THE JouRNAL oF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 24, Number 3 Fall2012
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THE JouRNAL OF AMERicAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 24, Number 3 Fall2012
CoNTENTS
SusAN KATIWINKEL
The Tradition of the Eccentric Body in Vaudeville: Subversion and
Power in Performance
5
SHELLEY MANNIS 23
Cain's Grave, Ground Zero, and "History's Unmarked Grave of
Discarded Lies": The Question of Hospitality to the Other in Homebocfy/Kabul
P ETER A. DAVIS 45
David Douglass on "Mr. Cruger's Wharff": The Enterprising Failure
of the New York Stage in 1759
D AVID CRESPY 62
Fortunate Collision: Al Carmines's Encounter with Claes Oldenburg's
Ray GunSpex
CoNTRIBUTORS 97
j OURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND T HEATRE 24, NO.3 (FAU2012)
THE TRADITION OF THE EccENTRIC BoDY IN VAUDEVILLE:
SuBVERSION AND PoWER IN PERFORMANCE
Susan Kattwinkel
The types of performance acts presented to audiences in American
variety/ vaudeville from its beginnings in the 1860s through its dying
days in the 1930s include just about everything imaginable, as well as
quite a few acts that audiences today would be hard pressed to accept
as conventional performances. Besides the singers, dancers, comedians,
athletes, and animal acts that made up the bulk of variety bills, appearances
of notorious persons, regurgitators, champion pedestrians, handkerchief
acts, living pictures, and other "nut acts" entertained and educated
vaudeville audiences. If you could imagine it, and if it had some original
aspect, you could make money, for a short or long time, in vaudeville.
What I am calling here eccentric bodies, a subset of the group
of performers frequendy known as "freaks," were a chief component of
clime museums and circuses throughout the nineteenth century.
1
Most just
sat on the side-show stage or in the curio hall
2
of clime museums, some
answering questions posed by an emcee or audience members and earning
their livings representing an "other" that both titillated and comforted
"normal" -bodied spectators. Their role in society was, as Rosemarie
Garland Thomson has explained:
to make the physical particularity of the freak
into a hypervisible text against which the viewer's
undistinguishable body fades into a seemingly neutral,
tractable, and invulnerable instrument of the autonomous
will, suitable to the uniform abstract citizenry democracy
institutes ... the privileged state of disembocliment that
the freak show conferred upon its spectators, however
fraudulent, must have been seductive.
3
1 For eccentric bodies in dime museums and freak shows, see Andrea Stulman
Dennett, Weird and Wonderful. The Dime Museum in America (New York: NYU Press, 1997)
and Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for A musement and Profit (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988).
2 Curio halls- short for "curiosity halls," were the exhibit rooms of dime
museums where the oddities- humans, animals, and collected objects- were displayed.
3 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed., "Introduction," Freakery: Cultural Spectacles
of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 10.
6 l<ATIWINKEL
Performers of eccentric bodies played their societal roles by existing
in a public fashion, acting as the receivers of whatever judgments and
assumptions with which spectators chose to endow them. As passive
objects of the spectator gaze, they had little control over their reception,
and limited agency over the pre-conceived perceptions carried in by
audiences who entered their space and encountered little cause for self-
reflection.
Those who managed to work their way onto the variety stage
found a different set of conditions, and a greater amount of agency. They
captivated and repelled audiences, and upset expectations by mixing in
with other highly skilled performers with non-eccentric bodies. Their
exhibition of talents impressive enough to get them onto the best
variety stages challenged social hierarchy in ways unavailable to them in
standard freak shows and dime museums, and gave them power to upend
conventional ways of thinking about eccentric bodies. But as variety
morphed into vaudeville at the end of the nineteenth century, fewer and
fewer performers of eccentric bodies found places on the bills. In this
article I will examine the performances of eccentric bodies in variety and
vaudeville: the types that succeeded there, the disruption of expectation
and comfort they posed for spectators, and the reasons for their decline in
popularity toward the end of the nineteenth century.
The Eccentric Body Explained
In this study I am interested in tracing the history of those
performers possessing the "eccentric body," most particularly those who
foregrounded that body in their performances. This term, along with the
term "freak," must be teased out in any work attempting to discuss the
phenomenon, because the breadth of definition makes the latter term
almost meaningless in any scholarly sense today. In the nineteenth century,
the term "freak" included far more people than it might today. Dime
museum scholars Andrea Stulman Dennett and Robert Bogdan separately
discuss five different types of freak: the "natural" or "born" freaks- people
born with a disability that could be exhibited (little people, giants, hirsutes,
conjoined twins, armless and/ or legless, obese and skeleton people, etc.);
"made" freaks - those who had done something to themselves, e.g. long
hair or tattoos; non-Westerners, billed as savages, cannibals, missing links,
or Circassians; novelty artists, or "nut" acts (including sword swallowers,
contortionists, expansionists, and regurgitators); and "gaffed" freaks, or
fake freaks - people costumed to look like eccentric bodies, either by
THE TRADITION OF TilE EcCENTRIC B ODY IN V AUDEV!llE 7
hiding existing limbs, crafting additional limbs, or even separate people
costumed as Siamese twins.
4
John Frick, applying terminology used in the
press in the early twentieth century, also includes a category of celebrity
freaks, or individuals famous for their participation in a titillating crime or
other scandalous event.
5
Because of the overly inclusive designation "freak," as well as
its negative connotations and change in meaning over the decades,
contemporary scholars uncomfortably use a wide variety of terms to
refer to the bodies of people seen by society as unusual.
6
Rather than
waver between terms and risk creating confusion about historical
precedent, I use the term "eccentric body." In common usage, the word
eccentric generally implies an oddness of activity or behavior and conjures
impressions of active engagement rather than passivity. Since my concern
here is performers and how they manipulated their bodies and spectator
reception, "eccentric" is more suitable than other contested terms in
use by scholars, although I certainly do not expect that my use will be
unproblematic. In this way I can avoid the difficulties of referring to
performers who might have been called freaks at one point in their career,
but not another. Many performers, of course, straddled the categories
described above, transformed from one to another as their talents/bodies
became over-common, or as they lost their uniqueness with age. Most of
the performers named in this essay moved back and forth between the
world of variety (where the term "freak" was almost never used to refer
to them) and the world of the museum or sideshow (where the term was
used occasionally, but not exclusively).
Variety and Museums in the Public Consciousness
Although the formats were different, the functions of dime
4 Dennett, 66; Bogdan, 6-8.
5 J ohn Frick, "Monday the Herald; Tuesday the Victoria: (Re)Packaging, and
(Re)Presenting the Celebrated and the Notorious on the Popular Stage," Nineteenth Century
Theatre and Film 30, no. 1 (Summer 2003).
6 On the first page of her Introduction, Rosemarie Garland Thompson refers
to them as the "different body," the "anomalous body," the "extraordinary body," the
"exceptional body," the "unexpected body," and the "differently formed body." In his
Introduction, which focuses on the history and applications- both popular and scholarly
- of the word "freak," Michael Chemers uses, without commentary, the term "anomalous
body" to refer to those people whose difference is physical and not self-imposed (as with
tattooed or pierced people). Michael Chemers, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the
American Freak Show (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
8
l<ATIWINKEL
museums and variety entertainments were similar, at least in the second half
of the nineteenth century. Both provided opportunities for immigrants to
learn about American culture and for all Americans to participate in the
national self-obsession as the country struggled to define itself within the
global context. Especially in New York City, where both entertainments
were concentrated, first, second, and third generation Americans were
able to see the successful performance of their own ethnicity, and to grow
accustomed to the many other ethnicities that surrounded them. They
learned assimilation on the variety stage and how to be American through
the comic songs and sketches that both ridiculed and promoted them.
As Esther Romeyn explains in her examination of Edward Harrigan's
plays, immigrant acts "introduced immigrant audiences to the intricacies
of urban life and the facts of urban politics, ridiculing those who clung to
an Old World past as well as those nouveaux-riches who broke the bonds
of class solidarity."
7
Simultaneously, as the nineteenth century progressed,
the various ethnic peasant stereotypes were replaced by urban, upwardly-
mobile types, dedicated to success in America. These types reflected the
desires of new and struggling immigrants and also presented them with
models of success as represented by their countrymen who were making
a living on the variety stage.
Like Harrigan's plays, which offered equal treatment of most
ethnic types, variety shows "also strove to transcend interethnic barriers"
8
primarily by uniting all ethnic types in a perceived class struggle against
American elites who would keep them in poverty. This class struggle
connected them to audience members of longer American descendency
who were ambivalent about, or even hostile toward, their new neighbors.
What they all had in common were working-class sensibilities and an uneasy
participation in what Albert McLean calls a "crisis in culture," leading to
a level of spectacle in variety theatre that Mark Winokur, in his gloss of
McLean, claims "celebrat[ed] an inverted version of mainstream culture
as freakish." Within the conflation of "genteel notions of education" and
entertainment as practiced by both variety theatres and dime museums,
"[t]he ethnic hence became allied to the freakish and the spectacular."
9
7 Esther Romeyn, Street Scenes: Stagjng the Se!f in Immigrant New York, 1880-1924
(Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2008), 139.
8 Ibid.
9 Mark Winokur, American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnici!J and 1930s Film Conm!J,
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 71 -72. Winokur cites Albert McLean, in this section,
American Vaudeville as Ritual (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), and for his
cliscussion of variety (which he conflates with vaudeville) and dime museums' inversion of
mainstream culture he relies on Robert C Allen, "B.F Keith and the Origins of American
Vaudeville," Theater Suro'!Y 21, no. 2 (November 1980): 106-113. For the functions of the
THE TRA.omoN OF THE Ece&vnuC BoDY IN VAUDEVILLE 9
Even more dedicated to the merging of education and spectacle
were the clime museums. Dennett explains the appeal of clime museum
freaks to Victorian audiences, who could compare themselves to others
and come out ahead. This was a comforting thought in a time of expanding
mechanization and an ever-increasing pace of work and knowledge
acquisition.
10
The mid to late nineteenth century developed a "theatricality
of self," in which individuals became aware of their abilities to construct
a public identity that controverted their private selves. In Eric Fretz's
words museum managers, especially PT. Barnum, "exhibited ... freaks as
commodities in an era of exhibitionism that privileged appearance over
essence."''
Ironically, the man often considered responsible for the beginning
of the development of "polite vaudeville" and who would later reject
freak acts, B.F. Keith, started his career in Boston with a dime museum.
Dime museums generally had two stages - one for freak exhibition,
presented ostensibly as an educational, scientific presentation of nature's
oddities, and one for the variety show. People came to see the freak acts
who were on display, and then were ushered into the theatre for the variety
entertainment, or vice-versa.
12
When Keith opened his museum in 1883,
his attractions included, according to historian Robert Snyder, "a chicken
with a human face, the Circassian beauties, a beast that was allegedly the
biggest hog in America, . . . and Weber and Fields."
13
Dennett, in her
book Weird and Wonderful.- The Dime Museum in America, traces the evolution
dime musewn, see Dennett, 1-5, 41-45. For the functions of nineteenth-century variety,
see Susan Kattwinkel, "Tony Pastor's Vaudeville: Serving the New York Community," The
Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 25, no. 3 (1995): 51 -75; Albert F. McLean,
Amencan Vaudeville as Ritual (Lexington: University of Ken. Press, 1965), 48-49; and Robert
W Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 20-25. The many examinations of ethnic performance
in variety and vaudeville, both specific and general, are too many to list here, but some of
the most probing, in addition to Winokur, include James H. Dorman, Popular
Culture and the New Immigration Ethnics: The Vaudeville Stage and the Process of
Ethnic Ascription," Amerikastudien-American Studies 36, no. 2 (1991): 179-93, Lawrence E.
Mintz, "Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes in Vaudeville and Burlesque," MELUS 21, no. 4
(1996): 19-27, and M. Alison Kibler, Rank .LJdies: Gender and Cultural Hierarcf[y in American
Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University. of North Carolina Press, 1999).
10 Dennett, 75-76.
11 Eric Fretz, "P.T. Barnum's Theatrical Selfhood and the Nineteenth Century
Culrure of Exhibition," in Thomson, Freakery, 98.
12 Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: Its Lift and Times (New York: Dover
Publications, 1968), 21-22.
13 Walter Prichard Eaton, McCIIIre's Magazine (Sept. 1918): 44, cited in Snyder,
The Vo1ce of the City, 27.
10
KATJWINKEL
of variety in association with museums exhibiting "human oddities." She
notes that "[i]t was essential for the survival of clime museums to have
some element of live performance."
14
The lecture halls of museums, where
variety shows were offered, presented bills generally indistinguishable
from those at variety houses such as Tony Pastor's or Koster and Bial's.
15
Few of the performers who graced the platforms of the museum curio
halls, however, were able to also hold the stage in the lecture hall. Even
there, an eccentric body had to have an act.
There is a difference between the eccentric body that may just
be displayed and one which must be demonstrated. Whereas in clime
museums eccentric bodies were mostly presented in curio halls, in which
they simply sat and returned the gazes of their patrons, vaudeville's appeal
came from its quick movement from one act to the next and the constant
activity of those acts. A skeleton man, no matter how thin, could not
just go on a vaudeville stage and stand and be thin. But if he could sing
a funny song about how thin he was, or perhaps contort his body into
a series of grotesque shapes, he might be a success in variety. Eccentric
bodies occupied a mercurial position in variety shows. In one sense,
they performed a similar role to the ethnic acts. They were the "other"
assimilating, because after all they performed, developing a talent, a skill:
"If that guy can make it, so can I." Minorities who considered themselves
"othered" by society could find inspiration, because they were not so
"othered" as the eccentric bodies on stage.
Michael Chemers, in his 2008 book 5 !aging 5 tigma: A Critical
Examination qf the American Freak Show, provides some of the most useful
theory for examining the nature of "freak" performers, especially as
applied to those on the variety stage. Using Erving Goffman's theories
of social negotiation, he notes that the performance of "freakery engages
the social interaction order in a position that commands much greater
power" than people of eccentric bodies are generally allowed.
16
Vaudeville
performers of eccentric bodies exercised an even greater ability to disrupt
audience comfort because people came to the theatre to be impressed,
not discomfited. Because they didn't carry in that "nameless, squirmy
something" that disability scholar Jim Ferris describes as part of the thrill
of freak shows,
17
audiences might be caught by surprise by performers of
eccentric bodies, upending expectations and giving the performer greater
14 Dennett, 101.
15 Jbid., 98.
16 Chemers, 16.
17 Jim Ferris, "Forward" in Chemers, Staging Stigma, i.x.
THE T RADITION OF THE ECCENTRJC B ODY IN VAUDE\'lll.E 11
power to upend the social interaction order.
Performers' uses of their bodies in variety and vaudeville existed
all along a spectrum of exhibition from those like Mlle. Polaire, who simply
emphasized an eccentric body (her extremely small waist) in order to
enhance a perhaps otherwise unremarkable talent, to those like one-legged
gymnast Stewart Dare, who honed a physical skill intimately tied to his
physical structure. What they had in common was a body seen as abnormal
by audience members, and entertainment skills regarded as impressive.
The more closely these two elements were combined, the more audience
members were simultaneously intrigued and made uncomfortable. This
separates them, in their presumed performance effectiveness, from those
freaks of notoriety who, as John Frick has noted, capitalized at the end
of the nineteenth-century on a growing sense that famous people were
just like everybody else except for the whim of chance.
18
As this feeling
developed into the twentieth century, the acknowledgement of "there but
for the grace of God go I," when applied to eccentric bodies, was enough
to make audiences hoping to be impressed by the talents of people not so
very different from themselves rather uncomfortable.
The Performers on the Variety Stage
The types of eccentric bodies in vaudeville varied less than in the
dime museums because of the added pressure of having to perform. Not
all owners of eccentric bodies could necessarily perform, and certainly
the work was more difficult, although with the exception of a few
famous dime museum performers, the remuneration was usually greater.
Additionally, the act was more likely to be successful if it had something to
do with the specific eccentricity of the performer's body. In other words,
a dancing hirsute (hairy person) was not nearly as interesting as a dancing
one-legged man. Examples of the most common types of performers
include Sandow ("the perfect man"), Jules Keller ("the legless wonder''),
La Petite Kitty (a little person, known often at the time as a Lilliputian),
and Baggeson (one of literally hundreds of contortionists). Some of these
performers were not just fillers, but became quite famous, commanding
high salaries and confounding audiences' and critics' senses of what kinds
of lives "disabled" people could live.
When Tony Pastor, a small-time but highly respected variety
house manager, celebrated his twentieth year in the business in 1885,
18 See Frick's examination of freaks of notoriety in his article "Monday The
Herald; Tuesday the Victoria," Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 30, no. 1 (2003): 26-39.
12 KATfWINKEL
the special performers he chose to include for the performance included
William Harbeck, known as the Boy Serpent or the Human Sailor's Knot.
19
Harbeck was popular at Pastor's and performed regularly there, through
at least 1894, when he appeared in a paired contortionist act with his wife.
Contortionists, often advertised as "boneless wonder" "frog man" "man-
serpent" or "serpentine wonder," flooded vaudeville throughout the late
19th century. There were hundreds, some who appeared in New York
only briefly and then either disappeared or went on tour, and some who
enjoyed lengthy careers. I put these performers in the category of eccentric
bodies because their appeal was clearly different from the virtuosity of
acrobats, gymnasts and dancers. First of all, the labeling was not confused:
a contortionist was not billed a contortionist one week and an acrobat
the next. Second, the descriptions draw attention to the eccentric body,
not to the skills it performs: "boneless" and the comparisons to snakes
and frogs indicate that the appeal was of the "grotesque," as they were
also sometimes labeled. Finally, the advertising, as with Frank Morosco's
advertisement of the "great" Morosco Family in a contortion act "devoid
of all unpleasantness"
20
indicates the squeamishness regularly induced by
these acts, similar to other eccentric body acts. The most successful had
some sort of twist to their act. The De Bar Brothers worked together,
as did Martin and Rose Julian (pairs of contortionists seemingly more
successful than singles); Matt Green and James Marco, both of whom
also performed with others, put their contortion within the context of a
sketch tided "Quarter to Nine," with his partner Athol, Marco performed
in "The Lizard's Nest."
21
Most of these contortionists came and went; few seem to have
stayed around New York for more than a couple of years at most. Many
found additional employment in circuses. Their proliferation was not
lost on vaudeville chronicler Joe Laurie, Jr., who noted that there "were
hundreds of contortionists during the heyday of vaudeville, usually
coming from the circuses and museums."
22
Contortionists, for the most
part, despite their monikers of "Frog Man" or "Serpent Man," appeared
"normal" until their performances began. Only then did the "nameless,
squirmy" feeling confront audience members. The discomfort attached
19 Performance program reproduced in Bernard Sobel, A Pictorial H istory if
Vaudeville (New York: The Citadel Press, 1961), 43.
20 George C.D. Odell, Annals if the New York Stage (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1927-49), 11:531.
21 See Odell volumes 9-15.
22 Joe Laurie Jr., Vaudeville: From the Hon!;y-Tonks to the Palace (New York: Henry
Holt & Co., 1953), 36.
THE TRADITION OF THE ECCENTRIC BODY IN VAUDEVILLE 13
to these performances was likely one that harbored a touch of fear.
These eccentric bodies could hide amongst the crowd. Unidentifiable in
the way that armless or legless or conjoined or even exceptionally thin
people were, contortionists proved that exceptionalness could belong to
everyone. Their power carne from their unexpectedness. Often, in fact,
contortionists were noted for their attractive physiques. Adonis Ames,
who enjoyed a successful career in both the U.S. and Europe, was noted by
the Los Angeles Herald as "one of the few men whom we can look upon
and pronounce him an Adonis, if not an Apollo ... [h]is skill . . . is quite
in keeping with what we might expect from one of fine physique."
23
Ames
posed for publicity photos in white body makeup and minimal clothing,
affecting Greek statues.
Acrobats and gymnasts were separated from variety spectators
by their skills. But contortionists used similar skills to manipulate their
eccentric bodes, disrupting and heightening the effect of knockabout
sketches or gymnastic feats. Ann Chisholm theorizes that these performers
disturb spectators because, ''As an irregular, distorted (and even bizarre)
transmutation of the body ... contortion poses a serious risk civically in
that it does not manifest transcendence or progress but rather deviates
from social conventions and standards of comporrment."
24
In the
nineteenth century they were unique enough to attract the attention of
physicians, who often examined them out of an interest in their "peculiar
and abnormal accomplishments."
25
Those who were successful on the
variety stage were those who presented themselves most like "normal"
types of performers, such as singers (Charles Osborn and Cleo Lewis
had particular success in the early 1900s), comedians, and dancers. Able
to "pass" as non-eccentric, contortionists' bodies, that appeared so
natural and moved so unnaturally, made audiences especially uneasy. This
duality perhaps explains why contortionists remained on the vaudeville
stage longer than any other eccentric bodies. The association of both
attraction and repulsion with contortionists is evident as late as 1903, in
the Boston Evening Transcnpt's review of The Pantzer Trio at B.F. Keith's
vaudeville house: "two beautifully formed, graceful women and a clown,
23 Los Angeles Herald, 23 April 1896: 6.
24 Ann Chisholm, Contortionists, and Cute Children: The Promise
and Perversity of U.S. Women's Gymnastics," Signs 27, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 427.
25 Edmund Owen, ''Notes on the Voluntary Dislocations of a Contortionist,"
The British Medical Journal, 6 May 1882. The contortionist examined in this particular article
was the American Warren (his full name - Charles H. Warren - is not provided by the
physician/author), who worked small variety shows throughout the U.S. in the late 1870s
and early 1880s. He was arrested in 1883 for murdering saloon owner Patrick H. Dwyer,
but his jury deadlocked.
14
K.\TIWINKEL
all contortionists of rare talent . . . . The repugnance of the usual
contortion exhibit is absent here."
26
Contortionists' eccentric bodies
perhaps disrupted audience comfort more than any other.
Strongmen and women, also on the border of the eccentric
body, were popular throughout the late nineteenth century, although not
as much as contortionists. Labeled the Hercules" or "modern
Sampson" [sic] or "woman with the iron jaw," they were always advertised
by how much they would lift. Like contortionists, the performers who
had some sort of twist to their act generally remained on the boards the
longest. Mlle. de Granville was lucky enough to be considered beautiful,
and appeared through the 1870s and 1880s and at least once in the 1890s.
Andrew Gaffney was also known as a "skeleton man," lending extra
interest to his weight-lifting feats. His career paralleled that of Mlle. de
Granville. The most famous of strong men was Sandow, known as "the
perfect man," who began his career in the 1890s and later appeared at
the Victoria. His act was different, and perhaps lasted longer, because he
generally did more posing than lifting during his act, and supplemented his
performance with lectures on health.
27
He was popular enough in 1896 for
Charles Jefferson to base a touring vaudeville company around him. The
company was called Sandow's Olympia and included the Rossow midgets,
as well as other traditional vaudeville-style acts.
28
The popularity of strong men and women paralleled the rise in
interest in physical education and health that gripped the nation beginning
in the mid -1900s. "Muscular Christianity" connected physical and moral
strength, and posited that both men and women should engage in
physical activity so as to distract themselves from more prurient pursuits.
Strongmen and women provided idealist models, even as they excited
more libidinous sensations with their limited clothing and posing. Those
who appeared as "skeleton men," moreover, excited additional feelings in
spectators, perhaps of guilt at their own physical failings, perhaps of self-
righteousness connecting eccentric bodies with physical activity.
Dime museums had made little people and big people a regular
sight, and by the late 1800s they didn't even appear there if they didn't
have an act. Alvin Goldfarb has written about several of these performers
26 29 December 1903: 11.
27 Both Alison Kibler and Robert Snyder have theorized that Sandow's
attraction was largely of a sexual nature (as was perhaps Mlle. de Granville's), making his
appeal quite different from that of other eccentric body performers. SeeM. Alison Kibler,
Ronk Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudevzlle (Chapel Hill: UNC Press,
1999), 51 and Snyder, 33.
28 New York Times, 6 September 1896, 11:2.
THE TRADffiON OF THE E CCENTRIC BODY IN VAUDEVILLE 15
on the legitimate stage,
29
but many also appeared on variety stages. Many
little people and "giants" appeared in troupes (such as the Lilliputians)
or on their own, in plays specially written or chosen for them. One of
the most famous was Little Mac, who appeared in troupes and singly,
on the legitimate stage and in vaudeville. Le Petite Kitty, "the smallest
living prima donna, thirty inches high and seventeen years old"
30
in 1883,
had a lengthy vaudeville career, apparently all on her own, as did George
Labell (or Laible), who appeared regularly in burlesques. As always,
novelty helped, as it did the McShane Brothers, billed as "pygmy pugilists"
and midget acrobats,
31
and the Two Clarks, who were comedians. Many
of these performers appeared alternately in the dime museums and
vaudeville, more than other eccentric body artists. Their commonness
made them less desirable in the dime museums, where only "the smallest"
was worth exhibiting. Robert Bogdan notes that midget troupes were still
very popular in the twentieth century, performing mostly their own tours
of their own material, but, like most other eccentric bodies, they were not
often seen in vaudeville after 1900.
32
Lori Merish has written about the "cuteness" appeal of little
people,
33
and Michael Chemers outlines the widespread belief in the
nineteenth century that dwarfs had lower than normal intelligence
because of their small head sizes.
34
Both of these facts contributed to the
popularity of midget acts. Audiences marveled at the child-like appearance
-sometimes exaggerated- of dwarf performers and were amazed at their
ability to remember lines from plays and perform the same intricate acts
as performers of regular size. Little people most commonly performed in
their own shows or in dime museums, so their performances on variety
stages, alongside regular-sized performers, highlighted their size difference
even while they confounded assumptions of intelligence.
The group of eccentric bodies carrying perhaps the most
complicated messages for vaudeville audiences in the nineteenth century
were one-legged or legless men, and to a lesser extent, men with missing
arms. Tom Harper was a one-legged dancer in the 1870s and 1880s.
29 See Alvin Goldfarb, "Gigantic and Minsicule Actors on the Nineteenth-
Century American Stage," Journal of Popular Culture 10, no. 2 (Fall 1976): 267-79.
30 Quoted in Odell, 11: 306.
31 Odell, 12: 320.
32 See Bogdan, 161-165.
33 Lori Merish, "Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley
Temple," in Thomson, Freakery.
34 Chemers, 39-41.
16 KATIWINKEL
Chronicler George Odell quotes a program or advertisement which states
that Harper "lost a leg in our late domestic difficulty."
35
Tom's brother
Will appeared with him at least twice, and later by himself at least once,
36
and was apparently one-legged also. Harper also teamed up with another
one-legged dancer by the name of Stansil; the two performed regularly
together throughout the 1870s. Odell also notes that T.F. Grant was
"another victim, presumably, of the Civil War,"
37
although he gives no
evidence for this assumption. Others performing in vaudeville at this time
who may have acquired their eccentric bodies in the same circumstances
were Professor De Houne, who performed at the Bowery theatre in one-
legged tightrope walking in 1872; Tommy J. Harpin, who performed at the
Volksgarten in 1881; Sam Martin, who danced mostly at the Volksgarten
1879 through 1881; and Stewart Dare, the one-legged gymnast, who
performed regularly throughout the 1870s and 80s. Dalton and Watts were
popular in the 1880s with their one-armed song and dance and later one-
armed boxing, and Charles Raymond did a one-legged pedestal clog act.
Eugene Ward, "the only footless dancer in the universe,"
38
had a brief
vaudeville career in the late 1880s and James E. Black and Jules Keller,
both legless, had highly successful dancing careers in the late 1880s and
early 1890s.
There were also armless men in vaudeville, although they were few.
Charles Perham and Hermann Unthan performed in the 1870s. Perham
was a song and dance man and relatively successful and Unthan played
the violin. Perhaps that wasn't an interesting enough talent for vaudeville,
for Odell only lists dates in 1873 and 1874. In the 1890s the famous Carl
Unthan (apparently no relation), billed as "The Armless Fiddler," played
in all of the major houses in vaudeville as well as in dime museums.
39
While not all of these performers could credit the Civil War with
the loss of their limbs (Carl Unthan and Jules Keller, at least, were born
with their eccentric bodies), those gentlemen who had been injured in
the war undoubtedly made the most of it in their performances. I t is
unclear whether anyone other than Tom Harper used this fact to draw
an audience. Harper's lengthy career indicates that the ploy would not
have been unsuccessful. Added to the usual appeal of such acts would
9-15.
35 Odell, 10: 275.
36 Odell, 13: 510.
37 Odell, 11: 131.
38 Odell, 13: 332.
39 These and other performers with missing limbs are listed in Odell, volumes
THE TRADmON OF THE EcCENTRIC BODY IN VAUDEVILLE
17
have been a feeling of patriotism, and most likely camaraderie from the
fellow veterans in the house. New York variety houses had certainly taken
advantage of northern patriotism in the years during and immediately
following the Civil War,
40
and certainly the appearance of such acts even
decades later would have been welcomed as a galvanizing force.
The Decline of Eccentric Bodies in Variety
By 1900, the complexion of the freak act in vaudeville had
changed. The eccentric body act declined, and while the novelty and
celebrity acts were still popular, they too declined in importance. Factors
such as advancing medicine, eugenics, and increasing feelings of social
responsibility were contributing to the decline of the eccentric body act.
41
John Frick has discussed the cultural transformation in Victorian society
that first allowed for the public spectacle of human oddity exhibition, and
then the destruction of that tolerance through a combination of medical
demystification and global awareness.
42
However, the disappearance of
the eccentric body in vaudeville preceded the demise of dime museums
by about thirty years, due to a variety of factors not present in the other
venues.
One of the main causes of the decline of eccentric body acts in
vaudeville was the reemergence of the sketch, which signaled the intrusion
of "legitimate" theatre onto the vaudeville stage. Afterpieces and other
small sketches had been very popular, especially in the smaller vaudeville
houses, in the 1870s and early 1880s. Tony Pastor was perhaps the last
manager of "polite vaudeville" to include this element, and even he had
abandoned the form almost completely by the late 1880s, mainly because
of the expense of keeping a resident company. But a decade later managers
began filling their bills with more and more sketches, sometimes replacing
the variety bill completely with a full-length play, generally a burlesque. In
1900 the New York Times quoted a vaudeville manager who complained
that the traditional variety acts had become "filler" between short plays
and who acknowledged the effect it was already having on the novelty
freak acts: "Some of the old diversions have almost entirely disappeared
from variety and have relegated themselves to the freak museum and
traveling circus. Who knows but that vaudeville and legitimate theatre are
40 See Snyder, 8 and Parker Zellers, To'!Y Pastor: Dean of the Vaudeville Stage
(Ypsilanti: Eastern University Press, 1971), 15-19.
41 Bogdan, 62-66.
42 See John Frick, "Monday the Herald; Tuesday the Victoria."
18 KA Tf\1(1NKEL
about to be merged into each other?"
43
By 1903 the editor of Harper's
Month!J echoed the complaints of the New York Times interview, saying:
"There are now only three playhouses in New York where the variety
show still flourishes, against six where it flourished a few years ago."
44
Sketches needed actors, and in the late 1890s vaudeville theatre
began recruiting legitimate stars to headline the playlets. Vaudeville, and,
in fact, freak shows, had always been lucrative business for their top
performers, with headliners often making far more money than the stars
of the legitimate theatre. Actors were drawn to that money and began
appearing in vaudeville for short stints. Naturally the vaudeville managers
pursued this avenue as crucial to their attempts to "upscale" vaudeville, a
trend that had begun with Pastor and Keith in the 1870s and 80s and was
reaching its zenith at the turn of the century. There was also an element
of refinement, even in early variety, as managers struggled to maintain the
lusty roots of variety while appealing to middle class women and children
with growing amounts of leisure time.
45
Both the visiting actors and the visiting novelties left less room
for the freak performers. While only those who had a performative
aspect to their acts had made it in vaudeville, they could not be used in
sketches, either because of a lack of acting training, or because of those
same eccentric bodies that had gotten them to vaudeville in the first place,
but which wouldn't play in a burlesque or melodrama with pretensions to
"theatre." Odell and ads in the New York Times indicate that even freaks
at the dime museums became performative. Even at the dime museums,
it was the eccentric bodies with performative elements to their acts who
were advertised and highlighted.
46
Legitimate stars, were, of course, just one of the aspects of the
overall gentrification and legitimation of vaudeville. While the trend of
cleaning up vaudeville to make it palatable to women and children had
started decades before, now managers wanted to make it appeal to the
upper classes. 1900 was a banner year for legitimation. First the Vaudeville
43 N ew York Times, 7 October 1900, 16: 1. According to Robert Bogdan, the
novelty type of freak act, that most adaptable to vaudeville, grew in the late nineteenth
century, until "the line that divided vaudeville from dime museum displays was not always
easy to draw, and various establishments competed with each other by imitation" (Bogdan
264-265), but as the quotes in this section from contemporary observers indicate, the
interpretation at the time was otherwise.
44 "Decline of the Vaudeville," Harper's Monthfy Magazine 106, April 1903, 814.
45 Snyder, 18-21.
46 See Odell v. 15 for the beginnings of this trend in the mid-1890s, and the
New York Times throughout the late 1890s and early 1900s for the changing tenor of
advertisements.
THE TRAomoN oF THE E c cENTRJC Boov IN V .\UDEVIUE 19
Managers' Association was formed, which worked in tandem with its
United Booking Office to control salaries, circuits, and to get rid of the
actors' agents. In response the actors formed the White Rats, and actors'
union. The latter organization, although it eventually opened to anyone
who had the money to join, originally only admitted a select few. In his book
My Latjy Vaudeville and Her White Rats, George Fuller Golden discusses the
"eligible candidates" and "best acts in vaudeville" who originally filled the
group's roster.
47
The membership eventually had to be opened up to gain
members, a fact that clearly vexed Gordon, but he was able to maintain
exclusivity a few years later when the union set up an Investment Fund
that allowed only "reputable artists."
48
Golden needn't have worried, since the big-time vaudeville
managers were trying desperately to "legitimize" vaudeville and were
beginning to drive the small-time managers, who might have found room
for the freak and novelty acts, out of business. One of the more obvious
methods the managers were using was to build bigger and more elaborate
houses. The freak acts would have been as unplayable on the giant stages
with the distant audiences as the comics were, a fact lamented by George
Jean Nathan in his 1918 book The Popular Theatre. He was complaining
about the extremes that the new "polite" vaudeville had gone to when
he said: "As vaudeville has acquired this air of elegance, there has
coincidentally departed from it its old bounce and gusto."
49
Douglas Gilbert goes even further in his dislike for the new
vaudeville. He attributes the worst managerial excesses to Edward Franklin
Albee II and claims that he killed vaudeville by cleaning it up too much:
He dressed up vaudeville fit to kill and it committed
suicide. It became something that was neither variety,
burlesque, nor review. On some of Albee's later bills you
couldn't find a wisp of crepe hair or smudge of grease
paint from opening to closing ... The performers, forced
to dress to match Albee's million-dollar theatre (which
were too large for comedy), looked no different to the
audiences who could see tuxedos anywhere and for
nothing. 5
47 George Fuller Golden, My Laqy Vaudeville and Her White Rats (New York:
White Rats of America, 1909), 93.
48 Golden, 181.
49 George Jean Nathan, The Popular Theatre (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918),
198-99.
50 Gilbert, 393. In 1914 Nellie Revell lamented the passing of the novelty act
20 l<AITWINKEL
Certainly eccentric bodies had no place in a theatre where spectators were
being made to feel sophisticated and cultured. Whereas vaudeville had
started as a place where people could go to become acquainted with those
different from themselves, both racially and physically, after 1900 it was
increasingly a place where the middle and upper classes went to see people
just like themselves.
Eccentric bodies didn't disappear from the entertainment world
altogether, however. There were still places for them, even within the
theatrical world; they were just fewer and more far between. In 1904 Willie
Hammerstein opened the Victoria Theatre, which operated within the
world of big-time vaudeville and immediately became known for its freak
and nut acts. While there were true eccentric bodies at Hammerstein's
theatre, like Sober Sue (whose paralyzed facial muscles made it impossible
for her to laugh) and Mme. Polaire (of the exceptionally small waist),
most of the acts were closer to nut, rather than freak, acts. Examples
include Princess Rajah, who did a snake act; Jack Johnson, a heavyweight
champion; and contemporary news makers, like Conrad and Graham, who
shot WE.D. Stokes; and Dorando, who won the 1908 Olympic marathon.
Loney Haskell, a monologuist who worked for Hammerstein, lectured
about these people as if they were freaks, since many of them had no act
of their own. The Victoria did reasonably well for a few years, but bowed
under the competition in 1914.
John Frick has argued that the expanse of the term "freak" to
include the notorious and simply quirky in vaudeville accompanied the
transformation of these personalities to an entertainment form that
capitalized on Americans' belief that even the most famous or odd people
were at heart "normal" like themselves, and therefore, they too could
expect their day of fame at some point in their lives.
51
Eccentric bodies
problematized this development. The agency they had had as the makers
of their own identities and meaning as performers no longer fit within an
entertainment form where everyone - performers and spectators - were
in an article in Theatre a g a ~ n e tided "The Passing of the Freak Act." She said: "In
fact, the passing of the 'freak act' - under which classification any number of acts can
be listed- has been one of the significant developments of the 1913-14 vaudeville
season . .. Participation, either clirecdy or inclirecdy in popular crimes, or association with
those concerned in the violation of the proprieties that excite newspaper notoriety, are
no longer guarantees of vaudeville engagements .... Proof of this rests in the fact that
of aU the vaudeville theatres in New York City, there is but one remaining that permits
performers of the museum class to appear on its stage; and even this playhouse is showing
an inclination to raise the bars and make the prohibition complete" (293). Her theatre
reference is undoubtedly to the Victoria, and her emphasis on people of notoriety implies
that the eccentric bodies of " the museum class" are already absent from the stage.
51 Frick, 28.
THE 'fRADmON OF THE E CCENTRIC BODY IN V AUDEVIllE 21
always already the same. Vaudeville spectators increasingly demanded a
"normalization" of eccentric bodies; they were drawn to the otherness,
but comforted by the appearance of eccentric bodies conforming to
societal norms, as opposed to living comfortably in a world of their own.
Eccentric bodies on the variety stage both "fit in" to societal norms and
challenged those norms.
As vaudeville changed from a site of communitas attended by
variety of classes and ethnicities to one of upward mobility attended by
whites several generations past immigrant status, audiences who no longer
saw themselves as "othered" did not need images of unexpected success
to inspire them. Instead, they wanted performances worthy of how they
saw themselves: better than average, educated, and fully American. The
eccentric body, regardless of how accomplished, no longer filled a space
in a melting pot of hard-working humanity, but served only as a reminder
of perceived faults yet unconquered.
Most scholarly work on vaudeville has focused on the "big-time
vaudeville" of the very late nineteenth century through its precipitous
decline following the Great Depression. It follows that there has been
little attention paid to eccentric bodies on the vaudeville stage, since they
had largely disappeared from the stage after the turn of the century. As
Susan Schweik notes in her account of the career of Marshall P. Wilder
(a vaudeville performer who "resisted tokenization" as a "hunchbacked
dwarf" and comedian), studies on disability performance have focused on
contemporary performance almost exclusively. She cites Petra Kuppers,
who describes the palimpsest of contemporary disability performers
as restricted to freak shows and circus side shows, without access to
the "aesthetic stage."
52
The variety theatre balanced in the liminal space
between the "popular" and the "aesthetic." The cultural negotiations of
eccentric bodies were both more complex than those in freak shows and
possessed of greater power. The history of the performative eccentric
body on the variety stage demands continuing attention as a worthy
precursor to contemporary disability performance.
52 Susan Schweik, "Marshall P. Wilder and Disability Performance History,"
Disability Studies 30, no. 3/ 4 (2010), accessed online 7 October 2012. See also Petra Kuppers,
Disability and Contemporary Peiformance: Bodies on Edge (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 25-31.
22
j OURNAL OF AMERICAN D RAMA AND THEATRE 24, NO.3 (FALL 201 2)
CAIN's GRAVE, GROUND ZERo, AND "HISTORY's UNMARKED
GRAVE oF DISCARDED Lrns": THE QUESTION OF HosPITALITY TO
THE OTHER IN HOMEBODY/KABUL
Shelley Mannis
"Every grave is empty.
Every grave holds nothing but dust."
-Marabout, Homebody/ Kabul
"We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all
the murderous ideologies of the 20th century... . And they
will follow that path all the way to where it ends: in history's
unmarked grave of discarded lies."
-George W Bush, Address to the Nation, 21 September 2001
2
On 28 and 29 October 2001, Tony Kushner, Jim Nicola (the New York
Theatre Workshop producer), and the cast of Kushner's then forthcoming
U.S. debut of Homebody I Kabul appeared at New York City's Guggenheim
as part of its ' 'Works and Process" series.
3
Their appearance took place
just after their first week of rehearsal, which had been delayed for a week
from its original start date by the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon (including a thwarted attack resulting in a downed plane in a
Pennsylvania field) on 11 September 2001-justthree weeks earlier. Kushner
and Nicola spoke with moderator Mary Sharp Cronson, producer of the
"Works and Process" series, to introduce brief cast readings of monologue
portions of Homebody/ K.abu!s script. As the actors read, they sat in street
clothes at music stands holding the script pages. Linda Emond's delivery
as the Homebody was somber, slowly paced, and thoughtful, tinged with
sadness. In this performance she delivered none of the effervescent, lilting
liveliness that she embodied by the time the show opened in December.
Likewise, while the audience chuckled at the more obvious laugh lines
(the Hombeody's goofy translation of a Farsi saying, for example, into
1 Tony Kushner, Homebotfy/Kabui(New York: TCG, 2004), 13.
2 George W Bush, "Address to the Nation" (United States Capitol,
Washington, D.C., 20 September 2001, Televised), Presidentia!Rhetoric.com, 27 January
2009.
3 Tony Kushner, Jim Nicola, Mary Sharp Cronson, and cast of Homebotfy/
Kabul, "Works and Process at the Guggenheim" (New York City, 28 & 29 October,
2001, DVD, Billy Rose Performing Arts Collection). This (filmed) series has since been
digitized by the CUNY Graduate Center and donated to the New York Public Library's
Performing Arts archive, where I viewed it.
24 J\.1ANNIS
"the man who has patience, has roses, the man who has no patience, has
no trousers"
4
), the silence at other times weighed heavily in the room.
For instance, when the Homebody begins musing on Kabul, Afghanistan,
she calls it "a city which, as we all know, has undergone change." ''As we
all know" was pointed, at the Guggenheim; Emond, teary eyed, took in
the New York audience in a long glance as she said these words with a
shaky voice. Similarly, in another passage the Homebody muses about the
ways in which she thinks history must recede to a certain point before
human beings can or are willing to comprehend or make meaning of it:
[W]e shudder to recall the times through which we have
lived, the Recent Past, about which no one wants to think;
and then, have you noticed? Even the most notorious
decade three or four decades later is illuminated from
within.. . . I who am optimistic, have you noticed?
attribute this inner illumination to understanding. It is
wisdom's hand which switches on the light within. Ah,
now I see what that was all about. Ah, now, now I see
why we suffered so back then, now I see what we went
through, now I understand.
5
Her "now I understand," which Emond delivered with a sense of
significance, of reference back to the "Recent Past" of New Yorkers, landed
heavily in the room and was followed by a thick, ponderous silence. The
silence almost audibly resisted the "now I understand." The room seemed
stunned, not yet able to reach an understanding of what had recently
happened in their city and elsewhere in the country. In the "Works and
Progress" reading, the "Recent Past" alluded to by the Homebody became
not an abstract concept but the specter of what has since become known-
in shorthand-as 9/11. Similarly, the Homebody's discussion of Kabul,
Afghanistan, "a city which, as we all know, has undergone change," with
its long history of devastation, conjured New York City in the present day.
In other words, the reading at the Guggenheim was haunted by
9/11. I use haunting here not simply as a metaphor, but as what rhetoric
scholar Joshua Gunn calls an idiom, or an "orientation to criticism"
6
that
uses the tools of psychoanalytic theory to grapple with the ways in which
4 Kushner, 13.
5 Ibid., 11-12.
6 Joshua Gunn, "Review Essay: Mourning Humanism, or, the Idiom of
Haunting," Quarter!J Journal of Speech 92, no. 1 (2006): 77.
CAIN'S G RAVE, GROUND ZERO, AND " H ISTORY'S UNMARKED GRA\'E OF DISCARDED LIES" 25
the past ("Recent" or otherwise) intrudes unexpectedly on the present.
Those who write about haunting ("hauntology") agree that openness
to ghosts or hauntings creates the possibility of enlightenment through
recognition of our incomplete understanding of the world around us.
As Colin Davis argues, "Conversing with specters is not undertaken in
the expectation that they will reveal some secret, shameful or otherwise.
Rather, it may open us up to the experience of secrecy as such; an essential
unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think we know".
7
Haunting is psychological and phenomenological-it exists to challenge
our awareness. This is at least some part of what Derrida refers to when
he says that "one must reckon with" spirits.
8
In other words, ghosts are
rem[a]inders of the past that we have not fully dealt with. Ghosts are also
"the other," or even what Lacanians might call "the other inside." Ghosts
attempt to tell us things that we may know without knowing--or wanting
to acknowledge-that we know. Ghosts are not merely traces of memory
left behind; they are fleeting, fragmentary revenants, manifestations of
lived experiences and complex perceptions pushed below the surface but
refusing to remain submerged. These revenants can be sinister, dangerous,
even, at times, deadly. Yet if we speak of them and Jearn to live with them,
as Derrida urges, they can provide insight into the past and glimpses of
more ethical ways of being in the world and relating to others.
"Everything since the 11th of September," Kushner said at the
Guggenheim, "has become so urgent, and so frightening, and so exigent."
His description reflected the general structure of feeling at the time-a
natural immediate response to the trauma of a terror attack on the scale of
9 I 11. For a United States shaken by 9 I 11, surely part of that "frightening"
quality was not merely the rawness of just having been attacked, but also
the sense of dangerous revenants raised by the attacks and lingering just
outside our collective consciousness. The smoldering pile of rubble at
Ground Zero was, effectively, simultaneously a grave and what Pierre
Nora terms a lieu de memoire.
9
It raised ghosts that were more than the
spirits of the lives cut short on 9111.
7 Colin Davis, "Et at Present: Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms," French
Studies LIX, no. 3 (2005): 377.
8 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
& the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), xx.
9 Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Ueux de Mimoire,"
&presentations Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26 (1989): 7-24.
26 MANNIS
"Murder's Grave. Would you eat a potato plucked from that
soil?mo
In Homebot!y/Kabu!s third act, as it was performed at the New
York Theatre Workshop in December 2001, a young English woman's
search for her mother, who has disappeared into Kabul (either dead
or in hiding from her family) lands her at the alleged burial site of the
Biblical Cain. The Sufi hermit tending the grave relays the legend of Cain's
relationship to Kabul, which the Moghul Emperor Babur claimed was
founded by the ancient figure: "Everywhere he tried to rest, they drove
him away. Only Kabul did not .... And this has always been a hospitable
city. But it was a great mistake. Burying him here. They should have driven
him away."
11
In other words, Kabul, asserts the guide, was undone by its
stance of hospitality toward the other. On the other hand, it seems that
ancient Afghans thought that driving Cain out of Kabul would have been
not only inhospitable but unjust. Cain had not, after all, threatened them
directly, though he was "marked." Jacques Derrida insists, in Specters of
Marx, that justice is made possible only by taking a position of hospitality.
Such a stance, while just, Derrida notes elsewhere, holds no guarantee of
safety-and this is born out in Kushner's vision of the legendary Grave
of Cain.
Located in Cheshme Khedre-once a beautiful area of Kabul,
now a ruin littered with undetonated landmines-Cain's Grave ("Murder's
Grave," as the Homebody has earlier called it) , serves two purposes in this
play: First, it works as a metaphorical reminder of the potential danger
of a stance of hospitality toward the other. More importantly, it provides
a portal to too-readily-repressed pasts- Afghanistan's, humankind's, the
United States'-that still haunt the present and influence the future, thus,
intimating the importance of hospitality even, and perhaps especially,
in the face of perceived threat from the other. Cain's Grave becomes a
phantasmagorical site of mourning that makes room for what David Eng
and David Kazanjian call "an active and open relationship to history," one
that "induce[s] actively a tension between the past and the present, between
the dead and the living."
12
The New York production, timed as it was,
10 Kushner, 22; New York Theatre Workshop, " Homebody/Kabul" (Filmed
Performance using Typescript, Seventh Draft, Billy Rose Performing Arts Collection, 15
December 2001). All descriptions and quotations specifically from rhe performed version
of the play come from rhis film and script. Quotations that remained unchanged in rhe
published version of the play come from that version, for ease of reference.
11 New York Theatre Workshop, III.3.102.
12 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, "Introduction: Mourning Remains,"
CAIN'S GRAVE, GROUND ZERO, AND "HISTORY'S UNMARKED GRAVE OF DISCARDED L IEs" 27
effectively layered Cain's Grave atop Ground Zero, invoking just the kind
of tension Eng and Kazanjian call for. Similarly, Walter Benjamin insists
that in order to speak productively of and with the spirits of history, we
must listen for more than the tales of the victors-and there are no tales of
victors here. Instead, Kushner's play potentially provided audiences with
the means to "allow lost pasts to step into the light of a present moment of
danger."
13
The ghosts conjured by Homebody/Kabul simultaneously speak
of lost pasts and shed light on the contemporary loss of the "Recent Past"
haunting the production: 9/ 11. Considering the WTC site alongside the
Grave of Cain as imagined by Kushner in Homebody/Kabul, I will explore
the way in which Kushner's play facilitates an important haunting as New
York's Ground Zero and Kabul's Grave of Cain become layered, two lieux
de memoire acting as points of connection among peoples and cultures. In
effect, The Grave of Cain scene powerfully subverts the us-against-them
rhetoric of the Bush administration following the attacks of 11 September
2001 and offers audiences an alternative route to mourning-and to
engaging with the other by listening to the specters of the past.
Hospitality, or Justice? 20 September 2001: " ... in our grief and in
our anger we have found our mission and our moment."
14
Just nine days after 9/11, Bush had already given a flurry of
nationally broadcast speeches: initial remarks from Florida, remarks from
Barksdale Air Force Base, and an address to the nation from the Oval
office on the day and evening of the attacks; an address from the Cabinet
room on the 12th; a memo establishing a National Day of Prayer and
Remembrance; his iconic "bullhorn address" to the workers at Ground
Zero; and an address at the national prayer and mourning service on
the 14th. The speech on 20 September 2001, was to be his third full-
fledged national address and, as rhetorician John M. Murphy convincingly
argues, the Bush administration's chance to draft "the version of history
that they wanted people to know." In other words, it was the most savvy
way for Bush to affectively prepare Americans to accept (even cheer) the
possibility of going to war in order to honor the dead and protect the
living while screening out reasonable ethical objections to such action.
The address began with and leveraged national mourning, using
it as a frame within which to begin to create a will to war: "Our grief has
13 Eng and Kazanjian, 6.
14 Bush, "Address to the Nation." All quotations from this section, unless
otherwise noted, come from this address.
28 MANNIS
turned to anger, and anger to resolution." The grieving nation that Bush's
arguably exceptionalist and ahistorical narrative depicted was an innocent
body attacked for no reason other than its commitment to freedom and
democracy: "All of this was brought upon us in a single day - and night
fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack."
In other words, Bush's speech framed the U.S. as a nation led to disaster
by hospitality to the other. And hospitality would have no role to play
in seeking justice. In one sentence, Bush wiped out the United States'
entire history with the rest of the world in general, and the Middle East
(particularly Afghanistan) specifically. He moved quickly to talk of war, "a
lengthy campaign, unlike any way have ever seen," one that will "maybe
include dramatic strikes, visible on Tv, and covert operations, secret even
in success." Americans need not scrutinize the U.S.'s global relationships,
just trust that justice would be defined for them and enacted on their
behalf. After calling the military to "be ready" and exhorting "the civilized
world" to "rally to America's side," he ended the address with a return to
mourning, invoking the dead in the service of his war plan. He held up the
badge of a dead police officer and proffered it as his "reminder of lives
that ended, and a task that does not end." With the gesture of invoking the
dead and the wounded as well as the righteousness of the United States
("My fellow citizens, we'll meet violence with patient justice"-again
glossing over the specter of U.S. violence past and violence to come), Bush
deftly disguised the fact that he had just begun laying the groundwork
for war in earnest, cloaking the violent response he had planned in the
notion of "patient justice." While Bush's rhetoric resists a true stance of
hospitality toward the other, Kushner's play encourages and models it.
The Play
Although written in 1998, Homebotfy/ Kabul made its United States
debut in late December 2001. Twenty blocks from Ground Zero, at the
New York Theatre Workshop, Homebotfy/Kabul opened on 20 December
and extended its run several times. The company began rehearsals
in mid-October. In its 2001 iteration, the play was a nearly four-hour
production. It broke recognizably into three main parts, although the act
divisions didn't (and don't, in the published revised version) line up with
these parts: the Homebody's monologue, set in London in 1998 (running
about an hour); the search for the Homebody in Kabul, Afghanistan,
shortly thereafter (over three hours); and a "periplum," back in London
(approximately fifteen minutes). There is not an American in sight in this
play, but through its associations with England (after all, has
CAIN'S GRAVE, GROUND ZERO, AND "HISTORY'S UNMARKED GRAVE OF DISCARDED LIES" 29
no truer friend than Great Britian" (Bush), the United States is a ghost
character, hovering always in the background. Whether it's through the
Homebody's references to the Khosti
5
bombings ordered by President
Bill Clinton in 1998, Priscilla's being repeatedly mistaken for an American
by angry mullah, or the vitriolic warning of the highly educated Afghan
woman that the Tali ban would be "coming to New York," the United States'
complicity in the historical quagmire that is Afghanistan-from however
far a distance-never goes unrecognized for long. More importantly, the
fact that the Western characters are British, rather than American, allows
the audience a bit of critical distance that they might not otherwise have.
The plot of the play is this: The Homebody, an at first unnamed
middle class London housewife, details her simultaneous alienation
from and love of "the world" through the lens of her recent fascination
with Afghanistan, about which she learns from a thirty-three-year-old
guidebook to the country. Her rambling monologue (hailed by many critics
as virtuosic, both in its writing and in Emond's performance) leaps nimbly
from ruminations on the string of invasions besetting Afghanistan from
its beginnings to her dysfunctional marriage to her observation that "the
touch which does not understand that which it touches is the touch which
corrupts"
16
to the impossibility of knowing history to the irrevocable
way in which one can be moved by "an encounter with the beautiful and
strange."I
7
("See? ... Kabul has changed me. I've listened," Priscilla will
say

Then she leaves the stage and disappears, the audience quickly
learns, into Kabul. The monologue, then, models hospitality to the other.
The largest portion of the action takes place in Kabul, where
the Homebody's husband and daughter, Milton and Priscilla Ceiling,
seek either her or her body.
19
They are told in the second scene that the
15 In December 2010, a suicide bomber attacked a U.S. base in Khost, killing
six and critically injuring more, yet another haunting reminding us that Afghanistan
remains a contested and volatile countty.
16 Kushner, 28.
17 Ibid., 30
18 New York Theatte Workshop, III.3.112.
19 We learn that the Homebody's (married) surname is Ceiling, but her
first name is never revealed. She is thus in some ways utterly familiar while remaining
unmarked in other, significant, ways. Most western audiences likely recognize the
generic figure of the "homebody," yet this character's having no first name emphasizes
the ways in which she is invisible, both in the western world (theoretically "unmarked"
as both white and female) and in Kabul Oiterally). It is perhaps partly because of this
partial invisibility that she can easily represent the western perspective in one sense
and still become the radical other in another. This in itself is a topic worthy of further
exploration elsewhere.
30
MANNIS
Homebody has been brutally killed, literally torn apart by a group of
young men who found her impertinently wandering the streets of Kabul
sans burka and listening to a Walkman. However, her body is nowhere to
be found, which leads Priscilla to believe that she is still alive. (Neither the
Ceilings nor the audience ever learn the truth.)
Priscilla hires a mahram, or guide (an acceptable escort for women,
who are forbidden by Taliban law from walking the streets alone), to lead
her through Kabul. This guide, Khwaja, puts her in touch with someone
claiming that her mother has married a Muslim man in Kabul whose
wife-for whom he has no more use and who he claims is crazy-needs
passage to London. In short, Priscilla is asked to trade her mother for
this woman (the highly educated Mahala). Priscilla encounters a variety
of Afghans as she searches for her mother, from a Pashtun doctor, to
a group of women anxious to avoid her once she pulls off her burka,
to her mahram (a Tajik poet who intervenes with the Talibani religious
officer who finds her smoking a cigarette with her burka in her lap), to the
overwrought Mahala (who claims she is forgetting the alphabet as a result
of long oppression by the Taliban), to Tali ban ministers, to Border guards.
Meanwhile, Milton never leaves the hotel room. There he is kept
company by a British aid worker who introduces him to the joys of opium,
regales him with tales of Afghanistan's troubled politics, and becomes
clumsily obsessed with Priscilla. Eventually Mahala is granted passage
to London (after a terrifying detention at the border caused by Taliban
suspicion that Priscilla is carrying coded missives to insurgents in England),
and the play ends with Mahala literally occupying the Homebody's space
and reflecting on the differences between Afghanistan and the West and
on the comforts of "certainty," even when that certainty is oppressive.
20
The series of events is at times shocking, bewildering, and
overwhelming. The various characters speak six different languages (seven,
if you count the language of science): Pashtu, Dari, Esperanto, French,
English, and Arabic. The performance provides no translation, with the
small exception of a few scenes in which Priscilla's mahram translates for
her; however, even those are incomplete translations, and clearly so. Thus,
not only are audiences disoriented by the dizzying shifts in locale, action,
and time, the vast majority are likely literally not understanding a sizeable
20 This resigned allowance of certainty's comfort must also have resonated
with New York audiences, who by the opening of the play had been exposed to a
barrage of rhetoric of certainty and righteousness from the Bush administration, not
to mention the mainstream new media's fairly unchallenging acceptance of his rhetoric.
Indeed, Bush's immediate boost in approval ratings was credited by scholars to his ability
to provide a cohesive narrative of events that framed the U.S. as an innocent victim of
jealous, diabolical rage- a victim who must now seek retribution.
CAIN'S GRAVE, GROUND ZERO, AND "HISTORY'S UNMARKED GRAVE OP DISCARDED LIES" 31
amount of the dialogue. No longer the center of the universe by any
stretch of the imagination, any solely English-speaking audience is forced
to work to find moments in which they can establish points of contact
with the characters, plot, and themes of the play. (In short, they can seek
points of contact with the other; they can listen to the ghosts.) Or, they
can sit in near complete confusion, no doubt an instructive and alien
experience in itself.
New York City, 2001: Ground Zero, Lieu de Memoire
On 11 September, a photographer for New Jersey's Bergen County
Record snapped a photo of firefighters raising the U.S. flag atop the rubble
at the site of the Twin Towers. Appearing on 12 September, the image
became instantly famous for its uncanny resemblance to the iconic
photograph of soldiers raising the American flag at Iwo Jima, and within
twenty-four hours of the initial crashes, people began referring to the
WTC site as "Ground Zero," evoking the devastation of the sites of the
nuclear bombs the United States deployed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
21
Ground Zero became a site of mourning, spoken of almost
immediately as a mass grave. The portion of the financial district
surrounding what became known as "the pile" and then "the hole" as
rescue efforts turned to recovery efforts took on an eerie, reverent silence
even at the height of the business day. Viewing platforms for half-hour
vigils were erected in December, drawing over 5,000 people per day.
22
By the
end of that month, thousands of people had made pilgrimages to Ground
Zero-and would continue to do so for years-for an endless variety
of reasons, not the least among them being to witness the devastation
first-hand, to seal the material/ corporal aftermath of the attacks in their
memories, to mourn the loss of life. The area grew layered with missing
flyers posted on the fence around the site, posters admonishing "Never
Forget!" and impromptu memorials and shrines.
As Richard Stamelman argues in "September 11: Between
Memory and History," ground zero became a lieu de memoire: a site of
memory.
23
Stamelman also draws on Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy
21 It's worth noting here that when the term "Ground Zero" was introduced,
most people using the term managed to avoid explicitly recognizing that it was the
United States who willingly created the devastation in Japan. I will return to this
association later.
22 Judith Greenberg, "Wounded New York," Trauma at Home: After 9/11, ed.
Judith Greenberg (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 200.
23 Richard Stamelman, "Between Memory and History," Trauma at Home: After
9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 11-20.
32 MANNIS
of History" (a work that also inspires Kushner), arguing for Ground Zero
as both a lieu de memoire and a material representation of the "ash heap
of history."
24
He also points to the haunted quality of Ground Zero as
a function of both history and memory. It's worth quoting him at length
here:
In using "ground zero" to refer to the [site of] the
attack on the World Trade Center we call to mind, either
consciously or unconsciously, those wastelands of total
ruination that newsreels and photographs of Hiroshima
(and Nagasaki, three days later) have embedded in our
visual memories .... The image of the earlier disaster lies
behind the later event like a ghostly, tragic presence. It
is the phantom image behind the image, the invisible
writing behind the writing, the dark shadow moving at
the bottom of the well of the present.
25
The recalled association with Hiroshima and Nagasaki is what Freud would
call the return of the repressed- a memory that many would probably
prefer remained shrouded. Although the horrible memory is inevitably
recalled by the term "Ground Zero," it is rarely acknowledged; it remains
spectral. Instead, the term is remade in new images, though it cannot
completely veil its earlier associations.
Using the term "Ground Zero" partly served to inspire sympathy
in the world community by metaphorically linking New Yorkers' horror
to the suffering of scores of Japanese people and property decimated by
atomic bombs, to emphasize the catastrophe that had stricken unsuspecting
New Yorkers (and by extension, Americans at large). The WTC site became
"a document that has been inscribed several times, where the remnants of
earlier, imperfectly erased scripting is still detectable."
26
At the same time,
however, that association brought with it the fact-however studiously its
recollection was repressed in the media and in Bush's rhetoric- that the
United States created and deployed the very bombs that caused the terror
of the Japanese victims with whom Americans were now aligned by the
appropriation of the term "Ground Zero."
The status of hallowed ground conferred on the WTC site
should not erase the history of similar violence the U.S. has reaped on
24 Ibid., 12.
25 Ibid., 13-14.
26 Avery Gordon, Ghost!J Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 146.
CAJN'S GRAvE, GROUND ZERO, AND " HISTORY's UNMARKED GRAVE oF DISCARDED LIEs" 33
other countries. The site is haunted, not only by those who died there, but
also by the history that the label "Ground Zero" conjures. In order to
create the space for productive mourning and a just response to the 9/ 11
attacks, the ghosts raised by the site-ghosts of multiple nationalities-
must be recognized and reckoned with. This requires more than simply
acknowledging the facts and the linear course of history. In Ghost!J Matters,
Gordon explains the difference between history and haunting as animated
by the difference between the political or systemic and the personal,
without negating the intimate interconnection of the two realms. For
her, haunting eschews the idea of simple cause-and-effect relationships
in favor of recognizing that one "cannot close the breach between two
interrelated but distinct affairs."
27
She argues instead that "haunting, rather
than ' history' (or historicism) best captures the constellation of connections
that charges any ' time of the now' with the debts of the past and the
expense of the present."
28
For instance, the specters of Japanese victims
of the atomic bomb mingle with, rather than devalue, the ghosts of the
WTC dead. That is, Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't cause the 9/11 attacks
directly, but the systemic practices that led to U.S. aggression against Japan
are not unrelated to those that led to the terrorist attacks on the U.S.
They call each other to mind, rather than establishing direct causal links.
The WTC dead are no less worthy of mourning than those killed by the
atomic bomb, and at the same time, the creation of a New York "Ground
Zero" calls for a reconsideration of the U.S.'s place in world affairs,
both historically and contemporaneously. It necessitates recognizing the
ghosts. The rubble of the WTC entombs both the dead of 2001 and the
systemic factors that led to the U.S. bombing Japan during WWII.
29
It
also raises the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, the WTC and its
nomenclature, as Ground Zero "re-members" Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
pulling two moments in history side-by-side, enabling-for those who
will acknowledge those specters-a reconsideration of international
relationships, of the U.S.'s place in the world.
While Stamelman convincingly argues for the WTC site as a lieu de
memoire, one step he does not take is considering how Ground Zero might
27 Gordon, 142.
28 Ibid., my emphasis.
29 Importantly, among the dead entombed at the WTC site are the terrorists
who hijacked the planes. What of their deaths? Are they, as Judith Butler queries in
Precarious Lift, "grievable?" Oudith Butler, Precarious Lift: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence (London: Verso, 2004).) If not, what about those who dropped the atomic
bombs on Japan? And more importantly, if the terrorists are not "grievable," does the
presence of their remains interfere with mourning? Do we risk not learning from what
their ghosts may have to reveal?
34 MANNIS
provide avenues for connecting not only with that difficult space "between
memory and history" but also with the other. The end of his article (with
its references back to Benjamin and Nora) does, however, create space for
this possibility. The lieu de memoire, Stamelman notes, "torn from its past
and set adrift in the direction of an unknown future, is ready to be filled
with whatever meaning or ideology or image the present decides to assign
it."
30
That is, it is agile, capacious, capable of engendering hospitality
toward the other. This could happen in the mode of recognizing the past
and, as Judith Butler suggests, "agreeing to undergo a transformation ...
the full result of which one cannot know in advance."
31
Homebody/Kabul: Lieux de Memoire revealing how ''we effect each
other, one might even say afflict each other in baleful ways"
32
In Frieda Mock's 2009 documentary about Tony Kushner,
Wrestling with Angels, Kushner speaks about the kind of attitude Homeboqy/
Kabul promotes, asserting that we "need to surrender a certain degree
of arrogant assumption in order to understand something genuinely
other." This idea resonates both with Derrida's injunction for a stance of
hospitality toward the other. When Homeboc!J/ Kabul made its U.S. debut
in December 2001, Kushner referred to the play as an act of grieving,
rather than an "angry" piece (Marks 20).
33
Rehearsals were meant to
begin in mid-September 2001, but after the terror attacks on the eleventh,
they were postponed until mid-October. However, when rehearsals did
start, what the production team did differed wildly from the norm in
that moment. Other stage and film productions implemented changes
for the sake of perceived propriety or sensitivity towards a presumably
fragile audience. This is evident, for instance, in the postponed revival of
Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, and there are well-documented deletions
of reminiscent of or referencing terror attacks in films.
34
However,
30 Stamelman, 18.
31 Judith Butler, Precarious Ufe: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York:
Verso, 2004), 21.
32 This is a line from the Homebody's monologue, one among those which
Linda Emond read at the ''Works and Process" appearance in October of 2001.
33 Peter Marks, "For Tony Kushner, An Eerily Prescient Return," New York
Times (New York, NY), 25 November 2001.
34 For a detailed account specific to changes in the theater world, see Marvin
Carlson, "9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq: The Response of the New York Theatre," Theatre
Survry 45, no. 1 (May 2004): 3-17.
CAIN'S GRAVE, GROUND ZERO, AND " HISTORY'S UNMARKED GRAVE OF DISCARDED LIES" 35
Homeboc!J/Kabul included no changes other than those Kushner and the
production team strictly deemed dramaturgically necessary. This got
people's attention. Six articles about Kushner's new play appeared prior
to the attacks. More than seventy pieces were written about the New York
production after 9/11.
35
Whereas before the attacks, critics were primarily
concerned with how Homeboc!J/Kabul would stack up as a long-awaited
follow-up to Kushner's nearly universally lauded A ngels in America, focus
after the eleventh turned to questions of the play's politics regarding the
Middle East.
36
The unspoken issue lingering amongst the various pieces
covering Homeboc!J/Kabul queried the limits of hospitality to the other,
which was revealed in the often-repeated concern that the play would
seem sympathetic to the "enemy." On the other hand, Jill Bennett argues
for the need for "interrogation of the imagined political boundaries of
victim communities and of their exclusionary effects."
37
Rather than
clinging to the idea of "national trauma" and embracing the notion of U.S.
exceptionalism, Bennett's argument suggests, we should use the occasion
of 9/ 11 and the global empathies and sufferings the attacks occasioned to
adopt stances of hospitality to people and nations otherwise relegated to
the identity of "other." Kushner's play-and the fact of its production-
embodied the ethos of Bennett's argument. Kushner said that he "was
very proud that, given that we were attacking Afghanistan at the time,
you could go to this little theater on East 4th St. and actually listen to
people talking in Pashtun and Dari."
38
However, a mere three months
after the attacks, anxiety abounded about how Kushner's representation
of Afghanistan would affect audiences.
Some in the cast and production team even feared, as many
journalists implied, that the play might seem sympathetic to the Taliban,
who are represented, like virtually every character in a Kushner play, as
complex human beings rather than strictly "black hat" melodramatic
villains. Talking about the Taliban in Wrestling with Angels, Kushner provides
a characteristically nuanced description: ''The Taliban were ghastly,
35 Jacob Juntunen, "Repairing Reality: The Media and Hontebody/ Kabul in New
York, 2001," To'!Y Kushner: New Essqys on the Art and Politics of the P!qys, ed. James Fisher
(New York: MacFarland & Company, 2006), 172-189.
36 Ibid., "Repariring Reality."
37 Jill Bennett, "The Limits of Empathy and the Global Poli tics of
Belonging," Traunta at Honte: After 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg, (Lincoln, NE: University
of Nebraska Press, 2003), 133.
38 Wrestling with Angels: Plf!Ywright To'!Y Kushner, directed by Frieda Mock. (2009;
American Film Foundation), DVD.
36 MANNIS
theocratic thugs. They believed in a state run by God. But on the other
hand, they also saved Afghanistan. They appeared in 199 5 and pacified
80% of the country."
39
Several people questioned Kushner directly about
whether he would make any changes to the play in light of the recent
terror attacks, and many simply mused on whether he should. As New York
Times writer Peter Marks relays in November 2001:
The parallels to current events ... were so uncanny that
after the terrorist attacks, some cast members thought Mr.
Kushner should cut several lines, for fear that audiences
would think he was taking advantage of the tragedy. At
one point, for instance, an Afghan character, an educated
woman who suffers greatly under the Taliban, complains
bitterly about how the United States bears responsibility
for bringing the ruthless regime to power. ''Well don't
worry," she observes, "They're coming to New York!"
40
Kushner tells Marks that when he originally wrote the play, this line was a
"grim laugh line," but that obviously it read completely differently in the
context of immediate post-9 / 11 New York City.
41
Still, he didn't change
it, and he has stood by that decision. As he writes in his Afterword to the
revised published version of the play, he never "changed anything in the
play to make it more or less relevant to current events."
42
Instead, he chose
to let the performance speak to history-and contemporary events-
uncensored. This in itself is already a stance of hospitality to the other.
Rather than shying away from the potential cognitive and
emotional dissonance some of the play's dramaturgy might evoke, he
trusted the audience to engage with the ghosts raised by Homeboc!J/Kabu/
on their own terms. Gordon insists on the importance of honoring the
right of everyone to what she calls "complex personhood" in order to truly
confront the "barbaric domination that characterizes our modernity."
43
For Gordon, complex personhood "means that even those called 'Other'
are never never [sic] that .... Complex personhood means that even those
who haunt our dominant institutions and their systems of value are
haunted too by things they sometimes have names for and sometimes do
39 Wrestling IIJith Angels.
40 Marks, 20.
41 Ibid., 20.
42 Kushner, 142.
43 Gordon, 4.
CAIN'S GRAVE, GROUND ZERO, AND "HISTORY'S UNMARKED GRAVE OF DISCARDED LIES" 37
not."
44
I submit that Kushner, in creating what he calls a non-polemic play
in which he imagines-and, I argue, helps audiences to imagine-"fully,
convincingly, what other people might be feeling,"
45
honors the idea of
complex personhood and implicitly asks audiences to do the same. In
other words, he adopts the ultimate stance of hospitality to the other.
Instead of reifying popular black-and-white melodramatic
distinctions of good versus evil proffered by Bush regarding the fallout
of the attacks ("the civilized world is rallying to America's side," as though
anyone not fully supportive of the U.S. is by definition uncivilized
46
) ,
Kushner's play calls into question the very definition of concepts
like "the civilized world," "hostile regime," or "evil and destruction."
Kushner's epic hauntological drama gives voice to multiple perspectives-
and six different languages. He removes the United States from what
Bush's rhetoric presumes as its place at the center of the universe and
urges empathetic listening, careful observation rather than indignant
exceptionalism. While Bush asserts that terrorism is "a threat to our way
of life," Kushner presents a world that doesn't exist to serve or validate
the United States. He asks, in short, that audiences try to "understand
something genuinely other."
47
Cain's Grave: "History's unmarked grave of discarded lies?"
Cain's Grave, an image evoked at Homeboc!J/ K.abu!s beginning and
end, serves as an emblem of loss reaching far beyond the legendary Cain's
literal loss of family, homeland, and life. In Kushner's play, Cain allegedly
lies at the heart of a destroyed city across the globe, and in the city in
which the U.S. premiere was staged, thousands presumed lost or perished
on 11 September laid buried in the still-smoking remnants of the Twin
Towers.
The Homebody's first mention of Cain's Grave couples Kabul
with New York City and the span of history with current events. She
initially describes it as "Murder's Grave" and bemusedly asks the audience
if they'd "eat a potato plucked from that soil."
48
Her metaphor implies that
44 Ibid.
45 Kushner, et al., "Works and Process."
46 Bush, ~ d d r e s s to the Nation."
47 Wrestling with Angels.
48 Kushner, 22 (emphasis in orig.). Notably, the audience is dead silent as
the Homebody speaks of Cain's grave, and as she utters, "Murder's Grave." They do,
however, laugh readily when she asks if they would "eat a potato plucked from that
soil." There's significance in both the breathless silence and the quick laughter. It's as if
38 MANNIS
the site must be poisoned, unhealthy, unnatural. (fhe WTC site, of course,
was literally poisonous, documented illnesses caused by the ash and smoke
rising daily at the time of the performance.) Yet she finds in the idea of
Cain's Grave a point of fascination. She recites/reads its alleged location:
area of Kabul ("the gardens south of Bala-Hissar") and specific cemetery
("Shohada-I-Salehin").
49
She wonders at that for a moment-"! should
like to see that."
50
"What is this insistent hunger to see the evidence of
loss-images of flaming buildings, ash-covered people fleeing for their
lives, the blasted ruins, the faces of grief? Memento mori-'remember the
death."'
51
The Homebody's urge to see the site of Cain's Grave mirrors the
documented urge of thousands to see the WTC site. The nomenclature
"Murder's Grave" evokes violence, destruction, and mourning all in one.
The essential "remains" implied by the grave are not simply those of Cain
himself, but "remains of lost histories as well as histories of loss."
52
Cain's
grave and Ground Zero are woven together by the [Homebody's] desire
to see, by their history of destruction, by their associations with significant
loss seeded deeper than the literal remains buried there.
The Homebody moves on to other notable tidbits about Kabul's
past, though she pauses before she does so, emphasizing with her silence the
weight of that specific piece of history-particularly in a city "substantial
portions of which are now great heaps of rubble."
53
Describing the
site of "the Pit" at the ceremony marking the day that Ground Zero
became a construction site, Dan Barry says attendees " found themselves
in a landscape of nightmare, with jagged stumps marking where mighty
buildings once stood."
54
In the midst of her often fleet of tongue speech
patterns, the Homebody slows down to linger thoughtfully at Cain's Grave.
As a lieu de memoire it connects the United States, through Ground Zero-a
strikingly similar lieu de memoire--to Afghanistan. Benjamin posits history
as a continuously growing pile of rubble at the feet of the Angel of
History, who gazes down at the pile and yet is blown incessantly toward
the silence indicates anxiety about the words "Murder's Grave," a hesitation to consider
the implications of the WTC site as "Murder's Grave." The laughter, then, releases that
tension, as if the Homebody's sardonic joke puts them at ease by reassuring them that
she won't pursue the dangerous metaphor of the grave.
49 Kushner, 21.
50 Ibid., 22.
51 Greenberg, 200.
52 Eng and Kazanjian, 1.
53 Kushner, 22.
54 Dan Barry, "Where Twin Towers Stood, A Silent Goodbye," New York Times
(New York, NY), 31 May 2002.
CAIN's GRAVE, G ROUND ZERO, AND " HISTORY's UNMARKED GRAVE oF DISCARDED Lms" 39
the future, to which his back is turned. Like Benjamin's Angel of History,
the Homebody gazes metaphorically at the ash heap of the past as her
audience is simultaneously drawn to the present (and uncertain future)
by the uncanny similarity between Cain's Grave and New York's Ground
Zero. The Homebody's pause creates a space for mourning and empathy
for the other (perhaps a first step towards hospitality) in the audience.
Poetically, the audience's tension is palpable in the stillness of the theater
space after the Homebody says wistfully, as though compelled by a force
she doesn't quite understand, "I should like to see that." Their grief seems
to align, in that pause, with Afghanistan's grief-as it will do even more
potently in the last half of the play.
The next time the image of Cain's Grave comes up is in the third
act, at which point it serves as a site of mourning for Priscilla; an Afghan
lieu de memoire becomes a personal lieu de memoire for Priscilla and raises the
specter of the U.S.'s smoldering Ground Zero. The stage is dark, awash
in navy shadows, seemingly lit only by moonlight, simulated from up left,
through a gap in a crumbling stone wall. The sky behind the wall (visible
through cracks) is punctuated by stars. The Marabout (a Sufi hermit) sits
on the ground downstage right, legs crossed, sewing by the light of a
single candle placed downstage center. Up center sit a bucket of water
and a cloth. Priscilla stumbles, in a dream state, into this representation
of Cheshme Khedre, to the spot her mother suspected held Cain's Grave,
and there at the graveside Priscilla struggles to speak of and with the
ghosts Kabul raises. Through Priscilla, the audience might speak of and
with the ghosts raised by the play, and potentially the ghosts of 9/ 11. The
Grave of Cain is now a material place, which Kushner describes in the
revised published edition of the play as ''An open place, mountains of
rubble. Terrible fighting took place here. There are signs posted warning
of the danger of undetonated mines."
55
As a material site, it evokes the
ethereal, both for Priscilla and for the audience. It calls forth, as Gordon
says a haunting does, "what is not seen, but is nonetheless powerfully real"
and calls "attention to what appears to be in the past, but is nonetheless
powerfully present."
56
The rubble, the signs of past violence and the
potential of violence on the brink of erupting ("danger of undetonated
mines"), and the make-shift shrine once again draw a line from the
Homebody's disappearance to Priscilla's quest, from Afghanistan's past
to the U.S.'s present. The site also serves another symbolic function. For
Priscilla, it signifies both what her mother sought and (possibly) where she
was killed. For the audience, it evokes a shared sense of catastrophe with
55 New York Theatre Workshop, III.3.111.
56 Gordon, 42.
40 MANNIS
Afghanistan. Finally, it serves a functional, ritual purpose-a place where
Priscilla accepts the loss of her mother through her homage to the grave,
and where the audience can mourn that, as Kushner says, "something
has definitely ended,"
57
and begin to examine what that "something" may
be-and what the next step should be.
Through Priscilla's recognition of, and reckoning with, her loss,
the audience gains purchase to (begin to) do the same. At the place that
she feels pulled her mother (away from her), her mother's recent past
and Afghanistan's long history collide, and Priscilla is moved. In their
introduction to Loss, Eng and David Kazanjian interpret Benjamin's
exhortation to historians be open to flashes of memory as a stance of
hospitality toward loss itself. They advise "allow[ing] lost pasts to step into
the light of a present moment of danger."
58
Priscilla enacts this openness
here, in the literally and metaphorically dangerous present moment. She is
perfectly aware that this is both the site where she seeks her mother ["My
mother is meeting me here."
5
1 and the site of her loss ["She was murdered
in Cheshme Khedre ...
6
~ , and yet she opens herself to an experience
radically different than that to which she is accustomed. When her mother
fails to appear, Priscilla notices the grave, at which point the Marabout
tells her the legend of Cain's time in Afghanistan:
He was marked. Everywhere he tried to rest, they drove
him away. Only Kabul did not. He was older than ten
thousand years old when he arrived, no danger to anyone,
an animal looking for a soft bed of leaves. And this has
always been a hospitable city. But it was a great mistake.
Burying him here. They should have driven him away.
61
The Marabout sadly bespeaks the peril of hospitality to the other,
particularly to an other "marked" as dangerous. And yet, even while he
says, "They should have driven [the marked other] away," he protects the
sanctity of the other's burial site. In fact, for the Marabout, Cain's grave
has become a reminder of not simply the potential danger of hospitality
to the other, but the potential consequences of hostility toward the other.
57 James Fisher, Understanding To'!)' Kushner (Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 2004), 71.
58 Eng and Kazanjian, 6.
59 New York Theatre Workshop, III.3.101.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., III.3.1 02.
CAIN'S GRAVE, GROUND ZERO, AND "HISTORY'S UNMARKED GRAVE OF DISCARDED LIES" 41
When Priscilla suggests, bitterly, that "Perhaps he's buried in Kabul
because he was murdered here,"
62
the Marabout says, "I have considered
this possibility. [Cain was marked] Not to reveal his shame, but as a
warning: He who murders the murderer will be punished sevenfold."
63
In other words, the Marabout ponders the possibility that devastation has
befallen Afghanistan as a result of their need to enact judgment [" ... we'll
meet violence with patient justice."
64
], if indeed they did murder Cain.
"Sevenfold, a thousandfold," he mutters, looking about the ruins, "does
this not seem to you . . . Excessive?"
65
It may be possible, the Mara bout thus
considers, that it was not hospitality that destroyed Afghanistan, but rather
that aggression did.
As the Grave of Cain layers itself on top of Ground Zero, the
U.S., like Afghanistan, is figured as potentially culpable for its own wound,
for wielding power that may not have been its own to wield.
66
Seen in
this way, the "justice" the U.S. according to the Bush Doctrine sought
is not real justice. There, the inhospitable act is the unjust act. At the
same time, there is no suggestion that the devastation is equal to the
transgression. As Butler says of the attacks on the U.S. in Precarious Lzje,
"[I]t is not " 'just punishment' for prior sins [but rather] ... an opportunity
for a reconsideration of the United States' hubris and the importance
of establishing more radically egalitarian international ties."
67
Uncannily,
Priscilla makes an unexpected shift in the direction Butler suggests: she
voices a desire to end the blame game. "Someone is responsible. Someone
is to blame," she says softly, "Though I suppose blame is, after so much
destruction ... beside the point."
68
This moment sits ponderously in the
theater, the audience perfectly still. The humming of the electronic
equipment in the room underlines the silence. It is as if, when Priscilla
acts with a ritualistic valence and a stance of hospitality to which she bas
been unaccustomed, the audience steels themselves to ponder doing the
62 Ibid., III.3.1 06.
63lbid., Ill.3.107.
64 Bush, "Address to the Nation."
65 New York Theatre Workshop, Ill.3.107.
66 The United States, of course, has a long and schizoid relationship to the
Middle East, particularly to Afghanistan. It first empowered the leftist leadership that,
among other things, liberated the women of Afghanistan in the seventies (in the name
of that empowerment). Then it supported (with armaments) the Taliban takeover in the
eighties, and then it overthrew the Tali ban again after 9/11.
67 Butler, 40.
68 New York Theatre Workshop, III.3.107.
42 MANNIS
same. As Priscilla mourns her mother's death, she simultaneously mourns
Afghanistan's long history of pain. Her pain, she suddenly and powerfully
realizes, is not the only pain and is far from the most important pain. She
models a way in which the audience might, through mourning their own
losses, align themselves with their global community more humanely than
Bush's rhetoric calls them to do.
In his notes from viewing the 2 December 2001, run-through at
the New York Theatre Workshop, Kushner emphasizes the importance
of the journey for Priscilla-the importance of her change: "This (the
Grave of Cain scene] is in a sense the end of the journey for her, in a
sense as simple as the transformation into someone capable of listening,
of curiosity .... She's still angry ... but there's a quality she has in this
scene of listening and responding."
69
In this explication is insisting on
the importance of hospitality, even in the midst of anger and of loss.
What he's advocating for in this scene is precisely the opposite of the
response to the attacks than called for by Bush's rhetoric. Rather than
listening to the specters raised at Ground Zero, Bush's rhetoric smacks of
self-importance and dismissal of the other, as we can see in his national
address on 20 September 2001, evoked at the beginning of this article:
'We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous
ideologies of the 20th Century. By sacrificing human life to serve their
radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they
follow in the path of facism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will
follow that path all the way to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of
discarded lies." Nowhere in this speech does Bush acknowledge the ghost
of U.S. historical relations with the Middle East, or the U.S.'s own "will to
power.'' Instead, he frames the other as the enemy, leaving seemingly no
room for uncertainty. He simply calls for more death, more war, and more
forgotten and ignored specters of the past.
Fisher argues that in Homeboc!y/ Kabul, "Contending that real and
fundamental change may in fact be possible [in moments when prevailing
circumstances unravel], Kushner posits recognition and acknowledgment
of the interconnectedness among diverse, seemingly incompatible
cultures.''
70
I would go a step further and submit that Homeboc!y/Kabu/s
creation of the grave of Cain as a lieu de memoire encourages post-9/11
American audiences to adopt a stance of hospitality to the other, even-
maybe particularly-when they fear what that hospitality might reveal. In
his Afterword (signed 11 April 2002) to the revised published edition of
69 Tony Kushner, Homebody/KabuiRehearsaJ. Notes to Declan Donnellan and
Eamonn Farrell, 28 October 2001.
70 Fisher, 71.
CAIN'S GRAVE, G ROUND ZERO, AND " HISTORY'S UNMARKED GRAVE OF D ISCARDED LIES" 43
Homeboc!J/ Kabul, Kushner expresses his wish that Americans do just that:
"We need to think about ourselves, our society-even about our enemies.
I have always believed that theater can be a useful part of our collective
and individual exarnining."
71
Homeboc!J/ Kabul enacts this belief through its
performance of mourning that seeks to acknowledge and welcome not
only the audience and its current circumstances but also the long train of
events that are connected to and implicated in this instance of mourning.
72
The lieux de memoire that the play pulls into conversation with one another-
Ground Zero and the Grave of Cain--open up a space for audiences to
listen to the ghosts of Afghan and American tragedies and imagine an
opportunity to mourn effectively, reflectively, and ethically. Now that the
ten year anniversary of the attacks has passed, the Ground Zero memorial
has opened, another administration has entered the Whitehouse, and the
U.S.-initiated war in Afghanistan continues, it seems an important moment
to think about what specters the Grave of Cain scene-as performed in
the New York Theatre Workshop production- might now raise, and what
insight those specters have to reveal.
71 Kushner, 143.
72 The scene at Cain's Grave in its full manifestation, unfortunately, has itself
been mostly abandoned in the revised published version of the play. What was arguably
the most important scene of Homebot!J/ Kabul has been rendered less powerful by irs
truncation, the moving and complicated hospitality to the other as performed in the New
York Theatre Workshop relegated to history itself, taking some of the bite out of what
was a powerful subversion of Bush's post-9/11 rhetoric. I take up this argument in full in
an article in progress.
44
:MANNIS
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DR.\MA AND THEATRE 24, NO.3 (FALL 2012)
DAVID DOUGLASS ON "MR. CRUGER'S WHARFF":
THE ENTERPRISING FAILURE OF THE NEW YORK
STAGE IN 1759
Peter A. Davis
I n the autumn of 1758, the reconstituted Hallam Company returned to
the British colonies of North America under the new leadership of David
Douglass. The company had abandoned the North American colonies in
1754, spending the next four years successfully ducking the press gangs and
negotiating the economic vicissitudes of a rapidly escalating international
conflict by way of an extended detour through the British West Indies.
But while in Jamaica, Lewis Hallam, the company's patriarch and founding
actor-manager, died suddenly leaving the company leaderless and shy one
leading man. Douglass, a local actor whose provenance remains lost to
history, took advantage of a chance to improve his lot and married the
newly widowed Mrs. Hallam. The arrangement was apparently satisfactory,
both domestically and professionally. Douglass soon found himself in
control of America's first truly professional company of players and was
now intent on resuming the company's interrupted tour through the cities
of the mid-Atlantic region.
1
The basic facts of this transition from Hallam to Douglass as well
as the outward specifics of the company's return to New York in 1758
are generally known among students of early American theatre. Most
published histories note the company's time in New York City and mention
their playhouse on Cruger's Wharf. A few even expand on the apparent
difficulty they had in securing appropriate permission to perform.
2
But no
one has yet examined this event in detail nor explained why they chose to
1 William Dunlap, History if the American Theatre (New York: Burt Franklin, 1963),
71; George C. D. Odell,AnnaLr if the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press,
1927), 1:75-79; Hugh F. Rankin, The Theater in Colonial America (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1965), 74-79; Richardson Wright, &vels in Jamaica, 1682-1838
(New York: Benjamin BJorn, 1969), 28-29. For an assessment of Douglass's background,
see Errol Hill, The jamaican Stage, 1655-1900: Profile if a CokJnial Theatre (Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 23-25.
2 See Rankin, 75; Odell, 75; Barnard Hewitt, Theatre U.SA.:1665 to 1957, (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 24-25; Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years if American Drama
and Theatre, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1982), 9-10; George 0. Seilhamer,
History if the American Theatre before the &volution (New York: Haskell House Publishers,
1969), 87-88; Arthur Hornblow, A History if the Theatre in America from the Beginnings to
the Present Time (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1919), 1: 114; American Theatre
Companies, 1749-1887, Weldon B. Durham, ed., (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 11.
46
DAVIS
make their return to the northern colonies when they did. Not only did this
sudden change of scenery require that the troupe abandon its presumably
comfortable life in the Caribbean, but confounding the situation was
a rapidly expanding military engagement (a provincial sideshow of
the Seven Years War commonly referred to in the United States as the
French and Indian War), which England had generously exported to its
American colonies by opening a front along New York's northwestern
boarder in an area now known as Canada. For some, the war presented as
much opportunity as hardship. And the potential opportunities of a war
economy may well have motivated Douglass and company to return to
New York in 17 58. But this apparently prudent choice might, in retrospect,
be more accurately characterized as risky, perhaps even reckless. It was
a decision that very nearly destroyed America's first professional theatre
company and altered not just the physical placement of playhouses in
New York City, but also the entire course of commercial entertainment in
the American colonies for years to come. What personal or professional
reasons may have led the Hallam-Douglass company to attempt such a
bold move at such an inopportune time may never be known. But the
larger circumstantial issues are most compelling and offer some clarity
into the historically murky view of how early colonial companies operated
and, more importantly, how they were received and perceived by their
audiences.
The Hallams, without Douglass, first appeared in New York
in 1752 during their initial tour of the New World. Despite scattered
opposition and the usual adverse conditions, they managed to make a
sufficiently good impression. But by the spring of 1753, after six months
and twenty-five performances, even New York had grown tiresome.
3
Following established trade routes and loosely arranged fair circuits, the
company moved on to Philadelphia and finally Charleston, where they
made the decision late in 1754 to leave for Jamaica.
4
Perhaps concerned
about the growing threat of war, the Hallams may have looked to the
Caribbean as a relatively safe haven. Indeed it was, at least for a time. The
war would soon move southward out of Canada and into the western
reaches of the mid-Atlantic colonies as the conflict spread to disrupt key
shipping lines and commercial trade routes. Almost nothing is known
3 Rankin, 79-80.
4 Detailed records of the establishment of early Eighteenth Century fairs in the
North American colonies are found in the papers of the Board of Trade, Public Record
Office, Kew, London. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: Urban Lift in Amenca, 1625
1742 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964), 195; Colonial Laws of the State of New York from
the Year 1664 to the Revolution, Charles Z. Lincoln, William H. Johnson, and A. Judd
Northrop, eds. (Albany, 1894), 1:296.
DAVID DOUGLASS ON "MR. CRUGER'S WHARFF'' 47
of the company's activities once they left South Carolina, but it is likely
they continued to perform sporadically in the British West Indies as well
as the Danish colonial capital at St. Croix. What is certain is that when
the troupe reemerged from the Caribbean, Douglass was in charge of
both the company and the widow Hallam. While much of the original
company had parted ways before leaving Jamaica, joining the couple on
their northern tour were Mrs. Hallam's sons, Adam and Lewis, Jr., and a
niece named Nancy. Although Adam and Nancy would have relatively
brief stage careers, Lewis, Jr., enjoyed a surprisingly durable and illustrious
career as a leading actor and manager in the new American nation until
his death in 1808. Douglass, who would eventually overcome his rather
inauspicious beginnings to become a respected Jamaican magistrate and
wealthy merchant later in life, took up the reigns of leadership with
confident gusto and a natural skill that was immediately apparent.
5
In
this renewed constitution, under Douglass's vigorous management, the
company returned to the northern colonies in the summer of 1758.
The company's first port of call, New York City, seemed a perfectly
reasonable choice at first glance, even by eighteenth-century standards. The
Hallam Company had enjoyed a profitable though limited stay five years
earlier. At the same time, New York was rapidly becoming an important
maritime hub, situated squarely in the center of the Atlantic commercial
world, only marginally affected by the conflict raging to the north and south,
while taking full advantage of the spoils of war.
6
Though not the largest
city in North America, New York had several advantages in addition to a
well-situated port. An expanding population base of over 18,000 residents
made the city second in size only to Philadelphia, and its reputation for
relative tolerance (plus its support of earlier theatrical endeavors) clearly
placed it above Boston, for instance, as a potential entertainment venue
following the war.
7
Owing to its Dutch beginnings, New York was by
far the most cosmopolitan city in the British colonial empire, with no
fewer than twenty-eight languages spoken by a multi-national and multi-
denominational population. Its long-standing commercial traditions
5 Wright, 28-29; Hill, 23-25.
6 Dunlap, 71; Odell, 1:75-79; Rankin, 74-79.
7 Between 1740 and 1760, Boston fell to number three behind Philadelphia
and New York as the most populous city in the North American colonies. At nearly
24,000 people, Philadelphia was among the largest cities in the entire British Empire by
the mid-eighteenth-century. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Lje in America, 1743-
1776 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964), 5; Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A
History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) , 180; Evarts B. Greene and Virginia
D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1932), 96-100.
48 DAVIS
allowed for greater tolerance of innovative enterprises than other colonial
communities. Equally important, its cosmopolitan nature meant a broader
cultural base that allowed for a diversity of marginal endeavors that might
not be as welcome in other, more ideologically-oriented colonial cities.
Douglass's decision to leave Jamaica at this particular moment
must have been fraught with uncertainty. If not driven by sheer bravado,
it was then a most courageous and farsighted move. By all outward
indications, certainly evident to a traveling company of literate and well-
connected performers, 1758 was not the most propitious time to leave the
sybaritic safety of the Caribbean for a northern colony deep in the middle
of a war. British military failures in 1757 along with a smallpox outbreak in
western New York must have posed significant discouragements to travel.
On the other hand, major changes in White Hall during the following
year that saw the arrival of William Pitt's administration may have given
new hope for a speedy victory to an exhausted British population and
convinced Douglass that passage out of the West I ndies was now safe.
More likely the reason was less about the location or success of the war,
than it was a simple matter of practicalities. There was more money to be
made by a company of actors in New York than just about anywhere else
in North America, even if it meant a dangerous passage north.
New York's rise as an economic center during the eighteenth-
century was an awkward one. The first half of the century was marked
by an erratic ascension as New York struggled through periods of boom
and bust.
8
Economic progress was regularly hindered by successive
governments prone to corruption and scandal, and just as often revived
by opportunistic and indelible mercantilism. This economic seesaw was in
full swing when King George's War came to an inconclusive end in 17 48.
The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle left Britain and France in a tenuous truce
and British North America in a financial slump. New York was especially
devastated. The energy that had propelled New York's economy through
the 1740s suddenly ceased. The end of the war saw an end to the sort of
military subsidies that tended to enhance colonial trade-specifically, the
provisioning the Royal troops. As a result, New York fell into a depression
beginning in 17 48. Money grew scarce, trade fell off, and business
slowed to a crawl. New York merchant, William Alexander, writing to his
colleagues, Henry and William Livingston in Antigua in 1750, worried that
"trade has been so bad in the West Indies, ... I have discouraged sending
8 For an excellent summary of economic conditions in colonial New York, see
Kammen, 161-190. For more detailed studies, see Philip White, The Beekmans of New York
in Politics and Commerce, 1647-1877 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1956) and
Bruce Wilkenfeld, The Social and Economic Structure of the Cz!J of New York, 1695-1796 (New
York: Arno Press, 1978).
DAviD DouGLASS ON "MR. CRUGER's WHARFF" 49
anything."
9
Two years later, the great colonial entrepreneur, Gerard B.
Beekman, observing the steady decline around him, complained to his
son that in New York "every branch of trade was stagnated."
10
It may
well have been the woefully economic times that drove the Hallams to
abandon their North American tour in 1754 and flee to healthier markets
in the West Indies. Unfortunately, their timing was just a bit off.
With the prospects of a renewed war with France in the mid-
1750s, the economy of New York revived as well. Though 1754 saw a
fifty percent reduction in the composite value of New York exports (an
annual decline that would continue through 1758), the next five years,
from 1755 to 1760, saw an astounding expansion that drove New York
to the heights of colonial wealth and economic power. The turnaround
is no great mystery. While exports fell from 50,000 in 1753 to less than
15,000 in 1758, the decline was due largely to the interference of the war
with trans-Atlantic shipping lanes, and not from want of raw material or
commercial productivity. This apparently depressing statistic alone has led
some historians to erroneously conclude that New York's economic woes
continued well into the 1760s. Hugh Rankin, writing in his seminal study,
The Theatre in Colonial America, makes this very assumption when he cites
the dismal export levels in 1758 and then determines that the "times were
not good in New York."
11
His assessment, of course, was both inaccurate
and shortsighted.
New York's financial picture was more nuanced. There was
unusual depth in the colony's economy and broad resilience not found in
other colonies. What turned the tide in New York's favor was the official
decision in 1756 to make the city the North American center for British
military distribution in the renewed and growing conflict with France -
admittedly, it was a mere formality since New York had been the de facto
center since the start of hostilities in 1754. But the official designation
arrived with the official declaration of war in June of 1756. The New
York merchants could not have been happier. Commenting on the rapidly
escalating war, Henry Cuyler expressed hope to his friend and business
partner, Dirk Vander Heyden, "that it may prove as fortunate to this place
as the Last War did."
12
As in the previous war, contracts from White Hall
9 Virginia D. Harrington, The New York Mmhant on the Eve of the '&volution (PhD
Dissertation, Columbia University, 1935), 290; William Alexander Letters I, fol. 1744-50,
New York Historical Society.
10 Gerard G. Beekman, Letter Book, New York Historical Society; Harrington,
290.
11 Rankin, 77.
12 Harrington, 291; Cuyler Letter Book, New York Historical Society
so D AVIS
to supply the Royal troops and sailors were given to prominent London
businesses with direct contacts in the New World. Fortunately, most
of these contacts were in New York. In addition to the Royal troops,
colonial regiments were being formed, and they, too, needed provisioning.
Not surprisingly, this was a responsibility that local merchants were only
too happy to fulfill. Most of the leading merchant families in New York
benefited from such contracts, but three in particular benefited the most-
Robinson, De Lancey and Cruger. An added perquisite that assured
financial reward and near monopolistic security in this new and highly
competitive game of regimental provisioning was the appointment of the
families' patriarchs- Beverly Robinson (wealthy land-owner, aligned with
the powerful Philipse family), Oliver De Lancey (brother to the Lieutenant
Governor of New York), and John Cruger (the newly appointed mayor of
the city)-to the powerful posts of "commissaries and paymasters of the
provincial forces."
13
In these posts the three major families could control
most of the military contracts in the city and establish a lucrative and
steady income stream for the duration of the war, however long it lasted.
By the summer of 1756 New York was back in business and
the rest of the colonies were demonstrably envious. The first contingent
of troops, a thousand strong, arrived in the city in the autumn of 1756.
While this may seem a relatively small number, it constituted an irrunediate
six percent increase in the city's population, which meant an equivalent
increase in all supporting businesses and services. Less than two years later
there were over 25,000 soldiers and 14,000 sailors residing and transporting
between Boston and New York. This represented, for all practical
purposes, a doubling of New York's population and the resulting effect on
the economy is patently clear. William Smith, the early nineteenth-century
historian of colonial New York, admitted that by 1760, "never was the
trade of this province in so flourishing a condition as at the end of the late
French war."
14
Even John Watts, brother-in-law to Oliver De Lancey and
himself a wealthy benefactor of the war, expressed concern that his fellow
New Yorkers "have run too much into habits of luxury . . .. The changes
and inconstancies of the war had allmost turned their Heads."
15
The presence of troops in the city meant an irrunediate rise in
profits for virtually every merchant and artisan. More significantly, it also
Collections, To Dirk Vander Heyden, 17 July 1756.
13 Harrington, 295.
14 William Smith, History of the Late Province of New York, New York Historical
Society Collections (1829), 1:284.
15 Letter Book of John Watts, New York Historical Society Collections, LXI, 233.
See also Harringron, 313.
DAVJD DouGLAss oN "MR. CRUGER's WHARFF" 51
meant more specie and bills of exchange. While the rest of the colonies
suffered from a scarcity of commercial gold and silver, New York had
an abundance. Its growing financial strength relative to its neighbors was
evident and of no small concern for many outside the province. From
his perch in Philadelphia, statistically still the capital of colonial life,
Benjamin Franklin admitted with some envy that "New York is growing
immensely rich, by Money brought into it from all Quarters for the Pay
and Subsistence of the Troops."
16
Even those outside the colonies were beginning to take notice.
Upon his arrival in the city in 1756, a British naval officer was so impressed
that his report concluded "such is this city that very few in England can
rival it in its show."
17
Just three years later, New York's status was so revered
abroad that the visiting Lord Adam Gordon, learning that Philadelphia
was in fact the largest city in the colonies, expressed surprise and remarked
that New York "had long been held at home, the first in America."
18
Adding to this economic expansion was another sort of trade
that had evolved a few years earlier, one that New Yorkers found
increasingly attractive- privateering. As a means of support it was
dangerous, unpredictable, and on the fringes of the law. But it was also
very lucrative.
19
And more particularly, it may relate directly to Douglass's
decision to return when and where he did.
As early as 1665, New York privateers had found success
patrolling the waters of the western Atlantic. But what began as a trickle
of occasional forays quickly became a flood during the first half of the
eighteenth-century. The first great phase began during the prelude to King
George's War. From 1739 to 1744, England fought an extended sea battle
against Spain called, oddly enough, the War of Jenkins' Ear-an allusion
to an atrocity allegedly perpetrated on an English sailor by the Spanish.
20
16 Bridenbaugh, 69.
17 Kammen, 292.
18 Bridenbaugh, 226; ''Journal of Lord Adam Gordon," Travels in the American
Colonies, ed. Newton D. Mereness (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 414.
19 For an overview of privateering in British North America, see J. Franklin
Jameson, ed., Pn"vateering and Piracy in the Cokmial Penod (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1923) and James G. Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits (Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Gregg Press, 1970).
20 To verify the Treaty of Seville (1729) the Spanish were allowed to board
English ships trading out of the Caribbean to make certain they were not carrying Spanish
goods. In 1731 an English captain named Robert Jenkins reported that while his vessel was
being inspected a Spanish officer intentionally severed his ear. Contemporary detractors
claim that Jenkins lost his ear while immobilized in a pillory for unspecified misdemeanors.
While the incident was initially ignored, the House of Commons revived it in 1738 when
52 D AVIS
The English crown, seeking to inflict the greatest economic damage on
its enemy, began licensing privateers in 1739 to engage the Spanish on
the high seas. New York was just one of several colonial port cities that
answered the call. But since few privateers had much success initially,
there was little interest in the activity until the war expanded in 1743 to
include the French. By 1744, thirty-six letters of marque, or privateering
licenses, had been issued in New York and the city was suddenly filled
with both prospective sailors and investors looking for easy money.
21
A
combination of fortunate geography, maritime skill, and mercantile zeal,
made for excellence in commercial plunder on the high seas. New York
quickly emerged as the largest center for privateering in North America.
Estimates indicate that almost half a million pounds of legal plunder was
secured by a mere fifty New York investors during the last four years of
the war.
22
All in all, a sizable take and a fair return on a modest investment.
Though the conclusion of the war in 1748 saw the termination of
licensed privateering and the onset of a post-war depression, most New
York merchants, aware of the unsatisfactory truce, knew that good times
were bound to return eventually. The six-year span between the War of
Jenkins' Ear and the French and Indian War was seen by most as merely a
temporary respite between privateering contracts. When hostilities broke
out again in 1754, the New York merchants anxiously awaited word of an
official declaration of war and the inevitable resumption of their lucrative
privateering endeavors. By the summer of 1756, the merchants had their
declaration and the pirating industry was once again in full swing on lower
Manhattan Island. This time they were prepared and in the brief period of
active warfare, from 1 7 56 to 17 61, almost twice as many letters of marque
were issued, making New York's fleet of more than seventy licensed ships
easily the largest in all the colonies and second only to England itsel.
23
Some six hundred ships were taken as prizes and one hundred and fifty
they called Captain Jenkins to testify-pickled ear in hand- on Spanish atrocities at sea.
The incident and Jenkins's graphic testimony was used as a convenient excuse by the British
to reclaim their dominance of the Caribbean and Adantic trade routes in the conflict that
began in earnest in November 1739. Eventually The War of Jenkins' Ear merged into the
greater conflict known as the War of Austrian Succession, which lasted until 17 48. See
John Tate Lanning, The Diplomatic History if Georgia: A Stur!J if the Epoch of Jenkins' Ear
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1936) and Odell Shepard, Jenkins'
Ear: A NarrativeAttn'buted to Horace Walpole, Esq. (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1951).
21 Bridenbaugh, 61-63.
22 Jameson, 155.
23 New York (State) Calendar if Historical Mss., II, English Mss., 1664- 1776
(Albany, 1865-66), 658-739.
DAVID DoUGLASS ON "MR. (RUGER'S WHARFF" 53
New York investors shared over 1.5 million pounds, amounting to three
times the haul from the previous war. Two hundred thousand pounds alone
were secured in just one eight-month period between September 1756
and May 1757.
24
At the height of the war, in 1759, no fewer than forty-
eight ships received commissions as privateers and nearly six thousand
seamen enlisted in hopes of making their fortunes on the high seas.
25
At a time when the average laborer earned about 30 a year, the 168
that the average sailor netted from a single four- to six-week venture was
most alluring. The average investor grossed about 10,000- an impressive
amount, especially since Beekman maintained that a gentleman in New
York at that time could live quite comfortably on a mere 300 a year. Little
wonder Lieutenant Governor De Lancey complained in 1758 that his city
had been afflicted with "a kind of madness to go a-privateering."
26
From Douglass's perspective in 1758 New York was an ideal
venue. The billeting of Royal troops meant a city with nearly twice the
potential customers than had been available five years earlier. Moreover,
Army regulars meant a potential audience open to theatrical amusements.
The wealthy merchants, who were openly benefiting from the war also
presented possible new audiences and their previous support of the
earlier Hallam tour must have been on Douglass's mind. On top of this,
New York's notoriety as a privateering center implied wealth and time
for luxury amusements like theatre. It also meant an abundance of ready
specie, which was far more preferable to an itinerant acting company than
bills . of credit, paper money, or, worse yet, simple barter. So despite the
war, or even perhaps because of it, New York was an apparently sound
decision for the company to make. But why Cruger's Wharf specifically?
And what effect might this choice have had on their success, or more
accurately lack thereof?
Since the earliest days of Dutch occupation, the southern tip
of Manhattan Island had been a strictly commercial seaport.
27
The small
town that grew up around it was connected directly to the major docks
and wharves that lined the shore. Except for Broadway, each of the major
roads in town terminated at a dock or slip where the dominant feature
was a market. New York derived its entire economy from the wharves
24 New York Mercury, no. 282, 9 January 17 58, 2.
25 Harrington, 303.
26 Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History o/ New York Ci!J to
1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 182.
27 One of the best studies concerning the early Dutch settlement on Manhattan
is Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center o/ the World: The Epic Story o/ Dutch Manhattan and
the Forgotten Colotry that Shaped Amenca (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).
54 DAVIS
and markets along its shores, particularly the southeastern shore just up
the East River from the old fort. The western side of the island, along
the Hudson, was largely undeveloped and would remain so well into the
eighteenth-century. But the eastern shore, with its series of slips and docks
connected to nearby markets was the center of activity. This arrangement
led, from the beginning, to private ownership of the waterfront, and as a
result, many of New York's docks belonged to wealthy families. The city
itself had limited legal control over its own waterfront, relying heavily on
its prominent families and investors to maintain its commercial lifeline to
the world.
28
Thus, in 1739 the Cruger family contracted to build a sizable
wharf just up from the City docks in an area bordered by Coentis Slip
on the south and Old Slip to the north. Located a mere one hundred
and twenty feet from the fashionable Hanover Square at the foot of the
Dock Ward, the wharf was on prime real estate. And the timing of its
construction was no fluke. The initial contract was signed exactly one
month after the start of the War of Jenkins' Ear. The Crugers, who had
quickly built a sizable fortune on shipping, were looking to enhance their
income with a little privateering on the side. What they got was a multi-
functional facility that soon became the most important private wharf in
the city.
29
The Cruger family established themselves in New York only
a generation earlier with the arrival in the late seventeenth-century
of Nicholas Cruger, a Bristol-based merchant. He quickly became a
dominant player in colonial shipping with powerful connections back
horne. Nicholas's grandson, Henry, for instance, headed the family's
offices in Bristol and eventually represented the city in Parliament as a
Pitt supporter during the Revolutionary War. Such contacts would prove
vital to the family during the inevitable periods of international conflict
and economic stress. The family also maintained extensive investments in
the West Indies beginning in the early 1750s with grandsons and great-
grandsons heading branch offices in Jamaica, Cura<;ao, and St. Croix. As
one of only a handful of such offices in Jamaica, the Crugers were obliged
to keep a high profile for the sake of good business. Mingling with the
Island's wealthy elite, the Crugers must have caught the attention of a
28 John A. Stevens, "Physical Evolution of New York City," American Historical
Magazine, vol.2 (New York: Publishing Society of New York, 1907): 92-128.
29 For an overview of the archeological studies conducted by the New York
State Historic Trust in 1969 on Cruger's Wharf, see Paul R. Huey, "Old Slip and Cruger's
Wharf at New York: An Archeological Perspective of the Colonial American Waterfront,"
Historical Archaeology 18, no. 1 (1984): 15-37.
D AVID DOUGLASS ON " MR. CRUGER'S WHARFF" 55
troupe of opportunistic players looking for new audiences to conquer.
30
In yet another indication of how adept the Crugers were in
keeping abreast of breaking events, they expanded their wharf in 1754,
anticipating the coming war with France. By then the wharf was the
acknowledged heart of private commerce in New York. Advertisements
and articles in local papers indicate that the wharf had several buildings
on it, including a tavern that was a seat of privateering activity. On several
occasions between 1748 and 1760, the Inn at the Sign of Jamaica Arms,
located on Cruger's Wharf, posted auction notices for confiscated prizes
from captured ships. It was one of only a handful of such sites actively
advertising its legal plunder.
31
When deciding on a suitable location for his company of players,
Douglass must have been aware of the Cruger family and their wharf in
New York City even before he left the Caribbean. Not only was John Harris
Cruger, the family's representative in Spanish Town, a prominent member
of the Jamaican business elite during 1750s, but the New York Mercury,
announcing the company's return in October of 1758, mentions that they
last played in St. Croix where another Cruger sibling, Nicholas II, headed
the family branch office.
32
There is no evidence that Douglass knew any
of the Crugers directly before his engagement in New York, but it is likely
he knew of them. Certainly a clever theatre manager in eighteenth-century
New York would have been well advised to befriend a Cruger or two.
Indeed, Douglass implies he had arranged for a theatrical space before
his arrival in an article in the New York Mercury of 8 December 1758. I n
his published appeal to the city's magistrates for a license to perform,
Douglass mentions the "charge of a building . .. which let me observe,
we had engaged for before we had any Reason to apprehend a Denial."
33
Not only were the Crugers among the most prominent merchant
families in the New World, their position in New York made for excellent
professional company. John Cruger, Sr., the elder Nicholas's son, had
amassed a small fortune in his own right during the 1720s and 30s through
shipping and trade. He then turned his interests to politics, serving as a
New York City alderman and finally as mayor, a position he held until his
death in 1744. His two sons, Henry and John, Jr., were his principal heirs.
30 Edward F. De Lancey, "Original Family Records, Cruger," The New York
Geneawgical and Biographical Record, vol. 6, iss. 2 (April1875): 74-82.
311. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconograpi?J of Manhattan Island: 1498-1909 (New York:
Robert H. Dodd, 1915), 1:32, 34; Phelps Stokes, Iconograpi?J of Manhattan Island (1916),
4:649.
32 New York Mercury, 16 October 1758.
33 Ibid., 8 December 1758.
56 D AVIS
Henry, the older of the two, took control of the family lands and business,
while John, Jr., already on his way to a successful career as a city alderman,
assumed his father's political interests. By 17 56, just two years before
Douglass's arrival, John, Jr. succeeded his father as mayor of the city.
Henry, in the meantime, ordered the construction of the original wharf
as well as its later expansion and continued to build the family business
by sending his sons to head up their various branch offices on both sides
of the Atlantic.
34
What better connections to have? Or so Douglass and
company must have thought.
Unfortunately, things did not work out quite as planned. Less
than three weeks after their arrival in New York, things were already going
poorly for the troupe. In the 6 November edition of the New York Mercury
Douglass complained that "having applied to the gentlemen in power for
permission to play, has (to his great mortification) met with a positive and
absolute denial." So instead, since
it is impossible for them to move to another place;
and though in the humblest manner he begged the
magistrates would indulge him in acting as many plays
as would barely defray the expenses he and the company
have been at, in coming to this city, and enable them to
proceed to another; he has been unfortunate enough
to be peremptorily refused it. As he has given over all
thoughts of acting, he begs leave to inform the public,
that in a few days he will open an Histrionic Academy, of
which proper notice will be given in this paper.
35
Proper notice was not given. Three weeks later Douglass was
forced to retract his threat of ''An Histrionic Academy" when those in
charge discovered the ruse. Another published apology followed in which
he nonetheless denied any deliberate subterfuge and declared that he was
merely hoping to "deliver dissertations on subjects, moral, instructive and
entertaining." He then summarizes his financial plight, in an attempt at
gathering sympathy, by asserting that "the expenses of our coming here,
our living since our arrival, with the charge of building, etc. (which let me
observe, we had engaged for before we had any reason to apprehend a
denial) amount to a sum that would swallow up the profits of a great many
nights acting, had we permission."
36
34 De Lancey, 76-78; Phelps Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, vol. 4.
35 New York Mercury, 6 November 1758.
36 Ibid., 11 December 1758.
DAVID DOUGLASS ON "MR. CRUGER'S WHARFF" 57
Apparently the appeal worked. The city magistrates relented and
on 28 December 1758 Douglass and company opened a short season in a
converted sail loft on Cruger's Wharf where they tried (presumably in vain)
to recoup their losses.
37
The limited engagement closed after only thirteen
nights and eighteen performances on 7 February when the company fled
to what they hoped would be easier pickings in Philadelphia.
38
New York
was left once again in the theatrical dark.
What, then, went wrong? How did Douglass miscalculate? Did
he overestimate the size of his potential audience or their willingness to
embrace theatre? Did he fail to fully recognize the political or economic
realities of a city still transitioning from a hardscrabble commercial
outpost into a cosmopolitan colonial city? Or did he merely misunderstand
the people he thought he could rely on to help him establish a workable
environment for theatre? While it seems likely that Douglass had secured
a playing space on Cruger's Wharf in part to curry favor with a powerful
and politically well-connected family, he may have underestimated John
Cruger's influence. What seemed like a good strategic move may have
backfired for several important and somewhat unpredictable reasons.
Though long identified with the Cruger family, the wharf was
actually owned by a single family member, Henry Cruger, along with a
handful of outside investors.
39
This is contrary to what some historians
have maintained, including New York theatre scholar, Mary Henderson,
who mistakenly identify John Cruger, Jr. (Henry's younger brother), as
the principal owner.
40
The original contract shows that John had no direct
financial stake in the endeavor, and though mayor of the city, he did not
have much pull with the colonial magistrates who controlled the royal
judiciary. In fact, John Jr. was not getting along very well at the time with
James De Lancey, the colony's Lieutenant Governor and chief justice. It
seems there was a brief but bitter dispute beginning in May of 1758 over
37 Clarence S. Brigham, Journals and Journryman: A Contribution to the History o/
Ear!J Amencan Newspapers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), 106;
Isaiah Thomas Papers, vol. 6, American Antiquarian Society, 22 April 1811.
38 New York Mercury, 5 February 1759. The paper announced that the company's
performances of Richard III and Damon and Phil/ida on 7 February 1759 at Cruger's Wharf
would be "positively the last Time of acting in this City." Indeed, the company's next
appearance is found in the Penn!Jivania Gazelle, 21 June 1759, when they announced
their opening night at the theatre on Society Hill on 25 June 1759 with performances of
Tameriane and The Virgin Unmasked.
39 Huey, 15-17.
40 Mary C. Henderson, The Ciry and the Theatre, the History o/ New York Plqyhouses:
A 250-Year journry from Bowling Green to Times Square (New York: Back Stage Books, 2004),
27.
58
the provisioning of city munitions to Royal troops. Cruger argued that
the city would be left defenseless if it gave up its arms to His Majesty's
army. De Lancey insisted that the city's primary obligation was defending
its northern borders against French invasion. It was De Lancey's desire to
raise a local army to augment the regulars in their invasion of Canada. But
his attempts were thwarted by a general lack of available men and arms.
This, De Lancey concluded, was the result of privateering. Under threat
of general impressment, Cruger relented and the issue was resolved.
But the resentment over the dispute lasted well into December.
41
In
fact, throughout the fall and early winter, at the very time Douglass was
attempting to plead his case, New Yorkers felt distincdy threatened by
news of the war and the possibility of invasion. Remaining undefended
was a genuine concern and a major editorial topic on the front pages of
New York's newspapers.
42
Under such conditions, the complaints of a
company of actors would seem a very low priority.
The eventual granting of permission in mid-December had
probably less to do with Douglass's heart-felt appeals than a sudden and
happy change in the war. News of the successful Canadian campaign did
not reach New York City until21 November, when De Lancey announced
the conclusion of hostilities and immediately decommissioned the New
York regiment. The city celebrated and the magistrates it seemed relented.
43
Five weeks later, Douglass's "Company of Comedians" opened their
abbreviated season on the wharf with a performance of Jane Shore, "acted
with great Applause, to a most crowded Audience."
44
By the first week
in February, the company was posting its final notice in the local papers,
electing to conclude their five-week run in the city with a performance of
Colley Cibber's adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III on the evening of
7 February.
45
Why did it not last? Admittedly, the city magistrates only granted
41 Phelps Stokes, 4:685. See also De Lancey, 80.
42 While almost every edition of New York's weekly newspapers printed
between the autumn of 1758 and early 1759 carry at least one article on the conflict, the
most detailed accounts are found in the following: Parker's New-York Gazette: or, the Week!J
Post-Bqy, 13 November 1758, 27 November 1758, 4 December 1758, 18 December 1758,
23 December 1758, and 29 January 1759; Wryman's New-York Gazette, 16 February 1759;
New-York Mercury, 18 September 1758, 30 October 1758, 6 November 1758, 4 December
1758, 11 December 1758, 23 December 1758, 1 January 1759, 12 February 1759, and 19
February 1759. The 8 January 1759 edition of the New-York Mercury contains a notice
seeking volunteers to fight printed just above Douglass's prologue.
43 Bridenbaugh, 169.
44 New York Mercury, 1 January 1759; Odell, 76-77.
45 New York Mercury, 28 December 1761; Odell, 78; Rankin, 79.
DAVJD D oUGLASS ON "MR. CRUGER's WHARFF" 59
the company a limited license for thirteen performances.
46
But other
more pressing matters may have had an influence as well. Douglass
already admitted that he was short of funds in his first public appeal in
November. His notice, dated 8 December 1758, indicated that he had
already secured the building "before we had any reason to apprehend a
denial," implying he had held the lease since October.
47
With no source
of income and two months behind in rent, Douglass must have known
that his project was doomed. As early as the November notice, he appears
to have abandoned his prospects for New York and only hoped to earn
enough to "enable them to proceed to another [city]."
48
Though perhaps
an idle threat, that seems to be exactly what they did. Furthering their
troubles was the successful conclusion of the Canadian campaign. At first,
a victory of such magnitude might seem a positive factor in attracting new
audiences and furthering a theatrical season, but the actual effect was the
sudden departure of the British Army, which constituted nearly half the
city's population. The war, now finished in the north, had moved quite
suddenly south to the Caribbean. The timing could not have been worse
for Douglass and company. Just as the necessary permission to perform is
finally secured, the primary audience leaves.
Complicating their stay was the location of the theatre itself.
Though no records are extant, it seems their audience faded as the run
progressed. At one point, just two weeks into their season, the company
increased the price of gallery seats from two to three shillings, perhaps
hoping to up their profit margin from the servants and lackeys attending
the play in service of their employers.
49
Whether this improved their
bottom line or merely drove more patrons away is a mystery; that the
wharf proved to be an unsuitable location for a theatre is not. Significantly,
it was the first and only theatre in New York City during the eighteenth-
century to be located on the waterfront.
An obvious detriment was the waterfront itself. Apart from being
filthy and noisy (as numerous contemporary accounts attest), i t was a
dangerous and unsavory place to go, especially in the evenings. Recent
demographic studies of the mid-eighteenth-century indicate that a narrow
band of severe poverty lined the eastern shore of lower Manhattan from
the city docks up to and beyond the northeastern reaches of Montgomerie
46 New York Mercury, 5 February 1759; OdeU, 78; Rankin, 77-78.
47 New York Mercury, 11 December 1758.
48 Ibid., 6 November 1758.
49 OdeU, 77. New York Mercury, 8 January 1759, 15 January 1759.
60
D AV!S
Ward.
50
This impoverished stretch, which constituted the wharves and
warehouses of the commercial district, was, surprisingly, only a block
deep in most locations. In the Dock Ward, where Cruger's Wharf was
located, the block immediately behind the waterfront was in fact upper-
middle class. And the Dock Ward itself, one of only six wards that defined
the city's administrative neighborhoods at that time, was the wealthiest,
though still one of the smallest. Most of the old-line Dutch and English
families lived in the Dock Ward with two great curving avenues extending
down from Wall Street to the waterfront more or less defining its borders
on the east and west sides-Broad Street, terminating at the city docks
and William Street that passed through Hanover Square before ending at
the Old Slip Market and Cruger's Wharf. 5
1
Despite the success of the privateers, much of the city's
commerce was drifting north into the John Street area by the late 1740s.
While Cruger's Wharf remained active as a terminus, the city's population
was beginning to shift away from the old Dutch settlement into the newer
reaches of the North and West Wards. This meant that the commercial
center of the city had shifted as well. Although Cruger's Wharf and the
lower Dock Ward may have once been the heart of New York life, by
mid-century it was becoming marginalized. In other words, a typical New
York theatre patron in 1758 would have been required to go out of his
way to attend a show on Cruger's Wharf. Given its location along the
waterfront and its distance from the new center of the city, the theatre on
Mr. Cruger's Wharf may have been less appealing than Douglass realized.
Add to this the financial hardships that he and his company were forced
to endure during their failed efforts to secure permission to perform, as
well as the sudden departure of half his potential audience two weeks
before he opened, and it is little wonder that Douglass abandoned New
York in haste, setting his sights instead on the prospects that a move to
Philadelphia now offered.
But even then, Philadelphia was only a temporary stop. Though
Douglass had learned an important lesson from his troubles on Cruger's
Wharf and was careful this time to secure permission to perform from
the colony's governor in advance of his arrival, and despite the company's
costly efforts to establish the first permanent playhouse on Society Hill,
Philadelphia proved to be just as slippery a venue for professional theatre
50 See Carl Abbott, "The Neighborhoods of New York, 1760-1775," Ne1v York
History 55, no. 1 (January 1974): 35-54; Graham Russell Hodges, New York City Cartmen,
1667-1850 (New York: New York University Press, 1986); Nan A. Rothschild, New York
City Neighborhoods: The 18'' Century (San Diego: Academic Press, 1990); Bruce M. Wilkenfeld,
"New York City Neighborhoods, 1730," New York Htstory 57, no. 2 (April1976): 165-182.
51 Phelps Stokes, 1:197-199; Rothschild, 68-80.
DAvm DouGLASS oN "MR. CRuGER's WHARFF" 61
as New York.
52
The company was gone after a run of just six months.
With total populations still below 30,000, the two major cities in the North
American colonies were simply too small to sustain a commercial theatre
company for longer than a few weeks or months. Furthermore, the volatile
nature of colonial economies made sustained theatrical runs beyond a few
months in any one city equally untenable. Like their familial predecessors
in the London fairs, the Hallam-Douglass company found touring to be
the only way to maintain viability and the only way to stay ahead of rapidly
changing and unpredictable economic conditions that defined the North
American colonies at mid century. For Douglass and company, itinerancy
became an economic necessity. It also proved to be an economic reality
that would dominate the character and commerce of American theatre for
the next fifty years.
52 Rankin, 82-85.
CRESPY
FoRTUNATE CoLLISION: AL CARMINEs's ENcouNTER WITH CLAEs
OLDENBURG's RAY GuN SPEX
David Crespy
In February of 1960, Claes Oldenburg, Allan K.aprow, Ralph Rauschenberg,
and Jim Dine staged the first happening, Ray Gun Spex, in the Judson Art
Gallery and within five months they had staged three more. Happenings
were a spontaneous and jarring improvisation of theatre, visual art
environments, music, and dance that attempted to create a non-linear,
visceral experience for the audiences who participated in them. Generally,
happenings artists attempted to create art that was "unmatrixed," that is,
without message per se, with the hope that each audience member would
find her or his own meaning in the experience. Like the spontaneous,
improvised music of John Cage, happenings were also a form of
"chance art." A happening, was experienced in the moment-never to be
repeated exactly again- with materials meant to be thrown away after the
performance.
In Ray Gun Spex, Claes Oldenburg appeared in a feathered
football helmet, mukluks, fluorescent orange shorts, and body paint; he
walked through the rooms of the happening reading Hawthorne's The
Scarlet Letter. Ralph Rauschenberg added pop and modernist dance to
the performance, and the audience was encouraged to participate in the
action of the piece. The first happenings at the Judson were attacked
as being too secular and avant-garde for a church. Its minister, Howard
Moody, staunchly defended them saying that the "real Church" was "a real
Happening in the World." He insisted that such an event occurs whether
the community wants it or not, and it cannot be predicted since it is one
of the "surprises of God." The happenings at the Judson Art Gallery set
the tone for the avant -garde Judson Poets' Theatre that began in 1961. AI
Carmines was one of the young people who attended these happenings,
and the shock of this new art was an aesthetic and spiritual awaking for
him. For Carmines the influence of the happenings was direct:
I remember a happening where Claes read The Scarlet
Letter in Swedish, as we all followed him through the
gymnasium. It was thrilling, and bizarre, weird. And the
happenings somehow melded in with the theatre also,
because the theatre was happening at the same time ....
For instance a lot of the Gertrude Stein musicals I
FoRTUNATE CoLLISION 63
created for Judson took their impulse from Happenings.
1
He was stunned by these curious performances-little of which he could
remember, except its experimental, multi-media, chance quality. It was the
free-wheeling experimentalism of the happenings that set the tone for the
performances at the Judson Poets' Theater.
And it was in this single, unique, unexpected, theatrical instant in
February of 1960, that Alvin Allison Carmines, a culturally-transplanted
Virginian, then a student of the Union Theological Seminary, became the
nexus of postmodern playwriting, a form of playwriting that I describe as
dreamwrighting. Carmines would be at the epicenter of the avant-garde
conflation of theatre, dance, visual, and music that became synonymous
with the Judson Memorial Church in the 1960s. Carmines's experience
of Ray Gun Spex in the Judson Gallery of Judson Memorial Church
was, according to Carmines himself, the single moment in his personal
theatrical history when his destiny became clear to him. He realized that
the drama he would shape would transcend the restrictions of traditional
theatrical form and move into visual and musical collage that epitomized
his musical theatre. Carmines discovered within these happenings the
method that he would use to create at the Judson, an improvisatory, yet
closely considered, theatrical dramatic technique, informed by a studied
and professional chance-based, non-matrixed informality.
I would also argue that the possibility for dreamwriting, a chance-
oneiric and new non-linearity in American playwriting, was born with
Carmines's experience with Ray Gun Spex. A dreamwright is any playwright
who uses the associative, non-matrixed logic of dreams rather than the
linear logic of traditional dramaturgy to create drama. Dreamwriting is also
characterized by what is at times an alogical transformational progression
of uncanny, bizarre, and the grotesque in imagery, characterization, and
plot. This is a dramaturgical style that was increasingly embraced by
1960s off-off-Broadway playwrights, particularly those who were a part
of the Judson Theatre. And at any given moment, nearly all of these
off-off-Broadway playwrights were part of the Judson community and/ or
attended performances there.
As I detail in my book Off-Off-Broadwqy Explosion, this new wave
of off-off-Broadway dreamwrighting also stemmed from many other
influences, such as the new dramaturgies of the European absurdist
playwrights, performances in jazz and poetry cafes of the 1950s, the
surrealists like Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton living in Greenwich
1 Al Carmines, interview with Stephen Bottoms, New York, September 1995,
website: http://www:judson org/judsonpoetstheater, (21 May 2012).
64 CRESPY
Village, and the early poetic dramas and techniques produced by the
Living Theatre. But a primary influence on 1960s-based dreamwrighting
was the melding of art and media of the Village into one interdisciplinary
art form that encompassed the music of John Cage, the happenings of
Allen Kaprow, the dance of Yvonne Rainer, the art of Claes Oldenburg,
the films of Andy Warhol, and the plays, playwrights, directors, and
actors of the Living Theatre. And by Carmines's own admission, the
congregational community of the Judson Memorial Church and Judson
Poets' Theatre was the glue that held the off-off-Broadway community
together. While there came to be many off-off-Broadway companies, the
community ostensibly included the "big four" Joe Cino's Caffe Cino, Ellen
Stewart's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Ralph Cook's Theatre
Genesis at St. Marks at the Bowery, and the Judson Poets' Theatre. For
Carmines, "Cino, La MaMa, Genesis were all off-off-Broadway, we were
all in opposition to what Broadway was, and we were very cooperative."
For example, if Carmines needed a costume at the Judson, Stewart would
send over a costume, if he needed a prop, Genesis would send over a
prop. And if a theatre was failing, the community stepped in to intercede,
as Carmines points out: "Cino was going bankrupt at one point, and they
asked me to do a series of concerts to support the Cino, so I did a series
of concerts for them, and they were able to keep their space." But if
there was cooperation, there was also a distinction between Judson and
the Cino, La MaMa, and Genesis for Carmines:
So the difference between Judson and all the other
places was that we were a genuine community where the
congregation of the church and the actors who acted in
the church within three years were indistinguishable and
it became a grounding and a meeting place for everyone
in the off-off-Broadway community. The other off-
off-Broadway theatres were wonderful, but they had
no conditions of that kind of community. They were
isolated and at Judson things were so constituted that
you couldn't tell who was actor and who was a church
member.
2
Because of the importance of Judson as a kind of cathedral of art within
the off-off-Broadway community of playwrights, and Carmines's musical
collaboration with them, I assert that Carmines's experience with Ray Gun
Spex became the nexus for 1960s-born dreamwrighting that has continued
2 Alvin Allison Carmines, interview with author, New York, 6 December 2001.
F ORTUNATE COU. JSJON 65
until this day.
Transcending Barriers of Art and Theatre
The real instigation for the associative techniques of
dreamwrighting was the breaking of barriers between what constituted
visual art, music, performance, and theatre that Carmines discovered
during the evening he experienced Ray Gun Spex. Happenings were a
visceral embodiment of the rational, studied formalism of John Cage's
chance art conflated with a surrealist expressionism born of the 1960s
infusion of Artaud. These sensibilities were then distilled by Carmines in
the camp absurdity of the Judson's productions of Gertrude Stein's work
as well as Carmines's musical collaborations with Maria Irene F o r m ~ s
Rochelle Owens, Ron Tavel, and Sam Shepard. In particular, Carmines's
collaboration with Maria Irene Fornes, who became an icon of the new
wave of this dreamwrighting, and who later became a major educator of
yet another generation of dreamwrights, contributed to Carmines's own
special place in the history of dreamwrighting and the new theatre of the
1960s.
Judson productions had a distinct chance performance quality,
facilitated by Carmines's own informal pastiche technique of musical
composition, as well Laurence Kornfeld's oneiric strategies of bizarre
imagistic directorial juxtaposition-a dramaturgical single-mindedness
which creates a kind of dream plot through associationallogic rather than
linear dramatic structure.
3
Kornfeld was Carmines's director/ collaborator,
and he had cut his teeth as a director with Julian Beck's and Judith Malina's
Living Theatre. In this discussion, I take a phenomenological attitude
toward the Carmines/Ray Gun Spex historical collision in order to bracket
off and examine a single moment of interdisciplinary connection among
theatre, playwriting, and performance art. This attitude is not unlike the
one brought to bear by performance theorist Bert 0 . States in his several
books on dreaming and fiction.
4
It is then possible to understand and
clarify how the elements of this event influenced the dreamwrighting
technique fomented by Judson Poets' Theatre and offer possibilities
for future scholarship and opportunities for new pedagogies of chance
oneiric playwriting.
3 For a discussion of "singlemindedness" in dreams, see Allan Rechtschaffen,
''The Singlemindedness and Isolation of Dreams", Sleep 1, no. 1 (September 1978): 97-109.
4 See Bert 0. States, Dreaming and Storytelling (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1993); Bert 0 . States, The Rhetoric of Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1988); Ben 0. States, Seeing In the Dark (New Haven, Cf: Yale University Press, 1997).
66 CRESPY
The Carmines/Ray Gun Spex aesthetic car crash resulted from
Carmines's own curiosity about the pulpit he was considering at Judson
Memorial Church. He decided to go downtown with friends Don Morse
and Stephen Rose as part of his self-education in Greenwich Village's
avant-garde art world.
5
The social activism of Judson Church, under the
progressive ministry of Reverend Howard Moody, was branching out to
the community of artists comprising Greenwich Village in the early 1960s.
Moody encouraged the Judson's then minister for the arts, Bud Scott, to
actively pursue ways to understand and meet the needs of the Village's
arusuc community. Scott met with artists in their studios, bars, and
coffeehouses, trying to encounter them on their own turf. Ray Gun Spex,
the event that Carmines attended, was one of Scott's projects to reach
out to the artists of the Village, and it grew from his understanding that
artists needed a place to show their work outside the commercial pressure
of coffeehouses, galleries, and other familiar performance venues in
Greenwich Village. The piece was also one of the first major collaborations
of happenings artists to occur in the United States-and perhaps
anywhere-led by Claes Oldenburg, now the sculptor of monumental
pop art pieces. "Ray Gun" was Oldenburg's own talismanic term for New
York, "Nug Yar," but it was also his way of characterizing his pop art
sensibility. The word "spex" was play on Swedish word for comic skit, and
it suggested a "spectacle" or "specifications."
6
The piece was a sampler
of current trends in happenings and included Oldenburg's Snapshots from
the Ciry, The Smiling Workman by Jim Dine; Dick Higgins's Edifices, Cabarets,
Contributions; Allen Hansen's Projections; Allan Kaprow's Coca Cola Shirley
Cannon Ball; Red Grooms's The Big Leap; and Bob Whitman's Duet for a
Small Smell. Spex was a seminal event in the visual arts world and spawned
a new generation of happenings and later performance art, which were
then growing out of the break with the Abstract Expressionists.
This happenings movement seemed to have two tracks, at least
according to Oldenburg, who methodically observed the new trend before
engaging in it himself. One of the tracks was rational and formalist, the other
was emotional and expressionistic. On the one hand, Jackson Pollock's
legacy of action painting represented an expressionistic predecessor to the
chance art of the happenings. Pollock's work was both a leaping off point
and an entrenched aesthetic to be eradicated for such happenings artists
such as Allan Kaprow, whose essay, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" was
5 Robert Boynton Helm, "The Rev. Al Carmines and the Development of the
Judson Poet's Theater" (Ph.D. diss., Western Virginia University, 1979), 28.
6 Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Arl (MIT Press,
2001), 21-26.
FORTUNATE COLLISION 67
extraordinarily influential and important itself.? Oldenburg saw a clash
within the happenings movement between the anti-expressionistic, non-
intentional, Cagean chance-art impulse of artists like Kaprow and the
neo-expressionistic Artaudian cruel theatricality represented by the work
of the Living Theatre.
8
Oldenburg had, by March 1960, seen the work of
many of the most important New York happenings artists:
I had seen pieces by Robert Whitman, Red Grooms,
Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, and perhaps George
Brecht. I was aware of a tradition called "happenings"
and also the experiments lumped with happenings
although they had a different sort of inspiration, such
as Red Grooms's The Burning Building. I had also seen
the productions at The Living Theatre. I was influenced
of course by all these things, but since my purpose was
making all this useful to myself, I wasn't trying to be the
first one to do anything. At the time, I made an analysis
of what was going on. I felt that there were two possible
choices whose differences then looked very clear to me.
There were people, both performers and spectators, who
would go to one kind of theatre and ignore the other. I
remember very well that the late Bob Thompson said he
would not see a Kaprow, for example, because he was
in the Red Grooms piece. I remember that when a Red
Grooms piece and a Kaprow were put on together at
the Reuben Gallery, in January of 1960, there was really
a lack of communication between the two groups; they
divideds between an emotional and a rational expression.
The latter had come out Cage's ideas and what Kaprow
had done with the 18 Happenings.
9
Ray Gun Spex was created specifically by Oldenburg to pull together these
two disparate threads of experimentation and simultaneously reinforce
and introduce the concepts of happenings to a curious public. In the three
short days it was performed, Rqy Gun Spex united an artistic community
far beyond the realm of visual art and galvanized artists across disciplines.
7 Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1993), xix.
8 Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: The Dial Press,
Inc., 1968), 135.
9 Ibid., 135.
68 CRfSPY
This was, in fact, the goal of the project that Bud Scott had envisioned.
The evening was a collage of competing happenings aesthetics
to draw together a community of artists who were moving down related
but very different paths. Carmines describes the evening as almost a kind
of party of the avant-garde where suddenly a new dialogue was possible;
barriers were torn down and artists could reach across disciplines to create
work that transcended traditional limitations:
I remember every element of it vividly-the happening
lasted about an hour and a half, and then we went over
to the student house and they had a big party, with Leroi
Jones [Amiri Baraka] and his wife, Hettie. And it just
blew my mind. I stayed out all night long, I had to go
to my church the next morning, and was just absolutely
worn out. But I adored it; I loved it, I just was thrilled
by it. And it changed my whole life because I began to
talk to Merce and I began to talk to Yvonne [Rainer] and
later they got me interested in forming a Dance Theatre
at Judson which Judson had never had.
10
Because of Carmines's location at the center of all the art created
at the Judson Memorial Church, the entirety of the Judson sensibility seems
to have been formed in that one evening. The conflation of theatre, poetry,
dance, music, and visual art that took place in Ray Gun Spexwas the Judson
art project in a microcosm; a meeting place between what Michael Kirby
called the matrixed informational structure of traditional plot or story
structure and the non-matrixed, compartmented, and alogical structure
of happenings.
11
Many of the figures who would go on to form Judson's
Dance Theatre were there as well, including Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer,
and Ann Halprin.
In the midst of what could only be described as a communal,
liminal celebration of a new art form, Al Carmines, a curious onlooker in
a church he was considering for a possible position as assistant minister,
suddenly found himself emotionally and physically transported beyond
the traditional theatre he had performed at Union Theological Seminary.
It was his rite of passage into a post-modern aesthetic, and the evening
was fraught with possibilities:
It was a happening that Claes Oldenburg led. Alan
10 Alvin Allison Carmines, interview with author, New York, 8 August 2002.
11 Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1965), 13.
FoRTUNATE Cows1oN
Kaprow was there; Al Hansen was there, and Tom
Wesselmann was there, but Claes led it, and it was in the
gym of the Church and everyone had to lie on the floor.
Claes had a candle and we had to step over the bodies
and he recited the Lord's Prayer in Swedish, backwards.
Now I was in seminary at this time, my last year, so I
went down to Judson, because I knew was going to be
there the next year. This was 1960 and I went down
there to see what Judson was all about. So I was totally
unprepared for this kind of happening; it just blew my
mind. But I participated.
12
69
Carmines was "at first frightened and then terribly excited by the
experience," and he himself admitted it was terrifying at times.
13
He was
a theological student who had a strong background in very traditional
musical theatre suddenly facing art that was at once utterly foreign to his
sensibilities, and yet the experience suggested an entirely new language of
theatre. This was, as Boal might describe it, a Chinese crisis, or one which
represented danger and opportunity in a single instant.
14
What made this
a particularly visceral experience for Carmines was that the experience of
Oldenburg's Ray Gun Spex completely changed his perspective on his own
body and the nature of musical and theatrical composition with regard to
dance and movement:
I was part of the art work myself; and it changed me
totally. It was the beginning of my understanding of
movement as a part of art because I had been in a
lot of plays on at Union [Theological Seminary] and
other places in college where the verbal facility was the
important thing. And so I didn't do much work on my
body. And this was all based on body work. It was like
lying on the floor, stretching, standing up, kneeling,
turning over. It was almost like Yoga. And it was my
introduction to modern dance is what it really was. Even
though it was visual art.
15
12 Carmines, interview, 2002.
13 Helm, 28.
14 Augusto Boa!, Legislative Theatre (London: Routledge, 1998), 56.
15 Carmines, interview, 2002.
70 (RESPY
In many ways, Carmines had been preparing for this event; even though
he was not entirely aware that he had been doing so. He had spent a
good deal of his time finding ways to reconcile his desire to create theatre
with his deep religious faith at the Union Theological Seminary, a place he
originally chose because of his interest in theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich's
beliefs clarified for Carmines the inseparable linkage between art and faith,
and dissolved the boundaries between them.
16
At the same time he came
to understand the differences between these two forms of expression and
the necessity of both:
Art is created by a very emotional part of you; but I
would say this though. I never felt that faith and art were
the same thing. I've always maintained against most of
my contemporaries, that there are two parallel tracks, but
that they never meet in this life. Because Art has to do
with truth, and faith has to do with love. And we never
in this life combine those things. Maybe in eternity we
will. We must be honest in our search for truth even it
goes against our feelings of faith and we must be honest
in our search for faith even it goes against our knowledge
of truth. So you have to bear this tension in you. And a
woman up at Union Seminary said to me once, "what do
you do when they conflict?" Finally, you shift, and you
move from truth to faith.
17
Carmines wrestled with these notions even as he was discovering his own
aesthetic as an artist; Ray Guo Spex offered a way to find the bridge between
art and faith through the body in performance. Carmines was, in fact, that
rare site of what Robert Haywood calls a collapse of schism between
between avante-garde art and religion, a "central theoretic subtext in the
critical discourse of modernism." Ultimately, Judson Memorial Church
would sponsor many diverse evenings of performance art, environments,
happenings, among which included The Apple Shrine (1950) by Allan
Kaprow, Carolee Schneeman's Meat Jqy in 1964, and Yvonne Rainer's
dance/performance Trio A for the People's Flag Show (1970), an event which
would result in Moody and Carmines being jailed.
18
16 Robert Joseph Cioffi, "Al Carmines and the Judson Poets' Theater Musicals"
(Ph.D. diss.,New York University, 1979), 15-16.
17 Carmines, interview, 2002.
18 Robert Haywood, "Heretical Alliance: Claes Oldenburg and the Judson
Memorial Church in the 1960s," Art History 18, no. 2 Oune 1995): 185.
FoRTUNATE CowstoN 71
Happenings and the Improvisation of Church & Theatre
What Carmines learned during that one evening at Ray Gun Spex
became the rallying cry of a generation. Carmines was an accepting
innocent in the middle of the radical art scene of the 1960s. Stunned,
shocked, and at the same time, utterly available and interested in even
the most unusual experiences in performance, Carmines was able to
process the radical art at the heart of Judson's experimentation and make
it utterly accessible and relevant to the congregants and audiences at
Judson Poets' Theatre. He had the unequivocal support of his minister,
Howard Moody, and as a minister himself and as director of Judson's
art activities, Carmines exerted tremendous influence on the power of
theatre to transcend traditional barriers. During the performances to the
point where the borders between art and religion literally and physically
disappeared within the Judson's grand sanctuary, and the church and its
congregation were transformed:
The Poets' Theatre became very famous, and we
continued to work together, and then we moved from
the loft of the church, down to the sanctuary of the
church, and then we had a meeting that lasted a year
long where we had Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Larry
Kornfeld, Deacons from the Church, Howard Moody,
and myself, and we met a year to decide to how we were
going to commingle the artists and the church part of the
sanctuary and that resulted in the elimination of pews
entirely and a huge agape feast on Sunday where a lot of
artists came because they were hungry and everyone was
invited and it was a very thrilling time.
19
As the composer of the Judson musicals, which themselves eventually
entered into the annals of avant-garde American theatre history, Carmines
had tremendous power over his playwrights, reshaping their work with his
music. The improvisatory aspect of Ray Gun Spex affected him when he
was working with Maria Irene Fornes on their collaboration with her play
Promenade that became an off-Broadway hit (which I discuss in greater
detail below), Carmines notes:
Particularly with Irene-she submitted a script and I
loved it, but I said, "Irene, we're going to have to take the
19 Carmines, interview, 2001.
72
stage directions as part of the script." And at first she
was kind of hesitant and then she said, "well, go ahead."
And I built a series of about four songs based on the
stage directions she had written for her play and that was
the direct result of having been to the happenings and
seen how important the movement was. Meaning that
if she had a stage direction that said "Point Left" and
say so in so, I said you must include the "Point Left" as
well as say so in so. So it changed my whole idea of what
playwriting was-moving it from a verbal art to a whole
art.
20
CRESPY
Ultimately this mingling between movement, music, and audience reflected
how Carmines with his traditional musical theatre background was trying
to consciously find ways into the text while avoiding the linearity of
traditional drama. By allowing the music to shift and change around the
movement, the plays found an alternative momentum which grew out of
the physicality of performers and the associationallogic of dreams. This
concept would have been completely foreign to Carmines before his Ray
Gun Spex experience, but it became one that Carmines was to apply over
and over again in his work both with the language of Gertrude Stein and
in his work with the off-off-Broadway playwrights of the 1960s.
Ray Gun Spex embodied for Carmines the possibilities of
reassigning traditional theatrical elements. The performance was
composed of several distinct happenings, each with its own world of
inference and association. Carmines distilled this technique of the purely
non-intentional, non-matrixed chance-oneiric operation of happenings
and emotional/ associational dream structure in all of his and Lawrence
Kornfeld's musicals. In particular this was true of Carmines's adaptations
of Gertrude Stein's In Circles, and in Irene Fornes's Promenade. Both
productions represent the successful use of non-realistic strategies of
repetition, transformation, and dramaturgically-based movement linked
directly to the physical movement, game activity, and the chance logic
of happenings. For Carmines, the elements of a play, dialogue, stage
directions, character development, song, and plot became interchangeable,
mutable, and followed John Cage's "electronic" logic.
Even in such abstract work as Carmines's composition for In
Circles, his musical adaptation of Gertrude Stein's play, he attempted to
find meaning in a clearly matrixed manner, using the guidance of the
actors' instincts to create characters with discernible relationships. Jacque
20 Carmines, imerview, 2002.
FORTUNATE CoLLISION 73
Lyon Colton, a member of the cast of In Circles and a frequent off-off
Broadway performer, remembers the experience this way:
We'd read a sentence or a paragraph or page or however
long we wanted to read. And we'd pass it to anyone else
in the group. After three or four days, patterns began
to emerge-someone would hand me the script when a
certain line or section would come up . . . . The director,
after a few days, stopped the process. "Let's go around the
circle. Let's discuss what character or character traits are
emerging from this experience, and any relationships you
might be forming with anyone one else in the group.'>21
At the same time it is clear that Carmines's continued exposure to the
happenings, which continued throughout the early years of the Judson
Poets' Theatre, had a profound effect on his willingness to allow his
musicals and plays to move out of the traditional, linear vein and enter
into the nonmatrixed, alogical structure of happenings. For example, the
opening number of In Circles, "Papa Doses, Mama Blows Her Noses,"
was entirely improvised each evening. Carmines composed a new music
and the actors relearned this number each night, and they eventually
discovered four part harmony. This was a way of allowing the actors to
warm up, and at the same time, inviting the audience to become part of
the artwork itsel He developed this idea directly from his experience with
Ray Gun Spex, which was primarily created in order to bring the human
figure directly into the artwork, to "reintroduce reference and figuration
into painting.''
22
This painterly correlation between Carmines's improvised
rehearsal process and metatheatrical performance of his adaptation of
Gertrude Stein's In Circles is further unpacked below.
Going back to &q Gun Spex and by examining it in some detail
allows the correlations to appear without belaboring the concordance
and difference between Ray Gun Spex and the kind of play productions
Carmines championed at Judson Poets Theatre. Oldenburg's evening of
happenings began with his own Snapshots From the Ciry-ao enormously
emotional and physical undertaking-performed by Oldenburg himself,
mummified in a wrapping of tape and debris that Oldenburg had carefully
gathered from the street. Allan Hansen described it this way:
In the basement gallery were Oldenburg and his wife,
21 Jacque Lynn Colton, interview with author, tape recording, 2 October 2002.
22 Haywood, 193.
74
Pat, covered in bandages and paint, charging about, dying.
It was like Shinbone Alley aftermath of Hiroshima in
Manhattan. There were shreds of buildings-objects
made of cardboard with blackened edges-and Claes
moved about like a modern mummy waving a bottle and
being a cross between a Bowery bum and an accident
victim. It was very hard to see because the space was so
crammed. The lights blinked on and off (Lucas Samaras
had been told simply to turn them on and off 32 times
during the piece, at any intervals). People were trying to
film it. Stan VanDerBeek was juggling 16 mm. cameras.
23
CRESPY
It is difficult to avoid characterizing Snapshots From the Ci!J as anything
but a clearly matrixed performance, as it was created to address the needs
of Judson art outreach program, which was created to support artists
struggling in an urban setting. Oldenburg and his wife Pat Muschinski
turned themselves into the walking dead for this piece, covered with
torn wrappings, struggling in the refuse of the city. Oldenburg himself
was wrapped head-to-toe in bandages, burlap bags, and was covered in
filth. He would spasmodically gesture, grunt, and create sounds that were
disturbing and at the same time were a reflection of the world of the
street. Germano Celant offers a comparison of the action painting of
Jackson Pollock versus the interactive art of happenings that occurred in
Oldenburg's performance:
Compared to traditional painting (experience frontally)
or sculpture (which is taken in from all sides), The Street
was a dynamic model in which human figures and
objects converged in a single context. They inhabited an
environment that simultaneously made reference to the
outside and inside. They did not, however, form a rigid,
petrified system, as is usually the case with sculpture and
environmental art; rather, in their organic and inorganic
definitions, ranging from the flesh of the performer to
the cardboard of the various elements, they moved about,
were active. They led one to think that their difference
was not definitive, stable and perfect, but penetrated a
space that is wholly continuous and without voids.
24
23 AI Hansen. A Primer of Happenings & Time/ Space Art (New York: Something
Else Press, Inc., 1965), 61.
24 Germano Celant, "Claes Oldenburg and the Feeling of Things," in Claes
FoRTUNATE C owsiON 75
The piece was a deeply personal one for Oldenburg, who was struggling
with the challenges presented by creating art in New York City. He was
attempting to create a kind of "contemporary primitivism" that would be
a popular art, and, therefore, perhaps, a bit more accessible for a neophyte
like Al Carmines. This appealed to Carmines, whose own work had a
strong emotional quality as a well as a quirky and outrageous sense of
humor. In some ways it was not as formalistic as the later pieces that
Oldenburg performed. He points this out in an interview about the piece
with Richard Kostelanetz:
I suspect that Snapshots had more of an expressionist
effect than later pieces; it was partly because of the
tremendous involvement which anything at the Judson
at that time inspired. There was a great sense of crisis
constantly; that was the style of the time and the place.
They were starting to reach out into the community, and
the community was flowing in there. The place had a lot
of action then.
What I'm trying to get at is that I tried to make an analysis
at this time of the theatre that could be done, and then
I decided what I wanted to do; and I was very selective
about what I took; I think I came out with a synthesis
that was something quite personal.
25
Oldenburg considered himself to be an outsider to the happenings
movement; he was not a member of Kaprow's "New Jersey" group and
had not studied with John Cage.
Oldenburg's sensibilities were more oriented toward the work of
Artaud and the theatre of cruelty. His character in the piece was going
through a kind of cruel experience. The audience was as well, as it was
subjected to darkness and Lucas Samaras's constant "snapshot" blinking
effect. For Oldenburg, the point was to bring himself and audience from
an inanimate sculpture into an animated artwork:
There was a lot of jostling around. Often, too, the
unpredictable and unprofessional surroundings of the
Oldenburg: An Anthology, ed. Germano Celant (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation, 1995), 22-23.
25 Kostelanetz, 135.
76
performances produced suffering, simply by lack of
foresight or sufficient provision for the audience. One
must admit, though, that such indifference is a form of
cruelty. Here was this mixture of my acting out suffering
and forcing the audience to undergo suffering; yet the
whole idea of the piece was rather objective-! was
going to translate myself analytically from an inanimate
object to an animate one.
26
(RESPY
In the midst of what must have been a harrowing, emotional experience for
the audience and for Carmines, Oldenburg had a formal experiment, one
that was repeated throughout the evening in the other pieces performed,
and that was the insertion of the human figure into the artwork itself.
Oldenburg would move from one project to the other, making "a very
engaging and emotional sequence." Then he would suddenly stop and
drop, starting something entirely different. Oldenburg was experimenting
with two streams of happenings with Snapshots from the City: one based
in the Cagean non-intentional experimentation, and the other following
Artaud's Theatre of CrueltyY
After Oldenburg's piece, the audience then moved into another
room where they saw Jim Dine's Smiling Workman, his first psycho-
drama. Dine performed the work himself, wearing a painter's smock,
and scribbled the words, "I love what I'm doing, HELP!" over the face
of a large canvas-embodying the notion of a "painter's theatre," which
became another term for the happenings. Dine then drank what appeared
to be red paint (it was actually tomato juice) and poured it over himself.
Next, he dove into the canvas in an attempt to fuse his three-dimensional
human figure with the two dimensions of the canvas. This was a clear
satire of the action painting of the Abstract Expressionists, although it
also served as a kind of homage. This was followed by Allen Hansen's
Projections, a multi-media piece including newsreel images of travelogues,
WC. Fields, paratroopers, children, rock and roll dancing, and the China
Clipper taking off.
Allan Kaprow's piece, Coca Cola S hirlry Cannon Ball was then
performed by Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Lucas Samaras in the
Judson gym. There seemed to be an enormous foot, which moved around
the space and was surrounded by "flats," which created the walls of the
performance space. The piece was accompanied by sporadic bursts of
language including, "Fat Baby," "Tick," "Tock," and "Hello Sam Spade."
26 Ibid. , 135.
27 Celant, 22.
FORTUNATE COLLISJON
77
The piece was performed in the half-subterranean world of the Judson
gymnasium, which was built just below the street level. The foot had an
ominous quality, and it was occasionally subverted by smiling faces, both
real and fabricated, seen through holes in the flats. Allen Hansen describes
the rest of the evening:
Then the audience had a sort of open-play-wander-around
period during which people sold assemblage items from
pushcarts as well as small magazines and comic books
made by the artists who took part. I handed out 800
children's drawings in poster colors. After Oldenburg
read from The Scarlet Pimpernelin Swedish from a balcony
the audience went back upstairs for Bob Whitman's
Duet for a Small Smell, which involved Pat Oldenburg
chopping up a body that had plastic bags of paint in it,
and ended with acrid incense being burned-the odor of
rotten egg chemicals. The finale was Dick Higgins' long
piece, Cabarets, Contributions, Einschlus:v a collage of small
happenings.
28
Oldenburg describes Higgins's final piece as an exhortation for the audience
to leave, since it was, "in fact interminable--counting in German until
everybody left."
29
The piece was designed to "give a spectrum of what
was going on," but at the same time it was an exhausting, overwhelming
experience. For Carmines, it became a kind of basic training in which
he was indoctrinated with a new improvisatory, chance sensibility that
profoundly affected the nature of the plays and playwrights he would
work with as a composer/ collaborator.
Promenade, A Chance-Oneiric Musical
The influence that Oldenburg's Ray Gun Spex had on Al Carmines,
is especially obvious in his collaboration on Promenade, the musical written
by Maria Irene Fornes and which would raise the bar for all other Judson
productions. One of the Judson's most important productions, Promenade,
originally opened in April of 1965. Though Carmines certainly brought
his "happenings" style to his earlier work, which he created from Gertrude
Stein's texts, Promenade was written with a living collaborator, Maria Irene
28 Hansen, 61 .
29 Kostelanetz, 13.
78
CRESPY
Fornes. Her own work as creative artist, playwright, and teacher, was
profoundly affected by Carmines's improvisatory work as a composer.
Promenade was perhaps the ultimate distillation of the Al
Carmines/Lawrence Kornfeld/Judson style and Carmines's collaboration
with Fornes was perhaps one of his finest. Fornes had submitted her
play on the suggestion of a friend to the Judson Poets' Theatre. Later she
served as a costumer for Judson shows, using her background as a textile
designer and seamstress. Ironically, Carmines initially refused to examine
Fornes's script (even though she constantly asked him to read it), because
he thought of her only as the Judson costumer. However, Carmines's
secretary threatened to quit if he didn't read it, and once he did, he realized
that Fornes was a genius. Lawrence Kornfeld directed the production-
building upon Carmines's improvisatory style of composition and
creation. Promenade is an ironic commentary on social status, performed
with the satiric music of Carmines and the lacerating lyrics and power of
Fornes's bitingly funny play. Originally written as an exercise, the play was
built with the same element of chance that Carmines experienced in Ray
Gun Spex. Fornes writes:
I wrote down the characters on set of index cards. On
another set of cards, I wrote different places. I shuffled
them together. I picked a card that said, "The Aristocrats."
And I picked the card that said, "The Prison." So the play
started in prison for that reason. But I found it very
difficult to write a scene with aristocrats in prison, so the
first thing that happened was that they were digging a
hole to escape. I wanted to get them out of there.
30
Fornes continued to improvise throughout the creation of the play, though
she abandoned the character cards, and continued to work with the place
cards. The quality of chance was at the heart of the production, and like
all of Fornes's work, which was influenced by her background as a painter,
she visualized the world of the play with a landscape-infused, textured
theatricality. Adding to the "happening" quality of the creation of the
play was the apocryphal story that Carmines and Fornes came together
one evening and claimed that they had lyrics and songs they loved but
had never been included in a musical. So, according to cast stories, they
threw them in a hat and pulled out a batch around which they then wrote
a story. While not entirely the truth, these "arbitrary, game-like rules as
30 Maria Irene Fornes and Robb Creese, "I Write the Messages That Come," The
Drama Revie1v 21, no. 4 (December 1977): 29.
FoRTUNATE CouisiON 79
compositional tactic" gave Promenade its remarkable experimental shape.
31
While Carmines was influenced by his original experience with
Ray Gun Spex, the experience of dance within that happening would
lead to another powerful influence on Carmines's musical score, Judson
Dance Theatre. Carmines noted this himself, pointing out that, "Three
things-Beckett, Genet, and the Judson Dance Theatre- are always in my
mind when I read any play or think of any production .... "
32
Inarguably,
Carmines's interest in dance, particularly the improvisatory style of
Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, David
Gordon, and Deborah Hay, which was built on "chance, collage, free
association, co-operative choice-making, slow meditation, repetition,
lists, handling objects, playing games, and describing tasks," was at the
heart of his technique in creating musical productions with writers.
33
The
"happening" -based dance technique was also central to Promenade. Because
of this dance influence, Carmines composed some of his finest music for
Fornes's play, and as he used the characters' physical action as described
by Fornes in her stage directions as lyrics for the music he created. While
most of the musicals at the Judson were deemed to be camp by most
critics, Kornfeld and Carmines strove for the grotesque, the uncanny, the
bizarre, the very elements which are at the heart of dreamwrighting. With
Promenade, the Judson style-infused as it was by happenings and dance,
found a new language for the theatre-a dramatic dream language of
music, dance, and drama that followed the alogical logic and emotional
truth of a dream.
The production of Promenade was lauded by critics, and the show
was revised and rewritten as a full-length musical several years later and
transferred off-Broadway to a new theatre at Broadway and Seventy-
Sixth Street. The owner named it the Promenade Theatre because he was
so enthralled with the Carmines/Fornes collaboration. The new off-
Broadway production of Promenade, which included Carmines's music,
Kornfeld's direction, and sets by Rouben-Ter-Arutunian, was even more
successful than the original Judson show. It closed after 259 performances
and was recorded by RCA for a musical album. The success of Promenade
gave Maria Irene Fornes international standing as a playwright and later as
a teacher of playwriting.
31 Stephen Bottoms, Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off
Broadwqy Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, November 20, 2006), 160.
32 Michael Smith, ''The Good Scene: Off Off-Broadway," The Tulane Drama
Review 10, no. 4 (Summer, 1966): 172.
33 Sally Banes, "The Birth of the Judson Dance Theatre: ''A Concert of Dance"
at Judson Church, July 6, 1962," Dance Chronicle 5, no. 2 (1982): 207.
80 CRESPY
Ultimately, the real significance of Al Carmines's encounter
with the weird, unsettling world of Claes Oldenburg was the fact of
the success and importance of the playwrights who were essentially
"trained" under him, like Maria Irene Fornes, but also Rochelle Owens,
Roslyn Drexler, and others like Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson. In the
case of Fornes, Carmines's lasting influence was even more profound.
She later became a master teacher of playwriting, she and taught the
next generation of playwrights both at INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-in-
Residence Laboratory at Theatre for the New City in New York City and
at the Padua Hills Playwright Workshop/Festival. Her students include,
Caridad Svich, Migdalia Cruz, Cherrie Moraga, Eduardo Machado, Milcha
Sanchez-Scott, Luis Santeiro, Octavia Solis, and many others. And each
of these writers were taught to discover, according to Svich, one of
Fornes's most famous students, "a use of language that is topographical,
expansive, physical, and demands embodiment in a different manner than
say, the work of more "interior" playwrights ... ," and to create plays in the
"here of place." That place was almost always encountered as the theatre
space itself. This description itself recalls the "environments" created by
Kaprow, Oldenburg, Dine, and other happenings artists in Ray Gun Spex.
34
Svich's descriptions of Fornes's playwriting exercises bring
to mind the kind of dreamwrighting that she and Carmines conceived
at Judson Theatre under the direction of Lawrence Kornfeld. In one
exercise that Fornes used at INTAR, she asks her students to imagine an
object in collision in space, and to actually draw a picture of that object.
The exercise then requires the playwright to describe a geographical
location for the object, and to write down this landscape, and to allow
a color the writer's childhood to seep into this world. The color then
initiates characters who people the landscape the writer has created.
The next ingredient are random lines of dialogue the playwright must
incorporate into a sequence of dramatic scenes inspired by the landscape
and characters.
35
The exercise would work just evocatively as elements for
a happening as it would a scripted play.
The point of describing this exercise is twofold: to point out
the wholly improvisatory, associative and chance-like structure of the
playwriting exercise, which is notable for its lack of a linear approach; and
to note how deeply that Fornes was shaped by an interdisciplinary approach
that grew out of her own background as a painter. This also reflects her
collaboration with Carmines's improvisatory composing style. And that
34 Caridad Svich, "The Legacy Of Maria Irene Fornes," PAJ: A journal of
Performance & Art 31, no. 3 (September 2009): 3.
35 Ibid., 5.
fORTUNATE COLLISION 81
the heritage of dreamwrighting, to which Fornes's many playwriting
students adopt, grew directly out of a chance occurrence itself. Had that
young theological student never made his way from the Union Theological
Seminary to Oldenburg's happening at Judson Memorial Church that
evening, it is conceivable that a generation of dreamwrights influenced by
Al Carmines's strange revelations, distilled by Fornes's collaborations with
him, may never have become writers they are today. To some scholars, this
may seem a somewhat tenuous connection, but going back to the original
happening that affected Carmines, where would a playwright like Fornes
have had such a fertile landscape of her own to develop her dramatic
art? Carmines provided a field of dreams for Fornes and other writers.
And because of the intense cross-pollination of off-off-Broadway, with
playwrights like Fornes working in many different venues, dreamwrighting
influenced all the playwrights working there, including writers like John
Guare, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Adrienne Kennedy, and many
others. And this influence was spread further as the 1960s generation
of writers became the teachers of the next generation of writers. It can
be seen not only in the plays of Caridad Svich, who is a lifetime Obie
Award-winning playwright, but also in the plays of Tony Kushner, who
was profoundly affected by off-off-Broadway playwright Jean Claude van
Itallie. Dreamwrighting is key to the dramaturgy of Paula Vogel's plays,
whose own writing was affected by the thinking of Bert 0. States, and
also Irene Fornes and John Guare. Because of Vogel's profound influence
as a teacher, dreamwrighting has spread to her student Sarah Ruhl, whose
plays are often structured around the illogical logic of dreams. Perhaps the
irony is that it was all just a matter of chance, that Carmines's encounter
with the uncanny world of Claes Oldenburg's Ray Gun Spex, may never
have happened. But that is my assertion, that it was just this kind of
chance occurrence, this collision of destiny, that led not only to the Judson
Poets' Theatre, but also the strange alogicallogic of dreamwrighting that
has entered into the mainstream of American playwriting.
82
CoNTRIBUTORS
David Crespy is professor of playwriting, acting, and dramatic literature
at the University of Missouri, founded MU's Writing for Performance
program and serves as its co-director. He is the founding Artistic Director
of MU's Missouri Playwrights Workshop. His articles have appeared in
Theatre History Studies, New England Theatre Journal, Latin American Theatre
Review, The Dramatist, Slavic and East European Performance, and www.glbtq.
com. His books include The Off-Off Broadwqy Explosion, with a foreward
by Edward Albee (Backstage Books, 2003); Richard Barr: The Plqywrights'
Producer, with a foreward and afterward by Edward Albee (SIU Press,
March 2013).
Peter A. Davis is on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign where he chairs the Theatre History and Criticism Program.
He is currently writing a book on the early development of the commercial
stage in New York City and how economic cycles influenced aesthetic and
practical innovations in the theatre industry during the nineteenth century.
Susan Kattwinkel is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the College of
Charleston. She has previously published on vaudeville in The Enrydopedia
of Broadwqy and American Culture, an essay in Interrogating America Through
Theatre and Peiformance (eds. Irish Smith Fischer and William B. Demastes),
and in her book Tof!Y Pastor Presents: Afterpieces from the Vaudeville Stage.
Shelley Mannis received her Ph.D from the University of Texas at
Austin. She is currently a lecturer in the Sweetland Center for Writing at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Thanks to Chase Bringardner for
his careful reading of early drafts of this article.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Quick Change: Theatre Essays and Translations
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Quick Change is full of surprises. It is a
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josep M. Benet i jornet, born in Barcelona, is the
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Theatre Research Resources in New York City
Sixth Edition, 2007
Editor: Jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson
N ~ : w Yotuc. Crrv
~ ~ ........ ....... {' """-
M\.all"' I: SLGI\L TUI.\tltl CL'IUl
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the
most comprehensive catalogue of New York City
research facilities available to theatre scholars. Within
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Comedy: A Bibliography
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This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers,
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comedy and attracted to speculation about its theory
and practice. For all lovers of comedy Comedy: A
Bibliography is an essential guide and resource,
providing authors, titles, and publication data for over
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__ ,_ .. _._
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Four Ploys From North Africa
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The Arab Oedipus
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Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY100164309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
The Heirs of Moliere
Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson
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This volume contains four representative French
comedies of the period from the death of Moliere to
the French Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover
by Regnard, The Conceited Count by
Philippe Nericault Destouches, The Fashionable
Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de la Chaussee, and The
Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya. Translated in
a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and spirit
of the originals, these four plays suggest something
of the range of the Moliere inheritance, from comedy
of character through the highly popular sentimental
comedy of the mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that
employs the Moliere tradition for more contemporary
political ends.
Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most
important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or ]afar
and Zaida, The Dog of Montargis or The Forest of
Bondy, Christopher Columbus or The Discovery of the
New World, and Alice or The Scottish Gravediggers,
as well as Charles Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843
Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's plays and the two
theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama,"
and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."
Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with
its most stunning effects, and brought the classic
situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He
determined the structure of a popular theatre which
was to last through the 19th century.
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
Price US $2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: The Graduate Center Foundation, Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY100164309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-8171868