THE jOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 9, Number 2
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Spring 1997
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THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 9, Number 2
Contents
jOHN W. FRICK, Anti-Intellectualism and
Representations of 'Commonness' in the
Spring 1997
Nineteenth-Century American Theatre 1
KATHERINE H. BURKMAN, The Myth of Narcissus:
Shepard's True West and Mamet's Speed the Plow 23
SHEILA RABILLARD, Crossing Cultures and Kinds:
Maria Irene Fornes and the Performance
of a Post-Modern Sublime 33
GERALD C. WOOD, Horton Foote's Politics of Intimacy 44
jAN BALAKIAN, Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 58
BOOK NOTES 85
CONTRIBUTORS 87
journal of American Drama and Theatre 9 (Spring 1997)
Anti-Intellectualism and Representations of
"Commonness" in the
Nineteenth-Century American Theatre
jOHN W. FRICK
Anti-intellectualism is back! After decades of lying relatively dormant
since the McCarthy era (or at least since Viet Nam), a "virulent anti-
intellectualism is in the air," spurring state legislatures to scrutinize how
academics in their state universities spend their time and the taxpayers'
money; casting suspicion upon a sitting president's days as a Rhodes
Scholar, as if mere attendance at Oxford rendered a person more
susceptible to leftist ideology; and manifesting itself in renewed attacks
upon the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, not
simply because they support "the esoteric, impractical (and) special-
ized ... " (the traditional arguments), but because, according to former
NEH Chairman William Bennett, they have become downright subversive
and have corrupted accepted moral standards.
1
Perhaps more disturbing
to the intellectual community is the ease with which the new strain of
anti-intellectualism has found a voice in the popular media, from pop
music lyrics that belittle school and learning to plot lines of TV sit-coms
constructed upon anti-intellectual premises (teachers are insipid individ-
uals out of touch with reality; pursuing a love interest is more fruitful than
studying; all lectures are tedious) to Rush Limbaugh's sneering, pseudo-
populist anti-intellectualism that seems to have been drawn straight from
the pages of Hofstadter.
Moreover, critics have "discovered" an especially insidious anti-
intellectualism at the core of such popular movies as Forrest Cump, JQ,
and Nell . Writing in the New York Times, Caryn James maintains that
while these films are undeniably "breezy and enjoyable, with vast
amounts of surface charm, . .. underneath, they are chi l ling in the way
they link virtue with lack of intelligence, ... creating a head-heart spli t
1
Jefferson Hunter, Letter to the Editor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3
March 1995, B6.
2
FRICK
that makes intelligence the villain."
2
Each of these movies creates a
distinct bifurcation between the educated and the uneducated and then
assigns moral worth to the characters according to the formula, simplicity
(i .e., a mind untrammelled by useless knowledge) is good; book learning
is bad. Nell's simple goodness is the product of her primitive upbringing,
away from the corrupting influence of socializing processes like
education, the very processes which presumably ruined the scientists
who study her; Einstein in /Q curbs his intellect in order to play match-
maker for his n ieee and save her from her cold-blooded, professorial
fiance; and the title character in Forrest Cump, a film that, like Rocky,
captured the public imagination, follows his instincts and simple virtues
to ultimately embody the American Dream-he is an uneducated, self-
made millionaire. Individual differences not withstanding, these movies
are bound by a common motif, "a resentment and suspicion of the life of
the mind and of those who are considered to represent it."
3
If there is a sense of epiphany in the critics' reviews Oames excepted),
it is perhaps due to the ahistorical nature of their observations, for anti-
intellectualism is anything Qut new, as they imply; instead, it is a
persistent and recurring pattern in American cultural history. As Morton
White has observed, in a new country "that lacked a feudal tradition, that
celebrated the yeoman's life, that suspected the dialectical minutiae of
technical philosophy, one might expect that [a] romantic anti-intellectual-
ism would flourish."
4
During the early years of the Republic, trust in
knowledge as the means to liberate humanity from the ignorance and
prejudice of the past, one of the principal tenets of the Enlightenment
transplanted to this country by its earliest settlers, gradually succumbed
to the suspicion that intellectuals were, in many ways, disempowering.
Reflecting cultural concerns of the era, during the same period anti-
intellectual ism permeated America's early popular entertainments, with
the man of intellect conventionally villainized in melodramas, lam-
2
Caryn james, "At the Cineplex It's Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest," New York
Times, 8 January 1995, 2:1. See also Frank Rich, "The Gump from Hope, " New York
Times, 21 july 1994, A23; Kenneth Turan, "Simple Lessons from Gump," Los Angeles
Times 6 july 1994, F1 :2; Sarah Lyall , " It's Forrest Gump vs. Harrumph," New York
Times, 31 jul y 1994, 4:2.
3
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage,
1962), 7. This volume remains the most authoritative source on the subj ect of anti-
intellectualism and will be used as such throughout this essay.
4
Morton White, "Reflections on Anti-Intell ectual ism," Daedalus (Summer 1962):
465.
Anti-Intellectual ism and "Commonness" 3
pooned on minstrel stages, and represented as the butt of jokes in
drawing-room comedies of the period.
In Ideology, Marxist cultural critic Terry Eagleton offers a theoretical
framework for comprehending the cultural tensions that produced anti-
intellectualism in ante-bellum America. Eagleton proposes:
A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and
values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such
beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevita-
ble; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival
forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic
logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself.S
Considering that insurgent, as well as hegemonic, cultural blocs routinely
employ the same means to appropriate and/or maintain power and since
"the struggle to win popular respect and consent for authority is endlessly
being waged, and most of it takes place in the realm of what we
recognize as popular culture,"
6
it is possible to view any cultural
institution, theatre included, as "contested terrain," as a site for ideologi-
cal conflict.
7
In the pages that follow, I intend to examine the process by
which cultural .positions were promoted, naturalized, denigrated or
obscured to create an historical context in which performances, both past
and present, might be "read" for the patterns of anti-intellectualism they
conceal; to reveal and examine the theatrical forms this anti-intellectual-
ism assumed and by which it was disseminated to eager nineteenth-
century audiences; and to examine the changing balance and relations of
social forces throughout the early history of American anti-intellectualism.
As anyone who has dealt with it will readily admit, anti-intellectual-
ism is a problematic term. In his etymological study, Keywords: A Vocab-
ulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams notes:
The social tensions around the word are significant and compli-
cated, ranging from an old kind of opposition to a group of
people who use theory or even organized knowledge to make
5
Terry Eagleton, Ideology (london: Verso, 1991), 5.
6
Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1989), 3.
7
Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popuiar, "' in People's History and
Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (london: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 198 1),
227.
4 FRICK
judgements on general matters, to a different but sometimes
related opposition to elites, who claim not only specialized but
directing kinds of knowledge.
8
Thus, while there exists an uneasy consensus that anti-intellectualism
describes positions generally opposed to organized thought and learning
and that there has long been suspicion of, opposition to, or derogation of
those who live a "life of the mind," there is nevertheless widespread
scholarly disagreement as to exactly who should be considered targets of
these sentiments, who should be regarded as intellectuals.
The opposite poles of the debate are represented by the Italian
political philosopher Antonio Gramsci and by Julien Benda whose The
Treason of the Intellectuals remains one of the more blistering critiques
of the intellectual. In his treatise, Benda restricts the application of the
term to a select, "tiny band of super-gifted and morally endowed philo-
sopher-kings who constitute the conscience of mankind"
9
while Gramsci ,
writing in his Prison Notebooks, argues not only for "traditional"
intellectuals (teachers, clergy, writers), but for a group he labels organic
intellectuals-highly trained specialists who serve business, the govern-
ment, the legal system, or the society at large, but are not necessarily in-
volved in contemplative or speculative activities.
10
The history of American anti-intellectualism supports a definition
closer to Gramsci's, for since colonial times the American "man on the
street" has conventionally lumped all "brainworkers" together regardless
of the practicality or impracticality of their endeavors. The two most
common examples of individuals whose work depends upon their
intellect, after all, are the brain surgeon and the rocket scientist, neither
exactly in the mold of Benda's philosopher-king. Thus today, according
to Edward Said, "Everyone who works in any field connected either with
the production or distribution of knowledge is an intellectual in Gram-
sci's sense."
11
8
Raymond Wil liams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 170.
9
Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington (New
York: Norton, 1969).
10
Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks: Selections, trans. Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Noweii -Smith (New York: Internati onal Publishers 1971 ).
11
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon Books,
1994), 9.
Anti-Intellectualism and "Commonness" 5
Nearly a century before Gramsci, the expert as intellectual was
recognized by Alexis de Toqueville, one of the first cultural critics to
study America. Commenting upon the social status of one group of
organic intellectuals, lawyers, in Democracy in America, de Toqueville
maintained that intellectually the aristocracy of America was "on the
bench and at the bar" as well as in the clergy, the professoriat and the
literati. "The special information that lawyers derive from their studies,"
he maintained, "ensures them a separate rank in society, [for] they
constitute a sort of privileged body in the scale of intellect."
12
In de
Toqueville's opinion, at least, lawyers were among the most cultivated
portions of American society and therefore deserved to be regarded as
intellectuals in their own right, not just as "mental technicians."
Since his specialized knowledge and the status derived from it
separated him irrevocably and quite publicly from the common man, it
is hardly surprising that the American lawyer was viewed from below as
a member of a "natural aristocracy," as someone not to be trusted, and,
in an era of passionate egalitarianism, as a logical choice as the villain of
nineteenth-century melodrama. After watching Lawyer Cribbs in The
Drunkard, for example, employ his legal training and "superior intellect"
to manipulate events for personal gain (and after his being constantly
called "Lawyer" Cribbs for five acts), antebellum playgoers, many in the
process of fighting their way in from the margins of society, must have left
America's theatres and dime museums with the impression that somehow
Cribbs' evil-doing and his lawyering were inextricably linked-that one
must invariably be the cause of the other.
The success of playwrights' appeal to audiences' anti-intellectualism
in plays like The Drunkard is just one indication that, by mid-nineteenth
century, intellect already constituted "a fault line along which culture
was dividing."
13
Like the presidential elections of 1824 and 1828, which
were framed as a choice between the "patrician values of the learned
classes" embodied by John Quincy Adams and those of Andrew Jackson,
the "rough and ready man of action, educated in Nature's school and
unencumbered by the weight of too much book learning," ante-bellum
popular entertainments were likewise routinely constructed as allegorical
illustrations-as conflicts between an absolute good, represented by the
untutored, good-hearted, strong-shouldered man of action, and absolute
12
Aiexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America Vol. I (New York: Vintage Books,
1945), 282-3.
13
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the
Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 9.
6 FRICK
evil, frequently depicted by a man of learning.
14
As Richard Hofstadter
explains, the average Jacksonian accepted unquestioningly the fact that
intellect was antagonistic to everything he held dear. In the plebeian
mind,
intellect [was] pitted against feeling, on the ground that it [was]
somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It [was] pitted
against character, because it [was] widely believed that intellect
stands for mere cleverness. . . . It [was] pitted against practical-
ity, since theory [was] held to be opposed to practice. . . . It
[was] pitted against democracy, since intellect [was] felt to be a
form of distinction that defies egalitarianism.
15
Regardless of how culturally entrenched anti-intellectualism was by
the end of Jackson's presidency, however, Hofstadter and his mentor
Merle Curti before him stress that such antagonisms had not always been
the case in American society and that action and thought were not always
regarded as mutually exclusive. Both emphasize that the Founding
Fathers were not only men of action, practical and capable enough to
mount and sustain a revolution; they were also intellectuals whose
theories provided the philosophical foundations of the Republic. In
Hofstadter's words, they were "sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation,
many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in
history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.
1116
From the beginning, conditions in the colonies had discouraged a
European-style patronage of intellectuals as a class apart and above the
masses and had forced America's first intelligentsia, the clergy, to
abandon specialized functions (preaching and teaching) and to adopt
practical pursuits like farming or a trade. Throughout the eighteenth
century, men of learning applied their knowledge to the solution of
everyday problems, thereby contributing to the dissolution of the ancient
barrier between knowledge and action. Benjamin Franklin, for example,
not only applied his skills to the exigencies of statesmanship, but also
furnished such practical inventions as the lightning rod while
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a pioneer in the study of insanity and champion of
reforms to improve the human condition, also participated in the actual
14
Daniel Rigney, " Three Kinds of Anti-Intellectualism: Rethinking Hofstadter,"
Sociological Inquiry 61 (Fall1991): 441.
15
Hofstadter, 45-6.
16
/bid., 145.
Anti-Intellectualism and 7
treatment of the deranged. Taking his cues from leaders who embodied
both physical and intellectual rigor, the common man readily accepted
the classical belief that knowledge is virtue, as well as the Baconian
notion that knowledge is power, and saw nothing incongruous in the
"congenial" relation between theory and practice.
Although American anti-intellectualism would not reach maturity
until the jacksonian era, its seeds (and with them the origin of the
historical tension between rationalism and the requirements of faith) had
actually been planted during the Great Awakening, assuming the form of
a wave of militant anti-rationalism so fervid that many historians consider
it the first widespread revolt of feeling against the intellect. During the
early years of the eighteenth century, charismatic eval)gelists like
Theodore Frelinghuysen and Jonathan Edwards, preaching that religion
should be personal and enthusiastic rather than cold, clinical, passionless
and institutional, aggressively and successfully challenged the model of
the American minister as college-educated theological scholar, an ideal
that had persisted since Puritan times. Citing the Bible, not theological
training at Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard, as the only authority they
recognized and claiming that everyone had the right to "direct access to
God," the new breed of preacher publicly proclaimed his hostility to
classical scholarship, theological abstraction, and a church dominated by
a learned and literary class of well-educated clergy.
17
In their view, as
summarized by Presbyterian minister Charles Grandison Finney, colleges
gave "young men intellectual strength, to the almost entire neglect of
cultivating their moral feelings."
18
In place of rational theological discourse and the abstruse, dogmatic
sermons of ministers engaged in it, eighteenth-century evangelists substi-
tuted extemporaneous sermons, a raw emotional appeal designed
expressly to ignite the rei igious passions of the flock, a "violence of
rhetoric" said to be a return to a more primitive form of Christianity, and
a charismatic preaching style that combined individual personal
"magnetism" with theatrics. It was the overpowering, charismat ic
personality in the pulpit and the attendant shift in focus from the religious
message to the messenger that prompted Hofstadter to remark that the
star system had debuted in America's churches, not in its theatres.
17
Merl Curti, "Intellectuals and Other People," American Historical Review LX
Uanuary 1955): 262; Hofstadter, 47, 93-95; Rigney, "Three Kinds," 436-38; Merl
Curti, American Paradox: The Conflict of thought and Action (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1956), 12-13.
18
Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on the Revivals of Religion (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1960), 435-6.
8 FRICK
In addition to being perceived as dull, passionless, and divorced from
all other human qualities, rationalism was suspect for another, perhaps
more compelling, reason. Americans, especially those in the more
evangelical denominations, believed that "a world in which everything
is open to question raises the specter of relativism, and ultimately, the
collapse of moral order of any kind."
19
To the Mani chaean minds of
fundamentalists, intellectual discourse endangered the foundations of
faith by casting doubt upon absolute truths, and since they were engaged
in mortal combat with Satan, the ambiguities or equivocations that might
be spawned by a relativist world view constituted an unwarranted
danger. For a significant portion of the American populace, then, the
threat which relativism posed to the "root system of their fundamentalist
faith" only widened the schism between passion and intellect.
Early in the nineteenth century, fundamentalist apprehensions,
together with a rising tide of populism, supported and nurtured a related
and especially aggressive strain of anti-intellectual ism-a Pascal ian notion
of "passional truth." Predicated upon the conviction that the heart not
only has access to certain truths, but also is capable of sensing truths that
the mind cannot, passional truth is innate and can be attained only
through extra-rational means- through intuition, not reason. Given
directly by God and hence irrefutable, passional truth was the secular
cousin of fundamentalist absolutism.
The implications of passional truth were clear to jacksonians, for the
educated and the uneducated alike. Since passional truth was accessible
to all men, regardless of intellect, and since the common man was
conventionally believed to have deeper passions than the intellectual, the
farmer and day laborer were more likely to experience deeper truths than
the " dust-ridden scholar in his library" or the lawyer in his study. In
other words, the primitive man, rather than being inferior to the
intellectual, as was conventionally believed in more patrician times,
might actually be his superior, both in knowledge that mattered and in
morality.
Hofstadter believed an irresistible attraction to primitivism, in its
various guises, to have been one of the most pervasive and recurring
forces in Western history and the American national experience,
discerning it in a wide range of cultural phenomena. Among these he
included Transcendentalism (which he labeled " the evangeli sm of the
highbrows"); the histories of Francis Parkman, George Bancroft and
Frederick jackson Turner; the mythical tales about the exploits of frontier
heroes like Davy Crockett, . Dani el Boone, and Mike Fink; modern
19
Ri gney, "Three Kinds," 438.
Anti-Intellectualism and "Commonness" 9
detective fictions; central figures in works by Cooper, Melville, and
Twain; and the public images of cultural heroes such as Andrew jackson,
Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Perhaps more significantly
for this study, he perceived primitivism as a persistent theme in the
attitude of American writers, both in and outside of the theatre, toward
Native Americans and African-Americans.
Primitivism figured prominently in many of the most popular and
ideologically influential dramas of the nineteenth century. As the arche-
typal noble savage, a figure attributed to Rousseau and disseminated
principally through the writings of Franc;:ois Rene de Chateaubriand, the
primitive was a recurrent character in Indian dramas by American authors
from Ponteach (c. 1766) to the spate of Indian plays in the early nine-
teenth century. In what is arguably its most famous incarnation, the
Chieftain Metamora in Metamora; or the Last of the Wampanoags written
by john Augustus Stone in 1828 for the American star Edwin Forrest, the
noble savage is characterized as "naturally good, . .. obeying his
impulses; childlike in his inability to control his emotions, [with] a
definite sense of honor, [able to] endure hardships, and ... brave in
battle."
20
He was believed to possess an innate understanding and
appreciation of nature and its secrets, to lack a fear of death, and to be
totally faithful to family and friends. In all respects, the noble savage was
seen as living in accordance with his sense of passional truth and as fully
embodying jacksonian notions of ethical excellence. "Even in his normal
day-to-day conduct," according to Richard Moody, "he epitomized the
nineteenth-century concept of the virtuous man. "
21
Yet, as attractive as these qualities might have been to the jacksonian
working man, Metamora might well have represented more than a simple
model of decorum and morality. As leader of a "band of native untaught
heroes ... fighting to the last gasp in the cause of their own country"
against the British, he invariably would have been recognized as an
uncompromising freedom fighter by spectators who remembered war
with the same foeY Additionally, as a being who was as " natural ,"
20
Don B. Wilmeth, "Noble or Ruthless Savage? The American Indian on Stage
and in the Drama," The journal of American Drama and Theatre 1 (Spring 1989): 41 .
21
Richard Moody, Dramas from the American Theatre, 1792-1909 (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966), 203.
22
Washi ngton Irving cited by Jeffrey Mason, "The Politics of Metamora," in The
Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, ed. Sue-Ellen Case and
Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City:University of Iowa Press, 1991), 97.
10
FRICK
"unspoiled," "originary," or (to borrow a term from theatre and cultural
historian Rosemary Bank) "unreconstructed" as they believed themselves
to be, he would have revealed to them their own i nnate nobility and
validated, at least in part, their worth, regardless of educational achieve-
ment.
23
The primitive, unfettered by booklearning but privy to passional and
biblical truths, was no less important a figure in dramatizations of Harriet
Beecher Stowe's classic, Uncle Tom's Cabin, plays that like the serial and
novel versions that preceded them, actively participated in America's
attempts to perform its conception of race.
24
Long the subject of debate
(much of it acrimonious), the character of Uncle Tom, especially his
subservience and his martyrdom, remains central to any informed
discussion of the novel and the plays that followed it. While other
characters have momentarily seized the spotlight (today George and El iza
may be considered more heroic due to their overt resistance to racial
constrictions), it was Tom who was Stowe's central character; it was Tom
who "entered the stock of American cultural archetypes; it was Tom, to
paraphrase Faulkner, who 'endured."'
25
At the core of Tom's being, on the stage as well as on the printed
page, were traits Mrs. Stowe herself prized highly. Possibly because she
was attempting to elevate the "domestic, Christian virtues associated with
women over the failed political, secular virtues associated with a
patriarchal society," as some critics assert, Stowe adopted attitudes and
moral truths held by eighteenth and early nineteenth century evangel ists,
incorporating them into Tom's character. These included an implicit trust
in the personal integrity and moral superiority of the primitive; a staunch
belief in Providence; and an unshakable faith in the ultimate authority of
the Bible, the latter manifest in Tom's conviction, expressed at various
times in both the novel and the playtext, that the only book he needed to
study was the Good Book.
Comparison of Tom's demeanor to that of his tormentor, Legree, in
the final scenes of the play reveals another, more subtle permutat ion of
23
Rosemary K. Bank, "Staging the 'Native': Making History in Amer ican Theatre
Culture, 1828-1838," Theatre Journal 45 (December 1993): 474.
24
AII discussion of Uncle Tom's Cabin in this article i s based upon the George
Aiken adaptation contained in Richard Moody's Dramas from the American Theatre,
1792- 1909, 360-96.
25
Richard Yarborough, "Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom's
Cabi n and the Early Afro-American Novel," in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed.
Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 53.
Anti-Intellectual ism and "Commonness" 11
anti-rationalism. While Tom, last minute doubts not withstanding,
approached his death with the surety his faith afforded him, Legree, in a
parallel scene, confided to his mistress that he was haunted by certain
recurring thoughts and was prone to introspection. To most, Legree's
ruminations represent little more than the workings of a guilty con-
science, but to students of American anti-intellectualism they signify
more. They connote a reconfiguration of a pervasive anti-rationalist
myth: that lack of intellect brings contentment while high intelligence
inevitably breeds unhappiness. Thus, not onfy has legree committed
heinous crimes, he has dwelt too much upon their nature. In other
words, he thought too much.
26
While anti-rationalism flowered before the Revolution and consti-
tuted the foundation upon which American anti-intellectualism rested,
the relationship between intellect, empowerment, and social dominance
was not perceived as a problem until the Jacksonian era. Prior to that, it
was generally assumed that political leaders would be men of intellect
and that social control would remain in the hands of a natural aristocracy
that was acknowledged to be intellectually superior to the masses and
which "moved freely and spoke with enviable authority."
27
Although this
consensus was occasionally challenged after the Revolut ion, patrician
norms nevertheless remained dominant until the 1820s, a decade which
Arthur Schlesinger has characterized as having been born in depression,
racked by discontent, streaked with suffering and panic, and shaken by
bursts of violence and threats of rebellion. During this tumultuous
decade, a seeming " tidal wave of egalitarianism seemed to crash over the
bulwark of rep ubi ican society," sweeping with it the foundations of the
traditional hierarchal republic.
28
Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, as Bruce McConachie has argued
convincingly, there was a similar waning of patrician authority in the
American theatre. The challenges came not only from working-class
sections of the auditorium, but from behind the proscenium as well.
While patrician box holders were engaged in a battle for control of the
26
For a more complete treatment of this, see Leo Gurko, Heroes, Highbrows and
the Popular Mind (New York: Bobbs-Merri l l Company, 1953).
27
Lawrence Frederick Kohl, " The Concept of Social Control and the Hi story of
jacksonian America," journal of the Early Republic 5 (Spring 1985): 29-31;
Hofstadter, 145.
28
Art hur M. Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (Boston: Litt le, Brown and
Company, 1945), 30; Steven Watts, '"Through a Glass Eye, Darkly': James Fenimore
Cooper as Social Critic," journal of the Early Republic 13 (Spring 1993): 57, 60.
12 FRICK
theatres that they would ultimately lose, stars like Edwin Forrest and T. A.
Cooper declared their independence from paternalistic theatre owners,
and maverick managers like Tom Hamblin abandoned upper-class
theatres to cater to the emerging "yeoman society."
29
It was within this
yeoman culture that distrust of experts surfaced and notions of intellectu-
als as "a superior little band of all-knowing men in power'' circulated
widely, subverting in the process traditional paternalistic strategies of
containment.
Given the political climate of the 1820s and 1830s and the myriad
pressures urging social level ing, it was perhaps inevitable that "opposi-
tion to the structures of authority" should translate into distrust of claims
to superior knowledge or capabilities. As Jacques Barzun phrases it,
"Intellect is ... hated because it is envied, and envied because it is felt
as a sign or pretense of social superiority. From below, on sketchy
evidence, intellect is readily associated with aristocracy and power."
30
This notion, while directly attributable to a rising populist tide and hence
politicized and partisan, nevertheless had a sound basis in historical fact,
for in nearly every period the intelligentsia, if not members of the
aristocracy themselves, typically sold their talents to the ruling classes or
their institutions. Through long association with the aristocracy, then,
intellectuals became linked with the privileges of class, regarded as an
''arrogant elite," and subject to the same hostilities as their patrons.
Anti-elitism affected members of the professions almost as soon as it
did more traditional intellectuals. Awakening to the possibilities of an
open society, the common man became acutely aware of opportunities
closed to him and quickly understood that professions were essentially
meritocratic and monopolistic, not democratic, in nature. Not only did
the professions control the distribution of their services and specify the
nature of these services, they also controlled the production of new
practitioners. With admission closed to all but those few permitted to
acquire the requisite specialized knowledge, professions came to be
regarded as coteries of insiders that constituted an "aristocracy of status."
According to de Toqueville, such attitudes may have been unavoidable
in antebellum America since democratic institutions exhibited the
tendency to ''awaken and foster a passion for equality which they could
never entirely satisfy" and economic success was attained only by those
29
Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society,
7 820- 1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 5-28.
30
Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959),
8.
Anti-Intellectualism and "Commonness" 13
with specialized skills and academic credentials, thus widening the gap
between the professional and "everyone else."
31
Although Andrew jackson used experts throughout his government
and rewarded them I iberally for their services, distrust of intellectuals
increased markedly during his presidency. It was George Bancroft, one
of Jackson's house scholars, as a matter of fact, who codified this distrust
and contributed to the desanctification of intellectuals through his theory
that the people were the source of all wisdom. Writing some years after
his service to Jackson, Bancroft summarized his argument, claiming that
"the many are wiser than the few; the multitude than the philosopher; the
race than the individual. .. . "
32
Equally important in shaping public opinion was the intellectual
nature of the man who occupied the White House. As described by
Thomas Hart Benton, the defining characteristics of Jackson's mind were
a sound "judgement, with a rapid and almost intuitive perception,
followed by an instant and decisive action."
33
Unsophisticated and not
intellectual in any sense (not even the Gramscian), Jackson nevertheless
exhibited the "shrewd practical intelligence" necessary for success in
politics, the military, or business; he was endowed with a down-to-earth
colloquial wisdom which, for lack of a better term, is called common
sense. As anthropologist and cultural theorist Clifford Geertz, discussing
common sense, outlines it, "Religion rests its case on revelation, science
on method, ideology on moral passion; but common sense rests its on the
assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its
authority."
34
By living his life and running the American government
according to "what the plain man thinks when sheltered from the vain
sophistication of school men," Jackson did much to raise "untutored
31
DeToqueville, 208; Louis Menand, " The Trashing of Professional ism," New
York Times Magazine, 5 March 1995: 41.
32
George Bancroft, The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Human
Race (New York: New York Historical Society, 1854), 10.
33
Thomas Hart Benton cited in Schlesinger, 41.
34
Ciifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology
(New York: Basic Books, 1983), 75. Geertz's concept of common sense closely
resembles Hofstadter's definition of intelligence. In Hofstadter's scheme, intell igence
is an innate "excellence of the mind ... that is manipulative, adjustive, unfailingly
practical," whereas intellect is critical, creative, contemplative, acquired, and not
necessarily practical (Hofstadter, 24-25).
14 FRICK
common sense" to the level of a Harvard education as preparation for
grasping "in-the-grain-of-nature realities" of daily life.
35
Anti-elitism slipped into the American theatre in a variety of guises,
including the creation of a specific character, the stage Yankee, who
proudly carried the banner of the common man throughout the century
and became one of the most popular acts in all of show business. As
Francis Hodge has characterized him, from his initial incarnation as
Jonathan in Royal Tyler's The Contrast (1787) through middle-class
versions (Adam Trueman in Fashion [1845], for example) to later
representations like Denman Thompson's creation, Josh Whitcomb, in
The Old Homestead in the 1880s, the stage Yankee embodied qualities
valued by Americans: simplicity, "independence, self-assertion,
capability, imagination, cleverness and high potential."
36
Invariably
pitted against a more intellectual, more sophisticated adversary (either a
foreign imposter or native-born aristocrat), the Yankee, an intriguing
"mixture of amiable rustic simplicity . .. with which he threw his
adversaries off guard and a shrewd and cunning intelligence with which
he unfailingly won his bargains," represented the superiority of demo-
cratic values and the equality of "low" and "high" social orders in
antebellum society.
37
In a seemingly endless series of plays (Nick of the
Woods [1838], The People's Lawyer [1839], The Drunkard [1844], Uncle
Tom's Cabin [1852], The Octoroon [1857], Ten Nights in a Bar-room
[1858], Our American Cousin [1858], A Glance at New York (1848], and
The Old Homestead [1886], to cite some of the more famous) the stage
Yankee, sporting names like Solon Shingle or Jonathan Ploughboy and
portrayed by stars like James H. Hackett and George Handel Hill,
provided the average Jacksonian a model of the ideal democrat and
enacted, singlehandedly and in full view of antebellum audiences, a
relentless ritual of social leveling.
The process of social leveling was a constant source of wonderment
to foreign visitors during the early years of the Republic. European
travellers in America, from Marryat to Mrs. Trollope, continually
expressed their dismay at the tendency of "low" Americans to mingle
freely with their social"betters," at the "egalitarian belief that one man
... was as good as any other (and] should be treated like any other," and
at Americans' hypersensitivity to even the slightest appearance of
35
Geertz, 77.
36
Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre (Austin: Universi ty of Texas Press, 1964), 257.
37
Hodge, 44.
Anti-Intellectualism and "Commonness" 15
servitude.
38
Because of his anti-elitist nature, the stage Yankee was the
ideal defender of the intermixing of social classes, as the following
exchange between Jessamy, aristocrat Billy Dimple's valet, and the
Yankee, Jonathan, in The Contrast illustrates:
JESSAMY: I say, Sir, I understand that Colonel Manly has the
honour of having you for a servant.
JONATHAN: Servant! Sir, [what] do you take me for ... I am
. Colonel Manly's waiter.
JESSAMY: A true Yankee distinction, egad without a difference.
Why, Sir, do you not perform all the offices of a servant? do you
not even blacken his boots?
JONATHAN: Yes; I do grease them a bit sometimes; but I am a
true blue son of liberty, for all that. Father said I should come as
Colonel Manly's waiter, to see the world, and all that; but no
man shall master me.
39
Derisively branded "familiarity" and a common subject of ridicule by
non-Americans, egalitarianism nevertheless remained a source of pride
to the native-born and was fiercely protected from any encroachment,
foreign or domestic.
Anti-intellectualism (both primitivism and anti-elitism) was also
thoroughly embedded in the antebellum minstrel show, an unabashedly
plebeian art form. In addition to using "innocents" (African-Americans)
as subjects of representation, minstrel performers capitalized upon and
cultivated the growing hostility to "those identified by their interest in
theory, speculative thought or activities of the mind" by ridicul ing
intellectuals' foibles and by parodying intellectuals' sense of their own
38
Edward Pessen, jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Home-
wood, IL: The Dorsey Press. 1969), 27.
39
Moody, 42. The Contrast also contains a scathing indictment of Lord
Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, a book that was in circulation at the time the play
was written. While the letters were admittedly morally repugnant to most Americans,
it is interesting to note that Cambridge-educated Chesterfield was regarded as "the
consummate civilized man in control of himself" and his letters were disseminated
in book form to an audience presumed to be largely patrician in composition. Quite
possibly, given what we know of American anti-intellectualism, i t was not only
Chesterfield's amorality, but also his status as an intellectual, that made him odious
to so many Americans.
16 FRICK
superiority. Much of this anti-intellectualism was directed at the
interlocutor, a minstrel performer given to somewhat flowery and
pompous speech, who served as the on-stage authority and, in both
formal position and bearing, constituted a recurrent symbol of class
superiority. As Robert Toll notes, "When the endmen mocked his
pomposity, audiences could indulge their anti-intellectualism by laughing
at him."
40
While class anxiety and anti-intellectualism remained beneath the
surface in the relationship between interlocutor and endmen, the minstrel
stump speech, one of the most prominent and durable of the specialty
acts, was an undisguised critique of intellectualism. In convoluted, over-
blown, malaprop-laden rhetoric, the stump speaker, like the commedia
dottore centuries before, discoursed hilariously on a variety of topics
from abolition to temperance to women's rights. Disguised as topical
humor, the minstrel stump speech was, in reality, a carefully scripted
polemic directed by its white male creators against these politically-
charged topics, each a pet reform of progressives, and against the
intellectuals who supported them.
The materialist mentality of the American
business man and the pioneering spirit that led to the opening of the
West, both characterized by acquisition and conquest, gave birth to
another form of anti-intellectual ism: an "excessive, rampant" strain of
utilitarianism that one historian called unreflective instrumentalism.
"From the conditions of frontier life," as Frederick jackson Turner
contended, "came intellectual traits of profound importance-coarseness
and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical ,
inventive turn of mind quick to ftnd expedients."
41
In Turner's view, the
intellectual embodied specialization and contemplation; the adventurer
symbolized versatility and action. The untamed West, with its demands
for swift, decisive action, was consequently no place for visionaries and
dreamers, for the tentativeness and "frivolous gentility" of the intellec-
tual. For strictly pragmatic reasons, then, both the entrepreneur and the
pioneer attached great importance to the immediately useful, to whatever
was clearly related to decisions and actions, while they simultaneously
devalued modes of thought that did not promise tangible and practical
results.
It was such attitudes that caused Merle Curti to conclude that
Jacksonians were natural heirs to the Elizabethan middle-class with their
40
Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America
(London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 53.
41
Frederick Jackson Turner cited in Pessen, 7.
Anti-Intellectualism and "Commonness" 17
zeal for utilitarianism's test of knowledge and to conclude that the cry of
the age must have been, "no college made me, I made myself," a claim
initially expressed in a thinly veiled satire on university training written
by Caleb S. Henry. In both oral and written discourse, Henry's dictum
echoed throughout antebellum society. It underlay Andrew Carnegie's
branding classical education a "waste of precious years trying to extract
education from an ignorant past" and railroad magnate Leland Stanford's
complaint that college graduates had "no definite . .. knowledge of
anything;"
42
as well as Tammany boss George Washington Plunkitt's less
than grammatical claim that "books is a hindrance more than anything
else. If you have been to college, so much the worse for you."
43
With
those most responsible for endowing institutions of higher education
preaching distrust of book-learning and "impractical" knowledge, it is
hardly surprising that the self-made man should have become the
paradigm, the cultural hero, of nineteenth-century materialist civilization,
and that practical rather than theoretical education should have become
the stated goal of American industrialists who founded their own colleges
and universities.
Although the number of men who attained eminence in American
society without benefit of formal schooling or breeding was statistically
small, the rise of those few who did triumph was sufficiently dramatic to
sustain the myth of the self-made man. An outgrowth of Puritan
philosophy, the self-made man was defined, not by his genius or business
acumen, but rather by his upstanding character, solid work ethic, and his
capacity for action (with or without prior thought) . As writers from
Hofstadter to Karen Haltunen point out, the self-help books of the era,
many written by Protestant clergymen, dealt predominantly with how a
person might "cultivate the habits of frugality and hard work and the
virtues of perseverance and sobriety" -those very traits which fostered
success in business and ensured survival in an urban environment, the
setting for American industry.
44
America's impatience with the ways of education and its fervid
distrust of a life of the mind was written into the very fabric of its most
popular and cherished heroes, most dramatically into legends surround-
ing folk icons like Daniel Boone, Mike Fink, Paul Bunyan, and Davy
Crockett. While contemporaneous examples of such folk heroes who
disparaged formal education were legion, none was more illustrative than
42
Rigney, 445.
43
Curti, American Paradox, 56.
44
Hofstadter, 253-6.
18 FRICK
Davy Crockett's disdain for "book learning," a facet of the Crockett
legend first disseminated orally and then as a "subliterature" (" adven-
tures for the simpleminded" designed for people who didn't read books,
as Daniel Boorstin characterizes them) that ranged from cheap short
stories, articles in newspapers and almanacs, to dramas performed on the
stages of some of America's most famous theatres. Throughout antebel-
lum America, "Crockett anecdotes plunged headlong ... from the small
world of fireside anecdote and barroom wheeze into the great democratic
world of print" and greasepaint.
45
According to legend, Crockett ran away from home at the age of
thirteen and following stints as an army scout, Justice of the Peace, and
Colonel of Militia, was elected to Congress. Virtually uneducated himself
and a prime model of the self-made American man, Crockett had I ittle
use for book learning and said so publicly on more than one occasion.
While serving as a judge, he claimed not to know the meaning of the
word "judiciary," bragged that he "relied on natural-born-sense instead
of law-learning," and once branded the rules of spelling "contrary to
nature."
Translated to the American stage in vehicles like James Kirke
Paulding's Lion of the West (1830; later readapted as The Kentuckian)
and Davy Crockett (1874) by Frank Murdock, Crockett remained a
"specimen of unrestrained nature," totally ignorant of conventional social
restraints and longing for physical action of any type, be it a duel with a
foreigner or unarmed combat with a pack of wolves. Although somewhat
tamed and civilized by the debut of Murdock's drama, the protagonist in
The Lion of the West, a thinly disguised version of Crockett who billed
himself as " hal f horse, half alligator, a touch of the airthquake, with a
sprinkling of the steamboat," was clearly still a transgressive figure who
stampeded through genteel society, trampling in the process the
American aristocracy, assorted representatives of the British nobility, and
a character named Mrs. Wollope, a not-too-subtle parody of Mrs. Frances
Trollope. Given his lack of socialization, some cultural critics have even
seen Crockett as a trickster figure-marginal, subversive, existing outside
institutional frameworks, poised between economic classes and social
niches, and capable of unlimited mischief and disruption. "Loose,
liminal , and wild," Crockett was ideally suited for the task thrust upon
him by Jacksonians-that of subverting patrician values and intellectual
culture. Consistent with these imperatives, in the majority of representa-
45
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York:
Vintage Books, 1965), 328.
Anti-Intellectualism and "Commonness" 19
tions, Crockett's ignorance and lack of respect for education were
invariably depicted as being among his most endearing qualities.
The violence, often mindless and excessive, that characterized
Crockett's relations to both men and animals revealed yet another facet
of antebellum anti-intellectualism, this one swirling about men's
preoccupations with their own manhood. In antebellum America it was
a common belief within the male sphere that physical strength was a
source of character, that development of the body gave a man self-control
and strength of mind, and that physical aggression was on occasion
necessary to assert one's masculinity. Commenting upon the latter,
E. Anthony Rotondo has astutely noted that "where strength and force
were so highly valued, it was only natural that men admired fighting
virtues and often endorsed violence."
46
Within the male subculture,
then, military prowess, brawling, displays of strength, feats of daring
("doing a 'stump'" in nineteenth-century parlance), and later in the
century, athletic skill, became the standard tests of manhood.
In addition to Crockett, Jacksonian males had another, perhaps more
immediate, model of masculine violence. As both admirers and
detractors described him, Andrew Jackson was the quintessential "man
of action." A war hero and Indian fighter, Jackson had virtually defined
himself through violent acts against an array of enemies, against his
friends, against Indians, against the British. As evidence of his violent
past, historians are fond of noting that Jackson had been involved in his
first duel (in jonesborough, Tennessee) when he was just twenty-one.
Not surprisingly, given a climate in which the most overtly aggressive
were regarded as the most masculine, antebellum men grew sensitive to
anything that might render them "not quite a man," and vigilant for any
"lack of vigor or command in another man's character."
47
In this violent,
physicalized world, the intellectual and cultural realms became increas-
ingly untenable and, as the nineteenth century progressed, few American
men questioned the notions that culture (used here to signify the process
of intellectual and aesthetic education and development) was impractical
and feminine, that men of culture and intellect were ineffectual and
effeminate, and that action (even unthinking action) was manly while
intellectual and cultural pursuits were not. In terms of the "lingering
prestige of brawn/' then, to be an intellectual or an artist was to be only
half a man.
46
E. Anthony Rotondo, American Manhood (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 225.
47
/bid., 225.
20
FRICK
Beginning in the mid-1820s, audiences could view their ideal of
manhood on stage in the person of America's first native-born star, Edwin
Forrest. In his on-stage personifications of such figures as Metamora and
as Spartacus in Robert Mongomery Bird's The Gladiator (1831) as well
as in his offstage demeanor, Forrest both exploited and reinforced
jacksonian conceptions of masculinity. Muscular, powerful, athletic,
overtly emotion'al, honorable, and patriotic, Forrest cast himself as the
paradigm of masculinity, and throughout a career that spanned more than
fifty years he polished the role of the self-made, unabashedly physical,
anti-intellectual jacksonian man.
48
Forrest was so careful in choosing
only the most masculine roles for his repertory, according to Bruce
McConachie, that he shied away from those that required him to display
gui It or weakness, and when he did portray vulnerable characters he
relied upon "stentorian fury" and bombast to carry him past moments
when he was required to show "womanish fear."
49
In his private life, according to his biographers, Forrest was actually
ambivalent about some of his so-called feminine traits, most notably
book-learning, cultural sophistication, and intellectualism. He was
described as being naturally curious, displaying a reverence for books
(although at the time that he achieved fame he had read only the Bible,
Shakespeare, and Robert Burns) and compiling a respectable personal
library during his lifetime, yet there is little evidence that he read more
than a fraction of his collection, his social discourse was restricted to
repeating material from the popular press, and he was never comfortable
in the company of true intellectuals. Whatever his private feelings about
intellectualism, however, throughout his life Forrest publicly cultivated
his physical, masculine self at the expense of his more "feminine" mental
attributes. His public persona remained staunchly masculine and, in
keeping with Jacksonian expectations, anti-intellectual.
50
In addition to a constant parade of masculine icons, from Forrest to
Frank Chanfrau and later Harry Montague, Maurice Barrymore, Frank
Mayo and others, male stereotypes, both the "manly man" and the
"effeminate intellectual," proliferated in the literature written for the
48
McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 83-90; Bruce A. McConachie, "The
Theatre of Edwin Forrest and jacksonian Hero Worship, " in When They Weren' t
Doing Shakespeare, ed. judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt (Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press, 1989), 3-18.
49
McConachie, " Forrest and Hero Worship, " 12.
50
Richard Moody, Edwin Forrest: First Star of the American Stage (New York:
Albert A. Knopf, 1960), 33, 47, 76-81 .
Anti-Intellectualism and "Commonness" 21
stage and served as useful constructs upon which a play might be
structured, as a reading of Royall Tyler's The Contrast attests. The central
conflict and much of the tension of this stage classic were generated by
juxtaposing these stereotypes and the disparate moral, intellectual, and
gender positions they represented. Presented with a clear choice
between the character of Its protagonist, a symbol of American manhood
aptly named Colonel Manly who behaved according to strictly masculine
imperatives, and that of the effete, effeminate Billy Dimple, a foreigner
who spent his mornings "at his toilette" and at reading and who
maneuvered throughout New York society using " feminine" means
(manipulation and duplicity), antebellum males were expected to emulate
Manly and to reject womanish values and pursuits. So instrumental was
the dichotomy between the stereotypes that without it, the play's
denouement (the final face-to-face confrontation between Manly and
Dimple after Dimple's evil had been exposed) would have been virtually
incomprehensible; for when Manly refused Dimple's challenge to duel,
he was acting not out of cowardice, as his overt actions might imply, but
on the conviction that Dimple was "less than a man" and hence not a
suitable foe. Dueling with Dimple, in this context, would have been
tantamount to dueling with a woman and would have been construed as
dishonorable.
In an especially intriguing character permutation in The People's
Lawyer (1839) playwright Joseph S. Jones used "manly physicality" to
undercut the intellectuality of his protagonist, the lawyer Robert Howard,
and to make him more palatable to blue collar audiences. Although
trained as an attorney, Howard spent his days working as a "crude
mechanical," which not only allowed him to experience first-hand the
problems of the laboring classes, but to participate in the physical culture
of the working man as well. Early in the play, the audience is also
informed that Howard is a powerful and accomplished brawler and that
should .his intellectual skills prove ineffectual in attaining justice for the
working man, he will not hesitate to resort to ever-trustworthy brute force
and fisticuffs to save the day. Thus, by encapsulating the cultural tensions
between intellect and physicality, conventionally assigned to opposing
characters, into a single character and by demonstrating that "rough and
ready" physicality and violence can render even a lawyer likable, Jones
reinforced the dominant notion of the era that physical action was
superior to intellectual action as a problem solving strategy.
While intellect and physicality were conventionally created as
oppositional forces to be treated seriously, their dramatic utility was by
no means limited to melodrama. Cultural sophistication and intellectual-
ism, villainized in The Contrast and other dramas, were adopted as
subjects for ridicule by writers of comedy like Anna Cora Mowatt. In
22 FRICK
Fashion, Mowatt's personification of these qualities, the "sweet" poet T.
Tennyson Twinkle, was rendered as an irrelevant appendage who was
"kept around" the drawing room (and in the plot) because he was "all
the rage," yet was virtually ignored by the "true men" in the play. He
occupied the woman's sphere of the play and was perceived by both
sexes as belonging solely to this world. After his initial appearance,
Twinkle moved progressively toward the periphery of the plot and finally
disappeared quietly, befitting someone of feminine sensibilities and
refinement.
Writing about human reactions to cultural change, Carol Smith-
Rosenberg observes, "Individuals experiencing themselves as powerless
in the face of massive and unremitting social transformation, respond by
attempting to capture and encapsulate such changes within a new and
ordered symbolic universe."
51
During the first decades of the nineteenth
century, Americans faced a social transformation so severe that, to many,
it threatened the very future of the Republican experiment. In those
tension-filled times, Americans turned not only to conventional sources
like family and religion for guidance, but to non-traditional sources like
dime novels, the penny press, advice manuals, and the stage in order to
"capture and encapsulate" an image of the natural aristocrat as a man of
feeling. Building upon what Hofstadter terms the "unholy alliance
between the fundamentalism of the cross and the fundamentalism of the
flag," antebellum democrats used popular culture to disseminate a
portrait of the intellectual as passionless, elitist, effeminate, and poten-
tially amoral-an image that proved influential in the construction of both
masculine and national identities and that informs popular culture to this
day. From the earliest days of the Republic to the present, then-from
Edwin Forrest to Forrest Gump-Americans have staunchly maintained
that the life of the mind is suspect and have correspondingly constructed
their cultural heroes as men of action, rather than men of speculative
thought.
5 1
Carol Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian
America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 90.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 9 (Spring 1997)
The Myth of Narcissus: Shepard's True West and
Mamet' s Speed-the-Plow
KATHERINE H. BURKMAN
It's a scientific fact. For every two years you live in California you lose
two points of your I.Q. It's redundant to die in L.A.
-Truman Capote
Sam Shepard's True West (1980) and David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow
(1988) are twin plays about twins. Although the dramas appear to be
very different on the surface, they duplicate each other in terms of both
their plots and their protagonists. Such similarity only becomes troubling,
however, because of a kind of duplicity that lurks in the duplicating
process; the playwrights, who purport to offer a critique of Hollywood,
offer instead a celebration of that which they critique. One may well
wonder how two such gifted American playwrights as Shepard and
Mamet managed to arrive at such sameness. What is the power of the
Hollywood myth that swallows up those who would combat it? What
has happened to our culture since cinema originally attempted to capture
theatre but now seems to have swallowed it up?
I would suggest that the power of the Hollywood myth, the glamor-
ous scenario envisioned by Lee in Shepard's True West, that you can
become an overnight star in an effortless burst of creativity, has its
underpinnings in the myth of Narcissus and the narcissism that Christo-
pher Lasch asserts underlies American culture in general. For participants
in the film industry, whether producers of scripts (the characters in Speed
the Plow) or writers of scripts (the characters in True West), the glamour
of the movie world involves a narcissistic escape akin to that which the
spectator experiences when viewing a film.
A culture organized around mass consumption encourages
narcissism-which we can define, for the moment, as a disposi-
tion to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projec-
tion of one's own fears and desires-not because it makes people
grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and
dependent. It undermines their confidence in their capacity to
24 BURKMAN
understand and shape the world and to provide for their own
needs.
1
The lost and dependent Lee in True West assures his brother that he
can make his fantasies become reality, that he can become a film writer
with ease. "I could be just like you .... "Lee informs his brother, "Sittin'
around dream in' stuff up. Gettin' paid to dream. Ridin' back and forth
on the freeway just dreami.n' my fool head off."
2
Lee's brother Austin,
who is in the business of turning out the movie scripts that Lee aspires to
write, knows the hollowness of such instant success, but he in turn
romanticizes his brother's life as an outlaw of the desert. In reality, about
which neither brother has much sense, Lee is merely a small time crook,
who steals television sets. The fun in the play lies in Shepard's critique
of the West in its desert and Hollywood versions, which involves
exposing the twin nature of the brothers with their interchangeable
dreams.
3
The encounter of the brothers in their mother's apartment is not that
of doubles in which the protagonist must face in the Other a darker
aspect of a self, an encounter such as Otto Rank describes:
The most prominent symptom of the forms which the double
takes is a powerful consciousness of guilt which forces the hero
no longer to accept the responsibility for certain actions of his
1
Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 33.
2
Sam Shepard, True West in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (New York: Bantam,
1981), 25. Subsequent page references will be included parenthetically in the text.
3
Alice Miller explains the relationship of the myth of Narcissus to narcissistic
disturbance in The Drama of the Gifted Child:
The legend of Narcissus actually tells us the tragedy of the narcissistic
disturbance. Narcissus sees his reflection in the water and falls in love with
his own beautiful face, of which his mother was surely proud. The nymph
Echo answers the young man' s calls because she is in love with his beauty,
just as their mothers are with our patients. Echo' s answering calls deceive
Narcissus. His reflection deceives him as well, since it shows only his
perfect, wonderful side and not his other parts. His back view, for instance,
and his shadow remain hidden from him; they do not belong to and are cut
off from his beloved reflection. (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 49.
Miller further explains that his passion for his false self prevents Narcissus from loving
himself (50).
The Myth of Narcissus 25
ego, but to place it upon another ego, a double, who is either
personified by the devil himself or is created by making a
diabolical pact.
4
The brothers are not Other to each other; there is no difference. Both are
living in illusion, for the desert that Lee's father inhabits is no more "real"
than the Hollywood that covers over some part of it. Visiting his father
in the desert, Lee has found it to be a wasteland for the drunks who have
lost their teeth, their bite: Austin tells Lee about how their father lost his
teeth one by one and then in a bout of drinking lost his false teeth as
well : "First he lost his real teeth, then he lost his false teeth" (41). Taking
out the false teeth on a drinking spree with his son, his father, Austin tells
Lee, dropped them in a doggie bag with some Chop Suey. "We went
back but we never did find it. (pause) Now that's a true story. True to
life" (42) .
The double loss of real and false teeth becomes one of the play' s
numerous metaphors for the lost nature of the "True West" in its
manifestations as either Hollywood or the desert that spawned this
horrific flower. Only loss is true, "true to life." Each brother senses his
own hollowness but idealizes the other in hopes of inhabiting a truer self.
The film script that Lee conjures up, in which two brothers are involved
in a pointless chase scene, neatly reflects and sums up Austin and Lee's
own plight. The brothers, Lee explains as he describes his script idea, are
in a desert and run out of gas:
So they take off after each other straight into an end less black
prairie. The sun is just com in' down and they can feel the night
on their backs. What they don't know is that each one of 'em is
afraid, see. Each one separately thinks that he's the only one
that's afraid. And they keep ridin' like that straight into the night.
Not knowing. And the one who's chasin' doesn't know where
the other one is taking him. And the one who's being chased
doesn't know where he's going. (27)
4
0tto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. and ed. Harry Tucker,
Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1971 ), 76. The term double is a slippery one
and Rank' s is an early definition. Gordon E. Slethaug in The Play of the Double in
Postmodern American Fiction discusses postmodern definitions (Derrida and
Foucault' s). By viewing reality as a construct of language, these thinkers have a more
lingui stic view of the figure, " instead of treating the double as a separate person or
separate aspect of a personality." (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern I llinois
University Press, 1993), 25.
26 BURKMAN
The brothers are like Narcissus sitting at the pool, so in love with an
idealized image of himself that he fails to realize it is just that, an image.
As Austin and Lee struggle over who will get the keys to Austin's car
as if that will determine the "true" victory in their power conflict, we
begin to realize the "false" nature of the struggle (not true at all} as they
turn into each other: Lee struggles to write his script, "Contemporary
western. Based on a true story" (18}, while Austin steals toasters and
prepares to leave for the desert. Each brother wishes to be the other,
each failing to realize that they are indistinguishable.
At the outposts of the play's geography are Alaska, from which the
boys' mother returns only to depart when her sons won't "behave" and
the desert, where the boys seek a father who is as absent for them as their
mother is. Richard Gilman writes that the rootlessness of the West is
Shepard's natural setting as it is "almost the condition of life" in his
dramatic world.
But at the same time the West, particularly California, is the
place where, most acutely, visible success, gestures of self,
personality, fame are means, conscious or not, of making up for
or disguising the lack of roots.
5
What is most compelling in Shepard's drama is his projection of the
myth of Hollywood as the other side of the bankrupt coin of the "true"
West that Hollywood in turn tries to romanticize in its Westerns. When
Austin informs his producer that his script is superior to his brother's, he
defines the two Wests which are really one.
He's [Lee] been camped out on the desert for three months.
Talking to cactus. What' s he know about what people wanna'
see on the screen! I drive on the freeway every day. I swallow
the smog. I watch the news in color. I shop in the Safeway. I'm
the o.ne who's in touch! Not him! (35)
Not, may we say, either one!
In his twiri version of True West, Mamet creates in Speed-the-Plow
another appearance of difference that is an illusion. In Mamet's drama,
the twin protagonists, Bobby Gould and Charlie Fox, have the opportu-
nity to produce a buddy prison film with a star, a film that reflects them
even as Lee's film reflects the brothers in True West. Buddies themselves,
5
Richard Gilman, " Introduction," Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (New York: Bantam,
1981), xxi.
The Myth of Narcissus 27
the two men laughingly envision themselves as whores who are about to
become "rich" whores,
6
producers who make vacuous films: Fox
explains to Karen, a temporary secretary, that Gould "takes his coffee like
he makes his movies: nothing in it. ... 'Cause he's an Old Whore" (31 ).
Like Shepard, Mamet sets up a false Other as Gould is seduced for a
time by Karen, who wants him to produce a film with substance. Here
Shepard's false opposition between Hollywood and the desert becomes
a false opposition between Hollywood and the East. Gould has been
giving a "courtesy read" to a novel called "The Bridge: or Radiation and
the Half-Life of Society, A Study of Decay" (29), a novel he explains that
is "From the East. An Eastern Sissy Writer" (29). Karen's emotional
report to Gould on the book he gives her to evaluate exposes both the
book and her as ludicrous. The novel, she rhapsodizes, invites us to revel
in the radiation that changes us. The author, she explains, "says that the
radiation ... all of it, the planes, the televisions, clocks, all of it is to the
one end. To change us-to, to bring about a change-all radiation has
been sent by God. To change us. Constantly" (64). As Clive Barnes
notes, "Mamet never gives art an even break against mammon."
7
The difference again, then, proves illusory as the seemingly innocent
Karen, who promotes the Eastern novel and herself, is just another kind
of whore, who sleeps with Gould to get him interested in the novel.
Mamet never gives any serious credence to the novel as a work of any
more substance than the buddy film the male whores agree to make.
And Gould, whose flirtation with an "art" film turns out to be only a
flirtation with Karen, returns to his "buddy" Gould from whom, it turns
out, he is basically indistinguishable.
Like Shepard, Mamet offers an amusing and somewhat biting critique
of Hollywood, exposing its myth as shallow, materialistic, and dehuman-
izing. But like Shepard again, Mamet plays fast and loose with his
audience, proving that he and Shepard are buddies at heart, barely more
distinguishable from each other than their protagonists, whom they seem
so intent on exposing but whom they tend to celebrate at the same time.
Stephen Watt, in his cogent analysis of Speed-the-Plow has quite rightly
suggested that "Hollywood on stage is gendered in ways analogous to
Hollywood on film," so that Karen's threat to Gould and Fox's masculin-
6
David Mamet, Speed-The-Plow (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 31-32.
Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically w ithin the text.
7
Quoted in Ann C. Hall, "Playing to Win: Sexual Politics in David Mamet's
House of Games and Speed-the-Plow," in David Mamet: A Casebook, ed. Leslie
Kane, Vol. 12, Casebooks on Modern Dramatists (New York: Garland Publishing,
1992), 155.
28 BURKMAN
ity must be removed if they are to get on with making the prison film that
will empower them "to impose their own brand of rapine on others: 'up
the ass with gun and camera."'
8
While Ann Hall believes that Karen
disrupts and exposes "the male system as a house of cards,"
9
and that the
casting of Madonna in the rol.e underlines the ambiguity of Karen as
virgin/whore that the director sought,
10
such ambiguity seems to be sadly
missing in the script.
Indeed, the casting provides clues to the way the drama plays into the
Hollywood myth it purports to critique. Karen/Madonna as sex object
can't be taken seriously by either Gould or the audience. An object can
hardly disrupt-it can only. titillate with a slight flutter. In her singing
career Madonna refuses to be such an object, her very offering of herself
as a sex object performed with irony and control that becomes a
comment on the objectifying of women. As Karen, however, a character
who seems to fight Hollywood sleaze, her offers of salvation are as
vacuous as the text that she wishes Gould to embrace-"! know what it
is to be bad. I've been bad, I know what it is to be lost, I know you're
lost" (77). Given such blatant cliches, how can the audience not be
relieved when the men throw her out? Because Karen/Madonna remains
even more stereotyped than the men, she does not offer any actual
disruption to the "buddies," who happily escape her influence.
Once again, there is no Other. Narcissus pays no attention to the
nymph Echo, who pines away with love for him, but we hear her voice
as distinct, at least in Ovid's version of the Narcissus myth. Reduced to
an- echo, she infuses that echo with her authentic experience.
Meanwhile Narcissus, strayed from all his friends,
began to shout, "Is anybody here?"
"Here," Echo answered, and the wondering boy
Looked far around him and cried louder, "Come."
"Come," she called after him . . . .
11
8
Stephen Watt, "Representing Hollywood on Stage: Structural Allegories, Phallic
' Players,' and Colonized Consumers, " Unpublished paper given at MLA, 1994, 5.
9
Hall, 138.
10
/bid., 149.
11
0vid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Horace Gregory (New York: The Viking
Press, 1958), 96-97.
The Myth of Narcissus 29
Since Echo manages, in the confines of her loved one's words, to make
her own statements, it is not surprising to hear that even when she has
long vanished from the forest, her voice remains with her bones:
Far from her usual walks on hills and valleys,
She's heard by all who call; her voice has life.
12
Mamet, however, makes his character all body and no voice, a hollow
echo of the aspirations of the men for power. Insuring that Karen wil l
remain "temporary" by giving her more vacuous cliches to speak than he
gives to the men, Mamet, in Brechtian terms, does not dismantle the
ideology of the patriarchal texture of the Hollywood myth that the play
depicts. Since the woman identifies with her oppressors and adopts their
strategies and behaviors, she becomes their twin, not their double.
Rather than the melodrama of the good girl versus the bad guys, Mamet
rather gives us the melodrama of the bad guys, who are boyish and
foolish, versus the worse woman.
Shepard indulges in a similar denigration of women by bringing on
a character as mother in True West who is the very personification of
absence. True, the men are for all intents and purposes orphans, in that
their father is as absent as their mother, having become as childlike as
they are. But the mother's treatment of her sons' murderous wrestling
match as the bad behavior of children indicts her as part cause. "You
boys shouldn't fight in the house," she exclaims as they begin their f ight
to the death. "Go outside and fight" (56). Perhaps if she had paid more
attention to her sons, they might have had a chance to grow up. The
disappointment of the mother and the rage of the brothers are all part of
their narcissistic dilemma, their lack of ability to separate from one
another.
13
Somehow the culprit here is not the bad boys, who are again rather
endearing, but the mother, who, like Karen, is permanently temporary
and absolutely muddled. She has come back early from Al aska, she
explains, partly because she missed her plants, whose death she
nevertheless brushes off with, "Oh well, one less thing to take care of I
12
0vid, 97.
13
"We cathect an object narcissistically, according to Kohut (1971), when we
experience it not as the center of its own activity but as a part of ourselves. If the
object does not behave as we expect or wish, we may at times be immeasurably
disappointed or offended, almost as if an arm ceased to obey us or a funct ion that we
take for granted (such as memory) lets us down. This sudden loss of cont rol may also
lead to an intense narcissistic rage." (Miller, 31)
30 BURKMAN
guess" (54), and her big news is that Picasso is in town. Informed by her
sons that Picasso is dead, her reply is: "No, he's not dead. He's visiting
the museum. I read it on the bus. We have to go down there and see
him" (55). Unlike Mamet's Karen, Shepard's Mom does stumble in her
capacity of wise fool on one important truth. When her sons inform her
they are off to the desert, though not the same desert that their father
inhabits, she announces: "Well, you'll probably wind up on the same
desert sooner or later" (53). What escapes her, however, is that she
inhabits that desert, or rather, that the desert inhabits her.
Like Gould, Lee, essentially motherless, longs for a woman who will
reflect him in some way:
LEE: Is it too late to call a woman? You know any women?
AUSTIN: I'm a married man.
LEE: I mean a local woman ...
AUSTIN: How 'bout some toast? ...
LEE: I don't need toast. I need a woman.
AUSTIN: A woman isn't the answer. Never was.
LEE: I'm not talkin' about permanent. I'm talkin' about
temporary. (44)
Shepard is no less aware than Mamet that his male characters treat
women as temporaries-what is an idea in Shepard becomes a metaphor
in Karen's position as "temporary"-but since the women are not just
considered temporary by the men but are portrayed as vacuously
temporary, the critique is undermined and the buddies' view of women
is subtly reinforced.
Mamet has found the perfect actor for his rendition of the Hollywood
myth on stage in Joe Mantegna, who revealed to Leslie Kane in an
interview not only the secret of his successful acting of Mamet roles but
also his unconscious collusion with Mamet in undoing some of the social
critique that the plays might hold. The secret to playing his role in
Glengarry, he notes, was "falling in love with the character as opposed
The Myth of Narcissus 31
to looking at him from the outside,"
14
as anti-Brechtian as one can get.
He goes on to say that "In other words, all these attributes that perhaps
to somebody else were sleazy or despicable, to me were all attributes.
They were confidence, they were power, they were respect, they were
compassion, caring."
15
Mamet, like Mantegna, identifies with the
Hollywood moguls' misogyny and self-hate, finally sentimental izing male
bonding and celebrating it even while he exposes its suspect basis. He
can't even let Gould go, resuscitating hi:m in a 1989 play, Bobby Could
in Hell, in which Hollywood is now hell itself and he is accused of being
"cruel without being interesting,"
16
as if somehow being interesting
would be a saving grace. For Mamet, Gould and Fox are entertaining
clowns, and that is their saving grace.
Similarly, Shepard identifies with and romanticizes the brothers who
fully understand their own failures as artists and human beings
("AUSTIN: There's nothin' real down here, lee! least of afl me" . . .
"LEE: I'm livin' out there 'cause I can't make it here!" [49]}. In Shepard's
hands, however, the critique of a bankrupt Hollywood is undermined
because he lovingly creates Peter Pan characters, who somewhat
charmingly refuse to give up their childhood dreams. They are like
Rabbit in Shepard's earlier play, Angel City (1976), who resists the crazed
world of film but realizes he does not want to leave what has become a
hell, and who ends up by becoming the film.
17
locked in a love/hate
embrace at the play's conclusion, Austin and lee are also like Narcissus
at the pool, still worshipping an idealized image that they know is hollow
but that they are incapable of rejecting as only an image. Ovid's
description of Narcissus just after he rejects the insight that his image is
himself could just as well be a description of Austin and Lee: "He spoke
and half mad faced the self-made image."
18
Finally, the myth of Hollywood on the Shepard and Mamet stage,
despite all the playwrights' efforts to deconstruct and expose it as
14
Leslie Kane, "Interview with Joe Mantegna," David Mamet: A Casebook, ed.
Leslie Kane (New York and London: Garland Publish ing, 1992), 256.
15
/bid.
16
David Mamet, Bobby Could in Hell, in Oh, hell!: Two One-Act Plays (New
York: Samuel French, 1991), 42.
1 7
Sam Shepard, Angel City, in Angel City & Other Pla ys (New York: Urizen
Books, 1976), 5-54.
18
0vid, 99.
32 BURKMAN
bankrupt, retains a glamorous potency, a potency that depends on a
subtle misogyny and that is at its core deeply narcissistic. There is no real
tension ' in the conflicts in these Hollywood dramas, no real contest
between the self and Other, no confrontation of the self with a double
that might provide subtext. While such lack of duality in plays that
appear to explore the self in terms of an Other may be viewed as merely
an illustration of postmodern insights about the lack of centering and
identity, the flattening out of character would seem rather to mask the
narcissistic trap that the playwrights seem to fall into as they critique a
narcissistic culture. Without conflict there is no integration, just a
merging that leaves the characters empty. In The Minimal Self, Christo-
pher Lasch finds that the central concern of much contemporary art is just
the kind of illusion of oneness that the plays project, one that provides
"immediate relief from the burden of selfhood."
19
An inner agenda nevertheless underlies much of contemporary
music, art, and I iterature, one that seeks to recapture a sense of
psychic oneness without taking any account .of the obstacles,
psychic or material, that lie in the way of that oneness.
20
When Estragon complains in Beckett's Waiting for Godot that nothing
happens, we know that nothing really has happened and that this non-
happening is a profound experience in which the characters are more
than buddies-they are friends. But Shepard and Mamet, despite their
wry humor in pointing out the bankruptcy of the myth of the West, fail
to see their complicity in its celebration. They are like Shepard's Austin,
who accuses Lee of scripting a melodrama not worth the writing, but who
aspires to live that melodrama himself. They are like Narcissus at the
pool, who has seen that what he worships is only an idealized image of
himself, but who rejects that knowledge. The myth of Hollywood on
stage, then, is the story of orie, Narcissus, who thjnks he is two, and
Mamet's and Shepard's treatment of that myth on stage is the story of two
who are really only one.
19
Lasch, 165.
20
/bid.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 9 (Spring 199 7)
Crossing Cultures and Kinds: Maria Irene Fornes and
the Performance of a Post-Modern Sublime
SHEILA RABILLARD
Maria Irene Fornes' recent play, Enter the Night, is situated in the
intersections between "high art" and "popular culture"; "mediatized"
and "live" performance; cultural assimilation and nightmares of
miscegenation. While such intersections have become familiar territory
for post-modern interrogation, Fornes draws from the ruptured bound-
aries of late capitalism a means to rearticulate a language of desire in the
face of human suffering. The most striking manifestation of Fornes'
delicately transgressive dramaturgy is her binding of post-modern
techniques that point out the limits of representation to her concern with
classic questions of constructing an emotional sublime. This is the
curious conjunction that I want to consider: whether, in a "mediatized
culture" (to borrow Baudrillard's term), through pastiche and cultural
recycling, Fornes can discover the possibility of psychic coherence. If the
term "sublime" seems almost anachronistic here, its employment is
intentional for it posits the strongest possible contrast between the
phantasmagorical sampling techniques Fornes employs in this drama and
her articulation of a species of emotional transcendence. This negotiation
of a concordia discors lies at the heart of her play.
1
1
1 am well aware of the variety of contending characterizations of the concept of
the post-modern. Among the godfathers of the term, for instance, Charles Jencks
dismisses works of extreme disjunction and abstraction as merely " Late-Modernism,"
reserving "Postmodern" for those "connected with semantics, convention, historical
memory, metaphor, symbolism and respect for existing cultures" (What is Post-
Modernism? [london: Academy Editions, 1989], ch. 3); Jean-Francais Lyotard, in The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) sees a radical break in
scientific research and systems of knowledge which Jameson, in turn, contends is
rather "the very ' permanent revolution' of capitalist production itself" Uameson,
"Foreword," The Postmodern Condition, xx). As should become clear, the present
essay is most indebted to Jameson's idea of the post-modern; see " Postmodernism, or
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. In
discussing features of Fornes' style, however, Todd Git lin' s summary of post-modern
cultural phenomena has provided a useful guide:
(cont inued)
34
RABILLARD
Enter the Night received its world premiere 16 April 1993 at Seattle's
New City Theater under Fornes' direction.
2
Commissioned in 1990 by
the resident company, the drama began as a series of monologues that
came to Fornes between sleep and waking:
She wasn't yet sure which direction the script would take, or
even what it might be about, until she began hearing the voices
of friends in the early hours of the dawn. "They were telling me
things about themselves, things I wouldn't otherwise have
known ... . When I woke up completely, I would write down
these monologues, and some of them were quite wonderful. I
thought, why not use them in the play?"
3
As she assembled these fragments, the shape of Enter the Night began to
appear: a delicate triangle involving three old friends-Tressa, a nurse
who tends the dying; jack, working as a stage manager and mourning his
gay lover's death from AIDS; and Paula, a woman threatened by
bankruptcy and a fatal heart disease. The play developed in keeping with
what she has called her collage technique: incorporating material from
her subconscious; from the culture's collective memories of Hollywood,
Shakespeare, and Christian iconography; from chance discoveries.
Among the latter were a nurse's diary found at an auction; a newspaper
account of an 18th-century Chinese scholar who produced the first
Chinese-French dictionary; and the sight of a light-man on a ladder which
prompted Fornes to include a brief sample of the balcony scene from
"Postmodernism" usually refers to a certain constellation of styles and tones
in cultural works: pasti che; blankness; a sense of exhaustion; a mixture of
levels, forms, styles; a relish for copies and repetition; a knowingness that
dissolves commitment into irony; acute self-consciousness about the formal ,
constructed nature of the work; pleasure in the play of surfaces; a rejection
of history.
"Postmodernism: Roots and Politics," in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America,
ed. lan Angus and Sut Jhally (New York and london: Routledge, 1989), 347.
2
1n this premiere production by Theater Zero (New City Theater and Art Center,
Seattle), Mary Ewald played Tressa/Huang; Patricia Mattick played Paula; and Brian
Faker played Jack. The producing director was John Kazanjian, the scenic designer
was Donald Eastman, lighting was designed by Anne Militello and cost umes by Rose
Pederson.
3
1nterview of Fornes by Misha Berson, Seattle Times, 16 April 1993.
Fornes and the Performance of a Post-Modern Sublime 35
Romeo and ju/iet.
4
The play presents a succession of haunting moments
that openly allude to their disparate sources; under Fornes' direction, the
Seattle premiere was framed by videotapes (played in the lobby before
the performance and during intermission) showing scenes from two
classic films that would be reenacted, in part, by the characters of her
play.
One of the most striking features of the drama lies in the way in
which it engages specific aspects of the cultural vocabulary of the
cinema. In particular, Fornes is fascinated with the image of the Asiatic
"other" inherited from Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919) and Capra's
Lost Horizon (1937). Through these two films-the one a tragedy
focusing on the unassailable barrier between the races, the other offering
a utopian vision of assimilation-Fornes inscribes the essential strategies
of her play. As she discloses the conceptual imperialism and inherent
contradictions of Hollywood representations, she endows a post-modern
cliche of the precession of simulacra with a powerfully elegiac quality.
When Tressa and jack enact the famous scene from Broken Blossoms
where the scholarly Asian servant hovers trembling above the sleeping
body of Lillian Gish, crucially Tressa (played by a white actress) becomes
the manservant and jack recreates the role of Gish, both in full costume
and makeup.
5
Here, Fornes subverts the emotional moment with a
battery of post-modern devices: the parody of a locus classicus, crossings
of gender and race, and the interfacing of live and recorded performance.
Yet it is by means of these dissonances that Fornes asserts the depth of the
emotional encounter between her characters. As each actor becomes a
collection of cultural images, he or she appears to offer only a parody of
profundity. But Fornes manages to transform these seemingly chance
assemblages into a kind of palimpsest, a text which inscribes the history
of a culture through a series of accumulations and partial erasures-in
4
1n her interview with Berson, Fornes described the various trouves that found
their way into this play. " I save things like that because when I was a painter, the
idea of creating collages was very attractive to me," she told Berson. " I apply the
same collage technique to playwriting" (Seattle Times, 16 April 1993). Actress
Patri cia Mattick, who played Paula in the premiere production, explained the
introduction of the scene from Shakespeare: "'Like she sees a light man on a l adder
bending over a wall to adjust a fixture. And this guy on a ladder reminds her of the
balcony scene in Romeo and juliet. So she decides to put a bit of the balcony scene
into Enter the Night. She's very open to ideas and inspirations."' (Quoted by Joe
Adcock in his preview of Enter the Night, "What's Happening," Seattle Post-
lntelligencer, 16 April 1993, 7.)
5
Gr iffith's Asian character is called "Cheng Huan"; in the program for the Seatt le
production of Fornes' play, he is referred to as "Huang."
36 RABILLARD
effect, a layered record of attempts, individual and collective, to confront
the otherness of race and gender and above all the ultimate estrangement
of mortality.
Originally titled Dreams, the play takes place largely at night or in
dim early dawn. The setting is Tressa's loft in a geographically unspeci-
fied Chinatown.
6
Softly lit, sparsely furnished, the playing area is raised
above the stage with a stairwell in the center of the structure leading to
an invisible ground floor; when characters enter, they seem to climb up
into a space of temporary refuge that hovers above the ordinary level of
existence. Both the slightly dislocated acting surface, and the setti ng of
the action-in Chinatown, but not of it, for all three characters appear to
be non-Asian-suggest that the playwright is developing a subtle rhetoric
of margins and disjunctions. Within this liminal space, three friends from
very different worlds attempt to cross the boundaries that separate them
and to comfort one another. Each is confronting illness: Tressa, the
nurse, has made it her business but suffers no less for that; Paula, who
belongs to a more sheltered, suburban existence, in the course of the play
learns that she does not have long to live; jack, from the insecure world
of theatre, has lost his lover to AIDS and is consumed by rage and guilt,
at times tempted to expiate the sin of survival by convincing himself that
he too is infected.
As the play begins, Tressa enters. It is 6:30a.m., and she seems to
have just finished her night shift, for she is exhausted, and-apparently
sti II preoccupied with her work-she reads aloud from a diary that
recounts in intimate detail the deterioration of a dying patient. Interest-
ingly, we are not told that the diary is hers; as she pronounces the words,
however, we take them as indicators of the suffering with which she is
only too familiar. Refuge is bound, in contrast, to the exotic, for as she
gradually relaxes, the Caucasian actress puts on loose, dark-blue Chinese
trousers and tunic and slowly powders her face a rice-powder white, like
a character in a silent film or a Chinese opera. When the costume and
make-up are complete, Tressa seems wholly composed-in both senses:
playing to the hilt a stereotypical"oriental" calm. (Curiously, the reading
of the diary and the cliched Asiatic composure, although both in a sense
" quoted" performances, are moving.) At this point in the play, although
the implications of Tressa's transformat ion are as yet obscure, the
elements of the drama have been established: illness; quotation of roles;
6
Joe Adcock's preview of the performance states that the play i s set in San
Francisco, but the program for the New City/Theater Zero product ion says simply:
" Tressa's loft in Chinatown."
Fornes and the Performance of a Post-Modern Sub I ime 37
and what Roland Barthes has called "Sinite"-the west's mythical
concept of Chineseness.
7
Throughout the drama, the characters are granted moments in which
they seem to enter one another's experience, although only in dream or
play-Paula, for instance, claims to have met an exotic foreigner, who
turns out to be either a dream, or Jack playing a joke, or a dream
premonition of Jack's entrance in a false mustache and fake gold tooth;
and the three play the balcony scene from Romeo and juliet, fluidly
enacting the lovers' duet in a trio of voices. But the dominant note is
desire: the unappeased longing of each friend to ease the other's pain, or
even to comprehend it; and Fornes' exploration of this longing (by turns
selfless and egotistical) is most vivid in moments where Tressa, Jack, and
Paula enact snippets from a repertoire of fami I iar cultural texts, among
them Frank Capra's Lost Horizon and D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms.
Quotations from the two films, popular Western fantasies of the Asiatic
Other, emphasize Fornes' setting on the margins of the exotic and allow
her to evoke more overtly the ways in which mass culture has confronted
"the undiscovered country from whose bourn I No traveler returns" via
the imagined boundaries of race. At one extreme, the frontiers between
life and death, and between East and West, are erased (or rather, almost
infinitely distanced)-although only in the guise of a lost Shangri-la which
can never be regained. And this is the gently ironic note on which the
play ends, with a reading from Lost Horizon.
But the most powerful scene of the play is the reenactment by Jack
and Tressa of the central gestures from Griffith's silent film. There was
not a hint of laughter in the house as Jack, in the Li l lian Gish role, was
rescued by Tressa as Huang, the gentleman Chinese scholar who tries to
bring teachings of peace to the West but finally fails to save even the frail
girl from a brutal death. As Huang, barred by race from his broken
blossom, Tressa's austere yet erotically charged pantomime played out a
yearning passion not expressed in her reading of the clinical diary record
of a patient's decline; and Jack, as Gish, was released from rage, grateful
for succor, a beautiful victim rather than a guilty survivor. Each gesture
in this scene presents itself as a quotation from the film which the
audience has just seen in the intermission, and is layered with reminders
of the play's own accumulations of roles. The audience can see the
masculine outlines of Jack's body ur.der the graceful posture of the
doomed girl, and read against his/her sentimentally beautiful, innocent
7
"China is one thing, the idea which a French petit-bourgeois could have of it
not so long ago is another: for this peculiar mixture of bells, rickshaws and opium
dens, no other word is possible." Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and
translated by Annette lavers (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1973), 130.
38 RABILLARD
death the aggression of his previous brief, suicidal performances: his
angry claiming of the role of crucified Christ, his self-dramatizing exit into
the night to meet with violence or infection. Likewise, Tressa's present
role is marked, and enriched, by traces of her previous playing as her
ministrations in the guise of "Huang" recall the opening scene in which
she escaped from her painful duties on the terminal ward by donning the
costume and mythical imperturbability of the Orient.
8
These traces serve
not to distract from the scene before us but to freight the disjunctions
between actress and Huang, between Tressa and Huang, so that the
current scene speaks of gaps and mismatches, of the deferrals of
representation, of desire for what cannot be fully possessed-in bodily
experience or in language. "Tressa" both is and is not "Huang" (nor, of
course, can actress be identified with character when pastiche continually
de-centers subjectivity); and the failure of one role to disappear com-
pletely into the other reminds us of an analogous failure: the role of
nurse, the one who attempts to comprehend another's pain, is always that
of the unworthy Other, filled with longing and distanced from what can
never be touched. There is an expressive fullness in the exposure of
representational poverty; and there is also comfort for the characters in
the action of playing together. When Paula happens on the scene-playing
she learns that this is a customary game, and her pleasure in this
discovery adds to the strength and subtlety of the allegiances binding the
three. Beyond this, a curious formal grace can be gleaned from the tinsel-
town triteness of the Oriental stereotyping. Via quotation, the status of
Huang (i.e., Griffith's Cheng Huan) or the Lama of Shangri-la as stereotyp-
ical Other is the more exposed-and the inadequacy of representation is
thematized in a way that lends it an almost elegiac quality. At this point
I should explain what I mean by claiming that Fornes thus achieves a
version of the sublime.
8
1t's interesting to compare this technique with Fornes' characteristic exposure
of the gaps between a drama and its staging. As William Worthen comments in "Still
Playi ng Games: Ideology and Performance in the Theater of Maria Irene Fornes,"
Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, ed. Enoch Brater (Oxford University
Press, 1989):
Despite their variety, Fornes' experiments share a common impulse: to
explore the operation of the mise-en-scene on the process of dramatic
action. Rather than naturalizing theatri cal performance by assimilating the
various "enunciators" of the stage-acting, music, set design, audience
disposition- to a privileged gestural style encoded in the dramatic text (the
strategy of stage reali sm, for instance), Fornes' plays suspend the
identi fi cation between the drama and its staging. (168)
Fornes and the Performance of a Post-Modern Sublime 39
The concept of the sublime is very much a creature of history and
Jameson's post-modern formulation-upon which I draw here-must be
understood as part of a conversation originating at least with Boileau's
reading of Longinus. For many critics today, under the influence of the
Derridean challenge to Kantian formalism, the sublime has come to
represent something like an inversion of the Kantian claim about it:
namely, the view that the sublime represents an
11
excess" in language
that keeps it from ever assuming any fixed form or meaning.
9
But with
Jameson, in a definition almost reminiscent of Burke's, we turn away
from the purely linguistic. Jameson's postmodern sublime is not found
in the natural world, however; it is the system of late capitalism.
11
The
other of our society is ... no longer Nature at all , as it was in
precapital ist societies" and what we try to grasp is
11
the whole new
decentred global network of the third stage of capital itself."
10
(More-
over, the challenge to comprehension is not so much magnitude or
intentionlessness, as the tendency of the system itself to co-opt necessary
aesthetic distance.) And, as with older forms of the sublime, Jameson
promises that a vision of this world space of multinational capital will not
paralyze; that a cognitive mapping is possible.
Fornes, I suggest, offers a version of the sublime that can be aligned
with Jameson's. In some respects, to be sure, Fornes' sublime seems to
resemble that of Burke: an encounter, in imagination, with the intransi-
gent natural phenomena of human mortality-geographies of bodily
decay, tidal waves of AIDS infection as terrifying as any mountainscape,
and in particular with the painful opacity of the experience of another
human being's suffering.
11
But as Judith Butler reminds us, what count
as natural matters of the facts of the body are always also the material
products of a culture's discourse. And here I want to locate Fornes'
performance of the sublime: in confrontation with the mass-media
processes of commodifying mortality. In Enter the Night, Fornes focuses
attention on the processes whereby the immense, intention less phenome-
non of death, and the impregnable privacy of another person's suffering,
9
The foregoing summary of versions of the sublime is drawn from the essay by
T.V.F. Brogan, Gerald F. Else, and Frances Ferguson in The New Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, et al.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
10
jameson, 77, 80.
1 1
The mystery of another person's experience of pain, physical or mental, is the
center around which The Conduct of Life circles, and Fornes returns to this meditation
in many of her plays.
40 RABILLARD
are commercially packaged with images of the Oriental"other." (Race,
sex, and death are slickly intertwined on celluloid: as Huang fails to save
his broken blossom, the barriers against miscegenation, the passive and
philosophical character of the East, the brute fact of mortality, are
similarly constructed as natural, mourned as inevitable. Likewise, though
Lost Horizon seems to promise an idealized meeting of East and West, as
well as a virtual immortality, it binds action and sexual passion to the
West, punishes inter-racial romance, and in the end confirms the
superiority of the West through its association with the ultimate
reality-death.) Fornes presents a Jamesonian sublime: a glimpse of
mediatized culture, of the dream-factory at work, as her characters
perform the acts of mourning and rehearse the gestures of longing that the
imagery of mass culture affords them. Yet at -the same time as she
suggests that the world "threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic
illusion, a rush of filmic images without density,''
12
Fornes evokes a sense
of richness-an intimation of complexities of fear and desire created in
part by the layering of dramatized and quoted roles (though eschewing
any simplistic metaphors of surface and depth, illusory versus veracious).
Chiefly, Fornes creates a plangency through the very crudeness of the
cinema's Orientalizing stereotypes. Within the action of the drama,
passages from Lost Horizon and Broken Blossoms, because their specific
racisms are outdated and hence their promise to express desires and fears
of the unknowable are faded, become signs of loss. In a broader sense,
the reductive mythology of "Chineseness," thus quoted and historicized,
reveals a gap in the cultural system that constructs us as subjects desiring
what the system provides.
At this point, I must add a small caveat. The effect of the pastiche of
excerpts from Lost Horizon and Broken Blossoms that I have just
hypothesized depends upon recognition of what Edward Said's landmark
study might lead us to call "Oriental ism" (although Said, of course, did
not deal specifically with the discursive construction of China or Tibet).
But I am obliged to point out that in the theoretical writing that has
helped me to develop the present argument-and perhaps in Fornes' own
dramatic strategies-! detect a hint of "Orientalizing" of another sort. By
referring to Asian peoples, and China in particular, for examples of the
"Other" who is stereotyped and misrepresented, it might be argued,
Fornes' play reinscribes the East as inscrutable. Ironically, Jameson's
seminal essay, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capital-
ism, " also turns to China for an exemplar of the disjunct. In defining
what he describes as a new, joyously schizophrenic style, Jameson quotes
12
Jameson, 76-77.
Fornes and the Performance of a Post-Modern Sublime 41
Bob Perelman's poem "China" and observes that it "turns out to have
little enough to do with that referent called China. " Moreover, Jameson
points out that China serves as exemplar for Barthes in what may be a
significant instance: "Barthes of Mythologies . .. saw connotation as the
purveying of imaginary and stereotypical idealities, 'Sinite/ for example,
as some Disney-EPCOT 'concept' of China."
13
In short, it is not easy to
find our location on the global cognitive map while using Jameson to
analyze a play set in "Chinatown" that concludes with a character
reading a speech by a mythical Lama from a supposed lost realm in the
Himalayas.
If I have expressed a faint unease concerning Fornes' use of the
Orient in- her creation of a postmodern sublime, perhaps I can put the
great and delicate pleasures of the play into perspective by concluding
with a very brief analysis of a much less nuanced prelude to the
manipulation of stereotype in Enter the Night. Fornes' earlier play, What
of the Night? (1989), though it has a similar title is very different: a
collection of four playlets with a number of overlapping characters,
spanning a period from before World War II into the projected future,
What of the Night? has been compared to The Danube (1982) and The
Conduct of Life (1985).
14
The playlets that concern me here are numbers
two and three, " Springtime-1958," and "Lust-1983."
"Springtime" explores the love between two women: Greta, a
German girl who is ill and confined to bed, and Rainbow. Despite the
sickness, the tone is romantic and affection between the two is expressed
through linguistic play: Rainbow asks Greta to teach her phrases ("I love
German," she says), and Greta teases her by mis-translating. As the title
announces, "Lust" is designed as a sharp contrast in theme and mood.
What is interesting for the present argument, however, is the fact that
lust-here treated as an infantile, utterly self-centered greed for posses-
sion, whether of pleasures and bodies, or money and power-is not
si mply demonstrated in sexual acts and financial dealings, but also
figured through linguistic and cultural self-centredness. In the first scene
we see one businessman, Joseph, taking a younger man, Ray, from
behind; as he does so he assures him that the sex won't interfere with
their business conversation. And it doesn't; negotiations are _carried on
uninterrupted during the sex act; sexual pleasure is just another commod-
ity.
13
Jameson, 75, 67.
14
See the introductory essay by Rosette C. Lamont, Women on the Verge (New
York: Applause Theatre Books, 1993), xxvi.
42 RABILLARD
By the sixth scene, the play develops into a series of Ray's dreams,
and the dream-visions contain shockingly clear-cut stereotypes of the
Asian "other." The shift to dream is signaled by a change of lighting, an
announcement projected on the rear wall, and a touch of Chinoiserie:
"Wang walks across to up-center, then down-center. His appearance
and behaviour mimic a traditional Chinese prototype. Wang: Ray has a
dream."
15
The first dream concerns a casual, homosexual encounter. In
the second dream, Ray is in the midst of a quarrel with a woman, whom
he has locked into the bathroom because he suspects her of sharing her
sexual favours with someone else. Again, the theme is greed, possession:
and the essentially self-centred nature of this lust is demonstrated
amusingly for, in the course of the argument, as Ray leans against the
mirrored door to keep it shut, he begins to grind his pelvis against his
own image and eventually climaxes as the scene ends. By the fourth
dream, Ray is in a Chinese restaurant. And here we see the contrast
between love and lust reworked in terms of language and culture. If
Rainbow and Greta play with one another's tongues, in Ray's solipsistic
dream-world Chinese is simply gibberish-when pressed to order his
meal, he gabbles in mock-Chinese nonsense syllables and the waiter is
made to speak in a caricature form of heavily-accented English.
Moreover, the operators of the restaurant try, in vain, to conform to
Western ways: a woman, Wing, dressed like Wang in supposedly
traditional clothes, sprays Christmas decorations on the window but
confesses that she has spoiled one part of the lettering and made a mess
of the picture of a bird. (Homi Bhabha has analyzed the ways in which
a dominant culture attempts to reduce the dominated to strategies of
imperfect imitation.) The link between the dream scene outside the
bathroom door, and the dream of the Chinese restaurant, then, is not
simply the continuing theme of unbridled physical appetite (although Ray
grabs a girl, "slurps" on her chest, and chews on a menu, suggesting an
infant's uninhibited oral pleasure); rather, the infantile self-absorption, the
imperfect awareness of others, allies commodified sex with the inability
to hear another language as language, or to comprehend another culture
except as an imperfect approximation of one' s own. Stereotypes of
Chinese people, in this context, become the means of dramatizing the
potentially political as well as personal dimension of "lust." Fornes' use
of Oriental isms for the blunter purposes of satire, then, may illuminate
the subtler strategies of the sublime that I have attempted to uncover in
this paper.
15
What of the Night? in Women on the Verge, 203.
Fornes and the Performance of a Post-Modern Sub I ime 43
Despite Fornes' post-modern techniques-pastiche and quotation;
characters with a seemingly performative subjectivity, continually
rehearsed from the repertoire of mass cultural imagery-1 have argued
that her drama recuperates a species of emotional transcendence.
Though his formulations have been criticized by Jameson (among other
theorists of the post-modern), I propose, in conclusion, that Jurgen
Habermas offers a way of articulating the core of Fornes' emotional
appeal. (And Fornes is, after all, a self-described romantic.)
16
Habermas
holds that language, however distorted or manipulative, always has
consensus or understanding as its inner te/os. We speak to be under-
stood, even if what we say is a curse or an insult. It is therefore possible
to project from this condition the contours of an ideal communicative
situation, implicitly anticipated in every actual act of dialogue.
17
Fornes,
I suggest, in drama that evokes not merely individual interchanges but the
encompassing discourse of a commercial, global culture, shows us
isolation, incomprehension, slick superficialities, the endless precession
of simulacra, and inspires a dream of what is not-a Shangri-la.
16
See Fornes' interview with Scott Cummings, " Seeing with Clarity: The Visions
of Maria Irene Fornes" Theater 17.1 (Winter, 1985): 55.
17
Habermas has said that the central intuition he hoped to clarify in his Theory
of Communicative Action was "the intuition that a telos of mutual understanding is
built into linguistic communication." jurgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity:
Interviews with Jurgen Habermas, ed. Peter Dews (London, New York: Verso, 1992),
100.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 9 (Spring 1997)
Horton Foote's Politics of Intimacy
GERALD C. WOOD
In the New York Times Magazine for 9 February 1986, Horton Foote
explains that his social views are not designed "to change people's
minds:"
I have social points of view that are not shared by a lot of people
[in Wharton, Texas], but I never picked fights much. I listened
to them and tried to understand what made them feel the way
they did. Not that I've even understood, but I've learned to
listen. I'm a social writer in the sense that I want to record, but
not in the sense of trying to change people's minds.
1
He is a "social writer," he says, because he is very attentive to social and
historical realities. By his own account, he tries to record accurately the
pressures and joys that come from living in a community like Wharton,
but he has no personal agenda for social change, no intention to modify
the behavior of people back home, or even their points of view. He
doesn't consider himself a political writer in that sense.
The sheer weight of political material in his work suggests otherwise.
For example, in his plays African Americans are represented as suffering
from overt racism and institutional violence. Most obviously, in
Convicts, by Foote's own description, "convict" is a code word for
racism, signifying the brutal social realities faced by people of color.
2
Like African Americans, women carry special burdens under the rigid
patriarchal system Foote analyzes. They are cherished as mothers and
caretakers, and they are better than men at understanding the emotional
life of the community. But when, like Sarah Nancy in Blind Date, they
place self-expression and unvarnished truth ahead of traditional self-
denial and coyness, they face stiff reaction. As Cecilia's mother tells her
1
Samuel Freedman, "From the Heart of Texas, " The New York Times Magazine,
9 February 1986, 61.
2
Horton Foote, Convicts, in Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale The
Widow Claire: Four Plays from The Orphans' Home Cycle (New York: Grove Press,
1988).
Politics of Intimacy 45
in The Tears of My Sister, "all men want women to be regular doll babies
all the time."
3
In addition to racism and sexism, other subtle, though no
less brutal, forms of violence stalk Foote's imaginative worlds; power is
irresponsibly exercised by wealthy against poor, young against old,
aristocrats against immigrants, even the beautiful against the less
attractive.
A most helpful play for discovering Horton Foote's approach to these
injustices is Only the Heart, written in 1943 and the only Foote play to
reach Broadway. This three-act drama studies Mamie Borden's attempts
to give direction to julia, her daughter, who has just completed high
school and is considering marrying her boyfriend, Albert. An attractive
and energetic person, Mamie Borden feels she knows what's best for
julia; the mother encourages her only child to skip college and marry
Albert because Mamie secretly fears the girl will pursue Less Roberts, an
unacceptable suitor. Using fear of rejection and lost opportunities,
Mamie manipulates her daughter into accepting Albert's proposal, which
has been engineered by Mamie. Mamie also hides her knowledge of Mr.
Borden's continuing affair with a "Bohemian" woman, a euphemism for
a woman of color.
4
After the marriage of julia and Albert, Mamie lures her son-in-law
into her business activities, partly as a substitute for her unfaithful
husband. As Albert becomes work-obsessed and Julia more lonely, her
aunt, India Hamilton, fears that Less Roberts' return to town will lead
julia into infidelity. As Albert spends more time with Mamie than julia,
the daughter begins seeing Less again, which becomes the subject of
gossip in the small town. Although the meetings are innocent, Mamie
tries to intervene, causing a crisis between julia and Albert. He fears she
is drifting from him; she fears he is only interested in her inheritance.
But, luckily, the young couple achieves a transforming moment of
intimacy in which he admits feelings of inadequacy and she confesses her
anxieties over m o n y ~ Recognizing their need for a new beginning, they
decide to go away to Houston, to start O'{er away from Mamie.
In the final act, Mamie attempts one more seduction of Albert,
poisoning his mind with references to Less Roberts, who now lives in
Houston. She even offers to make Albert a business partner and move to
Louisiana, leaving the house to the children. Fortunately, Mr. Borden
3
Horton Foote, Tears of My Sister, in Selected One-Act Plays of Horton Foote, ed.
Gerald C. Wood (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989), 161 .
4
Horton Foote,Only the Heart, foreword by Mary Hunter (New York: Dramatists
Play Service, 1944), 19. Subsequent page references will be included parenthetically
within the text.
46 WOOD
suddenly admits his involvement with the Bohemian, at the same time
entreating julia to find the courage to go away with Albert. As juli a
commits to separating from her mother, even at the risk of losing her
marriage, Albert decides to join her, leaving Mamie with her oil and her
prosperity. She has her money and her work, so she represses hurt and
loss, singing, in the words of the play, her "endless inward chant" (66).
Only the Heart is a political play. It includes rumors of the Klan's
pursuit of Mr. Borden and his lover. Money motivates all the characters,
who have been made especially insecure by the recent chaos and false
hopes of World War I. As Mr. Borden says,
During the war, hearing all the hopes of cooperation and
change, I thought we would give up our old mistakes-our old
ways of doing things. Never turn back, find the way to do
different. ... Once we were spared we couldn't be back to our
grabbing quick enough. Well, we deserve what we get-all of
us-forgetting once we were spared. (32)
But this is not the writer's political stance. It is the view of a tormented
man whose personal demon-passivity-leads him to imagine political
history as the record of failed moral courage. Typical of Horton Foote's
drama, the political realities in Only the Heart are colored by the
consciousness of each character.
The implications for Foote's political vision are profound. As unjust
as social realities may be, the deeper terror comes from the confusion and
fear with which individuals observe, feel, and interpret those realities. If
Borden, a fumbler, sees the War as the absence of effective action,
Mamie, narcissistic and mildly paranoid, makes foreign relations into the
story of chronic ingratitude. She instructs Albert that
people don't appreciate your trying to be nice to 'em. They'll
turn against you every time when you try to help 'em .... Why,
look at how those foreign countries we tried to help and loan
money are acting. (3 9)
According to Horton Foote, the drama of politics can never be separated
from the imaginations which shape it. Social action must be understood
as a reflection of its narrator; even in politics, as a man is, so he sees.
Because he believes so strongly in the capacity of the human mind
to create its own reality, to make its heaven and hell , Horton Foote uses
political belief as a figure, a dramatic projection of his characters'
psychology. Without denying the reality of, and the need for, political
action, the writer investigates how individual needs for intimacy inspire
Politics of Intimacy 47
or thwart responsible, effective social behavior. His plays, teleplays, and
films investigate the complex, self-expressive, and self-justifying ways in
which Foote's characters create a political vision, expl icit or implicit, and
then make it real by their action or inaction. In the process, without
didacticism, Horton Foote creates a disti nctive vision of the relation
between the universal need for intimate connection-and the powerful
sense of security and well-being it fosters-and humane and just behavior
toward others. It is Horton Foote's politics of intimacy.
Mary Hunter (Wolf), the director of Only the Heart, understood this
quality in Foote's work when she staged the play. In her foreword she is
careful to explain that Mamie is "externally admirable and attractive,
l ively-humorous in the lightly sarcastic vein-enterprising-gallant-
eager to advise, to help." The director also explains that the drama
actually "lies in the inner activity of the characters, not in the events."
Within Mamie Borden lies the tragic irony that her manipulation of others
is not mean-spirited; rather, her need to control-like her political belief-
is a perversion of a primal drive for "closeness." Mamie can only toler-
ate intimacy that she manages, that won't threaten her rigid sense of self:
.. . all her dynamic qualities are turned to manipulation of the
people around her into a position of dependency in which her
control is absolute. The reason is a tragic one-a deep fear of
the give-and-take of love and the closeness of healthy personal
relationships. In her own tragic and misguided way she is
searching for that love and closeness through the mistaken
means of making herself essential as a provider, as a controller
of the destinies of those around her. (7)
By denying the powers of intimacy, Mamie stays isolated from others. At
the end of the play she urges Albert to become as independent as she:
"Don't let people get at you, hurt you. Learn to live without them.
That's the only way to get through life" (72).
Mamie drives her daughter and son-in-law from her home because
she never confronts her failed intimacy. Uncomfortable with the
spontaneity and closeness of dancing (27-28), Mamie retreats from what
she sees as an essentially unhappy world into the pseudo-security of
money. As she says, "I reckon we could stand anything if we had a few
oil wells" (29). She replaces her own needs with manipulation of others
and the possession of "things."
48
WOOD
I'm gonna see that Julia gets all there is to get. Things you can
see and touch and feel, things that are there, ready to take care
of you no matter what your husband does, or what happens.
(31)
Thi s need to protect herself leads to her manic pursuit of work:
Everyone's got to learn to take care of themselves. And working
is the finest thing in the world, if folks only knew-nothing can
get at you-nothing, if you're busy, if you're working. (72)
Mamie isn't an evil person, despite her failure as a mother. Her self-
possession is a personal tragedy; it is a failure of love. As India explains
to Julia,
You have to love to be loved. Your Mama has forgotten that in
her loneliness, her desperation, she has tried to run every-
thing-people, tenants, farmers, me, your Papa, you, now Albert.
(67)
Mamie's tyrannies begin with, and are expressions of, her fear of love.
Even Foote's best characters are touched by this fear. In The Death
of the Old Man, a "camera eye" experiment for television' s Gulf Play-
house in July of 1953, the audience assumes the point of view of Wi ll
Mayfield, a man on his deathbed. According to Rosa, Will 's daughter,
and others in the play, Will always followed a selfless, loving path; he
believed " in investin' my money in livin' things . ... in helpi n' the poor
an' the unfortunate."
5
But, as he observes the deception and backbiting
of his children over the inheritance, Will is tempted to rise up and claim
material comfort; in a moment of weakness he begs the viewer to
Let me out of this bed ... let me out . . . I' ll work again. I' ll fill
the banks with money. I' ll buy houses and land and protect us
from the dark days because kindness has gone from the world,
generosity has vanished. (141)
In Horton Foote's imaginative world, obsessive materialism indicates a
failure of the kindness and generosity that could transform society. When
5
Horton Foote, The Death of the Old Man, in Selected One-Act Plays of Horton
Foote, ed. Gerald C. Wood (Dall as: Southern Methodi st University Press, 1989), 135.
Subsequent page references wi ll be included parentheti cal ly w ithin the text.
Politics of Intimacy
49
intimacy is not achieved the void is filled by a dark call to artificial
security.
On the other hand, because Foote believes in the power of the
human mind when strengthened by love, Only the Heart and his other
dramas also imply a norm for effective political action. It begins with a
clear-headed and rigorous acceptance of the fallen, chaotic nature of
social reality. This is the lesson implied in Elizabeth's conversation with
Horace, Jr., in The Death of Papa, the last of the nine plays in The
Orphans' Home cycle. The subject is Gertrude, an African American
woman.
HORACE, JR.: Is Gertrude poor?
ELIZABETH: Yes.
HORACE, JR.: Why?
ELIZABETH: Because she doesn't get paid much.
HORACE, JR.: She works hard?
ELIZABETH: Yes.
HORACE, JR.: Why doesn't she get paid then?
ELIZABETH: Because that's how things are.
6
Authentic living begins for Foote's characters when they face the reality
of "how things are."
Acceptance is not the same as paralysis. Responsibility for one's per-
. sonal and social history and the courage to act should follow insight. In
Only the Heart, for example, when Julia fears she can't leave her
mother's protection and choose her own life, her Aunt India reminds her
of the power of choice.
JULIA: But I'm made of that past. Its ugliness. Its complications
... It's creeping all around me, smothering me . ..
6
Horton Foote, The Death of Papa, in Cousins, The Death of Papa: Two Plays
from The Orphans' Home Cycle (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 148-149.
50
WOOD
INDIA: For God's sake, Julia, don't let anything frighten you into
believing you can't choose rightly. The past will do that. It's
done it to me. It screams out 'It's all so complicated. No use in
trying. Let it alone.' We had moments when we could have
done differently, chosen different ways, and we didn't. That's
our past. This is your moment. This is your time to choose.
7
The need to act, to struggle with history-both personal and social-is
crucial in Foote's view.
In Foote's theater of intimacy, the act of choosing-always politi-
cal-is valueless if it leads to isolation, his great antagonist. To be fully
satisfying, the characters' actions need to bring them into communion
with their race or class, their place or religion, their loved ones. If they
choose well, they will recognize their ties to and their dependence on
family, the land, and tradition. With this connection, this sense of place,
comes judgment and control, and the courage to be themselves and face
death. Without it, no genuine contentment, no fully human experience,
is possible in Foote's view. He finds the key to effective political action
in healthy primitive attachments, personal responsibility, and commit-
ment to a fallen, confusing world beyond one's control. In the demand-
ing, hard world of Horton Foote's imagination, nothing less is sufficient.
Horton Foote's most concise expression of this relationship between
intimacy and politics is The Dancers, a one-act play produced on Phi leo
Television Playhouse on 7 March 1954. Set in Foote's fictional town of
Harrison, Texas, in the early summer of 1952, it begins with the arrival
of a young man, Horace, on a visit to his older sister, Inez Stanley. The
political intrigue is stimulated by Inez's conspiracy with Elizabeth Crews,
a wealthy friend, to arrange a date between Horace and Emily, E I iza-
beth's daughter, who is generally acknowledged to be the prettiest and
most popular girl in town. Inez is a social climber who wants powerful
connections with the more fashionable and affluent members of Harrison
society. And Elizabeth wants to use Horace to sabotage Emily's romance
with Leo, a local boy unacceptable to the mother. Fortunately, Horace
meets Mary Catherine Davis at a drug store, and their closeness inspires
his rebellion against his sister and the power of privilege. He finds the
courage to take Mary Catherine, not Emily, to the dance.
But there is one more complication. As the young couple get to
know each other, plan their date, and practice the dance steps, they
return to the issue of confidence, a motif throughout the dialogue in The
Dancers. Horace is the first to admit his neediness.
7
Only the Heart, 66.
Politics of Intimacy
51
HORACE: Well ... It may sound silly and all to you . . . seeing
I'm about to start my first year at college . .. but I'd like to ask
you a question ...
MARY CATHERINE: What is it, Horace?
HORACE: How do you get confidence?
MARY CATHERINE: Well, you just get it. Someone points it out
to you that you lack it and then you get it ...
HORACE: Oh, is that how it's done?
MARY CATHERINE: That's how I did it.
HORACE: You see I lack confidence. And I ... sure would like
to get it .. ..
MARY CATHERINE: In what way do you lack confidence,
Horace? ...
HORACE: Oh, in all kinds of ways. (A pause.) I'm not much
of a mixer ....
MARY CATHERINE: I think you're mixing fine tonight.
HORACE: I know. That's what's giving me a little encourage-
ment. You're the first girl I've ever really been able to talk to. I
h
. 8
mean t 1s way . ...
Confidence is the teenage word for courage, a courage inspired by
intimate moments of deep sharing, often of dark emotions.
Two scenes later, very near the end of the play, Mary Catherine
confides in Horace that she has a darkness, too, a twin of his:
MARY CATHERINE: I haven't told you the whole truth, Horace.
This is my first dance too . ...
HORACE: Is it?
8
Horton Foote, The Dancers, in Selected One-Act Plays of Horton Foote, ed.
Gerald C. Wood (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989), 257.
Subsequent page references will be included parenthetically within the text.
52
WOOD
MARY CATHERINE: Yes. I've been afraid to go. Afraid I
wouldn't be popular. The last two dances I was asked to go and
I said no.
HORACE: Then why did you accept when I asked you?
MARY CATHERINE: I don't know. I asked myself that after-
wards. I guess because you gave me a kind of confidence. (257)
The Dancers dramatizes the reality that at certain times, in some places,
all people feel inadequate, alone, orphaned. But this lack of confidence,
born of demon fear, can become a source of transformation.
By sharing their darkness with caring others, who empathize from
their own dark places, Horace and Mary Catherine find courage. In these
intimate moments they discover the capacity to act vitally, to create sane,
free lives for themselves. In The Dancers Horton Foote dramatizes what
Paul Tillich describes as
acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether
we know it or not. If we know it, we accept acceptance
consciously. If we do not know it, we nevertheless accept it
and participate in it. And in our acceptance of that which we do
not know the power of being is manifest to us. Courage has
revealing power, the courage to be is the key to being-itself.
9
For both Horton Foote, the playwright, and Paul Tillich, the philosopher,
courage rescues knowledge from impotence, acceptance from passivity.
Vitalized by intention and passion, whether thoughtful or participatory,
courage sanctifies human experience.
But there is still one other danger in The Dancers. Once Horace and
Mary Catherine have found love and courage, they are tempted to cling
to each other and turn inward, forming a bond that feels good but creates
a death-like isolation. Horace and Mary Catherine face this situation in
the last moments of the play.
MARY CATHERINE: You gave me confidence and I gave you
confidence. What's the sense of getting confidence, Horace, if
you' re not going to use it? (A pause. They cont inue danci ng.)
HORACE: That's a pretty piece.
9
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 181 .
Politics of Intimacy 53
MARY CATHERINE: Yes, it is. (A pause. They dance again.
HORACE stops.)
HORACE: I'm ready to go if you are, Mary Catherine.
MARY CATHERINE: I'm ready. (They start out.) Scared?
HORACE: A little.
MARY CATHERINE: So am I. But let's go.
HORACE: O.K. (They continue out the area down the C. of the
stage and off D.R. as the music from the dance is heard ... and
the lights fade.) (264)
By going to the dance, Horace and Mary Catherine face the darkness
beyond their safe, sweet, very private selves; once they share their fears,
they cross the threshold into the unknown, even into death. Intimacy
offers not just security; it is also the source of a renewed spirit of
adventure and peace in the public and political world.
In a few rare moments-and in the voices of characters more public
than Foote himself-the writer imagines a world remade by the powerful
actions of such characters. For example, in the section "Behold a Cry,"
from the early play Out of My House (1942), Robedaux explains the
patient way to face and cure social injustice; he asks jack to wait until
people become "so selfish, so hating, so hideous" that
men everywhere will see clearly how wrong they are .. .. Then
men will not be afraid, then they will not hesitate to say . . . this
is wrong. This doesn't pay. We can help one another not
through fear, but through understanding. Your need is my need,
your hunger is my hunger, your loneliness is my loneliess.
10
This visionary voice of a radical return to empathy, comfort, and healing
is echoed in Lyndon johnson's notes on "The Great Society," read by
Sam johnson in Foote's unproduced screenplay Lyndon:
There is a new day coming in America, when schoolboys will
find new joy that captures and thrills them in discovering and
10
Horton Foote, Out of My House, Horton Foote Papers, Southern Methodist
University, IV, 20.
54
WOOD
developing their own native capacities, quite as much as in
baseball or football, when achievements in nobility, and in
creative living, in making friends and in holding them, will
crowd crime off the front pages of our newspapers.
11
1 n a rhetoric not his own, Horton Foote envisions in these dramas a
revolution in the way people treat each other, for only by genuinely
"making friends and holding them" can social justice be established and
maintained.
This political vision, discovered in the subtext rather than the text, is
also expressed in his films-adaptations as well as original works. In To
Kill a Mockingbird-based on the Harper Lee novel-Horton Foote re-
creates a story of tragic racism in a small Southern town, a racism
exacerbated by poverty and social ignorance. But, typical of Foote's
work, Mockingbird is not only about the violence of Bob Ewell and the
unjust conviction of Tom Robinson. It is also a memory play in which
Scout recalls her search for a female consciousness which will include
her tomboy assertiveness and female imagination, the creativity which
produces her story. This search, she remembers, was made especially
difficult because her white surrogate mothers were too fastidious and
Cal-her source of order and morality-was an African-American woman.
In To Kill a Mockingbird Horton Foote studies and celebrates Scout's
return to her past for strength and inspiration. Despite the death of her
mother, her brother's restraints on her freedom, and her father's adult
remoteness, the narrator survives and flourishes. As she remembers it,
the key is found in her controlling of fear...:..__expressed in the children's
early terror of Boo Radley-and transforming it into the loving assertion
"Boo was our neighbor."
12
It is a change made possible by her belief in
Atticus, a father who also suggests a loving God, who she remembers was
"in Jem's room all night. And he would be there when Jem waked up in
the morning" (80). This hope, realized in courageous individuals like
Scout, is the best hope in a dark, inverted world where justice is assured
only by betrayals of the social order. The most potent revolution in To
Kill a Mockingbird is in Scout's mind, where all revolution begins.
The same is true of Horton Foote's original screenplays. In Baby, the
Rain Must Fall, a film version of his play The Traveling Lady, class is both
1 1
Horton Foote, Lyndon [unproduced screenplay], Horton Foote Papers, Southern
Methodist University, II, 81.
12
Horton Foote, To Kill a Mockingbird, in Horton Foote: Three Screenpl ays (New
York: Grove Press, 1989), 80. Subsequent page references will be incl uded
parenthetically within the text.
Politics of Intimacy 55
brutal and seductive.
13
Henry Thomas has been threatened, beaten, and
emotionally abused by Kate Dawson, an influential matriarch in Henry's
hometown. In response the boy, a "string band" player of limited talent,
pursues a fantasy of Cadillac cars, Hollywood, and Elvis Presley
fame-images of social power. But, true to Horton Foote's political
vision, the central drama is not external; it centers on whether the early
disconnection and betrayals will keep Henry from rejoining his wife,
Georgette, and their daughter, Margaret Rose. Unfortunately, in this film
Henry returns to alcohol; in his drunkness he attacks a jealous man at a
dance and then, more gruesomely, Kate Dawson in her grave. A past of
failed intimacy makes present social responsibilities impossible.
A companion piece to Baby, the Rain Must Fall though written
twenty years later, Tender Mercies is also the story of an alcoholic singer
facing social and personal crises.
14
Stripped of fame and influence by his
drinking, Mac Sledge has his songs rejected by his ex-wife Dixie, a
successful country and western singer. Influenced by her responses,
Dixie's manager also dismisses Mac's new music. This economic
pressure pushes Mac toward the same kind of violence that destroyed
Henry Thomas. Fortunately, Mac's marriage to Rosa Lee and his
commitment to Sonny, her son, save him from self-destruction. Unlike
Dixie, who surrounds herself with narcissistic fantasies and conspicuous
wealth, Mac chooses to share feelings of abandonment and loss (over the
death of Sue Anne, the daughter of Mac and Dixie) with his wife, Rosa
Lee. In this case, unlike Baby, the Rain Must Fall, intimacy holds its own
against the history of injustice and dishonesty.
This emphasis on intimacy as the basis of social action in Horton
Foote's plays and screenplays reflects the subtle but substantive influence
of Christian Science-Foote's religious tradition-on his work. According
to the doctrine of this church, as estabished by its founder Mary Baker
Eddy, sin, disease, and death are not expressions of the reality of God.
Consequently, when spiritual love-figured in the lives of Mary and
Jesus-are made real, through prayer and Christian piety, "transformation
and healing"
15
can occur in the present, not in "a future-world salvation,
13
Horton Foote, Baby, the Rain Must Fall, directed by Robert Mulligan with Steve
McQueen and Lee Remick, Columbia, 1964.
14
Horton Foote, Tender Mercies, in Horton Foote: Three Screenplays (NewYork:
Grove Press, 1989).
15
Stephen Gottschalk, "Christian Science," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed.
Mircea Eliade, Vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 445.
56 WOOD
or safety."
16
Significantly, from these intimate acts of loving care-in
i mitation of God-individual consciousness can be modified. Fear and
weakness are replaced by hope and courage, powerful forces for spiritual ,
emotional, and physical reawakening.
Conservative in its focus on the individual, Christian Science
nevertheless is committed to "healing society at large."
17
As Mary Baker
Eddy explains it, "One infinite God, good," will not only establish a
general "brotherhood of man" but also eliminate "whatever is wrong in
soci al, civil, criminal, political, and religious codes."
18
Christian Scientists
like Horton Foote, believing that the miracles of Jesus demonstrate " the
power of .. . divine Love to transform and reshape society,"
19
look for
" the gradual healing of those elements of thought-like selfishness, pride,
and intolerance-which lie behind racial and economic injustice and
cause war. As a person's affections become more unselfish and
universal, he's also led to support enlightened human measures to
combat the ills of society."
20
Any meaningful political change is
predicated on the transformative power of genuine intimacy.
21
From this rei igious context, Horton Foote creates a theatre of
intimacy in which alienation, often called loneliness, is the universal
antagonist. His characters find themselves and their life's work in
communion with others. Sometimes the others are abstract and even
impersonal : the land, a job, a religion, or a region. But most often they
are intimate friends, relations, loved ones. In any case, the characters are
asked to make peace with their place in life, thei r personality, and their
social position. This acceptance leads to the need to act, but without
increasing the distance between people and things. If they choose their
actions well, they admit their ties to, and their dependency on, family,
place, race, and tradition. They feel connected to others, and from this
16
Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key t o the Scriptures (Boston: The
First Church of Chri st, Scientist, 1934), 340.
17
Gottschalk, " Christian Science," 445.
18
Eddy, 340.
19
Christian Science: A Sourcebook of Contemporary Materials (Boston: The
Chri stian Science Publishing Society, 1990), 246.
20
/bid., 254.
21
Stephen Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Rel igious
Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 268.
Politics of Intimacy 57
connection comes support, less need for judgment and control, and the
courage to be oneself.
The political issues in Foote's dramas are always judged against this
benchmark of intimacy. While never condoning the injustice so
prevalent in Harrison and other places, Foote investigates the psychology
of oppression, the reasons individuals and groups want to control and
destroy others. Although Foote's plays and films do not advocate or
represent political action, they nevertheless focus on the connection
between social, racial, and sexual injustice and failed attachments.
Horton Foote finds evidence of failed attachements in inadequate
parenting, misdirected love, and alienation. Feelings of superiority and
the need to manipulate indicate, in Foote's writing, a lack of primary
connection. The consequent loss of empathy and acceptance is the
source of violence, either against oneself, the natural world, or others.
Boundless competition and the obsessive need for wealth are not just
political problems; they are also symptoms of a failure of emotion and
imagination.
By dramatizing these issues in the subtext of his work, Horton Foote
creates a distinctive and subtly complex political vision. The personal
and family stories he creates are charged with and inextricably tied to
their political implications. For Foote, a Christian Scientist, the battle-
ground for social transformation is always the individual conscious-
ness-either empowered by its capacity for love or paralyzed by its
isolation and inflexibility.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 9 (Spring 199 7)
Two Interviews With Wendy Wasserstein
jAN BALAKIAN
Because I was working on a book about Wendy Wasserstein's plays,
I contacted her for an interview. At first she was reluctant, saying she was
too busy to meet with me. When I told her that I was a friend of
playwright Gary Bonasorte, who is a close friend of her friend Terrence
McNally, she agreed to talk. One interview led to others at the Stanhope
Hotel. Two are presented here.
Ms. Wasserstein's new play, An American Daughter, about a woman
who enters the world of Washington, D.C. politics, opens this spring at
Lincoln Center.
First Interview, 16 February 1995
Balakian: What led you to adapt Chekhov's "A Man in a Case?"
noticed that you changed it so that you emphasized the relationship in
your versron.
Wasserstein: Ann Cattaneo invited me to do the adaptation. I met her
when she was at the Phoenix Theatre. Now she's the literary manager at
Lincoln Center. She said something which really stayed with me. Her
husband joe is a really good painter, and she said to me that sometimes
painters do a I ittle sketch in order to keep their work fresh before they go
on to another fulf length work. It was right before l wrote The Heidi
Chronicles. I remember l was living on West Tweffth Street. It was the
first I wrote without smoking. lt got me going g a ~ n f found it f.asdnat-
ing what I did and what the other authors did. Because in many ways,
mine is the most conventional; mine is the most realistic. It's your basic
Chekhovian piece, not a leap of the imagination. It's very character-
driven, very melancholy.
Balakian: You place Belikov's marriage in the forefront, whereas
Chekhov had not done that. And the woman is dealing with the issues
that a lot of your women characters are dealing with. She doesn't see
herself as a woman.
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 59
Wasserstein: Exactly. And she tries to make them laugh all of the time,
and she's very lively. I think it reflected a lot of what I was feeling at the
time.
Balakian: I was also struck by your ending, which you made more
ambiguous than Chekhov's. In his version, there is a love note. In your
version, you shred it in pieces. Is that to say he is trying to salvage the
relationship?
Wasserstein: There's something sad about it. I think he'll keep the pieces
for himself to hold onto the sadness. It's even sadder that he's not able
to do it, but he wants the memory.
Balakian: I thought they were going to get together.
Wasserstein: I don't think so.
Balakian: What drew you to adapt john Cheever's "The Sorrows of
Gin"? The little girl motivates her father's transformation at the end. But
I am interested that you were drawn to this very WASP-y world, which
is very different from the world that you write about, and yet it deals
with a lot of the issues that you often deal with.
Wasserstein: I think dividing characters into stereotypical "WASP-y"
and jewish is very limiting. In fact, my intention is to do the opposite.
Balakian: In "The Sorrows of Gin," Cheever was interested in the
vacuous I ives of rich people. Was that what drew you to it?
Wasserstein: I don't think the "rich" is important. They were doing
various stories for television, and I think this was assigned to me by jac
Venza. My way into it was that my sister used to live in New Canaan,
and so I knew that world. And I'm interested in little girls with an
imagination, which is why I adapted The Nutcracker. I love the end of
that show when the father [Ed Hermann] and daughter are sitting and the
train goes by. They are waiting for something to happen, something to
change their lives. They have a yearning.
Balakian: Critics said your ending was too sentimental and that
Cheever's was not happy.
60 BALAKIAN
Wasserstein: I remember Wi lliam Henry in The Boston Globe did not
l ike it, but I liked it because I think it captured the essence of Cheever.
There is a connection, I believe, between Cheever and Chekhov.
Balakian: Would you tell me about Maids in America, which I read at
Mount Holyoke? [Wasserstein's papers are i n the Mount Holyoke
I ibrary.] The maid is the character with integrity, and it seems that you
are really interested in class. And of course, Cheever is interested in
social class.
Wasserstein: I grew up in Brooklyn, which is pretty middle class. And
then we moved to the Upper East Side. So, class does interest me. I
remember applying to schools in New York and the ones that were too
snobby to take me. And I still feel peoples' social prejudices. I find it
offensive. I' m offended when I observe it in the intelligentsia. Any kind
of differentiation-" l'm at the right table, and you' re at the wrong table."
Balakian: What led you to write Maids in America?
Wasserstein: That was Spielberg's idea-a black maid who runs for
office. Spielberg suggested it after he saw Isn' t it Romantic. It was my
idea to write five maids. I think the Polish maid in that is hi larious, the
one whose idol is Basia johnson.
Balakian: Was the film made?
Wasserstein: No. Then I turned it into a TV movie that never got made.
I've written a lot of these things.
Balakian: Getting back to Spielberg ....
Wasserstein: A woman in Beverly Hills had a maid who won the lottery,
and then they wanted me to write about it.
Balakian: I was struck by the ri ch woman's superficial femin ism. But
then she changes. I thought there was a movi ng moment when she tell s
her husband that "people like you and Ethel have a real passion, some-
thing inside you that tells you what you care about. I' ve always just had
a checklist, 'Marry well, eat well, breed well. ' It's what you and Ethel
have that I want to find in myself. Help me." So, she goes through a
transformation. I think it would make a fine film.
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 61
Wasserstein: I think so too. I never know why movies get made and why
they don't. Glenn Close would have been good in that movie.
Balakian: In Maids in America once again you're depicting a privileged
woman who lacks a sense of purpose, despite her privilege. Why did
you decide to do it as a screenplay rather than as a play?
Wasserstein: Sometimes I look at a lot of my screenplays and think I
wasted the energy and it should have been a play. Because the people
who think I'm not prolific enough don't know about all of these
screenplays.
Balakian: What makes you decide to write something as a screenplay or
as a play?
Wasserstein: It's just that you get a job.
Balakian: Can't you adapt the screenplays to the theatre?
Wasserstein: I would, but the studio owns the screenplay. Once they
hire you, you are their employee.
Balakian: So, you didn't initiate any of these on your own?
Wasserstein: Public Relations was my own.
Balakian: I'm curious about the differences between playwriting and
screenwriti ng.
Wasserstein: I think I'm a better playwright than I am a screenwriter.
Balakian: For what reasons?
Wasserstein: Because I'm really interested in dialogue, because if you're
a really good playwright, I think you try to hit ambiguous notes.
Screenwriting is so sparse. I think The Object of My Affection is my best
effort.
Balakian: I really like it. Might that be produced?
Wasserstein: Laurence Mark might do it. I'm not sure. I think it needs
another go round, but I think it could be quite good . . . . In plays you can
spend more time with people talking and there's less of a distinction
62 BALAKIAN
between what's comedic and what's serious. And also there aren't forty-
seven people in committees deciding whether to do it or not.
Balakian: Hollywood initially said,
11
We don't like the main character,
the beginning, middle, or the ending of The Heidi Chronicles." (We
laugh.) So, you feel more at home with playwriting.
Wasserstein: It's what I know better, although I'm interested in
screenwntmg. I'm going to write a movie for Nora Ephron in the fall.
But it gets sort of frustrating having all of these adaptations sitting at the
Mount Holyoke library. And then I have plays that win Tony's.
Balakian: So, playwriting is your calling.
Wasserstein: Right now, I just want to write my new play. That's it. I
don't want to think about anything else.
Balakian: Would you tell me anything about it?
Wasserstein: I'm going to write two plays, back to back. One is about a
woman whose life unravels. It's sort of a sad play, an interesting play.
I don't know if it's good or not, but it's certainly different for me, if I can
hold onto it.
Balakian: An older woman or a younger woman?
Wasserstein: A woman my age. And then right after I do that, I'm going
to write a romantic farce in a rich person's house, which I'm deeply
looking forward to. I want to get a house in the country and just write.
Balakian: Why are you writing them back to back?
Wasserstein: I spent last year writing movies-Public Relations and
Antonia and jane, which is very funny, based on an English movie.
Another adaptation. The adaptations of the movies are very much like
the Chekhov piece. I know Tom Stoppard does this too. It's that you
want to write, but you've done your big piece, so you do this sort of
work. It's fun to do, but because I've done that work, I want to get back
to my real work. When you've done that work, and it doesn't get made,
you feel like you were treading water. Except you learn something along
the way.
Balakian: Your craft is improving as you write.
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 63
Wasserstein: Yes.
Balakian: Tender Offer. That's such a sweet play. I was moved by the
poignant relationship between father and daughter.
Wasserstein: Fathers and daughters interest me. My new play has a
father and daughter.
Balakian: The father reaches out to his daughter in the language of Wall
Street takeovers. His offer seems to be that he's more interested in her as
a person. I was taken by the way you wed the worlds of art and business.
Wasserstein: I forgot about that play.
Balakian: It's in Antaeus, the one acts.
Wasserstein: That's a play that I also did before The Heidi Chronicles, in
that same period of time. My brother is an investment banker who does
mergers and acquisitions. And I used to go to The june Taylor Dance
School. My dad used to pick me up. Different things sort of reassemble
when you write a play. I wrote that play for my friend jack Gilpin, who
did a reading of it but wasn't able to do it. James Eckhouse did it, the guy
who is the father on 90210. So, maybe I was onto something about
fathers. And you know who starred in that play-Aiyssa Milano, who
went on to be the daughter in Who's the Boss . .. . That play too has a
Chekhovian sense to it. It's a little play, and it's a melancholy play. But
I love the end when they sing, "Nothing could be fina than to be in
Carolina."
Balakian: The art world and the business world seem to be the two
. polarities in your life, and they come together in that play.
Wasserstein: I think that's true. I like the idea in that play. Fathers and
daughters is a good subject.
Balakian: Well, everyone always says that daughters take after their
fathers.
Wasserstein: Yeah, I take after my father.
Balakian: I also read Miami. I was struck by the brother and the sister
who refuse to adopt the material values and conventional gender roles of
their parents. It's a play about the end of things, about transition.
64 BALAKIAN
Wasserstein: Right. It takes place in 1959. The year that Kennedy ran
for president.
Balakian: As Jonathan says in the musical, "Things change; people move
on. If you're smart, you take a leap." It's also about personal change.
Two relationships change and Ted Fine gives up his hotel. It's also about
female identity.
Wasserstein: Cathy identifies with Miss Kitty Katz. I love Miss Kitty Katz.
Tyne Daly would be good as Miss Kitty Katz.
Balakian: The daughter, Cathy, is concerned about getting left out; she
doesn't learn to use make-up. She says, "No one's going to marry me,
just so I can polish my nails and be perfect." And she also becomes
disillusioned with her mother's role. She says, "I don't want to promise
people I'll love them and then disappoint them. I don't want my children
to believe things are one way, only to find out they're another." I saw it
resonating with your other work.
Wasserstein: Very much so. Miami is an interesting piece. It was the
seeds of feminism and where Cathy Maidman's generation came from
and how it changed their lives, and that to her the role model was Miss
Kitty Katz and not her mother.
Balakian: Why did you decide to write it as a musical?
Wasserstein: Because I love musicals. I haven't written a musical since
Miami . Miami didn't quite work. But it had a wonderful score by Jack
Feldman and Bruce Sussman.
Balakian: It was done at Playwrights Horizons. Do you want to write
another musical?
Wasserstein: When I was watching tonight's musical, Call Me Madam,
I wanted to write another musical. I grew up going to musicals. All of
my plays have a lot of music in them. There's a buoyancy to them, and
the plays are very structured. And I'm a very good dancer.
Balakian: Will it be done again?
Wasserstein: It's like Hrosvitha of Gandersheim. It's a closet play. It
could be worked on. There's a lot of Sisters Rosensweig from Miami.
The whole thing about being Jewish and self-loathing and what Jonathan
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 65
goes through. The really good scene in Miami is the scene on the diving
board at the end with the brother and sister and they say, " . . . there's sky
writing and Kennedy for President." Actually, I remember Jacqueline
Onassis came to see it. . . . She liked my plays. The last scene is good
in the way that the last scene in The Sisters Rosensweig is good. It's
spare . .. . It was also the seed for The Heidi Chronicles because Miami
didn't go well, so I was in a state of despair.
Balakian: I also read Happy Birthday Montpelier Pizz-zazz.
Wasserstein: Oh my God, that's really old.
Balakian: That's a musical too. It concerns women's identities in the
context of their relationships with men. Dotty's career consists of singing
a muffin commercial, and her relationship with Montpelier does not work
out. She's banking on the idea that Bunny will take care of her. What
interested you in that musical?
Wasserstein: That peoples' idea of love is like a comic book.
Balakian: How have your women characters changed from the beginning
of your career until now?
Wasserstein: It's funny. I saw Jane Alexander in Washington yesterday
and thought about her and Sara [Rosensweig]. I remember the Tony
Awards the other year with Madeline Kahn and Jane and Linda Lavin and
Michael Learned. It made me very proud and very happy. I thought
there were all of these women on stage. Maybe my women have gotten
richer or darker. I think the new play is darker, and therefore I want to
write a comedic play right afterwards.
Balakian: Darker in the sense that you see the possibilities for women
becoming narrower?
Wasserstein: No. Sometimes I think the crit ics may be right about my
work: there's a lot of anger under the humor. When you entertain
people, you're not saying outright, "This is outrageous. ' '
Balakian: You mean sexism.
Wasserstein: Yes. And nobody is saying anything. But it is outrageous.
Someone should at least say it.
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BALAKIAN
(Wasserstein orders Lingonberry sorbet.)
Wasserstein: I think the plays are deceptively complicated plays.
Balakian: I've read various drafts of each of your plays. How has being
a jewish woman shaped your feminist sensibility?
Wasserstein: I went to Yeshiva in third grade. Whatever spirituality I
have, and there isn't a lot, comes from being jewish.
Balakian: Is it a more patriarchal culture?
Wasserstein: No. In the books it's patriarchal. It's all mixed messages
because it's run by the mother.
Balakian: Like the Armenian mother.
Wasserstein: Girls were brought up to be good girls in my house. It's
always, my brother was a "genius," and we were "very smart." I've
seen a lot of my young nieces recently, who are twenty-seven or so.
They're lawyers. So, they'll always be able to make a living. Do they
love being lawyers? Not particularly. But, in a sense what's great is that
they didn't make bad marriages and wake up at forty-two and think, " I
can't do anything." But still ... there's a lot of pressure for them to
marry. My niece just said to me, "I've got two more years."
Balakian: I'm thirty-three, and I'm not thinking that.
Wasserstein: I'm forty-four. I just think that you don't know what's going
to happen in your life. I think Sara Rosensweig is right. There are
possibilities in life. There is also great sadness. And there's random
sadness. And not everyone is nice. At least from my background as a
middle-class Jew, we were taught that girls had to be nice. So, on top of
that there's the maternal instinct and trying to make things work for
people. But I do know the issues of women would riot be taken care of
unless women take care of them. Given a male world, gay or straight.
Balakian: But are you saying that there's a backlash with this new wave
of women?
Wasserstein: God knows what's going on.
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 67
Balakian: In your essays you write, "The guilt that women feel when
they don't conceive, as though it could have been avoided if for so many
years they hadn't pursued independent lives .... I can't help feeling that
some members of the '69 junior class of Holyoke, who once believed
that suburbia was screwed now secretly believed that they were too
because they postponed having children for their careers." Do you think
that most women are really more comfortable staying at home and being
housewives and that feminism does not actually appeal to the majority
of American women?
Wasserstein: I think that right now it's not an option. To stay home is a
real upper-class option.
Balakian: But aside from the economics of it, do you think in terms of
. k'd "l
want1ng 1 s ....
Wasserstein: The pressure is still on the woman to somehow make it all
work. You still see more single women than single men. You see
women adopting babies alone. The crisis of The Heidi Chronicles is not
the crisis of my male friends.
Balakian: Has the ideology of feminism appealed to the masses of
American women?
Wasserstein: I think whether it appeals to them or not, it has changed
their lives. Look at the mass media.
Balakian: That's a select group. I was talking to a woman gynecologist,
who said that most women want families.
Wasserstein: I think people are more interesting than that. I'm 44. Talk
to women who are 48. Women who graduated in '64 and '65, right
before feminism. Those people-a lot of them-are really angry. They're
the ones who got married at twenty-two, had the kids right away. Some
go back to law school. But a lot of them are angry. If Hillary Clinton had
graduated a few years later, she might not have thought she had to marry
the guy who was going to become the president. She could have said,
"I want to be a senator."
Balakian: She certainly could be.
68
BALAKIAN
Wasserstein: I think a part of me is like the girl in Uncommon Women.
I always wanted to marry the guy who would be the playwright. I want
to be Celeste Holm in A// About Eve.
Balakian: In your essays, you say that despite feminism, you are still
waiting for your knight in shining armor.
Wasserstein: ... What's odd about me as a person is that I' m pretty
passive. Someone was set up with me, and they didn't want to go out
with me because they thought I'd be too threatening. I'm the least threat-
ening person I know.
Balakian: Well, you're a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.
Wasserstein: But it's the persona. I've also come to believe that if you're
bright it's threatening as well.
Balakian: My male students tell me they think it's sexy to be with a really
intelligent woman. How do you reconcile still wanting the knight in
shining armor with your feminism? Are they contradictory?
Wasserstein: I think you have different things in your life at different
times in your life. You know, for someone who writes plays, often I don't
believe in dialogue. But sometimes somebody touches you. What's
amazing about romance is that it's so unpredictable. And it changes your
life. And then I guess it comes down to mundane things like everyday
sex and all of that stuff. I'm hosting this thing on AMC on Friday night.
They asked three people to talk about their favorite movie, and I'm
talking about Brief Encounter. AMC is my favorite channel. I think in
some odd way I'm very romantic and not tough at all.
Balakian: Another thing I've noticed in your work is women who lack a
strong sense of self.
Wasserstein: Yes, that's true.
Balakian: I'm thinking of Holly in Uncommon Women who says, "I very
badly want to be someone else without going to the trouble of changing
myself." Do you see this problem as a particularly female crisis? Heidi
says, "I wonder what mothers tell their sons that they never bother to tell
their daughters."
Wasserstein: I' ve lived a much more eccentric life than my brother.
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 69
Balakian: Do you see women's lack of self-esteem as the result of
women being marginalized?
Wasserstein: I used to speak at girls' schools and tell them they could
become whatever-they wanted; they always said, "Why do you tell us
that and not the boys?"
Balakian: When Heidi asks "Do you think what makes you a person is
also what keeps you from being a person," is she talking about the
biology of women?
Wasserstein: It's also that what makes you a Pulitzer Prize w inner also
makes you threatening. What makes you outstanding also excludes you.
What makes you unique also makes you odd. Or what makes you kind
is also what makes you a w imp.
Balakian: I wanted to ask you about When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth.
Wasserstein: You saw Chris Durang tonight, who co-authored that show.
He's really talented and a nice man. The Heidi Chronicles is dedicated
to him.
(As we drove to the West Side, Wasserstein was singing a Simon and
Garfunkel tune.)
Wasserstein: I'm going to stop traveling. I just want to sit in one place
and write. . . . My teleplay, Drive She Said, was based on a real
experience. I failed the driving test. I dressed up and said I was a
screenwriter for Bette Midler, that I was moving to L.A. and needed a
license ....
Balakian: Are you sure I can't pay you for the theatre ticket?
Wasserstein: I'm sure. Not for the woman who has read The Man in the
Case.
Second Interview, 22 july 1996 at The Stanhope Hotel, New York City
Balakian: I know that your new play, An American Daughter, will not
open until next spring, but could you tell me something about it?
Wasserstein: I'm still reworking it and waiting for people to see it until
I've finished it. It's a different kind of play for me. It takes place in
70
BALAKIAN
Washington, and it was inspired by what happened to Zoe Baird and Lani
Guinier. And it's about a woman who is nominated for an office and
what happens to her; her life unravels. It's also an attempt to write about
her generation. It's darker than my other plays.
Balakian: In what sense?
Wasserstein: It's scathing. This is not a comfortable play.
Balakian: Do bad things happen to her in politics?
Wasserstein: It's not that bad things happen to her. It's very sharp; it' s
not warm towards the characters nor towards the situation. And what
happens to her is blatantly unfair. And what happens to women, some-
times, I think is blatantly unfair.
Balakian: Do you see her as a different kind of woman character than
your other female characters?
Wasserstein: She's an extension of them. She's more like Heidi . This is
a serious, good person. It's a funny play. It's a sharp play. I don't know
if people will identify with it or not. Some will.
Balakian: What were the issues that interested you? A woman 1n
politics? What was the impetus for writing it?
Wasserstein: A woman in politics, but still, what is the woman's issue?
Is there still an issue? And this is obviously "elitist" about a well-
educated person, a well-placed person, and a person with connections.
But it's also a thought of mine that the politics of theatre, as you go to see
plays, the politics of the plays are never surprising to us. The concerns
tend to be accepting of the left-wing point of view, which is my point of
view frankly. But I thought it's too comfortable seeing that, and if the
world has changed, in some way it is our own fault; it's sort of a look
i nward .. . .
Balakian: Cambridge University Press is doi ng a volume on American
Women Playwrights, and they asked me to do an essay about the
production process of your plays, and how your plays move from
regional theatres, where they are workshopped, to Broadway. How have
you benefited from that process?
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 71
Wasserstein: I work with Dan Sullivan very strongly and very collabor-
atively with that director, and that has made a huge difference. jenny Lyn
Bader has been involved with The Sisters Rosensweig. She can tell you.
Balakian (to Bader): What's this process like, and how would it be
different if her play were to begin on Broadway?
Bader: It gives her a very safe place to go to develop her plays, where
she's not under the scrutiny of the New York audience, which is a nasty
bunch.
Wasserstein: Plays take a long time. If your plays are character driven,
as mine are, what you're doing is taking the play and cutting it back,
f i nding the through line. It's the opposite process of working with a
movie, where it's all plotted out. It's finding the play in the process of
working on it. It has the ability to go places that you didn't think it was
going to go. The second act of An American Daughter was completely
rewritten.
Balakian: That's exciting.
Bader: Also the economics of theatre has changed. Fifty years ago if
Wendy wrote a play, it would open in Philadelphia or Boston, where
there would be try-outs, and you would bring it into town eventually.
But they don't do that anymore. Shows have gotten so much more
expensive. You have to develop them off-Broadway or at a regional
theatre.
Balakian: Do they all begin in Seattle before moving to New York?
Wasserstein: They begin in Seattle in a two-week workshop with the
actors holding their books, I ike a rehearsal with the I ights on. Dan and
I sat in the first row, and it was as if an audience were sitting in on a
rehearsal, very unencumbered, very bare-boned, very little furniture, so
it's just about the play.
Balakian: After that, what happens?
Wasserstein: With The Heidi Chronicles, we took it to Playwrights
Horizons. . . . The Heidi Chronicles, The Sisters Rosensweig, and this
play, oddly enough, were all three hours and five minutes.
Balakian: That's amazing!
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BALAKIAN
Wasserstein: They just stretch because it's about people talking. An
American Daughter is more plot oriented than the others.
Balakian: Sisters was more plot oriented than the prior plays. This one
is even more so?
Wasserstein: I think so. Something happens.
Balakian: How many weeks in Seattle before coming to New York?
Wasserstein: Just two. We're going to do another reading in the fall; I'll
fix it again. Then we'll do another reading, and then it'll be ready to go.
Bader: Wendy is very brilliant at cutting.
Balakian: So you discover things in that process that you were not even
aware of when you were at your desk?
Wasserstein: Yes. What's interesting to me about playwriting is not so
much structure. What I know how to do is to listen. I know it from
hearing it. It also happens when you write comedy. You can tell if
something is working when you hear it. It's a very specific kind of
language because it seems naturalistic when it's not; it's sort of pointed.
Balakian: Sure. Anything else you want to say about the process from
regional to New York?
Bader: With The Sisters Rosensweig, she had several New York readings.
Wasserstein: I had four readings before it was done. The other thing is
that I've worked with the same people. Dan Sullivan directed my past
two plays, and he's directing my next one. Andre Bishop produced them.
John Lee Beattie, Jane Greenwood, and Pat Collins, who did the lights for
The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig, wi II also work on An
American Daughter.
Balakian: So they come from Seattle to New York?
Wasserstein: Yes. I like those three plays. I like the idea of The Heidi
Chronicles, The Sisters Rosensweig, and An American Daughter. It's like
a body of work. It feels like it has a heft to me. And then I can just write
farces. (She laughs hard.)
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 73
Balakian: Is that what you want to do after this one?
Wasserstein: Maybe. Yeah. I' d love to write a farce. "Wendy lite."
Balakian: Getting back to your earlier work. Would you tell me about
When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth?
Wasserstein: Chris Durang and I wrote that together. Chris Durang has
a wonderful new play opening this year. With Sigourney Weaver. We' re
both having plays open at the Cort Theatre this year, which is great. I
think he's a brilliant writer.
Balakian: Is that why you decided to collaborate with him rather than
write it alone?
Wasserstein: It was when I was a student at Yale. Yeah. We are close
friends.
Balakian: I was intrigued by it because it explores issues of gender and
class. It also opens up questions about race. It seems to be a light-
hearted play, and yet there are serious issues that you are grappling with.
Wasserstein: It's the birth of Holly Kaplan, who later shows up in
Uncommon Women. I thought that was a funny play. There was a song
in there called "Bell Jars are Ringing."
Balakian: Sylvia Plath.
Wasserstein: And Chris Durang acted in that play at the Yale Cabaret.
So-did Christine Estabrook. It was quite funny.
Balakian: What was your interest in writing that?
Wasserstein: I think it was parts for women, and also it was during the
"having it all" time when perfect people were profiled in the Times.
Balakian: Just like today's New York Magazine. "The Woman Who Has
Everything: Former Spence Girl Gwyneth Paltrow is beautiful, brilliant,
and, in Emma, simply amazing. Plus, she's got Brad Pitt. "
Wasserstein: We offered her a part in The Sisters Rosensweig, and she
couldn't do it because she got her first movie role.
74
BALAKIAN
Balakian: She missed the better opportunity. The other thing that struck
me about When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth is the way you juxtapose
high and low culture. There are references to Sigmund Freud, Marilyn
Monroe, The Radio City Rockettes, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Liza
Minelli, Sylvia Plath, George Bernard Shaw, Sonny Bono, the Edinburgh
Festival, and Dinah Shore. In general in your work, you walk a close line
between high and low art.
Wasserstein: I think it's an effort not to be pretentious. I was thinking
about that because I have to go and rewrite this other play. The effort is
to make the writing seem effortless, which is a lot of work.
Balakian: I know.
Wasserstein: There is a way that many plays call attention to them-
selves-"this is brilliant!"-which is precisely what I' m not interested in
doing. It's also that vein of writing both comedy and naturalism.
Balakian: Dinah Shore also attempts to define women's roles and
questions America's notion of the ultimate woman. It asks how should
we measure excellence in women, and mocks the whole attempt to make
such judgments. I was also intrigued by your reference to Dinah Shore.
Wasserstein: I love her speech about when Dinah Shore ruled the earth.
Balakian: Yes. "Dinah Shore evolved from the Paleozoic Era to the
Triassic Era, and then into the Early Mesozoic Age, as the first truly
liberated land animal. Through evolution and diversification, Dinah
Shore grew and ruled supreme .. . . "
(Wasserstein sings "Bell jars are ringing. 'Ding a l ing, Ding a ling. ' A
voice keeps singing I wish I were dead.")
Wasserstein: I love writing like When Dinah Shore Rules the Earth, that
sort of fantasy writing that spins out. The play I wrote for The New
Yorker about looking for an apartment has that same kind of fantasy.
Balakian: I laughed hard when I read that.
Wasserstein: I love a fantasy that gets larger and larger.
Balakian: Why did you choose Dinah Shore as your paradigm?
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 75
Wasserstein: Dinah Shore used to sing "USA in your Chevrolet," and
throw a kiss to the audience at the end. She was a fifties television icon.
She was also the USO girl and sang "Ten Cents a Dance," a great song.
She was a band singer too. I just love the idea of Dinah Shore like a
stegosaurus clamping over the world. -
Balakian: What about the ending when Dinah Shore grew and ruled
supreme? You write, "But suddenly, Dinah Shore no longer ruled the
earth." Holly attributes this transformation to a Darwinist plot, and to the
inception of a new age that she dislikes.
Wasserstein: It's like the next age came along, Dinah couldn't reign
anymore. It's like a feminist fantasy, I guess.
Balakian: I was also intrigued by the fact that the three American female
icons that you mention in the play-Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, and
Judy Garland-suffered mental breakdowns. What were you after?
Wasserstein: (She laughs) I don'tknow. I was a drama student at the
time.
Balakian: It's as though you were suggesting that female celebrities are
doomed to become femme fatales.
Wasserstein: No, but Holly in that play is sort of upset. But no, I don't
think I was saying that.
Balakian: I got hold of your first play, Any Woman Can't- (1973), from
CUNY, and it definitely plants the seeds of your later work. Would you
comment on it? It seems to be about women being oppressed and
objectified. I also noticed that there are lines that appear later in your
other work.
Wasserstein: Maybe. That play I wrote while I was in Israel Horowitz's
playwriting class. It was his playwriting workshop, and it was the first
play that I ever had done. It was directed by Charles Karchmer (who just
directed a successful production of [Terence McNally's] Love, Valor, and
Compassion in Pittsburgh; Amy Sachs played the lead). In Any Woman
Can't, doesn't she audition for a tap dancing class with Bob Le Bob?
Balakian: Right. And she blows it, and then decides to get married.
Wasserstein: It's crazy that play.
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BALAKIAN
Balakian: I had a tough time following it structurally.
Wasserstein: One would.
Balakian: Would you comment on its idiosyncratic structure?
Wasserstein: It does have an idiosyncratic structure, but I think there are
the seeds of my other plays in it. It's a young person's play. But there's
something theatrical about it. There's something very much of its era
about it.
Balakian: Early seventies.
Wasserstein: Very much so. The choices: how should I live my life just
out of school? What makes me important, and am I important?
Particularly the romantic side gets further developed in Isn't it Romantic.
Balakian: And Chris tells Mark, "I feel like I've had Smith, dancing
lessons, speed reading, Amherst bodies, and all these wonderful middle-
class opportunities, and threw them out the window. It's some sort of
underachieving masochism .... Just tell me what to do. I can't go back
to Fred Astaire's and I won't be a secretary." She sounds like some of
your later characters.
Wasserstein: Maybe. Of course, there's the dancing theme that runs
through all of my plays because of my mother's dancing.
Balakian: She also doesn't have any sense of self, which is true of some
of your other women characters. I also noticed much objectification of
women in the play, and lots of sexism. In fact, men speak pretty crude
language. Were you trying to expose the pervasive sexism of that time?
Wasserstein: I think so, and what led her to make that decision.
Balakian: Man #1 puckers up and asks Chris for a bite. This would never
be on stage in the nineties.
Wasserstein: That's true.
Balakian: Your screenplays that I read in the Mount Holyoke Ar-
chives-The Object of My Affection, adapted from Stephen McCauley's
novel , and House of Husbands, adapted from Charles McGrath's
story- both show an interest in redefining the nuclear family.
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 77
Wasserstein: The Object of My Affection has been rewritten significantly.
Balakian: Will it be produced?
Wasserstein: It might be done, yes, but in a largely rewritten way.
Balakian: In House of Husbands, the husband, child, and wife reunite at
the end; they're going off to Martha's Vineyard on the ferry. Would you
comment on this ending? Are you validating the conventional family?
Wasserstein: I was just in Martha's Vineyard. I loved it a lot.
Balakian: So was I!
Wasserstein: I don't think I was validating the conventional family.
House of Husbands was a collaboration with Chris Durang. And that
was great. I love the Kris Kristofferson role. It's based on a Charles
McGrath short story. He's now editor of the New York Times Book
Review. Who knows how many times I rewrote that. Who knows what
appeared in the studios. But what's most significant about that screen-
play is Chris and I wrote it together. The men in the screenplay listen to
"Camelot" every morning. That's really funny.
Balakian: And it's like a fraternity that these separated men are living in.
So, this one couple who gets back together is not validating the conven-
tional family?
Wasserstein: As I remember in that play, all sorts of lunacy goes on, so
it's a good thing that that couple does get back together. You have to
look at the whole picture and the characters themselves. Heidi should
adopt a baby. Should Janie Blumberg adopt a baby? I don't think so.
Should Fanny Rosensweig adopt a baby? I don't think so.
Balakian: It depends on the character. In House of Husbands, what's
interesting is that you're also exploring the impossibility of communica-
tion between men and women. The men are taking a seminar about
"Understanding Women Through Literature," and they are "sick of trying
to understand their wives." And the women kidnap Reg, exclaiming that
they want to redefine gender. So, you deal with a lot of the same issues
that your other work does. Is there anything unique about this screen-
play?
78 BALAKIAN
Wasserstein: The only thing is that it was a collaboration and is really
based on Chip McGrath. It has the fantasy element that we were talking
about in Dinah Shore and in the real estate play. I think it is of a certain
world, of a certain place. There's also a fondness for some of the people
in it. A lot of my plays go from multi-dimensional to central characters.
Like the Russian taxi cab driver [in Isn't it Romantic] who's just brought
in for comic effect.
Balakian: Is it tough to collaborate? How do you do it?
Wasserstein: Chris and I would get tired and take little naps at the same
time. We did it all together. Some people love collaborating. Television
writers do it all the time. I like it sometimes, and then other times, I'm so
used to working alone, that I like working alone. I love collaborating
with a director. I love working with Dan Sullivan. I love him going
through the play and saying, "Here's what's missing," and then going
home to write. I adored working with Nicholas Heytner on The Object
of My Affection. There's somebody with an eye on it, and that's great.
Balakian: In The Object of My Affection there's that interesting relation-
ship between George and Nina. She tells the gay kindergarten teacher,
George, "We can make this arrangement anything we want it to be. So
there'll be no games, no power plays, no tired role models .... But we
deserve a home and family, too. And, George, my family is you." Some
critics accuse you of having your women characters bond too often with
gay men. Is that because, in this case, she is afraid of a real relationship?
Wasserstein: I think that's an easy way to look at things. This, too, was
an adaptation from Stephen McCauley's novel. I think the whole idea of
"This woman is attracted to unavailable men" is an easy way out. This
woman wants to love someone deeply, and for her there are different
kinds of love. There is a conventional love and an unconventional love.
And whether you can say it's wrong ... in this case it depends on the
play. I also think that given a certain time frame, people who have come
of age in the seventies and eighties, many of us have close friends who
are gay.
Balakian: Sure. Last time you mentioned that Brief Encounter is your
favorite film. I went out and rented it, and loved it for its old fashioned
romanticism. But I'm curious why it's your favorite movie.
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 79
Wasserstein: I gave a talk for AMC about it, which they taped. It' s Noel
Coward and David Lane. It' s based on a Noel Coward play, Tonight at
Eight-Thirty. It's with Trevor Howard and Celi a Johnson. They meet at
a train station. The Heidi Chronicles has references to it. She gets a
speck of dust in her eye. He says, "Can I help you? I happen to be a
doctor." And it's just about these two people who meet by a train, have
a love affair, and he goes away. There' s not even any sex in it.
Balakian: Well it's 1945.
Wasserstein: It's forties, but it ' s so .. . I love it.
Balakian: What do you love about it? Its poignancy?
Wasserstein: I love how poignant it is. I love how clean it is.
Balakian: Clean in what sense?
Wasserstein: Well written. Of its period. It can only go so far. I love the
train. I love that it' s so well directed. The craft of it is really, really good.
And I like those two people, two sort of non-important people. Of
course, there' s schlocky music, and "Oh, oh, I can't see you again." But
when she' s home with her husband doing the crossword puzzle, and that
love affair was so important to her, and it loomed so large for her, and it's
not really that important. And the dailyness of it, that they meet at the
luncheonette of the train station and go to the movies. I loved it. It's
odd, but that's my all time favorite.
Balakian: I was trying to see what connection there is between Brief
Encounter and your work.
Wasserstein: If there is any, and if they saw my work, I don't know what
the heck they would think. It's that it's real people, smart people who
mean well , and they still hurt other people. And that it' s extremely well
done and it doesn't seem that hard to do. And it is hard to do, so maybe
it' s just an admiration of the craft of it. It's so romant ic that it makes you
weep.
Jenny Lyn Bader (Wasserstein's assistant): Wendy' s work is very romanti c
and wistful. It has a lot to do with the specialness of the romantic
connection, which does not necessarily hold, but is so special for a brief
time.
80 BALAKIAN
Wasserstein: It's human, and then it goes away.
Balakian: Last time you mentioned briefly that what interested you in
Happy Birthday Montpelier Pizz-zazz was that the characters have a
comic book idea of love. Would you elaborate on that?
Wasserstein: Because the girl is waiting. . . . I was telling someone
yesterday that the one thing that unifies women of all different ages, is
you get a woman who is eighteen, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-eight,
sixty; if they're waiting for someone to call, it's all the same: "Should I
call him or not?" "Should I do this or should I do that?" It doesn't
matter how old you are. You just revert to that person. I don't care who
you are. And then you can call one girl friend, and she'll say, "You must
call him." And then you'll call another girlfriend, and she'll say, "You
never, EVER, call a guy."
Balakian: Apparently that's what the rule book says. All my friends tell
me never to call a guy, which I think is ridiculous. I just can't do life so
passively. But I haven't read the rules.
Wasserstein: So, does it work being aggressive?
Balakian: I grew up as a sort of tomboy, so I always played sports with
guys. I often call guys to play tennis or go for a run, and some women
think that's aggressive, but it's what I'm used to. Happy Birthday
Montpelier also has an interesting structure.
Wasserstein: It's a bit of a musical.
Balakian: Didn't it run at Playwrights Horizons?
Wasserstein: Just briefly. It was when Playwrights Horizons just changed
over from a burlesque house. So, in fact, the Sex Institute of Technology
was upstairs. And there were still pictures of the strippers at Playwrights
Horizons, and there were strange men and women there, because it had
just become a theatre. And that's when I first met Andre Bishop. There
was a character in that play, who wrote a letter signed Susan DeCutis.
Chris Durang had told me about a girl at Radcliffe called Susan DeCutis,
who was a friend of Andre's. So, he asked me, "How do you know
Susan DeCutis?" Chris Durang was in that at Yale. It's sort of musical.
Balakian: What else interested you about it?
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 81
Wasserstein: That there were two girlfriends, like Holly and Janie. That's
always common-the girl in the undershirt, and "I have to live next door
to her."
Balakian: Is it possible to read Public Relations?
Wasserstein: It's a movie that I haven't really worked on. If I do anything
with it, I'll turn it into a play.
Balakian: I tried all over New Jersey to get Antonia and jane, the English
film that you adapted, and couldn't find it.
Wasserstein: Call Larry Mark in Los Angeles. Andre Bishop has a copy.
Ask Julia Judge for Andre's copy of the film. The screenplay is interesting
because it has a lot of fantasy in it, which is fun. So watch the movie
first.
Balakian: What made you want to adapt it?
Wasserstein: Because it's about girlfriends, the fantasy part of it, and the
Jewish part of it was sort of interesting.
Balakian: What were the big issues in it for you?
Wasserstein: The assumptions that you make about somebody else's
life-that they know how to live a life and you don't. That's not
necessarily true. There's always that fantasy about the other, and that's
not always the case.
Balakian: It's not always the case that the other is better. Is that what you
mean?
Wasserstein: Yes. I loved doing that movie. It' s quite funny.
Balakian: Was your adaptation produced?
Wasserstein: No.
Balakian: Will it be made?
Wasserstein: Maybe when The Object of My Affection is made. I don't
know. This work is all pending. Once the play is rewritten, you can read
it when it's in shape to be read.
82
BALAKIAN
Balakian: Does it make more sense to group these adaptations together
as adaptations or as screenplays?
Wasserstein: Adaptations. Because the Chekhov one was successful, and
so was the Cheever, and so is The Object, and Antonia and jane. I'll
know about it in about a month. I'm going to L.A. at the end of the week
to find out what's going to happen to it.
Balakian: Does it make sense for college students to read about your
adaptations when they are unavailable?
Wasserstein: Yes. Ann Cattaneo told me sometimes painters, in between
their major works, do a drawing, just to keep going. And it's also
interesting what attracts someone as an adapter. It's interesting that I
adapted Chekhov and Cheever, The Object of My Affection, and Antonia
and jane.
Balakian: What attracted you?
Wasserstein: The people in them, the relationships. What's interesting
about the McCauley adaptation is there is now a Chekhovian note.
Balakian: What's the connection between Cheever and Chekhov?
Wasserstein: That wistfulness. [In The Sorrows of Gin] "The child
thought that the adult world was like a piece of burlap." It's that sadness.
It's not a large sadness, but a melancholic one. Moments of regret. And
there are also moments of comedy. They're not the ~ r g e s t problems in
the world. It's not what people would say, "Oh, what a tragedy."
Balakian: Like returning the Chanel dress [in Sisters Rosensweig].
Wasserstein: Exactly right. They're sort of middle-class tragedies. But
they're not even tragedies. They're sadnesses. That's in both Cheever
and Chekhov for sure.
Balakian: Kiss, Kiss Dahlings was really a riot. I saw it at Lincoln Center
and felt like I was actually watchf.og the Charlie Rose Show. What
interested you there?
Interviews with Wendy Wasserstein 83
Wasserstein: You know Blythe Danner is Gwyneth Paltrow's mother.
Balakian: The two younger women sell out to popular culture. Is that
what interested you?
Wasserstein: No, it was just these two generations of women actresses.
I love what Jerry did with the Chekhov and the mascara going down their
faces. Bottom line, it's Nancy Marchand and that love of theatre. And
also family. These three generations of women out there together. And
I love Blythe Danner in that raincoat and the thing about the blacklisting.
Balakian: I thought it was interesting that the two younger generations of
women sell out to television acting and video shooting, so it's almost a
farewell to theatre, that this new generation is threatened by television
and video.
Wasserstein: But at the end when Charlie Rose enters and the mother
says, "I'm ready," it's the greatness of actresses. I've got to go. I'm going
to the gala opening of Emma.
Balakian: Before you go, I wanted to ask you what the most difficult part
of writing is for you.
Wasserstein: Sitting down and doing it.
Balakian: Do you ever feel like you don't have anything left to say? Do
you get stuck, and if so, how do you get past that?
Wasserstein: I just get nervous. I get very nervous. I love when I'm
actually working. I think it's great. But like anyone else, it's hard.
Writing is really, really hard. A friend of mine recently gave me great
advice. My, friend Mindy Farrell in L.A. told me that you just have to
push the envelope, and even if you just push it an inch, that's O.K. And
I thought, "That's pretty good." That helped me because you never want
to do a bad job. You want to be honest and do it well. And sometimes
you get defensive, and you don't want to listen to everybody, but you
have to. I try to keep myself pretty flexible. But it's hard to do. First it's
hard to sit down and make yourself do it, and then it's hard to come up
against the limitations of your own talent.
84 BALAKIAN
Balakian: Absolutely.
Wasserstein: Especially if you're smart enough to know what's possible.
Balakian: Is pushing past that just confronting the blank page?
Wasserstein: You just do it, and then work as hard as possible. I' m a
great believer in rewriting and in listening to smart people.
journal of American Drama and Theatre 9 (Spring 1997)
Book Notes
From time to time, as space permits, we will be publishing notes about
books in the field that have been brought to our attention and that should
be of interest to our readers. There is no intention to present a critical
review of these works. The notes are informative only.
The Playwright's Art: Conversations with Contemporary American
Dramatists, Bryar, jackson R., ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 1995).
Fifteen playwrights from the last fifty years of American theatre are
interviewed by a variety of persons, the major questions being those
concerned with ways of working, production problems, the changing
landscape of theatre in America, and the place of critics in the theatrical
hierarchy. A long Introduction by the editor surveys the theatrical scene
in America from 1948 to the present. Each of the fifteen interviews is
preceded by a portrait of the playwright and a listing (with dates) of each
person's work to date.
Susan Glaspe/1: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction, Ben-Zvi, Linda, ed.
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
The editor's Introduction states that the "purpose of this book is to
explore the works of Susan Glaspell, the richness and diversity of her
writing, the way in which she has developed her art and pushed forward
the boundaries of drama, theatre and fiction." The collection includes
sixteen essays by a variety of authors, plus a chronology and a bibliogra-
phy by and about Glaspell. There are a few illustrations. It is the first
collection devoted to the body of Glaspell 's work, and should prove
useful not only in theatre studies, but also in feminist studies.
Plays by Early American Women, 1775-1850, Kritzer, Amelia Howe, ed.
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
A collection of eight plays by eight women living and working in the
United States from 1794 to 1844, including "Slaves in Africa" by
86
BOOK NOTES
Susanna Haswell Rawson and "The Forest Princes" by Charlotte Mary
Sanford Barnes. All eight were produced and/or previously published.
The volume includes short biographies on the dramatists, and a valuable
listing of women dramatists in the United States before 1900 with titles
and publication information for each of their known plays. The volume
will serve as a correction to male-oriented American theatre history.
Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 19 20-1940, Hatch, James V. and
Leo Hamalian, eds. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996).
This volume is a collection of sixteen plays by thirteen playwrights with
an historical and critical introduction by James V. Hatch. Nine of the
plays were never hitherto published; one was printed privately; the
remainder appeared in magazines or literary journals. They range from
farce to tragedy and document African-American concerns at a seminal
time period. Each play is preceded by a biographical sketch of the
playwright, and a series of appendices reprint documents relative to the
African-American experience and these "lost" plays. The book is
valuable for African-American studies and for study of the cultural history
of the 1920s and 1930s.
HILL, ANTHONY D., Pages from the Harlem Renaissance: A Chronicle of
Performance (New York: Peter Lang, 1996).
Here is a volume offering a unique perspective on the years 1920-1925
from the viewpoint of J. A. Jackson, former journalist, conservative
republican and railroad detective, who, during those years, authored for
Billboard a "J .A. Jackson's Page in the interest of the Colored actor,
Showman, and Musician of America." The author analyzes the content
and the effect of this particular journalistic effort. The book is ri ch in
illustrations, maps, and reproduced pages. Appendices document the
Colored Actor's Union, agents, theatres, and reviews. An extensive
bibliography closes the volume.
CONTRIBUTORS
jOHN W. FRICK is Associate Professor at the University of
Virginia. He is the author of New York's First Theatrical
Center: The Rialto at Union Square, the co-editor of The
Directory of Historic American Theatres and of Theatrical
Directors: A Biographical Dictionary, and is currently
working on a fourth book, Theatre, Culture and Temperance
Reform in Nineteenth-Century America.
KATHERINE H. BURKMAN is Professor Emeritus at Ohio State
University, Department of English.
SHEILA RABILLARD is Assistant Professor of English at the
University of Victoria, Canada. She has publ ished articles on
a variety of modern playwrights, is the editor of a forthcom-
ing collection of essays on Caryl Churchill, and is currently
at work on a book considering the epistemological chal-
lenges of modern drama.
GERALD C. WOOD has written essays on literature and film for
various journals, including the Keats-Shelley journal, Byron
journal, and Markham Review, as well as Recasting: Cone
with the Wind in American Culture (Florida, 1983) and
Handbook of American Film Genres (Greenwood, 1988).
He interviewed Horton Foote for Literature/Film Quarterly
(with Terry Barr) and Post Script, and pub I ished an essay on
Foote's place in Southern literary history for Christianity and
Literature. He also edited Selected One-Act Plays of Horton
Foote (Southern Methodist University, 1989). He is a
Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at
Carson-Newman College.
87
jAN BALAKIAN is an Assistant Professor of Eng I ish at Kean
College of New Jersey. She has published essays and
interviews on Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and
Wendy Wasserstein and has a forthcoming book on
Wasserstein.
88
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