance of significant design with emphasis on mood and
imagination:
In none of these sets has he attempted to be fantastic, but in
none of them has he fallen victim to conventional realism. They
are plainly defined places, but simplified to the essentials,
composed harmoniously, and colored with charm. It is rather an
ideal arrangement for a play which is dressed in smart, modern
clothes and set in specific places without being written in a
realistic mood.
29
By 1916, with just a few productions, Hopkins had established a
reputation as a director of "ideals as well of ideas; a man who possessed
honesty of purpose and the courage of his convictions."
30
Hopkins's stagings of The Wild Duck, Hedda Cabler, and A Doll's
House in 1918 were vehicles for famous Ibsen interpreter Alia Nazimova.
These plays of the realist Ibsen may appear strange choices for the
mystical Hopkins, but the experience was important in his development
as a director. Hopkins (who received better reviews than Nazimova)
appears to have approached the plays as though they were newly written
works and to have refrained from imposing any "concept" upon them.
Reviewer Heywood Broun indicated that with Hedda Cabler one could
not even tell that Hopkins was involved-an effect to which Hopkins
aspired in all his directing:
27
[n.a.], [n.t.], Christian Science Monitor, 17 October 1916, [n.p.]
28
[n.a.], [n.t.], Indianapolis News, 7 December 1916, [n.p.]
29
Ibid.
30
Louis R. Reid, "Art Versus Plausibility," New York Dramatic Mirror, 23
November 1916, [n.p.}
Arthur Hopkins
We should also assign a measure of praise to Arthur Hopkins,
but then he does no more than produce the plays as they were
written. He adds no frills, or mystery, or freak business, and he
isn't afraid to let his actors make people laugh, as Ibsen intended
they should now and again. So there isn't anything much that
can be said for Mr. Hopkins. In fact, not once during the entire
performance was it possible to exclaim, "Ah, there's something
the producer made them do!'
131
11
Regarding A Doll's House, Broun wrote: "On the whole the performance
may be set down as a good one. It is played without reverence or any of
the other backward looking qualities which mar many produ.ctions of
Ibsen. Arthur Hopkins produced the play just as he would handle the
script of a new playwright whose work was not clogged with tradition."
32
Hopkins's practice of considering older and classic scripts as though
they were newly written plays led to unique and imaginative stagings,
particularly in the most important phase of his career, his work with the
royal family of the American theatre, the Barrymores.
Hopkins had plans for three years of repertory productions at the
Plymouth Theatre with Robert Edmond Jones as designer, and John
Barrymore expressed an interest in participating. While the repertory
idea did not develop fully, Hopkins associated with the Barrymores-
John, Lionel and Ethel-in a series of productions which included:
Redemption (204) 1918 with John
The jest (256) 1919 with John and Lionel
Richard Ill (27) 1920 with John
Macbeth (28) 1921 with Lionel
The Claw (115) 1921 with Lionel
Rose Bernd (87) 1922 with Ethel
Hamlet (1 01) 1922 with John
Romeo and juliet (29) 1922 with Ethel
The Laughing Lady (96) 1923 with Ethel
A Royal Fandango (24) 1923 with Ethel
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (72) 1924 with Ethel
3 1
Heywood Broun, " Nazimova Flashes in Vivid Performance of 'Hedda
Gabler,"' New York Tribune, 9 April 1918, [n.p.]
32
Heywood Broun, " Nazimova Has Good Moments and Bad Ones, Too," New
York Tribune, 30 April 1918, [n.p.]
12 SHELTON
In terms of Hopkins's neo-romantic perspective, the most important
productions in this series were Recfemption, The jest, Richard Ill,
Macbeth and Hamlet.
The first Barrymore/Hopkins venture was Leo Tolstoy's play, The
Living Corpse, ret itled Redemption. For years viewed as a light
comedian, John Barrymore had recently turned to more serious drama,
but his performance here completely changed his image as an actor.
Additionally, the production epitomized those special qualities which the
Hopkins-jones synthesis brought to the theatre:
Of the artistic merit of this production by Arthur Hopkins hardly
too much can be said. A series of interiors full of atmosphere is
achieved with a minimum of detail and a simplicity which finds
in flowing vertical lines a complete and uninhibited medium.
The scene in the gypsy home, where the splotches of fire-lit
crimson seem to visualize the vividness of the gypsy music, and
that in the drinking den, where a translucent shadow effect or a
Rembrandt interior has been accomplished, are magnificent.
33
The subjective, dream-like aspects of the visual picture were emphasized,
rendering the subconscious mood behind the action of this play about a
man who fakes his death, leads a dissolute life, and then faces a moral
dilemma when his remarried wife is charged with bigamy.
Both john and Lionel performed in The jest, an Italian melodrama
adapted by Edward Sheldon and both scored triumphs in this play of
betrayal, intrigue, and revenge. In essence, "The enthralling quality of
what used to be called 'romantic acting' was instanced most luminously"
and Hopkins's contribution was equally evident:
With admirable diction, authoritative stage presence, and
majestic gestures, the Barrymores pervaded this melodrama, and
drove home all its gory points, its stately dalliance with love, and
vengeance, and fantasy and "romance."
As acted by John Barrymore, the character pulsed. Mr.
Barrymore refused to loll. He went at his part with the zest of
other days, and knew no hesitation. The same may be said of
Lionel Barrymore, whose vociferous speech and roars of
indignation made the rafters .. . ring.
33
[n.a:], [n.t.], New York Globe, 4 October 1918, [n.p.] In Collection of
Newspaper Clippings of Dramatic Criticism, 1918- 19, G-l, lincoln Center.
Arthur Hopkins
Mr. Hopkins staged the play most spectacularly, yet discretely.
There was solidity and artistic appeal in several of the pictures,
and one. could almost imagine Florence.
34
13
The entire presentation comprised an organic whole and a significance
of design as indicated by the New York Times, which noted that the
production was "broad in its primary effects, yet revealing a vast wealth
of harmonious and significant detail. The colors of the costumes and the
effects of I ight played upon the senses l.ike music. There were many
moments' when acting and atmosphere fused and kindled to consummate
beauty."
35
This production was the one which convinced the publ ic of
Hopkins's value as a director, for it contained theatrical qualities of
speed, excitement, and spiraling suspense. It '"rasped the nerves, and
disturbed the senses like a musky odor," and ultimately, the. element
which Hopkins added to.the script and the actors' performances "was the
quality of beauty, a haunting; heavy, almost oppressive beauty,- which
most people felt but few analyzed."
36
Hopkins's productions were
sometimes criticized for slow pacing and unevenness of acting, but in this
one he triumphed in all phases, including imaginative, skillful and
remarkable stage pictures.
37
The overall impact revealed the Wagnerian
imperative Hopkins valued most, that is, of appealing to the emotions
through the unconscious-the true purpose of theatre as far as Hopkins
was concerned.
Hopkins took a unique approach to Richard Ill which capitalized on
John Barrymore's burgeoning powers as an actor. Reflecting his desire
to strip away old habits and approaches, Hopkins decided to treat the
play as a new work and not as a great masterpiece. In actuality, the script
combined scenes from Henry VI and Richard Ill. Actors were given
typewritten parts with no written stage directions and told to play with no
reverence for words o'r tradition. Further, Hopkins told the actors that the
play was a melodrama and must be treated as such and not as cold verse.
He had-carefully chosen actors with no Shakespearean experience; but
34
Alan Dale, C:heered in 'The Jest,' A Play of Old-Fashioned
Acting, " New York American, 10 April 1919, [n.p.]
35
[n.a.], " The Brothers Barrymore, " New York Times, io April 1919, [n.p.]
36
Eaton, "American Producers," 233.
37
Heywood Broun, " Two Barrymores Seen in the First Performance of ' The
jest,'" New York Tribune, 10 April1919, [n.p.]
14
SHELTON
he did eliminate regional accents because he wanted an unnoticeable
homogeneity of speech. In addition, traditional stage business and
expansive gestures were discarded.
38
In keeping with Hopkins's neo-
romantic and New Stagecraft approach, Jones's sets for the production
employed a single unit, the Tower of London, while changes were
suggested by curtains or by small pieces placed within an opening or in
front of the main structure.
39
All in all, Hopkins infused the production
with modernism in visual and psychological elements by stripping away
the realistic hyperbole associated with Shakespeare since the 1850s.
This production had a unity of acting that not all of Hopkins's
productions achieved. The acting was low-keyed, all pitched to be in
harmony with Barrymore's subdued Richard/
0
whom he played as
" realistically as is possible for such a cold blooded, unadulterated villain
to be played."
41
This was acting without precedent. Rather than give a
physically powerful, passionate, and turbulent interpretation, Barrymore
presented an intellectual, stealthy, crafty, subtle, and malevolent
character.
42
Barrymore's "denotement of the relentless wickedness of the
hunchback, his fallacious excuses for his crimes, his self-justification in
every new atrocity-this was acting of the highest type, for it was not
dependent for its effectiveness on physical power."
43
Instead of robust
physical ity, Barrymore displayed a sardonic smi le-a Richard of
Barrymore's day, not Shakespeare's. Hopkins's psychological reading of
Richard placed more emphasis on the inner qualities of the character
than upon a overt, externally evil man. Clearly reviewers saw something
new in this presentat ion, and those who came to laugh at Barrymore as
38
Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy, 201.
39
Oscar G. Brockett and Robert R. Findlay, Century of Innovation. A History of
European and American Theatre and Drama Since 1870 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1973), 495.
40
J. Ranken Towse, "Richard Ill," New York Post, 8 March 1920, [n.p.]
41
[n.a.], '"Richard Ill' at Plymouth," New York Evening Sun, 8 March 1920,
[n.p.]
42
[n .a.], " Barrymore Acts role of Richard," New York World, 8 March 1920,
[n.p.]
43
[n.a.], " Arthur Hopkins Gives 4 Hour Production to Shakespeare' s Tragedy,"
.. ~ . ~ ...
Arthur Hopkins 15
a Shakespearean actor stayed to praise his performance, thanks at least in
part to Hopkins's directorial approach.
44
Not quite as successful was Hopkins's presentation of Lionel
Barrymore in Macbeth in 1921, memorable for the highly expressionistic
sets designed by jones:
Throughout this production he has attempted through significant
form to create an abstract background expressing the spiritual
relationships of the play. He has seen as the dominant element
of Macbeth the abnormal influence of the powers symbolized
by Shakespeare in the witches. He has tried to visualize the
superhuman nature of these mystic forces in gigantic masks
appearing high in the air above the blasted heath. Through the
rest of the play he has placed upon the stage very simple and
abstract forms to carry the mood induced by the supernatural
influences which seize and dominate the characters constantly
throughout Macbeth.
45
The masks suggested not realities but unconscious forms. Further, a
distorted Gothic arch was the characteristic design element, and it
implied the twisted, deadly, and thwarted ambition visited upon Macbeth
by the witches. However, the direction of the piece did not live up to the
nightmarish world of the significant design.
46
While evocative, the designs coupled with the tedious acting of
Lionel Barrymore may have been the undoing of the production. Perhaps
there was too much Jones and not enough Shakespeare: one reviewer
suggested that the production was a wrong attempt to intensify the magic
of the play by eliminating its essential spirit and by way of recompense
concentrating upon obtrusive, fantastical, and aggressively unreal
illustrations. Moreover, the actors stood still a lot-presumably from fear
of spoiling a tableau-and recited lines with a listless monotony,
becoming in effect a parody of Craig's ideal of being puppets. With no
sense of language and rhythm, the production was a poverty stricken
44
Unfortunately, the run of Richard Ill was cut short when Barrymore became
ill, and Hopkins closed the production (Hopkins, Reference Point, 119).
45
Kenneth MacGowan, "The Jones-Barrymore-Hopkins Macbeth," in The
American Theatre As Seen By Its Critics (New York, 1934), 203.
46
Ibid., 204.
16 SHELTON
performance in splendid attire.
47
Macbeth lacked the synthesis of all
elements of production into significant form that Hopkins sought in all of
his productions. The setting was too overpowering and the acting too
unfocused to reach the unconscious of the audience.
The important effort of the Hopkins-Barrymore-jones association was
the next production with John, Hamlet, in 1922, a landmark in the
American theatre. The production concept for Hamlet was inspired by
a Freudian reading of the play-one in which the Oedipal complex met
with simple settings in the mode of Craig. After the Macbeth digression
to expressionism, jones returned to a simple, stylized unit set composed
of architectural forms: draperies bordered the sides of the acting area
while broad steps led upstage to a tall archway in the back wall, and
moderate changes within this area indicated the various scenic locales.
The setting provided an abstract, unified background for the restrained
and beautiful acting of Barrymore and resulted in a very modern Hamlet,
as with Richard Ill, one for the current time.
48
For Theatre Magazine this Hamlet was theatre at its most moving and
inspirational, for which Hopkins was to be praised. Barrymore's
performance was "alive with virility and genius." "He is a great,
beautiful and rare Hamlet. An understandable, coherent Hamlet. ... The
American theatre may properly be proud of an actor capable of such lofty
doings." In the soliloquies, "Barrymore's mind is on two things-the
thought of what he is saying and the imperative necessity of conveying
that thought clearly to his listener." In high form in the closet scene with
the Queen, he was "Shakespeare's very own Hamlet."
49
In Heywood
Broun's opinion, Barrymore and Hopkins presented a Hamlet in tune
with the times if not ahead of them:
47
J. Ranken Towse, review of Macbeth, Collection of Dramatic Criticism, vol.
1920-21, M-R, Lincoln Center. Lionel Barrymore confessed in his memoirs that he
had not prepared for Macbeth as thoroughly as John had for Richard Ill, and that he
was confused much of the time (Lionel Barrymore, We Barrymores, [New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951 ], 205). Hopkins's assessment was that Lionel threw
himself into the character and in fact merged with it, that Lionel was "a frightening
figure in Macbeth, a figure too possessed for the character of his audiences."
(Hopkins, Reference Point, 117.)
48
Ralph Pendleton, The Theatre of Robert Edmond }ones (Middleton, CT.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1958). See pp. 46-49 for Hamlet scenes and p. 36 for
Richard Ill.
Arthur Hopkins
This Hamlet is as modern as the most recent disciple of Freud.
We learned last night, for the first time, that his tragedy lay in the
fact that he did not have the courage of his complexes.
Barrymore's most original contribution to the role probably is in
his amplification of the unconscious motives of.the Prince. He
plays the closet episode with the Queen exactly as if it were a
love scene. Nor did this seem fantastic to us. Shakespeare was
a better Freudian than most any of the moderns because he did
not know the lingo. He merely set down the facts. After seeing
Barrymore's interpretation we are convinced t.hat he added
nothing -but merely grasped suggestions which were already
there.
50
17
While Stark Young was not totally enthusiastic about all ~ p e c t s of
the production, his observations pinpoint the workings of Hopkins's
theory of unconscious projection. Barrymore's performance had been
stripped: no idle tricks of the voice, no display of actor's vanity or
professional virtuosity, no foolish strutting, nor no egotistical, histrionic
exhibitionism were evident.
51
Most tellingly, Young noted that the
production achieved its own style and voice, rely.ing not at all on
tradition:
And I must admire the economy of business-not all Mr . .
Barrymore's, of course, but partly due to Mr. Hopkins, ... all
through the part. The nunnery scene with Ophelia was done .
with a reaching out of the hands almost; the relation of Hamlet
to his mother and through her to the ghost was achieved by his
moving toward the ghost on his knees and being caught in his
mother's arms, weaving together the bodies of those two, .. .
There were no portraits on the wall with a ghost stepping out, as
Hackett used to do it in the sixties. There was no crawling
forward on the floor to watch the King during the play, as so
many actors have done; and none of Ophelia's peacock fan for
Hamlet to tap his breast with and fling in the air, as Irving used
to do. About all this production there were none of those
accessories in invented business; there was for the most part,
50
Heywoqd Broun, "Tragedy-of Hamlet,"New York World, 18 November 1922,
[n.p.]
51
Stark Young, "Hamlet," in Immortal Shadows (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1948), 9.
18
SHELTON
and always in intention, only that action proceeding from the
inner necessity of the moment and leaning on life, not stage
expedients.
52
Herein are the elements of Hopkins's aesthetic clearly analyzed:
simplicity, stillness, unaffected acting and restrained performance, all cut
to the bone by ''stripping away" all that was unnecessary. The artistic
impact, as Young realized, was that "in its best passages, without any
affectation of the primitive or archaic, it [the production] achieved what
primitive art can achieve: a fundamental pattern so simple and so
reveal ing that it appeared to be mystical; and so direct and strong that it
restored to the dramatic scene its primary truth and magnificence."
53
The
production run set a record for Hamlet in New York of 101 perfor-
mances, breaking Edwin Booth's record of 100.
54
The Barrymore productions involved romantic acting (albeit of a
restrained and somewhat realistic kind), evocative settings and costumes,
and imaginative stagings. In particular, John Barrymore's sensitivity and
intell igence joined forces with Hopkins's artistic theory which was made
tangible in Jones's work. The total aesthetic was Hopkins's. He used the
resources of the physical production to create atmosphere-a stylized,
dream-world quality that reflected the unconscious elements of character.
The production synthesized the intelligence of conception, the romanti-
cism of acting, and simplicity of setting. Hopkins's perspective permitted
Barrymore's energy and vitality and his strong conceptual approach to
roles-varied, sensitive, thoughtful, powerful-to achieve whatever was
necessary for the moment. This series of productions with the
Barrymores and Jones was the highlight of Hopkins's career, and the
52
Ibid., 11 .
53
Ibid., 14.
54
The presentation might have continued longer, but Barrymore only wanted to
break Booth' s record and quit. Hopkins indicated that Barrymore' s first performance
was the best. After that he quickly lost interest and would embroider his
interpretation-for Barrymore the curse of the theatre was repetition. In the 101
performance run, he played many different Hamlets. Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy, 229.
Hopkins was saddened by this attitude, but to his mind, " this was the great and
crowning achievement of the modern theatre. Never was one man more blessed with
all the attributes of the complex, towering, haunting grace, eloquence,
humor, pathos, and power." (Hopkins, Reference Point, 120).
Arthur Hopkins 19
synthesis achieved was very important in exhibiting the essence of the
"New Theatre" and in modernizing the American theatre. 5
5
In the midst of the Barrymore association, Hopkins was instrumental
in furthering Eugene O'Neill's career with the staging of Anna Christie
and the production of The Hairy Ape (he did not receive credit for
direction) in 1921. Hopkins emphasized the naturalistic, intense realism
of Anna Christie, and he guided Pauline Lord as Anna to an outstanding
performance. She played the role with unyielding realism in keeping the
mood repressed, but she also burst forth with flashes of fire.
56
This
production exhibited Hopkins's keen casting acumen and his practice of
letting actors create their own work with the result of sharp performances
subtly rendered:
Three crucial roles played as three roles are seldom played on
our stage, and as they must be played if the truth of Anna
Christie is to live. George Marion's barge captain is merely
perfect. In conception and in detail, here is old Chris complete.
Through Frank Shannon, a player who has counted for little
heretofore, Hopkins has found a man to capture the strength and
pungency and vigorous braggartly romance without which the
part of the lover and the play itself are impossible.
As for Pauline Lord as the girl, here is naturalism-or whatever
you want to call minute, exact and subtle reproduction of
emotion-absolutely at its best. . .. This is the spirit lived
spontaneously and envitably before our eyes ... . The strange
inner bloom of life is on the lips of this woman of the streets,
and the broken suffering of life is in her voice. 5
7
While not as significant dramatically, Hopkins's biggest hit of the era
came in 1927 with the 372 performances of Burlesque, a play he co-
authored and which introduced Barbara Stanwyck. The play was a
55
Aubrey Berg discusses this association in detail in Collaborators: Arthur
Hopkins, Robert Edmond Jones and The Barrymores, (Ph.D. dissertation, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1979). Barrymore was intensely coached by
Margaret Carrington for the roles of Richard and Hamlet (Berg, 189-90).
56
Louis V. DeFoe, "Another Grim O'Neill Drama," New York World, 3
November 1921, [n.p.]
57
Kenneth MacGowan, "Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie: A Notable Drama
Acted at the Vanderb'uilt Theatre," New York Globe, 3 November 1921, [n.p.]
20
SHELTON
backstage in the vein of Broadway of the previous year.
In spite of its popularity, it may have been one of Hopkins's weaker
offerings; either that or some of his basic directorial weaknesses showed
through the excitement of the story I ine. Alexander Woollcott reported
that the audience was enraptured, but that he thought Hopkins's wisdom
and skill were wasted on such a vehicle-the treatment was too refined
and prettified for such subject matter. He did credit Stanwyck with a
touching and true performance: "She brought much to those little acting
silences in a performance of which Mr. Hopkins knows so well the secret
and sorcery."
58
Brooks Atkinson was even harder on the director and
revealed a basic fault in Hopkins as a director: "With a tighter, more
symmetrical story and much firmer directions such actors could transform
Burlesque into a swift instrument of acted drama . . . . It requires more
authoritative discipline, more versatility in showmanship than the present
performance of Burlesque reveals ... . It might have been far more
incisive than it was."
59
Atkinson unfavorably compared the play and the
production with Broadway, a production he had used to examine the
artistry of the director in the American theatre,
60
but then Hopkins did not
have the sort of flair and theatricality of a George Abbott, who staged
Broadway. In fact, Hopkins eschewed showmanship-Abbott's strength,
and he abhorred using theatrics to make his presence known; however,
his approach to coaching actors may not have well served all plays.
Machinal (1928) with ninety-one performances was not by definition
a hit, but it was an important production in the Hopkins style. The script
by Sophie Treadwell presents, in a series of short telegraphic scenes, the
decl ine of a young woman who had murdered her husband:
61
Hopkins's
often criticized slow pacing did not seem to be a problem with this
production. His staging was non-sensational with no grabbing for
theatrical effects.
62
This time even Brooks Atkinson thought Hopkins's
astute casting eye served him weii-Zita Johann and Clark Gable played
58
Alexander Woollcott, "Arthur Hopkins Presents," New York World, 3
September 1927, [n.p.]
59
Brooks Atkinson, "Behind the Burlesque Scenes," New York Times, 2
September 1927, [n.p.]
60
Brooks Atkinson, "Broadway Glamor," New York Times, 26 September 1926,
[n.p.]
61
For a discussion of the production see, Jennifer Parent, "Machinal," The
Drama Review 16 (Spring 1982): 88-100.
62
Arthur Pollock, [n.t.J, Brooklyn Eagle, 30 September 1928, [n.p.]
Arthur Hopkins 21
leading roles-and that all in all the play was so skillfully staged that
Hopkins might have surpassed himself.
63
Among the other high points of the 1920s for Hopkins were
productions of plays by Philip Barry. They had a long collaboration
beginning in 1925 with In a Garden (73). Paris Bound (234) in 1927 and
Holiday (229) in 1928 were their biggest hits. The joyous Season (16) in
1934 was the last of their joint efforts. While Hopkins invested Paris
Bound with charm and had secured a good cast,
64
just a year later there
was some suggestion that he might have lost some of his directorial
acumen with Holiday. Actress Hope Williams, who was in both
productions, was praised, and Atkinson thought "all of the acting gleams
with light,"
65
but to others the acting in general seemed amateurish. -
Hopkins's penchant for using young and inexperienced actors may have
gotten the best of him:
Mr. Hopkins has gathered together a cast of too inexperienced
players and placed too great a faith in his ability, often exhibited
before this, to persuade such players to exhibit qualities they
never knew they possessed. Holiday looks rather amateurish.
Once the best of directors where plays light and cockeyed were
concerned, Mr. Hopkins seems for the moment to have lost his
touch.
66
Hopkins's last significant production which combined an important script
with good direction was the 1935 The Petrified Forest (197
performances) by Robert E. Sherwood which starred Leslie Howard and
Humphrey Bogart. Atkinson praised the "benign influence" of Hopkins
and credited Bogart, known on stage for his roles as the young man in
white flannels with a tennis racquet, with the best work of his
63
Brooks Atkinson, "Against the City Clatter, " New York Times, 8 September
1928, [n.p.)
64
Alexander Woollcott, "Mr. Barry's Delightful Play," New York World, 28
December 1927, [n.p.); Percy Hammond, [n.t.), New York Herald Tribune, 28
December 1927, [n.p.]; " Mr. Barry Brings It Off," Boston Transcript, 28 December
1927, [n.p.)
65
Brooks Atkinson, " The Age of Experience, " New York Times, 27 November
1928, [n.p.)
66
Arthur Pollock, "Holiday, Philip Barry's Latest Comedy at the Plymouth
Theatre," Brooklyn Eagle. 27 November 1928, [n.p.); See also St. John Ervine,
" Johnny' s Sad Case," New York World, 28 November 1928, [n.p.]
22
SHELTON
career-Bogart was cast against type (at the time) as the apish gangster
Duke Mantee.
67
The entire production was "acted flawlessly under Mr.
Hopkins most hypnotic direction for everything that is in it. .. . In the
direction of all this Mr. Hopkins seems to have recaptured completely all
the old wizardry that made him great in his own best days so that it all
moves with extraordinary deftness and precision of effects."
68
Hopkins
regained some prestige with this production for none of his previous nine
productions in the 1930s had been hits. The Depression was not kind to
Hopkins. The entire commercial theatre suffered, his directorial flair
wavered, and while he staged thirteen productions over the next eleven
years, he did not have another hit until The Magnificent Yankee in 1946.
Hopkins was the perfect match for the New Theatre, for his idea of
theatre, his aesthetic sense, was formulated along the lines of simple,
direct impact on the audience. First of all, Hopkins believed that theatre
was capable of being a cultural force. This belief guided him in his
efforts in experimentation, for he recognized that the fate of American
theatre was in the hands of the New York producers, and he felt that such
a position imposed a great responsibility on himself in particular. Early
on he decried the bitter truth that the untutored majority of the country
had a pathetic lack of discernment and would accept second rate drama
if produced so as to be "a great show."
69
Hopkins undertook a personal
mission to elevate the taste of the audience through his choice of plays
and the quality and style of production.
In essence, Hopkins had an almost reverential attitude toward the
theatre. He recognized that there were two theatres, one admirable and
one tawdry:
So when we think of the theatre we must distinguish between
what is consecrated and what is devised. In one we may find
exaltation, in the other debasement. Our reaction becomes
revelation of ourselves .. . . In my time I have seen much in the
theatre that is acceptably lulling but little that is challenging.
I have felt moments of complete liberation in the theatre, but
those rare moments only heighten the conviction that for the
most part the theatre is bound to easy acceptance, to quick
67
Brooks Atkinson, [n.t.], New York Times, 8 January 1935, [n.p.]
68
John Chapman, "The Petrified Forest, " New York Evening Journal, 8 January
1935, [n.p.]
69
Hopkins, "Our Unreasonable Theatre," 79.
Arthur Hopkins
appraisal. Perhaps it is not its mission to be profound, yet it has
been profound. Shall we take it at its best or at its medium?
Shall we bring to it indulgent caprices just to prove that we are
kindly people not demanding too much? The little grimaces
delight us. The trite observation we accept as an old friend.
These attitudes are admissible, but admissible only if we realize
that this is not the theatre that might be but the theatre in which
we are comfortable, the theatre to which we give prizes, not for
worth but for acceptability, the theatre in which we can recline
and gently fan ourselves into polite appreciation and
somnolence, the theatre which does not interrupt our own little
conversations.
70
23
Hopkins did not claim to have the solutions to the quandary posed by
these concerns over the superficiality of theatre, but in his efforts he
attempted to create profound, admirable theatre.
Another central tenet of Hopkins aesthetic was his belief in the
importance of the dramatist. As early as 1913 he wrote: "For the past
few years there has been something of a war to determine who has the
prior right on the stage-the carpenter, the scene painter, the property
maker, the costume designer, the composer, or the actor. Strangely
enough, the one person who seems to have been lost sight of by most of
the revolutionists is none less than the author." Contrary to what others
thought, he claimed that the purpose of Gordon Craig's call for change
from realistic conventions was "to create an atmosphere which was in
entire sympathy with the author's mood and which stripped the stage of
every excess obstacle and effect which tended to distract the auditor's
attention."
71
Just as Craig wanted to eliminate the clutter which distracted
attention from the play, Hopkins also sought to stage plays in a manner
that would allow them to be clearly apprehended.
In essence, Hopkins's aesthetic was anti -realistic. In his neo-romantic
estimation, the theatre prior to Ibsen was a place of dreams which lifted
the audience members out of themselves and transported them in ecstatic
flight which brought complete release. Actors were liberators, guides to
exalted places. Realism killed the dream state, the unconscious mind
which is common to all, for realism appeals to the conscious mind, the
70
Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy, 97-99.
71
Arthur Hopkins, "Lo, the Poor Dramatist!" New York Times, 23 May 1913,
[n.p.]
24
SHELTON
mind that reduces the mass to individuals.
72
The theatre which Hopkins
sought was antithetical" to that of the arch realist, David Belasco, whose
methods Hopkins appraised in To A Lonely Boy:
Had he possessed an appreciation of writing he would have
surpassed all producers, but he did not have Winthrop Ames's
recognition of the literate and authentic in writing. To him plays
were devices that provided acting and production opportunities.
He did not look upon the dramatist as a primary contributor, but
as one who supplied a framework which he would fill in. He
made ordinary plays seem important. He devoted his gifts to
material that was rarely worthy of them. He never understood
the praise received by plays which to him were without glamor.
To him the theatre was a world of glamor.
73
Hopkins's idea for deal ing with the limitations of the glamorous
theatre was to simp I ify, suggest, and strip away the non-necessary. He
identified with Craig's dismissal of the "unconvincing, inharmonious,
inartistic."
74
Unlike Belasco, Hopkins wanted to create atmosphere not
by piling on details but by eliminating all but the essential visual elements
which would suggest the mood and intention of the playwright. He
applied the same critical eye to acting and sought to strip away all that
was false and overtly theatric in performance.
These three aspects of Hopkins's aesthetic were all served by the
most overriding element in Hopkins's idea of theatre, unconscious
projection. He believed that the theatre should appeal to the emotions
and in order to do that, it had to be free and clean, direct and imagistic.
The conscious mind had to be still; nothing on stage or in the perfor-
mance should call attention to itself. By a harmonious presentation of
text, set, costumes, and acting -the spectator would be drawn into the
performance. Rather than being brought to an intellectual appreciation
of production elements, the spectator would be moved by the orches-
trated mood. For Hopkins, "Arts reception must be emotional. Its
appraisal should be an appraisal of the emotional reaction. It is not what
we think of art but what it does to us."
75
His guiding idea, unconscious
72
Arthur Hopkins, "The Lost Theatre," New Outlook (January 1933): 21-22.
73
Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy, 198.
74
Hopkins, "Lo, the Poor Dramatist," [n.p.]
75
Hopkins, To a Lonely Boy, 102.
Arthur Hopkins 25
projection, was the chief element of his theatre aesthetic and of his
method of direction.
In his theatre practices, Hopkins clearly was a gentlemanly director,
for he was quiet, undemonstrative, respectful of actors and all his
collaborators. Abhorring cheap theatrics on stage, he did not see fit to
use them himself in rehearsals. Hopkins in effect democratized his work
in the theatre, for he regarded his role as director as that of providing a
vision in order to guide his fellow workers. Gentle and unobtrusive in
helping his casts, he believed that unconscious projection began with the
director. If the idea of the play was to be realized, no one, not even the
director, could use the opportunity of play production to score or shine.
All had to work together into a harmonious whole.
Hopkins worked with the playwright before starting rehearsals to
make any changes and to clarify the script. He might have suggestions
about the script-he went so far as to become co-author of
Burlesque-but he wanted any revisions to be completed prior to
rehearsals. By the time rehearsals started, he understood the text and
knew what he wanted, and his attempt was to serve t ~ play/
6
Casting
actors on an instinctual basis, Hopkins looked for a basic personal quality
in the actor. He usually talked with actors rather than having them read
for a part. He liked young, new actors and gave many stars their starts or
at least boosted their careers.
Once rehearsals began, Hopkins had the actors read through the play
for a week or ten days, seated on stage, until they knew what the play
was about, what lines meant, "until the play, as they go through it,
reading, begins to take its right mental form. Then, and not until then,
they get on their feet and begin to move to the rhythm of these thoughts
and feelings that they have by now understood and made their own."
77
Although Hopkins did not pre-block the play, he set the general areas to
be used for an act ahead of time, letting the actors work out their own
movements-he did not want to impose himself on the actors'
interpretation. It would then take him only about an hour to block out
that act. Then he would spend two days reviewing and augmenting it
before moving on to another act.
Hopkins's belief in simplicity and stillness coupled with his
opposition to the fussiness of realistic stage business may have led him
to stage plays in a static manner at times. A typescript copy of his own
76
Sophie Treadwell, "The Hopkins Manner," New York World, 25 November
1928, [n.p.]
77
1bid.
26
SHELTON
play, The Conquest/
8
with hand-written blocking notes reinforces this
notion. The play is an updating of the Hamlet story set in modern
industrial society. A young man resists the pressures to go into the fami ly
business now run by his step-father. It is a rather stodgy and formal play,
and the blocking notes, while perhaps fitting the mood and language, are
not very dynamic, and the production may have suffered for it. The
climactic position-characters close together-is used a lot, which
diminishes its impact. The stage furniture is used as obstacles but not to
a great extent-characters are in front of pieces most of the time.
Movement seems to be naturalistic, based on emotional impulses. But
in the climactic scene in which the son accuses the step-father of killing
his father, Hopkins does not use movement or the set pieces as obstacles
to increase tension-perhaps to the detriment of the moment, given the
emotional context of the situation. Hopkins's use of restraint and stillness
may have worked well in the poetic drama of Shakespeare and others,
but it seems to undermine this play.
Hopkins was very sensitive in his handling of actors. He let the actor
get his own interpretation, and he made any comments or suggestions
offstage, quietly huddled with the actor.
79
Hopkins's process was so
unobtrusive that many actors felt that he had given them no direction at
all. Of course Hopkins did give actors guidance and suggestions, but for
the most part it was to strip away aspects of their performance which he
felt interfered with the idea of the moment or the play or with the
movement of the whole:
The stripping process begins early. I eliminate all gesture that is
not absolutely needed, all unnecessary inflections and intonings,
the tossing of heads, the flickering of fans and kerchiefs, the
tapping of feet, drumming of fingers, swinging of legs, pressing
of brows, holding of hearts, curling of moustaches, stroking of
beards and all the million and one tricks that have crept into the
actor's bag, all of them betraying one of two things-an
annoying lack of repose, or an attempt to attract attention to
himself and away from the play.
80
78
Arthur Hopkins, The Conquest, typescript copy, Lincoln Center.
79
Treadwell, "The Hopkins Manner;" Pemberton, "Arthur Hopkins," 24.
80
Hopkins, "Our Unreasonable Theatre," 82.
Arthur Hopkins 27
Hopkins sought natural, unadorned spontaneous acting, believing that the
interpretation would be fresher and would inspire the actor to still greater
efforts.
Lionel Barrymore's assessment of Hopkins's talent with actors
indicates that Hopkins did indeed use unconscious projection as a
director:
I have never known a more erudite gentleman anywhere at all
... who knew everything, but who possessed the extraordinary
trick of making you think you knew it first. Nobody, friend or
foe, could tell when Hopkins had actually started directing a
play. His company like a kaleidoscope, had no pattern
whatsoever at the beginning but invariably fell into amazing
designs, which Mr. Hopkins apparently had nothing to do with.
He operated on the principle of Machiavelli's great line in The
Prince: "If you must do good, do it by stealth." That is precisely
the way Hopkins directed. Anything he had to tell an actor was
told a day or so after the blunder or the scene in question with
such marvelous, dexterous stealth that the actor-being per se an
egotistical dog or he wouldn't be an actor-believed that he had
thought it up himself.
81
Hopkins's rehearsal demeanor seems appropriate given his desire to
allow the actor great freedom of interpretation. He sought to put himself
aside, not to interfere:
He will sit for two or three hours during rehearsal astride a chair,
chin and hands resting on its back, without uttering a word. An
entire afternoon may elicit from him nothing save a rare, "Hand
lower," or" A little louder, please." Mr. Hopkins has a theory
about direction-or more properly, an intuition amounting to
conviction. It is that a production is a growth and its materials
are living actors who must discover a feeling in themselves and
impulsively project it across to human spectators. This
subconscious communication, he feels, is far too delicate to
stand tampering with byconscious interference.
82
81
Barrymore, We Barrymores, 194-195.
82
Motherwell, "How Many Theatre-goers Know Him?," 28.
28 SHELTON
Hopkins's theory of unconscious projection permeated every aspect
of his work in direction. Nevertheless, Hopkins did not have the skill or
knowledge of acting to weld all of his casts into effective ensembles.
Further, his presentations were often slowly paced and tepid, lacking
dynamics of staging. However, his best productions had an absence of
theatrical tricks, broad pictorial effects unencumbered by detail, and a
unity of all aspects of production.
While David Belasco achieved the first artistic synthesis (based upon
his scientific perspective) in the American theatre, Hopkins's second
synthesis was more significant because he chose more important
dramatic literature than did Belasco. Hopkins's nec-romantic perspective
had significant form, unified by the vision of Hopkins and his idea of
unconscious projection. Theory and practice combined to provide
productions in which idea and text were viable and valid, particularly in
his Shakespearean and other productions of the early 20s. His avowed
experimental approach to new ideas about theatre, art, and psychology
led him to direct other important artists in some of their best work.
Robert Edmond Jones, john Barrymore, Philip Barry, Elmer Rice, Sophie
Treadwell, Pauline Lord, Clark Gable, and other young writers and actors
flowered under Hopkins's tutelage. Hopkins's essential humanity and his
approach of "simplicity, certainty and simplicity compounded with
taste"
83
provided a welcome and necessary antidote to the dominant
realism of the time. In his noteworthy productions such as Redemption,
The jest, Hamlet, Macbeth, Anna Christie, Machinal, What Price Glory
and others, symbolic, suggestive stagings that reflected an imaginative
approach to the world of the play led to some of the most historically
important presentations of the century and gave evidence of a new
synthesis oftheatre arts.
83
Pemberton, "Arthur Hopkins," Theatre Guild Magazine (April 1929): 25.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 11 (Winter 1999)
Lunchtime Follies: Food, Fun and Propaganda in
America's Wartime Workplace
ROBERT C. ROARTY
The American Theatre Wing, Broadway's wartime service
organization, played a key role in the professional theater's patriotic effort
to assist the nation's mobilization campaign during the Second World
War. The Wing sponsored highly successful War Bond drives generating
millions of dollars for the nation's war chest, and a speakers' bureau that
brought war-related educational and inspirational programs to civic,
religious, charitable, and business organizations of all types. Although
most widely known for the popular and well-publicized Stage Door
Canteens, where the stars of Broadway, Hollywood, and broadcasting
catered exclusively to uniformed military personnel, the Wing also ran
uncelebrated but valuable entertainment programs that benefited
thousands of American soldiers wounded in battle and recuperating in
East Coast hospitals.
1
The American Theatre Wing began as a war-service organization
associated with British War Relief and was created shortly after the
German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of war. Between spring
1940 and 7 December 1941, the Wing collected and donated nearly
$81,000 to the British organization. Additionally, the Wing organized
clothing drives and sewing circles to aid European refugees. Two days
after the American entry into the world conflict, the group severed its ties
with the British, incorporated as the American Theatre Wing War Service,
and began to develop its diverse range of programs aimed at supporting
the .United States' war mobilization.
One of the most interesting programs operating under the Wing's
management was a series of brief, variety-show structured amusements
presented in American factories and shipyards called the Lunchtime
Follies. The Follies featured Broadway actors, singers, dancers, nightclub
and vaudeville comedians, and musicians who performed for workers at
defense-related industry plants during the workers' scheduled mealtime
1
Isabelle Stevenson, The Tony Award: A Complete Listing, (Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1994), xi.
30
ROARTY
breaks. In its time, government leaders, industry heads, union bosses,
and most important, the thousands of workers who saw and enjoyed the
programs, praised the Lunchtime Follies' contribution to the home front
production effort. In terms of both their entertainment value and
ideological content, the Lunchtime Follies was a propitious and effective
theatrical venture. Unfortunately, the Follies are rarely mentioned in the
cultural histories of the period and are inadequately researched even by
theater historians.
2
To rectify this oversight, this paper wi II trace the
program's genesis, briefly outline its early production history, and
examine some ways in which the material presented in the Follies
operated as patriotic wartime propaganda. However, before beginning,
it is important to note some of the difficulties encountered in the
preparation of this study.
Only fragmentary information survives concerning the practical and
financial operation of many of the Wing's wartime programs. Nearly all
of the wartime records of the American Theatre Wing were entrusted to
a private individual for storage and through a series of unfortunate
circumstances, destroyed. In the case of the factory entertainments, most
of the original performance material prepared for the Follies was never
pub I ished and apparently not saved by the authors or composers. The
writers generously donated most of the short sketches and songs written
specifically for the program without regard for royalties or copyright.
Moreover, since the venue for the Follies' performances was not the
traditional Broadway arena and the audience restricted to factory
employees, most of the hundreds of presentations that took place
between 1942 and 1945 were not reviewed by the press. Despite the
irritating shortage of scripts and performance details, piecing together the
important features of the Lunchtime Follies to reclaim this noteworthy
theatrical episode is still feasible.
To locate the source of the American Lunchtime Follies it is necessary
to look first to Great Britain in 1939. In his book The Theatre at War
(1958), Basil Dean documents tbe origin of the British equivalent of the
Theatre Wing, the Entertainments National Service Association, more
commonly known as ENSA. This assembly of performing artists,
entertainment industry trade unions, and managerial associations was
formed as part of England's home front campaign in its battle against the
forces of Hitler and the Third Reich. Among the many programs
2
The Lunchtime Follies is mentioned in several biographies including Malcolm
Goldstein' s George 5. Kaufman: His Life, His Theater (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1979). Additionally, the existence of the Follies program is briefly noted in
Isabelle Stevenson's history of the American Theatre Wing found in her book on the
Tony Awards; however, no details are given.
Lunchtime Follies 31
administrated by ENSA was a series of mealtime entertainments presented
to defense plant workers and operated under the coined name of
i'ENSAtainments." After ENSA accomplished the difficult process of
securing permissions from military, government, and business' leaders, it
gave. the first performance at the Woolwich Arsenal on 22 July 1940.
Through. "a process of trial and error" a performance format was
developed that included singers, comedians, pianists, and military bands.
At its peak the British factory entertainment program had up to 200 small
performance troupes visiting ordnance plants, factories, and labor union
halls in locations all across the island nation. The entertainment
programs provided a needed diversion from the pressures of wartime
production and measurably increased the productivity of the workers.
Dean cites one factory superintendent's claim that "a definite
improvement of 5 percent in output" was realized after each ENSA
performance. Dean also notes that he shared the idea for the British
program with his American theatrical colleagues.
3
In late 1939, while the
ENSA program was still in its preparatory stage, Dean visited the United
States and distributed an outline of his proposed plan among influential
members of the New York theater community. "I spent much of my
time," Dean remarks, "like an itinerant preacher, distributing copies of
my pamphlet to incredulous theatrical friends."
4
When the japanese attacked the United States in December of 1941,
playwright Moss Hart, actress Aline MacMahon, producer Kermit
Bloomgarden, and actor/producer George Heller, under the auspices of
the American Theatre Wing, began to organize an American version of
the ENSA program. Originally called the Lunch Hour Follies, the
program's name was changed to the Lunchtime Follies shortly after it
launched operations as part of the Wing's overall wartime activities.
The Theatre Wing initially anticipated two different benefits from the
industrial variety shows. The primary goal of the program was, of course,
to help to increase wartime production by providing recreation for the
workers. However, the Wing's executive board also recognized that the
Follies would expose many blue collar workers to the enjoyment of live
dramatic entertainment and might have the additional advantage of
helping to expand the potential Broadway audience. It was even
suggested at the board's 17 june 1942 meeting that a large enough
3
Basil Dean, The Theatre at War (london: George G. Harrap, 1958), 136-137.
4
Ibid., 34.
32
ROARTY
factory entertainment program might be the starting point for a National
Theatre.
5
Logistically the Follies relied on the cooperation and support of
several non-theatrical organizations. From the outset the program needed
approval from the United States Department of Labor, the War
Production Board, and the National Security Agency. Munitions plants,
military shipyards, and aircraft manufacturing facilities were, at the time,
operating under strict security regulations to thwart the efforts of Axis
spies and saboteurs. Occasionally, permission for Follies performances
at these high security locations had to come directly from the
government. Performers frequently had factory police escorts to and from
the front gates and were required to wear large identification badges
showing that they were approved guests. In some venues, security
regulations were so strict identification tags had to be worn on stage,
"with the result that round pasteboard disks [were] seen dangling
incongruously from pink satin tights."
6
Because gasoline and automobile tire rationing had placed severe
restrictions on personal travel, transportation to and from the work sites
for performers, technicians, and the theatrical equipment necessary to
stage the shows was handled in a variety of ways. When available, the
production troupes used commercial buses or scheduled rail service. In
some situations, the American Women's Volunteer Service provided
automobile transportation for the five to fifty miles between bookings.
One of the consistently troublesome aspects of the factory
entertainment program was directly related to its funding. American
Theatre Wing financial records indicate that $10,000 was allocated to
cover the Follies' start up cost. The Wing's board of directors fully
expected the program to continue by finding alternative funding sources.
Early in the. program, "it was proposed that the AFL and CIO be
propositioned to finance the project, but that was quickly found
impractical."
7
To create interest in the program, some early
5
" The American Theatre Wing Minutes," 17 June 1942. In the collection of the
Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, New York.
6
[n.a.], "Lunchtime Follies, S. R. 0 .," New York Times Magazine, 11 July 1943:
8 + .
7
" 'Lunch Follies', Shows for War Workers, May Adopt Plan for Touring," found
in the American Theatre Wing Scrapbook, Lincoln Center Library for the Performing
Arts. Many of the clippings contained in the American Theatre Wing's scrapbooks
have no indication of publisher, date, or page. Even more problemat ic is the fact that
the original scrapbook pages were cut in half at some point in time, often splitting a
single article in the middle.
Lunchtime Follies 33
performances were presented free of charge, or for fees that did not fully
cover production costs. Even after the program had experienced some
success, Rachel Crothers, head of the Wing, suggested that the program
be discontinued because "the Follies may not have justified the amount
of money spent on them."
8
In the Follies' defense, Bloomgarden cited an
increase in future bookings and outlined a plan to make the Follies self-
sufficient by eliminating all free performances. The board agreed at that
time to let the Follies continue provided each interested production
facility accepted primary financial responsibility for a Follies visit. To
book a performance factory management would contact the Wing, agree
to provide some sort of temporary stage for the players, and compensate
the performers and crews for their efforts. According to a 1942 article in
the Christian Science Monitor, fees for each Lunchtime Follies visit
ranged from $200 to $650, depending on both the number of performers
and shows given.
9
Performances were scheduled to coincide with the
meal breaks of the workers, and in many cases the shows would be
repeated two or three times at the same factory, enabling each shift of
workers to enjoy the Follies. It was not unusual for a troupe to perform
at noon, 8:00 P.M., and again at 4:00A.M .. By the end of the war, the
American Theatre Wing,.s total contribution to the program amounted to
$34,181.02, most of that amount being used to pay for a full-time
advance man, publicity materials, and associated administrative costs.
10
More than five hundred actors, dancers, and musicians auditioned for
the Follies programs and the Wing usually had as many as 150
performers on call. The American Theatre Wing held one of the first
auditions at the Lyceum Theater near the end of july 1942. "Singers,
dancers, specialty acts, masters of ceremony, magicians, and all other
types of variety actors" were invited to join the Follies' "talent pool."
11
As the popularity of the program increased, up to six troupes of from ten
to twelve performers would be operating simultaneously at different
locations along the East Coast. Many Broadway and nightclub stars
donated their time and talent, while others in the troupe were paid ten
dollars per day on out-of-town trips and seven-fifty when performances
were staged near New York City. These flexible compensation
8
"American Theater Wing meeting minutes," 27 January 1943.
9
[n.a.], Christian Science Monitor, 6 October 1942, [n.p.]
10
" The American Theatre War Wing Service Financial Statement as of 31
December 1945," Pinto, Winokur, and Pagano, Inc., New York.
11
"Talent Registration," New York Post, 20 July 1942, [n.p.]
34
ROARTY
arrangements undoubtedly suggest the cooperation of the entertainers'
unions. Technical personnel accompanied the troupes to dress the stage
and set up and operate a sound system that was, commonly, no more
than a single microphone and several large speakers. Flexibility was also
the guiding principle regarding stage decoration. Simple unframed cloth
backdrops were frequently used to decorate the stage, while many of the
stage properties used by the performers were borrowed from the host
factory's own inventory, such as a piano, desks, tables, and chairs.
To supplement the dramatic material donated to the Follies by
established playwrights and song writers, the American Theatre Wing
sponsored a play and song writing contest open to the general pub I ic.
The contest offered U. S. War Bonds as prizes, and guidelines for
submissions requested that sketches require no more than two to four
actors, take no longer than ten minutes for performance, and be capable
of production on simple stages without extensive scenery, properties, or
costumes. The report of the National Contest Committee, dated 5
January 1944, shows that it received slightly more than one thousand
song entries and more than 260 sketches and short plays. The report
adds that though they awarded thirty-nine prizes, "very little material was
received that would be suitable" for use by the professional performers
involved in the Foil ies.
12
Although originally scheduled to open at a factory in Schenectady,
New York, the American Theatre Wing gave the first Lunch Hour Follies
at the Wheeler Shipbuilding complex near New York on 8 June 1942.
A repeat performance was then staged at Todd Shipyards in Brooklyn on
June 22.0 Nine days after the first presentation, Lt. J. D. Gassford,
representative of the Third Naval District spoke to the Wing's executive
board. Gassford related that he had conferred with leaders of the
shipyard where the Follies had been presented as well as with the
Admiral in charge of American naval shipbuilding on the East coast.
According to Gassford, they all believed that "if we can keep them [the
workers] going with light speeches, entertainment, etc., it ... would be
a vital contribution to the war effort."
14
Over the next four years, hundreds of fifteen to fifty minute programs
were presented in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Norfolk,
12
"Report of the National Contest Committee, January 5, 1944," found in the
records of the American Theatre Wing, New York.
13
(n.a.], "Whistle While You Work," New York Times, 23 June 1943, p. 22.
14
"American Theatre Wing Minutes," 17 June 1942, in the collection of the
Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts.
Lunchtime Follies 35
Connecticut, and in many locations in New York and New Jersey.
Crowds of up to eight thousand workers in war-related industries such as
the Sperry Gyroscope Company, RCA-Victor, Revere Copper and Brass,
the Maryland Drydock Company, the Rustless Ironworks, and a Curtiss
Wright propeller factory sat on rough benches, scaffolding, and shipping
crates and perched on cranes with sandwiches and sodas while popular
entertainers including Milton Serle, Arlene Francis, George jessel,
impressionist and radio star Arthur Elmer, and singers and dancers such
as Sunnie O'Dea, Ella Logan, Buddy and Judy Allen, and the Cole Sisters
entertained them. In the first year alone, the Follies played to more than
250,000 workers in fifty-five war-related production facilities.
15
Because of the program's necessary association with the government
agencies in charge of wartime production, many original entertainments
written for the Follies focused on topics suggested by either the War
Production Board or industry leaders. In an Associated Press news story,
jean Meegan quotes Aline MacMahon as saying, "The War Production
Board had a tasty list of troubles, . .. and we converted the problems into
entertainments."
16
In this matter, the Follies program was different from
its English counterpart. The ENSAtainments, judging from Basil Dean's
account, rarely attempted to address specific issues and focused instead
on relaxation and escapism. In contrast, from the outset, both the writers
and the associated producers in America saw the Follies as a potential
instrument for worker indoctrination. In its focus on industrial output, the
Foil ies program was comparable to the propagandistic performances
given in factories for workers in Russia following the Communist
Revolution.
For example, one of the Follies' most provocative and propagandistic
musical numbers was a song called "On Time." First sung by Patricia
Ryan at the RCA radio factory in Harrison, New jersey on 14 September
1942, "On Time" is blatantly propagandistic. Written by Harold Rome,
the song is based on a specific suggestion coming from the plant's
management who were experiencing serious production delays due to
worker tardiness and absenteeism that ran as high as 7 percent. Sexually
suggestive lyrics are employed to discourage no-shows and generally
promote more productive work habits.
Some men are lazy, some men are slow-
But those are the kind that don't stand a show.
15
Lewis Nichols, "Lunchtime Follies," New York Times, 13 June 1943, p. 21.
16
Jean Meegan, " Lunch-Time Follies," Omaha World-Herald, 14 February 1943,
[n.p.]
36
Those absentee boys, now I think are mean
They'd never get working on my machine.
To handle my goods and tighten my slack
Now I got no use for a stayaway [sic] Jack.
The man who stays home and lets his pals down
Won't get in my plant to turn my wheels around.
I can see by your smile- I can see by your style
That all you boys have something that I'd find worthwhile
'Cause I want a man who comes to work on time
Oh give me a man who's in there working right on time.
17
ROARTY
The Federal Government's request for assistance in getting an
important production-related message to the general wartime labor force
resulted in another highly propagandistic musical invention. Written at
the request of the War Production Board and entitled "Sloppy Joe," this
bit of musical propaganda was intended to help reduce a high incidence
of on-the-job accidents through an effective use of humor and ridicule.
The song sarcastically depicts the danger and inefficiency of a "flippy,
floppy, mopey, dopey" production-line worker who is always dropping
tools, damaging equipment, injuring his co-workers, and disrupting
production output.
18
GeorgeS. Kaufman, who collaborated with Moss Hart in 1936 on the
hit play You Can't Take It With You, reunited with Hart to produce at
least three skits for the Follies and possibly a fourth. All of the Kaufman
and Hart contributions contain elements of war-related propaganda but
are less specifically rooted in the day to day reality of the factory or
shipyard production line. Instead, the themes expressed in these sketches
center on notions related to Americanism, support for the Allies, and
promoting a.greater animosity toward the enemy.
The first Kaufman and Hart skit, "Fun To Be Free," was an abbrevi-
ated adaptation of a Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur 1940 patriotic history
pageant of the same name, with additional music written by Harold
Rome.
19
Revised after Pearl Harbor, the full-length play was scheduled
17
Unidentified newspaper clipping, November 1942, American Theatre Wing
Scrapbook, Lincoln Center library for the Performing Arts.
18
Arlene Wolf, "Lunchtime Follies, S. R. 0.," New York Times Magazine, 11
July 1943, p. 18+.
19
For more information on the original production of the Hecht-MacArthur
pageant see my article "Fun To Be Free: Intervention Takes the Stage," journal of
American Drama and Theater 9, 1 (Winter, 1997): 36-53.
Lunchtime Follies 37
to open at the Adelphi Theater on Broadway in early 1942. However,
the revival of the pageant was delayed and finally canceled in March
1942 due to what the press labeled as internal friction.
20
Instead, "Fun
To Be Free,
11
a series of vignettes taken from moments in American
history when freedom was thought to be in jeopardy, became the
cornerstone of the first Follies presentation at the Wheeler shipyards in
Brooklyn.
"The Man Who Went to M o s c o w ~ ~ the second Kaufman and Hart
piece is described as "a spoof of Hitler's attempt to conquer Russia."
21
A newspaper photo found in the American Theatre Wing scrapbooks
shows comic David Burns dressed as Hitler, complete with mi l itary
jacket, arm band swastika, and fake moustache. The accompanying
caption reads, "Here Schicklegruber explodes as robot-l ike 'Nazi soldier'
tries to follow incoherent commands."
22
On its surface this sketch vilifies
and belittles the German dictator, making a fool of hi m, and according
to the New York Times, it was "probably the big moment of the
Foil ies.
1123
It is appropriate to note that underneath its comic surface the sketch
'-
was a reminder to the workers that Russia was bearing the brunt of the
ground war in Europe and at a critical stage in her struggle against the
Nazis.
24
This reminder was important because many of the armaments
manufactured in the United States were sent directly to the Red Army as
part of America's Lend-Lease commitment to Russia. The skit also
portrayed the German dictator as a ranting, maniacal nincompoop whose
illusions of grandeur, however humorous, posed a very real threat to
civil ization. Immediately following "The Man Who Went to Moscow,
11
a Harold Rome song, "Gee, But It's Cold in Russia," was inserted into the
program to underscore both the humor of the sketch and the Nazi's lack
of success in conquering either the Russian soldiers or the Russian winter.
20
{ n.a.], "Stage News," New York Times, 26 March 1942, p. 26.
21
Malcolm Goldstein, George 5. Kaufman: His Life, His Theater (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979), 362.
22
Unidentified newspaper photo found in the American Theatre Wing
scrapbooks at Li ncoln Center Library for the Performing Arts.
23
" Whistle While You Work," p. 22.
24
In the summer of 1942, the German forces in Russia began an offensive that
would result in the destruction of Stal ingrad, and the deaths of untold numbers of
Russian soldiers.
38
ROARTY
Minutes from the Wing's board meeting of 1 July 1942 note that
while "The Man Who Went to Moscow" and "Gee, But It's Cold in
Russia" were well received by the workers, board member Kermit
Bloomgarden expressed concern about their characterization of the
German leader. Bloomgarden "thought some of the skits presented at the
Shipyard were quite unfunny," and went on to suggest that "Hitler ought
not to be pictured in any way but as the dangerous menace he is."
25
The
presentation of Hitler as a comic character was, of course, already
familiar to Americans through Charlie Chaplin's 1940 film, The Great
Dictator.
The third Kaufman and Hart skit, "Washington, D.C.," was first
presented at the Todd Shipyards performance. This comic parody made
fun of government red tape, bureaucratic nonsense, and the overall
complexity of doing business in the nation's capitol during the early
stages of mobilization. Part of its humor came at the expense of the
government's ever expanding alphabet soup of war time agencies,
committees, and bureaus such as the WPB, OWl, OSS, WMC, OLLA,
ODHWS, and FDA.
26
By employing comedy to expose the wartime
waste of time, manpower, and materials, the vignette suggests that the
obstacles to an efficient prosecution of the war are merely logistical
complications and that they are readily surmountable. The comic skit
ultimately proclaims an entirely optimistic war-related message. The
fourth Kaufman and Hart sketch is The Paperhanger.
27
To date, no clear
evidence exists that positively confirms that the approximately ten minute
playlet was presented as part of the Follies. However, Malcolm
Goldstein, a biographer of GeorgeS. Kaufman, says that it was originally
written "for this [the Lunchtime Follies] and other agencies."
28
Since the
script meets the strict production requirements of the American Theatre
Wing's program, it is reasonable to assume that it was performed as part
of the Follies. Its inclusion in this study is particularly important because
25
"American Theatre Wing Minutes," 1 july 1942. In the collection of the
Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, New York.
26
The War Production Board, Office of War Information, Office of Strategic
Services, War Manpower Commission, Office of Lend-Lease Administration, Office
of Defense Health and Welfare Services, Food Distribution Administration.
27
GeorgeS. Kaufman and Moss Hart, The Paperhanger (New York: Dramatists
Play Service, 1943). The published script is printed on both sides of a single sheet of
paper. Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically by reference to page
number (1 or 2).
28
Goldstein, 362.
Lunchtime Follies 39
it is the only sketch of its type published as a complete text and offers the
best opportunity to examine the blend of comedy and propaganda typical
of so many skits presented in the Lunchtime Fol l ies.
The Paperhanger requires a cast of three men and only minimal
properties: a ladder, a bucket, a wallpaper paste brush, and two lunch
boxes. Two of the characters are costumed in white coveralls and the
third in a dark business suit. The dramatic locale is the home of wealthy
Mr. Blatz. The only scenic element required is a half-papered wal l,
probably represented by an unframed painted cloth drop. When the play
begins, one character is facing upstage, apparently in the middle of a
wallpaper job, and singing "I'll Be Loving You, Always." As the song
ends, the man turns around and the audience sees his face for the first
time. It is Adolf Hitler. Hitler stops working, sits on a nearby crate, and
begins to sob. Another laborer then joins him on stage and initiates the
following exchange.
WORKMAN. Why, Adolf, what's the matter?
HITLER. (Through his sobs) If only my mother was here. I miss
her so.
WORKMAN. (Sympathetically.) Aw!
HITLER. Every day, just about this time, I used to kick her in the
stomach.
WORKMAN. Your own mother?
HITLER. There was nobody else around.
WORKMAN. But my goodness, Adolf! What did she say when
you kicked her?
HITLER. "Heil Hitler!"
WORKMAN. You're a very strange man, Adolf. Yesterday you
threw a dog under a railroad train- why do you do such things?
HITLER. The dog looked jewish (1 ).
From the outset of the piece, Hitler is portrayed as a wimpy buffoon
and an anti-Semitic bully. Hitler's violence against his own mother and
man's best friend are clearly beyond the bounds of logical behavior.
Moreover, Hitler's rationalizations for these actions frame him as both a
megalomaniac and. a bigot. In subsequent exchanges with the workman
Schultz, Hitler calls his propaganda minister, joseph Goebbels, the
"biggest liar I ever met in my life, including me, " and labels Herman
Goering, the head of the German Luftwaffe, "a dope fiend but nice" (1 ).
As the action continues, Hitler steals from the workman, taking a big
beautiful apple, and offering in compensation " a l ittle bit of a wormy
apple" (1 ). In response to the workman's protests Hitler explains " There
40
ROARTY
are three reasons that make it right. First, I am bigger than you are,
second, I am a son of a bitch, and third, I wanted the apple" (1).
To make up for the unfair trade, Hitler suggests that they exchange
sandwiches. The workman hands over his bologna sandwich for what
Hitler promises is a "wonderful gooseliver [sic] sandwich with lettuce
and tomatoes and pickles" (1 ). In reality Hitler gives the workman
nothing but two slices of bread. Once again Hitler justifies his treachery,
this time pointing out that no one has dared to stop his villainy. "There
is one thing I can't understand about people," Hitler explains. "I tell
them I am a son of a bitch, I prove it to them a hundred times a day, and
still they don't believe me" (1).
The balance of the sketch is an allegory of Hitler's prewar manipula-
tion of Russia, England, and the rest of Europe. Hitler first convinces the
workman that if they murder Mr. Blatz, they can share ownership of his
impressive house. After they sign a contract to that effect, Hitler distracts
Blatz, and the workman kills him with a knife. Once the crime has been
committed, Hitler reneges on the agreement, claims the house for
himself, and forces the workman to finish the wallpaper job. Hitler tells
the workman that Goebbels and Goering have already raped the
workman's wife, and if he does not follow orders, they will give cocaine
to the workman's daughter and turn her against him as well . Hitler ends
the sketch by turning to address the audience directly.
Isn't it wonderful how they always believe me? It's not as
though I kept it a secret - I come right out and tell them what
I'm going to do. They just can't believe that anyone can be as
big a bastard as I am. You know, you can't tell how far a fellow
could go, with a nature like mine. If one man believes it, why
shouldn't a whole lot of men believe it? Why shouldn't whole
countries believe it? Yes, sir, I wouldn't be surprised if I've got
hold of something. I'll bet you it's going to work. I have an
intuition. Things are definitely coming my way. (And they are.
At that moment Schultz, [the workman] on the ladder above
him, crowns him with a whole bucket of paste) (2).
Kaufman and Hart bui It the sketch upon foundations of both verbal
and slapstick humor, but it contains an important history lesson as well.
Hitler's broken promises, coercion, and brutality recall the failure of
appeasement and diplomacy that held the hopes of many in the world
before the shooting war began. Blatz, like Poland and Czechoslovakia,
is killed because his house represents something the FUhrer says he
wants: "Lebensraum"(2). The authors do not characterize Schultz, the
skit's representative of the German people, as a willing participant in
Lunchtime Follies 41
Hitler's oppressions, but as a victim. It is possible that they intended this
portrayal to differentiate between the dedicated Nazi party members who
enthusiastically took part in the German subjugation of minorities and
those Germans who abhorred the Reich's atrocities but who took no
action against Hitler's brutal regime. Hitler's exploitation of the workman
in The Paperhanger and the violence directed toward the man's family
force Schultz into a reluctant submission. Only at the end of the sketch
does Schultz rise up against the tyrant and take his revenge. The
audience, even as they laugh at his comic madness, witness the tactics of
terror and belligerence used by the Fuhrer to subjugate first his own
people, and then an entire continent.
While broad comedy of this type was an important part of the Follies
presentations, it was not the only propaganda strategy employed by the
sketch writers. Kenneth White, author of the unsuccessful 1941
Broadway play, The Lady Who Came to Stay, collaborated with j. P.
McEvoy to contribute a more serious vignette that is based on a real event
in the European war. Entitled "Dnieperstroy," this sketch focuses on the
destruction of the ten-year-old Dnieper River Dam by Russian workers
and soldiers. Red Army General Semyon Budenny, "[a]cting under
personal orders of Premier joseph Stalin," oversaw the destruction of
"the most important source of power in Southeastern Russia ... releasing
tons of muddy, swirling water to flood the lowlands below the delta."
29
The heroic maneuver was undertaken to "render relatively stable terrain
useless" to the advancing Germans and cover the Russian retreat from the
Ukraine.
30
"Dnieperstroy's" dramatic portrait of a nation under attack by
the Nazi forces, and of the courageous Russian people and their
determination to survive no matter what the cost in property or human
life provided a poignant example of the kind of dedication and sacrifice
needed by workers on the American home front. Another sketch, "The
Destruction of the Dam," contributed by Warner Brothers writer Robert
Rossen, dealt with the same topic and became part of the Follies
repertoire in late October of 1942.
31
Maxwell Anderson provided an additional somber sketch to the
Follies that, unfortunately, resulted in some controversy for both the
program and the playwright. "A Letter from Daddy" is a sentimental
29
"Dnieper Dam Reported Blown Up by Russians; Citizens Arming On Appeal
to Save Leningrad; U.S. Considers Extending Credit to Moscow," New York Times,
21 August 1941, p. 1 +.
30
Ibid.
31
Unidentified newspaper article fragment, New York Times, 23 October 1942.
42
ROARTY
vignette based on an actual letter written by a navy pilot to his five-year-
old son. The letter was delivered shortly after the flyer went down with
his ship in the Pacific and was made public by his widow. Anderson's
dramatization of the mother reading the missive to her son was criticized
because he failed to acknowledge the letter's original author. Anderson
was also faulted because he expunged a section of the letter that linked
the Catholic religion with the flier's hope for his son's future. Although
Anderson's motive for this omission is not explained, it is possible that he
was concerned about stirring the anti-Catholic bias present in the nation
at the time.
In one Follies sketch, an unknown author established a humorous
connection between the work being done in defense plants and the
entertainment world of the celebrities. "Factory Footlights" was first
performed at the Eberhard and Gould plant in Irvington, New jersey in
September of 1942.
32
The skit parodied what would happen to
Broadway if they employed factory production methods on the stage.
The sketch's comedy provides much needed laughter, but more
importantly acknowledges the pressures and difficulties experienced by
the workers in the audience, and finally praises their dedication to the
production front. Other sketches known to have been contributed to the
Follies came from writers such as George Oppenheimer, Ham Fisher,
Zero Mostel, and many others. An article that appeared in the 10 june
1942 edition of Variety stated that the American Theatre Wing had
secured promises from more than fifty American writers to provide ten-
minute sketches for future Follies programs.
33
As women replaced American men on production lines, the songs
and sketches used in the Follies changed as well. Harold Rome, one of
the leading songwriters writing for the Follies, supplied a group of
musical numbers that paid tribute to the crucial contributions made by
women workers. Rome's song, "Solid, Solid, Suzabelle," "concerned a
damsel who was turned from less patriotic pursuits, ... to the production
of tanks, planes, and guns."
34
Another popular number dedicated to the
woman worker, "She Rolled Up Her Sleeves - She Hitched up Her
Hose," was the subject of a photo layout in the Omaha World-Herald for
32
[n.a.], "'Lunch Time Follies' Invades New Jersey, Lambs-Berlin Party," New
York News, 10 September 1942, [n.p.]
33
(n.a.], "1st 'Lunchtime Follies' Clicks at Shipbui lding Yard Near New York,"
Variety, 10 June 1942, p. 4.
34
[n.a.], "Entertainment for War Workers," Philadelphia Record, 23 September
1942, [n.p.]
Lunchtime Follies 43
14 February 1943. One image reproduced there shows a chorus of six
women singing the song, dressed in short skirts and kicking their legs
rockettes style. Although we would now view this image as sexist and
politically incorrect, at the time it was probably viewed as an important
acknowledgment of the women's contribution to achieving maximum
product output and considered a positive glamorizing of the woman's
role in the workplace. This sort of image was an important component
of the government's campaign to convince women workers that doing
factory work previously handled only by men would not affect their
femininity or make them less attractive.
35
Kurt Weill, the German refugee composer, not only collaborated
with American lyricists on many musical numbers for the Lunchtime
Follies, but also served as head of the program's production committee
as well. A song featured in the Follies and attributed to Weill and lyricist
Lewis Allen was a tribute to the American worker entitled, "Story of an
Inventory." It was first presented in 1943 at the Cramp Shipyard in
Philadelphia. Loosely based on the children's rhyme "The House that
Jack Built," the lyrics function as a reminder to the workers of how
important each step in the factory production process is to the overall
success of the American war effort.
A thousand ships were launched today,
A thousand subs are on their way,
A million planes are off, hooray! ...
When ships go sailing down the ways,
When bombers roar and cannons blaze,
When men pass ammunition, praise
The man that worked the drill
That screwed the bolt
That held the shaft
That turned the wheel
That ran the belt
That made the things
That built the plane
That held the bomb
35
For more information on this aspect of the government's recruitment campaign
see: Maureen Honey, "Remembering Rosie: Advertising Images of Women in World
War II," in The Home-Front War: World War II and American Society, Kenneth Paul
O'Brien and lynn Hudson Parsons, eds. (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1995) 83-
106.
44 ROARTY
That dropped on Hitler!
36
In production, as they sang each line, chorus girls dressed in blue tights
and red blouses held up oversized wooden props representing the items
mentioned in the song enabling the audience to join with the cast in
singing the refrain. They punctuated the final stanza of the song with a
realistic sound effect of a dropping bomb played over the sound system.
Another audience participation number used in the Follies was a
propagandistic version of the "Schnitzelbank" song. Using a large fabric
backdrop with words and pictures painted on it to guide the audience's
responses, the lead singer would introduce each stanza and the audience
would join in singing the expanding chorus.
Isn't this the setting sun, yes this is the setting sun Oapanese Flag)
Isn't this the done for Hun, Yes this is the done for Hun (cartoon
of a Nazi soldier),
Heroes True (American military men), Heroes too (American
workers with Union badges)
Kick in the Panzer (German Tank), The only answer (bomb),
Things to buy (War Bonds), Battle cry (National Unity), ...
37
Other songs included in the Follies during its operation were a gag
song that went under the title "For Defense," a musical number that
equated the front lines with the production lines, "A Soldier of
Production Now," and a Ted Mossman number usually accompanied by
a square dance, "Put Another Nail in Hitler's Coffin." Popular standards
that the audience could sing along with such as "Deep in the Heart of
Texas, " "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition/' and several African-
American spirituals, were occasionally included.
Factory and shipyard management hailed the Lunchtime Foll ies
program for giving their workers an effective break from the routine of
production line manufacture and for creating a greater sense of teamwork
among the workers. In a letter to Kermit Bloomgarden and the American
Theatre Wing, the management at Todd Shipyards praised the program
and noted, "to say that our men enjoyed it, to say that their morale was
helped greatly, and to say that they would like more of it, is but to be
36
Nichols, p. 21 .
37
[n.a.], "Lunchtime Follies," Rustless Recorder, January 1943. (The in-house
newsletter of the Rustless Ironworks) and [n.a.], "Lunch Time Show for RCA
Employees," Camden Courier (NJ), 21 September 1942, [n.p.]
Lunchtime Follies 45
trite; you and the many representatives of the Theatre Wing were present
to see how the men reacted to it."
38
james McGary, an employee at the Todd Shipyards, witnessed his
first Follies from a rooftop perch. In a 1942 PM Magazine article McGary
is quoted expressing his desire for more lunchtime entertainments and
acknowledging the program's quality: "I guess it's about the best
performance I ever saw .. . the men know they're getting big-time
entertainment. You can bet they really appreciate it."
39
The New York
World Telegram quoted Frank Castillo, a nineteen-year-old apprentice at
the same shipyard who agreed with McGary, saying, "Its wonderful .. .
they ought to have more of them ."
40
An article on the Follies appeared in Factory Management and
Maintenance in November of 1942 and outlined exactly how the editors
thought that the program benefited the nation's overall war production
effort. "Today it is generally agreed that the destiny of the United
Nations will depend as surely upon the morale of the man in overalls as
upon the man in uniform. Fatigue and boredom born of labor are as
dangerous as any secret weapon the enemy might employ ... this new
service ... is making a vital and significant contribution to the country's
battle for production."
41
Echoing this senti ment, an article in the 24 June
1943 issue of the American states, "You can't win a war if the morale on
the home front isn't tops, and the variety shows ... are the big morale
boosters on the production front."
42
By the end of 1943, according to Philadelphia Inquirer reporter
Stewart Asher, manufacturers had acknowledged that "as morale
sustainer and tempo tonic the shows are worth many times their financial
38
Letter to Kermit Bloomgarden, 27 June 1942, reprinted in "The American
Theatre Wing presents The Lunch Hour Follies for War Industry Workers. " (American .
Theatre Wing brochure apparently printed after the first two performances.)
39
[n.a.], "No Fun in War Work: Broadway Has a Cure," PM Magazine, 22 June
1942, [n.p.]
o [n.a.], "The Noon Whistle Blows and the Show i s On," New York World
Telegram, 22 June 1942, [n.p.]
41
[n.a.], "The American Theatre Wing Presents the Lunch-Hour Follies," Factory
Management and Maintenance (November 1942): 90.
42
[n.a.], "Lunchtime Follies," Cohoes American (NY), 24 June 1943, [n.p.]
46 ROARTY
outlay."
43
As industry looked forward to the end of the conflict and the
return to consumer-oriented production, leaders interested in keeping
productivity high considered several proposals that would continue to
offer entertainment within the confines of the factory. Writing for Variety,
George Rosen commented on the new relationship between business and
entertainment.
It's only since the advent of World War II that the value of
entertainment as a contributing factor in attaining highest
production levels in America has been recognized. Figures
reveal increased production directly attributable to the theater-
for-the-factory, with the industrialists who have booked the
Wing's 'Follies,' many of them for return engagements, now fully
convinced of the morale value of carrying this new tool into the
postwar period of reconversion . . .. Picking up where 'Follies'
leaves off, big business will retain the best proven features of the
wartime industrial show biz and mold the new addition to its
production line to fit the needs of private enterprise.
44
The Follies were extremely popular with both workers and business
leaders in the East. In response to industry requests, a similar Follies
program began on the West Coast using Hollywood writers and film
players. As many as eleven Lunchtime Follies troupes performed
simultaneously at the many munitions and aircraft production facilities
located there.
45
Original material for the West Coast Follies came from
such capable writers as Groucho Marx, jerome Kern, and Ira Gershwin.
Sketches and songs again served two purposes: entertainment and
education. For example, one musical number performed in the West
featured "The Fleagelholm Welding School" and Zelda the Welder. The
musical sketch "glorifies the woman in war work in boogie-woogie
rhythm."
46
"You Look Better to Me Now," another West Coast Follies
song, "romanticizes the girl on the assembly line who is more alluring in
43
Stuart Asher, "Lunchtime Follies for Workers in War Production," Philadelphia
Inquirer, (1943), [n.p.]
George Rosen, " Plan Mail-Order Show," Variety, 1 December 1943, (n.p.]
45
Although the format would have been similar to the East Coast Follies, it is
likely that on the West Coast, the Japanese would have been the most prominent
enemy portrayed in most of the Follies' presentations.
46
Wolf, p. 18.
Lunchtime Follies 47
overalls than in her party gown."
47
Clearly the West Coast Follies was
acknowledging the tremendous contributions made in airplane and
armament manufacture by thousands of newly employed women. The
latter of the two songs also seems to address the concern of many women
that the stress of factory work would make them somehow less appealing.
Hearing about the entertainment program's productive benefits,
Midwest manufacturers and workers expressed the desire for their own
Follies program, but the shortage of professional talent in the heartland
and the geographical distance between industrial centers made the
proposal problematic. In response to those appeals, however, the
American Theatre Wing offered two rather unusual variations of the
In December of 1943, the Wing announced the availability of
"Mail-order" Follies programs. Upon request, the Wing would send
scripts containing sketches, songs, and ideas for soliciting local talent to
interested factory groups. It is not known how well the mail-order
program fared, but its creation is a clear indication that plant managers
and industrial leaders recognized the value of entertainment as a practical
means of easing the pressure felt by workers on the wartime production
line and increasing product output. In July of 1944, the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers, in cooperation with the Theatre Wing, released a series of
records that featured leading entertainers performing material from the
Follies. Costing as little as fifteen cents each, "the platters [were seen] as
the answer to the American Theatre Wing's problem of.how to get the
lunchtime follies to out-of-the-way plants in the face of transportation
troubles and stars' booking problems."
48
The fame of the Lunchtime Follies program was so widespread both
within the manufacturing and beyond that it was almost
instantly incorporated into the popular culture of the period. For
example, in a Black Terror comic book published during the war, the
story's hero is seen fighting hand-to-hand with Nazi saboteurs in an
American industrial plant, while behind him, using the bed of a large
truck for a stage, a group of scantily-clad chorus girls dances for an
assembly of workers under a "Lunchtime Follies" banner.
49
In 1943, the
AFL and CIO sponsored a musical variety show at City Hall in New York
47
Ibid.
48
"Lunchtime Follies Put Out on Wax," Unidentified newspaper article, 20 July
1944. American Theatre Wing scrapbook, lincoln Center library for the Performing
Arts.
49
Black Terror, [n.p.], 1943. Single page found in the American Wing Scrap-
book, New York Public library for the Performing Arts at lincoln Center.
48 ROARTY
that featured an amateur all-labor union cast. One skit in the production
was the recreation of a Lunchtime Follies presentation. Another example
of the Follies being incorporated into other entertainments can be found
in the 1944 film Right Guy, which contained a scene set in a factory
where a Follies performance was in progress and provided background
interest.
The Lunchtime Follies was an extremely successful endeavor for the
American Theatre Wing. Using a variety of entertainment forms,
including songs, dances, stand up comedy, magic acts, novelty
musicians, and dramatic sketches, the men and women of Broadway,
Hollywood, radio, and the nightclub stages of New York brought much
needed, and appreciated, amusement to war industry production
workers. In cooperation with government and industry leaders many of
the popular entertainments presented by the Follies addressed important
national or production related issues such as absenteeism, job safety, and
quality control. The skits and songs that were brought to the workers
reinforced American commitment to her allies, acknowledged the bitter
real ities of life on the home front, and, if only temporarily, refreshed the
workers' spirits. Designated as "one of the most astonishing institutions
to come out of the war,"
50
the Lunchtime Follies prove that theater has
a unique potential to be both a therapeutic entertainment and a powerful
motivational force when propaganda is intimately linked with popular
amusement. Like the films, fictional stories, and radio dramas of the
period that characterized the seriousness of the crisis facing the nation,
the Lunchtime Follies sought to "inspire a feeling of collective
responsibility, selfless dedication to winning the war, and solid
identification of civilian activity with men overseas."
51
Although it was
only one element of the American Theatre Wing's wartime mobilization
of Broadway, we should remember it as one of the most creative and
valuable contributions to the American home front made by the men and
women of the professional theater during a time of extreme national
emergency.
50
Unidentified clipping found in American Theatre Wing scrapbook, Lincoln
Center Library for the Performing Arts.
51
Maureen Honey, Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda During
World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 83.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 11 (Winter 1998)
An I am Sheba me am (She be doo be wah waaaah doo
wah) O(au)rality, Textuality and Performativity:
African American Literature's Vernacular Theory
and the Work of Suzan-lori Parks
KIMBERLY D. DIXON
At first there would seem to be no more than a superficial connection
between African American literary theory's concern for the vernacular
and the work of African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Parks's
work resists the regularity of literature: her plays in performance are
much like a barrel of marbles of richly-textured language dumped onto
a stage and allowed to crash and bump and roll around freely; the actors
appear to be the primary source of the sound, not the script. It would
seem i 11-advised to attempt to apply the theoretical ideas of a body of
written literature to Parks's work, particularly those of vernacular theory,
which so often seems to tangle its attempts to acknowledge African
American culture's oral tradition in a reliance on the model of the written
text.
Even as I write these words, however, I realize that my familiarity
with Parks's work comes not through the premiere performance at the
Yale Repertory Theater which I was able to attend more than four years
ago, or even through some bootleg videotape, but primarily from their
published texts. I have heard Parks's words only rarely in an actor's
voice, more frequently in my own, but most often in the voice of the
page, audible only to my eyes. Yet I still say with conviction that Parks's
language lives best on its feet. How? Why? This essay is an attempt to
address the struggle between o(au)rality and textuality in contemporary
African American theater by measuring African American I iterary theory
of the vernacular against Parks's plays in both their written and performed
forms. In particular, I will explore the qualities of performativity which
seem to connect all sides.
50
DIXON
Molefi Asante states that in African thought, "force unifies what is
called form and content in creative expression."
1
This essay will focus
on performance and literary forms in Parks's plays in order to examine
the force or action of performativity. I will attempt to balance my
exploration of Parks's texts in performance with the continued awareness
that most of my assertions are based on the pub I ished plays. By
investigating the conflicts and correspondences between the plays'
textuality and o(au)rality, I hope to create a more complete picture of the
plays' performativity. This portrait could complement any understanding
of a vernacular tradition as a solely literary theory.
As one might expect, as a theatre scholar I base my notion of
performativity in part on certain characteristics attributed to theatricality.
I assume a certain immediacy to the performative, in that the theatrical
moment is designed to appear to be happening "right now.
11
Through
immediacy, the theatrical moment conveys a sense of its own i 'realness"
however temporary. It is this sense of immediacy and realness (or
isolated authenticity) that often links the theatrical moment to ritual.
Harry Elam, Jr. and Alice Rayner describe Parks's The Death of the Last
Black Man in the Whole Entire World as ritual: "The play . .. is more
than a 'portrayal' or imitation of a burial ceremony: it is the ceremony
itself, by which the Black male figure, having been repeatedly hunted and
executed, is finally given his funeral rites, his honor, respect and a re-
membered body."
2
Paradoxically, for all its authenticity, the performed
or theatrical moment is somehow apart from "real life," with a sense of
"heightened-ness" that distinguishes it from reality.
3
Keith Byerman
describes the separation in his discussion of contemporary black writers'
incorporation of performance into their understanding of folk culture:
Masking, role playing, 'signifying,' and other forms of black
performance all create a distance from certainty . ... Both the
content of cultural materials, in trickster tales and folk wisdom,
and the style in the double meanings of the spirituals and the
1
Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 198 7) 79.
2
Alice Rayner and Harry Elam Jr., "Unfinished Business: Reconfiguring History
in Suzan-Lori Parks' The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,"
Theater journal 46 (December 1994): 457.
3
See Voltaire's "A Discourse on Tragedy"
Suzan-Lori Parks
sexual metaphors of the blues, implicitly stress this putting off of
both origin and presence.
4
51
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that contemporary discussions of
performativity are in part the result of theater studies trying to move "o.ut
of (the) theater."
5
So, too, does my notion of the performative extend
past the boundaries of theater. The connection between my theatre-
based concept of the performative and the performative in a literary
context does not lie in the relationship that a play or novel has with
reality, however. No matter the style of either text, a play's text, a play's
visual and aural components will enable it to establish a connection to
immediacy and heightenedness that a novel cannot, while a novel's
intimacy can have a different, but equally powerful impact. Rather, the
unifying characteristic of performativity in these two settings seems to lie
in the action of causing such effects, not in the effects themselves.
The obvious presence of physical action and activity in theater's
performativity threatens to overshadow the sense of action in the
literature's performativity, however; it is easy to conflate actors' actions,
their movements around the stage, with the plays' actions as commen-
tary. Amiri Baraka, a poet and proponent of a vernacular tradition in
African American literature, felt that. his desire for "some kind of action
literature" could only be met through theater "where one has to put
characters upon a stage and make them living metaphors."
6
In fact, a play's performativity can be very similar to a novel's. In
Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance Tejumola Olaniyan discusses
drama's capacity to invent individual and cultural identity through
performativity. Olaniyan states that the performative "conceives identity
as open, interculturally negotiable, and always in the making-a
process," and that it "stresses the historicity of culture, that is, its 'made-
ness' in space and time."
7
I find it most useful to replace the words
"conceives" and "stresses" with "demonstrate" as a way of underscoring
4
Keith Byerman, "Making a Way of No Way: Folklore, Ideology, and the Shape
of Recent Black Fiction," In Figuring the jagged Grain (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1985), 5.
5
Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsy Sedgwick eds., Performativity and
Performance, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2.
6
Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of
Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 74.
7
Ibid., 4, 30.
' _, .
52
DIXON
the ideological-not literal-action implicit in Olaniyan's construction of
theater's ability to reveal qualities of culture and identity. With this
thinking, the demonstration could occur in the context of an actor
speaking and moving on stage, but it could also occur (differently)
through a character's speech and actions on the page. Form helps to
determine performativity's demonstrating action.
Thuh straps they have on me are leathern. See thuh cord waggin
full with uh jump-juice try me tuh wiggle from thuh waggin but
belt leathern straps: width thickly. One round each forearm.
Forearm mines? 2 cross thuh chest. Chest is mines: and it
explodin. One for my left hand fingers left strapted too. Right
was done thuh same. jump-juice meets me-mine juices I do uh
slow softshoe like on water. Town crier cries uh moan. Felt my
nappy head go frizzly. Town follows thuh crier in uh sorta sing-
uh long-song.
8
To begin, Parks's writing has an almost overwhelming o(au)ral
component to its performativity. Her language "sounds" unlike any
other playwright's language though she shares Ntozake Shange's
penchant for mutilated language as a means of representing African
American vernacular speech,
9
Parks's style is more jerky and syncopated
than Shange's. I use the verb "sound" advisedly. Parks's irregular
notation "sounds" a certain way to the reader through its distinctive
appearance, while at the same time, it "sounds" to an audience due to
the way it demands the actor speak it. For example, Parks frequently uses
vocal sounds as rhythmic yet meaningful punctuations in a character's
speech. As a result, Parks gives voice to her characters through recogniz-
able English, but combines the elements of sound, vocabulary, and syntax
in new ways. These innovations are definitely informed by African
American culture and yet are not limited by it; Parks's use of language is
grounded in African American vernacular but extends beyond political
definitions of articulateness to examine speech as a physical process:
8
Suzan-Lori Parks, The American Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1995), 108. All subsequent citations will be noted
parenthetically in the text.
9
"I cant count the number of times I have viscerally wanted to attack deform n
maim the language that I waz taught to hate myself in" Ntozake Shange, See No Evil:
Prefaces, Essays and Accounts. 1976- 1983 (San Francisco: Momma's Press, 1984),
xii.
Suzan-Lori Parks
I push the form because what I hear and see is so beautiful that
I want to give black actors a chance to do some of the things that
they don't often get invited to do .... I want them to have parts
that really challenge their instrument; not just their emotional
instrument, but their diction, their diaphragm.
10
Language is a physical act. It's something which involves your
entire body-not just your head. Words are-spells which an
actor consumes and digests-and through digesting creates a
performance on stage. Each word is configured to give the actor
a clue to their physical life. Look at the difference between 'the'
and 'thuh.' The 'uh' requires the actor to employ a different
physical, emotional, vocal attack. (11)
53
Parks's language can exert a similar active force on the listener. In his
consideration of the same drum-like "percussive intonations and varied
rhythmical patterns" of African American language which Parks works to
capture, Paul Carter Harrison states that "sound-sense of words tends to
have a power that transcends the fixed representation of a word in favor
of a sense-force which creates ideograms in verbal references, and which
reinforces the power idea of speech."
11
Parks's language has naturally been likened to poetry as a way of
situating her concern for her words' o(au)ral performativity.
12
Theater
critic Robert Brustein states that her language "exalts Black English into
a kind of poetic code [in] an effort to adapt English words to the Black
experience,'
113
while a New York Times critic states that it "captures the
10
Parks quoted in Sydne Mahone, Moon Marked and Touched by the Sun: Plays
by African-American Women (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994),
242.
11
Paul Carter Harrison, The Drama of Nommo (New York: Grove Press, 1972),
52, 54.
12
"Poetry is primarily oral utterance, and the end of a poem belongs in
somebody's ears rather than their eyes" says poet Etheridge Knight. See Ugo Rubeo,
"Voice as lifesaver: Defining the Function of Orality in Etheridge Knight's Poetry,"
in The Black Columbiad, Werner Sollars and Maria Diedrich eds. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1994), 276.
13
Robert Brustein, "Robert Brustein on Theater: What Do Women Playwrights
Want?" New Republic 206 (13 April 1992): 29.
54 DIXON
flow of ethnicity through language ... transforms patois into poetry."
14
Parks's regular collaborator, director Liz Diamond, views the playwright's
work as experimentation and play: "Parks reclaims the stage as rightful
home to a poetry that celebrates the theatrical possibilities of both word
and image ... her words are actors."
15
Again, Parks's performative language is perfectly suited to act as a
force on actor or audience, and in such a context it seems a direct
representation of African American oral or vernacular culture. What
happens when that performative force is bound by a written text? There
are simple complications, such as in the first lines of The Death of the
Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World in which the characters are
listed by names as each announces those same names. Needless to say,
this roll call is necessary in performance so that the audience is aware of
Parks's playful appellations, but in print it only reminds us that
performance is the play's ideal medium.
More significant, Parks's efforts to create a vernacular speech become
obvious in the printed evidence of spelling, punctuation, and letter case,
and through that artificiality, her language's effectiveness is challenged.
What may have sounded like natural speech to an audience member
familiar with Black English Vernacular (or even relaxed American English
in general) is shown in print to be quite unnatural. This realization can
lead to a reader's objections to Parks's decision to represent African
American vernacular speech in . this way, either because the
representation preempts an actor's expression of an individual form of
Black English Vernacular, or because it does not correspond to the
notations for vernacular speech (including standard writing) with which
that reader is familiar. Alisa Solomon states that Parks's language
employs everyday vernacular pronunciation "with a nod to lora Neale
Hurston's seamless welding of the 'folkloric' and the 'literary."
116
If
Solomon's folkloric tradition can be interpreted as a primarily o(au)rally
performative one, while the literary is meant to be textual, the welding
is not only not seamless, but it leaves gaps that can cause the whole
structure to buckle. The playwright's efforts to capture the viscerally-
affecting essence of African American vernacular speech are thwarted by
14
Mel Gussow, "Death of the Last Black Man," New York Times, 25 September
1990, sec. C, p. 15.
15
Liz Diamond, "Perceptible Mutability in the Word Kingdom," Theater 24
(Summer/Fall 1993): 86.
16
Alisa Solomon, "Signifying on the Signification: The Plays of Suzan-Lori
Parks," Theater 21 (Summer/Fall 1990}: 79.
.Suzan-Lori Parks 55
the opposing written medium she must use. Parks herself is aware that
the two forms are at odds:
At one time in this country, the teaching of reading and writing
to African Americans was a criminal offense. So how do I
adequately represent not merely the speech patterns of a people
oppressed by language (which is the simple question) but the
patterns of a people whose language use is so complex and
varied and ephemeral that its daily use not only Signifies on the
non-vernacular language forms, but on the construct of writing
as well. If language is a construct and writing is a construct and
Signifyin(g) on the double construct is the daily use, then I have
chosen to Signify on the Signifyin(g).
17
Parks's choice results in a representation not of everyday African
American speech but of historically contingent, heightened version of that
speech. Parks seems to pursue this friction in notions of authentic and
unauthentic representation as proof that she has achieved a dramatic
language performative on the dual levels of text and speech.
Another way to discuss the tension between o(au)ral and textual
performativity in the work of Suzan-Lori Parks is via her application of her
language. Parks's structure can best be understood as a musical
framework. However, it does not always match the blues tradition most
often associated with vernacular literary theory. Perhaps the strongest
similarity between Parks's language and a blues narrative tradition is in
her use of names; her characters wear their personalities as labels. By
and large, however, Parks's form is more like jazz than blues,
18
in
keeping with African American theater's musical tradition which has
favored jazz over blues as a narrative model. Says Harrison: "it is the
musical ear that most informs the language forged by poets and
17
Parks quoted in Solomon, 75.
18
Parks's plays also diverge from blues narrative expectations in their subj ect
matter. Unlike blues characters, Parks' s figures are largely asexual, and any sexual
metaphors that exist in the text remain unengaged. For example, Parks's The
American Play is set in and around "The Great Hole of History" but a Freudian
reading is never invoked. While Parks works with male and female figures, gender
and behavior surrounding those differences are never addressed outright, leaving the
impression of asexuality.
56
DIXON
dramatists of the eighties."
19
Since they work in the multidisciplinary
medium of theater, playwrights are drawn to jazz for its reputation as a
musical form more intricate and polyvalent than blues. African American
playwright Aishah Rahman is most articulate in her description of the jazz
aesthetic tradition in African American theater. She describes it as the
simultaneous expression of multiple ideas and experiences through
language, movement, visual art, and spirituality. Rahman explains that
the aesthetic "acknowledges the characters' various levels of the
magnified complexity of human existence often found in the lives of
representatives of historically oppressed groups.
20
(W.E.B. DuBois's
" double consciousness" metaphor remains appropriate.)
Parks's musical infl uence is evident not only in her performative
language, but in her play' s structure. She erects a skeletal framework for
each of her plays, often with shorter-length scenes and subtitles. (Again,
these labels would not be clear to an audience unless announced). Last
Black Man is divided into seven scenes. It begins with an overture, then
alternates_ between biblically-titled panels ("Thuh Holy Ghost, " "Thuh
Lonesome 3some,
11
"In Thuh Garden of Hoodoo It") and first, second
and final choruses; the ensemble scenes go up against the duets of Black
Man with Watermelon and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick.
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom is divided into five
independent sections, including a reprise of one, with four different sets
of characters with thei r own narrative, and subdivisions labeled by letter.
Even The America Play, which is conventionally divided i nto two acts,
is subdivided into titled sections for its second half. Parks's choice of
structure would seem to scatter her plays' narratives, but in fact it
regiments the reader or audience member's understanding of the piece' s
action. Even without benefit of scene titles, audiences can recognize a
change of setting or characters, and Parks often accompanies less obvious
changes with an audible cue such as a gunshot or ringing bell . Both
reader and audience member are able to recognize the play's overall
structure, much like listeners recognize a symphony's movements or a
song' s verses. Parks chooses an extremely simple external framework to
allow the maximum amount of room for experimentation once inside.
Hers are plays of floating characters who remain buoyed by the upward
thrust of their words.
19
Paul Carter Harrison ed., " Mother/Word: Black Theatre in the African
Continuum: Word/Song as Method," in Totem Voices: Plays from the Black World
Repertory (New York: Grove Press, 1989), xix.
20
Mahone, 283.
Suzan-Lori Parks 57
This is not to imply that Parks's plays are themselves regimented; one
of the characteristics they do adopt from a blues tradition is unresolved
tension. We never learn whether Black Man with Watermelon actually
dies at the end of Last Black Man, or the outcome of the. various
"families" in Imperceptible Mutabilities, and it is not clear whether the
Foundling Father and Lincoln impersonator who is the main character of
The America Play has been shot for the last time. Parks's endings feel
somewhat arbitrary, as if Parks's characters could go on spinning around
the stage/page forever. (This time the reader is at the disadvantage. The
fact that a text can be reopened and re-read, while a single performance
can never be regained, leaves Parks's written endings more open than her
performance endings. A production's performative language and
structure are aided in the action of-an ending by lights, curtains, and
applause, while the text's ending must stand on its own.)
Repetition in structure and language and the effects it allows are also
key to the performativity of Parks's plays as vernacular narratives.
Repetition too is related to the play's musical ties. I was able to
conceptualize the structure of Last Black Man as Overture, (so named),
A, B, A, B, A, B; of Imperceptible Mutabilities as A, B, C, B, D; and The
America Play as A, B 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Each repeated figure represents
a chorus, each new figure a variation. Parks is extremely articulate in her
description of her process of repetition and revision. I will quote her at
length:
"Repetition and Revision" is a concept integral to the Jazz
esthetic in which the composer or performer will write or play
a musical phrase once and again and again; etc.-with each
revisit the phrase is slightly revised. "Rep & Rev" as I call it2
1
is
a central element in my work; through its use I'm worki ng to
create a dramatic text that departs from the traditional linear
narrative style to look and sound more like a musical score ...
And in drama, revision is the thing. Characters refigure their
words and through a refiguring of language show us that they are
experiencing their situation anew. . .. [A] text based on the
concept of repetition and revision is one which breaks from the
text which we are told to write-the text which cleanly ARCS .
. . . Rep and Rev texts create a real challenge for the actor and
director as they create a physical life appropriate to the text. In
such plays we are not moving from A-> B but rather, for
2
' Is it merely coincidence that Parks's nickname for this technique holds an
implication of accelerated motion? Harrison would say no: "Repetition tends to
revitalize rhythms, thus adding to intensity of the word's force." See Harrison, 46.
58
DIXON
example, from A-> A-> A-> B->A. Through such move-
ment, we refigure A. And if we continue to call this movement
FORWARD PROGRESSION, which I think it is, then we refigure
the idea of forward progression. And if we insist on calling
writings structured with this in mind PLAYS, which I think they
are, then we've got a different kind of dramatic l iterature. (8-1 0)
So my notations for the three plays are more appropriately: Overture, (so
named), A, B, A, B, A, B; A, B, C, 8, D; and A, B 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
respectively.
Parks's "rep and rev," or as james Snead describes it "progress
within cycle, 'differentiation' within repetition," has a significance for her
plays' textual and o(au)ral performativity.
22
In performance a subtle
phrase or gesture can, with repetition, be transformed into a larger
metaphor. For example, at the close of the first panel in Last Black Man,
Black Woman with Fried Drumstick and Black Man have this exchange:
Black Woman: They eat their own yuh know.
Black Man: HooDoo.
Black Woman: Hen do. Saw it on thuh Tee V.
Black Man: Aint that nice. (109)
This exchange is immediately repeated at the start of the next panel, with
revisions; the same words are now spoken between Black Woman and
the rest of the ensemble. With that change-and an upper case
"HOODOO" for emphasis-the words change from simply performing
the practice of mis-conjugation in Black English Vernacular, to perform-
ing a political commentary quite possibly about media misrepresentation
of African Americans as savages, and the general population's compla-
cency about it. (This transformation works particularly well for the written
text, but the o(au)ral text could overcome any ambiguities with careful
inflection.) Such double meaning is typical in African American vernacu-
lar speech, and is therefore an example of a vernacular performativity.
23
Parks tells us that the refiguration of the concept of progression enables
small changes to have significant impact. While her explanation centers
on live performance, I think the reasoning is just as appropriate-if not
22
James A. Snead, "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture, " in Black Literature
and Literary Theory, Henry Louis Gates ed. (New York: Methuen, 1984), 67.
23
See, for example, Alan Dundes's discussion of American Negro folk speech
as verbal art in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, Alan Dundes ed. (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973), 245.
Suzan-Lori Parks 59
more so-for written texts that allow the recovery of lost moments: "[O]n
stage, as in physics, an event doesn't have to be big to be a big deal. In
the theater, someone can simply turn their hand palm up and that is an
event."
24
This performance practice raises (once again) a question of artificial-
ity. just as the transcription of Parks's vernacular language from speech
to page seemed to underscore the performative artificiality of her
language in both contexts, repeated language seems to have similar
effect. Where repetition in an on-stage performance often has the help
of varied inflection to make it sound more natural, in print the repeated
phrase is monotonously identical. Parks continues to revel in that
breakdown between natural and artificial language: "What does it mean
for characters to say the same thing twice? 3 times? Over and over and
over and oh-vah. Yes. How does that effect their physical life? Is this
natural? Non-natural? Real?" (1 0)
Without an organizing principle of repetition, true improvisation
would be impossible, as an improvisor relies upon the ongoing
recurrence of the beat. ... That the beat is there to pick up does
not mean that it must have been metronomic, but merely that it
must have been at one point begun and that it must be at any
point "social"-i.e., amenable to re-starting, interruption, or
entry by a second or third player or to response by an additional
musician.
25
Improvisation is the inevitable consequence of Parks's performed
repetition. Ugo Rubeo states that linguistic improvisation is "a common
prerequisite" for orality in his consideration of Etheridge Knight's
poetry.
26
I would argue that it is necessary in performativity as well.
Repetition provides the backbone which improvisation navigates in order
to counteract conventional forward progression. Snead states that "If
there is a goal ... it is always deferred; it continually 'cuts' back to the
start in the musical meaning of 'cut' as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated
break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a
willed return to a prior series."
27
In the o(au)ral or written text Parks
24
Solomon, 79.
25
Harrison, Totem Voices, xxvi.
26
Rubeo, 282.
27
Snead, 67.
60 DIXON
performs the action of creating a structure from which another layer of
performance can dive.rge. Parks demonstrates her improvisatory skill
through her manipulation of language in its written and spoken forms.
Parks's language readi ly evokes the musical origins of improvisation with
playful references to jazz with Queen-then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut's line
"An I am Sheba me am (She be doo be wah waaaah doo wah)
11
(116).
In this way the performativity of Parks's texts in reinforced: "Performance
also defers presence by emphasizing its existence as a form of discourse.
It is never reality, only a variation on it."
28
Parks best expresses the improvisational fluency and playfulness of
her plays' performativity in her use of signification. Signification
combines the action and effect of performativity in a direct connection to
African American vernacular culture and the literary tradition that stems
from it. Several examples of Parks's ability to signify have already been
mentioned in what Rayner and Elam name the "materiality of the
signifiers: spelling, sound, gesture
11
of her language.
29
Parks is also adept
at invoking tropes of African American vernacular culture-"Signifyin(g)
[is] the black trope for all other tropes, the trope of tropes, the figure of
figures. Signifyin(g) is troping"
30
-including, not surprisingly, the trope
of the Signifying Monkey. Parks's stated agenda for her language as a
representation of African America's history of literacy certainly frames her
as that figure; Gates's description of the signifying Monkey as "the figure
of a black rhetoric" in the African American speech community only
reinforces this connection:
He
31
exists to embody the figures of speech characteristic to the
black vernacular. He is the principle of self-consciousness in the
black vernacular, the meta-figure itself. Given the play of
doubles . at work in the black appropriation of the English-
language term that denotes relations of meaning, the Signifying
Monkey and his language of Signifyin(g) are extraordinary
28
Byerman, 5.
29
Rayner and Elam, 446.
30
Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 81 .
31
Since the Signifying Monkey is a male figure, Parks's first signification is
around gender.
Suzan-Lori Parks
conventions, with signification standing as the term for black
rhetoric, the obscuring of apparent meaning.
32
61
Still, the majority of Parks's signification occurs within the plays'
narratives. Her characters' names echo themes or represent character
types in black vernacular culture: in Last Black Man, for example, "Black
Man with Watermelon," "Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork," "Yes and
Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread" recall stereotypes about African
American eating habits; "Black Woman wHh Fried Drumstick" also
relates to the traditional mammy figure; "Queen-Then-Pharaoh-
Hatshepsu" echoes Afrocentric rhetoric about a royal African past; "Old
Man River jordan" is the figure of the wise old backwoods ancestor;
"And Bigger And Bigger And Bigger" the angry urban Black; and "Prunes
and Prisms" is the useless, overeducated middle-class Negro who
practices diction exercises "to cure .. . big lips." Parks also ironically
employs names for her white characters to create equally stereotypical
figures of white culture-Anglor and Blanca Saxon (Imperceptible
Mutabilities)-and "non-black" names for her black characters who are
consumed by white America: The Foundling Father (The America Play),
Aretha Saxon, Buffy, Muffy, and Duffy Smith (Imperceptible Mutabilities) .
In addition, Parks's protagonists Black Man and The Foundling Father
resemble the trickster figure, or Shine, in their ability to evade death.
Parks' s role as the Signifying Monkey, and her text(s) as extended
signification, are particularly apparent in an extended passage from Last
Black Man in which we "hear" a fanciful genealogy of the black race.
(121-124) First ancestor Ham's account of the various couplings and
progeny is as much a parody of the black vernacular's "dozens" language
game as a commentary on the garbled and inaccurate record of African
American history. (Ham, of course, is named after the Biblical black
figure supposedly responsible for the black race's historical servitude, yet
when the character is asked "Whose fault iszit?!!" Ham replies, "SAINT
MINES! -Ham. Is. Not. Tuh. BLAME!" (123)
33
32
Gates, 53.
33
Rayner and Elam suggest that Ham's monologue signifies on the construction
of writing; see Rayner and Elam, 459. While the passage may make some
commentary on literate culture as a part of the general commentary and Parks's work
as a whole may make regarding the tensions between orality and textuality, I find no
particular reference to writing here. In fact, Ham's recitation seems more a
commentary on the oral tradition in African American culture. Parks could be
recalling families' reliance on a single, older, relative to accurately remember the
details of family history, or she could again be revealing the artificiality in oral
traditions' language. Finally, because of Ham's biblical origins, and the tradition of
62 DIXON
Lest signification be seen as a rhetorical practice recognized only by
literary scholars, signification is also incorporated into contemporary
understandings of theatre and the performative. Olaniyan states that the
mode of representation which the theatre performative suggests "is
problematic and opaque, a mode that emphasizes the process of
signification, enmeshed as it is in determinate systems and institutions."
34
In her examination of theatricality, meanwhile, Erika Fischer-Lichte argues
that "theatre involves the 'doubling up' of the culture in which it is
played: the signs engendered by theatre denote the signs produced by the
corresponding cultural systems. Theatrical signs are therefore always
signs of signs."
35
Again, how does Parks balance issues of textuality and
o(au)rality in her plays' performativity? Despite her participation in a
performance discipline, Parks does not favor either o(au)ral or written
textuality; but explores each side's capacity for the performative, even as
she underscores their inadequacies.
Parks's ambivalence about the virtue and value of textuality is most
apparent in her new anthology The America Play and Other Works. In
it the plays show us how the playwright manipulates written language
and the accompanying essays on her writing process and aesthetic
augment this textuality. As in the plays themselves, the structure of the
book itself seems to be important: the book is organized into three short
essays to start, and followed by her plays in chronological order. The
essays record Parks's views on the origin of her play ideas ("Possession''),
her form and content ("Elements of Style"), and finally the social and
political implications of her work ("An Equation for Black People
Onstage"). One cannot help but interpret these essays as explanation for
the texts that follow. As a result, the plays' autonomous performativity as
written texts is short-circuited. A similar valorization of textual
performativity over o(au)ral performativity occurs within Imperceptible
Mutabilities. There Parks uses occasional footnotes to explain the dates,
phrases, or numbers with African American historical significance which
she has embedded into the play's dialogue. Unlike other footnotes in the
play, however, these notations are not to be spoken in performance. To
be aware of them, the audience would have to rely on a written form (in
traditions' language. Finally, because of Ham's biblical origins, and the tradition of
recording genealogies in a 'family Bible', Parks could be signifying on the act of
writing, but only in its attempts to capture orality. See also Gates, 131.
34
Olaniyan, 31.
35
Erika Fischer-Lichte, "Theatricality: A Key Concept in Theatre and Cultural
Studies," Theatre Research International 20, 2 (Summer 1995): 88.
Suzan-Lori Parks 63
a program perhaps). In fact, Parks's use of numbers generally seems to
favor written text; she uses numerals instead of the full word, even for
smaller numbers, a distinction only readers will see.
Parks occasionally allows a character to endorse written forms as
well. In Last Black Man, Yes And Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread
admonishes Black Woman, "You should write that down and you should
hide it under a rock. This is the death of the last black man in the whole
entire world" (1 02). And then later: "You wi II write it down because if
you dont write it down then we will come along and tell the future that
we did not exist. You will write it down and you will carve it out of a
rock" . (130). At the same time, however, Parks undermines our
confidence in the written word's verity. In Imperceptible Mutabilities
Miss Faith tells Aretha that the book (which book? does it matter?) says
Aretha's husband Charles is dead: "Sorry. Never to return. Sorry. That
is a fact. A fact to accept. The power of the book lies in its contents. Its
contents are facts. Through examination of the facts therein we may see
what is to come. Through the examination of what comes we may turn
to our book and see from whence it came" (47). Charles, of course, has
already appeared in a dream sequence, and continues to do so for the
rest of the section. Charles, like Black Man after him and seemingly all
of Parks's subjects of the written word, are represented by texts "writ in
water" (116).
As she examines the merits of written language, Parks also analyzes
the spoken word and how her plays function as performance texts. This
analysis is grounded in the black vernacular tradition's history of orality
an its consequent emphasis on the power of speech. "[T]he scholar,
rhetorician, or historian who undertakes an analysis of the black past
without recognizing the significance of vocal expression as a transforming
agent is treading on intellectual quicksand."
36
Although Asante bases his
examination of nommo-"the generative and productive power of the
spoken word"
37
-in an Afrocentric perspective, similar concepts have
preoccupied mainstream discourse on theater and performativity as well.
Asante contrasts his theory to that of Walter Ong, who attributes the
power of the spoken word to an o(au)rality that is actually evidence of
some force being exerted rather than a receptacle of the force itself.
38
Sedgwick examines the performative by way of Austin's notion of
36
Asante, 86.
37
Ibid., 17.
36
Ibid., 69.
64 DIXON
performative utterances as pronouncements.
39
Byerman, meanwhile,
interprets the concept of nommo as a force of agency or autonomy: "To
be able to render the experience, to give it, in effect, a name, is to bring
it into being and, by extension, to bring oneself into being as the narrator.
If the story ... concerns the struggle for the definition of black life, then
the narrative serves to expose the arbitrary semiotics of oppression and
claims, by its very existence, a victory for the black voice."
40
Parks adopts Asante's interpretation and frames speech as powerful
not for the exertion of power it evidences or sets in motion, but for its
inherent power as it "spells in our mouths" (11). "Words are things that
move our bodies, things we use onstage, and when we configure them
in a slightly different way, it's magic-literally."
41
Parks's characters
operate with the understanding that speech has real-life impact. In
Imperceptible Mutabilities Molly is fired from her job and expelled from
school because her lack of "Basic Skills" was against company policy:
"Straight up. 'Talk right or you're outta here!' I couldnt. I walked" (26).
Because spoken words have power Parks's is sparing in her use of stage
directions: "The action goes in the line of dialogue instead of always in
a pissy set of parentheses. How the line should be delivered is contained
in the line itself. Stage directions disappear" (15). At the same time,
Parks's characters often describe on-stage action as it happens, as if
conjuring it. Black Man frequently narrates his own activity, as in the
refrain and accompanying gesture "The black man moves his hands"
(1 01) and his self-conscious laughter: "Ha ha ha. The black man laughs
out loud" (103). I also interpret Parks's regular use of invented verbs as
additional evidence of her (vernacular) belief in the power of words, if
only for the way these inventions underscore word-as-action: "Tonight
I dream of where I be-camin from" (54); "Mm gonna be down n out.
Make downin n outin my livelihood" (28) .
Even as Parks endorses the concept of nommo and speech as power
in action, a moment in her short monologue Pickling hints at the
impermanence of speech as a factor in its effectiveness. In the
monologue Miss Miss describes how she has captured a favorite
performance in a jar:
lve got it right here. On thuh top shelf. Hasnt spoiled-oh
no-see? The lid on this one is very tight. Taut. Charles
39
Parker and Sedgwick, 4.
40
Byerman, 6.
41
Mahone, 243.
Suzan-Lori Parks
tautened thuh lid. My farewell dramatic performance. Well
wrought. Lots of sighs init. -NoMissMissdontopenit: airll get in
and it will spoil! dont want it tuh spoil! dont want it tu waste
there are people right next door going without! put it back Miss
Miss put it back! (95)
65
Though Miss Miss was able to preserve the power of her words, she can
only re-experience that power through memory, second-hand. It is not
difficult to see a correlation between Miss Miss's pickled jars an the
inevitable performative dormancy in Parks's written notation of her
plays.
42
What, if any, resolution exists to Parks's predicament?
Apparently the playwright herself has decided that there is no answer,
and has chosen instead to explore the paths of the questions. If Parks
reveals in the gaps between her written and spoken text and between the
act of writing and the act of speaking. By using these and other
opportunities to examine the relationship between textuality and
o(au)rality in her plays' performativity, Parks is able to adopt an
intertextual approach to the vernacular tradition in African American
literary theory that exists almost completely within the boundaries of her
own body of work.
A coda: Miss Miss warns us that her performance must be preserved
because there are people next door going without. Apparently, there is
not yet a market for performance in Miss Miss's reality that would enable
everyone to have his or her own jar of pickled performativity. One
element of Suzan-Lori Parks's intertextual examination of performativity
and vernacular tradition which I have not considered here is the
connection between her own commodification and the way in which her
audiences negotiate her two types of texts. As Parks's reputation has
grown, there have been more and more readers who have also seen a
live production and more audience members who have also read her
collection. It would be interesting to see how the audience's awareness
of the existence of the "other'J text impacts it understanding of the one
at hand, and whether Parks has begun to change her strategies of
highlighting the strengths and limits of textuality and o(au)rality in either
site in light of this development. The commercialization of Parks's plays,
process, and aesthetic could also affect her perceived relationship to an
African American vernacular tradition. As Parks's style becomes more
well-known, some could see it as more vulnerable to being appropriated
and more removed from "the folk." This would again raise the issue of
4 2
Parks also uses photography as a metaphor for the elusiveness of active
moments; in Imperceptible Mutabilities both Aretha Saxon and Mr. Sergeant Smith
must rely on pictures to record their lives; see Parks, 46.
66
DIXON
artificiality obstructing potential authenticity in the performativity of
Parks's works.
I would argue that the likelihood of a broadening audience poses no
real threat to Parks's works and strategies. Readers and viewers who are
sensitive to the tension between o(au)ral ity and textuality as they play out
in her examples of contemporary theater would simply be provided more
opportunities to observe the conflicts and correspondences between the
two modes available for her exploration. Meanwhile, those less-sensitive
audiences who are newly introduced to Parks's work would not
jeopardize the integrity of the plays, even if they are unable to fully grasp
or appreciate that duality. After all, Parks's work has proven itself
capable of maintaining its aesthetic integrity in the face of audiences who
might prefer a simpler treatment of orality, textuality, and performativity.
One could argue that there are few sites in which the contemporary
African American woman playwright is more likely to be subject to
appropriation and losing touch than the very visible and mainstream
venues of the Yale Repertory Theatre, New York's Public Theatre, and
Hollywood in which Parks has been showcased.
43
In light of this, it is
unlikely that Parks will suddenly sever the ties to African American
vernacular speech, culture, and l iterary traditions which she has been
able to protect thus far.
43
Parks wrote the screenplay to Spike Lee's film Girl 6, 40 Acres and a Mule
Production, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1996.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 11 (Winter 1999)
Issues of Identity in Broken Class:
A Humanist Response to a Postmodern World
SUSAN C. W. ABBOTSON
The final quarter of the twentieth century has been marked by a
popular insistence on the evaporation of meaning in people's lives.
Arthur Miller responds to this mood with a resounding "No"-he insists
that meaning still exists and through the plays he has written during this
period suggests how it can be reinstated. His plays, from The
Archbishop's Ceiling to Broken Glass, form a counter-tradition and
attractive alternative to the influential, but increasingly unsatisfying,
de-humanizing theories of postmodern critics such as Frederic Jameson
and jacques Derrida.
Though set in 1938 in the wake of "Kristallnacht," Broken Glass,
Miller' s most recent play, responds to problems which have not
evaporated for a 1994 audience, but have become more urgent. . As
Miller tells Charlie Rose: "In each of us, whether recognized or not, is
that same bloody ethnic nationalism. This is not coming from the moon.
This is coming from us. And we have not come close to even confronting
this thing."
1
The notion of difference, when pursued too stringently and
unalloyed with the acceptance of universal humanity, can lead to
unnecessary fragmentation, harmful restrictions of the individual, and the
destruction of society as a whole. Written in the shadow of atrocities in
Rwanda and Bosnia, Broken Glass conveys the necessity of a humanistic
response to the contemporary world we inhabit.
Miller sees Nazism as defined by its strong conformist pressure,
chilling technological power, and erosion of autonomy-all of which led
to people being stripped of their humanity. Such a description all too
closely resembles the objectified picture the postmodern critic, Jameson,
creates of our contemporary society in Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism, where he announces the death of individualism,
1
Arthur Miller, interview with Charlie Rose, The Charlie Rose Show, Public
Broadcasting System, 31 August 1994.
68
ABBOTSON
"symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical production"
2
by
which all becomes identical and exists without individual identity,
choice, or spirit. Yet Miller clearly resists such forces, just as he insists
the Nazi regime should have been resisted.
Miller's plays affirm the presence of a moral and humanistic impulse
which is absent from the social vision which passes "beyond man and
humanism" described in Derrida's Writing and Difference.
3
"My effort,
my energy, my aesthetic," Miller has declared, " is to find the chain of
moral being in the world."
4
As the threat of an amoral, alienating world
has escalated, so has Miller's resistance become more focused and
forceful. His later plays are fruitfully read as an artist's efforts to redefine
the postmodernist trend toward disjunction and otherness into a culture
of connection and self. Such a direction corresponds with a more
positive mode of postmodernism which is developing among critics like
John McGowan and Alan Wilde. It is a mode which maintains a
humanistic and ultimately optimistic outlook through social commitment
and irony, while acknowledging the contingencies and uncertainties of
modern existence.
Aware of critics like William Spanos, who reject humanism as an
excuse for imperialism, Alan Wilde in Middle Grounds calls for a more
flexible "contemporary humanism" which can claim, in answer to such
criticism, "not that man is the measure of the world's meaning but that
he is its agent or partner in the task of bringing meaning into being."
5
Thus, we move away from a culture which privileges the individual
above social concerns toward a culture which John McGowan describes
in Postmodernism and Its Critics as "semi-autonomous," where the
individual and the communal society bear equal importance.
6
Indeed,
each is dependent upon the existence of the other. Without the diversity
inherent in individual input, any society becomes stagnant and lifeless.
2
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991 ), 15.
3
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, Alan Bass trans. (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1978), 292.
4
Arthur Miller, quoted in Arthur Miller and Company, Chris Bigsby ed. (London:
Methuen, 1990), 178.
5
Alan Wilde, Middle Grounds: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 128.
6
John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1991), 154.
Broken Class
. 69
However, a protective social structure is necessary for individuality to
flourish. Miller's plays, which present characters striving to understand
this complex balance between individual and social needs and interests,
clearly fulfil the demands of both Wilde and McGowan. A moral
responsibility for others and the self is the core of Miller's lesson: to
neglect either personal or social responsibility is tantamount to
self-destruction. But a moral responsibility can only be fully recognized
by those who have an understanding of their own identities as individuals
and as members of a society.
In order to act purposively and meaningfully people need to
recognize their own identities, which involves, McGowan tells us, "a
reconciliation to the necessary social bases of the self, a construction of
identity that manages ... to tie together the self's various social roles."
7
Thus, we acknowledge that individual and social identities are first,
inextricably connected, and second, humanly created constructs. As
Miller states: "I'm under no illusions that people really invent themselves.
They do to a degree, but they're working in a social matrix."
8
Social
identities tend to be externally imposed and defined by the
"community," while, as McGowan suggests, "the self-identity is
formulated in relation to others," but is ultimately controlled by the
experience and choices of the individual.
9
If a subject is unable either to
recognize her relation to others or to make the necessary independent
choices in creating her own identity, the consequences are damaging,
both to the self and to the community. In the premiere production of
Broken Class at Long Wharf, each scene began with a single freezing
spotlight on the scene's central character before raising the other lights.
This served to highlight the idea that we are individuals first and need to
come to terms with our individual identities; only then can we become
effective in the community at large, a community which is shown to
stretch beyond the shores of America.
In Miller's world, it is important that one take responsibility even for
things one cannot control, as a refusal of responsibility is ultimately a
refusal of humanity. Ignoring responsibilities, either personal or social,
will interfere with an individual's ability to connect. Miller has declared
that, through his plays, he tries "to make human relations felt between
7
Ibid., 246.
8
Arthur Miller, quoted in James j. Martine, Critical Essays on Arthur Miller
(Boston: Hall, 1979), 180.
9
McGowan, 244.
70
ABBOTSON
individuals and the larger structure of the world."
1
Citing the sense of
connection evident in Elizabethan drama, he admits that such a sense is
lacking in the contemporary world, but suggests it can be reformulated:
"We have to invest on the stage connections that finally make the whole.
For they exist, however concealed they may be."
11
An event like the Holocaust involves everyone; there can be no
turning away without cost. The denial, resignation, or ignorance we
observe in Broken Glass is tantamount to complicity. Non-action, Miller
informs us, whatever its rationale, becomes destructive when it allows
certain other actions to occur. Thus the theme of potency vs. impotency
is central to the play. Though Miller represents this theme mainly as a
sexual problem, he wishes it to be seen as affecting every aspect of life.
Of what use is Doctor Harry Hyman's evident potency when he himself
is incapable of true commitment or fidelity to either his culture or his
wife? Of what value is Phillip Gel Iburg's commercial success when he
understands so little of who he is and what he does? Of what use is even
Sylvia Gellburg's compassion when she has lost touch with her own
selfhood so much that she no longer retains even the capacity to stand?
This play explores the complex notion of humanity's dual identity and
points out the necessity of balancing self-awareness (individual identity)
and a sense of security through connection to others (social identity), a
balance which allows people to live with dignity and direction.
Neither Hyman, Gel Iburg, nor Sylvia have attained a proper balance,
and each represents a different aspect of failure. Miller wants us to
recognize and learn from their mistakes. Their reactions to
"Kristallnacht" are indicative of their failures and differences. Though
managing to be somewhat self-aware, Hyman refuses to acknowledge the
true identity of others and views the Germans with nostalgic pleasure
rather than seeing them as dangerous killers. His sense of connection is
severed by his own selfish needs. Gellburg may accept the truth of
events, but he refuses to allow them any relevance in his own I ife for he
lacks both self-awareness and community spirit. Sylvia fully recognizes
her communal identity and insists upon a connection, both personally
and humanistically. However, she has lost touch with herself, which has
led to a symbolic, but also literal, paralysis.
In contrast to the pinched, repressed Gel Iburg, Hyman seems full of
life, a romantic hero, who even rides a horse. But as Stefan Kanfer
observes, Hyman's horsemanship may also be revealing "some conflicts
10
Arthur Miller, quoted in Conversations with Arthur Miller, Matthew C.
Roudane, ed. Uackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 171.
" Ibid., 172.
Broken Class 71
in his own life. The physician turns out to be an embodiment of Isaac
Babel's observation, 'Put a Jew on a horse and he's no longer a jew."
112
We should take early warning when Hyman informs us that doctors are
often "defective" and look for Hyman's defect. Christopher Bigsby
points out that Hyman's "appetite for life" makes him "vulnerable to his
own passions."
13
Hyman is a selfish man. john Peter declares: "Miller
knows that those who are good at questions are not always good at
answers; behind Hyman's breezy articulacy there is a barely perceptible
undertow of hesitation, of vulnerability . .. Healers, Miller is saying, can
be as frail as their patients."
14
Hyman enjoys asking questions of others,
but he finds it far harder to question himself, preferring to remain in
ignorance of his own selfish motivations.
Hyman may have a capacity to enjoy life (which the Gellburgs have
lost a long time since) but he is dissatisfied with the quality of that life, a
dissatisfaction which leads him to flirtation and adultery. Partly a
reaction against encroaching mortality (an attempt to relive and revive the
youthful vigor with which he pursued girls like Roslyn Fein), his
adulterous behavior is also an attempt to boost his dwindling feelings of
self-importance. As he tells Gellburg: "Some men take on a lot of
women not out of confidence but because they're afraid to lose it."
15
We
need to question Hyman's sexuality and sense of responsibility, for both
are highly suspect. For all his life force, his marriage is as barren of
children as it is of true commitment. Hyman may be self-aware,
understanding his insecurities as much as he fears them, but he is unable
to do more than build a smoke screen with that knowledge because he
is unable to make any real connection. Hyman admires Sylvia's sense of
connection and is drawn to it, but how she achieves it is a mystery to
him. Hyman is left hanging at the close as an illustration of those
individuals for whom answers are ever out of sight, despite their ability
to ask questions, due to a fundamental lack of commitment in their lives.
12
Stefan Kaner, "On Stage: A Hit and Three Misses," New Leader 75 (May
1992): 21.
13
Christopher Bigsby, "Miller's Journey to Broken Class, " in program notes for
production of Broken Class at Long Wharf (1 March 1994- 3 April 1994), 23.
14
John Peter, "A Raw Slice of Humanity," Sunday Times, 14 August 1994, sec.
10,p.21.
15
Arthur Miller, Broken Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 78. All
subsequent references cited parenthetically in text.
72 ABBOTSON
Hyman is, as described by Michael Kuchwara, "the spokesman for
complacency in the play."
16
When problems loom, be it his wife's
displeasure or Nazi oppression, he creates an illusion to protect himself
and to prevent him from having to really address the problem. Hyman
has a history of infidelity and it becomes increasingly clear that he is little
better as a doctor than as a husband, despite all of his pretensions to care.
Hyman's wife Margaret suffers as much from her husband's potency as
Sylvia does from her husband's impotency. Hyman's psychiatric
treatment of Sylvia, telling her to focus her concentration on her legs to
awaken their power, borders on the Telling Gel Iburg he needs
to show his wife a little more love is like placing a band-aid on a
gangrenous wound.
17
He needs to dig deeper to uncover the true extent
of the disease, but such digging might necessitate real commitment; so his
diagnoses tend toward inaccuracy as he simplifies issues to suit his own
narrow, personal view of the world. This is hardly surprising from
someone who so patently lacks a true vision of social obligation.
Hyman acts at being a part of the community by taking on a
neighborhood practice, but as his wife points out: "Why, I don't know
-we never invite anybody, we never go out, all our friends are in
Manhattan" (6). His capacity to create illusions makes him attractive, but
it also leads him to hide from certain necessary truths, such as what was
really going on in Germany. His simplification of opera ("either she
wants to and he doesn't or he wants to and she doesn't. Either way one
of them gets killed and the other one jumps off a building" [94]), is an
indication of his reductive level of response to everything; it precludes
any necessity for deep commitment and leads to an easier (if somewhat
shallow) life. Like too many early reviewers of the play, he looks for easy
answers and thereby vastly simplifies the couples' problems, stereotyping
them and reducing the fundamental importance of what they must both
attempt to face.
The play's title invokes the idea of the multiple reflections one sees
in a broken mirror, each related yet unique in its own perspective: a
powerful symbol to illustrate the relationship between the individual and
16
Michael Kuchwara, "Review of Broken Glass," Associated Press, 25 April
1994, [n.p.]
17
Hyman is not the voice of appropriateness or a model of behavior as certain
critics have intimated. See Benedict Nightingale, "Smashed Certainties," Times
(london), 6 August 1994, sec. E, p. 5; John Simon, "Whose Paralysis is it, Anyway?"
New York, 9 May 1994, in New York Theatre Critics' Review 55 (1994): 128; and
Linda Winer, "Arthur Miller's Morality Soaper," New York News Day, 25 April1994,
in New York Theatre Critics' Review 55 (1994): 132.
Broken Glass 73
society.
18
The glass on stage in both the New York and London sets was
significantly never broken since the Gellburgs' resentments and worries
are continually bottled up as neither seeks to understand the other. Their
suffering stems in fact from their inability to break the glass which
surrounds them. Appearances are upheld and personal feelings repressed
as they try to live their lives as good middle-Class "Americans." As the
Gellburgs' lives constrict, we see a connection between them and their
Jewish counterparts in Europe who were being froz-en into ineffectuality
in the ghettos and the millions outside who refused to get involved. The
Gellburgs need to face and overcome both the chaos of a dehumanized
world as represented by the escalating Nazi horrors and their own
inhuman relationship, inhuman for its lack of true communication and
connection. To do this, each needs to face and come to terms with his
or her own identity.
For people supposedly trying to be frank with each other, the play's
characters are poor communicators. Though Sylvia, finally, will speak
openly and directly to her husband, we must remember that this is only
after twenty years of self-imposed silence. Gellburg and Hyman are
equally self-restricted in their attempts to communicate. At one point
Gellburg attempts to dismiss Hyman, mainly as a result of his
self-consciousness regarding his impotency. Hyman's passionate
response, instead of calming Gellburg, serves to make him even more
uneasy. Failing to communicate, Hyman does not react to Gellburg's
18
The "Broken Glass" of the play's title has been variously interpreted. It is
certainly intended to bring to mind the shattered windows of Kristallnacht. David
Richards suggests that it alludes to a marital row where dinnerware gets smashed. See
David -Richards, "A Paralysis Points to Spiritual and Social Ills," New York Times, 25
Apri I 1994, in New York Theatre Critics' Review 55 (1994): 129. However, we
realize that one of the Gellburg's main problems is that they have never allowed
themselves to release their frustrations so satisfyingly. It may allude to the glass the
bridegroom breaks at a Jewish wedding ceremony as Jeremy Gerard suggests,
although he is incorrect in explaining the act's symbolism as a "celebration of the
hoped-for performance of the marital vows." See Jeremy Gerard, "Review of Broken
Class," Variety, 25 April 1994, in New York Theatre Critics' Review 55 (1994): 128.
The various Rabbinic explanations for the breaking of the glass-from being a
reminder of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem to being a symbol of our
imperfect world-all seem to involve some sadness. This symbol of sadness, so
prominently displayed on a joyous occasion, serves as a reminder of the duality of
human existence. We may celebrate, but others are mourning; we may enjoy peace,
but others are suffering war. This world view is not pessimistic, but basic to Judaism,
which recognizes that all is not perfect. This is why observant jews feel commanded
to work for the improvement of this world and the enrichment of the lives of all its
inhabitants. This altruistic aspect of judaism is something both Gellburgs have
forgotten.
74
ABBOTSON
fears but to his own: he feels guilty for having flirted with Sylvia and
thinks Gellburg may suspect. Each isolates himself from the other by his
own self-involvement, and confusion results as each fails to recognize the
other's feelings of guilt and inadequacy. It is such failures of
communication that lie at the heart of the play's aura of ambiguity. There
are declarations and conversations throughout the play which are filled
with ambiguity as unresolved as the ending. For example, Sylvia's
sudden cry, "What is going to become of us?'' (106), leaves us wondering
whether she refers to humanity, her relationship with her husband, or her
relationship with Hyman.
Both Gellburgs avoid their personal needs and fears by immersing
themselves in either work or the home. Their problems fester and grow,
perpetuated by their mutual silence. Each secretly holds the other to
blame: Gellburg see his wife as emasculating and Sylvia sees her husband
as tyrannical. As john Lahr points out: "They're both right, and they're
both wrong. What' s true is the psychological dynamic, in which blame
becomes a way of not dealing with unacceptable feel ings."
19
Neither has
been fully honest or supportive of the other. Gellburg is too wrapped up
in his own divisions to tell Sylvia how much he loves her, or allow her
the freedom she wants. Allowing her to work would have broken the
control he feels he needs to assert to give him a sense of security. Having
married a provider for the sake of her fami ly, Sylvia is full of regret, but
instead of speaking out, she maintains a twenty year silence during whi ch
she helps drive her husband to impotency.
Gellburg's problem is far more complicated than Hyman's picture of
him as a self-hating Jew. Declaring himself and his son to be the first or
only jews to do this and that, he seems not embarrassed but proud of his
jewishness. But is he proud of his achievements as a jew or despite his
jewishness? The answer to this question is kept deliberately ambiguous.
Partly due to his recognition and fear of American anti-Semitism/
0
Gel Iburg has tried to sever his connection with other jews, yet his own
jewishness is unvoidable: he has a Jewish wife, he speaks Yiddish, he is
prone to jewish folk beliefs, and his achievements mean more, either
19
John Lahr, "Dead Souls," New Yorker, 9 May 1994, in New York Theatre
Critics' Review 55 (1994): 125.
20
As a character, Stanton Case, Gel Iburg' s ruthless boss, seems rather stereotyped
as the WASP anti-Semite, a not-so-subtle inversion of the more usuall y stereotyped
minority, such as the Jew. He passes his time at the yachting club while Gel Iburg
does all his dirty work, then discards the Jew swiftly after his usefulness is over. Thus
the play points out that while we bemoan (and some even try to deny) the Holocaust,
America herself was c;1t the same period a hotbed of anti-Semitism so strong as to even
turn Jews like Gel Iburg against themselves.
Broken Class 75
way, because he is jewish. But also, like Hyman, Gellburg is so
self-involved that he has no place for a community in his life. Even
though he has striven to be accepted there, he cannot feel comfortable in
the anti-Semitic American community, nor is he happy in the jewish
community for which he feels such antipathy. What is worse, Gellburg
has no place in the larger community of mankind, for, unlike Hyman, he
has no sense of himself anymore, and has lost touch with his own
humanity. .
The play's lessons regarding how to be a good jew are as much an
illustration of the wider issue of "how to be a human being, to live a
human life, grasp the shames and responsibilities of being human and
deal with the fears inherent in being human."
21
This places Gel Iburg's
difficulties into the more universal framework Miller continuously has in
mind. As Miller has said, Broken Class is a play about people who are
"fleeing from their identity and trying to go toward it at the same time ..
. . In this case they're jews, but this is obvious, I think, it's anybody's
identity."
22
Gel Iburg may have problems as a Jew, but they stem from his
problems as a human being.
In one sense, Gellburg's inner mirror has become shattered; he has
lost touch with who he is, and even whom he would I ike to become.
Louise Doughty suggests that Gellburg sees everything-Kristallnacht, his
wife, and the world-"through broken glass," which is why he cannot
make the right connections.
23
Furthermore, he breaks down whenever
he is pushed to a point where he may have to break his self-imposed
silence and speak out and face his problems. He is doubly caught: first,
between his own judaism and the popular idea of America as a melting
pot and second, between his own rejection of his jewishness and the
anti-Semitism he sees around him. Anti-Semitism is not something he has
created; it lies all around him. His response to it is to try to see himself
as unique, insisting on his unusual name and Finnish origins. However,
such a response is inadequate, for it is done to avoid becoming part of
communities he views with ambivalence; it is an empty identity he is
creating.
The blackness of Gellburg's dress and the paleness of his complexion
emphasize the emptiness inside the man. He is, as Miller says, "in
mourning for his own life," and it is a life he himself is largely
21
Peter, 21 .
22
Miller, interview with Charlie Rose.
23
Louise Doughty, "Shard Time: Night and Day, " Mail on Sunday, 14 April
1994, p. 30.
76 ABBOTSON
responsible for stifling. Reservedly stiff and "proper" (until the more
truthful realities of his life start to insist on recognition) Gellburg offers up
glimpses of inner torments in his outbursts of anger and his hesitancies.
His pent up anger conveys an increasing sense of threat. Even in silence,
his dark, brooding presence on stage commands attention as we wait to
see if he will explode. Internally, Gel Iburg is a mass of contradictions he
finds it hard to control. He has lost the ability to connect and
communicate to Sylvia how he feels about her. We are constantly told
that he loves and even adores his wife, and the difficulty he has admitting
this to Sylvia is related to his fear of such uncontrollable feelings that he
stifles and twists but is incapable of destroying. Revealing flashes of
violence as he throws a steak at his wife or pushes her up the stairs, he
is also capable of great tenderness, but he continually suppresses both
sides of his humanity. The point is, he is human, and every human
(including the Nazis) has the capacity to be both violent and tender, it is
the individual's responsibility to choose how to respond.
Concentrating on his work, Gellburg allows himself no personal side.
He is ever on duty as the foreclosure man. He acts a part in which he
conceals and suppresses his own humanity. Unable to trust himself, he
has lost the capacity to trust others. This inability to trust leads him to fail
even at work, for it is instrumental in his losing the property his boss had
wanted. Gellburg's growing nervousness when questioned and his
inability to .look anyone in the eye indicate the erosion of his sense of self
at the same time that it shows him trying to conceal the fact.
Gellburg desperately desires a sense of control in his life to protect
him against the chaos he sees around him. He acts like a "dictator" (26)
at his grandmother's funeral and even, on occasion, plays the tyrant at
home in order to seem in control, but to no avail. His work had given
him a sense of power and control, but he loses even that as he comes to
realize how empty his work actually is. By the close of the play, as he
recognizes that it is impossible to separate himself from his community,
he can no longer find pride in a job which is based on dispossessing
others. A conscious suppression of his uncontrollable love for Sylvia has
been another result of his mania for control. As Lahr points out,
"Gellburg is devoted to his wife, but idealization is not intimacy."
24
By
refusing to allow his love any freedom, Gellburg has grown as distant
from his wife as from their wider community.
Both Gellburg's and Hyman's self-obsessed concerns may seem
trivial in the face of the more important matter that Sylvia introduces, but
they are concerns which do need to be addressed. Gellburg and Hyman
24
Lahr, 124.
Broken Class 77
try to rationalize the events taking place overseas in an effort to defend
and preserve their own fragile beliefs. Their failure is an indication of the
innate wrongness of the beliefs they had adopted and the need for them
to discover something more worthwhile in which to believe. We should
also note that it is not just Gellburg and Hyman who dismiss concern for
the German jews, but the majority of Americans. Sylvia's sister Harriet
and Harriot's husband both agree that Sylvia's worries are not real
concerns and that she should not be worrying. about people three
thousand miles away.
Miller cites the Holocaust as the period when the world learned to
turn away, "And we're still doing it . .. There is the sense that we feel
helpless to affect anything in Bosnia or Africa now and we learned how
to do that then."
25
Miller insists that we combat this tendency to ignore
what is unpleasant in life and involve ourselves before another Holocaust
can occur. Humanity is "in a boiling soup," Miller tells us "We change
the flavor by what we add, and it changes all of us."
26
Therefore, it is not
acceptable to refuse to act on the grounds that a single person's action
cannot make a difference.
In direct contrast to her husband, Sylvia has been in touch with the
community all along but so much so, that she has lost her sense of self.
As she exclaims: "I'm here for my mother's sake, and jerome's sake, and
everybody's sake except mine" (44). She has lived her life so long for
others she has lost all connection with her own selfhood, but she begins
by blaming others for this. With Gellburg dominating every scene he is
in, Sylvia tends to get pushed to the side, but this marginality only reflects
the way she has allowed her life to run.
27
In a way, Sylvia's outer mirror
has been shattered. Through "Kristallnacht" Sylvia's sense of community
is challenged by both the behavior of the Nazis and the apparent apathy
all around her. But this challenge provokes Sylvia to embody a mixture
of rage and regret, disgusted at herself as much as others.
Sylvia has let herself become as pale and drained of vitality as her
husband. Even her laugh is "dead" (41 ). Having withdrawn from their
marriage as much as Gellburg, she "punished" her husband when he
25
Arthur Miller, quoted in Sara Villiers, "Tried in the Crucible," The Herald
(Glasgow), 15 May 1995, p. 11.
26
Miller, quoted in Martine, 178.
27
Alice Griffin feels that Sylvia's complacency is very reflective of the time in
which she was raised, when Women were encouraged to be amenable to others and
not to insist on their own independence. See Alice Griffin, Understanding Arthur
Miller (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 186.
78
ABBOTSON
would not let her work by refusing to have another child. Despite her
condition, she has shown no interest in healing the relationship with her
husband and mocks him when he feebly attempts to reconnect. She tells
Hyman that she pities Gellburg, but not once in the play does she ever
speak of loving him. She has failed to consider his private nature when
speaking to her father about their sex life, a conversation which has not
helped but only exacerbated Gellburg's feelings of guilt and
embarrassment. Caught up in her own confusions and feelings of
betrayal, she has failed to recognize that he is suffering too.
Miller is not writing a case study of Sylvia's illness, as lahr points out:
"He is aiming at something much more ambitious: an anatomy of denial
.. . Her private sense of humiliation is projected onto her fury about the
public humiliation of the Jews."
28
Sylvia has settled for and
accommodated herself to her situation to a point which ultimately
becomes untenable even for her self-effacing spirit. Her having reached
her limit manifests itself in her objections to the Nazis' treatment of Jews
in Europe. When Sylvia rises for the first time in the play, she is driven
to do so by her fear that no-one will do anything about the suffering in
Germany. This is the first time in her whole life, Miller tells us, that
Sylvia has taken her life into her own hands. It marks an important
turning point in her relationship with Phillip. She may have allowed
herself to be a victim, like so many of the Jews in Europe, "but she is also
a revolutionary." Miller concludes, "Finally, it is Sylvia who is giving the
orders, not Phillip."
29
For a time Sylvia is distracted by Hyman's vitality, and she is fooled
into believing that she has a stronger connection to the doctor than to her
husband. However, she eventually acknowledges the truer connection
which exists between her and her husband which they have been stifling.
This acknowledgment, coupled with her decision to face up to her own
responsibility for the way she is, gives Sylvia the strength to rise. Sylvia's
paralysis has been an emblem of her loss of control, related to a denial
of certain responsibilities she had to herself as much as others. She
comes to realize her own complicity in her condition, declaring "What
I did with my life! Out of ignorance ... Gave it away like a couple of
pennies-1 took better care of my shoes" (112). She finally takes
responsibility for her condition and ceases to blame others. It is the
acceptance of such responsibilities that offers a person real control in life.
28
Lahr, 124.
29
Arthur Miller, quoted in Griffin, 186-7.
Broken Glass 79
Much has been made of the various endings of the play and Miller's
difficulties in finalizing the piece. Miller has stated a final preference for
the ending that the 1996 BBC filmed production uses.
30
Arguably, it is
the nature of the play and its themes which have caused the problem in
the ending. First, it hardly matters if Gel Iburg dies or not, as the focus is
now on Sylvia; she rises to her feet in every version. Gellburg attracts our
attention throughout the play, but Sylvia now insists that we look at her
as she faces certain truths and allows herself to take center stage.
Progress has been made, admittedly minor, but enough to suggest the
possibility of hope. But beyond that, the play's ambiguity and lack of
closure are essential to its message. The play cannot (and should not) be
resolved by the playwright, for he has already passed on the "baton" to
his audience; it is up to them to create a happy ending-if they can.
31
Any disappointment on the audience's part becomes their responsibility
and an indication that they have failed, perhaps, to learn the play's
lessons. To see the play as incomplete is to hold back from engagement
and therefore to resist and prevent the play's completion, by refusing to
join the circle (of humanity) and involve oneself in ways that the play
demands. After all, Miller's intention is not to tell a tale of other folk so
much as to tell us our own lives and thereby involve us, the audience, in
our own moral resuscitation.
It is hard to resist comparing Broken Glass to a Greek drama. Miller
declares that its relatively short length was an intentional emulation of
such dramas.
32
Also, its evident concern with people's identities and
place in society are issues which lie at the heart of most Greek plays.
One can even begin to see how Broken Glass's predictability, about
which many critics have complained, is yet another aspect of its structure
which relates it to Greek dramas whose impact largely depended upon
the audience knowing what would happen next. Broken Glass uses the
same type of classical structure which Miller used for A View From the
Bridge, where the predictability of the outcome is an important part of the
play's message. Coincidence lies at the heart of such dramas as Oedipus
Rex and should be seen as positive proof that we do, indeed, all connect
and live in a world capable of coherence. Miller describes such plays as
30
Miller told me his preference when I asked him about the confusion over the
various endings. Audience discussion, Williamstown, 1996.
31
It seems that Miller retains something of his early education in agitprop in
which the onus for action is forced onto the audience, although he has evolved it into
a far more subtle and sophisticated form.
32
Miller, interview with Charlie Rose.
80
ABBOTSON
revealing "some unreadable h-idden order behind the amoral chaos of
events as we rationallyperceive them ... there are times when things do
indeed cohere."
33
Numerous reviews of the play discuss how dissatisfied critics felt on
leaving the theater.
34
Rather than a failing of the play, this may be an
indication of its effectiveness. Miller intends to discomfit his audience:
the repetition of the eerie cello music is an indication of this. There is a
sense of menace from the start as the strident cello fills the auditorium
with its pulsing rhythms. In Timebends, Miller points out how audiences,
in America particularly, have a tendency to resist plays which challenge
them and ask them to judge themselves. Maybe the final dissatisfaction
with Broken Class stems from learning that this menace is not so much
the expected Nazism, as the common failings within each and every one
of us, which all too often prevent us from fully connecting with our
fellow human beings. After all, the lesson of Kristallnacht was not
heeded until after the elimination of six million Jews-there is a guilt
attached to that neglect which we all must continue to share. The
Gellburgs may begin to uncover the roots of their problems, but they are
still a long way from solving them. Sylvia regains her feet by the close of
the play and seems to have regained her sense of balance; however,
although she stands, it remains unclear what she stands for, and where
her first steps might lead. Miller is suggesting that it is partly the
audience's responsibility to help create a world in which Sylvia can safely
walk.
33
Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (London: Methuen, 1990), 135.
34
For example, Gerard declares it is "an unfinished work whose power has only
been partly realized"(128). Michael Phillips sees it as too " reductive," " simple," and
lacking in " dramatic instinct." See Michael Phillips, " Broken Glass Makes Things
Perfectly Clear," San Diego Union-Tribune, 25 April1994, sec. E, p. 1. Frank Schenk
complains "You feel that there's a great play buried in Broken Glass, but l ike its
heroine, it can't seem to rise to its feet." See Frank Schenk, " Grains of a Good Play
Exist in Arthur Miller's Strained Broken Glass," Christian Science Monitor, 27 April
1994, in New York Theatre Critics' Review 55 (1994): 127.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 11 (Winter 1999)
Facing the Holocaust:
Romulus Linney's Examination of Goering
at Nuremberg
jOHN FLEMING
While probably best known for his plays about Appalachian life,
Romulus Linney has also crafted a number of powerful and complex
works based on historical subjects. For example, The Sorrows of
Frederick looks at the life of Frederick the Great, the eighteenth-century
ruler of Prussia, Chi/de Byron at Lord Byron the Romantic poet, and 2 at
Hermann Goering the number two man in the Nazi hierarchy.
1
All three
are contradictory personalities, three influential figures in the
development of Western civilization, people whom Linney calls "heroes
of the damned."
2
Daniel Watermeier describes these history plays as
"'psycho-biographies,' dramatic explorations of the all too human side
of complicated, difficult, anti-heroic personalities."
3
But in writing about
history and these historical figures, Linney notes that he intends the plays
to be "about the present as well as the past."
4
While 2 is representative of a Linney history play, the work, due to
its subject matter, also engages with the genre now known as "theater of
the Holocaust." Unlike Linney's play, the vast majority of the works
1
To clarify the ambiguous title some producers have taken the liberty of calling
the play 2: Goering at Nuremberg. Linney prefers the play's published ti tle of 2, but
he does allow the alternative title to be used.
2
Romulus Linney, quoted in james F. Schlatter, "Storyteller in the Wilderness:
The American Imagination of Romulus Linney," The Southern Quarterly 32, 2 (Winter
1994): 63.
3
Daniel j. Watermeier, "Slowly Does Thy Name Unfurl; or the Critical and
Theatrical Marginality of Romulus Linney," Paper presented at the MLA Conference
(Spring 1990), 3.
4
Romulus Linney, preface, Six Plays, (New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 1993).
82
FlEMING
within this genre deal with the individual or collective victims.
5
Often
the Nazi oppressors are excluded or severely limited in their on-stage
appearances.
6
In other cases, the Nazi leaders are abstracted via
surrealistic, fantastic, and other analogous means of representation that
distance the audience from having to deal directly with the horribly
human face of the Holocaust. Mel Gussow even notes a potential danger
of Linney's chosen subject: "Some may suggest that dramatizing such a
figure on stage .. . automatically humanizes him as a character and
thereby insufficiently recognizes his inhumanity."
7
In contrast, I would
argue that the importance of Linney's play, both as a work of art and as
a contribution to the genre of theatre of the Holocaust, is precisely the
fact that it shows the human element that conducted this inhuman action.
Its power on stage is that a very human embodiment of one of the
executioners of the Holocaust lives and breathes in front of us, refusing
to be dismissed as an aberration, painfully reminding us that it was
human choice and action that carried out the Holocaust. In 2, Linney
offers a well-rounded, complex, all-too-human, but not sympathetic
portrayal of Goering, and in the process, as Gussow notes, he is
5
Elinor Fuchs, Plays of The Holocaust: An International Anthology (New York:
Theatre Communications Group, 1987) xii. Fuchs writes: "There appeared to be two
types of play that grappled with the Holocaust. The first showed catastrophic events
as the private experience of individuals or families. The second showed such events
as coll ective catastrophe: dramatic interest was focused not on the individual but on
the fate of the community .... If the first type of play evoked pity and sadness at the
spectacle of a single life threatened, the second type, contemplating a wider and more
systematic destruction, aroused more disturbing emotions-rage, revulsion,
helplessness. . . . [This second type emerged] as the most authentic theatrical
expression of the Holocaust" (xii). The six plays included in the anthology are all
examples of this collective/communal victimization. Fuchs's book also offers a
selected bibliography of plays of the holocaust, annotated with brief plot synopses.
The bibliography covers seventy-nine plays from ten countries. Forty-two of these
plays are in English or have been translated into English.
6
Robert Skloot, Theatre of the Holocaust: Four Plays (Madison, Wisconsin: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 18. Since the vast majority of Holocaust plays
deal with the victims, the plays tend to be set in the ghettos or concentration camps.
Skloot writes: "Playwrights have often tried to create believable environments by
' softening' the depiction of ghetto or camp life; one method is to exclude or reduce
the appearance of the Nazi oppressors and instead focus on their victims" (18).
7
Mel Gussow, ''Plays are Written by Wrights: Festival Returns to Basi cs," New
York Times, 5 April 1990, sec. C, p. 15.
Romulus Linney 83
"scrupulous about assessing the enormity of Nazi crimes and Goering's
complicity in them."
8
Hermann Goering was the number two man in the Nazi hierarchy,
the man who directed the Luftwaffe, who aided in the formation of the
Gestapo, and who signed orders for the extermination of the Jews.
William Mootz comments:
A more unsympathetic character on which to build a play is
difficult to imagine .... [but Linney's] Goering is charming,
intelligent, wily and monstrous .... a man who at times is
almost endearingly human-proud, conniving, vicious, and
possessing a cynical sense of history. This is a Goering who is
repellent and oddly appealing. He is also overwhelmingly real.
9
These last characteristics, "repellent," "appealing," and "real," give the
play its fascinating texture, while also providing the strength of this
exploration into one of the most shocking, horrifying, and influential
events of this century. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Hermann
Goering alleged that he knew more than any other person about the inner
workings of the Nazi regime. For Linney, the probing of Goering's
character is also a probing into the essence of the forces that went into
the Holocaust, and which go into dictatorships in general.
10
By examin-
ing Goering's character and his effect on others, one gains an understand-
ing of the factors which both created, and allowed for, Nazism. In the
process the play is also a look into the dark side of human nature, an
8
lbid.
9
William Mootz, "Romulus Linney's '2'," Louisville Courier-Journal, 25 March
1990, [n.p.]
10
In researching Goering's life and testimony, Linney felt that Goering's recorded
testimony at Nuremberg provided "A feeling of authority about who is talking. He
was in on it from the beginning. So if you are looking to try to understand the Third
Reich Goering is an excellent source." Linney added: "In reading about Goering and
his testimony, I discovered a kind of understanding of the German character .... I got
the feeling that I was up against the real thing we faced in World War II, which is also
the same thing you face in any dictatorship" (Romulus Linney, personal interview, 13
October 1991). It would be difficult, or an oversimplification, to pin down specifically
thi s notion of a German character. That said, it should be noted that Linney asserts
that his portrayal of Goering and his Counsel are as accurate to history as possible. All
the trial dialogue is taken from the transcripts. The in-prison dialogue i s conjectural ,
but Linney believes that the depiction of these two characters is "truthful " (Romulus
Linney, personal intervi ew, 14 March 1998).
84
FLEMING
examination of the phenomenon of evil in the twentieth century, a work
which raises disturbing questions about humanity.
Goering on Trial
While the Frederick and Byron plays sweep across the entire span of
their protagonists' lives, in 2 Linney compresses the dramatic time frame
into the last year of Goering's life, the time in which he was imprisoned
and on trial at Nuremberg. Utilizing detailed research, Linney composes
both factual and imagined scenes as he skillfully dramatizes the contra-
dictions of Goering's complex personality, a man who in a moment
could go from charmingly witty to callously indifferent, a man who
sincerely loved his family, yet who could feel no remorse for the
atrocities of the concentration camps. Indeed, one of the most chilling
moments of the play occurs when the prosecution shows films of the
horrible inhumanity and devastation of the concentration camps. While
these sickening images play across the stage, Goering shows no remorse;
his only reaction is one of anger at how the film turns the tide against his
case.
11
Although Goering has a complex, multi-faceted personality, pride
and loyalty dominate. While at Nuremberg he relishes his moment in the
spotlight, and he revels in his temporary status as the number one Nazi,
the self-appointed "leader of Germany now."
12
Goering also takes pride
in his loyalty to Hitler, loyalty that takes precedence over an instinct for
self-preservation. Unlike the other Nazis on trial , and going against the
Counsel's advice, Goering vows, "Not a word against Hitler" (157). Near
the end of the war, Hitler had sent orders for the execution of Goering
and his family, yet Goering still remained faithful to his leader, saying:
"You swear an oath in good times so you will keep it in bad. Otherwise,
why swear an oath at all?" (185). Goering's unwavering loyalty may
merit admiration, yet this trait also blinds him to any sense of individual
responsibility and prevents him from acknowledging the horrors of the
concentration camps. Goering's high valuation of loyalty raises the
11
In the original text, the one used for its premiere at The Actors Theatre of
Louisville, after the films, Goering says: "I had them! Everybody was smiling,
everything felt good. Ih.en they show that terrible movie! God damn it!" (Manuscript,
34). In the revised text, Goering simply says: " Well that was a bad movie!" (175).
This flippant remark dehumani zes Goering.
12
Romulus Linney, "2," in Six Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group,
1993), 196. All subsequent references will be noted parenthet ically in the text.
Romulus Linney 85
question, at what point does loyalty become a liability? At what point
does a virtue become a defect?
While Goering did counsel Hitler against actions such as invading
Poland and Russia, Goering also acknowledges one of the inherent,
dangerous dynamics of a dictatorship. Accused of being a "yes man" to
Hitler, Goering responds: "I would be interested to meet a 'no man' to
Hitler" (188). Absolute authority deters opposition, and so while Goering
never shifts the blame or never uses the "I was just doing my duty"
defense, he does prioritize obedience and service to the state above
individual responsibility.
In addition to holding a position of power, Goering had a charismatic
and persuasive personality. Linney's Goering exhibits this power of
persuasion, both over other characters and, possibly, to a certain extent
over the audience. In the opening sections, Linney constantly shifts
sympathies as he presents Goering as a man of great spirit, a man who
can laugh at his situation, a man who is sometimes humble, sometimes
arrogant. While presenting the image of an underdog facing a tribunal
stacked against him, Linney's Goering earns the admiration and respect
of the Counsel. Through the Jewish Psychiatrist, it is revealed that the
previous Irish Psychiatrist had to be removed because he liked Goering
too much. But any sympathy Goering has gained in the opening sections
is just as quickly erased when he calmly tells the Jewish Psychiatrist:
"Congratulations. . . . You won ... (Shrugs) We all paid a price. What's
the matter?'' (159). Here, Linney exposes Goering's heartlessness, his
capacity for cruelty, his absence of remorse. Linney's Goering is both
likeable and repulsive.
Goering's affable and disarming personality makes him a master
manipulator, and the danger of Goering lies in his ability to sway the
inattentive and the corruptible. As noted by the Psychiatrist, Goering is
like Richard Ill in that he is a person who "can smile and smile, and
murder whilst I smile" (161 ). Historically and dramatically, the power
of Goering's persuasive charm is seen in the fact that he convinced one
of the American military officers guarding him to smuggle him a pill of
potassium cyanide; his suicide foiled the Tribunal's desire to hang him.
While Linney presents the persuasive power of Goering, the
playwright also stresses that being swayed by a persuasive personality is
no excuse:
COUNSEL: . .. I don't know how guilty you are anymore, or
how guilty I am, for that matter. Yes, it's my turn too. You
awed me, charmed me, in spite of everything made me
admire you, and I ... I blackmailed men on trial for their
lives. Right here, in this prison. For you!
86 fLEMI NG
GOERING: You were right to do so. They broke their vows.
COUNSEL: I had no right to do so. Men can change their minds.
GOERING: If that is what you think duty is, you know nothing
of men and never wi II.
COUNSEL: At 68, I'm learning. And one of the things I am
learning is that of all the ideas men ever had, duty is the
worst! (206)
Here, the Counsel admits that he succumbed to Goering's power of
persuasion, but he also realizes that individuals must take responsibility
for their actions. Through the Counsel, Linney continues the debate over
the nature of loyalty as Goering's belief that loyalty must be binding gets
countered by an argument that people must constantly re-evaluate the
situation so as to decide if their past decision is still the correct decision.
The play suggests that while duty is often seen as a source of unity, it can
also be a destructive force.
The character of the Counsel also provides an insight into what might
be considered a representative, or at least fairly prevalent, attitude of a
German citizen during the Nazi era. At their first meeting, the Counsel
describes his feelings towards Goering:
I was fifty-six years old when you came to power. I watched my
country-led by Hitler and by you-become one with itself,
strong and vigorous .... We were dazzled by Hitler, but we
loved you. You were human, sometimes harsh, but good at
heart. A mirror for Germans. (156)
Many German people identified with Goering. Not only did they love
and admire him, they followed him. In the course of the drama, the
Counsel performs his duty, both as a lawyer defending his client and as
a man loyal to the country he loves. Though he defends Goering as best
he can, the Counsel is aware of the evil perpetrated by Goering. The films
of the concentration camps sicken him, and Goering's lack of remorse
repulses him. While the Counsel has his doubts and has good intentions,
Goering still exerts undue influence over him. Goering manipulates him,
withholds information and convinces him to blackmail the other
prisoners. Through it all the Counsel sees his duty as: "To my client, to
the law, and to Germany. But not evidently to myself
11
(199) . The
Counsel recognizes the precariousness of his situation, but he does not
follow through on his ethical impulses. He allows himself to submit to
Romulus Linney 87
Goering's will. Even after his previously quoted diatribe against duty, the
Counsel again submits to duty by trying to sway the court to let Goering
be executed in the manner of his own choosing. Overall, the Counsel
seems to be an honest and fair man, yet he lacks the strength to break
completely free of Goering's persuasive power. In the Counsel, one sees
a likable man perform actions that he knows are unacceptable. Through
the Counsel one understands how the good and well-meaning can be
corrupted, how they can lose their individual wi II and become followers
of their leaders, dedicated to doing their duty to their country.
Goering's own loyalty to Hitler also withstands the pressure of his
wife who wants him to indict Hitler. But here, Linney adds another
dimension to Goering's character. He declares: "Hitler is not to blame for
what I did. I am" (204). Goering seems to accept responsibility, yet he
lacks any sense of guilt. At the end of the trial, the Counsel points out:
"You still don't think anything wrong was done! " (206). This callous
indifference marks Goering as monstrous, yet in his farewell to his
daughter, one sees Goering's humanity as he does exhibit some genuine,
loving emotions. His Counsel seizes this moment to try to make Goering
realize the horrors of the concentration camps: "You killed her. Her.
Can't you understand that?" (21 0). Goering responds: "UNDERSTAND
IT? YES!! I UNDERSTAND IT! And it makes no difference whether we
understand it or not. ... Because we are men, and men will do what
men will do" (210) .
Linney categorizes Goering as "a cosmic fatalist",
13
and Linney's
Goering seems to believe that he has no control, that his own nature
victimizes him. In the play, Goering says: "What do you want me to say?
I am a fool? Yes! I would do it all again? Yes? That there is nothing worse
than a man? ABSOLUTELY!!! Why did it happen? I don't know! " (211 ).
Any sense of guilt exists on an abstract rather than an individual level as
the words suggest a darkness to human nature, an inevitability to events.
However, in his revisions, Linney added a speech that suggests his own
rejection of Goering' s argument of the inevitability or of the lack of
control.
14
The Psychiatrist exclaims:
I don't know what the answer to the struggle of life is! But I
know it isn't you! I don't care if you love your family! I don't
13
Romulus Linney, personal interview, 13 October 1991.
14
The subsequent speech is not in the text as it was performed in its debut
production at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Linney remarked to me that Goeri ng' s
sense of no control " is kind of an easy way out, and it' s ducking responsibility"
(Personal interview, 13 October 1991 ).
88
FlEMING
care if you tried to stop the invasion of Poland! I care about the
blood you shed, which would drown Nuremberg! Your grand
cosmic pessimism is an excuse for murder! (193)
As in the Nuremberg Trials, Linney's play asks for accountability.
Humanity on Trial
Confronting the Holocaust is not pleasant, and while one may wish
to view it as an anomaly, the multi-faceted, complex portrait of Goering
forces one to confront what happened in this harrowing event of human
history. The vitality of Goering's character gives the play its chilling
power, and as a result one cannot dismiss the Holocaust or the human
forces which went into its creation. William Mootz comments:
[Linney's] Goering becomes a mirror reflecting man at his most
despicable. Before we too self-righteously hold Goering
accountable for his unspeakable crimes, the playwright seems to
be warning, we might consider the hatreds that seethe unbridled
in our own hearts.
15
Indeed, the play focuses sharply on the nature of humanity, and to what
degree it is inhuman. While few can deny the barbarity of the
concentration camps, Linney's Goering argues that he created them
"using as models the British enclaves in South Africa and the Indian
Reservations of the United States" (169) . While the comparison may not
stand scrutiny, it does point to a recurrence of dominant groups
controlling and dehumanizing those they consider "the Other." In a
similar vein, Goering argues that while he did order the Luftwaffe to
bomb cities instead of military targets, "compared with Dresden and
Hiroshima, my Air Force was a model of restraint" (208). All the
countries performed devastating acts, and Goering argues that all the
opposing generals are "as far away from this travesty as they can get,
where they would be on trial if they'd lost" (174). The victor declares
what is just and necessary, with those in power determining the rationale
behind acts which in other circumstances would be deemed inhuman.
Pulling back from the international scale of mass warfare, Goering
reminds his captors of cruelty and injustice in the social sphere. One of
his American guards is a black sergeant, and Goering deliberately calls
him "nigger" so as to make the point: "That is what they call you" (174) .
15
Mootz, [n.p.]
Romulus Linney 89
He adds: "Do the Americans still have your women, and hang you from
trees with crosses burning?" (177). Both the Sergeant and the audience
are forced to acknowledge the inhuman treatment that blacks have
historically received in the United States. Indeed, a subtle aspect of the
play is that one of Goering's strategies to befriend his captors was by
identifying the "Other" which they hated. With the Irish Psychologist
Goering capitalized on the Irishman's hatred of the British. With the
white American Captain from the south; Goering feigned a racist attitude.
By playing upon the animosity they felt towards these "Others," Goering
forged alliances with those who were supposed to be uninvolved, neutral
employees of the powers who were trying him for his crimes.
The idea of the "Other" is based on binary opposition, a "good
self/nationality" versus a "bad Other." It is this binary that Goering uses
to justify the divide between jews and Germans. "I wanted [the jews]
somewhere else, out of Germany, so they wouldn't be standing there
in your job somehow every time you turned around .... I did my
duty .... But what I didn't do was betray Germans" (179). Goering
admits to anti-Semitism, but not hatred, and he defends his conduct by
stressing that his actions were based on loyalty and devotion to Germany
and to being German. The Psychiatrist realizes the danger of this narrow
way of viewing the world, and so he states: "I am a human being first and
a jew second" (179).
In contrast to the Psychiatrist's desire for common humanity and
universal cooperation, Goering argues that the world is dominated by
selfish isolation:
GOERING: You, me, everybody lives despising others ... You'll
see, or your children will. There won't be countries any
more, just races, all hating each other. Hitler knew. We all
hate our rivals, and the first chance one of us has to domi-
nate them, boom! Tell me it isn't so!
PSYCHIATRIST: That is the past. How can I make you under-
stand it is the purpose of this trial to change exactly that!
GOERING: Because it won't. People are what they are, no
better.
PSYCHIATRIST: Then we will make them better .... After this
terrible war, the world must come together, and give up its
racial stereotypes.
GOERING: Tell that to the rabbis!
90
FlEMING
PSYCHIATRIST: Rabbis don't murder children! (192-3)
While one need not agree with Goering's extreme view of ethnic
division, it is a perspective partially supported by world events. At the
same time, Linney is scrupulous in pointing out the discrepancy between
Goering's cynicism and the need for culpability. Furthermore, the debate
calls into question the nature of humans, and one way they deal with
those who are different than themselves. To what degree are races and
nationalities inherently selfish and divided? Why do some people choose
not to overcome their differences and work together towards some
common goal? One can resign oneself to the hopelessness of an eternally
divided world, or one can accept that there is some basis for this
cynicism, yet that through awareness, people can overcome the
"artificial" differences and strive for a common humanity. One function
of history and history plays should be to make people aware of the past
in hopes that humanity can avoid repeating its errors.
On the other hand, some recent world events suggest that Goering
presented a picture of the world that is all too often accurate. To put the
Goering-Psychiatrist exchange in a larger context, one should note that
they are the actual words of Hermann Goering, and that Linney wrote
this play prior to the ethnic slaughters in Bosnia and in Rwanda. As one
looks at the fragmentation of the former Soviet Bloc countries, at the
continual fighting within the Middle East, and the political dissension in
places such as Tibet, India, and Pakistan one sees races and nationalities
striving for independence, an independence based on the exclusion of
those not of the same nationality or religious denomination. Rather than
cooperation towards a common goal of personal freedom and human
rights, the divisions stem from a desire to be separated from the "Other."
While contemporary world events play out the battles between
dominant and oppressed groups, Linney's play explores the forces and
ideologies that go into this division. The play addresses a number of
important issues-the factors which brought about the Holocaust, the
nature of war crimes trials, the personal complexity of a man who in his
official capacity committed heinous acts. In addition, the play also
probes one of the most profound questions, an inquiry into the very
essence of human nature. The Counsel tells Goering: "The trial is no
longer about guilt as we ever knew it. It is about the absolute worst in
human nature, and it looks squarely at you" (206) . In Goering, one sees
admirable qualities-a good father and husband, a reformer of animal
laws, and a lover of art-but one also encounters a co-author of one of
the darkest chapters in human history. One discovers a charming
personality who also demonstrates humanity's capacity for cruelty. To
what extent are Goering and the Nazis an anomaly, and to what extent
Romulus Linney 91
are they indicative of the way people really are? To what degree is human
nature more evil than good? Linney's play raises these questions, and the
chilling climax demonstrates how he brings these questions out in a
theatrical manner.
In production, Goering's suicide is revealed via a sound montage of
voices discovering his corpse. After the echoes and vibrations lapse into
silence, Goering speaks from the dead as a ghastly green spotlight falls on
him. He gloats to his captor over this victory of suicide, and then smi les
and speaks to the audience:
I am at peace with what I have done. I know you all very well.
You always liked me, and saw yourselves in me. You will find
other Hitlers, and other ways to go to war. When you do, he will
need me, and call me back. I will bind myself to him again,
laughing, a good number two.
(Goering's smile vanishes. He stares out coldly.)
After all, what do you think men are?
(The green light fades on him.) (213)
This final, fundamental question stands at the core of Linney's play, a
play that does not teach only one lesson, but rather offers a way of
knowing, a play which offers a diversity of insights into what it means to
be human in the twentieth century. Not all the insights are pleasant, and
the play, through its fascinating central character and through its
compelling dramatic interest, forces us to confront who we are and what
we are doing. While the play has a disturbing climax, it is not nihilistic
or unduly cynical. The Counsel and Psychiatrist offer hope as they cling
to some measure of optimism or ideal ism, and perhaps people will learn
from the past. Cumulatively, 2 acknowledges the capacity for evil within
humans but also stresses the necessity of accepting moral responsi bil ity.
Conclusion
Over fifty years have passed since the Holocaust and at least eighty
plays have been written about the subject. When 2 premiered in 1990,
it earned near universal acclaim at the Actors Theatre of Louisvi l le (ATL)
Humana Festival of New Plays and won the Ameri can Theatre Cri tics
Association Award for Best New American play produced outside New
York. Mel Gussow even proclaimed: " Just as 1979 was the year that
[ATL] discovered Beth Henley and Crimes of the Heart, 1990 may be
known as the year that Louisville premiered Romulus Linney' s 2 ... .
There is every likelihood that the play will finally bring Mr. Linney the
92 FLEMING
major success which he so clearly deserves."
16
However, the play has
not achieved that success. In London, Sir Peter Hall optioned the play in
1990 for his newly-formed Peter Hall Company, but of the dozen leading
English actors whom Hall approached, none were willing to play the role
of Goering.
17
In New York, Roger Stevens optioned the play in October
1991, but his financial backing fell through for the proposed January
1992 production. Stevens did produce the play at the 1992 Williamstown
Festival, but 2 did not make it to New York until 1995, and then only in
a small-scale, limited-run production. It has had a handful of productions
elsewhere in the United States but has never been performed in England.
In 1998 it will receive its first German production.
While 2 possesses all the artistic qualities needed for a successful
play, the lack of productions seems to stem from non-theatrical
considerations.
18
The mere idea of presenting Hermann Goering as a
protagonist who is fully human and not just odious seems to make
producers wary. But if one can get beyond this surface objection, one
discovers a play which probes humanity as it acknowledges, confronts,
and attempts to understand one of the darkest chapters of human history.
It faces the Holocaust head on and refuses to blink. Linney's play raises
questions about human nature, and it triggers debate about the world in
which we live. In the February 1998 edition of American Theatre Stephen
N unns writes: "At a time when reading descriptions from around the
world of mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing hardly raises eyebrows, 2's
themes have more resonance than they did when the play debuted eight
years ago."
19
One hopes that producers, actors, audiences, and readers
will eventually accept the challenge of facing this play, for Goering's
charm should sound a warning. If a man this seemingly likeable could
carry out such atrocities, the world must be on its guard.
16
Gussow, sec. C, p. 15, 18.
17
Romulus Linney, personal interview, 13 October 1991.
18
Regarding the premiere production, critics such as Mel Gussow and William
Mootz indicate that this thematically rich piece is also dramatically compelling in
performance. Gussow uses such phrases as "a gripping new drama," "a powerful,
personal study," and "the most stimulating aspect of the festival" (Gussow, sec. C,
p. 15, 18); Mootz describes it as "a mesmerizing production" composed of "vivid
scenes" and "a brilliant, fast-paced narrative [in which] even the play's climax,
foretold by history, is given an ironic emphasis that rivets attention." (Mootz, [n.p.])
19
Stephen Nunns, "Editors' Choice, " American Theatre 15, 2 (february 1998):
74.
(ONTRIB UTORS
SUSAN C. W. ABBOTSON recently received her doctorate from the
University of Connecticut and is now an adjunct professor at
johnson and Wales University. Her dissertation was on the plays
of Arthur Miller and August Wilson, and she has published essays
in South Atlantic Review, Charles Lamb Bulletin, English Studies,
and Modern Drama. She wrote the drama section for Bedford
Books' Resources for Teaching Literature and Its Writers (1997),
co-authored Understanding Death of a Salesman (1999) with
Brenda Murphy for Greenwood Press, and is currently writing The
Student Companion to Arthur Miller for Greenwood.
KIMBERLY DIXON is completing her dissertation on contemporary
African American women playwrights at Northwestern University's
interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Theatre and Drama. She is a
graduate of Yale University and the University of California Los
Angeles, with degrees in theater, African American studies, and
psychology. In addition, Ms. Dixon is an emerging playwright and
screenwriter.
jOHN FLEMING is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Auburn
University. He has previously published articles on Latin American
theatre and contemporary British theatre and has recently finished
a book-length manuscript on Tom Stoppard.
ROBERT C. ROARTY is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program in
Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
LEWIS E. SHELTON is Professor of Theatre at Kansas State
University, Manhattan, where he teaches acting and directing, as
well as directing productions. He has published essays on Ben
Teal, Alan Schneider, David Belasco (all in journal of American
Drama and Theatre), and Elia Kazan. He continues to research the
history of American directing.
93
Erratum
In our Spring 1998 issue of the journal, we mistakenly
reversed two captions for photographs in the article "Psychic
Space: The Interiors of Maria Irene Fornes" by Scott T.
Cummings. The caption on page sixty-three describes the
image on page seventy and the caption on page seventy
describes the image on page sixty-three. We apologize for
our mistake.
94
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